Coming Ashore

by Catherine Gildiner

  Then in England, although many of the people were intelligent and interesting, they’d been through the meat grinder of the boarding school system and were emotionally stunted. They may have wanted to leave the class system behind, but they couldn’t; it had done too much to mould them. We found one another mutually amusing and had respect for one another, but we were nothing alike. We were always looking at each other curiously as one looks at the orangutans at the zoo who bear an uncanny resemblance to us, until they do something revolting.

  Finally I’d come to Toronto and found a man who saw the human panoply as I did. On the rare occasions when we didn’t buy into the same version, he, at least, found mine interesting or entertaining. The result was we rarely disagreed or quarrelled. I couldn’t believe my luck! I made friends who didn’t think I was eccentric, or if they did, it was the era when “eccentric” had taken on a more positive connotation.

  I’d found an intellectual discipline for which I was suited and was feverishly working on my Ph.D. thesis on Darwin’s influence on Freud. What could be better than locking yourself away all day in a carrel with two of the greatest geniuses of the last century? How many people got to spend the day with Darwin and Freud with no interruptions? Michael thought medical school was boring, so I would regale him with all I’d learned during the day and we would talk into the night.

  One chilly Saturday in late March, when everyone in Canada couldn’t take one more day of the cold, sun-deprived winter, we were preparing to go to the north end of the city to hike in a provincial park when Michael said, “I have to go to my parents’ apartment to do their income taxes on the way up.”

  “Don’t they have an accountant?” I asked.

  “Yeah, me.”

  I’d never heard of a child doing their parents’ taxes. We drove for miles and miles up Bathurst Street in the Valiant, the car we’d bought for fifty dollars then covered the hole near the gas pedal with a cookie sheet. I felt we must have been north of the tree line. I’d never travelled from the core of downtown Toronto, and I had no idea the city and its suburbs sprawled into the near tundra.

  As we entered his parents’ neighborhood, nearly all the men we passed were wearing small skullcaps with bobby pins holding them on. (The bobby pins on men seemed weirder to me than the skullcaps.) Then we passed men who looked like they were extras in Fiddler on the Roof and a parade of men in long coats and hats like the man on Laugh-In used to wear — the one who fell off the park bench every week. These men had long curls on the sides of their faces as though they had set one piece of hair in a pin curl and it had unfurled.

  “Wow, get that,” I said, staring in amazement out the car ­window.

  Michael gazed out at the men who were streaming down the sidewalk in nineteenth-century costumes accompanied by sons who dressed just like their fathers. The boys dressed more like midget men than children. Looking unfazed, he asked, “What?”

  “Did we just drive into a pioneer village or what?” I asked.

  “They’re Orthodox Jews.” Then looking across the street, he added, “Those guys there,” pointing to the long-coated parade that wore black wide-brimmed hats, “are Lubavitchers.”

  People were spilling off the crowded sidewalk and into the street. “Why are the sidewalks so packed? Did a game just let out?” I asked.

  “None of them can drive on Saturday so they are walking to shul.”

  “What’s shul?”

  “It’s Yiddish for synagogue.”

  “Do you speak Yiddish?”

  “It’s my first language.”

  Was he kidding? His first language was something I’ve never heard of. Was there a Yiddishland? I’d honestly never met anyone whose first language wasn’t English. I decided to file that on the back burner because the large families crowding the sidewalks were fascinating. Glued to the window, I said, “I wonder why they have such large families? Hey, wait a cotton-pickin’ minute here; I think all of those women are wearing wigs? Look, I’m not kidding!” He looked out and seemed unfazed by this klatch of women in wigs or else hats much like the ones worn on the trolley in Meet Me in St. Louis.

  “Jewish law says that a married woman should keep her hair covered. A number of them live in my parents’ building.”

  “Do your parents think they’re weird?”

  “No. Why would they?”

  “Well, they kind of look like Mennonites — only Jewish.”

  “My parents are Jews who grew up in a shtetl in Poland. They lived through the war. They lived through starvation in Leningrad. Believe me, this scene does not look odd to them.” After a brief silence, he added, “I’m a Jew from Poland. I came here after the war, when I was already a teenager, in 1956. We lived with my grandparents, who looked exactly like these people.”

  I was confused. When I first met him, he said he was Jewish, but he also said that he and his parents were atheists. If a Catholic is an atheist, then they are no longer a Catholic. They are mutually exclusive. I was confused so I asked, “You said you were an atheist. How can an atheist be a Jew?” He looked straight ahead with a set jaw. I guessed from this lack of response that I’d asked a dumb question.

  After a few minutes of silence, he asked with an edge to his voice, “Haven’t you ever seen a Jew before?”

  “One third of my high school was Jewish but they didn’t wear period costumes.”

  “People in this area are mostly Orthodox and most are from Russia or Poland. They are first-generation immigrants who lived through the war.”

  I stared out the window again, getting my bearings. No one I grew up with ever mentioned the war other than as an historical fact. To me it seemed so long ago. I had never met anyone who had actually lived through it or even fought in it. Befuddled, I looked at Michael. He looked back at me and, noting my confusion, said, using a low guttural tone that I’d never heard from him before, “You know the war where they killed six million Jews or, as you say, people in costumes.”

  “Look, you’re being unfair. Every Jew I’ve ever known has looked just like me and many had Christmas trees.”

  “I would never have a Christmas tree in my house.”

  Uh oh.

  At that moment, Michael turned off Bathurst Street onto ­another major artery called Wilson Avenue. As far as the eye could see, I saw only cement in several of its incarnations: road, sidewalk and cinderblock low-rise apartments. Even the grey snow on the curbs matched the cement. It was the only place I’d ever been where you couldn’t see any vegetation on the horizon even if you did a 360-degree turn. Michael grew up here? I’d never met anyone who’d grown up in an apartment. I’d only read about it in A Tree Grows in Brooklyn when I was young girl.

  I’d assumed (clearly, I’d made a number of wrong assumptions that day) that since Michael’s parents had two sons in medical school, they were wealthy. Everyone I knew in Buffalo who’d gone into medicine had fathers who were either doctors themselves or were on all kinds of boards. It was hard to get into medicine and you needed some clout, as well as tutors for the medical boards that only upper-middle-class parents knew how to orchestrate. Over the years, Michael had made comments about his father, indicating he spoke many languages, read all the time and loved political theory and history. I’d never met a working-class family in Lewiston or Buffalo who had those interests. To my narrow middle-American mind, people who had these lofty interests were cultured, and culture spelled wealthy; who else had time or the energy for culture?

  We parked the car and walked down the dreary main artery of Wilson Avenue. We were flanked by small six-plex apartment buildings in dingy cement block with aqua chipped metal railings. This was where Michael’s parents lived. Sandwiched between the apartment buildings were kosher delis and laundromats, and many of the signs were in Yiddish. On the streets, nearly everyone was speaking either Yiddish or some language that sounded like they were constantly
arguing with one another.

  We walked into the tiny lobby and I looked for the elevator, but there wasn’t one. As we walked down the narrow hall of the second floor toward Michael’s parents’ apartment, a woman, leaving the chain on the door, opened it a crack and her frightened dark eye peered out at us. Michael smiled and said, “Hello, Mrs. Jacobson,” as we passed; she didn’t say a word, just closed and bolted the door. All the doorjambs had small, crookedly placed caskets on them. (I later found out that the boxes contained mezuzahs that signify that you are entering an observant Jewish home.)

  We knocked on the door, heard footsteps and then nothing, so clearly someone was looking at us through the peephole in the door. Michael said, “Czesc, tat. To jestem ja. A to jest moj kolega.”

  Were we in the Tower of Babel? I knew he was from Poland but I’d never heard him speak Polish. I had never known anyone who spoke another language to his or her parents. I assumed he said that it was Michael and a friend. Although judging by his father’s stricken expression when he opened the door, he may have said, “Hi, Dad, it’s your doomed son. I have brought the grim reaper with me today. She is the blond standing next to me.”

  The father looked exactly like Michael. He had the same wide mouth and exactly the same long face. He looked at me gravely, bowed slightly and said formally in an accent that was hard to decipher, “Mary, we open our home to you.” He gestured expansively to their tiny one-bedroom apartment. I would have felt very at home if my name had been Mary. When I got inside I heard, but did not see, Michael’s mother, who chastised her husband from the bedroom, saying, “That is not Mary. That was his old girlfriend. I guess she’s gone now.”

  Mary? An old girlfriend?

  There was a tiny galley kitchen and a small table in a corner to dine on. The living room had a couch and one chair and all kinds of paraphernalia around the apartment about Israel: maps of the country; Jewish calendars, which had no bearing on the ­Gregorian one; and a sculpture, or actually a doll, that was two feet high and dressed as a Russian Hassidic rabbi in a flat fur hat. On the rabbi’s nineteenth-century long black fitted waistcoat was pinned the math award Michael had won for all of Canada when he was in high school.

  Michael’s mother now made an entrance from the bedroom. She shuffled in wearing pink terrycloth mules that dragged on the wooden floor as she walked. She was a tiny woman with legs like kindling, matchstick arms and a larger middle. Clearly she had once been a real beauty. Her face still had a beautiful bone structure. His mother sat on the couch and leaned her head back on a cushion, looking as though someone had just told her that her son had died.

  The father asked me about myself and we talked a bit about my studies. His English was halting, but he tried; he hadn’t come to Canada until he was over forty. His mother just sat looking at a fixed spot on the wall and audibly sighed. Once in a while, she mumbled in Yiddish. She was whispering “Oy” and then “Oy gevalt.” She wore a housedress (schlafrock in Yiddish) that zipped up the front and is used as a full body apron for house cleaning. Finally Michael’s father said to his wife, in a pleading voice, “Ida, please make Mike and his friend,” he hesitated, then haltingly said, “Ca-thy, something from which to eat.”

  The mother said, “What? I run a restaurant?”

  “Ida, they need a nosh. The children, they are hungry.”

  She didn’t look up at any of us but addressed the ceiling as she remained on the couch. She threw her hands up and said, “What? What should I make?”

  “Ida, what do you want from me?” Michael’s father asked, splaying his palms in front of him. “Make a tea.”

  “How should I know how she wants it or where she wants it?”

  I remember what happened next so well because I had never heard Michael’s voice sound so harsh as he retorted, “What? Where do you think she wants it — on the floor?”

  She shrugged and said, “Different people have different customs.”

  Both Michael’s father and Michael glared at her, and she ­finally shambled into the galley kitchen and made tea with lemon squashed into it with a fork and served it in glasses with small ­handles. She put a cube of sugar on everyone’s saucer and then placed her cube between her teeth and began drinking the tea through the sugar cube. It seemed a cumbersome method for sweetening tea and made it impossible to converse without a speech impediment, so I just left mine on my plate. Not that anyone was conversing.

  I had no idea why she was so hostile and clearly depressed. Strange as this may seem, it had never occurred to me at the time that she didn’t like me. I mean, she didn’t know me. How could she dislike me? I assumed something bad had happened and we had come at an inopportune moment.

  I can make conversation with a doorknob so I tried to chat. However, by this time the father had settled into silent despondency. Michael, following suit, set his jaw and his eyes seemed to pull back closer to his ears, an expression I had never seen before. The mother answered me in shrugs.

  After about fifteen minutes of this oppressive silence, Michael stood up suddenly and said we were leaving. His father said, “Mike, please stay.”

  Michael said, “What’s the point?” He looked at his mother, a vein pulsating down the length of his long brow. “Thank you for the hospitality.” She didn’t get off the couch and we left. I could tell he was upset and we walked back to the car in silence. We were too emotionally spent to go on a hike, so we went home. I now understood why he’d waited almost four years to introduce me.

  >> <<

  A few weeks later, when Michael and I were out to dinner at a Hungarian restaurant across the street from our apartment, we ran into Barry, a high school friend of Michael. His family was from the same town in Poland as Michael’s parents and they had maintained their friendship in Canada. Barry said, “So your mother’s sitting shiva now that you’re dating a shiksa.”

  Michael shrugged, laughed and said, “Of course.”

  Later when I asked Michael what Barry was talking about, he said, “Let’s not get into it,” and then he started another conversation.

  I went to the university library and found a Yiddish dictionary and looked up the word shiksa. It said Gentile girl, a detested thing. Offensive. Used as a disparaging term for a non-Jewish girl or woman. I quickly looked up shiva. It said Mourning period of seven days observed by family and friends of deceased. So, in effect, Barry had said, “You are going out with a detested thing and your mother will mourn your death. You are now dead to her.”

  Holy shit. This was serious.

  I had gone to school with Jews and my best friend Leora was Jewish. How could I not have recognized this attitude before? I had never even noticed if people were Jewish or not. In high school, no one made much mention of it. I was from an assimilated American suburb where the goal was to be alike, not different. I had noticed that many Jews were in advanced classes (the classes were nearly empty on Jewish holidays) and had parents who were really on top of the schoolwork. My father had said that the reason my mother’s master’s bridge club was mostly Jewish was because “Jews used their heads for more than a hat rack.” That was his full explanation of religious and cultural differences.

  I decided I had better learn a bit more because I could tell that Jews who lived through the war in Europe and had come here after the war were nothing like the Jews who’d lived in the U.S. for generations. In fact, this was the first time I’d ever met an immigrant other than the Puerto Ricans I’d worked with at the doughnut shop, and they’d liked me.

  I remember when I used to complain about customers that I didn’t like, my father used to say that we had a business to run and we had to find a way to get along with people. He said the best way was to walk a mile in someone else’s shoes. When I complained that someone had been rude to me or attacked me, he never ­defended me, even when I was little. He taught me how to defend myself. He also said that before you atta
ck anyone, always know more about them than they know about you. Or as Roy said, “You best know shit from Shinola before you shine your shoes.”

  I decided at that point to read everything I could get my hands on about the Holocaust, and I would read all of modern Jewish literature. By the end of the year, I was on a first-name basis with every librarian at the Jewish public library. As Roy used to say, “When Cathy’s got somethin’ cookin’, stay away from the stove.”

  >> <<

  One day when I was reading The Pawnbroker, Alina, Michael’s younger sister, and her giggling wild friend Yael dropped in. ­Alina, then sixteen, was tall and thin. She had the exact wide, sensual mouth as Michael; however, she’d inherited her mother’s beautiful bone structure, and was, as my mother would say, “an arresting beauty.” She’d moved out of her family home when she was fifteen years old and never lived there again. When I didn’t look surprised by this fact, Alina said, “That wasn’t exactly a Jewish thing to do.”

  When she visited her parents without Michael, it was her job to drop off a care package of food to our apartment on the way home. The food was always the same: kreplach, a stuffed dumpling; chopped liver homemade by his father; chicken soup; a strange tube of derma called kishka — intestine stuffed with potato and bread and unfailingly accompanied by a side of gravy. Then the chaser was always cholent, a bean and barley concoction that in my opinion could have been packaged and sold for window caulking. Upon opening a care package, Michael always said, “Oh Christ, I don’t want any of this,” and then sat down and ate every bite in one sitting.