Page 309 - The Legacy of Abraham Rothstein - text

Studies: human

scholarship and cultural attainment. Whatever spiritual qualities
they possess are refinements of intellectual discourse and
attention to purifying discipline, earthbound activities far
removed from the deified beatitude and torment of Christian
saints or the self-absorbed world-negating meditations of
Oriental sages. The best of these heads capture that essence;
the worst are crudely-carved lumps of stone, like Easter Island
ancestral archetypes.

The correlation between age and seriousness—linked attributes
eliciting respect in traditional societies—is also confirmed by
the two heads which are smiling: both are beardless, thus
callow. In the twentieth-century United States in which AR
lived, styles in male facial hair went from full beards to
mustaches to none at all. Thus not every mature man he
represented has a beard—but almost all have at least a
mustache. His memories of Europe, of course, were frozen in
1903; his father, grandfather, teachers, and every other male of
substance sported a beard. The type of beard—square,
bifurcated, long and pointed or short and rounded—probably
meant something to AR, being associated with certain authority
figures in his youth; in describing a man of the shtetl in his
narrative, he rarely omitted reference to the beard. And none
of the bearded men are smiling.

Two pieces in wood, nos. 105 and 110, are peculiar: the back
of the head is radially incised as if representing a yarmulke—but
the front is carved with hair. Had this occurred but once, it
might be supposed that AR changed his mind from one side of
the piece to the other. Otherwise the pieces differ: the former
is bearded and grave, the latter is beardless and smiling. No.
110 is also an example of AR using a bad piece of wood, a
branch which cracked and required a good deal of putty to
mend.

No. 45 wears an oriental yarmulke, indicating a Jew from the
eastern Diaspora (but see no. 142 for another possibility); one
is reminded of the tribute figures carved in stone at Persepolis,
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