Emlekezik - Remember

In the olden times, the marriages were prearranged by the parents of the bride and groom. Naturally, they always looked out for the welfare of their children's future. The young couple did not see each other before the wedding.

My mother's father, his name was David, was 19 years old when he married her mother Chaje at age 15. In many cases these marriages worked out very well but my grandmother (my mother's mother) was a city girl. She came from Palanka, near Munkacs, and she found herself suddenly on the outskirts of a little town Bilke, on top of a mountain where the next neighbor was miles away. The land as far as she could see belonged to the parents of her bride groom the Weiss family and besides that, they were mining ore of which iron was made.

The young groom did not know too much about the business. He was attending schools, Yeshivas, in the big cities. After the wedding, he had to learn the business part and his father did everything to break him into it. At the same time, naturally, they found that the bride needed to be improved also.

Her parents were business people. They traveled far and wide for merchandise which consisted of silks from France, lace from Switzerland, and iron work from Germany and other commodities which brought profit to the business. They were the Strobel family from Palanka. Between the two families was a big gap. except that they both were wealthy.

The bride arrived with beautiful silk dresses and capes. Her mother-in-law, my mother's grandmother, wore peasant-like dresses more suitable to the life of the surroundings. The countryside there in itself was so overwhelmingly enchanting that the beautiful silk dresses were lost there completely.

One morning the young bride got up and found her sun umbrella stuck in the vegetable garden to serve as a scarecrow to scare away the birds. This was the limit! She picked herself up and went home which was not an easy thing to do. At that time, there was no railroad. With a horse and buggy, it took her a week to reach her destination.

In the 1800's, this was a revolutionary thing to do for a young woman to leave her husband. Her parents were terribly upset, beside the shame this brought upon them. They could not handle the situation. Needless to say, they tried everything to persuade her to go back to her husband but there was no way. After a while, she must have felt that she was not welcome anymore in her parents' house. But she finally came up with a solution. Chaje told her father that if he would give her another dowry, she would go back to her husband.

She soon arrived in Bilke with a bundle of money and bought in the center of the town a big piece of land and had a beautiful house built on an elevation far from the main road. It had a terrace and a cellar. The terrace continued as a gangway around the house. The rooms were very large. But the most outstanding feature was in the kitchen. It had two stoves stacked one upon another. The whole town came to see this invention. In another room, the ceiling was painted with beautiful ornaments on wooden boards.

Eva Klein - Daughter