Savyon Liebrecht’s novel, The Bridesman, opens with the narrator on a flight from Los Angeles to Tel Aviv. It’s been twenty-four years since Micha left Israel for the United States and he’s heading back on an all-expenses-paid invitation from his beloved aunt Adella. Liebrecht’s novel, translated from the Hebrew by Gilah Kahn-Hoffmann, is a short book that tells the story of a tightly-knit Persian Jewish family that almost becomes the undoing of Adella two decades earlier. Micha does not know exactly why his aunt calls him back to Israel and how she can afford to pay his way, but he will by the end of the book.
In the meantime, Micha assumes Adella wants to hire him as a ghostwriter to pen her story. He has made a name for himself in the United States doing this for other people. When he arrives in Tel Aviv and meets her again after decades, she catches him up on the family story, namely how she got away from the wrath of her in-laws.
Micha narrates the first part of the story, and was only nine when Adella marries his favorite uncle, Moshe. It’s an arranged marriage and one that Moshe and Micha’s family do not take very well even though they consent to it.
Although Adella is Persian Jewish and understands Moshe’s family’s language of Hebrew with Farsi sprinkled in here and there, she is still seen as an outsider. She was orphaned at the age of ten when her mother died. Her father had left his family years before that. Upon her mother’s death, Adella was sent to a boarding school and didn’t have an easy time because she was the only Persian student there. She was about to be married off to an older man when she learned that Moshe’s family was looking for a bride for him. Adella was ready to accept this proposal on the spot. But when she met Moshe and his large extended family, including young Micha, the family was turned off by her demands to speak alone with Moshe. Adella walked with a limp and wore thick glasses back then, and the family thought she should be grateful to marry into their family without any demands. As Micha recalls, the family withheld Persian wedding traditions from Adella.
They didn’t bother with the henna ceremony. That pre-wedding ritual had all the things I loved—unbridled joy, ululations, loud music and dancing, tarboosh hats, white and gold caftans, brightly colored garments handed down from generation to generation, candles and flowers, presents for the bride and groom. They didn’t have any of it.
Micha is the son of one of Moshe’s sisters, and he and Adella became close because he was one of the only family members that treated her nicely. The title of the book comes from Micha’s role in Adella and Moshe’s wedding. Since she had no other family, Micha was the one who walked her down the aisle and gave her away.
Moshe is also disabled, but it’s never entirely clear what afflicts him. He has tremors and a hard time standing up to his domineering brothers. With his siblings married and working in family stores, including a bakery, Moshe was left to care for his ailing father. When Adella married Moshe, she became the father’s caregiver, too. It’s not a bad existence, although their apartment was dark inside and old. The three of them relied on allowances that Moshe’s eldest brother Yosef gave them for their living expenses and the family Shabbat dinners they hosted each week. When Adella asked for control of the household finances, she offended her brothers-in-law. She asked to see the disability insurance statements that Moshe and his father received each month. She also wanted to open a joint bank account in her and Moshe’s names. The brothers-in-law were outraged by a woman acting this way and did not agree.
Adella continued to try to wrest control of these finances, to little avail. Moshe felt torn between his brothers and his wife and ultimately chose his wife. When Micha was fifteen, he emigrated to the United States with his mother, where they joined his father in Los Angeles. How Adella turned her life around after Micha left Israel doesn’t become clear to Micha until he returns to Tel Aviv twenty-four years later. She has kept so many family secrets for so long and is desperate to speak with him after all this time, a time in which Moshe is at the end of his life.
A unique story that portrays a Persian Jewish family that arrived in Israel in 1950, caught between the traditions of the old country and the secular possibilities of the new one, The Bridesman is also nevertheless universal in its portrayal of the layers and complexities of families.