Bride

Ora Ahimeir knew nothing of her mother Haya’s first marriage—she died of heart disease at age thirty-four—until a chance meeting with a woman in the U.S. exposed the secret: her mother’s first husband was murdered. Another thirty years would go by before a clue led the author, almost like a detective, to unravel her mother’s secret past. Then she sat down and wrote a gripping book about her, her family, and the Old Yishuv—the Jews of Palestine—in the first half of the 20th century.
The clue, discovered in the Safed museum in Upper Galilee, was an invitation to her mother’s wedding on which someone had written: “Four days after the wedding he was murdered.” David was a Jewish constable in the British Mandate police force, who had come as a pioneer from Hungary; Haya, the 18-year-old bride, came from a respected Hasidic family in Safed. The two young people fell in love, and in spite of her family’s disapproval, they married. This was 1938, the year of the Arab Revolt, and a few days after the wedding David was shot in the back on his way to work, apparently by an Arab. Haya, who had rebelled against her family, was suddenly a widow as well as an outcast in her own hometown, where her tragic fate was seen as punishment for her sins. She moved to Jerusalem and turned over a new leaf, but never really recovered from the love of her youth.