Page 7 - The Legacy of Abraham Rothstein - text

Introduction

were reawakened during the desperate and despondent months of
her terminal illness. At some point in 1951 he began typing, hunt-
and-peck, his life’s story on an old Underwood typewriter.
He gave his papers, including letters and miscellaneous
documents, to his daughter Carmel; she, in turn, passed them on to
me in 1989 for editing. My first chore was to put them in order. To
my surprise, I found two more or less complete manuscripts covering
the same ground; I was able to isolate them based on the page
numbers AR had assigned, the context of the material, and, most
definitively, the paper (typically, he did not purchase new typing
paper, but used the backs of old stationery presumably retrieved from
the junkyard where he worked). When the same events appear in
both texts, the accounts often diverge significantly. In those cases, I
was forced to exercise my judgement in selecting the most
plausible—or colorful.
The question remains why he composed his narrative twice—for
one is clearly later and does not represent a revised copy of the other,
earlier version. Had he either lost the first text (165 pages) or used it
as a rough draft for the second (109 pages), then it is unlikely that the
former would have survived. As AR himself explained, he was not a
practiced writer; his origins were in a culture with a strong division
between sacred texts (written, static) and profane folk tales and
pseudo-intellectual speculation (oral, dynamic). It may simply be that
having told his story once and seeing the value in it, he repeated it,
finding different aspects to emphasize in the retelling. Analogously,
he carved certain forms twice, either in different media or scale—and
kept both of them, although we may find the probably later version
unquestionably superior. At any rate, given their often distinct
characteristics, it is our good fortune that both his texts survive.
What I have produced is a conflation of those two large manuscripts
and a series of short afterthoughts also typed on odd scraps of paper;
other editors might choose differently, but I had a certain goal in
mind.
In order to present his narrative in a readable form, I had first to
reorganize the material in chronological order and resolve as many
internal contradictions as possible. The only chapter heading AR
assigned was the preface, and I have kept it almost intact. All other
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