Rothstein Read Online Free PDF Page B

compounded that hatred. “I think I remember this better than anything else that ever happened to me,” Rothstein confided to the noted psychologist John B. Watson just months before his death. “It was the only time I ever really cried.”
    As time progressed, the differences between Harry and Arnold-and between Arnold and his father-only grew. Harry became a brilliant student, likable, a leader. Arnold withdrew, seeking out the darkness, playing in closets in basements. He cared nothing about academic subjects, and it showed. He resented teachers and ignored obligations. “From the start, however, he had the strange restlessness of the malcontent,” observed author Russell Crouse. “He did not like … school because the schoolteacher knew more than he did. Most of his time was spent in devising schemes to offset that superiority.”
    Arnold fell behind one grade and then another. By fifth grade he and Edgar were classmates. “I’d do all the homework and Arnold would copy it and remember it,” Edgar recalled. “Except in arithmetic. Arnold did all the arithmetic. He loved to play with numbers.”
    Harry followed Abraham Rothstein’s Orthodox ways. Arnold did not. Harry enthusiastically attended cheder (Hebrew school), attaining an easy fluency in Hebrew. At thirteen he pleased his parents by announcing plans to study for the rabbinate. Arnold had to be browbeaten into cheder, where he proved even more indifferent than at public school. Following his bar mitzvah, he announced, “I’ve had enough.”
    “You should be proud of being a Jew,” Abraham would tell his recalcitrant son.
    “Who cares about this stuff?” Arnold sneered. “This is America, not Jerusalem. I’m an American. Let Harry be a Jew.”
    Arnold Rothstein wasn’t the only young Jew rebelling against the faith and the restraints of his father. Throughout New York other young men and women proclaimed their Americanism. They wanted nothing to do with the old ways. Each day, muckraking journalist Lincoln Steffens noticed young men just like A. R.:
    We saw it everywhere. Responding to a reported suicide, we would pass a synagogue where a score or more of boys were sitting hatless in their old clothes, smoking cigarettes on the steps outside, and their fathers, all dressed in black, with their high hats, uncut beards and temple curls, were going into the synagogue, tearing their hair and rending their garments…. Their sons were rebels against the law of Moses; they were lost souls to God, the family, and to Israel of old.
    Abraham Rothstein’s was the older generation in the shul, Arnold’s, the generation who considered their fathers’ world dead. This was the nineteenth century. This was America. They would make their own world.
    It was too often a criminal underworld centered on Abe Rothstein’s old neighborhood, the Lower East Side, one of the nation’s most vice-ridden districts. Rebellion manifested itself in ways far worse than smoking on synagogue steps. Thievery, prostitution, gambling, and gangsterism ran rampant. The place had always been tough. Originally such gangs as the “Plug Uglies” and “Dead Rabbits” dominated it. Then came the Irish “Whyos,” “the Gophers,” and the “White Hand Gang.” Now, it was the Jews’ turn: Monk Eastman (ne Joseph Osterman), Joseph “Yoski Nigger” Toblinsky. “Spanish Louis” (a Sephardic Jew). “Big Jack” Zelig, Max “Kid Twist” Zweibach, Nathan “Kid Dropper” Kaplan, Harry “Gyp the Blood” Horowitz, and “Dopey Benny” Fein. They stole and bullied and provided muscle for pimps and gamblers and the political bosses, the “Big Tim” Sullivans and “Silver Dollar” Smiths.
    Not much can be said in their favor except that their prices were fairly reasonable. Jack Zelig’s rates ran:
    Some had specialties. Gyp the Blood, leader of the “Lexington Avenue Gang,” could break a man’s spine over his back by bending him across his knee. For a few dollars he’d