Page 24 - The Legacy of Abraham Rothstein - text

Living with the Binshtocks

I was born in the winter of 1882 on Chernakowsky Street. The
family lived in a two-story brick building facing the Vistula River.
From the house about fifteen steps led down to the river, a navigable
waterway. In a cold climate houses are built with thick brick walls to
give warmth in the hard winters, so the window sills were wide
enough to sit on comfortably. My mother used to keep me quiet by
letting me sit there watching the river and its traffic. Once a day a
side-paddle steamboat passed by on its way to cities upstream from
Warsaw, returning toward evening to its dock by the old bridge. The
Vistula’s headwaters are in the Carpathian mountains, and it was very
amusing to watch rafts of heavy timbers lashed together floating
down the swift stream from the mountain districts of Austria, some
of them sold in Warsaw, others passing through to the Baltic Sea and
Danzig—then German ship-building port. The rafts were manned by
cheap labor, Austrian Slavs who were relieved in Warsaw and
shipped back home by train. The rafts were anchored off the place
we lived, and the agents who hired the laborers and sold the lumber
were taxied to and from their rafts by my grandfather, Mathias
Binshtock. Sometimes my grandmother made lunch for those
businessmen, and our home would serve as an exchange where they
made out papers.
As I remember, I never saw another Jewish boatman in that part
of the country. As a rule, Jews there were occupied in trades or
businesses specifically Jewish; we were unfit for or not wanted in
certain other trades, and the river work was exclusively Gentile. Yet
my grandfather was in this trade all his life, and even acted at times as
a broker for the lumber merchants. His small boat seated four
people, while he stood at the rear, paddling and steering with one
long oar. He was respected by the river people, almost all of them
Poles. It was a novelty to be a boatman and liked by the Jews, and to
be Jewish and liked by the Gentiles. A tall, straight man with a short
beard in neat working clothes, he used snuff from a nicely engraved
box. When I knew him he was gray already and about sixty years of

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