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Dedication

For Shoshana, Malka, Gladys, and Kathy, in honor of fifty years of friendship. Thank you.

Epigraph

Rabbi Hillel used to say: If I am not for myself, who will be for me? But if I am only for myself, what am I?

—ETHICS OF THE FATHERS 1:14

1

DAUGHTER OF THE GROOM

How strange to watch a woman marry your father, thought Shaindele, a bit stunned, her eyes brimming with the tears she knew would earn her dark looks, if not outright scoldings and exhortations, if certain people in the family noticed. And who could blame them? she thought, hurriedly wiping them away. Her initial furious objections to Leah Howard, the bride, her blatant exhibitions of nastiness, indeed outright hatred, for the new woman in her father’s life had been so vicious, what else could they think now, seeing her crying at the wedding? But they would be so wrong.

She had not only changed her mind but had been forgiven, and with so much compassion by the woman now sitting quietly in the bridal chair, calm and beautiful, awaiting her bedecking; a forgiveness she believed she had not earned and did not deserve. With her whole teenage heart, she wanted to gladden the bride not simply out of politeness or religious obligation but because she deserved it. And then there was her father. After all he had suffered, would it not be inhuman, almost monstrous, to begrudge him the happiness that now shone from his kind blue eyes, at long last replacing the shock and hopelessness that had taken root there with such vicious tenacity—until now?

But as much as she tried, as much as she wanted to, all her good intentions were swept away like dead leaves by the raging current of fear coursing through her.

Her father’s unexpected marriage to an outsider, a woman brought up in the tainted secular world, a woman who had eaten pig and shellfish, had unsanctified sexual relations with who-knows-how-many men, and had once tattooed her flesh—an abomination specifically proscribed by God Himself!—was like plastering a plague notice across the door to their Boro Park apartment. Who among the matchmakers and their clients would be intrepid enough to push past it and venture inside? No matter that all now agreed that the bride was a pious and worthy penitent who had put her past firmly behind her, adhering to every religious precept—as far as true forgiveness was concerned, among the very pious who made up her world, there was the theory, and then there was the practice.