Breaking Glass
he morning of my wedding, my father gave me a piece of unexpected advice. 'When you step on the glass,' he said, 'why don't you imagine that all the doubts and fears of childhood are inside and that you're smashing them too?'
He was referring to one of the more mysterious customs at a Jewish wedding, in which the bridegroom stamps on a glass, marking the end of the ceremony. I liked my father's suggestion, though I was so afraid that the wineglass, wrapped in a white handkerchief, would shoot out unbroken (as I had once seen happen) that I forgot everything in my pulverizing zeal. But I was touched by his words, particularly because breaking the glass had already assumed a symbolic place in my mind -- though one connected not to my own childhood but to his.
I was married on Nov. 10, the anniversary of Kristallnacht. The German name, which means 'the night of broken glass,' is too euphoniously euphemistic to describe accurately what really happened in 1938, beginning on the night of Nov. 9 and running into the next day. Mobs, urged on by the Nazi Government, ran amok throughout Germany and Austria, murdering, looting, smashing Jewish shop windows and burning synagogues. Thirty thousand Jews were arrested -- including my grandfather, my father's father.
My father was 14, and Kristallnacht shattered his world. One month later he left Vienna on a children's transport, finding refuge first in Scotland and later in the United States. He never saw his parents again. Strange, then, that I chose the anniversary of this terrible day for my wedding five years ago.
I cannot claim this was strictly by design. I'd wanted to get married in winter and my wife-to-be had inched the date forward until we settled on Nov. 10. It was my father who pointed out the eerie accident. He did not ask me to change the date, but we easily could have. We had planned a small wedding in my parents' house. But after initial discomfort the coincidence had a distinct, if perverse, appeal.
More than 50 years had passed since the pogrom of 1938. The world could not be counted on to remember forever -- hadn't I myself forgotten the date? Here was a way to graft my father's story onto my own. Soon the year 2000, with its obliterating zeros, would roll the terrible events of the 20th century deeper into the past. My wedding would at least guarantee a kind of private commemoration. I would lash a piece of history to my back and carry it with me into the future.
But by mingling Kristallnacht with my own wedding, was I preserving it or erasing it further? Perhaps I did not wish to mark the date so much as unmark it -- a typical childhood fantasy. I wanted to make whole my father's broken past, to offer up my own wedding as the joyful answer to tragic times.
Both impulses, of course, are equally grandiose and impossibly naive. My own life can never contain or summarize the suffering of earlier generations, any more than it can answer or redeem those losses. My father understood this when he spoke to me on the morning of my wedding. For all he knew of the world, he could still have for me a father's wish -- that I would banish the fears of childhood, even though the fears of his childhood were fully founded in real events. Every generation is born innocent, and if that is bad for history, it is nevertheless necessary for life.
And yet how can I stop trying to connect myself in some way to the past? Which brings me back to my wedding and the ritual of the broken glass, which forms the final moment of the traditional Jewish ceremony. There are several explanations for this practice. The one I like is that it is a reminder of the destruction of the temple in Jerusalem -- an event that happened some 1,900 years ago -- and in a larger sense, a reminder that the world itself is broken and imperfect. Smashing the glass recalls this fact and introduces a fleeting note of sadness into an otherwise festive occasion.
It is in this spirit that I celebrate my wedding anniversary today. I think about my grandparents who were murdered and their son -- my father -- who escaped to America and married my mother. I think about my own lucky American life and joyful marriage and how little, and how much, separates the past from the present, sorrow from celebration. I hear my father's kind advice, the cheerful cries of friends and family and the distant echo of breaking glass.
LIVES  Jonathan Rosen is associate editor of the Forward. His first novel, 'Eve's Apple,' will be published in the spring.