Lauren Yanofsky Hates the Holocaust

by Leanne Lieberman

  “Since when are you not a loser?” I tease Brooke, hip-checking her into her locker.

  Brooke sticks out her tongue. “This year I’m into change. Wanna go for a run?”

  I shrug. “You sure you want to run with a loser?”

  “Only because I can cream you.”

  Brooke and I walk to her house and change into our running clothes. Brooke used to live close to me in an even bigger house than mine, but her parents got divorced this summer. Now she lives in a townhouse near school. Brooke had to help move instead of coming to basketball camp with me for the last three weeks of August.

  From Brooke’s house we race uphill to my house. It’s our standard run, and Brooke usually wins, but I did some research on sprinting and realized I’ve been starting my sprint too early. Today I let Brooke pull ahead and don’t pick up my pace until I’m almost at the top of the hill. I sail past her easily and then cruise down my street. I even slow down so she can see my graceful arrival into my driveway. Brooke sticks out her tongue when she catches up, panting and huffing. She picks up my basketball from where it’s resting by the net and starts dribbling fiercely. “I’m going to kill you now.”

  When I was still in Hebrew-school hell, I would look forward to the weekends when Brooke and I would hang out and spend hours making forts out of cushions and blankets. When we got sick of the fort, we’d play soccer in her yard or basketball in the driveway.

  Sometimes Brooke would come by my house on her bike and we’d go exploring. Before Brooke, I had only biked the streets around my house, a series of curved avenues boxed in by what my brother and I called “the busy streets.” Brooke fearlessly crossed major intersections, leading us blocks away from home. When I’d asked her if she was allowed to bike that far away, she shrugged and said, “I dunno. I never asked.”

  Brooke’s life was like that. In my house, play dates were scheduled by my mother in advance, and snacks were carefully and punctually prepared: neatly arranged cut-up fresh fruits and vegetables, homemade banana bread and—my favorite—peanut-butter-and-banana sandwiches on whole-grain bread. In her house, Brooke merely helped herself to processed-cheese squares or granola bars whenever she wanted.

  Brooke’s bike routes took us farther and farther away from home, and soon we were biking down to the beach, where we would chase seagulls and build elaborate sand castles. It was a gentle downhill ride on the way there, and a long uphill climb home. Brooke, being competitive, liked to race me up the hills, but because I was taller than her then—taller than everyone until grade nine, when the guys started to catch up—I could always beat her.

  Brooke introduced me to Chloe and Em at her sleepover birthday party the year we turned eleven. I immediately liked their goofy enthusiasm. While the Hebrew-school kids were obsessing about what brand of jeans they wore and how their hair looked and who had the fanciest bat mitzvah, Brooke, Chloe and Em were putting on plays in Em’s basement and taking the bus to go swimming at the Kitsilano pool down by the beach. Instead of going to Jewish camp to be indoctrinated with Zionist propaganda, Brooke, Chloe and Em spent two weeks camping on the Oregon coast in a Volkswagen Westfalia with Em’s parents. They got to make campfires and roast marshmallows. I had to sing Zionist songs and play war games where we pretended to battle Arabs.

  I dubbed my three friends The Perfects. Everything about them—their hair and their cute clothes, the way they always had so much fun—seemed bright and shiny. I wanted to be just like them, and I wanted to go to high school with them.

  Brooke and I play basketball for half an hour, sweating in the warm afternoon sun and laughing at each other’s missed shots. Then Mom pulls into the driveway in her station wagon. She barely even looks at us before going into the house.

  “What’s up with her?” Brooke says.

  “She’s mad at me again.” I bounce the ball hard against the pavement.

  “Gee, what did you do, touch the walls?”

  I flash a grin at her. The first time Brooke came to our house, Mom asked her not to touch the walls because she might leave fingerprints. Brooke refers to my house as “the museum.” Unlike most of the other houses in my neighborhood, our house is really modern. From the street it looks like a giant glass box, except you can’t see into it because of all the trees and frosted glass. The whole back of the house is glass too. Inside, our house is very white. The kitchen is white, the living room is white, and, well, everything is white and made out of shiny materials I can’t identify. The living room isn’t for sitting in, more for looking at. I rarely have friends over because there’s nowhere to hang out except the family room, and Mom’s always there, getting in the way.

  Mom tried to decorate my room in all white too, so the house would be “consistent,” but I insisted on painting my desk blue and having a blue bedspread and blue blinds. My room feels like the ocean while the rest of the house is the sky on a hot day.

  “It’s too complicated to get into,” I say and focus on trying to sink another basket. Then I sit down on the steps to stretch my legs. Brooke joins me. “I’ll pick up my bag in the morning on the way to school,” I say.

  “I could drop it off tonight, if you like.”

  “Nah, that’s okay. I don’t need anything in it until tomorrow.”

  Brooke grins. “I might be going out tonight anyway, on a mission. Want to come?”

  “What kind of mission?”

  “Oh, just a visit to my dad’s.”

  Brooke’s dad left her mom and lives with another woman a few blocks away. But it’s no secret Brooke’s parents had the worst marriage ever—they barely talked to each other—and both of them seem much happier now that they’re apart.

  “To do what?” I bunch my fists on my legs. Recently Brooke told me that she and her sister put water in her dad’s fuel tank to mess up his car.

  “I haven’t decided yet,” Brooke says.

  I’m spared having to answer by Mom sticking her head out the side door. “Could you please come in and help out now?” She licks her lips the way she does when she’s pissed off.

  Brooke and I say goodbye, and I go in to set the table for dinner. Mom focuses on making pasta sauce, dicing up mushrooms and peppers. My dad cuts up vegetables for a salad, humming along to a jazz station on the radio in his tuneless way. I avoid looking at Mom and take a quick survey of the kitchen for the envelope I didn’t open earlier. I don’t see it, but stuck under a refrigerator magnet is the announcement for Hebrew school. When Mom isn’t looking, I quietly crumple it up and shove it into the recycling bin under the sink.

  Dad coughs.

  I give him my most innocent look. “What?”

  Dad sighs. “So, how was the first day of school?”

  “Fine. The usual.” I always say this, although today it’s not exactly true. I think about Jesse for a moment and then about Brooke ditching me at lunch.

  “And how was your first day?” I ask. “Did you instruct the youth of today on Jewish destruction?” Dad teaches an introductory university course on the Holocaust each fall.

  Dad swats me with a dishcloth. “Classes don’t start until next week.”

  Even though Dad’s a Holocaust historian, he’s a pretty cheerful guy. When he’s not reading depressing books about the slaughter of European Jews, he obsesses over his golf game and eats deli sandwiches, pickles and pretzels. He also likes basketball, but he can’t play anymore because he has lower-back issues and won’t do the Pilates exercises his physiotherapist recommended.

  When I finish the table, Mom asks me to unload the dishwasher. I don’t dare say no. It’s the only thing she says to me the whole time.

  When dinner is ready, Dad asks me to get Zach.

  I find Zach in the front hall, threading red K’Nex pieces through the rails of the banister up to the second floor. “Adding some color?” I say. He ignores me and keeps adding pieces and making airplane noises until I get in his face and tell him we’re having pasta. Zach is twelve and kind of bizarre. You
can call him for dinner all you like, but if he’s engaged in something he’ll tune you out. Zach doesn’t have interests, he has obsessions. Lately he’s been into flight. It started with birds—bird-watching, bird books, hawks, the Audubon Society, endangered wetlands, migration and hawks.

  Zach’s bird fixation began because Mom got this nutty idea that the eagles living down the street were my grandparents—Dad’s parents—reincarnated. She wasn’t serious; she just liked the idea. Well, Zach had a hard time with the distinction between Mom greeting the birds as if they were my grandparents and the eagles really being my grandparents.

  Anyway, Zach is done with birds now and has moved on to flying machines: planes, helicopters, jets, rockets, etc. He started with a grand survey of all flying machines and is now fixated on biplanes. Zach can talk at length about planes like the Fairey Swordfish, a torpedo bomber used during the Second World War. This fall he is supposed to start studying for his bar mitzvah, a celebration that marks the beginning of adulthood for Jewish boys when they’re thirteen. You have to read a blessing over the Torah—a sacred Jewish text—and there’s a party afterward. Most kids also lead the service and chant part of the Torah. Girls have a similar celebration, except it’s called a bat mitzvah. Zach isn’t very keen on having a bar mitzvah, but my parents have promised him a ride in a biplane if he’ll go through with it.

  After dinner I leave the whiteness of the main floor and head downstairs to the basement, which is unfinished. I guess Mom couldn’t imagine an all-white basement too, so it’s just for storage. Sometimes Zach and I play floor hockey on the concrete floor, when he’s in the mood.

  I head to Dad’s workbench, where tools are stored next to old paint cans and extra flooring. The workbench is a bit of a joke. Dad can’t do anything more complex than change lightbulbs and tighten screws. Mom doesn’t even let him paint anymore. Dad likes to hold up his hands and say, “These are the hands of an academic.” He thinks this is superfunny.

  I’m using the workbench to make a lantern for next summer’s lantern festival at Trout Lake Park. Brooke took me to the festival this summer, and I loved it. At first I couldn’t imagine what a lantern festival would be like. A bunch of kids with Chinese lanterns hanging out in a park? It sounded lame. Then we got to the park, and I saw people walking around with all kinds of different homemade lanterns. There were cupcake lanterns and animal lanterns and lanterns shaped like the moon. Brooke had brought a lantern she’d made to look like a basketball. When she put an led light inside it, the whole thing glowed. It was supercool. I’d wished it had a real candle in it, but Brooke said she couldn’t figure out how to keep it from catching fire.

  The lantern festival wasn’t just about lanterns. There was music too, and people were wearing costumes and doing weird theatrical performances. Women dressed as fairies with big wire-and-net wings gave out handfuls of silver powder to blow for making wishes. A marching band of accordions and drums passed in a cacophony of sound. Brooke and I stopped by the lake to listen to a Chinese percussion band with chimes and gongs and other instruments I couldn’t identify. There were stilt-walkers and fireworks and a troupe of women gyrating in hula hoops lit on fire. “Wow, it’s like the circus,” Brooke said.

  “Yeah, but better.” I’d stared at the women with the fiery hula hoops and wondered what it would be like to be surrounded by fire and not get burned. Maybe it was like pulling your finger through a candle flame so quickly that you didn’t get singed, except you would be pulling your whole body through the flame.

  When we were heading out of the park to leave, I saw a group of people picnicking, surrounded by glowing paper-bag lanterns. Sitting away from the crowds, they had marked their area with a circle of light. I stopped and looked and let out a long sigh.

  I’d seen candles used a zillion times before, but never like this. Mom was always lighting candles for the different Jewish holidays, marking those special times, but these candles in the park were marking a special space. I’d looked longingly at the paper-bag lanterns, and then one of the picnickers, a young woman, noticed Brooke and me. She beckoned. “Come join us.” The woman stood up and carefully moved a few of the lanterns to make the circle bigger. I looked at Brooke and she shrugged, so we sat down on the grass inside the ring of lanterns. The people kept chatting softly, and Brooke and I sat without talking, staring at the glow of the flickering flames. We sat there for a long time, until we had to leave to make our curfew.

  So now I’ve got tissue paper, some light wood, glue and a saw. I even took a lantern-making course with Brooke, but I haven’t quite decided what to make.

  I stay downstairs until after ten, trying to sketch an idea for a lantern, and then I go to the kitchen to get a snack. The house is quiet, and most of the lights are off. I pour myself a bowl of cereal and sit at the counter in the dim light. Then Dad comes in and turns on the lights under the cabinets. “I thought I heard you in here.” He sits down next to me.

  “Hungry,” I say, eating more cereal.

  Dad taps his fingers on the counter and then runs his fingers through his beard the way he does when he’s thinking about something. Finally, I say, “Is Mom really mad?”

  “I think just frustrated.”

  I shudder. “I hate it when she’s mad at me.”

  “She just wants you to be involved, to do something in the community.”

  I make a face. “I’d rather try archery or knitting.”

  “What about the youth group? You could try that again, couldn’t you?”

  “Um, I could think about it.”

  Dad pats my hand. “That would probably make Mom happy to hear.”

  “I said I could think about it,” I say cautiously.

  Dad sighs. “That’s a good first step.” Then he grabs my head before I can protest and kisses me on the forehead. “Don’t stay up too late.”

  I sit for another few minutes in the kitchen and then head upstairs to bed, turning out lights as I go.

  I wish I could tell Dad the real reason I won’t go to Jewish high school and why I don’t want to be involved in the Jewish community. It’s the most important reason, but not one I’m ever going to tell my parents.

  Reason number seven: I’m not Jewish anymore.

  If I had to answer a census, then yes, I, Lauren Yanofsky, come from Jewish heritage, but I stopped being Jewish three and a half years ago. People who convert to Judaism are called “Jews by choice.” Well, I decided to become a “non-Jew by choice.” This doesn’t mean I’ve just assimilated and want to be like everyone else. It means I’m really, truly, not a Jew.

  And it’s all because of the Holocaust.

  I decided not to be Jewish the year I was thirteen, shortly after my bat mitzvah. Dad had promised me pro-basketball tickets if I agreed to visit a new Holocaust memorial at the Jewish cemetery with him. So one very damp April afternoon, I reluctantly got into the car with him and Grandma Rose.

  Because Dad is a Holocaust historian, I already knew too much about the destruction of European Jewry during the Second World War. I was always being dragged off to see some Holocaust memorial or attend some convention. I’d been to the Holocaust museum in Washington and to Yad Va’shem, a huge Holocaust museum in Israel, and I’d even been on a tour of Polish concentration camps. My mom and Zach and I had done some fun stuff on those trips while Dad was doing research, but only after we’d endured our share of death, destruction, remembering and commemorating. Some kids got Disney. I got Hitler.

  On the way to the cemetery, Grandma Rose sat in the front seat and clucked her tongue against her teeth as she and Dad discussed my cousin Molly’s bat mitzvah. I slouched in the backseat, trying to ignore their conversation. Grandma Rose was horrified that there would be no Sunday-morning brunch or Friday-night dinner.

  “What about the out-of-town guests?” Grandma Rose said. “You have to entertain.” I could see her lip curling.

  “I think they want to keep it a small affair,” Dad said.

&n
bsp; Grandma Rose sniffed. “You mean a cheap affair.”

  “Well, that may be true,” Dad admitted.

  Grandma Rose had strong feelings about how things should be and look. My own bat mitzvah, which she’d help my mom plan, had been a multiday, highly coordinated series of dinners and parties with matching flowers, napkins and invitations, all in baby pink, my least favorite colour.

  My Jewish friends all called their grandmothers Bubbie, or Bubba, and their grandfathers Zeydi, the Yiddish words for grandmother and grandfather. I couldn’t imagine calling Grandma Rose Bubbie. She was too formal, and she never spoke Yiddish. Grandma Rose was tall, with great legs and beautiful white hair that she had styled weekly. She owned a vast collection of raincoats and matching umbrellas. I didn’t know Grandma Rose well, even though she lived only ten minutes away by car. She was quiet and liked listening to classical music. She found our house, and my brother and me, too loud. This was weird, because her husband, our zeydi, had been a very loud guy. He had a big tummy and a big voice, and he gave such strong bear hugs, your back cracked. When we were little, he was always pulling nickels out of our ears or tossing us over his shoulder and yelling, “Sack of potatoes for sale!” Zeydi would give us Reese’s Peanut Butter Cups and not care if we got the leather seats of his Cadillac sticky. When Zeydi passed away a few years ago from prostate cancer, Grandma Rose became even more quiet and reserved.

  When we arrived at the cemetery, it was so damp outside, it felt like the rain was suspended in the air. I unenthusiastically got out of the car and pulled my hood over my hair. Dad offered me a spot under his big golf umbrella, but I held back and let him and Grandma Rose walk ahead. We made our way past the section where Zeydi was buried and over to a stone monument where the rabbi and a bunch of people from my parents’ temple were gathered. I wondered how long this would take. Half an hour? More? It started to drizzle, and I wished I’d listened to Mom and worn my boots. I tugged the drawstrings around my hood tighter so that my hair wouldn’t frizz and moved under Dad’s umbrella.