Page 254 - The Legacy of Abraham Rothstein - text

Reminiscences

and the smell would disgust me. I know there were times I wouldn’t
eat chicken. Papa was fond of knives. He always kept several around,
and many of them were quite large. This was probably the influence
of the butchers in the old country. He was good at slaughtering
chickens, and didn’t like the way the butcher shops did it. So he
would go out in the country and bring back live chickens, which he
would kill in the back yard according to kosher rules—no pain for
the animal, which meant using very sharp knives.
Although he would have little to do with organized religion, Papa
did sometimes have interesting relationships with religious figures. In
his early days in Los Angeles, he briefly taught Hebrew to Rabbi
Edgar Magnin, whose own training had mainly been in English.
Later, toward the end of his life, Papa met Ben Aronin, the cantor at
Community Synagogue’s High Holiday services. The two of them hit
it off, and Papa gave him one of his carved canes. Aronin, in return,
gave him a copy of a book Ben had written in Hebrew for American
students, Chelm, City of Wise Men, inscribing it, “For my dear friend
Abraham Rothstein, artist, scholar, and lover of his people. With the
fond regards of Ben Aronin.”
When I announced that I would be married in the rabbi’s study at
Wilshire Boulevard Temple, Papa said that was ridiculous: if you have
to have anything to do with organized religion, you should go to the
Catholic Church, because they were successful and knew how to do
things.
Papa said of the American Jew and the American Communist that
neither of them were the real thing. He liked Japanese and Mexican
people, but hated blacks and Communists—mainly because they
were idealists and the Jews were no better off under Russian
communism than under the czar. In fact, he judged a country solely
on how it treated Jews. He was not naive about politics; he knew it
was dirty, and exposés did not amaze him. He only wondered: why
now?
He did not care for American rabbis or synagogues. He
considered the rabbis not to be scholars, and the synagogues to be
businesses. Papa was convinced that anyone who had money must
have robbed widows and starved children; he couldn’t be any good.

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