Page 89 - The Legacy of Abraham Rothstein - text

A job in Warsaw
flea tenants is like being inside the infamous barrel studded with nails
whose points pricked the body of the man condemned by the
Inquisition to be rolled in it down the streets. We had a few fleas of
our own at home, but on white linen one can get after them and use a
football tackle to knock them over, but in fur there is no chance. I
became melancholy and homesick, longing to be with my family and
enjoy the country life. I decided to skip that fur bed and go home to
sleep, eight miles on foot. That long walk was not as hard on me as
the return trip in the morning. I had to get up at three in the morning
after a frosty night and either find a peasant wagon going to the
Warsaw market or walk in the dark through the woods infested with
highway robbers.
I was not afraid of the robbers; I had nothing on me. But those
ghost tales of those women slicing feathers, and others that I read in
the religious books, were a hundred times worse than physical
torture. I used to run the whole four miles to the tollgate, the first
outpost of the city proper. My own shadow looked to me like a ghost
following me. A drop of water from the trees sounded to me like the
soul of a dead man settling down o][n my head. The creaking of the
frozen snow under my feet sounded like the voices of witches. I
never looked backwards, for I remembered well the story of Lot’s
wife: when she looked back to see Sodom and Gomorra destroyed by
the Lord, she was turned into a pillar of salt. When I reached the
tollgate, I was exhausted and bathed in my own perspiration. I could
not complain to my father; he got me the job after much effort, so
where does a child complain? The mother. My father thought I was a
shlemiel, spoiled and made timid by my mother.
The last straw, the one that relieved my mental suffering, came
one dark morning on that lonely road from Pelcovizna to Praga. I
had rushed home the day before after working hours, longing to see
mother and sisters and brothers, and the goat and her little kids
recently born, and the chickens, and all the wildlife in Pelcovizna.
Men have braved death on the gallows or before firing squads in
wartime, when that call within tempted them to desert their regiment
and risk capture and run for home to see mother, wife, or child. I
knew the suffering I would have to go through in the morning, yet I
walked home to be near the family. My mother knew I had to be in

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