Page 283 - The Legacy of Abraham Rothstein - text

Reminiscences

to have a glass of schnapps with my father in the evening; it was the
thing to do in those days. They had heavy old shot glasses that were
used in bars, half glass so it looked like you were getting a full shot
but in reality you were not; perhaps drunks couldn’t tell the
difference.
He never dressed up—always wore khaki work clothes. His skin
was dark and bronzed, and he had large veins on his arms and hands,
and lumpy ganglia on his wrists from all the hard labor. His face was
lined from so many years of working out in the sun. When Mema
died, it hit him hard; he realized then how attached he was to her.
After her death, I spent nights over there with him, because my
mother didn’t want him to be alone. I would sleep on the couch. I
was about eleven or twelve at the time.
I recall from that period that he had an old World War One hand
grenade—the explosive was gone—down in the basement, and we
would look at it. That was pretty exciting. And he had a gun down
there, too, a pistol. It was an amazing place for a child. When you
came back up from there, your hands would be dirty, and you had to
wash; he would turn the water on so hot you couldn’t stand to be
under it. He had an old water heater mounted directly above the sink
on the wall, and the water came out very hot. I remember there were
still horse-drawn carts coming by out in the alley, like the ragman.
I helped him paint the outside of the house once or twice,
whitewash it, actually. He would mix it up first himself. I remember
once when the termites got into his house, into the flooring, and had
eaten up into a sofa leg. One day he was sitting down in that sofa,
and it broke. Then he cursed those termites over and over again. He
told me once that when he was a young man he was sure that he was
going to die before he was thirty. He used to read philosophy—I
think he liked the French philosophers, like Montesquieu.
One of his last jobs was working in a sort of junkyard making
metal bands around bales of paper and rags, and I went out there to
work with him a few times. We would take spools of this metal and
stretch it out on a bench and cut it to length. Then we’d bend it and
put clips on each end. The compressors would crush the material and
we would bale it up; then it was sent to Japan—and come back to us
as boxes for all those things we buy. There was a mountain of paper
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