CHAPTER 1
A Wedding in Vilna
In the end, it was a beautiful wedding.
Even if, according to the bride and groom’s parents, the occasion was long overdue and perhaps, for their sophisticated hosts, the event was a touch slapdash. Fortunately, there was far more to celebrate than there were reasons to complain. Not the least of which was the venue, a grand apartment in a posh Vilna neighborhood, a city that was no doubt flush with cosmopolitan allure for a young provincial couple exploring its delights in 1933.
It was actually the young lovers’ second attempt at a marriage ceremony. The first try for a romantic but no-frills elopement came to a panicked halt when the bride abruptly changed her mind. Game as she had been to buck tradition, and with it a Jewish ceremony—prepared even to be married by Vilna goyim—her whole being had rejected the scene around them at the Vilna courthouse. No, she thought, I cannot get married like this. Waiting in front of them in the long, colorful line of besotted couples was a man wearing a hat with the brim tilted in a smug slant across his forehead. “Like a gangster!” the scandalized bride would later scoff. The groom, perhaps registering the look on his future wife’s face, took his cue and raised no protest. The wedding was put off.
But rather than leave Vilna unwed, the couple was rescued by the groom’s well-to-do relatives. The ceremony and reception took place at Number 8 Daichishe Road, at the home of Saul and Batsheva Rabinowitz. Saul was the owner of not one but two lucrative textile businesses and this, their luxurious city home, was staffed by no fewer than two maids and a nanny for their two young boys.
The wedding, an intimate affair, numbered guests in the twenties. In addition to family, the couple’s circle of friends, already in Vilna for the city’s annual fair, comprised the majority of celebrators. The ceremony was simple—the young Jewish couple made their vows and then, as it was a Saturday, enjoyed a small Kiddush before the splendid supper was served. The elaborate feast of fish and meat was procured by the bride’s father and prepared by the groom’s mother.
A young woman liberated for her time, the twenty-four-year-old bride eschewed at least one principal wedding tradition: the white dress. Instead, she wore a long black evening gown; her rippling curls, dark and thick, framed her small oval face in a fashionable bob. Standing six feet tall—nearly a foot higher than his betrothed and large enough to fill a doorframe—was the groom. At twenty-five, his dark hair, which he was fond of slicking back and to the side, was already beginning a gentle retreat into two narrow peaks. Above a generous nose his brown eyes shone warmly; he was mad for the spitfire at his side.
It was September 30, 1933, and Miriam Dworetsky and Morris Rabinowitz were married at last.
* * *
The day Miriam Dworetsky finally chose an eligible suitor from a good Jewish family must have come as no small relief to her father, Gutel Dworetsky, who had himself been a widower for more than two decades. His wife, Rochel, died during labor with their fourth child. Delivery complications claimed the lives of both mother and baby, leaving Gutel, who was still a relatively young man in 1913, with three small children—Miriam, five; a son, Beryl, three; and finally Luba, who was just one.
Intent on devoting himself fully to his bereaved young family, Gutel vowed never to marry again. For a man of his time, this was something of an outwardly peculiar decision. Gutel was financially comfortable; he owned homes in both Novogrudek and Zhetel, neighboring towns that, at the time, were still under Russian rule. Taking a new wife appeared both personally and parentally practical. But Gutel was of the mind that his children would be scarred by the sudden presence of an unfamiliar woman and was seemingly content avoiding the business of a new marriage. Still, he wasn’t prepared to raise a family alone, so Gutel’s niece Itka came to the Dworetsky family home in Novogrudek to help with the children.
Itka, the daughter of Gutel’s sister, was too young to be a spinster, but presumably old enough that her family determined her own marital prospects were lacking. This was likely because Itka, as the family delicately put it, was simpleminded. In whatever ways she was limited, Itka was equal to the task of caretaker to her young cousins and slipped into the role of their surrogate mother. What Itka thought of the arrangement was never really clear but enough could be gleaned through the happiness of the children she helped to raise, who, despite growing up in the murky shadow of Rochel’s death, never felt they were without a mother.
Gutel was a religious if not strictly devout man. The Dworetsky family observed the Jewish holidays and their corresponding rituals and traditions. Every year without fail, he would take the children to synagogue for the Yizkor memorial services in remembrance of their departed mother. As they got a little older, Miriam and Luba became aware of how the congregants’ glances lingered over them; they noticed how elderly women’s eyes welled with tears watching their widower father and his motherless children. But their pity baffled the girls. “What are they crying for?” they whispered to each other. They understood they had no mother, but their father was doting, Itka was always with them. What, they wondered, could they be missing?
Of the children, only Miriam remembered Rochel. But as time passed, her mother’s form and figure faded even further until all that remained with tactical clarity were scattered scenes from the funeral, the feeling of hands and arms lifting her up so she could see above the mourners. But even those memories were devoid of the palpable sting of loss; the connection to Rochel became ever more remote. Whether Miriam was ultimately the product of a too-lenient single father or if she had inherited her self-guiding streak from her mother was something no one, least of all Miriam, could ever really be sure of. But the elder Dworetsky daughter, who made a regular habit of defying convention, would soon provide her father with plenty to worry about.
As a young woman, Miriam didn’t possess stereotypical, head-turning feminine attributes. Her pointed features and diminutive size, paired with the contemporary styles—the cropped finger wave hairdos and the shapeless dresses with their hanging forms—deprived Miriam of the womanly shape that time and future tailoring trends would reveal. Miriam’s dark gray eyes and fair complexion matched against her deep brown hair gave her face a muted polish. When Miriam posed for photos her face would set in an almost grim expression that belied the high-spirited nature within. She may not have been a classic beauty, but Miriam’s lively personality, her beguiling laugh, gave her an irresistible zing.
Copyright © 2021 by Rebecca Frankel
