Page 53 - The Legacy of Abraham Rothstein - text

Moshe Itzel and his brood

parents to size her up. An engagement and a wedding followed, and,
as I said, we did not take part in it. In a small town like Pelcovizna,
everyone is invited. The wedding was held in a hall in Warsaw
which furnished the dishes—the bride’s parents hired the musicians
and paid for the food. Anyone who had shoes and a clean pair of
pants came to drink and eat, and all the girls came to dance. The only
ones mad at the wedding were the bride’s brother David and his wife
Glicka. Rachel had always liked my father and mother and us
children, so she suffered and felt ashamed.
After a few weeks of moving into Grandfather’s house, she was
not the same jolly girl. The husband was a big tall strong fellow, but
an ignorant country boy, a rube. This affected her mind, and she
went insane. She came down with brain fever and was very sick. It
was in the middle of the winter. One afternoon, she got out of the
house, came to our window, and knocked all the panes out of it.
Another of my father’s sisters lived next door, and her family ran out,
grabbed Rachel, and carried her into her house. A medical doctor
came to see her. We smaller children—Ben, Joseph, Rivka, and I—
could not stay in the house without window-panes on those frosty
days, so we were sent for a few days to stay in the little house of my
grandfather’s tenant, a Jewish man and his family, until a glazer put
back the glass. Rachel was sick for months. She had remorse and
cried. Then Berl and the rabbi and other people came to my mother
and tried to persuade her to go in and say a few words to Rachel.
She was stubborn, but she agreed. She went in for a couple of
minutes, and Rachel began to feel better, and came out of it. Later
she had beautiful children. But ever since that conflict, our family was
never on very friendly terms with the rest of the mob.
Uncle Chaim was a very refined man, pious and learned, but
sickly; he did not live with the rest of the family on the property. He
was a well-to-do grocery merchant and kerosene wholesaler in
Warsaw. The kerosene business in that period of horse-drawn
transportation and illumination by lamp was like the gasoline
business today. A half-pint of kerosene was enough to fill a lamp to
burn two evenings. It was sold in all the groceries, and, as a rule, they
also had in stock a big barrel of Polish herring; so the grocery man
and the store both smelled like kerosene and herring—and
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