The dowry was a European custom that persisted well into the twentieth century in Brooklyn. This meant that a girl’s family could essentially “buy” her a professional husband, as the amount of the dowry was calibrated to each of the American middle-class professions. In this system, a doctor was the most expensive husband, a dentist the next most expensive, and after that a lawyer. Flora found this offensive and wanted no part of it.
Yet in the novels she read, the man asked the girl’s father for her hand. So she told Morris he had to ask her father, Joseph, for permission to marry her. This was difficult for Morris as he was shy, but he agreed to do it. He and Joseph went into Joseph’s study one evening for a private talk. Flora was surprised when they emerged from the study about two minutes later. It turned out that Morris had asked Joseph for Flora’s hand. Joseph said, “What will you do if I say no?” Morris said, “I’ll marry her anyhow.” Joseph replied, “So why ask me?”
Even though Flora married a dentist, she always worked for a living. When she received her first paycheck for teaching school, her mother told her she should buy something special to remind her of her first salary. At that time, the Bezalel artists from Israel were holding an exhibition in New York at the HIAS building because no one else would give them space. These artists made innovative pieces based on Jewish motifs. Flora went to this exhibition and bought a bronze figure of a shadchan, a matchmaker. She kept this figurine for the rest of her life, and it turned out to be not only an interesting art piece but also an efficacious magical object.
One evening when she was giving a party, she noticed a man and woman who’d never met each other before sitting and talking on two chairs placed right beneath the shelf on which the shadchan stood. Flora realized that the man’s name was Isaac and the woman’s name was Rebecca. She went over to them and pointed out that they were sitting together underneath the shadchan. Isaac walked Rebecca home that night, and they started going together. On Issac and Rebecca’s fiftieth wedding anniversary, Flora reminded them of the night they sat under her shadchan.
In Flora’s family, no one cared about dowries, and her own parents, Charlotte and Joseph, had married for love. When they were apart, even after decades of marriage, he wrote her love letters. Joseph’s feelings for his family were deep and true, but this didn’t deter him from the joking he also loved. Once, before Flora was married, she was traveling in Palestine with her mother and brother. As a prank, her brother and an Arab friend from the village near Rosh Pina drew up a contract for the friend to “buy” Flora, who was blond and exotic-looking in the Middle East. When Joseph heard of this, he wrote to Charlotte: “You are a poor business woman indeed if you didn’t sell Flora at that price—you’ll never get a better offer for her!”
Copyright © Leora Freedman 2014
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