Dr Margolin before the wedding

'A Wedding in Brownsville' is by Isaac Bashevis Singer, a Polish-born Jewish writer who wrote in Yiddish and won the Nobel Prize in 1978.

Dr Solomon Margolin is a successful doctor in New York. He was born in Sencimin, a small Jewish town in Poland. Tonight, a Sunday, he must go to a wedding in Brownsville, Brooklyn: Abraham Mekheles, a fellow Senciminer, is marrying off his youngest daughter, Sylvia. His wife, Gretl, refuses to go; and Margolin himself finds it a burden. He is on a fat-free diet, he has to be at the hospital early on Monday, and such weddings irritate him: the loud music, the mixed-up Yiddish and English, the distorted customs. He knows how the Senciminers will greet him, too: they will reproach him for growing aloof, drop hints that he is a snob, slap him on the back and drag him off to dance.

Underneath the irritation is something deeper. Since Sencimin was destroyed and his family killed, he has drifted away from the old community. The wedding will bring back everything he has lost.

Gretl was a nurse in Berlin, born a Christian; one of her brothers was a Nazi, another a Communist shot by the Nazis. In New York she has become almost Jewish, and she does all the housework herself, almost as a mania.

Margolin's career has gone well: an office on West End Avenue, rich patients, respect. He treats rabbis, refugees and Jewish writers free. He has never broken the Hippocratic Oath (a doctor's promise to serve patients honestly). But secretly he feels he is a failure. As a boy he was a prodigy of Jewish learning; then he scattered his talents, changing subjects and wandering from country to country.

His one great love, Raizel, daughter of Melekh the watchmaker, married someone else and was later shot by the Nazis. Sencimin was destroyed, and his whole family was tortured, burned and gassed. Hitler's carnage destroyed his faith in humanity. He lies awake with the 'eternal questions', and the fear of death haunts even his dreams.