by Sigal Samuel
Another sound fell on Glassman’s ears. A happy, indiscernible babble. Laughter and the clinking of bottles. The glug of glasses being filled. He leaned out the window and saw two girls and two boys celebrating on the lawn.
“L’chaim!”
At the sound of it, he almost laughed. L’chaim: to life! But also: to Chaim!
He turned back to his wife, who was still smiling, and knew in that moment that wherever she was, she was not angry at him. He had not been able to depart at the same time as her, and that was just as it should be. His time to go had not yet come. His wife knew and she was glad.
And yet.
He could not let her leave like this.
There was still so much he needed to say to her.
“L’chaim!” the voices sang again.
He cleared his throat. He extended a finger and traced his own mouth. He parted his lips, experimentally. He tried to move his tongue—to push it forward to the teeth, pull it backward to the throat, roll it sideways, even—but, in her presence, the muscle was heavy and dry. A wad of sandpaper. A bloodless mass.
He opened his mouth—
Again his mouth fell shut.
In that moment, he broke down and cried. He cried because of what his muscles remembered. He cried because, by constantly choosing silence over sound, he had accustomed his tongue to a life of stillness. But the tongue, like anything else, was a creature of habit. When you finally needed to convey something truly significant, you would find it frozen, atrophied, paralyzed in the position it knew so well—the position you had trained it to assume.
“L’chaim!” sang a voice for the third time.
Samara’s voice, he realized.
And then he thought: A muscle can always be retrained.
He opened his mouth—
Acknowledgments
Thank you to Lisa Sharkey, Carrie Feron, and Alieza Schvimer, whose editorial savvy and passionate support for this book I am so grateful to have on my side; and to everyone at William Morrow and HarperCollins.
To my agent, Samantha Haywood, who believed in this book from the start and worked tirelessly to find it the perfect home.
To everyone at the University of British Columbia MFA program: Steven Galloway, who was generous with time and advice; Keith Maillard, whose enthusiasm for the book increased my faith in it; Kim Fu, Andrea Bennett, Indrapramit Das, Taylor Brown-Evans, Chelsea Rooney, Krissy Darch, Emily Davidson, Anna Maxymiw, Michelle Turner, Jordan Hall, Bill Radford, Ben Rawluk, Meredith Hambrock, Melissa Sawatsky, Kevin Spenst, Emily Urness, Margret Bollerup, Lauren Forconi, Erika Thorkelson, Michelle Deines, Cara Woodruff, Emily Walker, Kari Lund-Teigen, Cara Cole, and Jill Margo, all of whom offered feedback and encouragement. Special thanks to Michelle Kaeser, whose sustained advice shaped the structure and substance of this book.
To Amanda Perry, my intellectual chevruta, who read thousands of manuscript pages and brainstormed countless ideas. She demanded her own paragraph and she deserves it.
To Rhoda Sollazzo, for keeping me company and offering insight at a tricky juncture. To Vahid Bazargan, for inspiration. To Emily Myles, for helping me pin down Lev’s voice. To Ali Kaufman, for listening and advising. To Julie Sugar, for attending to the details. To Anne Cohen, for fine-tuning the French and more. To Annie Greene, for reading the book in its zygote stage and flagging her favorite parts.
To Crystal Sikma, whose keen editorial eye, poetic insight, moral support, and generosity kept making this book possible, day after day, year after year.
I am grateful for the support of the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada. My research was guided by the writings of Jewish mysticism scholars Daniel Matt, Aryeh Kaplan, and Sanford Drob. The Vladimir Nabokov letter quoted in this book is from the June 13, 2011, issue of the New Yorker. The phrase “What we cannot speak of, we must pass over in silence” is from Ludwig Wittgenstein’s Tractatus. Information about establishing contact with the space station was found on the Amateur Radio on the International Space Station (ARISS) website. The short story “Words I Wish I Had,” which appears in the P.S. section at the back of this book, first appeared in Prairie Fire.
Most of all, thank you to my family—my father, Michael Samuel; my grandmother, Rachel Meyers; my sister, Simcha Samuel; and my brother-in-law, Erick Provost—who have always supported me as a writer. You are my greatest cheerleaders. I love you.
P.S. Insights, Interviews & More . . . *
About the author
* * *
Meet Sigal Samuel
About the book
* * *
The Story Behind The Mystics of Mile End
Reading Group Discussion Questions
Read on
* * *
Words I Wish I Had
About the author
Photo by Crystal Sikma
Meet Sigal Samuel
SIGAL SAMUEL is an award-winning fiction writer, journalist, essayist, and playwright. Currently a writer and editor for the Forward, she has also published work in the Daily Beast, the Rumpus, BuzzFeed, and the Walrus. Her six plays have been produced in theaters from Vancouver to New York. Originally from Montreal, Sigal now lives and writes in Brooklyn. The Mystics of Mile End is her first novel.
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About the book
The Story Behind
The Mystics of Mile End
To STUDY KABBALAH, you’re supposed to be (a) forty years old, (b) married, and (c) a man. I am none of these things. Luckily, I grew up with a dad who was a professor of Jewish mysticism and was willing to share its secrets with me.
Raised in Montreal’s Orthodox Jewish community, I was exposed from a young age to all the most important ancient Jewish texts. Well, almost all of them. The kids in my school studied Torah and Talmud, learned Hebrew and Aramaic. We got quizzed on these subjects just as we got quizzed on Shakespeare and chemistry. In this world, you were supposed to be able to explain (and observe) all of Judaism’s 613 commandments. But you weren’t supposed to take an interest in the religion’s more esoteric branches—especially not if you were a girl.
That didn’t stop my dad from giving me lessons in mysticism. His after-school classes, which usually took place around the dining room table, began when I was about twelve years old and continued throughout my high school years. Together, we pored over the books my curriculum left out, like the Zohar and Sefer Yetzirah, and “met” famous kabbalists, like Isaac Luria and Abraham Abulafia. We studied a lot of the classical mystical ideas mentioned in The Mystics of Mile End, from the account of the divine chariot, to the symbol of the Tree of Life, to the legend of the four rabbis who enter a holy garden with very bad results.
Learning these stories gave me all the thrill of a teenage rebellion—without requiring me to actually rebel. Inwardly, I was musing over the Tree of Life; outwardly, I was an overachieving, rule-abiding girl in a regulation-length skirt. It was loads of fun. It also marked me, at least in my head, as an outsider relative to my Orthodox community.
Maybe that’s why I’ve always been drawn to spaces where Orthodoxy bumps up against distinctly non-Orthodox sensibilities. In my hometown, I can’t think of any neighborhood that captures that collision more loudly or more charmingly than Mile End.
Home to many of Montreal’s oldest immigrant communities, Mile End was the city’s main Jewish area until the 1950s, as Mordecai Richler famously showcased in his novels. Walking through the streets today, you’re as likely to find a Polish church or an Italian café as you are to stumble upon a Jewish bagel shop or tombstone business. The neighborhood also plays host to two vividly contrasting populations: Hasids and hipsters. (You could say it’s like Brooklyn’s Williamsburg, but grittier and more French.) With its striking mash-up of Orthodox Jews and artsy, academically oriented youth, it’s a ready-made metaphor for the battle between religion and secularity.
In Mile End, the dividing lines between groups are star
k—but also, often, surprisingly porous. The neighborhood is a character in and of itself, and I wanted to treat it that way, to give it all the perceptiveness and magic that any flesh-and-blood protagonist deserves. In a way, I hope, it can be almost like an ideal character: the kind that takes you by the hand and invites you into friendships that aren’t necessarily supposed to exist—that are as unlikely, maybe, as an Orthodox teenage girl studying kabbalah with her dad.
Sigal Samuel
Brooklyn, NY
February 2015
Reading Group Discussion Questions
1. Why do you think the author set this book in Montreal’s Mile End neighborhood? What does the setting add to the story?
2. David is depicted as a secular professor. Do you think he is a spiritual person, if not a religious one? How does his relationship with religion change after he is diagnosed with the heart murmur?
3. How are Lev and Samara different? How are they alike? Why do they adopt such opposite attitudes toward religion as they grow up?
4. Is Samara a sympathetic character? Why or why not? Is it important to your experience of the book that you like her?
5. Why do both David and Samara grow obsessed with the Tree of Life? And why is the outcome different for each of them? Can you relate to this sort of obsession?
6. When Samara begins to climb the Tree of Life, she chooses to send letters to Alex. Why him?
7. Mr. Katz’s neighbors see him as deranged. Are there any moments that suggest he may not be so crazy after all? What do you imagine led to his obsession with recreating mystical trees?
8. In one of his stories, Mr. Glassman lists words that don’t exist but should. What do you think he wishes he could say to his wife, and what does he say after the book ends? What are some experiences that you wish you had words for?
9. A Jewish legend quoted in this book tells of four sages who enter a holy garden: one dies, one goes mad, one “cuts down the plantings,” and one comes out intact. Do you see parallels between them and the characters in this novel?
10. Where do you think Samara and Lev will be in ten years? What will their relationship be like over that decade? Will Jenny still be in their lives? Will Val?
Read on
Words I Wish I Had
JUST WEEKS before I began writing The Mystics of Mile End, in 2010, I wrote a short story called “Words I Wish I Had.” You could say that the story provided the seed for the novel. Or you could say that during that time I was preoccupied with certain themes, which kept showing up anytime I sat down to write fiction: mystical obsessions, the relative power of language versus silence, and the impact of both on family relationships.
Either way, the discerning reader will notice similarities between the novel and the story. Montreal setting? Check. Father-daughter duo? Check. Words that don’t exist but should? Check. A precarious-looking pyramid that threatens to collapse at any moment, yet manages miraculously to endure? Check! I hope you enjoy the spy work of identifying these common threads. But I also hope you enjoy the two works of fiction for the separate worlds they set up, each with its own distinct characters and internal logic.
—Sigal Samuel
The first time I saw him, I was eleven years old and my nose was bloody. It was the first time Annie invited me over to her house, which was strange because we’d been in the same class since kindergarten but also not strange because I was a boy and she was a girl and you know how these things go. She must have taken pity on me that day because it was a Monday. I always got beat up on Mondays.
In her kitchen we made cheese-and-jam sandwiches and ate them standing up.
“Those kids are just dumb, Aditya,” she said between bites. “Ignore them.”
“Mmm,” I answered. I was busy savoring the taste of the cheese and jam.
“You shouldn’t let them get to you,” she insisted.
I shrugged. What did she know about it? It’s true that she didn’t have many friends, but that was better than getting beat up, as far as I could see. I licked the smears of strawberry jam from my fingertips and asked where the bathroom was.
On my way, I noticed a strip of light coming from a door that had been left ajar. I tiptoed toward it and peered through the crack and what I saw was books, books, books, overflowing the bookshelves, stacked upon the windowsill, propped beneath the potted plants—everywhere.
Only after a minute of staring did I notice the man, whose metallic glasses caught the sunlight as he sat half-obscured by the stacks of books on his desk. I must have gasped, because suddenly he—Annie’s father—looked up and saw me. His bright blue eyes pierced me like a javelin. I squirmed free and half walked, half ran back to the kitchen.
“What does your dad do?” I asked Annie.
She hesitated. “He’s a translator.”
“How many languages does he speak?”
“I don’t know, exactly.”
“How can you not know?”
“I just don’t.” Then, “Last time I checked he spoke English, French, Arabic, Persian, Norwegian, Russian, Greek, German, Mandarin, Aramaic, Portuguese—”
Or something like that, anyway. I don’t remember now exactly which languages she listed, but I remember that the list stretched on and on, beyond the realm of the impressive and into the realm of the impossible.
“Yeah, right,” I said with a snort. I figured she was making it up, the way Becca Kline had made up that story last year about her dad being a firefighter who saved dozens of lives and then we found out that he was just the guy who sits in that booth all day selling tickets at the Place-des-Arts Metro station. “Nobody can speak that many languages, it’s not possible.”
She just shrugged and took another bite of her sandwich. She didn’t try to defend her position, as Becca Kline had tearfully done for weeks after the discovery of her lie. In retrospect, this should have struck me as odd, but at the time I didn’t give it a second thought, just licked the remaining jam off my fingers and reached over for Annie’s crusts, which she never ate.
A month or so passed before I saw him again. Returning to the kitchen on my way back from the bathroom, I risked another peek into his study. The surface of the desk was now entirely covered with books, the man himself scarcely visible between the stacks. Dictionaries encased him like a child’s snow fort.
Back in the kitchen, I asked Annie, “Why did your dad decide to become a translator?”
“Why do you want to know?”
I looked away from her keen gray eyes. The truth is that I was curious about everything having to do with words just then. For some time I had been nursing a secret dream of becoming a writer, but I had not yet dared to tell anyone. My father was dead set on me becoming an engineer, and my mother, she was still trying to get me to learn how to make a decent aloo gobi.
“Just wondering,” I said.
Annie considered, then asked, “Have you ever heard of esprit d’escalier?”
“No.”
“It’s an expression.”
“Okay.”
“In French.”
“Okay.”
“It means the feeling you get after leaving a conversation, when suddenly you think of all the things you should have said but didn’t.”
Annie explained that when her father was a teenager he lived in an apartment building on the corner of Clark and Saint-Viateur. Every morning at exactly eight o’clock he would run down the stairs on his way to school. There was a girl who lived one floor above him, and she would also run down at that exact same time every morning. A francophone, she had the most beautiful red hair he had ever seen. All through high school, he tried to get up the courage to speak to her during these daily pilgrimages down the stairs. But he always felt so nervous—a nervousness compounded by the fact that he only spoke English. No matter how many hours he spent privately rehearsing the perfect lines, when he was actually faced with the girl, the words got stuck between his teeth like so much unsightly spinach.
It was only
years later, after the girl had moved out, that he learned the French expression esprit d’escalier, which literally means “spirit of the staircase.” And he thought: If only I had known this expression earlier—if only I’d had a word to express what I was feeling—then maybe I could have explained it all to her, and how different things might have been!
All of a sudden he remembered other moments from his past, moments when he had been unable to translate his inner experience for somebody else because he lacked the word for that experience. Like that time when he was six years old, and his best friend’s mother had just given birth to a new baby girl. The best friend brought him over to look at the baby, and when he saw her in her bassinet, all shiny and pink-smelling, he reached out and pinched her. She howled. The mother howled. The best friend glared at him angrily. If only he had known the word gheegle—Filipino for the irrepressible urge to pinch or squeeze something that is unbearably cute—on that day! The word might have explained him, might have exculpated him.
Annie’s father discovered that there were words unique to each language, untranslatable words that cannot be expressed in English— and what one cannot express in language, one cannot fully experience. Without a name to nudge it into shape, a feeling always remains cloudy and dim, like a shadow hovering at the edges of one’s peripheral vision. One can barely communicate it to oneself, let alone to others. With this in mind, Annie’s father began to gobble up as many dialects as possible. He collected their untranslatable words in a special notebook, which he referred to as his dictionary.
Annie showed me this notebook once, and a typical page looked something like this:
Dictionary of Words I Wish I Had
Coonoomoonoo Trinidadian): translated as “shy,” the word has a deeper pejorative meaning of being unwilling to come forward, speak up, make oneself heard, or make waves