Between Gods: A Memoir (31 page)

“So what can I do?”

It is perhaps the most honest question I have ever asked of anyone. I am entirely childlike in my desire to know. How can I make sense of a world where this could happen?

“You could try to imagine what they would want,” Charlotte says.

“What who would want?”

“Your dead relatives. The people who were killed.” She coughs. “Your great-grandmother Marianne.”

I look at her blankly. “But what is evil? Is it an impulse in all of us?”

I think of my university courses in social psychology, the famous studies where subjects,
many
subjects, could be goaded into delivering larger and larger shocks to a victim until the shocks were purportedly big enough to kill.

“The Holocaust must have been imagined by sociopaths and then executed by unthinking followers,” I say. “And the depressed economy, people hungry and willing …”

Charlotte is silent.

“It makes my own suffering seem ridiculous,” I say. “Like, like …” I am searching for an apt comparison, for something without the cliché of “a grain of sand” or “a speck of dust.”

“Your suffering is also valid,” Charlotte says. “Talking yourself out of it only gives it more power.”

I think that my suffering is a shard of their suffering. Again the clichés.

“There’s one thing I know,” Charlotte says. “
They
would not want you to suffer.”

“Who?” I ask.

“Well, Marianne, for example. Little Eva.”

But I resist. If I don’t suffer, Eva will be forgotten. The small girl with her stuffed mouse in the freezing cold barracks in Auschwitz. My suffering is, I realize, a perverse kind of tribute.

“Think of it in reverse,” Charlotte says. “Would you want her to suffer for you?”

“Of course not!”

“Well?”

It occurs to me then—comes over me in a wave of feeling—that there
is
a light that shines on all things. That shines and can never be extinguished.

On the evening of Yom Kippur, I take the bus up Bathurst Street in the rain. I am meeting Degan for Kol Nidre, a prayer that annuls the previous year’s vows for the upcoming year. It is the most misunderstood of Jewish prayers, the one most used by antisemites as evidence that Jews aren’t to be trusted.

On the bus I sit beside a middle-aged woman in a black dress with a bright pink umbrella. “You’re on your way to synagogue,” she states matter-of-factly.

I nod. How did she know?

In the parking lot, Degan is just arriving, the hood of his yellow raincoat pulled up. A security guard comes out of the building. “You can’t leave your bike there.”

Degan bristles but does as he is told, moving it out of sight of the BMWs and Audis, locking it to the rack behind the building. We’re a half-hour early for the service, but inside the place is packed. The men are all wearing dark suits and prayer shawls, and the women Prada and Gucci. The custom of eschewing leather shoes in favour of sneakers, which I know is practised at other synagogues in the city, has not taken root here.

The only seats left are in the nosebleed section, where we have a perfect view of the top of the lead rabbi’s
kippah
.

The service is like a collective confession, but whereas in Christianity the emphasis would be on the sins themselves, here the emphasis is on redemption. The idea that we are forgiven, actually
forgiven
, is hard for me to take in.

The cantor’s voice pierces me, pulls a taut stitch through my heart: “When the wrongs and injustices of others wound us, may our hearts not despair of human good. May no trial, however severe, embitter our souls and destroy our trust.”

Words are cheap, but the sentiment monumental.
No
trial.
However
severe.

The sermon is about Jerusalem, the city of peace. The rabbi speaks about the three great religions that all lay claim to it. His talk is beautiful and generous but followed up by a pitch for money. If we buy Israel Bonds and donate them to the synagogue, it counts as a mitzvah, we are reminded.

After, Degan leaves his bike and we take the bus back down Bathurst Street in a rain that has turned into a downpour. My feet hurt in my black patent heels. At home, I change into a track suit and wool socks. The fast, which lasts for twenty-five hours, has technically begun, but I remind myself that pregnant women are exempt, and to fast would remind me that I am not among them.

I have started to bleed, which could be my period, or could, as apparently often happens, be my uterus expelling a second round of tissue.

“What are you doing?” Degan asks as he watches me peel a pineapple.

“My fast includes fruit.”

“Just fruit?”

“And vegetables.” I run the tap and fill a glass. Degan raises his eyes. Water is forbidden. You’re not even supposed to brush your teeth.

“What about protein?” he asks.

“Right! And almonds.”

“I fasted today for four hours,” he says. “Between meals.”

I giggle. “We’re wimping out.”

“Speak for yourself,” Degan answers. “I’m just gearing up.”

On the morning of Yom Kippur, I get up and go to my desk. The prohibition against “work,” which includes the use of a pen, not to mention a computer, feels harder than the prohibition against food. Still, I eat a bowl of blueberries and put the kettle on for coffee.

Degan fasts.

We arrive at the synagogue and join a service for people in their twenties and thirties, the same crowd from Shayna’s Shabbat Nation Fridays. I am compelled by the beautiful liturgy, by the sombre and reverent atmosphere. We read aloud together:

Each of us is a shattered urn
,

Grass that must wither
,

A flower that will fade
,

A shadow moving on
,

A cloud passing by
,

A particle of dust floating on the wind
,

A dream soon forgotten
.

Reciting this ancient poem gives me shivers up my arms, up the back of my neck. I have started off on the wrong foot but vow now to fast for the rest of the day.

On Yom Kippur decisions become final: “How many shall pass on, how many shall come to be.” I feel again the pulse of my body convulsing against my will, pushing our baby out of my womb, out of the world entirely. I think of Vera’s Eva, born at the wrong time, in 1938. Lining up for the showers at Auschwitz. Vera afraid that her daughter’s clothes had been removed and now she would catch a cold.

I realize that Leonard Cohen’s song “Who by Fire?” is taken from the Yom Kippur liturgy. The ways we might die, the places and time our life will end:

Who in your merry merry month of May?

Who by very slow decay?

And who shall I say is calling?

There is a challenge in this final question, an anger. It is as though Cohen is asking who has the
right
to decide such a thing. The way someone will die. The length of their last breaths.

The day proceeds with hours of intense prayer. It is rigorous, a spiritual scouring. I’m amazed by how quickly a bit of hunger pushes me up against my mortality. Marianne on that first morning when they could not leave the house to buy bread. Vera faced with her children’s rumbling stomachs. Did little Eva ask for cereal? Did she beg? We sit and stand, sit and stand, stumble along with the Hebrew. After six hours, Degan whispers to me, “I’m done. I want to leave.”

We slink out of the synagogue and head home to sleep, trying to ward off our hunger. It’s late afternoon when we wake. The rain has subsided, the sidewalks giving off little breaths of steam. From our bedroom window I see red and
orange crimping the edges of the maple leaves. The last of the sun disappears behind the high school in the field behind our apartment. “That’s our cue,” Degan says. “It was a good fast.”

I agree.

We tuck into a meal of bread, spinach salad and lentil soup as though it were a race to the bottom of our bowls. Pacing ourselves is physically impossible. I think of Marianne’s empty stomach, her cold body banging up against the other cold bodies in the cattle car. What she would have given—what they all would have given—for a simple bowl of soup.

At the end of our meal, we lean back and fold our hands over our bellies. Degan has a little smile on his face. “What are you thinking?” I ask him.

“The New Year has started,” he says.

And I believe it is so.

eight

T
HE
H
ARBOURFRONT
F
ESTIVAL
rolls around again. I get an email from the organizer asking if I’d like to introduce the Czech writer Josef Skvorecky. I do a bit of research, and learn that he lived in the same town as Gumper before the war. I email Mr. Skvorecky and introduce myself. Yes, he says, he remembers my grandfather. They used to drink coffee together at the famous café in the town square.

I met Eli at the Harbourfront Festival exactly a year ago. A nice guy. Whatever.

On Friday evening Degan and I head up to the synagogue. “Just going to the bathroom,” he says when we get there. When he returns he tells me he was in front of the bathroom mirror, trying unsuccessfully to pin his
kippah
to the centre of his head. In a fit of frustration he said to his reflection, “It’s fucking hard being a Jew.”

When he came out of the bathroom, there was a woman waiting her turn, grinning at him.

The service brims over with goodwill, and singing, and the Newfoundland folk dance I have learned is called the
hora
. After, Shayna gestures us over to her table and we eat with the Shabbat Nation band, like roadies. She slings an arm around me, a chunk of challah in her hand, and leans across to Degan sitting on the other side of me: “I’m in love with your wife.” She leans her head on my shoulder; I can smell the faint citrus scent of her shampoo.

“That’s okay,” Degan says.

“Just a little bit.”

He grins.

“We can share,” she says.

Degan sings: “ ‘And where, where is my Gypsy wife tonight?’ ”

“I love Leonard Cohen,” Shayna says. “The name ‘Cohen’ is Hebrew, meaning a member of a special tribe of priests.”

“Oh?”

“The line is patrilineal, actually,” she says, pivoting to look at me. “If your
father
is a
cohen
—a direct descendant of Aaron—then you’re a
cohen
, too.”

The rest of our Sabbath is quiet and lovely. In the morning I lie in bed reading an anthology of essays about childbirth that my friend Christine Pountney, who also sang at our wedding, has lent me. Christine’s piece is breathtaking, the kind of writing that makes me want to give up altogether because I will never be that good. I skip from her essay to one by the Israeli-Canadian writer Edeet Ravel, in which she talks about how she wanted a girl so desperately because of “the circumcision problem.” Her partner
was not circumcised “in case the Nazis came again.” And she did not want to inflict any more suffering on a tiny infant.

This gives me pause.

In the end, she gives birth to a girl.

Degan sleeps in; when he wakes up, we make love. The window in our bedroom is open a crack and I can smell the crisp leaves, the first intimations of frost. The hint that things are on the cusp of change. I think of Degan calling himself a Jew to his own face in the mirror. I say, stating the obvious, “You’re warm to Judaism these days.”

He shrugs. “I feel closer to being Jewish than I do Christian,” he says. “And I like supporting you. But I don’t—”

“I know,” I say, rushing in to reassure him.

He pauses. “I should probably tell Rabbi Klein I don’t want to convert. Remind her. To make sure she knows, too.”

In the afternoon we go for a long walk in the Don Valley; in the ravine below the bridge, the city is wild, leaves and vines creeping over the concrete. Back home we print out the words to “L’cha Dodi” and practise. We go outside and look for the first three stars in the sky, signifying that the Sabbath has ended. Havdalah is the ceremony marking the change between Shabbat and the rest of the week; we light a braided candle, say the blessing, then extinguish the candle in a goblet of wine in a hiss of smoke and steam. The ceremony typically ends with the song “Eliyahu Hanavi”; we listen to a Klezmer band’s rendition on YouTube, shouting out our coarse interpretation of the words and slapping our thighs.

Degan harmonizes.

Harriet has been right about one thing: there is sadness when the day is over. I’m glad to remember Shabbat will come again next week.

Reluctantly we turn our phones back on, our computers. There is an email that my cousin Heather has given birth to a son. Heather is Mum’s brother’s daughter, which is to say she’s as
WASP
as they get.

Her husband is Chinese.

The baby will be called Cohen.

nine

W
E
’
RE SUPPOSED TO MEET
with Rabbi Klein every six weeks, but it’s hard for me and Degan to coordinate our schedules, and months pass before we find a time. When we finally do, Rachel moves to hug me in the waiting room outside her office, but I back away. “I’ve got an awful cold,” I say. Degan says, “And I’m all sweaty from biking uptown.”

It’s already dark at five thirty, bruised clouds billowing above the city, but the rabbi’s office is snug and warm. It has the faint smell of ink and of postage stamps, of books on shelves gathering dust and books whose spines have been cracked again and again. We sink into the red armchairs.

“So,” she says, and smiles. “Catch me up.”

We tell her about the High Holidays, about my dad coming to synagogue and about Uncle Paul dying.

“I’m so sorry,” she says. “May his memory be for a blessing.”

I can see, by her soft face, she means it.

There’s a silence, in which we hear the first smatter of rain at the window. “And we want to talk about conversion,” Degan says. “We wanted, or rather
I
wanted—”