Page 258 - The Legacy of Abraham Rothstein - text

Reminiscences

married into a friendly noisy family with lots of get-togethers. I know
my mother was wistful about that; her own family she saw about
once every five years, when she could save the train fare. My father
would object to a plan of going or doing, with “you can read about
it,” or “it’s not new, there is nothing new under the sun.” As for
anything he considered trivial or frivolous, his response would be “it
is written that you must go to the house of mourning to know what
living is.”
He gave up the farm by 1935; then he just stuck to the produce
business until about 1947, when he had a serious case of pneumonia.
He was convinced he was going to die—of course, he was always
convinced he was about to die. He wouldn’t go to a hospital, but I
had a friend who was a physician—actually, our dermatologist, Dr.
Sheffner—who was very kind and came to see Papa every day. He
even managed to get some penicillin, which was very new then, and
that helped to pull him through. But it was a terrible illness, and he
couldn’t carry hundred-pound sacks of potatoes after that. So then
his friend Mr. Lavitus got him a job in the scrap metal business: it
was sorting scrap metal from bottles, and baling newspaper. Not easy
work, but he could do it, and he enjoyed any kind of physical labor
that freed his mind.
I recently became aware of a distant memory; if only my sister
were here! It seems that a friend persuaded my father to rent a room
to a man. The name is long gone from my memory; I never met him,
and his stay was not very long. The single fact I can bring back is that
the man hanged himself there in the house. I was shocked, but I
cannot recall my father’s response.
Papa moved to Orange Street in 1958 or 1959. He had stopped
driving by then. His brother Ben was more gregarious, and had made
more money than Papa. He owned several apartment houses on
Orange Street near Fairfax, and he offered my father the job of
managing one of them. In return for free rent, Papa took care of
small maintenance jobs around the place. The disposal of things at
his old place was a problem. He gave many old books to a synagogue,
but most of the furniture was lost. Of course, he took the pictures of
his parents that had hung in the hall on Figueroa Street.

254