Between Gods: A Memoir (30 page)

Mum nods. This she understands.

I email Sylvie to ask how I can help; she requests we bring a vegetable dish. I cook a sweet potato casserole from the cookbook Shayna gave us for our wedding. The relief at knowing what’s appropriate to bring. My stomach flutters when I picture my parents at home in Kitchener, Mum putting earrings on, Dad straightening his tie.

I head over early to help Sylvie set up. The hall walls are covered with photos of her father, a famous opera singer, in
Tosca, Madama Butterfly, Don Giovanni
. I think of Degan’s opera tickets, produced at the same time as the news of the pregnancy, and squeeze my eyes shut against the tide of feeling. The Filipina maid mistakes me for more hired help, tapping me on the shoulder and directing me briskly to where the silverware is kept. When she realizes her mistake, she flushes. “I’m sorry,” she says. “Welcome.”

In the dining room the second life-sized maid, the one made out of papier mâché, has been removed.

An hour later the doorbell rings. It’s the Hamburger King and his son who dated Monica Lewinsky. We smile, say hello. The bell rings once more and I hear my parents’ voices in the front hall. “Good to see you again,” Aaron says to Dad. “The last time was at your father’s
yahrzeit
.” Stating this for the benefit of the other guests. I want to run and bury my face in Dad’s chest, to curl up in his arms like a little girl.

Mum, absent at the
yahrzeit
, is introduced around. She hands Sylvie a bouquet of irises, a bottle of red wine. “Hi, sweetie,” she says casually as she hugs me hello.

I can see they have no idea how symbolic the evening feels from my perspective, or how emotionally exhausting the anticipation has been. But she knows, of course, about the miscarriage, and her touch is especially gentle.

“Well,” Dad says loudly, to the growing gathering, “this is one of the most stressful days of my life.”

Everyone stops talking; people shift their eyes nervously.

“Because it’s your first Rosh Hashanah?” I ask tentatively.

“Haven’t you seen the papers? Congress didn’t approve the bailout plan. The economy is tanking. As we speak. Now! And now! And now!”

There are murmurs of agreement.

“You would not believe how much money I’ve lost today,” he says, his forehead in his hands. Then he looks up at the room full of strangers. “We need a fiscally prudent budget,” he booms. “And for that we need a majority government.”

The election is coming up, and Dad wants everyone to vote for our current prime minister, Stephen Harper, who he believes is our only economic hope.

I wince at how this might be received, since his politics are
so different from my own and so different, I am certain, from everyone else’s in the room, but the moment passes and the chatting guests shift positions. We move to the table, set with cut crystal and white linen tablecloths. There are the usual blessings, the bread and the wine, and a blessing over the honey and apples. And the
Shehechiyanu
, which is the blessing for firsts, because it’s the New Year. We dig into the meal: the same clear chicken broth in glass bowls, this time with a matzah ball floating in the centre. I watch my father divide his in half with his spoon. He starts telling the Hamburger King about his background. “I was one of those Jews whose parents didn’t tell the kids they were Jewish,” he says.

“After the war?” the Hamburger King asks.

Dad nods yes. “We’ve never been to Israel.”

The King raises his eyebrows. “How would you identify yourself?”

“Religiously?”

A nod.

Dad pauses. “Well,” he says. “I was raised Christian. All my religious experience is with Christianity. But truly? In my heart, I know I’m a Jew.”

It is as though someone has struck a gong from his corner of the table. My eyes widen. His comment rings in my ears throughout the rest of the meal, so I can barely hear what anyone else is saying. When Degan and I get up to clear the plates, he whispers to me in the kitchen, “Your father is
Jewish
.”

“I
know
,” I say.
“Weird.”

Over dessert, Sylvie confirms again that very few Jews were able to get into Canada in 1941.

Dad says, “How many? Fifty?”

Sylvie says, “I’d put it lower.”

The Lady Boat that brought Granny and Gumper to Canada was torpedoed on its way back to Europe. I am here, in this world, by luck alone.

Degan and I have a big fight when we get home. I’m sad about the baby and wrung out from the visceral stress of the evening. I ask why he hasn’t returned the emails from the real estate agent. “Can’t you see how hard I’m trying here?” he says, his voice tight.

“It’s just one tiny email. It would take you two minutes.”

“I’m doing my best,” he shouts. “This is hard for me, too.”

“
What’s
hard for you?”

He glares at me.

“Do you think the baby was just yours? That I’m not sad, too?”

He’s right, but his yelling scares me. I close myself in the bathroom and sit on the toilet with my head between my knees, crying. For the lost baby. For our lost history and rituals. The night was so momentous. My father celebrated Rosh Hashanah and labelled himself Jewish. It seems something more is called for now, some acknowledgement or marking, but I’m lost. I slink upstairs to sleep alone, but Degan follows me. “Don’t be like that,” he says.

He holds me, and I cry.

Later, although it’s forbidden due to the
chag—
“holiday”—I turn on the computer. My cousin Lucy has written “L’Shana Tova” on my Facebook wall. Her message is there for everyone to see. I feel the old terror of being revealed for who I am, or worse, for who I hope to become.

Dad, for his part, seems unfazed. He has sent an email thanking us for including him in the holiday. “I enjoyed it very
much. The people were very warm. There’s just one thing I wish had been different.” A beat. “I wish there had been more reading from the holy texts.”

six

T
HE NEXT MORNING
, Dad calls to say that his cousin, my uncle Paul, is dead.

Last August Paul had a heart aneurism. He was open on the operating table for six hours, but the surgeon could not get the sleeve into his artery. When he woke up and they told him, he cried.

Now his heart has given up entirely.

I gather the pieces I know about Uncle Paul’s life like so many blue marbles in the palm of my hand. I think about him as a small boy, sent away to boarding school in England during the war. About his household, where nobody spoke of Judaism. I think of Paul putting his Jewish stepmother into an old-age home. And of my wedding, when Shayna sang in Hebrew and his face crumpled and his chin fell to his chest. I assumed it was shame. Could it have been something sadder? He wouldn’t hug
me in the receiving line. Now he is gone from this earth. He is the small boy in the novel I’m writing, put on a train and sent away forever.

I sit at my desk to do some more writing. My research has led me to an article on trauma and memory. Knowing and not knowing, remembering and forgetting, and the psyche’s brilliant dance between the polarities. The article details case studies: a woman who escaped before the war, assimilated, and did not even recognize her own husband and children when they came for her after surviving the camps.

Her family. She didn’t know who they were.

I think of Gumper’s
Report from England
about his nephew Paul: “He knows he is Jewish, of course.” But maybe Uncle Paul had truly forgotten who he was, where he came from.

The article suggests that in art engaged with trauma “there often is a ‘lie,’ a distortion, covering over the as yet unworked through and unknown aspect of trauma.” The novel I’m writing deals with themes of secrecy and denial. It tells a story very different from my own family’s, a story that depicts characters dying, rather than escaping in the nick of time as my grandparents did. Still, I have chosen to use many of my relatives’ names, spreading them among the fictionalized ones so the two might appear indistinguishable.

What are the unknown aspects of our family’s trauma? I can see their outlines, but they won’t speak, won’t reveal themselves. They lie scattered around me like bodies on a battlefield.

Degan finally contacts the real estate agent and we make an appointment to see some houses. There’s nothing remotely within our price range, and I resign myself to spending the rest of my life in an apartment. There are worse things.

Besides, since losing the baby my nesting instinct has leaked away, too. Back home, we order takeout Thai for our Sabbath meal. The blessings are becoming routine. We make love, and read aloud from the Heschel book
The Sabbath
. The prose is as rich and dense as honey cake. In the morning we sleep in, read the newspaper in bed. I have a pregnancy test in the medicine cabinet; it flickers at the edge of my awareness. I don’t want to wait for my period to come—or not—to tell me if I’m pregnant. “Just going to the bathroom,” I say to Degan casually.

I peel back the silver foil. When I pee on the stick, though, only one pink line spreads across the window.

No baby for another month.

I crawl back into bed, into Degan’s arms. “Sing to me,” I say. And he makes up a beautiful song about our lost little one on her way to eternity.

Later, we sit on the couch and talk more about conversion. What would it actually
mean
to be a Jew?

We practise asking each other, “What church do you go to?”

“I’m Jewish,” I say.

A smile plays across my mouth.

“And what church do
you
go to?” I ask in turn, but now I start to giggle.

“I’m Jewish,” Degan says, laughing.

“Merry Christmas,” we say to each other. And practise answering, “Thank you. But I’m Jewish!”

More laughing. We roll around holding our stomachs.

Finally I say, “I’m tired. Let’s have a nap.”

“A Shabbatnap?”

We crawl into bed laughing. “Good one,” I say.

Degan tickles me.

“Stop,” I say. “You’re ruining the Shabbatmosphere.”

The following morning, though, I wake up feeling low. Later today, I will go to Uncle Paul’s funeral. The days are getting dark again. I was supposed to spend this winter plump and pregnant, knitting booties in a rocking chair beside a fire, like a woman in an insurance commercial. But my baby is gone and the new test has come back negative. I’m suddenly terrified of another winter like the last, immobilized beneath the SunBox, the bad blood pinning me to my seat. I drag myself to contact improv but barely have the energy to roll around, and flinch when anyone tries to touch me.

Michael sidles up. “What’s up, lollipop?”

I ask if he will fast for Yom Kippur, which is coming up shortly.

“I’ve got a big day at the theatre ahead of me. So no.”

Ariel pirouettes past us, leaps wildly through the air. I wave at him, and he wheels toward me and bows deeply. “Yes, m’lady?”

“Are
you
fasting for Yom Kippur?”

He snorts. “Um. No? I’m secular.” And he flounces away.

I leave before the closing circle, unable to face the goodwill and sharing, and drive to Brampton for the funeral. Uncle Paul’s brother speaks, and his son. They mention his sense of humour, his kindness, his financial success. Nobody says anything about his religious background; nobody speaks of his background at all. But in the front hall of the opulent country club where the reception is being held there’s a pile of photo albums of his earlier lives. Paul as a chubby baby in a bonnet, in the arms of his uncle, my Gumper. Paul as a little boy in pre-war Czechoslovakia, with buckle shoes and short pants and a rascally gleam in his eye. Paul with his mother, Mary, Gumper’s sister who didn’t survive the war.

He received the news of his mother’s death without any 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
.

Do people really change? Is it possible to start life anew?

seven

I
ASK
C
HARLOTTE MY QUESTIONS ABOUT CHANGE
. Her answer is a resounding no. People can’t change their essential selves. But what they
can
change how they relate to themselves. And that makes all the difference.

It’s early on a weekday morning, mothers walking their kids to school along the leafy residential street outside Charlotte’s office. She looks fresh, her hair still damp from the shower. “I can’t stop thinking about evil,” I say.

I tell her about little Eva on that cold morning in Auschwitz. Five years old. Pulling up her sleeve, clenching her milk teeth against the pain of the tattoo. Trying not to cry. This is the detail that has lodged itself in my mind, the detail I cannot forget. “Is evil archetypal?” I ask Charlotte. “That kind of evil?”

I expect she will say yes—Jung’s framework is her
framework—but instead she is silent. “It’s not useful to try and understand it,” she says.