Page 248 - The Legacy of Abraham Rothstein - text

Reminiscences

Nation and I. F. Stone’s Weekly, as well as three Hebrew language
periodicals. He was very critical of non-readers.
He could read Hebrew, Yiddish, German, and English, as well as
Polish and Russian, and could make out French and Spanish. He
spoke Spanish with his workers on the farm. He loved to dissect
English words, looking for the roots. Papa was always writing letters
to newspapers, announcing Zionist meetings and responding to
current affairs. And he would have my mother copy them out in her
beautiful handwriting. Of course, after he got so involved with his
farm in the twenties, he had little time for that. I do remember him
writing a letter about the House Un-American Activities Committee
in the forties. He was always on the lookout for discrimination.
Father Coughlin and the KKK would get him worked up. I think he
enjoyed getting angry, spewing out his feelings. And after a few bad
experiences, he became very anti-Negro. He had been set upon,
probably around the time we moved from the area around Twenty-
first and Central. It had begun to become black, and he had been
mugged in the alley. After that he locked up the house; you couldn’t
open the windows.
Papa had a revolver, and Mama begged him to keep it somewhere
safe. He had carried it in his truck because he did his business in
cash, and he had been robbed. And, of course, in the old country you
couldn’t carry a gun; here you could. On New Year’s he liked to take
out his pistol and shoot it at midnight. I think he was both paranoid
and in genuine fear. I remember Mr. Lavitus warning him that if
anyone robbed him in his truck and found the gun, they would use it
on him—so he kept it at home after that. At first he kept it under the
pillow at night; at last my mother forced him to put it under the
tightly drawn sheet. He would have terrible dreams about being
attacked, and she was afraid that he would grab the gun in his sleep
and start shooting! She would have to wake him up and turn on the
lights when he had one of those nightmares. He would actually call
out in his sleep, then jump out of bed and start grappling with things
before she could snap him out of it.
Papa supplied and delivered produce to a route of customers,
mostly small “Mom and Pop” stores. They served poor whites in
poor neighborhoods—Compton and Watts were poor white then, as
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