Page 245 - The Legacy of Abraham Rothstein - text

Reminiscences

a woman I knew slightly because of her three sons. She herself was
not an admirable person.
Papa had difficulty disciplining us children. He couldn’t bring
himself to say a harsh word—so he made my mother tell us. But he
was sentimental; he loved to listen to emotional arias from La
Traviata and La Bohème, mainly sad or sorrowful things, although
there were a few piano pieces he liked me to play. “Jolly” was his
word for describing a child who was happy and normal. When my
sister and I were in public school, he always assumed that we were
very bright children, and needed no supervision with homework. He
had no interest in those things. And if there were problems, he never
took it out on me—he would tell my mother. He was afraid of
confrontation.
He had a tremendous interest in anything that moved. As a boy he
had fished, but not hunted; Jews were not supposed to kill except for
food. But harmful things could be killed. Once he killed and skinned
a weasel; I remember playing with a weasel skin, which became a
great toy of mine. He must have caught it either out on the ranch or
in the large backyard we had on Twenty-first Street.
One very early recollection: I couldn’t have been more than three
years old. He had gone off to the Quartermaster’s Office in Chicago
for several months, and we went down to the station when he
returned. But he came back with a mustache. It wasn’t that short
bristly mustache that he wore later on, but a big Stalinesque one. I
ran away screaming from this strange man who wanted to swoop
down on me. At that point he was already wearing a green felt hat—it
looked almost like a U.S. Park Ranger’s hat.
It was against my mother’s wishes that he had gone in the first
place. There was another separation after that, during a very serious
flu epidemic. At that time it was thought you would be better off
away from the city, so he put my mother, my sister, and me on a train
for the mountains. He admonished us not to say we were from the
city, because they would turn us out. And I remember reading later
that people in small towns were out there with shotguns, turning
away outsiders. It was a very big epidemic, sometime around 1920.
He made all sorts of folk toys for us when we were children, many
of which are still around: dreidels, Purim gragers, and, of course, aleph-
241