We All Need To Eat

by Alex Leslie

  This writer, Isaac Bashevis Singer—he really knows how to tell a story. People are people are people. The way he writes, as if he carries a pad and pencil around with him every day of his life. He writes Yiddish just the way my father, Tateleh, and his friends talk. Tateleh is always having people over. Their Yiddish, guttural and rapid, so different than their English, a stiff plod. They drink the brightest amber tea from the samovar, small glasses set out on the table like stars hanging in the room at the level of their hands while they tell each other the news, direct the constellations of facts. Singer writes about pogroms but, oh, if I asked Tateleh about all that, the look I would get. “Where are you from, Tateleh?” is a question I will never ask. From a place to leave and never go back, even for a visit. I drift in and out of the room, stand at the door, and listen in for whatever scraps I can get. I watch my cousin Mordecai standing by another door, also listening. Zev Guttman’s sister’s family is on that ship and we are hoping the circle of men will say something about it. Mordecai stares across the room at me. Half in shade. Sickle of cheekbone. Perfect Mordecai, who does not drive on Saturdays, who smiles at me because he knows my secret, that I am dating a goy, a man who has the nerve not to be a Jew. Mordecai isn’t a blood cousin, we have none here; he’s the son of one of the men in Tateleh’s tea circle.

  One of the older men says, “What could we do, swim out to the ship and throw bread up its sides?” Many people from shul have sent letters about their families trapped over there. It’s been getting harder and harder for a few years for families to come here to Winnipeg. The old man mutters a prayer and everybody repeats. My lips and tongue moving through the Hebrew too, before I even notice.

  Someone answers, “The bread would only fall back down and get ruined in the ocean.”

  Another man says, “I would catch it in my mouth!”

  My father mimes swimming to shore, teeth gripping invisible bread, frantic dog-paddling.

  Laughter dips and fades like a fire dying out.

  The Singer stories came from a friend of Tateleh’s who often goes back and forth across the border to the States. My father and mother first came to the States when they left their shtetl, their village, in eastern Ukraine, then moved up here. I don’t know why—what makes Canada any better? I read the Singer stories all in one burst. Tateleh read the stories quickly, and then left them under a stack of newspapers. The stories are set in the 1600s. There are very few Jews left in the shtetl, because of very awful pogroms. There is a messiah who is probably not a messiah, and a girl who is possessed by a dybbuk, a demon. Once a dark spirit is in you, it takes a very long time for it to get out, and you’re probably a bissl crazy forever. All very dramatic. Tateleh buys newspapers in both Yiddish and English. I had to explain to Louis, the boy I’m seeing, mild Louis tall as a lamppost, that the Yiddish is not Hebrew. He laughed. “It all looks the same!” I tried to explain to him that Yiddish is the language people speak, not the language we use to pray. Louis and his family just talk English. His mother knows about us and she is unhappy he’s dating a Yid, of course, but did not tell him to stop. He is so persistent. She must know that about her only son. Louis asks me to say words in Yiddish—door, house, father—and I do: tir, hoyz, tateh. He asks me to say words in Hebrew, insists playfully, pressing me to the edges of my temper that he is beginning to know well, like feeling for the walls of a dark room. “Teach me how, Charna,” he teases me. Louis promises several times a week that his mother will meet me soon. Tateleh does not know about Louis, of course. He has warned me: do not be surprised that anybody hates you for being a Jew. But he has also said, nothing can change where you come from. We are from shtetls, the Jewish villages, where most people we know are from. I was born soon after they arrived here, but I often feel as if I’m from elsewhere. After all, who can remember their own birth?

  In shul there are many stories about what’s happening over there. Before prayers there is the real story: the gossip. Zev Guttman’s skin is fragile as the cloth of his old tallit he brought with him from Berlin, and I know there is no good news about the ship. There have been more pogroms. In cities where they’re supposed to be civilized. “It’s 1939! What is this? This meshuga garbage,” Tateleh spits. I take comfort in his disbelief until a friend of his says, “Why should we be surprised by anything? Isn’t that is why we are here and not there?” In shul Tateleh is far from me, in the men’s section, and I watch him out of the corner of my eye during the Amidah. As he prays, his bulk sways freely forward and back, a black bear suspended on wires. I have never wondered what he prays for, until today. He is massive, my father, never cuts his beard, rough yarn that spools from his chin. My sister says he’s depressing to be around, that I should ask for help finding a husband and move out of the apartment. “Charna, it’s time to go,” she tells me. Silent prayer is the part of service I love most. When a building full of people think the same words at the same time, the air shimmers with the vowels trapped in their lungs. Invisible people wander among us, blow in our mouths and ears. Zev Guttman looks like he’s holding his breath, like he might faint at any moment, and I close my eyes, let the words float me along.

  Soma

  A few days before my grandmother Charna’s fifth yahrzeit —the fifth anniversary of her death in the Hebrew calendar—I go away with my partner, Melanie, to an island up the coast. The ferry cuts through the hard black wax of the Pacific and my body moves toward a nameless heaviness it always does at this time of year, end of summer, when Grandma Charna died, the pale heat edging toward a finish. We booked the trip months ago and, when I realized that it overlapped with her yahrzeit, I hesitated, then left the dates alone. A change is better than a rest, is something she said. We all have our meshugas, is another thing she said. We all have our craziness, crazies, we are all the craziness, sometimes. Nobody more or less, just taking turns. I have the Kaddish downloaded on my iPhone. I meant to print it out at the office but forgot, so my iPhone prayer will have to do the job. Moments like this make me feel like a pretend-Jew or, what I actually am, a half-Jew. The joke I tell people when they ask if it’s my father or mother: it’s the left side. I’ve been listening to the prayer on my earbuds during my hour-long work commute for weeks. The riddled lilt of the mourner’s prayer. This year, I decided to memorize it for Grandma Charna, not read it as I’ve done the previous four years. Memorizing it has been harder than I predicted, the sequences too complex. I thought it was Hebrew until I googled and found out it’s actually Aramaic. A language even more distant from me than Yiddish, my grandma Charna’s birth tongue, a language she rarely spoke in front of me, tried not to pass on to her children, save them from that clipped, giveaway accent in the years after the Holocaust. A shifting blend of German, Hebrew, Polish, Ukrainian—the mishmash everyone spoke before everything changed.

  Mameh loshen, mother tongue.

  Inside the ferry, we get hot chocolates, watch the Pacific, its ambling slurry. The island is three ferries away from Vancouver, each ferry crossing a deeper relief. Carrying us away from the daily drain of our jobs. How can this coast be simultaneously so beautiful and so polluted? If its insides were shown, its heavy-metal count and creatures strangled by chemicals, it would be hideous. This is the kind of thing I say that makes Melanie grimace and say, “Why do you have to be so negative about everything?” “It’s not negative if it’s true,” I argued once, and she said, “Oh my god, you have to write that down.” I drink my shitty salty hot chocolate while Melanie dozes against the window. I inspect the surface of the brown liquid. There are black shimmering patches like gasoline. What do they put in this stuff? I fish a Globe and Mail from between the seats. The cover story is about a town in Wisconsin where a neo-Nazi group is organizing a march. Photos of Jewish adults and children have been taped on telephone poles throughout the town. Similar groups are popping up across the States, the article goes on to say. The mayor has voiced his criticism of the group and assured the town that every
effort is being made to contain the planned rally. Contain? I feel derision sparkle in my fingertips. I hear Grandma Charna: What do you think they’re doing, planning a birthday party for a child? Her laugh an unstable creature. They think they can stop this? With a declaration of disapproval? People like this, they never go away. They won’t stop at anything. Nothing they won’t do. They won’t stop at anything. I’m glad she isn’t alive to see this—the photos of spray-painted gravestones in Ottawa and Winnipeg and Toronto, the Rabbis receiving anonymous phone threats, the chanting crowds of furious young white men. This surreal resurgence. I examine the men’s faces in the black-and-white newspaper images. I set my index finger over their mouths, gingerly, testing for heat. Who are you and what do you want? Purity. We want purity. The ocean moves outside, a dark brain, deep folds of shadow and light. Melanie doesn’t understand about Grandma Charna. Her family gets along in a way that confounds me. At first I thought they were pretending to be that normal. During the first few months we knew each other, I waited for the big reveal of dysfunction. Spoiler: there was none. You would never guess, meeting Melanie, that she did half of medical school, dropped out to become a vet when she became obsessed with a rescue dog. When I tried to explain to her a little about Charna, Melanie said, slowly, careful not to offend: “Sounds like she had a lot of baggage.” I laughed. Baggage. Understatement of the century. Melanie’s family is a mix of Swedish and Scottish.

  She’s asked me a few times, “Where’s your family from again?”

  “Ukraine,” I said. “Near the Black Sea.” I repeated what Grandma Charna said to me: “I don’t know a lot about it.”

  Early on, Melanie was surprised. “But how can you just not know? This is the twenty-first century, aren’t there

  records?” It’s hard to explain, the Holocaust and pogroms and back and back and back.

  “Too much to get into.”

  I told her once that the government didn’t even release any records until the nineties, and she dropped the subject. They never met. Grandma Charna would either have loved her or torn her to shreds. Probably both. Melanie awakens, shifts, leans against me. She takes the Globe and Mail out of my hands.

  “Stop reading that stuff,” she says.

  I wrap my arms around her. “Why? It’s what’s happening.”

  Her yawn slurs her words. “Too much. It’s too much. We’re almost at the island. Can’t you take a break?” I curl my fingers through her hair. I love the texture of her hair, the dense coils. When wet, heavy as metal springs.

  “It’s just a newspaper article,” I murmur softly, trying to cover my defensiveness with sleepiness. I slide my hand down her neck, to her bra strap. “Don’t,” she says, leans forward and takes the Globe with her, pushes it onto the ground. “We should never have gone away during this yardzite thing,” she says.

  “Yahrzeit,” I correct automatically.

  “I know, yahrzeit.” She rolls back and forth in her seat, slurs like a pirate: “Yahhrrrrrrrrrrrrr-zite. Yahrrrrrrrr matey zite.”

  Here she is, again, in my arms, intolerable, refusing-to-get-it, consoling. “How much do you love me?” she asks, falling asleep again, and I tell her.

  When the ferry docks on the tiny island, there are sounds like fire smacking ice, the hissing and popping of a rough entry. We unpack our stack of cut-offs and T-shirts. Her warm hand on my bare shoulder. “You’re going to be moody this whole trip, aren’t you?” she asks, and I turn and kiss her. She knows about the yahrzeit but not about the Kaddish in Aramaic on my phone, a glaring exception in an endless loop of R ’n’ B and acoustic covers. She would recede into disapproving silence if I told her I’d listened to the prayer on repeat over these past few weeks, mouthing along to the ancient words, the pulse of vowels in a minor key. Words that I recite cautiously, laboriously, like reciting a character’s words in a foreign play. I am that crazy lady on the bus, meshuga, rehearsing death, hunched in a plastic seat, the competing voice intoning from the speaker system, This train is bound for Waterfront Station. I have not told her why I am so upset about this yahrzeit, can feel my body stiffening in anticipation before a fall or jump—I am now the age my grandma Charna was the year the Holocaust ended and there was, officially, nowhere to return to. But what could they even have known, then? Grandma Charna withheld so much, it’s easy to feel, sometimes, like I’m making it all up.

  The ocean is at the foot of the cliff behind our cabin, with a trail straight down to Pacific black.

  Charna

  At the kiddush lunch at shul, there are many stories about everyone’s families trapped in Europe. I get up and wander into the corner alone. A pile of old prayer books rests on a table. I should take one of those siddurs back home, begin a daily routine. My sister Hannah dragged me to her prayer circle six months ago, and the woman who leads her group spoke passionately about her siddur as her best friend, always giving the best advice. This is the kind of thing that summons my snark from the lizard seed of my brain. My sister had looked at me hard, stunned, when I told her about the seriousness of my feelings for Louis after the group, and then she said, very slowly, “What is your long-term plan?” When I glared, she said, “No, it’s not that, I just don’t want you to go through pain. Eventually, you will have to make a choice.” Nobody in our shul marries non-Jews. Why would anyone marry a goy. Just look at what they’ve done to us. Now, I’m standing holding the siddur, and Hannah comes up. Successfully married to bland Joshua, and excruciatingly pregnant. She puts all ten of her fat hard fingers in my hair and whispers very close to my face, “What are you thinking about, scowling here in the corner holding a prayer book like a meshuga lady, the end of the world? Come and talk.” She wants to know how Tateleh is doing and I tell her about his friends and the joke about the dog swimming. I think about that dog, tired in the middle of the Atlantic. I expect her to sigh and shake her head—like a bunch of old ladies, sitting around gossiping—but instead she puts a hand on her explosive belly, and says, “Yes we must all be careful these days. It’s different for you, Charna, you were born after they came here, but I remember.” She was five when they came and has told me scraps over the years—the boat full of sickness, the vague shapes of the many faces from before, Tateleh’s mother and sisters.

  Then: “You spend too much time with old men. Old people, and that goy Louis. I’m going to hunt him down and attack him from behind.” She screeches and grabs at the soft folds of my stomach, chases me away with a pelvic thrust.

  Hannah’s prayer group meets in a different home every week. Her best friend since Hebrew school, Basha, is the host this week. From the way Basha looks at me slyly, I know she knows about my relationship with Louis. A person like her will take a story and run with it to see how far it can get her. I fear her judgment and her love of advertising in equal amounts. The other women rub Hannah’s stomach like a charmed stone.

  “What have you been up to, Charna?” one of them asks me, and I answer that last night I enjoyed spending the evening working on the parashah for tonight’s group. She looks confused and glances at Hannah.

  “Didn’t Hannah tell you what this group is for now?”

  I shake my head.

  “We write letters.” Basha takes out a book of addresses of members of parliament, and mayors of cities from where we are in Manitoba all the way east. They’ve been gathering and writing these letters for weeks now.

  Dear Sir: As members of the Jewish community and as Canadian citizens, we are writing to express our deep concern regarding the situations of our community’s families currently residing in areas of Europe...

  We ask for your kind consideration of the extremity of

  circumstances...

  As taxpaying citizens...

  While we write and fold, Hannah begins to sing a wordless melody. Spirals, widens, never resolves. The prayer continues for a long time until we fall into silence, like a woman dropping the end of
a rope to the floor. I see that Basha, normally coy and mercurial, is crying. I wonder where her family’s relatives are. Germany, I think. Things are getting worse quickly. Hannah’s hand moving mechanically back and forth across where she is full of her child, Tateleh’s first grandchild. He shouted when he found out, a ripcord pulled at the root of his throat. The baby will be named according to our Ashkenazi tradition, with the initials of the names taken from family who have passed away. I asked him, will the initials be your parents’ initials? We have been trained to never talk about the past, but sometimes it’s just the natural thing to say—what were his parents’ names? A door is closed between before and now. There and here. The door cannot be opened. A few things have drifted through, a melody and the scent of loss. Yiddish. My sister’s pen moving across the page, occasionally slipping back to cup the heartbeat of her child.

  The ship never arrived. Changed its course out there. They would not even allow it to dock its thoughts here. So we hear. For a long time it has been very difficult, but now there will be no more families coming. I have a strange thought: now, it is only us.

  I have never even seen the ocean.

  There is much more in the Yiddish newspaper than the English newspaper about the new laws, the roundups, the bureaucratic delays that have lockjawed into refusal. Canada is not letting Jews in. Europe is not letting Jews out. There is a space in between, a space between us, so deep, and I heard some of the old women at shul talking about it, one started weeping, “It’s the same as before, the same as before, but now worse,” and a friend of Tateleh’s pulled me toward the table laden with dishes of potatoes and fish so I wouldn’t hear any more. I say to Hannah, “What can I do?” Hannah answers, “There’s nothing we can do but be glad we are not there.” Our mother died of influenza when I was four, her body not equipped against the illnesses on this new continent, and we never speak of this either. In my childhood, when Hannah and I went to the deli to scoop herring from the barrels that smelled like an open sewer, the women stared at us. They judged Tateleh for never remarrying. A man with two daughters could not be without a wife. But he avoided, first by hiding with us all under a prayer shawl woven from his grief, then by spending all of his time working. Many people from shul had told me, suggestively, your tateleh works too hard. What does he do with his time? They suspected he was seeing a secret lover, or a goy, but no. I listened to his nighttime prayers. Motherless, I was sad, but also freer than other girls. He never forced me to do anything. These days, his friends come and gather often in our apartment. The samovar is cut with dark ghosts of trees. The amber tea. I sit in my room and try to read the siddur I took from shul. I whisper the blessing for sleep. How is it that when I say these words, they are supposed to make something happen? I must remember to tell Tateleh that it doesn’t matter if he doesn’t know the names of his parents; we can name Hannah’s baby for our mother. But this is useless to say. He knows the names of his parents and cannot bear to say them aloud, to repeat what he was forced to leave behind. He reads the newspaper, fingers burrowed in his hair, shoulders hunched, brows carved. I let him be.