PodCastle

* Author : Rebecca Fraimow
* Narrator : Barbara Krasnoff
* Host : Benjamin C. Kinney
* Audio Producers : Peter Adrian Behravesh and Jim Freund
*
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PodCastle 689: Gitl Schneiderman Learns to Live With Her In-Laws is a PodCastle original.


Rated PG-13
Gitl Schneiderman Learns to Live With Her In-Laws
by Rebecca Fraimow
Shprintze, you nudnik,
Before you ask again, I’ve gotten all your letters scolding me for not writing—and Esther and Sarah’s too. Well, I’m sorry about it, but with one thing and another, my cousin’s kid crying all the time on the one side of me and Gitl crying all the time on the other, I haven’t had two wits to rub together, let alone two words to put onto a page for you. Anyway, what’s the point of going on a visit only to spend all your time talking to the same people you’d talk to at home? But everything’s calm to the point of boredom now, so I can spare a little time to catch you up, and then you can share this letter around and catch up everybody else.
Now you might well say, what was all this crying about? Isn’t everything coming up well for your cousins? And what’s the trouble with our Gitl? So she’s become a widow, it’s very sad, her husband’s memory for a blessing and all; still, it’s been almost a year, shouldn’t she be over her sobbing by now?  After all, she only knew this Schneiderman a month before they married, and then it was just another month until he got conscripted. Not much of a marriage, I’d say!
Well, as you know, I feel a little responsible. If she hadn’t come to keep me company last time I visited my cousins in Lodz, she’d never have been here to meet him in the first place, and would still be having a good time with all of us back home in Vilna. Instead she’s been stuck under the eye of her in-laws playing out the role of a pious widow. What a fate! I mind my own business, you know that, Shprintze, but when my cousins invited me to stay again, how could I not come to see how she was doing?
Honestly, you’d have been shocked to see her, so pale and sad and quiet—our wild Gitl, always laughing, who used to talk of running away to the theater!—that I really started thinking more than ever that all this business of love and marriage was a bad affair. Hours and days I sat with her in that dark room with all the mirrors covered, and if ever she did raise her voice a little like she used to, her in-laws would start glaring as if the very idea of a smile disrespected the dead. I couldn’t entirely blame them, either. The family had come in for some real bad luck; it wasn’t just Gitl’s husband who’d passed that year, they were grieving a daughter, too. The shiva had just ended when I got there, and it seemed like this Mirele and Gitl had been close.
So you can see why I didn’t much feel like writing to you and the others, when all I had was such bad news.
Still, I kept coming. Mostly, of course, because it seemed a mitzvah to sit with her, and, as I told you, I felt a little responsible. But don’t think I’m making myself out to be so good; there’s other reasons, too, that I was wanting to be over there, instead of staying all the time in my cousin’s house.
As you know, my cousin’s husband Yudah is rabbi these days to a small synagogue in Lodz. It’s a nice synagogue and a nice neighborhood, so there shouldn’t be any problems. Only, every night, when everyone ought to be asleep,