A Wedding in Brownsville – Class 12 English Chapter 3 Notes & NCERT PDF

About the Author

Isaac Bashevis Singer (1902-1991) was born in Poland. His father and grandfather were rabbis, and he studied at the Warsaw Rabbinical Seminary. In 1935 he emigrated to the US and worked as a journalist and columnist for The Jewish Daily Forward. Nearly all his fiction was written in Yiddish for that paper, and only later translated on a large scale. He won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1978. His works include A Friend of Kafka and The Seance and Other Stories. This story was translated by Chana Faerslein and Elizabeth Pollet.

Summary

A reluctant guest. "The wedding had been a burden to Dr Solomon Margolin from the very beginning." It is a winter Sunday, the only evening he and his wife Gretl can spend together. Abraham Mekheles, a Landsman from Sencimin, is marrying off his youngest daughter, Sylvia. The wedding is "somewhere out in the wilds of Brownsville". Margolin has stopped attending the Senciminer Society. Meanwhile the town of Sencimin "had been destroyed", and his family there had been "tortured, burned, gassed." He expects the bride's side (Senciminers) and the groom's side (Tereshpolers) to pester him, call him a snob and drag him off to dance. Still, "he had to go to Sylvia's wedding."

Margolin's past. Gretl, a German former nurse from a Berlin hospital, has become "almost Jewish" in New York. One of her brothers was a Nazi who died in a Russian camp, and another, a Communist, was shot by the Nazis. Margolin is outwardly a success, with an office on West End Avenue and wealthy patients, but "secretly Solomon Margolin had always felt that he was a failure." As a boy he was a prodigy. At eleven he received a Responsum from the rabbi of Tarnow calling him "great and illustrious", and at seventeen he attempted to translate Spinoza's Ethics into Hebrew. But he "squandered his talents". His "one great love, Raizel, the daughter of Melekh the watchmaker", married someone else and "had been shot by the Nazis". Hitler's carnage "had destroyed all his faith in humanity". He suffers from hypochondria and a fear of death.

The journey. Gretl has refused to be "carted off" to Brownsville, and Margolin, who is ashamed of how "American Judaism was a mess" at such functions, is secretly relieved. He is honourable to a fault: he has "never broken the Hippocratic Oath" and treats rabbis, refugees and writers without charge. He goes alone by taxi through the snow. He wonders whether the world, like the taxi, is "plunging away somewhere into the unknown toward a cosmic destination", and why God created "a Hitler, a Stalin". Crossing the East River, he sees a sky "red as glowing metal". On Eastern Parkway the taxi stops for an accident. A wounded man "above a dark suit and blood-spattered shirt and bow tie" is carried on a stretcher, "one eye closed, the other partly open and glazed". Margolin thinks: "He might even have been going to the same wedding as I..."

The wedding. The hall with its "neon Jewish sign and Star of David" is warm, noisy and full of Senciminers. The talk is of the Holocaust ("gleichgeschaltet!") and of money and remarriage ("What is life anyway? A dance on the grave."). A guest reminds him: "Over there you weren't a doctor. You were only Schloime-Dovid, the son of the Talmud teacher." The hall spins "like a carousel". Then he sees a woman with long braids wound "like a wreath", and "the grace of Sencimin" about her. She says she is the daughter of Melekh the watchmaker: "I'm Raizel." He cries, "If that's true, then anything is possible!"

The truth dawns. In an empty room upstairs his love returns "with full force". He realises that by Jewish law he is not married, since he and Gretl had only a civil ceremony: "One can get married with a penny." But his wallet is gone. Raizel asks, "Why go home?" He remembers the accident: "perhaps he had been more than a witness? Perhaps he himself had been the victim." He finds "no trace of pulse or breathing" and asks, "Can one die without knowing it? And what will Gretl do?" He thinks of "Hovering in the World of Twilight", the Astral Body clinging to past illusions, and dismisses it as superstition. Yet he whispers: "What's the difference? As long as we're together." She answers: "I've been waiting for that all these years." The hall fills, the cantor sings, and Abraham Mekheles leads his daughter down the aisle.

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Board Exam Focus

The questions ask about Margolin's past and its effect on his present, his attitude to his profession, his view of American Jewish life, the traits that endeared him to others, why he had the curious experience, and whether the encounter was an illusion.

Outline 1: Was Margolin the accident victim? Evidence for: the stretcher case with the bow tie; the driver's silence; the missing wallet; no pulse or breath; the feeling that "some physical dimension were missing"; Raizel's "Why go home?". Against: he blames drink or food poisoning. Singer leaves the ending open, which is typical of surreal fiction.

Outline 2: How the past shapes the present. His lost prodigy and lost love leave him feeling a failure. The Holocaust has destroyed his faith in humanity, and he despises matrons with "petty ills". He keeps his distance from the community, but at the wedding his hidden longing surfaces.

Outline 3: Surrealism. The hall spins, time dissolves, the dead return, and the story ends in a union beyond death. It is a higher reality of the mind.

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