MY SON, THE DOCTOR: A Memoir

By Avrum I. Froimson and MD

My memoir that tells why and how I became an orthopedic and hand surgeon.
It describes my childhood growing up in a small industrial city during the depression, my family's challenges, my education and career. This book was conceived to tell my story to my large family, four children, twelve grandchildren and two great grandchildren and future ones.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Gatekeeper Press
• Release date: Jun 11, 2020
• ISBN: 9781642379815

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This is my son, the doctor, said my mother, introducing me to the salesclerk in Benson’s department store. She looked down and smiled at me. The year was 1937. I was six years old. As the oldest son of Russian-Jewish immigrants, my life’s path was already clear to my parents. Although that is my earliest memory of hearing my career goal, there were countless more such introductions as I was growing up.

By the time I was in school, I began to understand why my parents wanted me to become a physician. There were very few career opportunities for Jewish graduates. Employers would not hire them. And my parents did not want me to become a small businessman like my father.

The Great Depression was punishing our small steel-mill city in western Pennsylvania with massive unemployment. My father struggled in his grocery store to provide for the family after losing his thriving home building company to bankruptcy in 1930 when the home buyers could not make their mortgage payments to the bank and their second mortgage payments to him. By contrast, the local doctors appeared to be prospering. They lived well and drove large shiny cars like Buicks. They were respected, almost held in awe by my father and mother. They wanted me to have that kind of life.

So that was it. I would have to become a physician. Each time I was a patient in the family doctor’s office, I looked around at his instruments, the furnishings, and the huge picture of the human nervous system hanging on the wall, and I imagined myself in his place one day. Watching him on a house call in our kitchen using a staple device to quickly close a two-inch laceration on my knee, I imagined doing that one day.

The confirming experience came when I was eleven. Our dog, Rex, ran into the street and was struck by a car. When I got to him, I found him lying unconscious with a gaping scalp wound. I carried him home. Since there were no family funds to take him to a veterinarian, my father told me Rex was going to die. But I refused to believe that. I took my dog to the basement and lay him on a blanket near the warm coal furnace, cleaned his scalp laceration, and sewed it closed with a needle and thread from my mother’s sewing kit. I stayed there with him for two days until he woke up, struggled to his feet, and then licked my face. He always limped after that, but we were pals. He must have sensed that I had saved his life. He never left my side until he died of something else years later. I wanted to become a doctor.

I was born in 1931 in Beaver Falls, Pennsylvania, a small city twenty-seven miles north of Pittsburgh, to David and Annette Froimson, both immigrants from Russia. I was their first child.

My father had come to America in 1914 at age twenty-one, from a village in the Ukrainian region of Russia known as the Pale of Settlement—the only region where Jewish people were permitted to live. Only Jewish people lived in this village, and they were often subjected to pogrom attacks by Cossacks riding in on horses, abusing or murdering indiscriminately. The most infamous of these attacks was the 1903 pogrom that killed thousands in the nearby city of Kishinev. The Jews could not defend themselves.

At eighteen, he had traveled to Odessa to work as a Hebrew teacher. There was a large Jewish population in Odessa at that time. Some of the leaders of the Zionist movement lived and worked there, so he had opportunities to meet and hear speeches by such luminaries as Ze’ev Jabotinsky and Ahad Ha’am.

David was sure to be conscripted to serve in the army of the Czar for twenty-five years. Not only were Jews unable to practice their religion in the army, they were treated badly by other soldiers. He knew he must leave Russia. Since it was illegal for him to leave the country, he had to escape. Some of his friends went to Palestine to be pioneers in the rebirth of the Jewish state, and he considered going as well.

But, in the end, he decided to go to America where he had family. When the Dneister River froze solidly in winter, he walked across and made his way to Romania, and with the help of the Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society, traveled across Europe to a German seaport. He boarded a ship to Montréal, Canada, and from there traveled by train to Buffalo, New York, and on to Pittsburgh, where his cousins lived.

In Pittsburgh, he learned English in night school and worked at various jobs until he was drafted into the United States Army at the onset of World War I in 1917. As a conscientious objector, he served in the Quartermaster Corps, the supply branch of the army, until 1919.

He settled in Beaver Falls after the war. He had been there several times in his job of carrying leather in a backpack to shoe repair shops in the many towns along the Ohio River and the Beaver Valley. He was attracted to its beautiful hills and valleys and the Beaver River that passed through it. The main downtown business street was very wide and lined with a variety of retail shops, many operated by Jews. The small but robust Jewish community had a synagogue and a rabbi.

At the north end of town, he opened a small grocery store to sell to steel workers and others living in the neighborhoods around the nearby mills. He established a credit business where the customers could charge their purchases and later pay their bills when they received their paychecks. This was his business advantage, allowing him to compete with the larger grocery stores that required cash. Credit cards did not exist then. He prospered, and in a few years, built his own building for a larger store with a seven-room apartment on the second floor.

In 1921, after the Russian Revolution, my father returned to Russia without a visa and at great risk to himself to rescue his aging parents, Abraham and Malka. It was a very dangerous trip since he could not obtain passports or visas for them. If caught, he would have been subject to arrest, imprisonment, or even execution because of his own desertion. But he was not discovered, and he brought his parents to Beaver Falls to live with him