Page 47 - The Legacy of Abraham Rothstein - text

Father and Mother

Zanwill to relax and permit Yankel to at least help his father-in-law.
After years of threats and scenes, Yankel was finally permitted to be a
helper. My father lost time and money on this affair, and we
remained on the old bread ration.
My mother I knew as a good Jewish woman who worked, cooked,
sewed, bore children and nursed them with her own milk. She was
submissive to her fortune. Her education was limited, as it was for all
Jewish women in that country, to reading the Tseana Urena, a sort of
German-Yiddish translation of the Bible word for word. At the time
that I learned to know and understand her, she was reading it very
slowly because she lacked spectacles. Like most Jewish mothers, she
wished to have her children acquire learning, not for the benefit of a
profession or career, but for the sake of learning itself. She was happy
to get up at three o’clock in the morning and walk through two feet
of snow carrying me to the teacher so I could study with him before
the rest of the boys came at seven. To hear me reading my lessons on
Sabbath day before my father or grandfather was to her a greater
enjoyment than fine dresses or ornaments. “The greatest ornaments
to me are my children,” was her saying. It was the dream and
aspiration of my mother to have a son become a rabbi. Other women
in the neighborhood believed I had it in me, so she entreated my
teachers to pay extra attention to me, and even paid extra money for
them to tutor me three hours before school started. She used to
wake me up at four o’clock in the morning, dress me, and take me to
the teacher. Even in a heavy winter, with snow two feet high, she was
not deterred—she would put on my father’s long felt shoes and carry
me halfway to the classroom. My mother really sacrificed herself for
my education. It might not look like a modern education, yet in those
days and in that place it was an education.
Few women in the community at that time had any education or
even an inkling of learning; hardly five in one hundred could read or
write, neither the language of the country nor Yiddish. One could see
in the synagogue on the Holy Days one or two women reading aloud
from the prayer book in Hebrew and explaining in Yiddish the
meaning, mostly Jewish yearning for Zion and Jerusalem, or stories
like that of Hannah, whose seven sons were tortured and killed by
the Syrian satrap. A crowd of women around them would sob and
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