Wedding Song Read Online Free Page A

trusted my father with a bag of gold, his first real assignment as a goldsmith. Knowing that this job would determine his reputation as an artisan and an honest man, Baba slept in his workshop to protect the gold. His diligence paid off, and five years after my grandfather’s death, my father had an established business making gold jewelry. He told his brother Morad that he must join him in providing for the family. The two worked at a small shop two blocks from the
mahaleh
, the Jewish ghetto, where they lived in my grandfather’s house with all but two sisters who married around puberty.
    Finally there was food on the table, but my grandmother suffered with the burden of housework. When her “asthma” attacks increased, her married daughters had to leave their own families and rush to the house to nurse her, causing tension with their husbands’ families. My father knewit was time for him to get married, to start a family, and at the same time, to relieve his mother of the grueling daily work of cooking and cleaning.
    Baba did try to find a wife with a good social standing in Shiraz. Although the community admired my father’s devotion to his family, they wouldn’t give him one of their daughters in matrimony, dreading the life of poverty and servitude that my father’s bride would endure. My aunts and uncles understood the importance of this decision as well and worried for their own welfare. Soon Baba realized that he must find a wife whose family could not question his larger commitments.
    Less than a decade after the devastation of World War II, Iran was an impoverished country in shambles. Being financial burdens, Jewish girls were married off to any men within the religion who could feed them. A bride for my father, the family elders suggested, should come from outside the Shirazi community to ensure unobtrusive in-laws. Someone in Shiraz knew someone in Tehran who knew of a family in the Jewish ghetto willing to send their daughter away. My father’s brother-in-law, his sister’s husband Masood, volunteered to take him to Tehran. The one-day trip by bus took them through narrow passes wrapped around mountains, a most adventurous endeavor for both of them.
    In Tehran, they found the house and introduced themselves as
khastegar
s, seekers of a bride. The family welcomed them, and asked them to take their shoes off and rest against the pillows on the floor. Someone brought them tea, flower-essence drinks, and chickpea cookies. Soon family and friends gathered in the house, filling it with their sounds of joy, ululating, clapping, and singing wedding songs. My father heard someone being sent to get the rabbi to perform the wedding, and he realized that he was going to be married to a woman he hadn’t met.
    Masood told me years later, “We had two feet, borrowed another two, put our tails on our backs and ran out of the house with our shoes underneath our arms.”
    When recounting the incident, my father couldn’t stop laughing. “I don’t know what kind of a girl they were going to glue on me,” he said. “I didn’t know if she was blind, bald, disabled, or old, but I wasn’t going to wait around to find out.”
    The residents of the
mahaleh
must have been bewildered by the sight of two strangers running in the narrow alleyways with their shoes under their armpits and little travel bundles over their shoulders. But that day,being young, inexperienced, and having never left their city before, my father and Masood panicked. They worried that as revenge someone would report them to the authorities, falsely claiming that they had stolen from the Tehrani family’s house.
    Fearing the family’s wrath, they decided to leave Tehran. Masood suggested a pilgrimage to the tombs of the Jewish heroes Esther and Mordekhai in the mountainous city of Hamedan. He also suggested that they find the Jewish school and wait outside to see if any of the girls looked suitable. When the school let out, the two men followed