Between Gods: A Memoir (6 page)

I say to Charlotte, “I wonder what else I inherited from her besides looks.”

The fifty-minute hour flies past. I leave with instructions to pay attention to something Charlotte calls “the still-small voice within.”
Close
attention. And I am to sleep with a notebook beside my bed, and to write down my dreams, in as much detail as possible, as soon as I wake up in the morning.

That night I dream of Dad’s dog Moushka, “little fly” in Czech. She has been skinned, all her fur removed. She whimpers in pain. Dad is holding her. The vet stands above her, about to end the suffering, his long needle poised.

The following Tuesday, I go back to my hometown to present a writing award I have judged for local high school students. My father takes one look at me and sees I am depressed.

“When did it start?” he asks.

I shrug helplessly. “I’m not sure.” I falter. “I’m taking this course. About Judaism,” I say. Tears start to slide down my cheeks.

“Oh, sweetie,” Dad says. “I’m sorry.”

We are standing in the back hall. He has just come in from walking the dog; he’s wearing a fluorescent orange lumberjack coat meant for hunting season. He has not bothered to do up his boots, and the tongues loll heavily forward.

“It’s only an introduction,” I say. “The basics. But I seem to be having a strong reaction to it.”

“I can see that,” he says. “I can’t say I
understand
it, but I see it.”

“I know it’s not logical.”

“Here!” he calls to the dog. “Lie down beddie!”

“This might sound weird,” I say, “but it feels genetic. Like my body is remembering the loss of my tribe.”

I am thinking of Eli, the kind of instant recognition I felt when we met. Of my sudden desire to observe Shabbat with someone who has grown up doing so. Can these reactions be a biological imperative? Something in my genes suddenly asserting itself?

Dad says, “It’s funny, but I think I know what you mean.”

“How so?”

He lists the people he’s most comfortable with in the world: his cousins and several friends from Czechoslovakia. “They’re all Czech, so I thought that was why I felt close to them. Hearing you talk makes me wonder, though.” He pauses. “They’re Czech, but they’re also Jewish.”

I bite my lip, my face wet with tears.

“Do you remember anything?” I ask. “About your parents practising?”

“They didn’t practise,” Dad says. “That’s the point.”

I nod at the well-worn line.

“But my father’s
mother
 …”

“Ruzenka?”

Dad nods. He squints, concentrating. I can see he wants to please me, wants to offer up a detail. Any detail.

“I think she used to come for dinner on the High Holidays. And we would eat … latkes?”

“Latkes are for Hanukkah.”

Dad shrugs. “I’m sorry, sweetie. They were just trying to forget it.”

He lines his boots up neatly, turns toward the kitchen. He pauses for a second, then looks back at me, his face suddenly bright. “I did hear a story about my father,” he says.

“Oh?”

“Before the war, when the political tide was turning, lots of Czech Jews were converting to Catholicism. Dad apparently scorned this. He said—get this—he said that he wouldn’t convert to Christianity if he was
the last Jew on earth
.”

Dad laughs at the irony. His father
did
convert, essentially, and spent the rest of his life celebrating Christmas and Easter. Still, my eyes widen at this revelation. There was a time when my grandfather vowed he would never renounce his faith?

To hear this second side of the story is like spotting a small light flickering far out at sea.

Someone in my family, at some point, cared deeply about being Jewish.

I have only a handful of memories of my grandfather. We called him Gumper, after my eldest cousin’s first attempt at “Grandpa.” I remember him waltzing with Granny beside their swimming pool in Quebec. He wore high rubber boots and work pants, but I could see, even then, that he knew how to lead a lady, just the right amount of pressure on Granny’s lower back to move her where he wanted her to go.

And Granny wasn’t an easy lady to lead.

The morning Gumper died, I wet my bed. I was ten years old, and I remember the surprise, the intense shame as I sniffed around in my sheets and realized what had happened. I bundled up the urine-soaked bedding and tiptoed in to tell my mother. It was very early, before dawn, and I was confused by the lamp already lit in my parents’ bedroom. Dad was on the phone, in his green plaid flannel pyjamas, his face slack. “I’ll be on the next flight,” I heard him say.

“Where are you—” I started to ask loudly, but my mother shushed me. “He’s gone,” she said.

“Who?”

“Gumper.”

“Gone? Where did he go?”

“He died, sweetie.”

And just like that, the shame of the peed bed disappeared, eclipsed by something entirely adult, the implications of which I didn’t understand.

Gumper was a sportsman who loved fly-fishing and hunting: we have silent video footage of him on safari in Africa, dressed in khakis, his motions jerky from the old-fashioned camera as he lifts his fist in a cheer. He also loved mushrooming, that quintessentially Slavic pursuit. At camp one summer I made him a toadstool out of clay, glazed it and brought it home for him in my trunk. I remember the pride on his face, and the pleasure.

Gumper was passionate, and wildly successful. The grandson of an itinerant merchant, by the time he came to Canada he was so distinguished that the local newspaper ran a headline about him: “Jan Pick, millionaire manufacturer of Prague, will establish a factory in Sherbrooke.” His wealth and his smarts got Granny and him out of Nazi-occupied Czechoslovakia. They escaped to France, then to England, and finally on to Canada. On the day of their arrival in Sherbrooke, the mayor assembled a welcome party to greet them at the station. But Gumper was too busy staring out the window of the train, looking for exotic Canadian wildlife, plotting his next hunting expedition. They missed the stop entirely and sped past in the blackness, on to the bright metropolis of Montreal.

Three years later—back in Sherbrooke—my father was born.

In the Holocaust’s aftermath, babies were often given the
names of relatives who had perished. Granny and Gumper had lost almost everyone, but they called Dad Thomas, after Thomas Masaryk, the first president of Czechoslovakia, their beloved and forsaken homeland.

nine

O
N IMPULSE
,
I MAKE AN APPOINTMENT
to meet Rabbi Klein again in person. I bike up Bathurst Street: it’s under heavy construction, the street clogged with orange pylons and honking SUVs, their shiny flanks coated in dust. I’ve driven past her synagogue before but have never been inside. The front hall is twice the size of the church I attended as a girl, brightly lit and hung with modern art. There’s a tastefully placed kiosk selling pricey Judaica, and a front desk manned by a uniformed security guard. He checks my purse, for what I can’t imagine, then politely directs me up a wide spiral staircase lined with framed portraits of all the synagogue’s earlier rabbis. The secretary shows me in.

“Have a seat,” Rabbi Klein says.

I sit down in a red armchair and start to cry right away.

“It’s not you—it’s me,” she says. “I have this effect on people.”

I sniffle, smile wanly.

I have forgotten how gorgeous Rabbi Klein is. She has the kind of beauty that is hard to nail down: it’s not just her long curls, or her dimples or creamy skin, but the way she holds herself, the openness in her face. Her aura is both innocent and refined.

“So,” she says. “Catch me up.”

I lean back in the armchair and start talking. I tell Rabbi Klein about the Doing Jewish class, how sad I feel reading the textbook. I tell her about my conversation with my father, about the Jews he feels most comfortable with in the world. I also find myself telling her about meeting Eli, and the validation he gave me that what I’m experiencing is meaningful.

“I’m just reading his book,” the rabbi says.

I nod. “Judaism used to be invisible to me,” I say. “Now it’s everywhere.”

We talk for a while about the legacy of denial, about how the grief I am feeling isn’t just my own but my father’s and grandparents’, as well. About how a secret, passed down the generations, grows until it’s impossible to hold. About the sudden desire I have to fix the past, to undo the wrong that’s been done.

“I think I might want to convert,” I hear myself say.

I pause. The word
conversion
makes me think of thunderbolts, of door-to-door salesmen peddling salvation and of women with their eyes rolled back in their heads. I hesitate. “At least, I’d like to learn more about my options.”

From somewhere down the hall, someone knocks on a door. We hear it open, then slam closed.

The rabbi gathers her dark curls in a fistful at the side of her neck. “Refresh me,” she says. “Do you have a husband?”

“A fiancé.”

“And he’s Jewish? Not Jewish?”

“Not Jewish,” I say.

A little frown wrinkles her forehead. “How does he feel about all this?”

“He’s supportive,” I say. Which Degan is. Absolutely.

“He wants me to be happy,” I say. Which he does.

The rabbi smiles a Botticelli smile. “He sounds wonderful.”

“So anyway,” I continue, “the people in my Doing Jewish class are all signed up for the Jewish Information Course this winter. I was thinking
I
might like to take it. That it might clarify things, shed some light. I wanted to ask—” I swallow, my throat all at once dry. “—I wanted to ask if you’d sponsor me.”

I’m surprised to hear myself say this. The JIC is a long and exhaustive class, and I’ve reached the hardest part in the novel I’m writing, the place where I really need to focus. I have no extra time at the end of my days, not to mention energy. But something else has taken over, an instinctual part of me I know to defer to, so I submit and wait for the rabbi’s reply.

“Yes,” she says finally. “I’d be happy to sponsor you. And Degan.”

“And Degan?”

“He’d also have to take the class.”

“Okay,” I say uncertainly. Still, I’m relieved. I’ve been warned that getting a rabbi on board is difficult, that it’s their job to push you away as a test of your sincerity, so I’m especially chuffed. What was all the fuss about?

“The class starts in January,” she says. “We’re already halfway through the fall. But I like you. And you’re obviously sincere.”

Good. Fantastic.

But I see there’s something else.

“They probably haven’t told you this in your Doing Jewish class,” she says.

I wait for it.

“No
beit din
,” she starts to say but stops again, realizing I don’t know the term. “
Beit din
—literally ‘house of judgment.’ It’s a Jewish court. A panel of rabbis.”

I nod.

She continues. “No
beit din
here in Toronto would agree to create an intermarriage.”

I exhale, relieved. “I’m not married,” I remind her.

“No. But you will be.”

I pause, not understanding.

“We don’t want Judaism to be a wedge between you and your fiancé,” she says.

I am silent. How would it be a
wedge
between us?

“Degan is …” I pause. Didn’t I already say this? I repeat it, just in case. “Degan is incredibly supportive.”

“Is he interested in raising a Jewish family?” the rabbi asks.

I stare blankly. We don’t even have a date for our wedding. Suddenly just the
thought
of a wedding is scary. But Rabbi Klein persists. “Is he interested in
being
Jewish?”

This is like asking if our postman is interested in becoming the king of England. I continue to stare blankly, but no more help is forthcoming. And then it dawns on me. Slowly. She makes me say it myself. “I can’t convert unless Degan does, too?”

“Right,” Rabbi Klein says, relieved I have finally figured it out. “We want to make sure you are on the same path. Together.”

And what if we aren’t?
I wonder.

I leave the rabbi’s office in a daze. Biking down Bathurst Street, I almost get run over by a delivery truck; it whizzes past me, horn blaring. I feel there has been a mistake, that I didn’t make myself clear. My family died in Auschwitz. My father
is Jewish
.
Frankly, I am surprised that I can’t just call the religion my own and have that be the end of it.

Degan also receives the news with incredulity. “What’s she saying? You’re not good enough by yourself?”

“I guess.”

“What does she—” he begins. “What’s her name again?”

“Rabbi Klein. Rachel.”

“It sounds to me like Rachel is saying you’re not good enough for them.” He scratches his beard. “No. They’re saying
I’m
not good enough because I’m Christian.” He shakes his head. “It’s ridiculous.”

“The religion is very family based,” I say.

“And
your
family died in
Auschwitz
.”

“They were Jewish enough for the Nazis,” I agree.

“And how would it hurt them? To have you?”

I shrug. Mentally I do the math: right now, in our household, there are two people. And no Jews. If we have a baby, that baby will not be Jewish.

If I alone could convert, there would be one Jew in our home. In that scenario, if Degan and I have a baby, the baby will be Jewish. Two Jews where before there were none. Two
sincere
Jews, in the rabbi’s own words.

It’s hard for me to see the harm done.

I do a bit of reading online. The Reform Movement’s 1983 Resolution on Patrilineal Descent is clear. It allows for the child of a Jewish father and non-Jewish mother—a child like me—to be accepted “as Jewish without a formal conversion, if he or she attends a Jewish school and follows a course of studies leading to Confirmation. Such procedure is regarded as sufficient evidence that the parents and the child herself intend that she shall live as a Jew.”