Rothstein Read Online Free PDF

tenement stock. Good stock. After all, he was Abe Rothstein’s boy.
    They called Abraham Elijah Rothstein, “Abe the just,” a richly earned compliment. Most of New York’s Jews in the late nineteenth century were immigrants, fresh off the boat and scrambling to make a new life in a new land. They quickly abandoned old beliefs and old customs-turned to American ways, or at least what greenhorns thought were American ways.
    Abraham’s parents, Harris and Rosa Rothstein, had fled the pogroms of their native Russian-ruled Bessarabia. Abraham Rothstein was born on Henry Street, on the Lower East Side, in 1856. He worked hard, following in his father’s profession as a cap maker. Later he emerged as a highly successful cotton-goods dealer.
    He made a very comfortable living. But far more noteworthy than the living Abraham Rothstein made was the life he made. He lived his life and practiced his trade according to the faith of his fathers. Most native-born Jews rejected orthodoxy, embracing secularism and Americanism. Some turned socialist or Zionist. Abraham Rothstein chose tradition. He attended synagogue, observed the Sabbath, lived according to the Decalogue-and was soon known to all who knew him (and many who didn’t) as “Abe the just.”
    “My father bequeathed me a way of life,” Abraham Rothstein explained decades later. “He taught me a way of life. He taught me, above all, to love God and to honor Him. Secondly, he taught me to honor all men and love them as brothers. He told me whatever I received I received from God and that no man can honor God more greatly than by sharing his possessions with others. This I have tried to do.”
    He not only was active in the Bessarabian Landsmannschaft-most native-born Jews abandoned such old-country organizations to the greenhorns-he found his bride through it. The arrangement was not a matter of simply returning to the Lower East Side or even crossing over to Brooklyn. The marriage was brokered with a family in San Francisco, that of general-store owner Jacob Solomon Rothschild and his wife Minnie. Twentythree-yearold Abraham Rothstein traveled cross-country to meet his seventeen-year-old bride and on September 3, 1879, married her at her family home.
    They met only on the day of their wedding. Abraham was to have arrived a few days earlier, so the couple might know each other at least superficially. But transcontinental travel was problematic, and he arrived mere hours before the ceremony. “When we married, we did not love each other,” Esther would recall. “How could you love a stranger? But all the material for love was there. I respected Abraham, I knew he was a good man or my father would not have approved of him. From the first moment he was gentle to me and considerate. Love, of course, came later.”
    However, sex-and children-came much sooner. The newlyweds returned to New York, moving in with the groom’s parents, his older brother Lewis, and the Rothsteins’ Irish-born servant girl, Mary O’Reilly. Their first child, Harry (actually Bertram), arrived little more than nine months after their wedding July 18, 1880-at the family home at 270 Madison Avenue. Arnold arrived in 1882 on East 47th Street-a significant fact, because the Rothsteins moved about Manhattan at a dizzying pace, surely increasing an insecure child’s fear. Edgar was born in September 1883-at 1835 Lexington Avenue. Sister Edith followed in August 1886. Sarah arrived in March 1888 (on East 43rd Street). And finally, Jacob “Jack” was born in March 1891, when the family lived at 165 East 78th Street.
    Arnold’s difficulties with older brother Harry began very early. Once when Arnold was just three, Abraham Rothstein stumbled upon a strange and frightening scene: Harry asleep; Arnold poised over him with a knife. “Why, my son?” the distraught father asked. “Why?”
    “I hate Harry,” was all Arnold had to say. He meant it.
    Harry’s trip to San Francisco with their mother