Chapter 3 A Wedding in Brownsville Class 12 Kaleidoscope English NCERT Summary
Chapter 3 A Wedding in Brownsville Class 12 Kaleidoscope English NCERT Summary enables students to build a solid foundation and improve their conceptual understanding of various subjects covered in the CBSE curriculum. It serves as a valuable aid for exam preparation helping students to revise and reinforce their understanding of the chapter.
A Wedding in Brownsville Class 12 Kaleidoscope English NCERT Notes allows them to quickly grasp the main concepts and key points, saving them time and effort in their studies.
Chapter 3 A Wedding in Brownsville Class 12 Kaleidoscope NCERT Notes
About the Story
This story is mostly about how the main character, Dr. Solomon Margolin, feels empty even after he achieves his goals. In the beginning of the story, Dr. Solomon talks about how marriage is a pain for him. Dr. Solomon was a Jew who used to live in Poland, where his family was killed during Hitler’s Holocaust.
About the Author
Issac Bashevis Singer was a Polish-American writer who used to write in Yiddish. In 1978, he was given the Nobel Prize in Literature. He was educated at the Warsaw Rabbinical Seminary. In 1935 he emigrated to the US and since then has worked as a regular journalist and columnist for the New York paper, The Jewish Daily Forward. His publications include, A Friend of Kafka, The Seance and Other Stories.
A Wedding in Brownsville NCERT Summary Class 12 English
Dr. Solomon Margolin is a Jew from Poland. During the World Wars, the Germans did horrible things to the Jews of Poland. They were killed without mercy, and those who were able to escape went to the USA and lived as refugees in and around New York. He was the son of a rabbis (preceptor). There was a school where his father taught Talmud.
During his childhood in Poland, he became friends with Raizel, the daughter of Jewish watchmaker, Melekh. As time went on, they fell in love. He also remembered that Raizel got married to someone else, which made him sad at the time. However, she and her family were later killed by the Nazis. This thought used to make him feel even worse about himself.
Some families were able to avoid slaughter and they later moved to New York and other places in North America as refugees. Since Jewish people were new to the area, they had started some groups, in which the Doctor also took part. He was a co-editor of an academic Jewish quarterly, a member of the Board of a Zionist group, and he used to go to many events like Seders. Besides being a doctor, this was his daily practise. Here, too, he would help rabbis, refugees, and Jewish artists for free. He would also give them medicine and a hospital bed if they needed one.
Gretl, who was Dr. Solomon’s wife, was also German, but she was against the Nazis. Dr. Solomon and Gretl used to live a simple, low-key life. Gretl used to do all the housework herself and never thought about hiring a maid or other helper. Dr. Solomon used to think about how his wife went from being a beautiful German girl to a Jewish housewife. Gretl was born in Germany, but she had started to learn about Jewish customs and make friends with Jewish women. The main reason for this was that one of Gretl’s brothers was killed by the Nazis because he was a communist and didn’t like the idea of killing a lot of Jews.
Once, he got an invite from his friend Abraham Mekheles, whose daughter Sylvia was getting married in the town of Brownsville. Abraham Mekheles was a Senciminer, which means that he, like Dr. Solomon, was from Sencimin, a small town in Poland. But Dr. Solomon wasn’t sure if he should go to that wedding because he was trying to get away from the Jewish society. This is because Dr. Solomon started to think that Jews who moved to America were not keeping their customs true. Dr. Solomon used to think that the Jews were breaking their cultural traditions. For example, he thought that Jewish men were drinking too much. This caused Dr. Solomon to leave his own town. Gretl noticed her husband’s aloofness from his own community. But because Dr. Solomon was a well-known member of the Jewish community, he finally chose to go to the wedding in Brownsville.
Dr. Margolin called a taxi because it was snowing heavily everywhere and it was dangerous to drive at night in the winter. So, he went to Brownsville, where the party was being held. On the way, he passed a pub where drunk people were arguing with each other and using bad language. On the Eastern Parkway, he saw the scene of an accident. A man was being taken away on a bed, and it seemed like Dr. Solomon knew that person. Still, the driver again started driving the taxi and drove it again, and Dr. Solomon finally got to Brownsville, where the wedding was.
When he got there, he saw that everyone was laughing and having a good time at the wedding. Women were dancing and people were getting drunk. There, he saw and talked to all of his friends and family from Senciminer. He met Zissel, a person from his neighbourhood, who told him old stories about how cruelly the Nazis killed Jews. He said that the Nazis forced the Jews to dig their own graves. Those Jews were then killed and buried in the pits they had made themselves. Many Jews were killed by starvation or by being burned alive, and many were sent to the Auschwitz prison camp in Poland, which had more than 40 death camps. Each camp was full of poisonous gases so that the Jews would die quickly.
In the middle of all the people, Dr. Margolin saw the face of a woman. When he tried to get closer to that woman to remember who she was, it turned out that she was Raizel, his long-lost love. He went to talk to Raizel and was shocked to find out that it wasn’t a dream and that Raizel was in fact at the wedding. Dr. Solomon and Raizel got back together after a long time. Dr. Solomon took Raizel by the hand and led her away from the crowd. He met her and brought her to the wedding tent, where he planned to marry her. But his wallet was gone and he couldn’t get a single penny, which was required as per Jewish law. Also, he realised all of a sudden that Raizel looked a lot younger than she should have.
Dr. Solomon started to feel like he had no life left in him. He couldn’t feel the weight of his body, and it was as if his body didn’t exist. This made Dr. Solomon wonder if the accident and the person on the cart he saw on his way to Brownsville (on Eastern Parkway) were his own. Dr. Solomon was confused and wondered if he was still living or if it was just his soul floating around on Earth looking for his long-lost love. He also wondered if Raizel was real or just something made up by his mind. The story finishes on this unclear note, and Abraham Mekheles finally walks his daughter Sylvia down the aisle at her wedding.