NCERT Book Class 12 English (kaleidoscope) Short Stories 3 A Wedding in Brownsville

21/A WEDDING IN BROWNSVILLE

3
A Wedding in Brownsville
Isaac Bashevis Singer was born in Poland. His
father and grandfather were rabbis and he was
educated at the Warsaw Rabbinical Seminary. In
1935 he emigrated to the US and since then has
worked as a regular journalist and columnist for
the New York paper, The Jewish Daily Forward.
Apart from some early work published in Warsaw,
nearly all his fiction has been written in Yiddish
for this journal. It is relatively recently that Singer’s
work has been translated on any scale and that
his merit, and the endurance of his writing, have
been recognised by a general audience. He was
Isaac Bashevis Singer awarded the Nobel Prize for literature in 1978. His
1902–1991 publications include—A Friend of Kafka, The
Seance and Other Stories.

The wedding had been a burden to Dr Solomon Margolin
from the very beginning. True, it was to take place on a
Sunday, but Gretl had been right when she said that was
the only evening in the week they could spend together. It
always turned out that way. His responsibilities to the
community made him give away the evenings that belonged
to her. The Zionists had appointed him to a committee; he
was a board member of a Jewish scholastic society; he
had become co-editor of an academic Jewish quarterly.
And though he often referred to himself as an agnostic
and even an atheist, nevertheless for years he had been
dragging Gretl to Seders at Abraham Mekheles’, a Landsman
from Sencimin. Dr Margolin treated rabbis, refugees, and
Jewish writers without charge, supplying them with
medicines and, if necessary, a hospital bed. There had