Abraham and Chana Kraus, religious Jews in their late seventies, were thrilled with Freida Sima’s insistence on a traditional home. The reaction among Mordche’s sons was mixed – at nineteen and seventeen the older two were staunch freethinkers while the younger ones, ten and fifteen, cared more about what it would be like to have a mother again. Their mother, Sadie, had died six months earlier of a bad heart, but had been ill for almost a decade and was the reason the family had moved to California years earlier. (In addition to its beneficial weather for invalids, it was a place where Jews found it easier to carve out a new, less traditional identity for themselves.)
After Sadie’s death, Mordche had moved the boys back to his parents’ home in New York. But after four months of caring for her grandsons, his mother stated unequivocally: “I’m too old for this. You need a wife!”
Protesting that he was not interested in remarrying, he was shocked at the intensity of his feelings upon being introduced to Freida Sima. It was an attraction so powerful that he acceded to her religious conditions. He bought the Shabbos lachter she would light every week for the rest of her life and agreed to her keeping a kosher home, holiday traditions, and marital laws.
For her part, Freida Sima would turn a blind eye to what he did and ate outside the house. They both agreed to argue politics and religion no more than once a day – if possible.
And so on a beautiful Sunday afternoon in February, fourteen days after they met, Mordche and Freida Sima were married in her uncle and aunt’s apartment, surrounded by their families. In a rented tuxedo and bowtie, Mordche was escorted to the chuppah by his elderly parents, joined by a radiant Freida Sima who was led by another uncle and aunt. Her parents did not yet know of her marriage, as letters to the Bukovina took a month to arrive and they had met only two weeks previously. Now her brothers in America and her sister in the Bukovina could finally get married!
Even as she looked at her new family with love, Freida Sima felt pangs of caution. How would the boys treat her? What would happen if she and Mordche had a child of their own?
Basking in wedded bliss, she couldn’t imagine that childbirth, the Great Depression, and life-threatening illness would turn their lives upside down within two short years. But all that is yet another story.
(This installment of the Frieda Sima series is dedicated to the memory of Elish Eisenberg, brother of Freida Sima, whose 18th yahrzeit is Yud Bet Shevat (January 22 this year.)
