No, I’m not the famous klezmer clarinet player, but I am Yisrael Zohar. I’m the Yisrael Zohar who has married Rebecca née Cohen today. I wouldn’t exactly say our marriage was arranged, perhaps negotiated is a better term. I have known Rebecca since she was ten, I am thirty-six and she is twenty four now. We are very fond of each other and both are convinced that our love will grow from that. Neither of us would have been prepared to marry just for the business settlements, both our families are in the cloth trade, but now our families are joined, the competition that neither family business could really afford is over, we are one business now. Rebecca and I are both only children and the intention is to settle all on our children. Perhaps I should be honest. I am not sure, but I think I love her.

I am Rebecca Zohar now, and I am so happy, today I married Yisrael. He doesn’t know it but I fell in love with him when I was still at school. I would have managed to marry him years ago but for Mum. She saw it as selling out to the competition, and, wanted me to marry Levi the Rabbi’s son, but I’m an only child and Dad loves me more than he loves himself I think. It has taken me six years to get him to see the advantages of joining the businesses. Once he had seen it Mum’s stance was a lost cause, she just had to be brought to realise it. Yisrael’s dad and mine get on, and once they had the heads of agreement for the settlements on paper they were glad to just get on with it. Besides they have someone who’s always available to play golf with now and some one to tell lies to who has to listen when they have a drink after playing.

Dad has never drunk to excess, he just likes a glass or two. Mum doesn’t have a problem with Dad liking a drink, she’s been known to have a taste or two herself, and she makes sure when she goes shopping to check the cupboard so that there is always a bottle of Dad’s favourite whisky available. I was probably sixteen when she told me men are just little boys on the inside and easy to handle if you give them what they want. She made me blush when she said ‘what they want’ with a wink because I knew that she wasn’t referring to whisky any more which was what she had been talking about.

I don’t think Yisrael’s mum approves of drinking and probably not ‘what they want’ either because she’s is a bit stuck up and prudish too. She’s not ultra orthodox but she is orthodox, and condescending about it. Yisrael thinks that she believes she married below herself and that his dad lets her down a bit socially. Dad really loves Mum a lot, but it embarrasses him to shew it. Mum loves Dad a lot too, but is a bit insecure because she came from nothing, which is a bit silly because so did Dad.

Neither of my parents are orthodox, but whereas Dad doesn’t care and and never did I think it bothers Mum a bit now because of Yisrael’s Mum’s air of superiority about it. Put our mums together in the same room and it’s like watching a pair of cats stalking round each other prior to the fur flying. They are so nice to each other it hurts. However, as Dad said, and Yisrael said his Dad said much the same thing, once we have our first child our mums will just have to settle their hackles because we will have all the cards to play.

I’ll be glad when the wedding is over and we are on our own, as I’ll be able to demonstrate my love for Yisrael, I’ll never tell him, he will discover it for himself eventually. But the main reason I’ll be glad when the wedding is over and we are on our own is we’ll be making a start on our family. It’s only three hours to bed time now, and I have no intention of wasting any time after that. We are going to name our first son Benjamin Emanuel after Yisrael’s dad and then mine and our first daughter Ruth Naomi after my mum and then Yisrael’s, but we haven’t told them yet.

We’ve been married a month and invited our parents to dinner on Thursday. What a disaster! The atmosphere between our mums was positively arctic. Our dads were fine, after all they are business partners, but they spent the whole evening holding our mums back. Dad told me to give him and Poppa, that’s what I call Yisrael’s dad, a bit of time to work on our mums before we invite them round together again. My mum was kind of ok, but Yisrael’s was so provocative, and, goaded Mum into saying things I know she would never normally have dreamt of saying.

When we were in bed Yisrael apologised to me about his mum because he knew it was her that caused the problems. He acknowledged that I had worked very hard to create a good impression of a wife who looked after her husband and their home, and, told me the food, which he knew had been totally kosher just for his mum, had been superb, his word not mine, but unfortunately it would not have made any difference if it had been the best kosher food cooked anywhere ever. He told me he was proud of me, and that Poppa had told him he was a lucky man, which made me cry.

I asked him if he knew why his mum was like that and he looked at me with an incredulous look on his face and said, “You really don’t know do you?”

I was puzzled, so I said, “No,” and asked, “Why should I know?”

“It’s simple. Mum is eaten up with jealousy.”

“Jealous of what?”

“Your mum.”

I thought that was too ridiculous for words, and, said, “That can’t be true. My mum has never had anything to be jealous of. They were all poor, and after the holocaust she was a young girl on her own and poverty stricken. She was the only surviving member of her family. Even now she makes all the money decisions and does all the negotiating for Dad because she can make money go further and get a better deal. She still can’t accept that she’s not a poverty stricken Yiddish refugee with no idea where her next meal is coming from. You know she thinks in Yiddish, and, even if you ignore her accent, her English is just about understood by the neighbours.”

“That’s it in a nutshell. Your mum is the archetypal Yiddishe Momme, poor, the only survivor in her family of the holocaust, genuinely caring and loving, incapable of guile, immensely respected by all who know her, Jew and gentile alike. She’s the epitome of an eastern European Jewess. She could have have come straight out of Fiddler on the Roof. Dad thinks highly of her, and, has a huge respect for her business acumen. She was the biggest single factor that persuaded Dad to join the businesses, if it had been just your dad he knew he could compete, and, eventually maybe even buy him up, but he considered that your mum’s influence could possibly have put him out of business.

“Mum’s family were wealthy intellectuals and got out of Germany long before anything started to happen. Mum’s granddad said it was obvious what was going to happen. She always thought herself to be very lucky, and then she went to study at the university of Tel Aviv. She had always wanted to go to Israel to study, she had learnt Hebrew long before she went. Studying there was a personal disaster for her because she was made to feel like a second class citizen, not only was she clever, happy and wealthy, but worst of all she had no holocaust history in her family anywhere, and she has never recovered.

“Why would anyone want to be proud of that kind of tragedy?”

“It’s not that she wants to be proud of it. I think it’s more that she feels excluded from mainstream Jewish history. The entire Jewish people share descent from the diaspora and she sees the holocaust as a similar event, one that affects all Jewry. So she’s sensitive that others may question her right to be Jewish.”

“That’s silly. Of course she’s Jewish.”

“That’s what Dad says too. He doesn’t speak a word of Hebrew, despite going to Israel regularly on business, but Mum won’t go with him any more. He thinks most of it is self inflicted, a product of her own imagination, but imagination or not it is real to her. I think she feels she’s only a Jewess by default, and she became orthodox in her late teens to compensate. When she and dad are at outs he accuses her of only marrying him because the obliteration of his family at Auschwitz makes her feel respectable, and he provokes her by saying she would eat a bacon sandwich if a Rabbi told her it were kosher.”

I had to laugh because I could almost hear Poppa saying that, “That is funny in a way, Yisrael, but terribly sad too.”

“I know, but crazy as it sounds, I truly believe Mum would trade her fluent Hebrew for Yiddish at the drop of a hat. Yes she is everything you have seen, but she is also desperate to have her family history accepted as a valid Jewish family history. She is too proud to lie about it, but even Granny Esther said she should be less sensitive about it because she looks too Jewish ever to be mistaken for a gentile.

“I know she is difficult, but please be forgiving because I do love her. Dad loves her, and, doesn’t want her to miss a second of her future joy in her grandchildren. He will bring her round eventually even if he has to get Rabbi Rosenfeld to do it for him. I believe that her first grandchild will make a difference, we just have to be patient.” Yisrael had tears in his eyes when he told me that, he was pleading for understanding and time.

I told him, “I do understand now, Yisrael. I am going to tell Mum what you just told me. Please trust me, and even more please trust Mum. She will understand, she is good with people. I have no idea how she will do it but I am sure she will bring your mum round faster than our dads ever could.”

A month has gone by and Mum told me yesterday she’d had lunch with Yisrael’s mum and they were going shopping together on Wednesday. I have no idea who said what to whom, but Yisrael’s mum has invited us and my parents to dinner next week. The situation must be ok because our mums are now ganging up on our dads instead of each other. I think I shall tell them. Yisrael and I were so excited when the test shewed positive. He wants a girl and I think I do too. When I told him, he kissed me very gently and said, “I do love you, Rebecca, you know.”

I was so happy that I broke all my promises to myself, and, told him that I had loved him since I was fourteen when he had been so kind to me at that party where I hadn’t been asked to dance by anyone and just got called names by the other girls because of my glasses and my braces. He had asked me why I was not dancing, and gauche and naïve I had told him. He danced all evening with me and then took me in to supper, which made the other girls so envious. I was so happy. I only realised that was why he had done it many years later.