The People of Vojkovice and Outlying Villages

My eldest sister was getting married and the nuptials were held in our cottage courtyard. I can see the scene clearly before me. The courtyard neatly swept and the heap of manure in front of the cowshed covered in fresh hay. It was shoulder-to-shoulder in the courtyard and the adjoining garden was packed tight as a sausage skin. Men and women alike were all dressed in their holiday clothes, and it was not only locals—not a soul of whom had stayed home—but also those from the outlying villages, farther afield . . . They too had undertaken the long journey, so that—for the first time in their life—they could see a Jewish wedding.

At the center of the courtyard was a small, empty space; a canopy there rose high above, attached to four colorful poles. The rays of springtime sun shone down cheerily on our cottage, the garden, and the brightly colored crowd. The plum trees in the garden were wrapped all in white blossoms, looking like giant wedding bouquets.

A pious silence reigned over the crowd in the courtyard and the garden, and a look of eager expectation was mirrored on every face. As if on command, all eyes turned in one direction as the members of the wedding party came out the door leading from the entryway to the courtyard. My mother in a new woolen dress, on her head a new bonnet—she usually wore a scarf even on the major holidays—my father in a suit of black—from his own wedding—the rabbi in his prayer shawl, the groom, the bride . . . the bride! Dressed in her wedding gown, I hardly recognized my sister. I was accustomed to seeing her only in everyday attire, with a basket on her back or a short hoe in hand, and now I gaped at her as if she were an apparition from another world. She wore a black silk dress with a tunic, her hair artificially curled, with a wreath on her head and a white veil flowing down. With a white lace handkerchief—loaned to her by the Mazlíks’ daughter Barča—she wiped at her eyes and nose beneath the veil. The parents of the groom and bride, then the groom and bride themselves, came to a stop beneath the canopy. The rabbi stood before them, face turned toward the crowd in the courtyard and the garden. It was as quiet as church. Only the cows mooing softly from the cowshed from time to time.

The rabbi’s voice rang out, clear and sonorous, audible in every corner of the courtyard and garden. It felt like an electric current running through me. The rabbi was speaking in Czech. Hearing Czech words spoken from a mouth such as his on such an occasion shook me from head to toe. So monumental and sudden was the impression that it is etched in my memory to this day. The rabbi (Dr. Filip Bondy, later the first preacher of [the synagogue] Or Tomid) spoke Czech mainly for the sake of the betrothed. The groom too was from an “assimilated” family—he hailed from the village of Tuhaň in the Mělník district—and, like the bride, was completely confused where German was concerned.

I drank in the sight of the speechifying rabbi. It was the first time in my life that I understood every word spoken out of a mouth such as his. The rabbi spoke the way one does to poor people on such occasions: how true happiness does not reside only in the palaces of great noblemen, but also in the huts of the poor, and how newlyweds do not long for the vanities of this world (it would be a pointless endeavor), but only for true love, peace, and unity.

The bride wept, the groom wept. There was not a dry eye in the courtyard. A few of the more sensitive farmers’ wives wept loudly. Everyone there came to the unanimous conclusion that this Jewish clergyman from Brandýs spoke to the soul in a way the reverend from Sluhy could not match.

These nuptials in Czech, a unique phenomenon in those years, were the first impulse that started me thinking—albeit very unclearly and solely from a child’s point of view—about the strange phenomenon that only Jews spoke German among themselves and all the other people around us spoke Czech. I had always explained our poverty by the fact that our family didn’t know German. The Marečeks, the Mazlíks, the Kuchařs and all the other cottagers and peasants also didn’t know German. Along with everyone else in the village I considered German to be the language of noblemen and rich people. And all of a sudden the Brandýs rabbi himself, a person who, according to my notions at the time, was half god, was speaking Czech—and on such a glorious occasion! It turned all my ideas up to that point about the inferior, backward Jewishness of our family upside down, and I proudly flattered myself that we were every bit as much real Jews as those rich men who spoke only German among themselves.