Page 175 - The Legacy of Abraham Rothstein - text

Brothers and problems

body or mind. The women soon became enemies and never talked to
each other. We never entered their part of the house and they kept
out of ours. Fannie suffered and blamed me for buying a house in
partnership. It affected the feeling between us two brothers, and we
became cold toward each other. It was our fault, for we, my brother
and I, were just two hicks from the little village of Pelcovizna, and
did not understand how to do business or how to live together. For
seven years we lived in that hell house, the women never talking to
each other and the brothers talking only a little in the store. I suffered
just as much as Fannie, but I couldn’t say anything that would bring
fighting out into the open when the store was our only means of a
living.
When we look back in history, we never find two sisters
antagonizing and hating each other, plotting murder, as brothers do.
In the beginning were Cain and Abel. Out of jealousy, on account of
a few extra sheep that Abel possessed and could sell at a high market
price, while Cain had to sell his vegetables at a low price because of
overproduction, with no price control thanks to party politics, Cain
came to words with his brother. After a few arguments, which he
provoked, he struck Abel with a staff out of his farm cart. Disgraced,
exiled, and despised by all the surrounding country people, he turned
hobo and was buried somewhere in a potter’s field.
Father Abraham, who had a good account of the Cain story from
his father, old Terach, tried his best to avoid such a tragedy in his
own family. Being a practical man, he sent his servant Hagar with her
kid Ismael to the Sahara Desert to separate him from Isaac. But Fate,
which is one of those laws of nature—or, rather, a bylaw of
creation—decreed that Ismael would hate and detest his brother.
Isaac was wealthy and had servants, and kept that brother of his at a
distance in the desert, but his own progeny, Jacob and Esau, could
hardly wait to see the light before they started fighting. Rebecca
suffered: how she could hold out nine months with those two
slugging each other is one of those medical enigmas. Jacob, in his
tender childhood, had to flee into the fields of the Aramaeans, and
hire himself out to a mean shepherd. That tricky man, Laban,
considered love and matrimony a bagatelle, as long as he could get

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