Page 93 - The Legacy of Abraham Rothstein - text

Failure in Ochota
very tough going. Then my Uncle Chaim, a nice cultured Jew and
very good-natured, the youngest of Moshe Itzel’s children, helped
out. He lived in a suburb of Warsaw, and had a big grocery store as
well as a business wholesaling kerosene. He found an empty store in
the suburb of Ochota, where he had his business, and urged my
father to move out there and start a little grocery. Uncle Chaim
helped us stock it, and furnished his kerosene wagon and horses to
move our antique furniture and wardrobes to the two rooms at the
rear of the store. It was much better than my grandfather’s place, and
the rent was cheap.
Ochota was closer to Warsaw than Pelcovizna, and the young
people were more intelligent and better-educated in Yiddish, knowing
also a little Polish and Russian. As in other cities, the youth in that
village congregated in the bet hamidrash, and my acquaintances were
among the surrounding Orthodox Jewry. Yet I soon learned to read
books in Hebrew and Polish, novels and sociological writings, which
the young people of that village read without their parents’
knowledge, books which if found would have been burned and
created a scandal. It was not what we would call indecent or risqué
literature; just to read any book outside of the religious writings of
the rabbis was considered immoral. Modern Hebrew literature was
especially despised by the Orthodox Jews, who considered it their
enemy, undermining our religion and moving us toward assimilation.
That section of the country had no library, so we had to go to a
Warsaw bookstore which rented out Hebrew and Polish books, and
read them in places our parents would not discover.
The first novel I ever read was The Love of Zion, by the Hebrew
author Abraham Mapo, a beautiful historical story of King David’s
time imbuing the reader with a longing for Zion and a desire to go to
Palestine. It made more Zionists than any other propaganda, and was
the model for modern Hebrew novels and belles-lettres, stimulating
many writers and poets in the Haskalah period—the golden era for
Hebrew literature. Smolensky came forward with several novels that
attacked hypocrisy and ignorance. In Jewish circles Smolensky was
the herald of modern political Zionism and modern Hebrew
literature. I also began to read a Hebrew daily, which was a great
stride for a village boy. I was reading Russian and Polish papers at the

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