View Full Version : The Story Of Isidore Rasosky Better Known As The Farther Of Barney Ross

10-14-2009, 05:53 PM
The world of Barnet David Rasofsky then still only a child was shattered one morning on December 1924, shattered by a gunman's bullet that left his farther lying in a pool of blood on the woodedn floor of his ramshackle grocery store on Jefferson Street in the Chicago ghetto. Isidore Rasosky died the next day in hospital, the victim of a robbbery gone horribly truly wrong. He was sixty years of age.

Isidore was born in Russia and was a descendant of the orginal sect of high priests. He was a talmudic schoolar and a teacher of religious law, but when he was forced to flea Russia, coming to New York in 1903, he found the new world full of teachers and scholars and was forced to eke out a living selling grocaeries from a pushcart on the Lower East Side.

It took him two long, hardwoking years to save enough to send his wife Sarah and son Ben. They rented a basement flat on Rivington Street and Sarah worked with her Husband on the pushcart.

Two children died in infancy before a son, who they named Morrie survived. Then came another son, Barnet David, who they called Beryl, his Yiddish name. Two years later Isidore took his family to Chicago where Sarah's uncle had put down a deposit on a small groccery store for them.

There were more children, Sammy, Georgie, and Ida, adn there would be another move, to Jefferson Street, were Isidore opened Rasofsky's Dairy. It was there he toiled ninteen hours a day, and it was there were he would eventually die.

10-14-2009, 07:04 PM
I never knew that. Perhaps the death of his father really pushed Barney Ross to become something great.

10-15-2009, 02:16 AM

Get the book "Barney Ross" by Douglas Century, there are so many interesting things about this guys life. He was a war hero. His associations with Al Capone and childhood friend Jack Ruby. His involvement with a gang of Jewish toughs (though never proven, only told by his brother) that use to organize raids against Nazi sympathizer in Chicago before he went to fight in the war himself. His addiction to pain killers and heroin to ease the pain of wounds suffered at the battle of Guadalcanal and how he beat it after years of hiding it from family and friends.

Probably my favorite boxing book. It doesn't hide his shortcomings, but makes you understand the man and look at him as a role model regardless.