by Alex Leslie
Soma
Grandma Charna predicted her own death. She said, “This is my last year. I’ve decided.” She chuckled. She never laughed at jokes, only at truths. She was often saying things like that—things that, at the time, felt out of left field, uncalled for, too dark, but looking back were big and true and right. After I graduated from university, the big recession hit the States, then swept across the border to Canada, and she said to me, “Be careful, the Great Depression created the Holocaust.” I did what I always did: nodded and fell silent and wondered at her worries, the giant quiet wellspring, always blooming, always replenishing, under everything. It’s hard to say if that is what made her feel unknowable, or if it was her intelligence, her penetrating read of people. Probably a bit of both. When she disagreed with you, she would look deep in your eyes, as if waiting for the next thought to reveal itself; I used to shut my eyes and whine, “Stop it!” When I was little, she told me often that people are limited, so it’s best to expect as little as you wish to be disappointed, and I believed her. I believed everything she said.
I listen to Melanie get the coffee going and open all the doors wide downstairs and I lie in bed googling “alt right” and “fascism” and “canada” on my phone. I need to know the details. A rabbi in Surrey, a half-hour drive from our apartment, has awakened to find her door anointed with red swastikas. I hear Grandma Charna’s voice, whispering in my ear, “Maybe they’ll poison her little dog too.” I never argued with her pessimism. It would have felt like theft. She had full claim to the past; I was history’s blind passenger, ferried along in her blood vessels. An editorial on the CBC website laments that we are in a new age of fascism, this year in the twenty-first century, to be remembered as the starting point of a dark spiral. A few of my friends have reposted an article comparing the restrictions against Syrian refugees to Canada’s refusal to admit Jews before the Holocaust. When do people know that something is beginning? How do people know when to leave? Where is the moment, the sign? A symbol or a door? A scream in the street? No one in our family has ever been back to eastern Ukraine. If I were to go, I would be the first to go back since everyone was run out or killed. Grandma Charna taught her children: there is nothing to go back for. We are not really from there—what we came from is gone. So, are we from nowhere? She read the newspaper every morning; I got my obsession with news from her. The same photo of the swastika on the rabbi’s door floods my Facebook newsfeed, a column of bent spiders, a chain, interlocked feet and teeth, unbreakable. Melanie calls me from downstairs. I met her a year after Grandma Charna’s death, just after the first yahrzeit. Grief had split me. There’s a string of neo-Nazi protests planned for cities across Canada next week. I put the phone away.
Melanie is frying up a pound of bacon when I come down the stairs. She piles it with avocado slices. There are buns and grapefruit, halved, with brown sugar in wet mounds. We drive around the island, stopping at the food co-op, beaches, the two harbours, the store that sells knee-high boots and cans of gas to fishermen. She knows how to distract me, stares sharply at me sideways while driving, and says, “What are you brooding about?” She regrets going on this trip during the yahrzeit. I can tell. My memories of doing things with Grandma Charna are so few; I only remember our conversations. She didn’t like the things other people liked—going to movies, going for walks, visiting the ocean. She liked to sit in their tiny apartment and gossip, argue. Grandpa Louis reading his newspaper in the background. She didn’t like to talk about being Jewish. When I was around twelve or thirteen, she sat me down and told me the tradition for naming babies, the tradition she had used to name my father and his sisters—take the first letters of names from previous generations who had passed on. So her children didn’t have the Yiddish or Hebrew names she and her sister had, but they kept the letters. The names of her mother’s and father’s murdered families were woven in there, like a secret code. When she told me this, my brain recorded it like a tape, but I stared at her, silent. She probably wondered if she had a mute for a granddaughter. A spy or a sponge. She kept a Talmud in the guest room, but in all the years I visited, I never saw it move. The overlap in the Venn diagram of our lives. I remember her voice, cracking slightly, saying, so formally and strangely, to me, “In my culture, which is Jewish, this is how we name the children.” Which is Jewish. As if she had to defend, explain, or qualify herself. It took me until my late teens to put the pieces together, go looking on my own. After drifting through religious studies courses in undergrad, where I listened to students argue about how many men wrote the Bible, I took a Holocaust class, and when we learned about the online Holocaust registry, I logged on and typed in Grandma Charna’s family’s last name and the city on the Black Sea close to our shtetl. She would never say the name of the shtetl. An endless list of people appeared on the screen, with photos and dates. Every shtetl in the region had been raided, the inhabitants massacred or marched to camps, I read. I scrolled down and down and down, my mind loosening, swarming, darkening. During my next visit, I told her about the Holocaust class, and she tapped my middle knuckle with her index finger. “What’s the use of something like that? It will make you sick!” Things she left me: the tendency to keep secrets; a mood surfacing like a hundred-year-old whale from the ocean; a very old copy of Isaac Bashevis Singer stories, margins webbed with her notes, her name in Yiddish script on the inside cover. Yiddish script is read backwards, resembles the footprints of spiders, if spiders had footprints. Isaac Bashevis Singer, her favourite writer. I tried to read the stories. They’re full of Jewish clichés, like something out of Fiddler on the Roof—wanderers uttering platitudes, rabbis peddling lost worlds, the oppression by the Russians. And the women—always really sad or crazy. She said, “What’s the use of talking about the past? What’s done is done.” Melanie and I eat fish and chips on a restaurant’s falling-apart plywood balcony, tear off the golden skins, drip grease on our shirts, wander around at low tide ruining our sneakers with black sand reeking of fish eggs, and she buys me an ugly hand-shaped mug from a woman living in a tent behind the grocery co-op.
Melanie wraps her arms around my waist, says, “I’m so glad we’re here.”
“Here we are,” I answer.
“Try not to think too much,” she says.
Melanie is a deep sleeper. I slip out of bed, down the stairs, and out of the cabin. I go down to the water. I need to practice.
Tomorrow will be Grandma Charna’s yahrzeit. The churning of the water among loose stones, the continuous replacement of the shore, a moving finish line. I used to think that people in our family were dark people, brooding people. Damaged goods. It took me such a long time to realize that it was something that happened to us, something from the outside that should never have happened at all. Who can say: where we come from, everyone was killed, massacred in their villages that no longer exist? Piled in trenches dug by their neighbours, doused with gasoline. And in winter, the ground too frozen to penetrate, the people herded into barns and the barns set on fire. The report released in the nineties says that the people were seen waving from their windows, flames made of Jews. What the hell am I supposed to do with that? Maybe it’s better not to know. Better not to talk about it. Better not to dig things up. That’s what they thought, pretenders at being from nowhere. I can go on and on about this stuff, need to remind myself to rein it in. Something I can say, though, is that I’m not as bitter as Charna. I’m different. Don’t be bitter—it will make you hard. You’ll push people away. She told me, before I could understand, that those people were murderers. Before I knew anything else about her, I knew there was something I could never repair. The wind blows frozen off the ocean, though it’s late summer. Night makes the water unforgiving, impenetrable. I take my iPhone out of my pocket and scan the Kaddish again. Too cold to practise. If Melanie wakes up, she’ll panic that I’m gone. My thumb coaxes the text downward.
A loose stone under my foot and my hand flails and springs ope
n. The screen a white apparition under the sheen of water. I’m on my knees, scrambling in the water. The screen goes dead. I smash the glass against a stone and stomp, shivering and shaking, to the cabin. Even my stupid smartphone prayer, I’ve failed at.
I cannot sleep and then, when I do, I dream about a woman who is not my grandmother, in a room with cement walls, a lightless room, maybe a bunker, talking on an old-fashioned phone with a spiral cord connected directly to the wall, pleading with the person on the other end of the line. I am standing in the corner of the room, unable to intervene, powerless. I do not recognize this woman but then I do: it’s Charna, but much, much younger, around the same age I am now, disguised by decades. Her fear balloons hot and fills the room. She is pleading into the phone: “She needs to know her great-grandmother’s Hebrew name.” She is talking about me. I wake up, fighting with the sheets that lasso my body, and stumble down the stairs from the sleeping loft. My back and my legs ache. At the bottom of the stairs, I pitch forward into a pool, elbows knocking, forehead slamming into the floor. My right leg is a river of electric pain. I curl up on the floor, and Melanie comes running down the stairs. I see her plaid pyjamas and planetary blue eyes. She rolls me onto my side, extends my arm under the side of my head, repeats, “Breathe.” Her voice, distant, screams my name. I feel her veterinarian fingers do all the right things—check my throat, dig into my pulse. “We need to go to the hospital,” she’s saying. I laugh. “There’s no hospital on this island.” My laughter is incoherent and balms my pulsating muscles. There is a rip in my spine and heat comes rushing through. I wait until the pain settles, and Melanie helps me reluctantly to the couch after I pull myself up onto my feet on my own, stagger forward. “I’m fine, I’m fine.” She wants to me stay there, on the floor, until we can know I’m not injured, wants to lie against my back, cradles me gingerly.
My whole life, people have told me I have an old soul. What will I be like when I am old?
Charna
For a time, when I was a small child, I hardly went to school at all. I hated the orderliness, the English, the rude shout of the bell, the way the English teacher drew out my name: Cha-ahr-na. I preferred the Yiddish of our home. So when I wanted some time to myself, I left our apartment in the morning and went to sit on the synagogue steps. If someone passed and asked me what I was doing there, I would report confidently, “My tateleh is inside saying Kaddish for my dead mother,” and the person would nod and continue walking. Nobody wants to interfere in a family’s mourning. Stick fingers into the grease trap of private ritual. Mishpocheh is strange, but untouchable. Family. My strategy worked for quite a while. A number of times, my father’s friends from shul passed and raised their eyebrows at my response, knowing I was lying. But they did not question me. My small body perched on the stone steps of our shul. “My tateleh is inside reciting Kaddish for my mother, who has died,” was my refrain. Of course I knew the words to the Kaddish, heard it every week at shul. We are so used to death that everyone knows the mourner’s prayer. Or we are so in awe of death that we mark its passing as often as we can, while we meet on this side of life. One day I was sitting on the steps while my classmates were taking a geography test about the prairies when I saw my tateleh’s brimmed black hat at the end of the street. Here it comes—his hat like a solar eclipse. He never walked this direction during the day. He stopped at the foot of the steps, looked up at me, bowed, and recited, Yitgadal v’yitkadash sh’mei raba b’alma di-v’ra, and continued until I joined in. I yelled the ameins. My small high voice rebounded from the stone. I shook and I shook and I shook. My father carried me back to our apartment on his back.
Hannah hosts the next meeting of her group at Tateleh’s. The apartment she has with her husband, Joshua, is tiny and prepared for the baby, a cradle beside their bed with a blessing nailed above it. Tateleh locks himself in his room with a peace offering of cake and applesauce and tea. Hannah rushes around and opens all the windows. “You two live like a couple of old spinsters,” she hisses at me. “I don’t know how you’ll ever raise a family of your own.” I fill in the next words myself: with that man. Marrying a non-Jewish man is an act of leaving—my marriage would not even be recorded at shul. I will be an invisible Jew if I let Louis have his way. And I want him to. Sometimes when Louis holds me, I am full of dread, and then flooded by an unbearable joy. Basha’s women arrive shouting news. The paper and envelopes and book of addresses are set out on the table. The work begins. Basha speaks loudly about her sister, who is getting married soon. There is also news that Cousin Mordecai will be married next year. At some point, my father comes into the kitchen for more tea. I watch his hazel eyes scan the growing stacks of letters. He takes too long to find the tea leaves, pack them with his thumb into the tin ball, and drop it into the cup and watch it sink into the water like a fishing lure. I pray for Basha, that yente cow, to stop talking when she says to Tateleh, “Yezekhiel, we are so pleased to hear the men’s study group is helping with the fundraiser next month.” The group is led by Zev Guttman, who comes every time to Tateleh’s tea circle.
My father turns slowly. “Nu?”
Basha explains eagerly. “Raising funds for the Jewish Congress to bring people over. The conditions are getting worse—more violence, nobody can get out now.” She goes on and on. I concentrate on writing to avoid his glance. I pray for Basha to stop talking.
I hear his sigh like a rotted-out step giving way.
“Are you going to contribute?” Basha asks.
Silence. My father says, “No.” He drags the tea ball around the cup.
Hannah shakes her head at Basha but Basha does not know when to stop. “Why not? It would be lovely to see you there.”
My father says, lifting his cup: “And what are you hoping to accomplish?” Basha says: “To bring people to safety.”
Tateleh: “What you are doing is not that.”
Basha: “What?”
I look at my hands.
Tateleh: “You do not know.”
Basha: “Pardon me?”
Tateleh: “You are not going to help anyone. You are only making things worse for all of us, rocking the boat, drawing attention to us. Why risk making things worse? The same could happen here...very easily, the same could happen here. Tsuris.” Troubles.
When I look up at Basha, she is white and the women are silent, staring at Tateleh.
Tateleh: “What happens happens. We take care of our families.”
Basha: “But that is meshugeh—”
Hannah says, “Tateleh, we are only trying. If no good comes of it, then—” She raises her hands.
Basha: “What are we supposed to do, pray?”
Tateleh, walking out of the room, voice staying in the room longer than the body: “You have never seen what they do to Jews.”
Soma
She would have liked this. Because she liked to do things on her own, and only in her own way.
I go down to the ocean.
I say Kaddish for her in that light generated by the ocean at dawn, even though nobody is supposed to say this prayer alone. The stones at the shore shake with quiet.
I’m worried I won’t be able to do this without my phone, but I know the words by heart, the words I have prepared, practised. When I try to remember the beginning, the rest are there. The prayer unspools from my tongue. Only life upon all of us. Mighty be the name. The ocean marks time in the background.
This is what I want, and I take it. This is mine. I learned this from her: to be unapologetic. To take what I want. To not wait for what is already mine.
I thought I would feel her now, but I don’t feel her at all. She is missing from the spaces between the ancient vowels that crowd the edge. I listen for her there. The sky hangs, a scrubbed shell.
I send the words to her.
Nothing comes back.
Charna
Every night before I sleep, I th
ink about that ship on its way back to Europe. In my mind, it moves swiftly, soundlessly, barely brushing the waves. Godforsaken people. No news of arrival, no place of leaving. The news is so bad and then there is only a stomach-sick quiet that drags on. No going back. Gornisht helfn. Beyond help. There is a revolving door inside my tateleh that never stops moving. How long does it take to cross the ocean? Forever and no time at all.