by Alison Pick
And what about me? I wonder. Will I ever be Jewish? Am I already?
A few years back, at a writing residency at the Banff Centre for the Arts, an older writer I admire told me that I had no choice in the matter. I was Jewish. Because my family died in Auschwitz. Because it’s in my blood.
La sangre llama.
But when it’s my turn to introduce myself, and when I explain my background to the rabbi, her reaction is more stayed.
“You’re Jewish,” she says. “Sort of. But to really be accepted, you would need to go through a process.” She clears her throat. “Because your mother is Christian.”
six
IRONICALLY, I FIRST STUMBLED ON our family secret at Christmas. I was maybe eleven years old. We were at my aunt and uncle’s house; a huge Christmas tree shone with a hundred white lights in the corner. Over my head, in the crowd of adults, my auntie Sheila was speaking to my mother, saying something about a couple they both knew, the husband Jewish, the wife a Gentile.
I was cruising a plate of Black Magic chocolates, trying to guess which one would have a pink centre.
Above me, I heard Auntie Sheila: “So their daughter isn’t Jewish. Because Judaism always comes from the mother.”
I bit into a chocolate and screwed up my face: marzipan.
My mum: “So our girls …?”
“Our girls aren’t technically Jewish, either,” Auntie Sheila said. “Secret or no secret.”
“Even though their fathers …”
“Right,” Auntie Sheila said.
I remember this moment as if it were in a cartoon: a little light bulb appearing in the air above my head, and the sound effect, the clear ting of a bell. My brain was working fast, trying to process this information. Who did they mean by “our girls”? They meant my cousins. They meant my sister. They meant me.
I put my half-eaten marzipan back on the plate.
I was not Jewish because my mother was not Jewish. But my father, the implication seemed to be …
Then, when I was twelve, my friend Jordan stopped me on the playground. “Your dad is Jewish,” he said.
I remembered the conversation between my mother and my aunt but still wasn’t sure what it meant. I had a crush on Jordan, and I weighed my possible responses and their various consequences. Jordan was Jewish. Would he be offended if I denied it? Would I get in trouble if I agreed?
“No, he’s not,” I said at last.
“Yes, he is. My mum says.”
“No, he isn’t.”
“He is, too.”
“No, he’s not,” I repeated, my desire to protect my father finally outweighing my desire to find common ground.
“What you need—” Jordan said, slinging an arm around my shoulder; he was more confident than the other twelve-year-old boys were “—what you need is a good Jewish name. We should call you Rosie.”
Rosie, I knew, was the English translation of my Czech great-grandmother’s name, Ruzenka. I giggled.
I denied the truth several more times and then managed to divert Jordan with a game of kissing tag. It was easily done. But I felt a growing unease. The clues were beginning to add up. Something wasn’t right in our family. Something was lurking, biding its time. It seemed to be pulling at me, a persistent tugging I wasn’t sure I could resist much longer.
I was born in the middle of the 1970s, but my home life was straight out of the fifties. My mother cooked and took care of the children. My father worked and made money. In our house the values that are archetypically masculine—assertiveness, agency, success—were prioritized at the expense of the feminine traits of nurture and interdependence.
Feelings were tolerated as one tolerates a needy aunt who comes to visit yearly: we put up with her, we were polite, but behind her back we were all rolling our eyes.
Predictably, the feminism I cleaved to as a young woman was the variety in which a woman gained purchase by behaving like a man. I’d spent my childhood as Daddy’s girl, prized for my chutzpah (although this, of course, is the last word he would have used). I wasn’t made to feel explicitly ashamed of my softer feelings; but, on the other hand, I was never asked about them, never invited to explore or express them.
“What’s all that about?” Dad would ask if I ever fussed or cried.
So by the time depression came for me in my early twenties, I already had two decades of unexpressed grief accumulated inside me, the grief of small pains and sleights. Yes, in the big picture I was a content child with a very happy childhood. None of the classic traumas had ever darkened my door. But it turns out Granny was right. Life is inherently painful. And several generations of unshed tears eventually become a flood.
Luckily, my psychotherapist Ben was an exceptional listener. He barely spoke. He nodded. He sighed empathetically. Every now and then he suggested a connection between the present and the past, his suggestion so subtle I was sure I’d come up with it myself.
“How are you feeling?” he would ask, and then he would wait, his hands folded quietly in his lap, while I fished around inside myself for something.
“I’ve been thinking,” I’d start to say, and he’d let me continue.
When I was done, he’d repeat the question: “And how are you feeling?”
Our meetings exhausted me. I arrived home wrung out like a dirty old rag. Once, I thought to record a session—an attempt to hang on to the insights that erupted so fast and furious, breaking briefly into the air, only to be swallowed back up by the great ocean of unconsciousness. There was nowhere for them to go but back to where they came from. Several years later I listened to the tape, anticipating a deluge of psychological insight. Instead, there was silence. The odd muffled sniff. Heavy sighing. A statement by Ben or me, followed by such a long period of quiet that I thought the recorder had broken. Such intense, tiring inner labour and nothing to show for it on the outside.
Ben was Jewish. I knew this at the same level that I knew he had grey hair and sported comfortable corduroys. I told him about my “interesting background”—I must have—but it didn’t form the basis for any of our work. The Holocaust is unfathomably deep material. I was still toiling away at the upper reaches of my blindness, admitting that my childhood had not been as perfect as I’d always assumed. It took twelve, or perhaps twenty, sessions to distinguish between what I thought I’d had—parents who were perfect—and the reality—parents who were human. Hundreds of dollars. Hours of mental anguish untangling the threads of acceptance and blame. There is no perfect parent. To exist is to get hurt. And the extra confusion of a case like mine: more money than we knew what to do with, everybody smiling and apple-cheeked. Not a whiff of anything remotely like abuse.
And yet. Turns out my father was not at all consistent. Turns out he was absent, then present, then absent, like the sun moving in and out of the clouds. Turns out he could sit through a half-hour of dinner-table conversation with a blank look in his eye, not registering a single word that was said. To admit this meant admitting that the parent I had idealized was other than how I had needed him to be. Another five sessions on that alone. Long, pregnant pauses, tears, my psyche struggling and thrashing as though being drowned.
But if my father’s dissociation was related to the family history with the Holocaust, it wasn’t something Ben and I discussed.
Dad had done some psychotherapy himself as a young man. He had been part of one of the T-groups that were popular in the seventies, a group led by a man named Dr. Martin Fischer. “He was good,” Dad would often say. “It’s so hard to find someone good.”
When I was a newborn, Dad sometimes took me to group. I picture myself as a baby asleep in my bassinet, my little hands curled up at the sides of my head, and try to imagine what it meant that Dad, who could easily have left me with my mother, chose to bring me along.
It was, I think now, a kind of pledge. He would work through his past. He would not pass it down to me.
Does every parent dream this impossible dream?
&nbs
p; When depression first came for me, Dad was the one who encouraged me to find someone to talk to. He never asked for details about my sessions with Ben, but he asked if I was still going, and whether it was helpful.
And one day, a few months in, he called me on the phone. “If you want me to come, I will.”
I put down the bowl of grapes I was painstakingly washing.
“Where?”
“To a therapy session. If there’s anything you want to talk about with me there.”
In the background the dog barked. “Go beddie!” Dad reprimanded her.
“Oh,” I said, mortified. “I don’t think so.”
“Are you sure?”
“Yep,” I said. And then something occurred to me. “Why don’t you go alone?”
“What do you mean?”
“You’re always saying you’d like to find someone good. I think Ben might qualify.”
I was thinking, of course, of Dad’s own “bad blood,” and of the futile pledge he had made to me as a baby. I was thinking of the long gaps between sentences when we talked, gaps that Dad seemed to fall headlong into, disappearing from both himself and from me.
Eventually he agreed. But he saw Ben only once. He was interested in the puzzle of the psyche, he told me, in figuring out how the pieces of a family story fit together. Ben was too focused on feelings. And Dad was done with feelings. There wasn’t anything soft and subterranean left inside him that he needed to express.
Dad found out by accident that he is Jewish. In his early twenties he toured Europe with some college friends. At the Jewish cemetery in Prague, the tour guide pulled him aside. “Don’t you know that Pick is a Jewish name?”
I can see it so clearly. Dad pauses, his eyes on one of the tombstones, its stylized menorah. It’s a fall day and he pulls his sweater tight around his chest. His heart is suddenly pounding. He feels both that he is being told something ridiculously, impossibly implausible, and something that makes his whole life make sense. He looks around for his friends, and finally spots them over by the iron gates, rolling cigarettes.
“I’m not Jewish,” he says.
The tour guide shrugs. “Your name is.”
“Well, I’m not.”
The guide shrugs again. “Suit yourself.”
Back home in Canada, Dad needed not weeks, not months, but years to work up the nerve to ask whether what the guide said was true. When he finally approached his mother in the kitchen, she got a look in her eye—part fear, part relief—and called upstairs to her husband, “He knows!”
Dad asked and his parents confirmed what the guide had said. They told him about their relatives who were killed in the concentration camps. Dad’s grandparents, the aunts he’d never known.
I try to imagine what this must have been like for Dad. To spend your whole life thinking you were one thing, only to find out you are something completely different. That everything you thought you knew—your church, your school, the food your family ate—was a carefully constructed fabrication, designed to mislead even the most casual observer. Implicit in this charade, unspoken and therefore all the more terrible, was the knowledge that the truth had killed your family.
seven
FAMILY LIFE IS DEFINED BY TRADITION. Degan and I are slapdash: We fall into bed at different times. We eat our dinner on the run. Come Friday, though, we slow things down. Years ago, we agreed to a day each weekend when we would turn off the phone, turn off the Internet and relax into each other’s company. It’s a ritual we call, our tongues firmly in our cheeks, “24 Hours Unplugged.”
There’s always a moment of panic after pulling the plug, a huge chasm yawning in front of us. But we have learned how important it is to do it anyways.
This Friday it feels especially needed. The week has been crazy, Degan adjusting to his new job, me ticking my way through the tasks of adjusting to a new city: finding the closest gym, the closest post office; figuring out where to buy dish soap. As dusk falls, we put our cells away. We turn off our computers, the frenzied screens falling peaceful like the faces of sleeping children. We cook slowly, and eat together in the strange and fertile silence. After dinner we retreat to the couch, where we sit on opposite ends, our feet touching lightly in the middle.
I’ve been waiting all week for the chance to get to the reading that has been assigned for Doing Jewish, from Anita Diamant’s Living a Jewish Life. Now I pull out the book. I turn it over in my hands like a talisman, savouring its unbroken spine. I read the blurbs on the back and the dedication on the opening page. I flip to the Contents page: the first chapter I’ve been assigned is about Shabbat, the Jewish day of rest.
A Jewish day of rest?
I read, for the first time, about the day of study and prayer that is the cornerstone of all Jewish life. Every Friday evening, Jews around the world light candles, recite blessings and rejoice in a taste of the world to come. In the modern world, a crucial part of the ritual is turning off technology.
I look over at my phone, as inert as a stone; at the clean kitchen, dishes gleaming, and the actual fire Degan has kindled in the hearth.
“Hey, babe,” I say.
He glances up from his own book.
“Listen to this.” I read him the description, and a slow smile spreads across his face. “Yup—‘24 Hours Unplugged,’ ” he says. “The Jews have been spying on us.”
“I know.”
“For centuries.”
“Copycats.”
He laughs.
“Isn’t it bizarre?” I say. “It’s like we invented something out of my ancestors’ tradition. I mean, how does that happen? What are the chances?”
“Do you think you’d heard about Shabbat and forgotten? That you suggested ‘24 Hours Unplugged’ based on something someone told you?”
I shake my head. “I’ve never heard of Shabbat before right now.”
“Maybe Jordan?” Degan knows the story of my outing on the playground.
“Nope. Really.”
“Weird,” he says.
He lowers his face to his reading, but I’m too excited to stop. “It’s almost like a genetic memory,” I say. “Like my cells were remembering something my consciousness had been told to forget.”
Degan is silent.
“Right?”
“Yeah,” he says. “Sure.”
From behind him comes the steady tick of the clock on the stove.
“I mean, the ritual we have ‘invented’ (I make quotes in the air with my fingers) constitutes, point for point, a secular version of Shabbat. We rest, we eat, we make love.” I clear my throat. “We watch videos, which is like our version of praying.”
He laughs again.
“In a way, we’re living as Jews,” I say.
“I know,” Degan says. “I get it. It’s cool.”
I can see he wants to get back to his book and I let the subject drop, but I feel an overpowering urge to tell someone who would fully understand the implications. Someone Jewish. But who? Jordan lives on the other side of the country. My father hardly counts. What about Eli, his dinner invitation? I think back to a scene in his book where he goes away to reflect on his Hasidic upbringing. His girlfriend telephones him again and again. Again and again he ignores her calls.
He sounds like an asshole, I think. But he is also undeniably compelling.
Eli and I agree to meet up at a restaurant called Utopia on College Street. It’s a Tuesday evening in the full blush of autumn, the maple trees showing off their prettiest dresses. I lock my bike and see him right away on the busy sidewalk, a head taller than anyone else, moving toward the intersection. His bright orange sweater matches the fall leaves. He hasn’t spotted me, and I walk for a minute beside him in the crowd, bump my shoulder lightly against his. He pulls away instinctively, and then sees it’s me who has nudged him. “Oh!” He laughs, “You scared me!”
We go inside, joking, already comfortable.
The restaurant is almost as noisy as the street, and packed wi
th young hipsters sporting plaid shirts and tattoos. I go downstairs to the bathroom; on my way back to the table, I see Eli surreptitiously mussing his hair.
I order a lamb burger, sweet potato fries and a beer.
“I’ll have the same,” Eli tells the waitress. “But no beer.”
I raise my eyebrows.
“Allergic.”
I realize I know nothing whatsoever about this person.
Soon, though, we find we have many things in common. We skip the small talk and launch into a heated conversation about the writing life, about the loneliness at the heart of the true creative enterprise. We talk about the relentless desire to write something good, something perfect, and the inevitable accompanying disappointment. There are so many books in the world. Why add another unless it’s special?
I gesture at the spine of a novel poking out of his bag. “For example,” I say, “that one.”
“You didn’t like it?”
“Not really.”
“Why not?”
I squint. “Well, for one thing, the women weren’t complex enough.”
He eyes me thoughtfully. “Are you married?” he asks finally.
He’s the kind of man, I see, who isn’t afraid to take what he wants. Our emails have flirted around this subject, but now that he’s got me in person he can address it head-on.
“No, not married.” I stop with a french fry halfway to my mouth. I haven’t told Degan where I am tonight, who I’m meeting. I wait to hear myself say, “Engaged,” but no sound comes out of my mouth. I find myself twisting my ring around my finger so the diamond doesn’t show.
Eli wears a ring, too. I don’t inquire.
“So,” I say, instead. “I really did like your book. I wasn’t just being nice.”
