Page 5 - The Legacy of Abraham Rothstein - text

INTRODUCTION

Papa told me, “I don’t have a lot of money to
leave you, but I have something better than that:
my carvings and the papers I’m writing.”

—from the reminiscences of his daughter Carmel

The Legacy

Abraham Rothstein (AR in these pages) died more than a quarter-
century ago. In that time a generation has passed; his siblings are
gone, and descendants he never knew have grown up and dispersed
across the land, their knowledge and appreciation of AR inevitably at
a minimum. But that is not extraordinary: in most cases, with the
passage of time the residue of a person’s life is found only in
attenuating biological and behavioral influences. And even those
vaguely familiar characteristics will become unidentifiable once the
progenitor’s contemporaries have vanished—unless something else
has been left behind: a tangible legacy, reflecting his personality and
his reactions to the world he inhabited. AR, in the final years of his
life, created such a legacy—a testament in words and sculpture—and,
in so doing, gave those who came after him a unique and fascinating
glimpse into the man and his times. The primary purpose of this
book is to bring that legacy to the attention of AR’s posterity; it is far
too valuable to languish any longer in dusty folders and closet
corners.
In editing his writings and cataloguing his sculpture, I am
consciously fulfilling his own express desire to pass this heritage on
to his grandchildren and their descendants. He was painfully aware of
the discontinuity between generations, finding himself in a sort of
limbo between the old and new worlds. As he witnessed the
assimilation of American Jews—including his own family members—
his concern grew that everything of value in the Judaic tradition was
being discarded in the materialistic melting pot. The value he placed
in inculcating even the most minimal Jewish identity in his children
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