by Alison Pick
AT THE END OF NOVEMBER, my cousin Lucy stops through Toronto. She’s the eldest of the four Pick granddaughters, a senior lecturer in the history of Christianity, in the divinity school at a big American college. She’s also a world-class authority on Spanish medieval Jews. Luce takes me out to a French bistro on the nicer end of St. Clair. I order a spinach salad; she orders the duck confit poutine. While we’re waiting for our food to arrive, I explain the pain I’m experiencing, the visceral desire to reclaim what’s been lost.
“I’m thinking about it all the time,” I say.
“I understand,” she says. “I went through something similar.”
From across the restaurant we hear another patron: “He’ll never learn that Torah portion.”
We both laugh. I look at Lucy across the table, taking in her freckles, her hazel eyes. How she looks like me, how we both look like our great-grandmother Marianne. “I’m taking a class,” I say. And then, on a whim: “I’m thinking of converting.”
Her eyebrows go up. It’s not judgment or disapproval, just curiosity.
“What would it involve?”
“The class. And then the beit din—”
She nods to show she knows the term.
“Would you have to go in the mikvah?” she asks, referring to the Jewish ritual bath.
“Yep.”
The waitress places our orders in front of us. Lucy has ordered well as usual. She prods her poutine with the tines of her fork.
“Granny had to go in the mikvah before she married Gumper. Because she’d been baptized.” She takes a bite. “Granny hated the mikvah,” she says. “She felt it implied that she was unclean.”
“She told you that?”
“She did.”
“Don’t all Jewish women immerse before getting married?”
“Ones who practise, sure. But Granny never practised. I mean, she was baptized! So the mikvah would have been a requirement from the rabbi. Who Gumper’s family would have furnished.”
“Because Gumper’s family was more observant?”
I know the answer, but I defer to Lucy’s authority. She had a decade of adult conversations with our grandparents while I was still a little girl.
“Yes,” she says. She lifts a french fry from the mess of duck and gravy, and chews, her face softening. “Gumper was always so sad at Christmas.”
I cast my mind back but can’t access any memories of Gumper at Christmas, only the kind of recollection that comes from seeing a photograph again and again. The shot that keeps appearing in my mind’s eye now is of Gumper on Christmas morning. He’s unwrapping a novelty licence plate, the type you might see on the back of a red convertible, inscribed with the French words J’aime ta femme.
“I love your wife.”
Who would have given him such a gift?
There’s a rumour in our family that Granny had an affair. Several affairs. Dad remembers Gumper taking off his shoe and hurling it across the room at his wife. But in the Christmas photo, Gumper’s head is tilted back, his mouth wide open as he laughs.
“It’s Gumper who makes me want Judaism back,” I say. “Thinking of what he went through, what he lost.”
“He hated Christmas,” Lucy says. “The whole big show.”
Not if I was the last Jew on earth.
I put my fork down; it makes a small chiming noise against my plate.
“Maybe I’ll convert,” I say, as though thinking of the idea for the first time.
Lucy asks, “What does Degan think?”
I shrug. “He’s supportive.”
She smiles. Says, “The only way to really get it back would be to marry a Jew.”
Eli’s name pops up on my computer screen. It’s a Friday afternoon, the autumn light waning outside my study window, the Sabbath coming slowly closer, a steamship filling more and more of the horizon. He writes, “Do you want to have coffee?”
“Sure,” I answer. “Let’s.”
We have a subtle power struggle over where we will meet, who will be the one to travel across Toronto. I’m the one who ends up taking the bus south, and then the subway east to the Danforth. I sit on the bench outside the Big Carrot, where Eli is picking up some groceries.
My phone vibrates in my pocket. “I’m inside,” he says.
I see him before he sees me, in front of the dairy fridge, the bushy hair, the wool sweater. He’s not classically handsome, not exactly, but my body responds with sweat, an uptick in my heartbeat. I sidle up. “Hey.”
There is broccoli in his cart—just the crown—and rye bread. Almond butter, organic yogourt. The contents of his shopping cart look exactly like mine.
Eli turns to me and grins, puts a hand casually on my shoulder. “Well,” he says, “I hear you’re engaged.”
“Who told you?”
“You did. By email.”
I exhale. “I forgot.”
“Do you have a date for the wedding?”
“No,” I say. “Not yet.”
Eli is paying for his groceries, not looking me in the eye.
“And they won’t let you convert because your boyfriend isn’t Jewish?”
I nod. The cash register dings and he pockets a handful of change.
“I’ve been thinking about it,” he says. “It makes me so pissed.”
“Are you surprised?”
He shakes his head. “Unfortunately not.” He pauses, runs a hand through his messy hair. “They’re like that,” he says.
As though he isn’t one of them.
Outside in the autumn dusk, the street lights are coming on one by one. We walk down the Danforth, each carrying a bag of groceries. At Broadview we head south. The neighbourhood is affluent, the red brick houses wrapped in big front porches. Behind the gauzy curtains are domestic friezes: a man cutting onions, a small girl practising a cello. To an outsider, Eli and I would comprise another domestic scene: a couple carrying their groceries home for dinner at the end of a long week.
Eli touches my elbow. “Look.”
I follow his gaze. It’s only five o’clock, but the moon is already out. It shines, full and bright, like a fisherman’s lantern, like a little portal to infinity punched in the darkness.
Degan gets panic attacks from looking at the stars; perhaps it’s an existential fear of our human insignificance, maybe an inner ear imbalance—we’re not sure. My instinct, developed over the seven years of our relationship, is to pretend I don’t notice anything celestial. But Eli wants to give the moon its due. We stand in silence, shoulder to shoulder, availing ourselves of its exuberant beauty.
When we arrive at his house, he shows me in, shows me around. Thick, creamy carpets, antiques. I remark on the beautiful claw-foot tub in the bathroom and check my email on his laptop. I notice a framed photo on a coffee table by the window—a redhead with red lipstick and her arms thrown around Eli’s neck. “Your girlfriend?”
He nods. “She’s away for another month.”
Downstairs, he lights a fire. I watch the curl of his back as he bends over kindling and newspaper, listen for the hiss of the match. He straightens, turns to face me, wiping his palms down his thighs. “I have some nice Scotch,” he says.
“Do I look like a girl who says no to Scotch?”
We settle on the pillowy couch, talk for a while about memoir as a genre, the writer’s responsibility to the truth. There’s an onus on the writer to get the essence right, we concur. But the order of events, the dialogue—a reader should understand that any book is creative.
“I’m glad I’m working on fiction,” I say.
“Will you ever write about your family?”
“I doubt it.”
“You should.”
I tell him about my visit with Lucy, what she said about Granny and Gumper’s wedding.
The fire cracks and spits.
I sigh. “I really want to go in that tub. Like, really.”
Eli’s eyebrows rise. “Upstairs? My tub?”
I laugh. “Th
e mikvah.”
“Have a bath,” he says. “Make yourself at home.”
twelve
THE MORE MY LIFE FALLS APART, the stronger my longing for Judaism becomes. It is as though everything unmet in me, all my aloneness, has finally found a point on which to fixate. The elusive something that will make it all better shines like a new toy, the way a frosted glass beckons to a drinker.
The only thing is, I’m not sure if that’s the story I’m in—one of addiction and desperation—or if I’m in another kind of story, one with a real happy ending.
I take up the reading of conversion memoirs as a mother-to-be takes up child-rearing manuals. I read Stranger in the Midst by Nan Fink, and Turbulent Souls by Stephen Dubner, the co-author of Freakonomics, whose family background is similar to my own. He wonders, “Was it love that had inspired my return to Judaism? No, I told myself, not love … It was instinct. My noisy soul had demanded that I follow the flow of my blood.”
Yes, I think. Exactly.
La sangre llama.
“But that flow,” Dubner continues, “had now led to my father … was my embrace of Judaism nothing more than an embrace of my dead father, a glorified nostalgia trip?”
This gives me pause. I, too, have always idealized my father. Would I have such a longing for something—for anything—on my mother’s side of the family?
The details of my world feel so bittersweet I can barely stand it. I brace myself against parking meters, dollar stores, the national anthem. Degan comes in and out of the scene like a mechanical toy doll, like an image on a faraway screen with the volume turned all the way down. I am losing weight. Food makes me queasy and I have a constant case of the runs.
At least I will look good in my wedding dress.
And when I think of that train of silk and lace trailing behind me down the aisle, it seems as heavy as history itself, with only me to drag it into the present.
thirteen
MUM EMAILS: “What do you want for Christmas? What does Degan want?”
I consider. “We’ll be celebrating Hanukkah over the holiday,” I finally write. “Do you want to join us?”
Several days go by with no reply. Finally there’s a single line from Dad: “Sure, we can if you like.”
I tell Degan bluntly, “I told my parents we’re celebrating Hanukkah.”
“Of course you did,” he says. We haven’t talked about what we’ve been calling “the conversion conundrum” recently, but I know he knows how much this will mean to me.
I look at his expression. Such generosity. “Yes, let’s do Hanukkah this year,” he says.
Degan goes to work all day and listens to people’s problems. To twenty-somethings who refuse to eat, and to others who mutilate their bodies. The office politics are like a hundred-legged sea creature. He comes home to an apartment buried beneath a mountain of dirty laundry. The minute I see him I start to weep. “I’m sorry,” I say.
He hugs me.
“I had such a long day,” he says.
Degan tries to tell me about a client, a single mother, a Somali refugee he wants desperately to help, who is being screwed over by immigration. But his voice is like traffic down the parkway that splits Toronto in half, the individual words indiscernible over the general noise. Weeks go by; I am completely unable to hear anything he says about his own life. He is paying two-thirds of our rent so I can write. The least I could do is put dinner on the table. What kind of wife am I going to be? I’m a failure before I’ve even started.
I think of Granny and Gumper. At the end of the war Gumper returned to Europe. He wrote letters home to Granny, love letters, unabashed. From Prague on June 13, 1946: “I’m really longing to see you, truly I am! I see so many bad marriages here, and my constant hope is that ours will continue to be a good one. Otherwise, things always end disastrously.”
I arrive early for our next Doing Jewish class. Out in the parking lot a car alarm is screaming; the rabbi claps her hands and it stops, as though at her command. “Okay,” she says. “Let’s get started.”
She looks around at us. “Who knows which month we’re in?”
She’s appealing to the Jews who are here to support their partners in a potential conversion. They shift in their seats: the Israeli with the dreadlocks, the cluster of ball-cap wearing boyfriends.
“Tevet?” one of them guesses.
“No. Anyone else?”
Everyone in the class averts their eyes, nobody willing to risk an answer.
“Kislev,” the rabbi says finally. “The month of trust. Also the month of?”
I raise my hand. “Hanukkah?”
“Correct.”
Debra gives me the thumbs-up.
“Which,” the rabbi adds quickly, “is a very minor holiday. A holiday for children.”
I busy myself with my notebook.
“Anything else about Kislev?” she asks.
The silences blooms and bursts.
“Kislev is the dark month,” she says. “Both outside and within. As the days get shorter, our own inner darkness makes itself known.”
Rabbi Glickman invites us to close our eyes. To enter the blackness, the cold. My lids fall shut as though weighted by coins.
She begins to speak in a singsongy voice, like a yoga teacher might use in Savasana or a kindergarten teacher during story time. “Christmas is such a big light,” she says. “It’s so overpowering. We need to fortify ourselves, to push back against it, to find our own way to light the darkness. Our own Jewish way.”
Lay off my holiday, I think instinctively.
I open one eye; the rabbi is looking directly at me.
I close my eye, chastened. But in my mind’s eye my dukes are still raised.
“Now picture a menorah,” she continues in her singsongy voice. “Perhaps the special menorah you had as a child.”
I exhale, refocusing. A menorah, okay. That was the one Jewish item we did have, at Granny and Gumper’s house in Quebec. It was pushed to the very back of the highest shelf of a huge walnut cabinet Granny and Gumper managed to smuggle out of Europe. Nobody mentioned the menorah; it was never lit. And instead of eight branches, it had six.
Rabbi Glickman says, “Picture the menorah. Envision the row of unlit candles.”
I do.
“Now light a match,” she says.
I imagine striking the flint, wait for the little flame to rise, but my brain refuses the image. The rabbi is instructing the other students to light the candles one by one. I try, try again. But again my mind balks. It knows the light is a lie.
We learn that Kislev, the dark month, is also the month of dreams. Almost all the dreams that appear in the Torah occur in Kislev. Back from class, I fall into a deep sleep while the first snow falls outside my window. I dream that my cell rings. When I answer, Eli whispers in my ear. Come with me to Paris.
I know him in my dream by his Hebrew name, Moshe.
Come with me, he whispers again.
Is this the still, small voice within? Or is it a test, a temptation?
On Friday afternoon my phone buzzes in my pocket. “Let’s meet up,” Eli says.
He sounds different from the dream. Buoyant, and matter-of-fact.
There’s no discussion about who will be the one to cross Toronto.
An hour later I ring his doorbell; there’s the sound of footsteps from deep within the house. After several minutes he appears, wearing a beige cable-knit sweater. There’s a fire in the grate, and behind him our Scotch is on the table, already poured. I feel, for a moment, that I could actually step into this advertisement, which could be for booze, or J. Crew, or for some other life I’m meant to be living. Maybe this is my chance to leave my lead cloak behind forever.
Eli takes my coat, kisses me on the cheek. “How’ve you been?”
“Not great.”
“Still feeling down?”
“You could say that.”
“Well, you look good.”
He ushers me into the g
lossy magazine.
We settle beside each other on the couch. I notice that the photo of his girlfriend, the one that used to be on the coffee table, has been removed. I put my feet in their wool socks up on the ottoman.
“It’s been a long week,” I say, although of course it’s been more than a week: it’s been a month, a decade, a lifetime. Because this is the thing about depression, or one of the things that makes it so awful: you cannot, no matter the effort, remember life without it. You know, intellectually, that there have been periods of happiness. Of peace and ease. But knowing and believing are two different things.
“How’ve you been?” I ask.
“Good,” he says. “Busy polishing my dreidels.”
I smile.
“I was thinking,” he says. “My mum is having a Hanukkah party on Saturday.”
“Oh?”
I wait. Two seconds. Three.
“It might be interesting for you,” he says. “Because of what you’re exploring.”
A vision of his family home, the crystal chandelier ablaze, a long table laden with the traditional latkes and jelly doughnuts, rises up in my mind. His mother, a beautiful woman with the same olive skin as Eli, stands with a match poised over the menorah. She gestures me to her side, puts an arm close around my shoulder. She invites me to light the candles. As I do, she sings the blessing. My harmony weaves through hers, as though I’ve known this song my whole life.
“I’d love to come,” I say, jumping on the invitation before I can remember to try to sound aloof. “Thanks!”
He grins.
I pull my daybook out of my purse to mark down the date. “Just let me—” I say, flipping through the pages. Then I realize. The party falls on Degan’s birthday. We’re going to be up at the cabin.
“Oh shit,” I say. I check the date again to make certain. “No. I’ve got plans.”
“Really?” Eli says. “Can you get out of them?”
I rub my temples, digging into them with my thumbs.
“No,” I say. “I can’t.”
We’re sitting close to each other, our hands just a few inches apart. I see out of the corner of my eye that Eli has stuck his index finger out, in my direction. I instinctively do the same. The tips of our fingers touch.
