Page 266 - The Legacy of Abraham Rothstein - text

Reminiscences

no professional sculpting tools at all; the ones he had were picked up
in a junkyard, I’m sure. He wouldn’t have paid money for them. I had
a little bench grinder there which he used, and none of his tools were
sharpened extremely well, but for his age he did a damned good job.
He made what he needed to do the job. Like he took a regular cold
chisel and sharpened it to make a gouge; it’s tough steel, but he
ground the end of it off and reshaped it. He also had an old taped-up
straight-edge razor he used for carving. In those days, everyone used
them for shaving: my dad had six or seven of them, some made in
Germany of very fine steel, with shell or ivory handles. Using that for
a carving tool was probably not a good idea. But Abe never
complained about his tools.
I had fluorescent lights in that garage, but I don’t think he liked
them—or knew how to turn them on—so he had his own light,
made out of an old Essex headlamp, with a transformer to step it
down to six volts. It had on old twisted fabric cord, must have dated
back to the First World War. I used to tell him not to turn it on, that
he would be electrocuted. And his eyeglasses—I think they were not
prescription lenses, just something he picked up somewhere; my dad
had a couple of pairs of those: magnifying lenses in a gold oval-
rimmed frame.
He would never give a name to any figure that he was carving.
That would be sticking your neck out, showing that you cared about
someone—and that was something the Rothsteins had trouble doing.
So he would just say that he was carving some woman from the old
country. One time I do remember him saying that he was carving
Einstein’s head out of marble. And he used to try to cut a block of
stone in half with an old-fashioned hand drill that you held against
your chest, drilling holes in it. It would take him weeks to cut it. He
put a lot of effort into what he was doing, especially with stone. He
never worked up a sweat, just kept at it steadily.
In the early sixties I had four little girls, and I used to bring them
in the back yard to play. Abe would be working there, and he
wouldn’t look up—but I could tell he knew what was going on. I
used to call him Uncle Abe. He wouldn’t smile much, except when I
told him a few stories about the Navy and things like that. All three
brothers appreciated a military story; for some strange reason—
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