Page 264 - The Legacy of Abraham Rothstein - text

Reminiscences

I remember my dad talking about the property his family had on
the Vistula River near Warsaw. He said that every year his father
would go into Warsaw to talk to the government about planting reeds
along the banks of the river, because the land was being washed
away. But, according to him, the Polish intellect was not too high,
and they couldn’t understand the problem, even though my
grandfather told them that they were losing Poland, bit by bit. I think
towards the end of his life he planted reeds on his own.
I also recall a story my father told me about one of his relatives:
the man was a giant, with red hair and one large rib that ran around
his body. Even the Polacks feared him. One day, someone had fallen
under the wheels of a beer wagon, and this one-ribbed fellow actually
lifted the wagon to rescue that person; then something snapped, and
the giant fell over and lay there until he died. What the reality of this
is, I don’t know. My father also said that the Cossacks used to chase
the children, and that barefoot he could outrun the men on
horseback. I would ask him why the Cossacks were chasing him, and
he would say that was just the nature of the beast, the way things
were.
I remember going out with my father to Abe’s house on Figueroa
a couple of times, but that was fairly late, after his wife died—I don’t
remember her at all. He showed me around: his cellar, his wine-
making junk, his books; he told me where he got his books, and
asked me if I wanted any. I said, not really. Most of them he picked
up in junk shops, not in book stores. Must have been a couple of
thousand books, all used books, on all sorts of subjects: horses and
farms and plants and things like that, I remember—which my father
had books about, also. I don’t know if Abe read them all, but he was
very well-versed. He told me he was going to use his basement as a
bomb shelter—at that time, everyone was thinking about a nuclear
attack.
The next thing I knew he was living almost next-door to my
father, who had four garages in a row, filled with all kinds of junk.
Abe was carving in one of those garages, using a vise my father made.
My dad would pick up some old pieces of wood and give them to
him, and he would start chopping away. I guess that’s all he had to
do. I used to go see him there, because those were my garages, too; I
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