Chapter 3 — A Wedding in Brownsville

'A Wedding in Brownsville' by Isaac Bashevis Singer follows Dr Solomon Margolin, a Jewish-American doctor, who reluctantly attends the wedding of Sylvia, daughter of Abraham Mekheles, in Brooklyn. At the reception crowded with Holocaust-survivor immigrants from Sencimin and Tereshpol, he unexpectedly encounters Raizel — the love of his youth — whom he believed had been shot by the Nazis. The story ends ambiguously, with Margolin suspecting he may have died in a road accident before arriving and that his 'Astral Body' is 'hovering in the World of Twilight'.

Dr Solomon Margolin is a tall, blue-eyed doctor with an office on West End Avenue, New York. He is 'the son of a poor teacher of Talmud' from the Polish shtetl of Sencimin — a self-taught prodigy who taught himself algebra, geometry, and attempted a Latin-to-Hebrew translation of Spinoza's Ethics at seventeen. Though outwardly successful, he 'had always felt that he was a failure' who 'squandered his talents'. He serves on Zionist committees, treats rabbis and refugees without charge, and is married to Gretl, a German former nurse.

The Senciminers are Jewish survivors and emigrants from the Polish town of Sencimin. Dr Margolin's family and community originated there. The town 'had been destroyed' in the Holocaust — 'His family there had been tortured, burned, gassed.' At the wedding, Senciminers form the bride's side of the family, and the reunion of survivors is coloured by grief: guests casually report neighbours 'shot', 'burned in the synagogue', or 'starved to death in Russia'.

Raizel is the daughter of Melekh the watchmaker from Sencimin. She was Dr Margolin's 'one great love' in his youth; he had visited her father's house. Margolin was told she 'had married someone else and later had been shot by the Nazis.' When she appears at the Brownsville wedding — with 'long braids wound like a wreath around her head' and 'dimples in her cheeks' — he is stunned: 'If I'm not out of my mind then I'm seeing things.'

The wedding takes place at a hall in Brownsville, Brooklyn, reached by taxi through a snowy Sunday night. The hall is lit with neon signs and a Star of David and is packed with immigrant survivors dancing to 'an Israeli march that was a hodge-podge of American jazz with Oriental flourishes.' The setting contrasts American Jewish celebration with the Holocaust memories that surface in every conversation, captured in the line: 'All of us are really dead, if you want to call it that. We were exterminated, wiped out. Even the survivors carry death in the hearts.'

Near the close, Margolin cannot find his wallet, and when he examines himself 'as though he were one of his own patients', he 'could find no trace of pulse or breathing' and feels 'oddly deflated as if some physical dimension were missing.' He recalls the blood-spattered accident victim he saw being carried on a stretcher on Eastern Parkway and thinks: 'Perhaps he himself had been the victim of that accident!' He considers the idea of 'Hovering in the World of Twilight. The Astral Body wandering in semi-consciousness' but dismisses it as superstition, wondering, 'Can one die without knowing it?'

Margolin is deeply critical. He finds 'the Anglicised Yiddish, the Yiddishised English, the ear-splitting music and unruly dances' irritating. He feels 'Jewish laws and customs were completely distorted' and that 'the reverend rabbis and cantors aped the Christian ministers.' He tells himself, 'Even she, born a Christian, could see that American Judaism was a mess.' He is ashamed whenever he brings Gretl to Jewish celebrations.

Gretl is Dr Margolin's wife, a 'blonde, faded, middle-aged' German former nurse he met at a Berlin hospital. One of her brothers was a Nazi who died in a Russian prison camp; another, a Communist, was shot by the Nazis. She has 'become almost Jewish in New York' — joining Hadassah, cooking Jewish dishes, lamenting the Holocaust. She refuses to attend the Brownsville wedding, calling it 'out in the wilds of Brownsville.' When Margolin later thinks of her at the climax, his thought is: 'I'll give her everything, my last cent.'

During the taxi ride through a snowy night, Margolin reflects philosophically: 'Wasn't the world, like this taxi, plunging away somewhere into the unknown toward a cosmic destination?' He ponders why God would 'create a Hitler, a Stalin' and why there are 'heart attacks, cancers.' He recalls 'those pious uncles of his, when they were digging their own graves' and questions immortality and the soul. On Eastern Parkway he witnesses a traffic accident — a man on a stretcher with 'a chalky pallor' and a 'blood-spattered shirt' — and thinks the victim might even have been going to the same wedding.

Margolin leads Raizel away from the noisy reception to the quiet chapel upstairs where the wedding ceremony is to take place. There, beneath the empty wedding canopy with 'a bottle of wine and a silver goblet' set in readiness, Margolin tells Raizel, 'We could have stood there,' and then: 'According to Jewish law, I'm a single man' (because his marriage to Gretl was only a civil ceremony). He tells her one can 'get married with a penny' under Jewish law. When he reaches for his wallet, it is gone — a detail that deepens the surreal uncertainty of the ending.

The story was written by Isaac Bashevis Singer (1902–1991), who was born in Poland to a rabbinical family and educated at the Warsaw Rabbinical Seminary. He emigrated to the United States in 1935 and worked as a journalist and columnist for the Yiddish newspaper The Jewish Daily Forward. Nearly all his fiction was written in Yiddish. He was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1978. His other works include A Friend of Kafka and The Seance and Other Stories. The NCERT textbook text is translated by Chana Faerslein and Elizabeth Pollet.

Yes. The NCERT Kaleidoscope Class 12 English PDF, including Chapter 3 'A Wedding in Brownsville', is available free on CBSE PrepMaster (cbseprepmaster.com). No sign-up or payment is required — just open the chapter page and read or download directly.