The Imported Bridegroom

The Imported Bridegroom and Other Stories
by Abraham Cahan

Boston
Houghton, Mifflin and Company
1898
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The Imported Bridegroom
A Providential Match
A Sweatshop Romance
Circumstances
A Ghetto Wedding
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The Imported Bridegroom
I
Flora was alone in the back parlor, which she had appropriated for a
sort of boudoir. She sat in her rocker, in front of the parlor stove,
absorbed in Little Dorrit. Her well-groomed girlish form was
enveloped in a kindly warmth whose tender embrace tinged her interest
in the narrative with a triumphant consciousness of the snowstorm
outside.

Little by little the rigid afternoon light began to fade into a melancholy
gray. Dusk was creeping into the room in almost visible waves. Flora
let the book rest on her lap and fixed her gaze on the twinkling scarlet
of the stove-glass. The thickening twilight, the warmth of the apartment,
and the atmosphere of the novel blended together, and for some
moments Flora felt far away from herself.
She was the only girl of her circle who would read Dickens, Scott, or
Thackeray in addition to the Family Story Paper and the Fireside
Companion, which were the exclusive literary purveyors to her former
classmates at the Chrystie Street Grammar School. There were a piano
and a neat little library in her room.
She was rather tall and well formed. Her oblong ivory face, accentuated
by a mass of unruly hair of a lusterless black, was never deserted by a
faint glimmer of a smile, at once pensive and arch. When she broke into
one of her hearty, good-natured laughs, her deep, dark, appealing eyes
would seem filled with grief. Her nose, a trifle too precipitous, gave an
unexpected tone to the extreme picturesqueness of the whole effect, and,
when she walked, partook of the dignity of her gait.
A month or two before we make Flora's acquaintance she had
celebrated her twentieth birthday, having been born in this little private
house on Mott Street, which was her father's property.
A matchmaker had recently called, and he had launched into a eulogy
of a young Jewish physician; but old Stroon had cut him short, in his
blunt way: his only child was to marry a God-fearing business man,
and no fellow deep in Gentile lore and shaving his beard need apply.
As to Flora, she was burning to be a doctor's wife. A rising young
merchant, a few years in the country, was the staple matrimonial
commodity in her set. Most of her married girl friends, American-born
themselves, like Flora, had husbands of this class--queer fellows,
whose broken English had kept their own sweethearts chuckling. Flora
hated the notion of marrying as the other Mott or Bayard Street girls
did. She was accustomed to use her surroundings for a background,
throwing her own personality into high relief. But apart from this, she
craved a more refined atmosphere than her own, and the vague ideal

she had was an educated American gentleman, like those who lived
uptown.
Accordingly, when the word "doctor" had left the match-maker's lips,
she seized upon it as a great discovery. In those days--the early
eighties--a match of this kind was an uncommon occurrence in the New
York Ghetto.
Flora pictured a clean-shaven, high-hatted, spectacled gentleman
jumping out of a buggy, and the image became a fixture in her mind. "I
won't marry anybody except a doctor," she would declare, with
conscious avoidance of bad grammar, as it behooved a doctor's wife.
But what was to be done with father's opposition? Asriel Stroon had
never been the man to yield, and now that he grew more devout every
day, her case seemed hopeless. But then Flora was her father's daughter,
and when she took a resolve she could not imagine herself otherwise
than carrying it out, sooner or later.
Flora's thoughts were flowing in this direction when her father's gruff
voice made itself heard from the dining room below. It was the
anniversary of his father's death. In former years he would have
contented himself with obit services, at the synagogue; this time,
however, he had passed the day in fasting and chanting psalms at home,
in addition to lighting his own candle in front of the cantor's desk and
reciting Kaddish for the departed soul, at the house of prayer. It
touched Flora's heart to think of him fasting and praying all day, and,
with her book in her hand, she ran down to meet him.
"Just comin' from the synagogue, papa?" she greeted him affectionately,
in English. "This settles your fast, don't it?"
"It is not so easy to settle with Him, my daughter," he returned, in
Yiddish, pointing to the ceiling. "You can never be through serving the
Uppermost. Hurry up, Tamara!" he added, in the direction of the
adjoining kitchen.
"You ain'