Between Gods

by Alison Pick

  “Thanks,” he says. “Are you Jewish?”

  “Why?”

  He shrugs. “Jews react to it differently.”

  “Half,” I say. “But I grew up thinking I was Christian.” I explain, and tell him about my recent discovery, that I’ve been making Shabbat for several years without knowing it.

  “What do you mean?”

  “I mean a day of rest. Turning off the phones and computers. Everything.”

  “Are you serious?”

  “Yeah.”

  “That’s amazing.”

  “Isn’t it?”

  His eyes are wide. I continue, emboldened. “Until a month ago I knew nothing about Judaism at all. But everything I learn feels so comfortable, so familiar.”

  He nods. “You’re recognizing who you are. Realizing what you’ve always been. You just didn’t know it until now.”

  “Yes.”

  “It’s a big thing you’re going through,” Eli says. “It’s huge.”

  It’s a simple, even obvious statement, but Eli is the first person to reflect this back to me. Something lights up in my chest: I’ve been seen. Later I will understand the power in this, the psyche’s desperate lunge toward an acknowledgement that has been withheld for so long in my family. But for now I’m just grateful.

  “That’s it,” I say. “You’re right.” I take a big swallow of beer and force myself to look at his ring. “And your girlfriend? The one in the book. Are you still together?” I think of how she called him and he refused to pick up, and of how frustrated I felt on her behalf.

  “I’m with someone else now,” he says.

  “You dumped her?”

  “Something like that.”

  “And your new girlfriend?”

  “She’s away for a couple months.”

  “Is she Jewish?”

  “Nope.”

  “Does it matter to you?”

  “You ask a lot of questions.”

  I flush.

  “I’m just teasing,” he says, and reaches across the table to squeeze my shoulder. He chews, considering. “No,” he says. “It doesn’t matter to me right now.” He pauses. “But at some point it will. I’d like to raise my children as Jews.”

  We look at each other. I can almost see the joint thought bubble in the air over our heads, the cartoon sketch of the brood of Jewish children we could produce together.

  What a relief it would be having a partner who could serve as my personal guide to my ancestors’ tradition.

  After dinner we walk in the Annex arm in arm, like a couple from an earlier century, like we’ve known each other for years. We stroll along the leafy avenues, turn down an alley lined with back doors, the secret selves the houses don’t show. I have the feeling there’s something Eli wants to tell me. Several times he starts and then stops. Finally he turns to me. “I’m leaving in January,” he says.

  There’s a thud in my gut. “Oh?”

  Up on College Street we hear a woman yell, “José! Get back here! You little idiot!”

  “For a six-month writing residency,” Eli says.

  I don’t need to ask where. I know with complete certainty that he’s about to say “Paris,” and when he does, he sees the look on my face and peers at me, puzzled. “What?” he asks.

  “In the Latin Quarter, right?”

  “How did you know?”

  “I applied.”

  “You’re not?”

  “They took me. But I decided not to go.”

  Eli has expressive features, but a look crosses his face now that I can’t quite read. Relief, or disappointment. “That’s weird,” he says. “That we’d apply to the same place.”

  I nod. “At the same time. And both be accepted.”

  “Why did you turn it down?”

  I think back. “I’m not sure. It didn’t feel right.”

  He screws up his nose. “Weird,” he says again.

  Eventually we find ourselves back on College Street, lit up like a carnival at night.

  “Toronto is so busy,” I say. “I’m overwhelmed.”

  “It’s a good city.”

  “But it’s so big. Nobody knows their neighbours. You have to make plans to see anyone.”

  “We made plans,” he points out.

  We have reached our bikes. Identical blue milk crates strapped on as baskets. We kiss briefly on the lips, the hip citykids’ kiss.

  I watch him bike away.

  Just a little crush, I tell myself. No cause for concern.

  But as I cycle home, I notice the leaves are falling. The days are getting darker. I am crying all the time. And Degan feels far away, like a tiny boat far out on the sea.

  eight

  I SPEND THE FOLLOWING MORNING at my desk, researching therapists. I’ve come to recognize the signs that I’m going to need one. I’ve left it later than I should have, though, and the Googling, the calling and speaking to candidates, the locating of their various practices on a map of the enormous city takes a lot of energy. Still, I am determined to find the right person. Somebody—as Dad would say—good. There is a woman named Eileen who lives close to our new apartment, but my psyche demands something even more subterranean, and I settle eventually on Charlotte, whose office I get to by subway, taking a long, steep escalator down, down, into the series of tunnels that run beneath the city, before emerging again, north, in the sunshine.

  Charlotte is a proper British lady of indeterminate age, with a pin skewering the bun on the back of her head and stockings under her sandals. Her office is decked out in full Jungian regalia, with a sand table and a mandala on the wall. She sits in a rocking chair; where Ben would nod or murmur, Charlotte rocks.

  Me: “I feel so awful.”

  Her: Rock, rock.

  Me: “I can hardly get out of bed in the morning.”

  Her: More rocking.

  She asks me what else is going on in my life. I tell her about our recent move, about my newfound attraction to Judaism. Unlike Ben, she alights on my Holocaust history immediately, questioning me about it in detail. “Your relatives died in Auschwitz?”

  I nod.

  “Is there a way you remember them in your family? With a yahrzeit, maybe?”

  “With a … pardon?”

  She explains about the memorial candle lit on the anniversary of a death. I shake my head: no.

  “Why do you think you’re so suddenly drawn to Judaism?”

  I tell her how I identify with Dad’s side of the family. I’ve always been a Pick. I do share some of my mother’s qualities: her particular brand of remoteness, her fixation with maintaining a good appearance. I love, as she does, to go to an early movie or crawl into bed in the evening and read. But my personality traits are all from my father. I’m dramatic by nature, and don’t care much what people think of me. Prone to bursts of vigorous activity followed by long inert spells of brooding. If you put me beside my Martin cousins, nobody would think we were related; whereas my Pick cousins could be my sisters.

  This Pick resemblance goes back several generations. We four granddaughters are sturdy brunettes with an uncanny likeness to our great-grandmother Marianne, the one who was killed in Auschwitz.

  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 st
art?” 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

  ON 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.”