Page 246 - The Legacy of Abraham Rothstein - text

Reminiscences

bet blocks. He didn’t play games with us; it was mainly reading. I
could read Hebrew words before I went to kindergarten, but by the
age of four I needed glasses. When he was very involved with his
Zionist work, I would be sent out (with other children) with a little
blue box to collect coins. He was certainly ahead of his time and
ahead of most people in that regard. Zionism really was the most
important thing to him.
I can remember hearing “affy davy” often—the affidavit of loyalty
to family left on the other side. He did everything possible to provide
for the needs of new family immigrants, scraping together little bits,
twenty or thirty dollars at a time, to send to Europe. Had I been born
a boy, Papa would have named me Theodor Herzl.
Papa was very good at fixing things. He used to have to get up on
the roof and fix the tarpaper roof. And he had a taste for
catastrophes. The day after the big Long Beach earthquake in 1933
he shlepped us all down there in the old car to see what had
happened before the police threw up barriers. And I do remember
being taken to see the flood waters after a very severe storm.
In that divided house we lived in on Twenty-first Street, it was
very strange. My sister and I had to go up a ladder through a
trapdoor in the kitchen to sleep on the porch. And I was literally
pinned into my bed, for fear I would fall out. But it was a nice place
to be at night. I remember my mother standing in front of a mirror
combing her hair: it went down her back all the way to her knees,
long beautiful thick black hair. And then, in the rage of the twenties,
she cut it. Papa didn’t speak to her for six weeks or two months.
And when he didn’t speak, no one else did either. He had terribly
puritanical ideas about women, much more so than most Jewish men.
He was very suspicious of anything pitsich oys, the Yiddish word for
decorative.
Papa also had a very ambivalent attitude toward women. He
wanted his daughters to marry and have children, but at the same
time he scorned the idea: a woman married because she couldn’t do
anything else. His daughters were to be sons and have
accomplishments. When I told him I was engaged he went into a
depression for many weeks and would not speak to any of us. Later
he said, “I never thought you would leave me.”
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