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Updated: May 12, 2025
She was summoned to her elder brother's house, for a conference on the subject of the proposed match, and there she found the young man who had bought the cigarettes. For my mother's family, if they forced her to marry, were willing to make her path easier by letting her meet the hossen, convinced that she must be won over by his good looks and learned conversation.
They amuse themselves chiefly by running along the streets in long rows, arm-in-arm, singing 'Hossen hossen-hossen! They also treat each other to 'Nieuw rood met suiker' black currants preserved in gin with sugar until they are all quite tipsy, and woe to any quiet pedestrian who has the misfortune to pass their way, for with loud 'Hi-has' they encircle him and make him 'hos' with them.
For my father considered himself a man of experience now, this being his second match, and he was determined to have a hand in this affair himself. No sooner was the hossen out of the store than his mother, also unknown to the innocent storekeeper, came in for a pound of tallow candles.
It does not really matter how my mother felt, as she sat, with a protecting niece in her lap, at one end of a long table, with the hossen fidgeting at the other end. The marriage contract would be written anyway, no matter what she thought of the hossen.
My mother climbed up on the counter, with one foot on a shelf, to reach down the cigarettes. The customer gave her the right change, and went out. And my mother never suspected that that was the proposed hossen, who came to look her over and see if she was likely to last.
Wedding messengers had been sent to every person who could possibly claim relationship with the hossen. My mother's parents were too generous to slight the lowliest. Instead of burning the barn, they did all they could to garnish it. One or two of the more important of the poor relations came to the wedding in gowns paid for by my rich grandfather.
Picked up from the dirty floor of the poorhouse, his father was identified as the lazy porter who sometimes chopped a cord of wood for my grandmother; and his sisters were slovenly housemaids scattered through Polotzk. No, Mulke was not to be considered. But why consider anybody? Why think of a hossen at all, when she was so content?
But as one of my aunts put it, when my mother objected to the association with the undesirable cousins, she could take out the cow and set fire to the barn; meaning that she could rejoice in the hossen and disregard his family. The hossen, on his part, had reason to rejoice, without any reservations.
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