A Mazel Tov
“Come! Come!” my father calls.
I break away from Cousin Harriet as my father takes my hand. We weave through the crowd of wedding guests in this New York catering hall, as the music from the Hungarian band drifts over the crowd. “What is it? What is it?”
“You’ll see.”
He tugs me forward and I finally see Mama’s back. She and Cousin Zenny are holding each other’s arms. Her back is straight as she steps-together-steps-together, as if she’s been doing this all her life. The Czárdás! Cousin Zenny is smiling. They spin and Mama throws her head back — so graceful, so happy! The people are applauding. I have never seen this before.
What a celebration this has been! When the guests first arrived,
I stood near Harriet and tried to look at each one — tried to take in that they were my family: Cousin Ivan and his wife Magda. Cousin Zenny and his sister Dora. Bella, Helen and Susie, the three sisters — only two months ago, they had come to our house.
Everyone there was related to everyone else. Cousins. All. Mostly first cousins of which my mother was the eldest.
They knew each other from another time. From Köröshmöza, Hungary, where they had played with each other and gone to school together.
And now we were all in the same room. Amazing!
My mother greeted each new arrival, hugging and rocking. It was unlike any wedding I’d ever seen — a day of steady tears tickling cheeks, making crooked roads onto many a face and finally falling into smiling, laughing mouths.
“Herman!” Mama embraced a guest.
“Lottie! My babysitter!” Cousin Herman turned to me. “It’s a wonder I survived.” He chuckled.
At home, we had a photo of Mama the same age as me, in a too-big old-fashioned dress, standing by a baby carriage. I remembered the story of her rocking it so hard that baby Herman almost fell out.
Harriet grabbed our cousin Eli and pulled both of us to the long table with its gleaming settings, where we would all sit after the ceremony.
I had felt sorry for the girl — Mama — in the photo, her hair pulled up so it wouldn’t get in the way of things. I knew she’d had no mother or father there — her mother in America and her father in a different town. Wasn’t this what “orphan” was?
I watched one cousin’s hand lightly run a finger or two down another cousin’s face, eyes taking in the whole of a family member. Cousins were touching cheeks, smoothing hair that didn’t need smoothing. The wonder expressed in so much physical nearness:
“You’re here! This wedding! When did you get out of ‘there?’”
“In all our lives, would you have believed? A chassene?”
The bride, Hannah, was 38 years old. She was wearing a short-sleeved white dress. Such soft material — silk? It fell just below her knees.
I knew that Cousin Dora had made this so-pretty dress for today’s wedding. I knew that the parents of Hannah and her groom, Ben, were not there to have the moment every parent waits their whole lives to see.
Nobody in that happy space of celebration had either parent in attendance.
I now know, of course, what I couldn’t fully understand then — that a tiny few years before that day of wonder, thousands of people with no homes to return to — with no family left other than themselves — were ultimately herded into different camps than they had been pulled out of.
They were liberated people. But what did that mean? Each of these thousands — millions? — taken out of a slice of hell for each of them, and brought into a sunlit, no-barbed-wire world that most of them had denied could still exist. Most were ragged and broken in body and mind — arm bones and leg bones existing beneath papery skin.
Hannah and Ben, our story’s bridal couple had met at one of those DP camps.
When all the guests had arrived, all initial greetings had happened, a quiet came. My father waited under the chuppah. Each pole was proudly held by one of the four youngest guests.
The groom, Ben, knew he was the first to be called. Hearing the prayer for him, spoken by my father, he understood and took a few steps forward.
And then there was movement from the crowd. Two guests took each of Ben’s arms. This was not prearranged; it was the cousins’ understanding of what was needed — what had been done for hundreds of years.
Ben stopped. Looked to Herman on his right and Esther on his left — his parents for this day.
My father’s prayer was now clearly directed at Hannah. His voice rang out to welcome Ben’s bride, as he began his greeting to the lovely Hannah to “Come. Stand alongside your groom.”
Hannah turned from one side to the other. She watched Zenny’s arm take hold of hers as any father would do for a daughter. A shy smile from Hannah. A serious face from Zenny, his eyes bright with as-yet unshed tears, he smiled at his “daughter.” And then my mother took Hannah’s other arm and kissed her cheek.
The three walked as the welcoming prayer moved them forward to the chuppah. The “parents” stood on either side of the officiant as in the hundreds of weddings my father had brought to a chuppah.
There was nobody in this small catering hall who wasn’t somehow tied to the chosen and kallah, the groom and his bride. Everyone had a stake in this new marriage. Everyone.
Ben put a ring on the forefinger of Hannah’s right hand.
And now breaths were held, eyes fastened on the groom’s right foot. On the ground, my father placed a small, thin glass, wrapped in a napkin. Ben lifted his foot and brought it to a smashing final moment.
A “Mazeltov!” Exploded in the air from every single guest, every musician, and the two waiters ready with champagne. Music also exploded from the Hungarian musicians. No one had a dry eye. Everyone shouted many times over, making sure their cries of happiness would be heard everywhere and by everyone — heard by the G-d who brought together this couple. And maybe by a few of those who regretted that two young Jews escaped their “just end.”
Standing in the crowd, I could feel it. If I put my hands in the air and rubbed my fingers together I knew I could touch der Eibishter’s breath. Nobody that day doubted that our Almighty G-d was celebrating with us.
