Читать книгу The Mash-Up: A Short Story from the collection, Reader, I Married Him - Linda Grant - Страница 7
ОглавлениеTHE WEDDING WAS PERFECT, up to a point.
Because we were what Ali called a mash-up couple, we had to find a way of celebrating our marriage with a nod to both families, a ceremony that would make them feel their traditions were respected and that neither side had the upper hand. These things can turn ugly if not handled properly, with slights and sulks and stormings out and long-borne grievances and grudges stumbling to the surface like aggrieved old drunks. At least on my side of the family. My grandmother has not spoken to my aunt Dolly for forty-three years, since she was not placed at the top table at Elaine’s wedding.
We went online and found a character called Rabbi Larry Peirera. He was prepared to conduct a wedding ceremony of our own devising, like those websites Ali used where you could customise your Nikes. Rabbi Larry, as he told us to call him, was an endearing fellow, a little mushroom of a man with a black boyfriend. When we met with him for the first time, at a bar in Shoreditch, we spent several ice-breaking minutes discussing the symbolism of our three sets of tats and he told us wonderful stories that started funny, and ended in heartbreak, of the long-ago centuries in the Sephardic world where Jews and Muslims lived side by side. “But I’m not a Muslim,” Ali reminded him. “I’m Persian
