“Forget the bag,” said Tante Molly. “Look at the necklace! The earrings! See how fapitzt [fancy] she is. That’s what my Boitie always looks like; she takes such good care of herself.”
Peering closer at the picture of “Boitie” – her American relatives’ and friends’ pronunciation of “Bertha,” the shadchan nodded in agreement.
“A sheine maidel [a pretty girl]. So how old is she? Twenty? Twenty-two?” The aunts looked at each other and sighed. “Twenty nine, but such a good catch! A forelady with a good salary – and she has savings too…”
The shadchan looked at them quizzically, as if to ask how such a good catch was still available. Tante Molly jumped to her niece’s defense. “She wouldn’t consider marrying until she brought her brothers over. Now they are here and working, so she can look.”
“And she needs a traditional young man,” she added in an aside, “not chas veshulem [Heaven forbid] a freier [freethinker].”
The shadchan placed the pictures face up on the kitchen table and took out his notebook. “This isn’t going to be so easy,” he began. “She isn’t young and she needs a traditional man who makes a decent living. I assume she won’t want to work after marriage.”
The aunts nodded vigorously in agreement. After all, what woman in their circle would want to keep working in a factory? Women were supposed to raise the children, take care of the housework, and have supper on the table when their husbands came home.
Packing up his notebook the shadchan put on his coat, promising to return soon with names of suitable young men for Freida Sima.
And indeed he did. The first on the list was a heavyset immigrant from the Bukovina who worked as a shochet, a ritual slaughterer.
“Oy, the chicken killer!” my grandmother recalled years later. “All he did was talk about chickens! How loud they were, how they hopped around without a head, how you had to be careful or the blood would get everywhere. Chicken parts, chicken feathers – chickens, chickens, chickens! At least make it interesting and tell me about a cow! But he only knew to talk about chickens!”
After several dates, when she sensed the “chicken killer” was about to propose, my grandmother beat a hasty retreat, remarking to her aunts that one day longer with him and she would have become a vegetarian.
The next candidate was an immigrant from Poland who worked in the garment district but dreamed of being an entrepreneur. “He was a nice young man, very ambitious,” recalled my grandmother. “We went out a few times and all of a sudden he starts telling me that after we get married I will continue to work for another seven years and that will give him enough money to open his own business.”
She shook her head in dismay. “To work another seven years in the factory, I didn’t have to get married. So I gave him a polite ‘no thank you’ and that was that.”
The list of candidates went on and on but many were not what they presented themselves as being, particularly when it came to religious tradition.
“Eventually I figured out a system,” my grandmother explained. “On the second or third date we would walk by a silver store and I would point to a candelabra in the window, saying we should have something like that when we get married. If the young man would say ‘What for?’ I knew he wasn’t for me. What good Jewish boy wouldn’t think his wife deserved nice lachter [candlesticks] to bench lecht [light candles] in for Shabbos?”
