Saturday Dec 20

Weddings of Brickner
and Jack Breidbart

Especially enjoyed
Breidbarts wedding at
Regina Mansion where I
was an usher.

[Papa accidentally wrote his December 20th entry on the December 18th page of his diary, so there's nothing on this page but some ink smudges and a notation that reads "See page 353".]

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Matt's Notes

It's hard to imagine how Papa managed to attend two weddings on a school night, especially if he was in the wedding party for one of them, but we'll have to take his word for it. Perhaps Mr. Brickner's affair was close enough to Breidbart's wedding at Regina Mansion (according to the book Jews of Brooklyn, Regina Mansion was a catering facility at 601 Willoughby Ave in Brooklyn's Bedford-Stuyvesant neighborhood) to allow Papa to walk from one to the other.

Jack Breidbart has been one of my favorite characters in Papa's diary, though I've always seen him as a rakish, incorrigible bachelor buddy, someone Papa can always count on for a good time. It seems dramatically fitting, then, for us to see him married off and headed for the next phase of his life in the diary's final pages. Did Papa, as he stood there in his tux and enjoyed Jack's good fortune, wonder for a moment or two when his turn would finally come?



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Update 12/21/07:

My mother posits:

Papa may not have gone to two weddings on the same night. I think he was recording the events together, since he had not written in his diary for several days.