“A Wedding in the Cemetery” - A Short Story by Joseph Opatoshu - 1929 - translated from Yiddish by Jeffrey Shandler - published in Jewish Currents - May 6, 2020

“The Wedding in the Cemetery” - A Short Story by Joseph Opatoshu - 1929 - translated from Yiddish by Jeffrey Shandler - published in Jewish Currents - May 6, 2020

A story about another lockdown from 1929.

You can read today’s story here 

As I read the opening words in this story I was reminded of life now in cities all over the world. 

“THE ENTIRE JEWISH COMMUNITY, over ten thousand people, were imprisoned in their homes. They were afraid to be out on the street or in the marketplace, where the gutters had been spread with lime. Their sealed-up houses and windows testified that the epidemic spared no one, young or old, poor or rich.

Family after family stood beside their shuttered windows. They gazed fearfully at the stretchers and wept as they were borne away, carrying patients to the hospitals. As the wailing of family members gradually diminished and then stopped completely, the streets grew emptier, more silent. It was rumored that no one taken to the hospital ever returned home. ....

The epidemic grew stronger, attacking like a well-armed enemy, moving from one street to the next. There wasn’t a single house in the city without someone who had the disease. The members of the burial society were exhausted, drained of all their strength, as corpses lay out for four to five days, waiting to be prepared for burial.”

Jeffrey Sandler’s introduction very succiently explains the folk brliefs that lead community to arrange a wedding for a very poor man to a equally poor woman.  Both are disgusted by the spouses the rich of The community pick for them.  It was very interesting to learn why the wedding was held in a cemetary.

Joseph Opatoshu (1886–1954) was a prolific author of Yiddish fiction. Born in Poland, he emigrated to the United States in 1907. For decades he contributed hundreds of stories to the Yiddish daily Der tog, in addition to writing major works of historical fiction and accounts of immigrant life in America.

Jeffrey Shandler is Distinguished Professor of Jewish Studies at Rutgers University. His translations from Yiddish include Yankev Glatshteyn’s Emil and Karl, the first Holocaust novel for young readers. His next book, Yiddish: Biography of a Language, will be published this fall.

This Is third Short Story by Joseph Opatoshu posted upon in The Reading Life.

I hope to read his 1938 novel In Polish Woods one day.