Page 287 - The Legacy of Abraham Rothstein - text

Reminiscences

child must retain a residue of such sensory impressions from his or
her grandparents’ house, an often-visited but still alien environment,
different enough from home to stamp the youthful brain with lasting
memories; however, certain events stick in my mind which I feel are
indicative both of his character and the impact it had on me.
One early childhood experience continues to haunt me, forty years
later. I must have been about five years old, sitting in front of AR’s
house, playing alone on the cement walk. Suddenly he came out of
the house and extended an open book into my field of vision. It was
a small book, old by its look, and it had but a few words on the page,
appearing below a line drawing. “Look,” he said, commanding my
attention. “This is the definition of satire: ‘big fishes on little dishes,
and little fishes on big dishes.’” He evidently considered this
aphorism both immensely humorous and intensely profound. Then
he withdrew, as abruptly as he had appeared, leaving me to ponder
this visual-logical-literary revelation. And, oddly enough, it stuck;
recently, when I had occasion to analyze some of the epigrams I had
composed over the years, I realized that my own definition of irony
followed the same sort of twisted aphorism that AR had, for reasons
unknown, decided to show me. I have since looked for the source of
the quotation, as yet to no avail.
I, too, was first exposed to Hebrew by Grandpa Abe. My
resistance to sitting with him and repeating rote the words of an
incomprehensible text sometimes ended in tantrums and my
mother’s intervention. But I do remember quite clearly one time,
while sitting next to him on the sofa in my parents’ living room, that
he told me to read “just a little bit every day.” That was, in itself, a
good lesson for me; I was impatient and inclined to reject the whole
enterprise because it could not be immediately accomplished. I
remembered those words, and they may have had a salutary effect
upon me in later large-scale efforts (including, of course, this book: it
has been assembled in bits and pieces over a two-year period).
The last strong impression of him I retain from my first seven or
eight years was made during construction of an addition to my
parents’ house on Dunsmuir Avenue. Sacks of cement had been
delivered and deposited near the front sidewalk, but the work was
being done in back, at the bottom of a rather steep driveway. AR was
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