Page 38 - The Legacy of Abraham Rothstein - text

The move to Pelcovizna

as his set of the Diernfort Talmud, the only edition printed in
German, thirty-six volumes. The water washed the lime off the walls
and chimneys built of soft clay and brick, and they collapsed. It was
then we had to move into my grandfather’s house. This incident
made an impression on my youthful mind which I have retained as a
clear picture for sixty years.
My father was born in Pelcovizna, another suburb of Warsaw, but
at the time of horse and wagon people lived and acted as farmers or,
as we would say, country people. The surroundings there were
farming land. Corn and wheat grew within fifty feet of my
grandfather’s property, a piece of land comprising five acres or so.
Old houses were scattered about it, in which my grandfather’s sons
and daughters and their families lived rent-free. The rest of the land
was planted by my grandfather with potatoes, beans, and buckwheat;
sometimes he rented it out to others for truck farming.
We had a goat called Metchka that we let forage for herself
because we were so poor; other people kept their goats tied up.
Sometimes when she came to the door begging we would give her
bread, but my grandfather would get mad at that goat whenever she
came around, and we children would hide when he knocked on the
window with his cane. At those times I was afraid to look at him. On
occasion Metchka would go to the inn across the highway where the
peasants stopped for a drink. Grain was put in the trough there for
the horses, and that goat would get up on her hind legs and gobble it
fast. A driver would stick his head out of the inn door and give the
alarm. But Metchka would make one big leap, and get away before
the men could beat her with their sticks. They even threw pieces of
wood and stones, but she was too experienced.
One of the family always had an old underfed horse. When spring
came, close to Pesach, grandfather marshaled his sons and their
children, hitched up that old horse to a wooden plow, and the whole
gang went farming. The women cut old potatoes into quarters, which
were thrown into the trench by the girls, who followed the plow. The
furrow was very shallow; the cut barely covered the potatoes and
never harrowed the ground. The harness was composed of old ropes;
one person held the reins, another the horse, and the whole thing was
over in a few hours. Fertilizer? Yes, we scattered on the ground all
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