Page 40 - The Legacy of Abraham Rothstein - text

The move to Pelcovizna

house, which I remember as not over seven feet high from floor to
ceiling. The ceiling was made of three long heavy beams across the
house, with boards laid above and below them. In that six-inch space
my grandfather and my father both kept all their legal papers, like
passports, title to the property, bills, and the ktuba marriage
certificate. It was not a safe place for insurance policies, but nobody
had money for insurance and no insurance company, most of which
were foreign organizations, would have taken a chance on the place.
Once every few years the walls sagged down, and it looked like the
house was going to split. Then my grandfather would order my
father, who was ready to serve any troubled human being at any time,
to go to an old lumber yard in Warsaw and buy a few pieces of old
lumber. We kids then had to dig away the earth which covered the
wall almost to the windows. Next the rotted piece of wood was
pulled out, the wall lifted with a wooden lever, and the new lumber
stuck in under it. It is an old trick in the villages in those countries to
shovel up earth a foot or so against the wall in wintertime to keep the
snow away from the house. It keeps away moisture and makes the
house warmer.
I remember that the front room of that house faced the highway
to St. Petersburg—now Leningrad—and that in front of the house
was a sort of vestibule. It had no walls, only a little gable roof
supported by two hexagonal wooden pillars. Those pillars were so
bored into by termites that the skin of the wood was gone, and the
hollow spaces between the hard rings were filled with the powdery
excretions of the termites. We used to use that powder on a knife cut
to stop the bleeding, and the mohel who circumcised the small babies
would come and dig out that powder to stop the bleeding on the
circumcised. I later read of the ancient Italians using powdered sugar
or a cobweb on a bleeding wound.
When we moved to Pelcovizna I was about eight or nine.
Benjamin, the youngest, was about three or four years old. Chaia, my
oldest sister, had gone to school for a few years when we lived on
Chernakowsky Street. She knew Polish and could read a Polish
newspaper. Hannah, the second to Chaia, never went to school and,
like other Jewish girls, was helping her mother rule the house. She
kept it clean, according to the standards for a two-room house and
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