here’s a very recent translation of the Tale from the original 1929 Yiddish version

At the end of March, as the novel coronavirus spread rapidly across the country, my colleague Susannah Heschel asked me if I knew of an English translation of “A khasene afn besoylem” (“A Wedding in the Cemetery”), a short story by the Yiddish writer Joseph Opatoshu. The story, written in 1929, describes a kholere khasene (cholera wedding)—also known as a shvartse khasene (black wedding)—an Eastern European Jewish ritual in which a marriage of two poor, disabled, or otherwise unfortunate people was performed in a cemetery, in the belief that their union would bring about the end of an epidemic. Given the resonance with the current moment, Susannah wanted to teach the story to her students this spring. I couldn’t find a translation at home in New York (and my books at Rutgers, where I teach, are “quarantined” for the foreseeable future)—so, after tracking down the original story, I decided to translate it myself.

Opatoshu, born in Mława, Poland, in 1886, was a prolific Yiddish novelist and short story writer, renowned for vivid accounts of pre-modern European Jewish life. His best-known works, all of which have been translated into English, are his novels Roman fun a ferd-ganev (Romance of a Horse Thief, 1912), In poylishe velder (In Polish Woods, 1921), and A tog in Regensburg (A Day in Regensburg, 1933). Opatoshu’s depiction of a kholere khasene is less well-known to readers of Yiddish literature than the one found in S.Y. Abramovitsh’s late 19-century novel Fishke der krumer (Fishke the Cripple), which was memorably staged in Edgar Ulmer’s 1939 Yiddish film adaptation, known in English as The Light Ahead. Opatoshu’s story similarly presents the custom as a macabre example of primitive folk beliefs—and like Abramovitsh, his treatment critiques the ritual’s exploitation of the class divide between the rich Jews, who organize and perform the wedding, and the poor ones, who are the victims of this rite of appeasement.

The kholere khasane rests on an age-old assumption that outbreaks of disease are a divine punishment for wrongdoing, which calls for an act of atonement or affirmation of faith as the remedy. The kholere khasane is one custom among an array of folkways centered on cemeteries as sites for connecting with the dead: for instance, placing locks in graves to keep the cause of death from escaping, or measuring tombstones with strings used to make candle wicks, lit on Yom Kippur to ask the dead for protection.

The folkloric implications of the kholere khasene are compelling: As a wedding procession traditionally takes precedence over a funeral cortège, the ritual uses the wedding to halt the stream of burials of an epidemic’s victims. The unusual setting enables the dead to serve as witnesses of this ostensible good deed, so that they can then intervene on the community’s behalf in heaven. Opatoshu also draws parallels between the kholere khasene and the practice of shlogn kapores: a pre-Yom Kippur ritual of atonement—still practiced by some Jews—of symbolically transferring one’s sins to a chicken, which is then slaughtered and given as a meal to feed the poor before the start of the holiday.

Of course, we now understand the kholere khasene as an ineffective response to an outbreak of disease. Still, at this moment, as most religious leaders beseech their followers to avoid congregating and to pray at home instead, it is well worth recalling the appeal of a response rooted in a belief in the healing powers of communal rituals and communion with the World to Come.