Between Gods: A Memoir (23 page)

I can see, as the rabbi preacher told us, that the whole Seder is enacted with the children in mind, and several times I have to squeeze my eyes shut against the intensity of my longing. My cells are tingling in recognition, something so long dormant sparking back to life with full force. This was what I imagined I wanted from Eli. A big table, beautiful and passionate, filled with Jews, both born and chosen. I belt out the words to “Go Down, Moses,” Shayna’s voice soaring beside my own.

It is two in the morning by the time I arrive back in Kitchener.
I Was a Child of Holocaust Survivors
is lying on the desk among Dad’s papers, and beside it,
The Globe and Mail
is open to a story about hidden Jews. “I Swore to Never Tell,” the headline exclaims. I turn away. I’m done with that story.

During Passover, Jews don’t eat anything leavened, including pasta, most processed foods and wheat, barley, spelt, oats and rye. Degan’s version of “Kosher for Passover” is no bread. Which is almost killing him. We stroll down Queen Street on his lunch break, looking for shoes to match his wedding suit. He tells me that at work he almost didn’t order the fish because it was
breaded. But the cafeteria worker told him there is no bread in breaded fish, only flour.

“Is flour okay?” he asks.

He is cramming a muffin into his mouth as he speaks.

My
version of “Kosher for Passover” is to eat everything I usually eat, plus matzah. And chocolate-covered matzah.

We stop at city hall to get our marriage licence. The man behind the desk jokes with us about the couples he sees who fight so much he wonders why they are even bothering. Degan holds my hand in his lap, squeezes it.

The marriage licence form asks all kinds of questions: our mothers’ maiden names, our dates of birth, our religions. We have to swear an oath that the information we give is true, so for religion I can’t put “Jewish.”

“Christian” feels like a lie.

I hesitate, and finally write “None.”

Degan writes “Spiritual.”

This will be there on the certificate forever.

We kiss goodbye and Degan heads back to work for the afternoon. On my ride home I see another biker, weaving wildly through heavy traffic, no hands, eating an apple, the fringes of his prayer shawl flying out behind him.

seventeen

O
N THE SPECTRUM OF MASCULINITY
Degan is basically feminine—he gestures with his hands when he talks and is hopeless in the face of home repairs. So, not the sort of man to whom a bachelor party would normally appeal. But since we’ve decided to go all out with the wedding—white dress and everything—he thinks he may as well. On Saturday evening he heads off for beers with his friends and I drive to Kitchener for a wedding shower hosted by a friend of my mother’s. The guests are women who refer to themselves as “ladies,” friends of my mother’s I haven’t seen for twenty years; they give me bedsheets and ask where we will live once we’re married. Not a Jew in sight, of course. There is someone who is
married
to a Jew, though: Aunt Ruth is the wife of Dad’s cousin Paul.

Paul was a small boy when war broke out in Czechoslovakia.
He was sent away to boarding school in England and never saw his parents again.

Gumper, in his
Report from England
, recounted seeing Paul after the war. He was now a teenager. “He doesn’t speak Czech anymore,” Gumper wrote. “He remembers me but can’t remember his parents. He received the news of his mother’s death without any signs of upset, and when I try to talk to him about it, he doesn’t respond at all, and I don’t know whether it means he doesn’t want to talk about it, or whether it simply means nothing to him.

“He knows he is Jewish, of course,” Gumper also wrote. But Paul kept the secret religiously. When he got married, he did not tell his wife.

Back in Toronto, Shayna calls to ask me if I want her to perform some kind of ritual at our wedding ceremony.

“Yes!” I say right away. “Like what?”

“Well,” she says, “the Mi Adir, the traditional welcoming prayer, is always sung at a Jewish wedding.” She clears her throat. “But if you want I can do something else. Whatever you think would be helpful.”

Where did I find her? I think, with gratitude. How on earth did I find her?

“The Mi Adir would be perfect,” I say to Shayna.

I eat a quiet dinner alone and then drive up Bathurst in the watery spring dusk for a rare evening therapy session. I discuss the wedding ceremony with Charlotte, the plan for Shayna to sing the Mi Adir, for Degan to break a glass underfoot as is Jewish custom. I wonder what effect this might have on my father’s family. Perhaps, Charlotte suggests, allaying some of my fears, they might not even recognize these acts as Jewish.

I tell her my dream about a white dog racing toward me at full speed, teeth bared, only to stop short of me by an inch and nuzzle my palm. “I don’t know what the dog represents,” I say to Charlotte.

She seems to know but won’t tell me. She only smiles, and rocks in her chair, and tells me what good work I have done. On the path to marriage I have been tested and tested again. And here I am, stepping into the power of it.

eighteen

I
SPEND THE NIGHT BEFORE THE WEDDING
with my family in Kitchener. We go out for ice cream, watch a silly movie. Although Degan has been around for years, there’s something of a goodbye in the evening, as though our nuclear family of four has come to its happy conclusion. That night I dream I am in the billowing white wedding tent. It is filled with people, everyone I know and love. Then I see Dad, in the far back corner, alone, at a Sabbath table covered in white cloth. He is singing the blessing over the wine.

The next day we drive in convoy to the retreat centre where we’ll be married, the cars loaded with tonic water, dried flowers, tripods, potted plants, ribbon, a guest book. Degan is sitting in front of the main building when we arrive, practising the knot on his tie. We kiss hello, then fall on the remaining logistics like wolves on bloody meat. “The caterer just got here,” he says. “She
wants to know where we want the riser. And should they put flowers in the lounge in case of rain? And the DJ needs to know if we have extension cords.”

Degan’s face is pinched, but I can see it’s a happy kind of pinched.

“Oh,” he says. “And one more thing. I spoke to Shayna. She doesn’t want to sing the Mi Adir.”

I pause, and fiddle with Granny’s wedding ring. “Really?” I ask.

I suspect he has misunderstood. Shayna was so sincere in her offer to help in whatever way she could. I ask more. Degan reveals she was at school, surrounded by a bunch of five-year-olds when she called; it must have been hard for him to hear what she was saying.

The afternoon is sunny and beautiful. There are birds in the branches and the fragrant scent of lily of the valley along the trails. Wild mint in the cool spring mud. We rehearse the wedding ceremony outside in the field under the huge leafy oak.

My family is there, and Degan’s sister from England, and our friends Michael and Christine, who will be singing in the ceremony in their rock star sunglasses and floppy hats and tight T-shirts. Their baby crawls around the field, sampling the dirt and grass like hors d’oeuvres. When the rehearsal is over, I take my dress in its thick plastic sheath to the hermitage, where I’ll be sleeping alone. My last night of not being someone’s wife.

Around five the guests start to arrive. We have planned a talent show for the first night. Sixty of our friends cram into the lounge, where we have made the hearth into an impromptu stage. Degan and I are the opening act: we perform a pantomime to music from
Chariots of Fire
about our long journey to marriage. It involves sweat, and red paint smeared on our faces, and
beating off other admirers in the audience with a measuring stick. Mum’s family has written a very long song to the tune of “Daisy, Daisy”: “Aaaaalie, Deeeegan, tell me your answer do.” The verses are endless, and soon the audience is roaring with laughter as each new one begins. My cousin Lucy is representing the Picks, and she has chosen a poem to read. She introduces it by saying, “Symborska is my favourite poet. Next to Alison, of course.”

After the talent show everyone mingles, and congratulates us. I drink a beer and try to say hello to as many people as possible. When I am finally ready to head off for bed, Shayna appears at my side and says she will walk me down to my hermitage.

The May night is chilly, with a fat moon that’s almost full. We make our way along the dark path through the forest and find my cabin nestled in the trees. We sit on the porch and dangle our feet over the edge.

“So,” I say. “We’d planned for you to sing the Mi Adir.” I pause. “Right?”

She reaches for my hand; I feel her long, slim fingers in mine. “I had a chance to really sit with it,” she says. “To meditate. I feel so caught. In my desire to help, I wanted to offer anything. But I didn’t listen. I assumed I
knew
what you’d want. There was arrogance in my assumption.”

I remove my hand from hers. I rub my temples with my thumbs, glad that the darkness masks the confusion on my face. “It didn’t seem arrogant,” I say. “It seemed helpful.”

“I didn’t think it through,” she says.

“You didn’t think
what
through?”

There’s a very long silence. “I spoke with Rabbi Glickman,” she says finally.

I swallow, and remember the rabbi’s words that it’s better not to include “Jewish elements” in the ceremony but to hold off and have a second Jewish wedding when and if we actually convert.

I keep making the same mistake, forgetting what a small world we’re in, how everyone is implicated in everyone else’s business. My hackles rise.

“What did she say?” I ask. “That you’d compromise your professional integrity by singing an offical Jewish wedding song for non-Jews?”

Shayna looks surprised. “No,” she says. “It’s not that. It’s that she wants what’s best for
you
.” She pauses. “I want what’s best for you, too.”

“And the mikvah?” I ask. The plan has been for Shayna to come down to the river in the morning with my sister and my closest girlfriends to say the blessings for immersion as is the custom before a Jewish woman gets married.

Shayna sighs deeply; I see where this is headed and am glad again for the cover of the darkness.

She finally speaks. “My own first mikvah was with friends, in a river. At a place like this one.” She gestures around at the cabins, the trees, the knotted paths concealed in the darkness. “My friend said, ‘We’re doing mikvahs for Shabbat,’ just like that. So I did it and it was done.”

The implication is that this was a loss, like losing your virginity to an asshole.

Shayna continues. “I’m not clear where your path is going. And if you do find some way to officially convert, I don’t want to have taken the experience, your first time, away from you.”

Part of me, a rational part that nevertheless feels very far away, hears her words and her integrity. But another part, much
closer to the surface, interprets what she says to mean that a mikvah when I am not
really
Jewish would somehow cheapen the ritual itself. I once again am not good enough; my participation will somehow sully the mikvah or demean it.

“Oh,” I say. “Well—” I swallow hard “—the problem is that I don’t know where the path is going, either. I don’t know if the rabbis will accept me. So I might not ever have the opportunity …”

I swallow again, my throat thick with feeling. Under the sadness I feel a seething rage, not at Shayna but at Judaism in general; at the hand that has pushed me away not three times, as is customary, but what feels like hundreds of times. As many times as I’ve had the courage to approach.

“It’s just that I want it so badly,” I say. “That it’s
already
who I am.”

Shayna is quiet, taking this in. She says, “You are very brave.” I hear the sincerity in her voice. The genuine compassion.

“I really wanted to have some Hebrew in the ceremony tomorrow,” I say. “It was what I was looking forward to most.”

She touches my arm. “What if I sang something else?” She tugs on my sleeve, suddenly excited. “It doesn’t have to be the Mi Adir.”

I consider. “That would probably be okay,” I say. I think of my evenings in bed with Degan practising Hebrew words. The truth is Shayna could sing “Mary Had a Little Lamb” in Hebrew and we wouldn’t know the difference.

“Try something,” I say.

“Okay,” she says. “How about this? It’s from the Song of Songs.”

I close my eyes and her voice takes me away. Her gift has never been clearer.

When she’s done singing, she mistakes my silent awe for uncertainty. “There are other options, too,” she says quickly, “if you want me to sing some different pieces to both you and Degan, so you can decide together.”

“No,” I say. “I’ll make an executive decision. It’s perfect.”

“And you understand about the mikvah?”

“I do.”

“I could come down to the water anyway and say a different Hebrew blessing …”

But her voice trails off and we decline together in mutual silence.

At six the next morning, I hear the hinges on the hermitage screen door squeak open.

I roll over, squinting in the half-light, and see them. My sister, Emily, who looks so much like me, like my Pick cousins, like Marianne. Lindsay, our cousin on the Martin side, who I grew up with. Emily Denton, a summer friend from North Hatley; and my best friend, Nicola, who knows everything about me there is to know. The ones I’ve chosen. I feel them gather around my bed and start singing, five women’s voices weaving the harmonies of “Down to the River to Pray.” I open my mouth to tell them that the ritual is off, that there won’t be a mikvah. As I’m about to speak, though, I realize I
can
still go down to the river. That water is nondenominational; that the earth will have me regardless.

It is raining lightly as we leave my hermitage, the sound of the raindrops on the green spring leaves like a thousand little wedding bells ringing. We walk in silence, in single file, my friends in raincoats and umbrellas, and me in my bathrobe and running shoes. The gravel road gives way to forest, to a dirt path
knotted with tree roots and a dense tangle of branches overhead. We step, one by one, over a trunk that has fallen across the path, and duck beneath a wall of cobweb, spangled with raindrops like jewels. My sister Emily has gone ahead earlier and scouted out a place, a clearing sheltered by a canopy of leaves, and a small pool in the fast-flowing river where the water is deep. We stand in a circle holding hands. Then they break into a line, my silent witnesses, and I let my robe fall away.