by Alison Pick
I nod.
She continues. “No beit din here in Toronto would agree to create an intermarriage.”
I exhale, relieved. “I’m not married,” I remind her.
“No. But you will be.”
I pause, not understanding.
“We don’t want Judaism to be a wedge between you and your fiancé,” she says.
I am silent. How would it be a wedge between us?
“Degan is …” I pause. Didn’t I already say this? I repeat it, just in case. “Degan is incredibly supportive.”
“Is he interested in raising a Jewish family?” the rabbi asks.
I stare blankly. We don’t even have a date for our wedding. Suddenly just the thought of a wedding is scary. But Rabbi Klein persists. “Is he interested in being Jewish?”
This is like asking if our postman is interested in becoming the king of England. I continue to stare blankly, but no more help is forthcoming. And then it dawns on me. Slowly. She makes me say it myself. “I can’t convert unless Degan does, too?”
“Right,” Rabbi Klein says, relieved I have finally figured it out. “We want to make sure you are on the same path. Together.”
And what if we aren’t? I wonder.
I leave the rabbi’s office in a daze. Biking down Bathurst Street, I almost get run over by a delivery truck; it whizzes past me, horn blaring. I feel there has been a mistake, that I didn’t make myself clear. My family died in Auschwitz. My father is Jewish. Frankly, I am surprised that I can’t just call the religion my own and have that be the end of it.
Degan also receives the news with incredulity. “What’s she saying? You’re not good enough by yourself?”
“I guess.”
“What does she—” he begins. “What’s her name again?”
“Rabbi Klein. Rachel.”
“It sounds to me like Rachel is saying you’re not good enough for them.” He scratches his beard. “No. They’re saying I’m not good enough because I’m Christian.” He shakes his head. “It’s ridiculous.”
“The religion is very family based,” I say.
“And your family died in Auschwitz.”
“They were Jewish enough for the Nazis,” I agree.
“And how would it hurt them? To have you?”
I shrug. Mentally I do the math: right now, in our household, there are two people. And no Jews. If we have a baby, that baby will not be Jewish.
If I alone could convert, there would be one Jew in our home. In that scenario, if Degan and I have a baby, the baby will be Jewish. Two Jews where before there were none. Two sincere Jews, in the rabbi’s own words.
It’s hard for me to see the harm done.
I do a bit of reading online. The Reform Movement’s 1983 Resolution on Patrilineal Descent is clear. It allows for the child of a Jewish father and non-Jewish mother—a child like me—to be accepted “as Jewish without a formal conversion, if he or she attends a Jewish school and follows a course of studies leading to Confirmation. Such procedure is regarded as sufficient evidence that the parents and the child herself intend that she shall live as a Jew.”
In other words, such a child is taken at her word. Couldn’t the same concept hold for an adult who decides to apply herself?
The document refers to the Reform Jewish community of North America but in practical terms seems to apply only in the United States. In Toronto, apparently, the maternal line is all that matters.
I do some more digging and discover that in biblical times Judaism was patrilineal: any child sired by Abraham (who had multiple wives and concubines) was an Israelite. The change came in the rabbinic period, and its impetus was the need to be certain of parenthood. You can never be sure who fathered a child: a woman might lie or might not be certain. Whereas maternity is obvious and indisputable. It’s a sexist notion, but it isn’t a surprise to me. What is a surprise is that my own religious identity is suddenly tied up with Degan’s. Like runners in a three-legged race, we are bound together by someone else’s rules. My fate will be his. Or his will be mine.
I sit in Charlotte’s office with tears running down my cheeks. I unfold the crinkled piece of foolscap on which I have written a dream about my great-grandmother Marianne. As per Charlotte’s instruction, I’ve included as much detail as possible. In the dream I am in a cattle car, walking backward toward my great-grandmother, but when she finally meets my gaze, she wears my own face. It’s not that she looks like me; she is me.
I feel like a fourth grader reciting an awkward, exaggerated composition. The dream is full of all the things I try so hard to avoid in my writing: a hackneyed setting (an empty train!), obvious metaphors (my face where hers should be!). Still, as I read, the atmosphere in the room changes. Charlotte’s chair rocks. The air is like soup, or some kind of weird clingy water. I strain to keep my mouth at the surface. I sense that the density, the deadness that threatens to pull me under, is related to the dream and to my history. “What does it mean to you?” Charlotte asks. “That your great-grandmother looked at you with your own face?”
“Isn’t it obvious?”
Still I resist saying it. The concept of the intergenerational transmission of trauma seems so fantastical, like saying that Marianne tripped on her shoelace seventy years ago and my ankle is sprained as a result. My happy life, my privilege: how could things that happened so long ago, to people I never knew, affect me?
Layers of fog close in when I try to engage the details of my history. I feel physiologically unable to remember the structure of our felled family tree, the many severed branches, who was related to whom and in what way. Perhaps it’s a kind of defensive amnesia, a psychic version of a runner’s cramp.
“I did some reading this week,” I tell Charlotte. “About a therapist who works with second- and third-generation survivors. Their marriages crumble, their children are troubled. But they fail to see how their struggles are related to their parents’ Holocaust experiences.”
“Sound familiar?” Charlotte asks.
My psyche bucks and heaves.
This has nothing to do with me.
This has everything to do with me.
Charlotte: Rock, rock, rock.
I think about the traits I have that I am almost unconscious of, traits that nonetheless govern my daily life. For example, last week there was a plastic bag with old apple slices and almond butter in the fridge. The almond butter was smeared on the inside of the bag, and extracting it would have been a hassle and made a mess. I threw the whole thing out. But the apples were good. If not good, then edible. I thought about the calories, about how long they could keep a body going. Even if the apples were rotten. How it would be possible to extract every ounce of almond butter from the bag. An apple filled with worms. It could be eaten. Would have been eaten. Devoured.
I threw it out, but I thought of it for hours.
Bread was Granny’s downfall. She could never say no to dinner rolls, to the crusty baguette on the cutting board.
When she ate a chicken breast, nothing remained. The bones on her plate so light as to barely exist, pale and nearly weightless, picked clean.
ten
MY LITERARY AGENT Anne has teamed up with a prominent British agency that will represent her authors in the European markets. One of the British agents, John, is in town, and on Sunday night Anne invites a handful of us to the Spoke Club to meet him. The room is dark and filled with beautiful men in suits. The writer Andrew Pyper asks what I want to drink.
“Scotch?”
He signals the barmaid.
Another writer, Michael Winter, approaches us, puts an arm around my shoulder. “Can I get you a drink?”
“Your friend here took care of it.”
I look around at the room: Rob Wiersema, Russell Smith, Peter Norman. Michael and Andrew. Where are the other women?
The agent has trouble keeping his eyes off my cleavage. The music is loud and his accent heavy; we stumble through a conversation about Carol Ann Duffy. I am
astonished to hear that some of John’s clients are poets. Is poetry so valued in Britain that money actually enters the equation?
“Are you a poet?” John asks, his eyes on my chest.
“I am.”
Anne overhears this and jumps in. “And a novelist. She’s working on a new manuscript.”
“What’s it about?” John asks.
I explain it is set in Czechoslovakia around the time of the Munich Agreement.
“Why did you want to write about that?”
“My grandparents were Czech.”
“What’s your last name?”
“Pick.”
John says, “Was the name shortened?”
“No. It’s a Czech name. A Czech Jewish name.”
He doesn’t pause, or flinch, or pull back. Soon we are shouting, over the thump of the bass, about his clients Colm Toibin and Ian McEwan. I hear myself laughing. But inside I am scared: have I ruined my chances? He knows my secret. Maybe now he won’t sell the novel. Britain is antisemitic. The whole world is antisemitic. I should have just stayed comfortably in hiding.
Books about evil pile up beside my bed. Hannah Arendt’s classic Eichmann in Jerusalem. The more recent Becoming Eichmann, a historical rebuttal to Arendt. Tom Childers’s The Nazi Voter, recommended by my childhood friend Jordan, whom I’ve started emailing with again. I don’t open the books. I return them to the library, check out more, but those, too, remain untouched. I want no mediating influence. If I am to understand these acts of inhumanity, I want to understand them on their own terms. Unvarnished, unadorned. I forsake theory in favour of anecdote. I force myself to read about the guards in the camps who would put live mice in the prisoners’ mouths, then hold them closed. The mice would burrow down out of instinct, eating the hosts alive from the inside.
With women, a mouse was inserted into the vagina, which was sewn shut with thread.
I read about a woman who was pregnant when she arrived at Auschwitz. She gave birth in a dirty barracks to a beautiful baby girl. Dr. Mengele, otherwise known as “the Angel of Death,” was curious how long a human infant could survive without nourishment. He bound the mother’s breasts so she could not nurse. For six days her daughter suffered terribly. On the seventh day, the mother administered morphine to kill her own child and thus save her.
I gravitate to these unique tortures not out of voyeurism but because of their detail. After three generations of denial, I am trying to make the Holocaust seem real. To accept it. One million dead people are too many for my psyche. Two million, six million—a bland mass of incomprehensibility. But one woman forced to hold her own infant until she starved? That remains seared in my mind forever.
November arrives. The nights fall quickly and completely, as though someone has thrown a bolt of black velvet over a lamp. Debra, the daughter of the minister from my class, emails to ask if I want to meet her at synagogue for Erev Shabbat, the evening service. I’m pleased by the invitation and accept. On my way in, I hear a woman screaming in the boardroom, “I’m sure you have a right to criticize my country and my city, but I don’t want to hear it! I DON’T want to HEAR IT!”
The service takes place in a small chapel upstairs. The space feels like someone’s living room, with wooden beams and wall-to-wall carpeting, and a bimah, or pulpit, at the front where the fireplace otherwise would be. Rabbi Klein sits in a pew with her three small children. She passes one a blue sippy cup and puts a finger to her lips, signalling for the other two to be quiet while an older woman behind her talks. She looks up and sees me, and waves, welcoming. I wave back but lead Debra toward a seat on the opposite side of the room. I see the rabbi as untouchable, in the fashion of a famous rock star, and the relaxed atmosphere in the sanctuary as terrifying.
I grew up going to Anglican church—not every Sunday, but once or twice a month. I recall the stiff formality, having to get dressed up, the black patent Mary Janes that dug into the backs of my heels. The church basement, where the children made crosses out of Popsicle sticks and glue, was always cold. After Sunday school, we filed upstairs to join the adults. I braced myself against Dad’s voice, singing “Sons of God,” loudly and off-key. I braced myself, but I was proud to be beside him.
In the difficult years following Gumper’s death, he would put his forehead on the pew in front of him and cry.
Dad was on the board of directors of our church for several years. He sometimes still attends. If you press him, though, he’ll admit he thinks Jesus was a “spiritual person.” Probably not the Son of God.
Debra and I slide into our seats. The Shabbat service begins with niggunim—“wordless melodies.” I hum a few bars, but my voice is dry in my throat. I am all at once sick with envy, seeing these families, the kids racing up and down the pews, the men wearing kippot, shaking hands, everyone breaking all at once into “L’cha Dodi,” the song that welcomes the Sabbath bride. I feel comfortable here in a way that I never did at church. Still, I don’t know how to belong. I close my eyes and try to let the Hebrew words wash over me, soothe me, but instead they are like tears: if I give in to them, I will never stop crying. It is a familiar, old kind of sadness. A sadness that has driven me to bad decisions in the past, that has at its core a desperate kind of hunger.
I think about Gumper. Not if I was the last Jew on earth.
The sermon is about the custom of putting a rock on a Jewish grave to mark it. I picture Gumper’s tombstone, unadorned in the small Quebec cemetery, furred over with several inches of snow.
At the end of the service, wine is passed out to the adults, grape juice to the kids. There are big hunks of freshly baked challah for everyone. Debra, the minister’s daughter, leans over and whispers, “Makes the wafers look pretty meagre.”
I laugh. The sanctuary is warm; the lights are bright and children’s voices fill every corner. For a moment it is okay to be alive.
We file out with the crowd. “Good night,” I say to Debra. “Good Shabbos,” I add for good measure.
“To you, too.”
And then I walk back into the autumn darkness. Dread hits me like an open palm. I double over. I can barely make it to my car.
Degan comes home and finds me under the covers, with the shades drawn. It is eight in the evening. The dishes are undone, and there are clothes and jewellery strewn across the bedroom floor. He sits on the edge of the bed. “I’m worried about you,” he says.
He reaches for my shoulder. I flinch from his touch.
“What’s going on with you, babe?”
I shake my head, helpless to speak, my eyes filled with tears.
Degan leans down, kisses my forehead.
“It’s so dark,” I finally manage.
There’s a black glove pressing down on me, a hand at my throat.
We spend Saturday at home, quietly observing the Sabbath. On Sunday morning I sit at my desk and read, to keep up a semblance of routine, to try to keep myself afloat. I flip through the pages of a contemporary anthology on depression. One writer sees it as a philosophical problem pertaining to the nature of the self. Her essay is so abstract that you could be forgiven for thinking she suffers from nothing but an excess of intelligence; and yet, the list of drugs she has been on is two full lines in length. (I am surprised, on encountering the list, by how familiar the names are—Celexa, Effexor, Paxil—like in a child’s list of fruit or farm animals.) The next writer sees depression as “akin to being tied to a chair with restraints”; whereas a third seems so pleased by his condition you could no sooner wrest it from him than take a prized soother from a toddler.
I turn to Eric Wilson’s bestseller Against Happiness. “To sit long with our various alienations and our sumptuous paralyses and our nervous fears is to come indeed to a startling realization,” he waxes. “Melancholy connects us to our fundamental self.”
Perhaps. Except, I can’t help but think that his endorsement is for something quite different from the depression Andrew Solomon describes in The Noonday Demon, in which he is
pinioned to his bed for weeks, able only to blink and to cry.
Freud addressed this discrepancy in his seminal essay “On Mourning and Melancholia” when he wrote, “Even in descriptive psychiatry the definition of melancholia does not seem to warrant reduction to a unity.”
From the kitchen I hear Degan turn on the radio. An old pop song is playing: “I just wanna fly. Put your arms around me baby, put your arms around me baby …” I latch on to the lyrics in the manner of a sinner reciting Hail Marys. In my mind they transform, instantly, to I just wanna die, but the humour implicit in the dissonance between form and content is lost on me. Snappy melody, catchy tune: Eyyyyyye just wanna DIE!
I sing the line under my breath, over and over all morning. It is as though, by repeating it, I am stacking sandbags to prepare for a flood. The truth is, I do not want to die. But by claiming the opposite, perhaps I can outwit the bad blood.
I do not want to die.
Well, only a little. There’s a difference between wanting to die and wanting to never have existed in the first place.
An hour later, I stack my books neatly beside my keyboard and lean back in my chair, arching to crack my back. It’s still early—not yet noon—the weak sun limp against the windowpane. I hear Degan opening the fridge, then running the tap at the kitchen sink. I turn on the computer, check my email. I note the Hebrew date, then read about the month of Cheshvan. It is—surprise!—the bitter month, the month of spiritual darkness. It includes no Jewish holidays.
The month of Cheshvan is for identification with our ancestors.
On a whim, I go to my shelves and pull out a final book to add to my reading pile. Years ago, I stole it; it is the only thing I have stolen in my life. I remember walking out of the bookstore in St. John’s with complete entitlement, striding through the double doors with the hardcover under my arm for anyone to see. The book was called Suddenly Jewish. And the words rang in my head: this is mine.
eleven