Page 178 - The Legacy of Abraham Rothstein - text

Brothers and problems

and dragged along, until we threatened to withdraw the ticket. He
lodged with Ben, as my side of the house was the smaller part, so he
was influenced by them—and married Ben’s wife’s sister. He remaind
very cool toward us and very seldom came to our house or talked to
Fannie: another Pelcovizna product.
Later, in the twenties, my brothers were also in the fruit business
and came more in contact with farmers and farm life, so we bought a
ranch or farm, thirty-eight acres of idle land. Had we been brought
up on a real farm, even in the old country, we would have
understood better about the land, the price, and the financing; but we
did not have that experience, so we bought that ranch when things
were booming and paid too much per acre. I knew little more than
my brothers, and did not have friends or acquaintances with farms
who could give advice and see the quality of the soil. My brother Joe
said that the land was good, it will grow everything. He took a few
little sacks of soil and had the county farm bureau test it. The land
was so irregular in its topography and the soil so alkaline that it was
not worth one half of what we paid for it.
Yet we stuck to it, working like those poor old horses that we had,
with our noses to the ground. There was drought in the summer and
rain and mud in the winter. The ground needed leveling, but we had
no tools. The pump went out of order, and the cucumbers were
killed. The tractor, an old Ford, was the most miserable machine ever
produced, and most of the time it went out of commission after
plowing one acre. Yet I felt fine working hard, and it was the
happiest time of my life when I plowed, harrowed, picked tomatoes,
and cultivated. I felt like a natural man. To a farmer, a blade of grass,
a blossom, a root, seem like living beings; he is never lonesome when
alone in the fields with the living plants. I have done work in the
barn, cleaning; I have operated on a sick horse’s neck and cured him,
opened a horse’s hoof and taken out gravel and put in medicine; and
it was so simple and natural that I felt like I was born in that place.
My wife did not like farming, but several times she came out to pick
cucumbers, corn and beans, and she was happy, her face was
beaming.

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