Alvin Roth's employment and mentorship under Abe Steinheim

Alvin Roth’s employment and mentorship under Abe Steinheim joined a rare opening for an orphaned young man to a bitter disagreement over what work, success, and moral responsibility meant. Steinheim offered Alvin a place beside him in a major construction business—and eventually a full scholarship at Rutgers University—but the opportunity could not reconcile Alvin to the employer he regarded as a cheat of working people.

Recruitment and Apprenticeship

Alvin was twenty-one in 1940, an orphan who had spent close to seven years as Herman Roth’s ward and lived in a furnished room above a Wright Street shoeshine parlor. After a difficult adolescence, he had found work at Steinheim & Sons, one of Newark’s two largest Jewish construction firms. The connection began years earlier: at High Holiday services, Steinheim saw Alvin beside Herman, mistook him for Herman’s older son, and asked, “What does the boy do? Let him come over and work for us.”

Steinheim did not consign Alvin to the mailroom or make him an office boy. He hired him as his driver, sending him on errands, with messages, and between construction sites to check on subcontractors. Alvin thus saw the business from close range: Steinheim called the subcontractors “the chiselers,” while Alvin thought Steinheim was the one who took advantage of them. In summer, Alvin drove him to Freehold to watch his trotters race; on other Saturdays he accompanied him to races at Weequahic Park. Steinheim’s interests in racing and development also brought him into contact with local officials and the wealthy shore set. The work exposed Alvin not just to construction, but to the personal connections and deal-making through which Steinheim expanded his business.

The employer who took Alvin on was formidable. He had turned his immigrant father’s small building company into a multimillion-dollar operation, after a family conflict drove his brothers out. Herman called him “made of steel,” and hoped Alvin would learn from his appetite for work and willingness to take on risky projects. The narrator presents a more complicated picture: Steinheim could use his wealth and influence to get his way, while Alvin saw his constant pursuit of money as an organizing principle of the man’s life.

A Lesson in Work—and Its Limits

Herman treated the job as a chance to steady Alvin’s life. After Alvin had stolen from the till at an Esso station, Herman persuaded the owner to drop the charges and repaid the missing money himself. Later, he urged Alvin to keep his complaints about Steinheim to himself and learn from him instead. Herman’s advice was not an endorsement of every business practice: he defended Steinheim as a builder in a cutthroat trade, and as a believer in Roosevelt’s New Deal, he presented the job as a practical education rather than an ideal of capitalism.

Alvin found the lesson intolerable. He called Steinheim a bully, a cheapskate, and a swindler, and described a man who shouted at his sons, humiliated his wife, and expected work to fill every day. Alvin’s account of a Sunday trip to a deli captured the employer’s command of the room: Steinheim pushed to the front, ordered food on a lavish scale, and then took Alvin to inspect the rental office. The weekly routine, Alvin said, never stopped. To Herman, such behavior might be the cost—or the substance—of learning how a successful business operated. To Alvin, Steinheim’s wealth and power made him a walking indictment of capitalism.

That difference made the employment relationship a family dispute as well as a workplace conflict. Herman had helped redirect his nephew from trouble and hoped that steady work would give him a future. Alvin, however, saw deference to Steinheim as complicity in the very exploitation Herman’s practical reasoning asked him to overlook. He challenged his uncle’s distinction between breaking the law and exploiting workers, asking whether it was acceptable to work for a thief so long as the employer was not legally one.

The Rutgers Offer

Steinheim’s mentorship reached beyond the driving job when he decided Alvin should attend Rutgers University. He told Alvin he was too smart to be so foolish, then personally called the university president and demanded a full scholarship. Steinheim offered to build the college a beautiful building, but made his offer conditional: the orphan had to be admitted and educated at no expense. He also explained that he preferred a chauffeur with intelligence and promise to a formally trained driver who was an idiot.

The proposal gave Alvin a path far beyond his current position. Steinheim envisioned him beginning as a freshman in New Brunswick in September 1941, completing four years, graduating Phi Beta Kappa, and returning to the company as somebody. Herman regarded this as the opportunity of a lifetime and urged Alvin to show respect, learn the business, and not provoke the man who could make the opportunity possible. Yet the offer did not dissolve Alvin’s objections. The mentorship depended on his remaining within Steinheim’s orbit—driving him in the summers and eventually joining the business—and the education was inseparable from a relationship Alvin had come to despise.

Departure and Abandoned Future

The argument between Alvin and Herman continued for four nights. On Friday, Alvin did not come to dinner. The next morning, Herman learned that Alvin had received his pay, thrown the keys to Steinheim’s Cadillac in his employer’s face, and walked out. Alvin had paid his rent, packed his belongings, and left to fight Adolf Hitler. He took the express train from Newark Penn Station to Montreal, heading for Canada rather than the Rutgers education and return to the business Steinheim had imagined.

His departure ended the apprenticeship before its most ambitious promise could be tested. Steinheim had opened a route from chauffeur to university graduate and potential business insider; Alvin rejected that route rather than accept its terms. Herman saw a nephew turning away from rescue and possibility, while Alvin’s refusal expressed a moral judgment about the person who controlled both his work and his prospective future. Their relationship therefore remains suspended between genuine sponsorship and irreconcilable values: Steinheim offered Alvin extraordinary material support, but Alvin would not let gratitude or opportunity decide what kind of labor he could accept.