A gloomy wedding
By Mordechai Spektor
In Yiddish Tales, translated by Helena Frank
Copyright 1912, by the Jewish Publication Society of America
A gloomy wedding was published in the United States of America in English translated from the original version written in Yiddish. It was written/collected originally by Mordechai Spektor one of the most prolific Yiddish writers of the 19th century. He is considered one of the veterans of this kind of literature among notable names like I.L. Perez and Shalom Aleichem. The consulted collection has 48 tales largely collected from magazines and papers and unbound booklets. Most of them were translated from Yiddish and some from Hebrew by Helena Frank, published in 1912, by the Jewish Publication Society of America.
The story takes place in late 19th century Poland in a Jewish, generically called, shtetl. The plot is centered on the social life of a traditional Jewish family that is about to join the big wedding of the youngest son of the family who has been accepted as a groom and future husband in a wealthy Jewish family in Warsaw.
The news is received with great joy and enthusiasm especially of the Mother-Gittle, a widow who during the past years also prompted some question regarding the youngest son celibate which took longer than expected and turned into more like a rebellious one.
Happy to have settled him down she is the only one of the family that will join the big fancy wedding since the rest of the siblings and family questions the choice of the groom and the planned wedding. The traditional mother’s expectations of the wedding will soon be deceived when she realizes the huge changes that the new Jewish world has developed. Feeling odd and uneasy and completely left out of her familiar social context she faints at the wedding and during her recovery, she recalls the traditional wedding of her last son and the ‘’right way to do it”.
Returning back home, sad and alone, she looks twenty years older than the day she received the happy wedding note when her face and body flourished with enthusiasm and happiness when hearing about the wedding.
Placing the story into the Aarne-Thomson-Uther classification we may consider it as part of the Realistic Tales.
The characters and their functions smoothly submit to the theoretical structure of Propps study. There is the initial context of the story-the Jewish Traditional family in Poland at the end of the 19th century, the members of the family are enumerated and the hero is briefly mentioned.
I. The youngest member of the family Moishele is absented, in this tale as well, he departed to study elsewhere and kept distant for a long time.
II. The interdiction was in this particular case more like a suggestion, to study close to the family and not leave it, considering the whole context with the father’s death. Still, Moishele left and soon was to be found as being the lover of a rich countess. This may very well be considered as the :
III. Violation of the interdiction: staying with the family and keeping the traditions. The Villain, the rich sophisticated nontraditional daughter in law comes and disturbs the peace of the family. She is considered to be the personification of the new secular world that is endangering the well-settled norms of the traditional Jewish life.
IV. The descriptive part of the crowd at the wedding is actually describing the new world that will soon prove to be as overwhelming for the traditional Jewish mother who, by her own analyses, will define the ‘’precious objects”: the other wedding and the mother’s contribution to it, the respect and pride she received as being the groom’s mother-Tradition.
V. The information about the Victim, who is now the mother, will slowly take shape in the time of recovery from the faint when she is unconsciously revealing her personality features.
VI. The Villain attempts are utterly aggressive but very hurtful in the nonchalant way of receiving the gifts from the old-fashioned mother in law.
VII. The Victim/Mother eventually gives in and submits to deception.
VIII. VIII. The Villain causes physical, emotional harm to the Mother as she “grows” 20 years older by the time she gets back from the wedding.
There are several editions of this Collection of Yiddish Tales published with the same translation but by different publishing houses as well as audio versions of the tale.
The tale is still known today mostly in the Jewish topic related studies and used as a parallel to the development of the new social norms in contemporary times.
Sources:
http://www.yivoencyclopedia.org/article ... or_Mordkhehttps://archive.org/search.php?query=a% ... %20weddinghttp://yleksikon.blogspot.com/2018/05/m ... ector.htmlAlina Lumei
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