The Rosenthals and the Blumbergs: A Tragic Tale of Love and Faribel

The Rosenthals and the Blumbergs had once been so thick you couldn’t see daylight between them. Bessie and Lola were in and out of each other’s houses like squirrels sharing the same drey, nibbling each other’s digestives, gossiping and smoking into the early hours, while their respective spouses, Bernie and Roger, would go for long walks, inhaling the fresh Hendon air as they planned to overthrow their autocratic synagogue committee and replace it with a socialist commune.

Then one day it all went pear-shaped, nobody quite knows why. The most popular theory held that Bernie Rosenthal had mistaken Lola Blumberg’s charming smile for an invitation to indulge in a bit of canoodling. This was harmless enough, you might think, especially during that heady period of enlightenment which embraced progressive couples busily designing a new order for the Hendon Reconstituted Community Synagogue.

Apparently, however, Lola’s smile had changed to a grimace within a nanosecond, and thenceforth, the pleasantly warm temperature which had hitherto bathed the two families, plummeted to absolute zero. A big freeze, (known to insiders as ‘The Great Faribel’), settled upon the two families. They vowed never to speak to one another again, and in addition, each family swore its friends and relatives to an oath of fealty more binding in its prohibitions than the Ten Commandments.

But nature always stirs the pot, however warm or cold the temperature. And so it came to pass, a mere two decades later, that the son of the Blumberg couple, one Sidney by name, fell passionately in love with Charmaine, beloved daughter of Bernie and Bessie Rosenthal.

A shidduch being, of course, out of the question, the love-stricken boy confined himself to the composition of billets doux, after the fashion of the great nineteenth century romantic poets. Fortunately for posterity, some of these tear-stained scribblings have survived, and I am pleased to present hereunder, an example of one of the finest and most moving:

“Charmaine, Charmaine, my beautiful Charmaine, / For you I pine, I seek your love in vain,/I cannot sleep, I have a seizure in my brain./ My blood pressure is high, my mood is low/ My eyes are red, my fingers are blue/ And all because I long for you…”

Not to be outdone in the poetry stakes, Charmaine crafted a couple of heart-warming responses on scented notepaper, one such missive reading,

“My darling sweet, my lovely pet,/ That day in Hendon when first we met/ Is one I never, ever, shall forget./ The sun shone bright, the birds sang loud,/ The sky was blue, there was no cloud/ Except the one that’s number nine/ The one on which I now recline./Our parents’ quarrels do not matter/ You have my heart upon a platter,/ I dream of you when in my nightie ,/ And pray most days to God Almighty/ That very soon we’ll be together/ In sunny and in rainy weather./ With all my love and lots of kisses,/ Your ever loving would-be missus./ Charmaine”

With such poetic fervor steaming up the atmosphere, all might have gone well for the Rosenthals and the Blumbergs. In fact, the big freeze had already begun to thaw somewhat, at the instigation of old man Bernie and his erstwhile comrade-in-arms, Roger. They missed their conspiratorial rambles through the glades of Hendon and had never quite understood the intransigence of their faribeldike wives.

Unfortunately, however, matters took a turn for the worse when a no-goodnik by the name of Monty Nissenbaum, took a fancy to Charmaine, and by the same token, developed an intractable hatred for his rival, the lovelorn bocher, Sidney Blumberg.

Before you could say Jacob Rubenstein, there was heard an excruciating sound of metal crunching against metal. Monty, known for his lack of temper, had driven his trante Ford Sierra into the side of Sidney’s new Porsche. The resulting dispute went through the courts at great expense too all parties. Monty’s plea of crime passionel was thrown out by the judge, who awarded damages of one halfpenny to Sidney after it was proved that his Porsche had been parked across the Rosenthal driveway, and the prospect of a thaw receded even further into the distance.

At this point, Rabbi Jeremy Greenstock, known far and wide as the Hendon Gaon, lowered himself onto the stage like a deus ex machina. A personable young man with a vague expression and a large, untidy beard as befits a Gaon, he claimed modestly to be not only the spiritual leader of the Hendon Reconstiruted Community Synaogue, but also the Healer-in- Chief of Troubled Souls and mender of Broiges, large or small.

So he set to work, liaising first with Sidney, who by now had been banished to Outer Hampstead  and forbidden to return on pain of being cursed by Charmaine’s mother, and then with Charmaine, who had begun to put on weight at an alarming rate. The Rabbi’s plan was to allow the couple to get to know each other in private, marry them in secret, and present the estranged parents with a fait accompli. What could possibly go wrong?

Quite a lot, it seemed. Sidney missed the secret ceremony because the messenger sent to deliver the wedding plans had lost the way to Hampstead, and Charmaine, thinking that she had been spurned, fled to her chamber and refused to eat for a whole day. Meanwhile, old man Blumberg, having learnt of the Rabbi’s conspiratorial scheme, and at the same time being informed by the family’s physician, the renowned Dr Schlosberg, of the true nature of Charmaine’s weight gain, suffered a minor heart attack. At the same time, Charmaine’s mother, after a short episode of shrieking and ranting, lost her voice and was diagnosed by the aforementioned Dr Schlosberg as suffering from hysterical aphonia.

Many years later, the two sets of parents ended up in the same care home for the elderly. The Great Faribel was still in place but nobody seemed to notice, since most of the residents were not on speaking terms for one reason or another.

As for Sidney and Charmaine, this strand of the story at least had a more or less happy ending. Sidney, nonplussed by Charmaine’s refusal to forgive him, went on to marry Louisa van Wyk, a nurse at the old people’s home. Charmaine married Hildegard Kristiansen, an environmentalist, and settled in a colony for feminists in a remote part of Northern Norway, where she and her spouse tended a large herd of reindeer, and where they were occasionally visited by Charmaine’s son Mordechai, who was an expert on climate change, especially on how to cope with big freezes in warm climates and unexpected thaws in cold climates.

In case you are wondering what happened to Rabbi Jeremy Greenstock, I can report that after he had been unfrocked by the Beth Din, he underwent a life-changing revelation, converted to Islam and spent the rest of his days in the peaceful back ward of a private hospital, the address of which was kept a secret to discourage pilgrims seeking solace from the former cleric.