The journey and the wedding hall

Margolin decides to go by taxi, since snow has fallen and he does not know Brooklyn. In the dark, silent taxi, he thinks about the big questions: why did God create a Hitler, a Stalin, world wars, cancer? Is there a soul? Is immortality possible?

On Eastern Parkway, the taxi stops suddenly: there has been a traffic accident. A wounded man in a dark suit and bow tie is carried to an ambulance, his face chalky white. Perhaps he too was going to a wedding, Margolin thinks; perhaps even the same one.

At last he reaches the brightly lit wedding hall, with its neon Jewish sign and Star of David. Inside, the warm closeness of the Senciminers swallows him up. The hall is full of noise: music that mixes jazz with Oriental flourishes, dancing, food, drink, flashing cameras. Everyone seems to know him, though he recognises no one. They call him by his childhood name, 'Schloime-Dovid', and remember him as the little boy with blond side-curls who recited the Talmud by heart.

Little by little he forgets his worries. But all the merry talk keeps turning to the same subject: the Holocaust. 'My father? He was killed. They were all killed.' 'Shot. Together with her children.' 'They burned him in the synagogue.' 'Auschwitz.' One guest says: 'All of us are really dead... Even the survivors carry death in their hearts. But it's a wedding, we should be cheerful.' Another sums it up: 'What is life anyway? A dance on the grave.'