Between Gods: A Memoir (17 page)

It occurs to me that this performance, and the secret it protected, has been a boon to my writing. I work at my book as though taking dictation, the novel’s symbols appearing on the page as though dug up like prehistoric weapons perfectly preserved in mud and clay. Rail as I might against my grandparents’ silence, there is something about it that helps me now, that lets the well-trod,
trampled
terrain of the Holocaust feel fresh. “Make it new” is Ezra Pound’s famous dictum—antisemite that he was—and I am able to make it new precisely because it
is
new. Not to anyone else, but to
me
.

seven

T
HE BOOKS EDITOR
from a Toronto magazine emails to ask me to a movie. I take it as a friendly gesture—we’ve crossed paths at several book launches in the past weeks, and each time ended up talking about this particular film. But when I get to the theatre, I find him sloppy drunk. “How
are
you?” he breathes, reeking of his poison.

“I’m depressed,” I answer, too tired to lie. Because of course the joy I felt in the month of Adar has faded; the sliver of black slipped back in.

The editor leans over and grips my arm. “That makes you a good Jew.”

The lights go down; he tries to hold my hand. I shake him off, lean forward in my seat with my arms hanging over the empty chair in front of me. I bury my fingers in the popcorn. I am repulsed by his breath and his desperate eyes, and enraged
by what he seems to expect. But I stay for the duration of the movie, frozen in my seat. At the end, he asks about the book I’m working on. This, I realize, has been the purpose of the exercise, his end of a transaction that I haven’t let myself be conscious of. He wants to spend time with me; I want a review in his magazine. I’m disgusted with myself, and too ashamed and angry to make the pitch.

“It’s about the Holocaust,” I say with a sigh, which is exactly what I’ve vowed not to say, having internalized the idea that people are sick of the topic, that the last thing we need is another book on
that
.

“I grew up with the Holocaust,” the editor says. “My father’s parents came from a family of Polish Jews who all died.”

The editor becomes immediately interesting to me again, his transgression entirely forgiven. I see every Jew, every survivor, as a potential saviour, thinking they might know something I don’t, might be the one with the piece of information that allows me to understand the nightmare.

I try to engage him in a conversation about his history. “I don’t want to talk about it,” he says.

Degan gets home from work and we drive up to the synagogue for our class, listening to Paul Simon singing, “I’ve reason to believe / We all will be received / In Graceland.” We jam ourselves into the tiny desks and start in on our lesson. We learn that a new vowel, vaguely similar to the English o, can appear with or without a line beneath the dot, although the rule to distinguish the scenarios remains unclear to us. Krista, the baby, has the best pronunciation in the class, babbling out the new vocabulary from her sling on Diane’s chest. After the break, Harriet tells us it is “Jewish Partner’s Night” and sends the
crowd of baseball caps away into an adjacent room. They will be talking about the responsibilities of being supportive to their converting partners.

“Where’s my supportive partner?” Debra pouts.

And I find myself wondering the same thing. Where is the person who will guide
me
in this process, bring me home for Shabbat, correct my Hebrew? I am the one coaching Degan on the difference between the two- and three-dot vowels as he crams in the minutes before class. I don’t judge him: he’s doing this for me; he’s giving up a night every week when he’d rather be doing a hundred other things. But I, too, would like someone to relax into.

As a teenager, I didn’t think about marrying a Jew. Jordan would kiss anything in a skirt, but we all knew that one day he’d make a Jewish girl his bride. We listened to a lot of Moxy Früvous in high school, getting out of our car at abandoned intersections in the middle of the night to dance to “King of Spain” while the traffic light turned red, then green, then red again. We listened to Neil Young and Paul Simon. I loved the songs “America” and “American Tune,” and the opening line of “Hearts and Bones”: “One and one-half wandering Jews / Free to wander wherever they choose.” I liked the melody, and how it named me clearly. Pick, from the acronym pic,
perigrinus iudei confessionis
, Latin for “traveller of the Jewish faith.”

Sometimes I would imagine I could find a Jewish boy. He would be the one, and I the one-half. But I didn’t think about it seriously. It might happen. Or it might not.

Suddenly, though, it again feels crucial—just as it did during my obsession with Eli. I tell Degan as much in the car on the way home. “If I were single, I would only date Jewish men,” I
say, staring out the window with my arms crossed in front of my chest.

Degan swerves out of the turning lane. “You’re kidding me, right? I go to that ridiculous class with you and this is what I get in return?”

“You said you weren’t taking the class for me,” I retort.

“You’re serious.”

I’m silent.

He slams his palm down on the horn. A minivan speeds past, the driver giving us the finger. “Fucking unbelievable,” Degan shouts.

I see that I’ve gone too far, but it’s too late to take my words back.

“This is about that writer, isn’t it?”

My stomach sinks. “Which writer?” I ask. But I know full well who he’s talking about.

“Eli Bloom.”

“Bloomberg,” I mutter.

“Oh! I got his name wrong! Please accept my apology.”

I see immediately what is happening. All the long months when Eli posed a real threat, Degan had to pretend otherwise. He didn’t want to lose me. But now that the threat is gone, it’s safe for his rage to appear. I brace myself and inhale, choosing my words carefully.

“It isn’t about him,” I say. “It has nothing to do with him. You know that.”

“Don’t tell me what I know.”

I swallow.

Degan says, “He’d make a good Jewish husband, though, you have to admit.”

“It’s not …” I falter. What can I say? “I’m sorry.”

“You’re
sorry
? And you want to screw Eli?”

“I didn’t mean it,” I say. “I really, truly, didn’t mean it. I just …”

His jaw is clenched. “Then why did you say it?”

“I don’t know. It was stupid.”

“I don’t know if I can handle the class,” he says, his anger taking a turn.

Without the class I’m lost.

“That woman,” he says, referring to Harriet.

“I know. But we need to look at the bigger picture.”

“What bigger picture?” he challenges.

“The class is just another hoop to jump through.”

He’s silent. He has no desire to jump through any hoops and we both know it. I press my eyes shut. When I open them, he’s looking at me, his face softer.

“What makes
me
mad is that you should have been in there with the Jewish partners tonight.”

“What do you mean?”

“I mean, I think you’re Jewish. Already. Now. You’re just realizing it for the first time.”

I nod and reach for his hand. An uneasy truce.

“I really am sorry,” I say.

When we get home, Degan shovels the walk while I get ready for bed. He crawls in beside me. We fall asleep, and wake in the middle of the night clinging to each other. We make love roughly, violently, trying to cover up the unanswered questions.

eight

C
HARLOTTE DOES NOT SEEM SURPRISED
to hear we’ve been fighting. “As a wedding approaches, the stakes in a relationship get higher,” she says.

“The funny thing is, Degan wasn’t as worried about Eli before, when he might have had cause to be. And now he’s worried for no reason.”

“Are you still thinking about Eli?”

“No. I’m not.” I weigh my words and find them to be true. The sentiment flakes a bit on the surface, but the core of it is genuine.

Charlotte says, “Perhaps it’s now safe for Degan to acknowledge his worry. Now that the real threat is gone.”

“That’s exactly what I was thinking,” I concede.

Charlotte crosses her ankles demurely. “So if Eli is out of the picture, who will be your Jewish guide?”

I pause. I can’t tell if she’s being rhetorical.

“I’ll be my own Jewish guide?” I say, in a little kid voice, shrugging and looking to her to see if this is the answer she’s after.

“Is that what you want?”

“I asked you first.”

She smiles. There’s a light layer of concealer caught in the creases around her mouth, but her words are pure, unadorned. She’s asking me what help I need.

“I’ve been trying to muscle through it,” I say. “Alone.”

“Because you want to do it alone or because you feel you have no other option?”

I shrug again. “Isn’t it obvious?”

“No, actually. It isn’t.”

“Who’s going to help me? My father certainly isn’t.”

“Should he?”

“
Shouldn’t
he? He’s the parent, right? Aren’t I supposed to be able to look to him?”

“You’re angry at him.”

“I’m
not
angry at him,” I snap.

She nods, her face placid. I have a flash of what it would be like to slap her. I puff out my cheeks and slowly let the air out. “Maybe I am angry,” I say. “But I don’t want to be. I get it. At least, intellectually. He didn’t grow up with it. He knows nothing about it. I know way more than he does.”

“Does that also make you angry?”

My eyes fill with tears.

“Helpless,” she suggests. “Sad.” It is unlike her to supply me with the words. I nod, biting my lower lip.

“Make room for the feeling,” she tells me.

I give in and let myself cry, hard and gasping, for several minutes, leaning over with my face in my palms. Then I look up and
shake my head. I take a deep breath, glance around the room. “I feel better,” I say, and laugh. The heavy dread is gone. “That’s all it takes? To, uh, what did you say? Make room for the feeling?”

“Sometimes.”

I pull on my right earlobe. “I always feel that if I start to cry, I won’t be able to stop.” As I say this, I remember Granny Pick saying the same thing. My inheritance.

I look to Charlotte, my face scrubbed clean. “The thing about the Jewish guide,” I say. “What should I do?” Only very occasionally do I allow myself to ask her advice directly.

“You’d like to find someone—someone
appropriate
—to help you navigate the new cultural Judaism you’re discovering.”

I nod to confirm.

“Why don’t you ask for a guide?”

“Ask who?”

She sweeps her hand through the air above her head and raises her eyebrows.

“You mean, like, ask the universe?” I giggle. “Like, put it out there?”

“Yes,” she said. “Or however you’d like to think about it.”

I nod. Why not. How could it hurt?

At home in bed I fold my hands discreetly under my pillow. To be seen—by Degan, by myself—in a real prayer position, on my knees (which is the Christian prayer position anyway, I realize), would be too much. But I close my eyes, and this time when I try to picture God, the image that comes is a country sky, dark and full of stars. “I would like a friend,” I whisper. “Dear God, please bring me a Jewish friend.”

On Sunday morning I gather up my water bottle and my knee pads and walk through the slush to the contact jam. I wave at
Michael from across the room and warm up with a woman with spiky red hair and a purple body suit. We tumble around a little, crack each other’s backs. The relief of physical communication below the busy level of my head.

Toronto is a big city, but, like any place, circles overlap. The writers and musicians, the painters, the dancers. I’m not surprised to see Shayna, Eli’s friend with the beautiful voice, stretching out her long legs against the banister.

She sees me, too, and gives a little half wave. “Alison, right?”

I walk the few metres to where she’s standing.

“Do you come to the jam?” she asks. “I haven’t seen you before.”

“Not always. Often. But we know each other from—”

“I remember,” she says.

This time the pause is comfortable. We lean against the wall, watching as dancers begin to assemble their bodies into complex puzzles. Ariel flounces past in dinosaur pyjama pants, waggling his fingers in my direction. Shayna takes up her stretching again, unfolding her long limbs the way a grasshopper might. “How’s it all going?” she asks, holding her heel in her hand, extending her leg while bracing herself against the wall.

“Good,” I say. I scrunch up my face. “I can’t remember what I told you last time, but I’m studying for conversion. My fiancé and I.”

She lowers her leg and looks at me properly for the first time. “You’re converting?”

“Maybe. We’ll see.”

“Is your fiancé Jewish?”

“No.”

“Wow,” she says. “That’s brave.”

“Thank you?”

She laughs.

“No, I’m serious,” she says. She looks me in the eye to make sure I hear what she’s saying. “Most people who convert are marrying someone Jewish.”

I feel the blood rush to my face, feel that exquisite mixture of pain and pleasure that comes from being seen when you’re vulnerable.

“It’s a problem that he’s not,” I say. “The
beit din
doesn’t want to create an intermarriage.”

“What do you mean?”

“If they convert me and I then marry a Gentile …”

She squints. “They know your dad is Jewish?”

I nod unhappily. Shayna sighs. “We have a history of turning people away.”

We rest our eyes on the dance floor in front of us, the mass of moving bodies. Someone grunts with pleasure or exertion; someone’s bare foot squeaks across the floorboards. I hear something that sounds suspiciously like a fart, but nobody comments or apologizes.

“If there’s anything I can do to help,” Shayna says.

Up close, I see the space on her forehead where her eyebrows have been plucked.