EARLY LIFE
with the next trip, found out I was there. He comes into the store, says he wants to speak to his daughter. He wanted me to leave, but I told him I wouldn’t go home, I’d rather go to the river and drown, then go home. I wouldn’t go. So, I stayed on another while. A year went by, and she made another proposition to me. She said, ‘Dora, you are a very aggressive girl. Why don’t you help me out in the store, at the counter? When we cut the merchandise, you can package it. You can meet more people.’ The little girl was sent to school already; she was seven years old. So, I did that for a while. Then it didn’t suit my father to see me working in the store. So, with the next trip, he came and took me home. It was the same misery again. My step- mother would make me scrub the floors at 4 AM. Her children were all sleeping with beautiful beds and the maids and everything. I had to lay on the floor and scrub the floor. Anything that didn’t have to be done, I had to do. My brother Boruch, they just knocked him down. They usta beat him so much. He didn’t know any better. I knew it was a better world than that. THE PEAR TREE I want to tell you an instance about my brother when he was about 12 years old. So, he went to school and climbed up on a pear tree to steal a few pears from the farmer. They reported him to my father. My father took his clothes away and locked him in his room. In the old country. All the men are wear- ing leather straps. He took off the leather strap from his pants and beat him that blood was running from his body. Being a sister, the feel- ing wasn’t right with me. They wouldn’t give him anything to eat. The stepmother rode him like that. At night I usta sneak down, and get a glass of milk, and a piece of bread, and stick it into the room so he wouldn’t starve. My father found out. He beat me so that I thought this was already the end. I suffered like that till I was about fifteen.
Dora Shooster- My stepmother told us that she didn’t want to brush my hair and she didn’t want to put me at the table. My brother and I were not allowed to sit at that table with the family. On Friday night, my father was already a rich man at that time; he used to take a poor man for supper, that was the rule. In Europe, grown-up men with families would go around begging from house to house. My father would go to the schul on Friday night and take one or two, ‘Oy Chum’, they called them, men home to dinner. My stepmother had a special woman to cook the dinner for the family. If she had fish for dinner, she never gave my brother, and I fish. She gave us left-over lima beans, and she gave the other children the better food. I had an aunt, my father’s sister, who had six daughters. She used to send one of the girls after me and take me to her home and wash my hair and keep me there all day. She was very good but very poor. Her husband used to make furniture. If somebody would get married, he would make a bed for them. He made $5 a week. They had ten children. My aunt used to go to the farmer and help take out the potatoes from the ground. She would work there half a day, and he would give her a bushel of potatoes. She would come home and make a potato kugel, and we would all sit down to eat. She had beautiful children, such gorgeous daughters. There was a family that I was related to in Kishinev, which is a city perhaps bigger than New York, in Russia. They had a pogrom there (1903,1905).
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