Page 98 - The Legacy of Abraham Rothstein - text

Smuggling
him off, then wind eight pounds of silk pieces, thirty-six by thirty-six
inches, around my body under my clothes, tie them down with two
leather straps, and deliver them to the manufacturer. The clerk made
one ruble a pound, and the government lost two. The government
had customs police hanging around the Nalevka Street manufacturing
district, so I would walk calmly down the street with my cane on my
arm, reading a Polish paper, until I saw an opportunity to slip into a
factory without being seen by the burly detectives. In two minutes I
would cast off my dangerous silk and be out through another door
onto the street. As for the material, it would immediately be thrown
down on a table and made into neckties, so nothing could be proven.
The fear of being tailed and caught by the customs police or secret
service who worked on the railway was the bad part of it; it was a
riskier job than breaking into a house and stealing, since it involved
the czarist government. Once I had to receive smuggled guns in the
form of walking sticks; they contained pistols in the rounded handles.
That kind of smuggling is a political crime, for which I could have
been sent to Siberia. But do not men fight, steal or rob for bread, lie
and cheat for bread? It is hard to understand in this country where a
man who is willing to work can most of the time find work to sustain
life, but in Poland at that time it was different. Industry was not
developed, and apart from the small shopkeepers and merchants,
handworkers like tailors and shoemakers, and workers on the railway
and other utilities in the hands of the government, Jews had no
chance for a job, and the mass of the non-Jews were just as poor and
jobless.
The man in need or the man who is avaricious does not think of
the consequences, but of the need of the moment, and only has
regrets afterward. It was really my father’s fault: he consented to
Herskovitz’s plan to help us with those few rubles a week—a lot of
money to those in dire need of food. Fate seemed to be in my favor,
when I was called to the army and had to flee Russia; it probably
saved me from going to prison, being condemned as an outcast, and
remaining in that land of misery and destruction. And it not only not
saved me, but my two brothers and one sister from being left in that
place of Jewish misfortune; I pioneered and opened the road for
them. Had we been more successful in business here, and been able

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