From the New York Evening
World of Monday, 4 November 1918, page 4 (no byline):
WEDDING IN CEMETERY.
Brave Couple Carry Out Ancient
Tradition to Beat Influenza
Now watch the “flu” follow Austria
into the discards.
In Mount Hebron Cemetery [Flushing,
Queens], Miss Rose Schwartz, No. 369 East Tenth Street, stood beside Abraham
Lachterman, No. 638 East Eleventh Street, yesterday afternoon, and before than
them stood Rabbi Unger, who performed a marriage ceremony.
The tradition upon which the couple
acted is an ancient Jewish one which declares that the only way to stop a
plague is to hold a wedding ceremony in a cemetery.
When Miss Schwartz and Lachterman
consented to offer themselves to stop the influenza epidemic, the neighbors
were so grateful that they provided food, taxicabs, a wedding gown and even the
furnishings for a flat. Two thousand
persons cheered the courageous pair as they started for the cemetery.
This short newspaper report
from over a hundred years ago was the impetus for a New York Times article called “A Century Ago, a Cemetery Wedding to End a Pandemic” by Steve
Bell, which ran in the “Metropolitan” section of the Sunday edition on 14 June
2020.
The ceremony’s called a “black wedding” (in Yiddish, shvartse chasene—with variations) and it’s
supposed to stop a plague. The one recounted in the article was the 1918 Spanish
Flu, but other accounts are about cholera outbreaks.
Okay, the whole story is bizarre, but the thing that stopped
me was the date of the original Evening
World report. 4 November 1918 was one
day before my dad was born (5 November ’18)!
Furthermore, Dad was born at home because it was deemed too
dangerous for a pregnant woman to give birth in a hospital during the very
pandemic for which the black wedding was intended as a remedy
The way the macabre story popped out at me made me curious,
so I googled shvartse chasene and
there are lots of posts (plus one painting and an album of klezmer music) on
the ritual. Some had some synchronicity with aspects of my life which
intrigued me.
In addition to the newspaper report the Times used
for its article having been dated the day before my dad was born, the New
York Times article attributes the black wedding tradition to Jews
from “Eastern Europe”—though I never heard of the practice and my dad’s family was
from Eastern Europe. His father came from the Ukraine in the late 1890s and
his mother from Latvia in the early 1900s.
(My mom’s family was Central European, from Austro-Hungary—mostly
Austria—but that was many generations earlier.)
Then, one tale of a black wedding ceremony I found was a
translation of a 1929 Yiddish story by an apparently well-known Yiddish
novelist named Joseph Opatoshu. That’s not a last name I’m likely to
forget easily—and it turns out that Joseph Opatoshu (1886-1954) was the
father of actor David Opatoshu (1918-96).
(By the way—David Opatoshu’s life dates are the same as my
father’s!)
David Opatoshu was in Exodus (1960; he
played Akiva ben Canaan, the head of the Irgun, an underground Zionist
paramilitary organization, and the uncle of Ari ben Canaan, the character
played by Paul Newman) and guested on many, many TV shows, including two
of my favorite series, the Star Trek episode “A Taste of
Armageddon” (1967) and Perry Mason’s ”The Case of the Feather
Cloak” (1965).
The main reason I recognize David Opatoshu’s name, though,
is that I wrote his biographical entry in the Cambridge Guide to American
Theatre (1993).
Later, I gathered up some sites for research. I found
another account of a black wedding from the papers
of Mayer Kirshenblatt, another name that’s hard to forget. It
turns out that Mayer Kirshenblatt (1916-2009). a Polish-born Canadian
painter and author, was the father of Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett (even
harder)—who just happens to have been the chair of the Department of Performance
Studies when I was at New York University.
BKG (as we referred to her) was something of an anomaly at
DPS. Almost everyone on that faculty was either a theater scholar or a
dance scholar—sort of Thalia and Melpomene versus Terpsichore. Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett (b. 1942) is neither;
in fact, she isn’t even in a performance field. She’s a folklorist, and
the black wedding would be right in her wheelhouse.
I looked at the Google hits a little more carefully on my
second search than I had when I was just browsing to see if there was any info. I discovered that several posts about black
weddings mention a town called Uman. That’s the small city in the
Ukraine were my paternal grandfather was born.
It’s not a big city, and it doesn’t come up in the press or
anything. In fact, other than the times my dad mentioned it when he
told me about his family and the couple of times I deliberately looked it up, I’ve
only come across it once that I can recall. It was a passing mention in
some novel—by Leon Uris or James Michener or someone like that—as the
birthplace of a character. Now it pops up again.
I think something’s telling me I should write this post . .
. .
The World article
labels the black wedding an “ancient” ritual, but none of the stories and
accounts go back very far. I found one mention
of black weddings at the end of the 18th century, but there were few details
and I couldn’t really confirm it.
If the practice was observed before that, say in ancient
times or the Middle Ages, it’s not recorded in any source I could find on
line. (Physical library facilities
aren’t available these days, so I can’t check older, printed sources. But I have to believe that if there were
reports of black weddings earlier than the 18th or 19th century, someone would at least have
mentioned it on the ’Net.)
I’ll be sticking with the English phrase ‘black wedding’
rather than any of the Yiddish names for the rite. There are too many variations to keep up with
that. First of all, the Yiddish words
have variant spellings in English: shvartze
chassene and shvartse khasene,
for two alternatives.
Then some accounts call the ceremony mageyfe chasene, or ‘plague wedding’; others use cholere chasene for ‘cholera
wedding’—though that has a more limited application, I’d imagine. I presume there are other permutations as
well.
As the 1918 World
report suggests and the 2020 Times
article states, a wedding ceremony between two of the community’s most
unfortunate members performed in a cemetery was believed to be the only way to
stop a plague. Quoting another 1918
newspaper article, from Philadelphia’s Public
Ledger, the Times added that “the
attention of God would be called to the affliction of their fellows if the most
humble man and woman among them should join in marriage in the presence of the
dead.”
The bride and groom might be orphans, for example, as they
were in an 1892 ritual in Poland. The
bride, in fact, was what the Jewish community labeled a “round orphan” because
she had no living family. Other than
being orphaned, the couple might be poor or disabled or some combination of the
three.
Their misfortune was the hook to attract God’s sympathy and
the dead surrounding the celebrants were seen as an enhancement of that
attraction—sort of a sweetener, if you will.
The idea was that a marriage by the graveside would attract the
attention of the dead, who would intercede with God on behalf of the
living. In addition, He would look down
on the unfortunate bridal couple, two strangers marrying in a grim place, and
take pity on them and halt the plague.
Sometimes the wedding pair didn’t even know each
other—though in decades past, that was often just as true of ordinary betrothed
couples whose marriages were arranged by parents and marriage brokers. The townspeople would pay the expenses for
the ceremony, donate the bride’s and groom’s wedding outfits, and supply the food
served at the ceremony. The people of
the community pledged to support the couple after the marriage.
A local klezmer band played music after the ceremony and the
attendees, pretty much the whole Jewish community—if the location was a shtetl (a town whose population was
entirely or almost entirely Jewish), then the whole village—danced among the
burial plots and headstones.
In some cases, apparently, the townsfolk even got the
newlyweds a place to live and give them gifts of money at the wedding (also not
uncommon at Jewish weddings of bygone days—or perhaps even now!). At a black wedding in Philadelphia in 1918,
the guests reportedly made gifts totaling $1000—the 2020 equivalent of almost $17,000.
It’s uncertain what the ceremony looked like. It was certainly based on traditional Jewish
marriage ceremonies as they were performed in the region. There was a chuppah, the canopy that’s raised over the bride and groom on the
synagogue’s bimah, or “stage.” It symbolizes the home that the couple will
build together. It was set among the
graves, sometimes right between two gravestones.
As least one or two accounts say that the bride’s wedding
dress is black—the groom’s in black anyway—and the chuppah, which is traditionally made of white cloth, is also
black. The section about black weddings
in Luboml: The Memorial Book of a
Vanished Shtetl (composed c.1968) is entitled “The Black Chupa (The Black
Wedding Canopy).” A photo of a black
wedding in Israel last March shows a black chuppah,
though another shot shows the bride wearing a white gown.
(The “memorial book” cited above is a phenomenon, which
we’ll encounter again in this post, of the post-World War II era. Yizkor
is Hebrew for ‘remembrance: and the sefer
yizkor, or memorial book, commemorates a Jewish community destroyed during
the Holocaust. The books are published
by former residents as remembrances of homes, people, and ways of life lost
during World War II.)
 |
Mayer Kirshenblatt, The Black Wedding in the Cemetery, ca. 1892 (April 1996); '
acrylic on canvas, 36" x 48" |
A contemporary painting of an 1892 wedding shows a bride in
white and a blue chuppah (though it
may be supposed to represent purple) in the background—but the artwork, The
Black Wedding in the Cemetery, ca. 1892 (April 1996) by Mayer Kirshenblatt, is an artist’s imaginary
rendering of the event.
 |
Zoya Cherkassky, Black
Chuppah (2020);
Ink and markers on paper, 12¼"
x 9¼"
|
An article entitled “Zoya Cherkassky: Lost Time: Black Chuppah” by Alison M. Gingeras (b. 1973) shows a
drawing by artist Cherkassky (b. 1976) of a wedding couple under a black canopy
(as the title Black Chuppah, 2020, suggests)
and the bride dressed all in black. Of
course, this is again a modern artist’s depiction of an imagined scene.
There’s obviously a strong element of magical thinking (positing
a causal link between a thought and an action or event which seemingly cannot
be justified by reason or observation) and superstitious appeasement (the
belief in the influencing of a deity by sacrifice or other ritual) to the black
wedding. Furthermore, the black wedding
doesn’t have one sole meaning.
Some rabbis, for example, feel it works because helping a
needy couple or the marginal of the community who were unlikely to marry
is a mitzvah, an act of kindness or a
good deed, That would please God who’d
reward the townspeople for their kindness and solicitude by halting the plague.
Others, however, were afraid that the ritual would only make
things worse. On 25 October 1918, for instance, The Jewish Exponent, a weekly
community newspaper published in Philadelphia since 1887, called a black wedding in that city, “the most deplorable exhibition
of benighted superstition” and lamented that “the publicity given to the
occurrence will convey to many people the impression that this is a custom
sanctioned and encouraged by the Jewish religion.”
The disagreement sounds to me like a somewhat lurid instance
of the question Jews ask whenever something controversial or newsworthy involving
a member of their faith arises: Is it good or bad for the Jews.
The origins of the black wedding are entirely unknown,
except that the ritual had been imported from Eastern Europe two to
two-and-a-half centuries ago. That’s
hardly “ancient” as the Evening World report
determined, and it wasn’t really a “tradition,” in the sense that it grew up
over generations. It was invented,
probably by a rabbi, to meet the specific needs of a particular time and place,
namely a cholera, typhus, or influenza outbreak in an East European town.
According to Aliyah Guttmann on the website Ketubah, the practice of black weddings may have arisen from a mash-up of
Hasidic thought, Orthodox Christian celebrations, pagan rituals, and the many
superstitions which were common all over Eastern Europe.
The earliest report of a black wedding that I found on the
’Net goes back to 1785. The writer, Jeremy
Brown, an emergency physician and Director of the Office of Emergency Care
Research at the National Institutes of Health (NIH) who writes on science in
the Talmud at Talmudology.com, cites
some sources for his accounts, but I didn’t see any other reports except ones
obviously derived from Brown’s.
In fact, all the reports of this ceremony I read are almost
identical, not just with respect to the information revealed, but also the
phraseology in which the reports are written.
That’s not really confirmation; it’s just repeating the same hearsay
multiple times.
In an article on The
Lehrhaus website, Brown reports the 1785 black wedding was performed to
address an outbreak of cholera, but I couldn’t determine in what town or region
it occurred or who was involved. The rite was attended by two of the most
eminent masters of Hasidism: Rabbi Elimelech of Lizhensk (1717-87) and Rabbi
Yaakov Yitzchak HaLevi Horowitz (1745-1815; better known as the Seer of
Lublin). That’s essentially all we know;
no other modern report tells any more, including what the ceremony looked like.
(Hasidism is a Jewish religious practice that arose in what
is now Western Ukraine—then part of Poland—during the 18th century and spread
across Eastern Europe. Hasidism in
general—there are many sects, usually named for the birthplace of the
founder—is ultra-Orthodox, distinguished from other Haredi Jews by their
distinctive garb, different for each sect, and its belief in Kabbalism, Jewish
mysticism. Most Hasidim today live in
either Israel or the U.S.
(Rabbi Elimelech Weisblum was one of the founding Rebbes of
the Hasidic movement; Lizhensk was his hometown in Poland. Rabbi Horowitz, also from Poland, was a leading
figure in the early Hasidic movement, he became known as a “seer” or “visionary”
due to the belief by his followers that he was able to see supernaturally
across great distances.)
Brown also reports that black weddings were celebrated for
orphaned teenagers in Jerusalem and Tzfat
(also called Safed, the center of Kabbalism in Palestine) in 1865 to
combat an infestation of locusts that destroyed the crops across Palestine
(then part of the Ottoman Empire), causing hundreds of death.
Brown cites an “eyewitness account” reporting that in Tzfat
the leaders of that holy city took
boys and girls who were orphans and married them off to each other. The huppot
[alternative spelling for the wedding canopies] were in a cemetery between the
graves of our teacher the Ari z”l [Rabbi Isaac Luria Ashkenazi (1534-72)] and
the Beit Yosef [Rabbi Yosef Karo (1488-1575)].
For this was a tradition that they had, and thanks to God who removed
this deathly outbreak from among them.”
(The abbreviation z"l
that follows Rabbi Luria’s common name is an honorific for the dead that stands
for “of blessed memory” [Hebrew transliteration: zikhrono livrakha]. It’s
used here for a rabbi, but it is equally applied to non-rabbinical figures.
(Luria, a leading rabbi and Jewish mystic in the community
of Tzfat, was considered the father of contemporary Kabbalah. Karo was the author of the last great
codification of Jewish law, the Shulchan
Aruch, which is still authoritative for all Jews.)
The Jerusalem ceremony was performed on the Mount of Olives,
also called Mount Olivet, and “was attended by many, and was a very joyous
occasion.” In addition to its biblical
significance, both Old and New Testaments, the Mount of Olives has been a
Jewish cemetery for over 3,000 years.
Cholera was frequently breaking out all over Europe in the
19th century. It’s a particularly terrifying
disease, especially in an era when little was known of modern medicine,
hygiene, and sanitation. It’s
transmitted through contaminated food and water; the principal contaminant being
fecal matter infected with the cholera bacterium.
The disease is highly contagious, though it’s not usually
passed from person to person. An exposed
person can go from infection to the onset of symptoms in as little as two
hours. I won’t go into the full range of
symptoms—it’s a pretty disgusting illness—but the principal manifestation is
watery diarrhea that can leave the victim fatally dehydrated.
It’s not hard to see why people who are ignorant of any
scientific or technological means of preventing or modifying a potentially
fatal disease with revolting symptoms, mysterious origin, and no real treatments
would be afraid of such an epidemic. And
people in fear cope in many different ways,
Some turn to science and research to look for an effective
cure or treatment, but others try to find answers in superstition and
ritual. In one town at the turn of the
20th century, where the outbreak was blamed on adultery and sexual
transgressions, a self-appointed corps of health-guardians went on a killing
spree aimed at the known adulterers in the community. (And Hester Prynne only had to wear a scarlet
A.)
In another cholera crisis, in 1866, rabbis in the town of
Uman, the Ukraine, a city of 10,100 in 1860, of whom about 6,100 were Jews (ca.
61%), decided that the cause of the epidemic was Jewish women wearing
crinolines and earrings. (I suppose it
was considered immodest, ostentatious, and sexually alluring, and thus displeasing
to God.)
So the protectors of public health (and, I presume, morals)
went on a rampage and attacked the crinoline-and-earring-wearing women, tearing
off their undergarments and beating them.
(And this is the town in which my dad’s father was born some
24 years later. No wonder his family
left for the U.S. around 1896! Of course,
the pogroms had a lot to do with that decision, but aside from that . . . .)
Rokhl Kafrissen, a writer for Tablet, a daily online magazine of Jewish news, ideas, and culture,
reported that the first evidence she found of a black wedding was one that took
place during the Russian cholera outbreak of 1831. Subsequently, there was reference to another
one in 1849 in Crakow, Poland (now known in English as Krakow).
Other such ceremonies took place in Berdichev (about 140
miles northwest of Uman), then part of the Russian Empre (now in northern
Ukraine and called Berdychiv) in 1866 and at Opatow, Poland (known as Apt in
Yiddish), in 1892.
The 1892 black wedding in Apt is the one depicted in Mayer
Kirshenblatt’s naïve painting The Black Wedding in the Cemetery, ca. 1892.
Kirshenblatt, who was untaught and only picked up a brush when he was
73, based his art on memories of his Polish homeland—he emigrated to Canada
in 1934—before World War II.
The scene of the
wedding in Apt, where Kirshenblatt was born, was obviously painted not from a
childhood memory—the artist wasn’t even born when the marriage took place—but
from stories told by his elders, part of what Alison M. Gingeras called the
“oral history” of Apt. The artist
recounted the story in They Called Me Mayer July: Painted Memories of a
Jewish Childhood before the Holocaust (2007), a book he and his daughter, Barbara
Kirshenblatt-Gimblett, published together.
The memorial book [sefer yizkor] for Apt recounts how a holy
rabbi helped the town during a cholera epidemic in 1892. Every few days someone died. In a community of about six thousand, that
was a calamity. Prominent citizens went
to the holy rabbi, imploring him to say a few prayers to the Almighty. Maybe the epidemic would subside. The rabbi thoughtfully replied, “Let’s try a
wedding on the Jewish cemetery. Perhaps
the dearly departed will intervene with the Holy One to help.” It is considered a great mitsve,
or good deed, to help the poor to marry.
All that was needed was a bride and groom.
The matchmakers got busy. In
town there was a young bachelor who was supported by the community. His job was to clean the communal bath. Each week he drained the water and replaced
it with a fresh supply. He also kept the
fire going in the mikve, the ritual bath, so that the water would
always be hot. He lived in the hegdesh,
a room where the burial society kept the implements for cleaning the dead for
burial. Itinerant beggars also slept
there. On being approached, the young
man gladly accepted.
Now a bride was needed. There
was in town a young lady, an orphan. In
Yiddish, it is enough to have lost one parent to be an orphan. This woman had lost both parents. She was what is called a kaylakhdike
yesoyme, a round orphan, because she had absolutely no relatives. In exchange for a place to sleep on top of
the oven, her daily bread, and a few cast-off clothes, she did the housework
for a well-to-do family. She received no
wages. On being approached she also
gladly agreed.
A proclamation was issued in the synagogue, the houses of study, and
the Jewish schools that a black wedding, a shvartse khasene, would
be held on the cemetery at a designated time.
Everyone was to attend. On the
appointed day, the whole town, including people from the surrounding villages,
streamed into the cemetery. They
gathered near the oyl, the little building housing the graves of
holy rabbis. The sexton brought a
wedding canopy. The bride wore a donated
wedding dress. The rabbi conducted the
ceremony. Many people shed a tear on
this solemn occasion.
The community donated gifts and food.
A table was set up with a small barrel of vodka, glasses, and large
joints of roasted mutton. Everyone
wished each other a long life. When the
assembly was already a little tipsy, Yankl Krokowski, the badkhn or
master of ceremonies, stood on a stool and announced that the time had come to
call out the wedding gifts. Seeing as
this poor couple had no home, the appeal went out for cash donations. Everyone reached into their pockets and in a
short time the iron pot was full of money.
When it became too heavy to hold, Yankl set the pot down on the table. He regaled the company with jokes and songs. The band struck up a lively tune, and
everyone, men, women, and children, danced.
Reb Zvi Hirsh, who officiated at the wedding, stepped into the large
circle of dancers. Small in stature,
head held high, his eyes looking toward the sky, his beard and sidelocks [payess]
flying, Reb Zvi Hirsh began to dance. He
invited the newlyweds to join him in the obligatory mitsve tants. The merriment continued late into the night. Sure enough the epidemic subsided in a few
days.
(The honorific
‘Reb’ is used to designate someone in an Orthodox or Hasidic community who is
revered and honored for his wisdom and learning. In the case of Reb Hirsh above, he was also a
rabbi, the spiritual leader of a community or congregation. The word’s short tor Rebbe, which is the title
used to designate the leader of a Hasidic sect.
.
(The mitsve
tants, or ‘mitsve [mitzvah] dance,’ is a custom at Hasidic
weddings. It literally means ‘commandment
dance,’ referring to the commandments demanded of a Jew in Jewish law, but
since the dance isn’t actually commanded by the law, it’s closer to ‘customary
dance.’ Indeed, in Orthodox and Hasidic
communities, in which men and women are kept separate in public, dancing involving
men and women together is a violation of religious custom.
(In the mitsve
tants, usually done at the wedding when the guests have all departed and
only the close families of the bride and groom are left, the barriers dividing
the genders are all removed, or the bride is brought into the men’s section. The men, including the groom, the bride’s
father, the groom’s father, and the Rebbe, each dance individually in front of
the bride—who doesn’t actually dance; in fact, she doesn’t even move. It’s an energetic and joyous dance, intended
to express great happiness and joyousness.)
In 1918, just weeks before the Mount Hebron ceremony in
Queens, New York, Harry Rosenberg and Fanny Jacobs got married in a graveyard
near Cobb’s Creek in Philadelphia on 20 October. The pair, both poor, were strangers but they
wanted to help save their community from the Spanish influenza pandemic. The ceremony was celebrated before an
audience of 1,200 immigrant Russian Jews.
Unhappily, according to Kaushik Patowary on the website Amusing Planet, “genealogical research
suggested that neither Harry nor Fanny survived the Spanish flu, perishing
along with 50 million others.”
Three weeks later, on 11 November, a similar ritual was
performed in Winnipeg, Manitoba, in Canada.
The Winnipeg Evening Tribune, the local newspaper, reported
that the sumptuous ceremony had been planned for over a month.
The Tribune reported:
“At one end of the cemetery a quorum [minyan]
of ten Jews conducted a funeral. At the
other, 1,000 Gentiles and Jews witnessed the wedding. . . [.] Harry Fleckman and Dora Wisman were
contracting parties at the wedding. Rabbis Khanovitch and Gorodsy officiated.”
Even in our modern times, the start of the third decade of
the 21st century, the trend continues. On
18 March, in the face of a latter-day plague, the COVID-19 pandemic, an orphan
couple wed in a cemetery in the Israeli city of Bnei Brak, in the center of the
country’s Mediterranean coast, just east of Tel Aviv.. Bnei Brak, a city of nearly 200,000, is one
of Israel’s poorest and most densely populated.
It became a hotspot for coronavirus infection.
It’s also a center of Haredi Judaism (ultra-Orthodoxy).
The website Kikar
reported that the chuppah, which
photos show was black, was set up inside the cemetery. The ceremony was recorded and the video
posted online (https://youtu.be/okAHpZkrHc0)
and showed Haredi men surrounding the chuppah,
chanting and standing amidst the graves among which the couple was posed.
This is the canopy of the Roth and
Berber families, where the bridegroom is an orphan from a father, and the
canopy was held near the tombs of the rabbis buried there. The canopy was held
in the cemetery, as a purple against epidemics.
(In Judaism, a person can become an orphan with the loss of
one parent.)
Almost nothing is known about the outcomes of these
marriages. No one recorded if they were
successful and happy or disastrous.
Apparently some ended in suicide, such as a 1905 ceremony in Jerusalem a
week after which the groom was reported to have killed himself. There’s no telling, however, if the causes
were the essentially forced marriages.
At the end of Joseph Opatoshu’s short story, “A Wedding in
the Cemetery,” he describes the moment just before the vows are taken. The groom is “the hunchback Shloyme—a
freeloader” and the bride is “the schoolteacher’s daughter Brokhe, a young
woman who was disabled.”
The wedding canopy had been set up
at the tomb. The tall, gangly groom,
wearing a high fur hat, covered his eyes with his hand. Under his black silk caftan he wore a white
ceremonial robe with wide sleeves. The
rabbi, the Hasidic leader, and the members of the rabbinical court stood
around, impatiently asking again and again, “Where is the bride?”
The bride, dressed in white and
covered with a veil, approached from a distance. The limping beggarwoman danced in front of
her, carrying a loaf of challah in both hands.
Every once in a while she stopped and blurted out, through thick, fleshy
lips, “From me, to you!”
Accompanied by a soft melody, the
bride was led with dancing steps under the canopy. She looked about and grew terrified. She raised her withered hand and looked as if
she were about to flee, then stopped, and exclaimed in a thin voice, “Our
neighbor won’t be able to stand it! She’s
so jealous, she was always teasing me that I’ll never get married.”
The people who had led her to the
canopy tried to calm her: “Hush, hush, Brokhe, a bride mustn’t speak now.”
Brokhe tore the groom’s hand away
from his face and stared at him, the way a child stares at a new doll, and then
she turned away. “But that’s
Shloyme—that good-for-nothing Shloyme is my groom? No, no, no!” Her voice became a thin, sharp
cry, rising over the thousands of bowed heads, reaching up to the blazing sky.
[I’d have loved to post the
whole of Opatoshu’s story in this article—it’s certainly perfect content—but
even as short as it is, it’d make the post much too long for the blog. You can read it, however, at, among other
sites, Jewish
Currents (https://jewishcurrents.org/a-wedding-in-the-cemetery/).
[For those who aren’t
familiar with it, klezmer music is a folk tradition of the Jews of Eastern
Europe. It flourished largely in the
late 19th century and the early 20th—though it’s actual origins are uncertain. The
genre originally consisted largely of dance tunes and instrumental display
pieces for weddings and other celebrations.
Typical instruments are violin, cimbalom, clarinet, accordion, trombone,
trumpet, piano, double bass, cello, and flute.
[Finally, what strikes
me as the oddest of black wedding material, a children’s book called The Wedding That Saved a Town (Kar-Ben Publishing, 2008; 32 pages) by Yale
Strom and illustrated by Jenya Prosmitsky.
I can’t really imagine using the black wedding ceremony as the basis for
a child’s story book, but there it is.
