Talk:Lev Abramov

Lev Yisraelovich Abramov (Russian: Леви Израилович Абрамов, Yiddish: לעווי יזראַילאָוויטש אַבראַמאָוו) is the protagonist Sam Ramey's father.

A stern, stoic man who is obsessed with getting his son to succeed (as he sees fit) at any cost, Lev does not tolerate Sam's "transgressive" behaviour. He especially dislikes Sam's interest in the theatre, fearing that Sam's interest will take time away from his studies.

Lev also feels that many of Sam's friends are a bad influence on him, particularly Frankie, whom Lev sees as rude, disrespectful, emotionally unstable, and juvenile.

Early Life
Born in the Slutsk shtletl in the 1860s, Lev Yisraelovich Abramov was born Leib Ben Israel (Leib, Son of Israel).

As a child, Leib was raised religious. He studied at a yeshiva starting at the age of 12. At this time, he did not know Russian at all. It was not until much later, when he met his cousin who had traveled in the Crimea, that he was shown Haskalah (Hebrew Enlightenment) ideas and began to learn Russian by himself. At the age of 18, a year after his marriage to Raisa (through a matchmaker), Lev and Raisa decided to move to Odessa, not seeing much of a future in religious life. Odessa possessed a vibrant Jewish community in the mid to late 19th century, with Jews making up almost a 1/3 of the city's population!

Lev flourished in Odessa. With the help of Raisa, his brother as well as his cousin, he opened a French cafe (which was popular in the day) and participated in trading. He also helped out with the local papers as a printer worker. Many of the intellectuals in Odessa were maskilim, members of the Haskalah movement and forerunners of the Back to Palestine proto-Zionist movement.

Lev became obsessed with the revival of Hebrew and the idea of empowering the Jewish community by fighting Tsarist censorship. Lev would do this by interacting with groups of maskilim to distribute and print socialist literature. Many of the maskilim supported socialism and embraced Marxism as a way of creating a new society (contrasted with the old, oppressive society of the Tsar).

'''Becoming involved in pro-socialist and anti-Tsarist circles exposed Lev to tragedy. '''In the late 1880s, during the height of pogroms, when his father was falsely accused of a crime and his older brother was seized by the Tsar's army and never returned, Lev decided that he was going to leave for the West before anything worse could happen to their family.

With Raisa, he went to America and settled there in 1894. Lev had heard that America was pretty good in terms of religious freedom and had more economic opportunities; plus, the German Jews had immigrated to America before and they were relatively successful there.

Life in New York
Raisa and Lev first settled in the Lower East Side in New York.

There, they established themselves in the garment industry and later became involved in the Jewish trade union movement which had emerged in the late 19th century.

By the time their son Sam was born in 1900, they were relatively well off.

Living in a very Russian-Jewish part of the Lower East Side in New York, their family friends were usually Russian Jews.

For the most part, they spoke Yiddish with a bit of Russian and later on, some English as well. Sarah and Samuel learned English at an early age and attained native fluency, something their parents did not achieve.