Page 277 - The Legacy of Abraham Rothstein - text

Reminiscences

folly of following without questioning and the magnifying glass
showed the power of concentration.
Now I realize that he was a pedagogue. He hand-carved Hebrew
alphabet blocks in order to teach us Hebrew, but he got frustrated
with me because I wasn’t quick enough to learn my bo-ba-beh’s and
he gave up on me. He also made dreidels from lead and wood. And I
remember him sitting on the back steps carving coconut husks. He
would put faces on them, like the Pharaoh. He did that to amuse us
as well as instruct us in oppression; then he would chisel the coconut
open and we would eat it.
He had a way with animals. He would call the ducks in the yard
behind his house: “tash, tash” and they would come running to the
fence to get their heads scratched. During the war, he raised chickens
in a coop in the back area. He used their slaughter as a lesson in
biology, showing us the entrails, with the shell-less egg yolks. He
showed us the stupidity of chickens and how they continued to
function after their heads were cut off. Needless to say, there were
several lessons that came with this demonstration!
When I stayed overnight, I slept in the back bedroom. He would
come in and tell me stories, the last line of which would always be, “a
story, nabory, and a cucuricu.” His stories were about his life as a boy
in Poland: cutting ice, spending the night with his feet on a chair
because of horrible bugs. And drunken Cossacks who were worse
than wild Indians. I recall a sort of shaggy-dog story about a boy who
got a ride with a coachman by promising to tell him a story as they
drove along. The boy’s story was simply that of a crane who picked
up one leg and then the other, and so on until the coach arrived at its
destination. It was a trick to get a free ride! He would sing a song
transliterated, “Oo-ru-bu-ru-bonam, ha-sha-boy-a-bonim;” or at least
that is what it sounded like to me. I later saw a Danny Kaye movie
(Me and the Colonel, I think) in which Kaye sang that song.
I remember him taking orders for produce on the old wall phone
in the kitchen, writing them down and saying, "Uh-huh, uh-huh."
One graphic memory is connected to the wholesale produce market.
I had stayed overnight in the back bedroom. As a special diversion,
he woke me up very early in the morning and took me with him in
the big stake truck, with its grinding gears and the smell of oily rags,
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