Page 44 - The Legacy of Abraham Rothstein - text

Father and Mother

At fifteen I followed in my father’s footsteps and read thoroughly all
the political columns in the newspapers. I knew the names of the
prime ministers of all the well-known countries and I became
prominent for my political views amongst the brethren in the
synagogue.
In my early years, my father made a living delivering bread to
grocery stores, working for a large bakery on percentage. With his
team of horses and driver he delivered the bread, collected the
money, and paid every night for the goods. Of his past, what he did
before he started with the bakery, I did not know. In patriarchal
family life, children are shy and one is not as chummy with his father
or mother as in this country. Looking back I can understand why
kings and churches ruled the people for hundreds of years without
open rebellion, because of family life. The father was never
questioned; he was the ruler and always right, and a child must
respect and look up to him and not question. The head of the
community, in the same way, never had his authority questioned, and
so on up to the king. I lived for years in the same house with my
paternal grandfather, Moshe Itzel, and stayed up nights with him
when he became sick, yet I never felt familiar enough to ask him
about his youth, his schooling or his birthplace, such things as
grandchildren naturally ask in an affectionate mood.
My father should have made a good living from his bakery route,
but he was not aggressive and did not manage his business well. He
had too many friends who knew him as a good man and a worker for
the community. They would watch for him at the groceries where he
delivered his bread, and tell him their troubles. One needed a doctor,
another a lawyer. One needed help to save his son from military
service, and Mr. David Rothstein was a yid who could talk to the
governor in Russian. Many considered him to have a bag of silver
from the bread collection from which he could spare a few rubles to
buy a friend a horse, or help marry off a daughter who is approaching
eighteen years of age—and no young man can be found to marry
such an old maid. At night when he had to pay in the bakery office
for the bread he would be ten or fifteen rubles short. The shortage
was put on his account as a debit. After five or six years he was five
hundred rubles in debt, so he lost both time and money.
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