by Alison Pick
I don’t push my luck by asking what those reasons might be, although I know it is some combination of his desire to support me, and his intellectual curiosity. Degan’s brain is insatiable; he can get interested in anything.
He can also lose interest just as quickly.
“Sign us up,” he says.
“Are you sure?”
“I said I’d take it!”
I recant. “Okay! Great! I’ll call the rabbi.”
On the fifth day of Hanukkah, a bright sunny morning in Tevet, Degan and I go to meet Rabbi Klein. “What do you want me to say to her?” Degan asks as we pull into the synagogue parking lot.
“Just be yourself. You’ll be great.”
Truthfully, though, I’m as nervous as a teenager bringing home a first boyfriend. I feel a desperate desire for everyone to show their best side, to end up, against the odds, liking each other.
In the front foyer of the synagogue is a swarm of mothers dropping their toddlers off at the preschool. They are all Jewish, I think. The children, their parents. And then I feel a strange, undeniable relief. I don’t need to hide.
We climb the spiral staircase under the domed ceiling, past the row of framed portraits of rabbis. It’s been months since I’ve seen the lovely Rabbi Klein. Her dark curls spill over her shoulders like those of a Greek goddess, or a woman in a Pantene commercial. “Chag Sameach,” she says.
“To you, too,” I say. “This is Degan.”
They smile and shake hands, and we seat ourselves in the two red armchairs across from her. After a bit of small talk, the rabbi turns her attention to Degan. “Tell me about yourself,” she says.
“Sure. Uh, where should I start?”
“Did you grow up in a religious home?”
“Anti-religious, more like it.”
“How so?”
“My mother was raised Catholic, but the brutal, abusive version. She spent my childhood teaching me to avoid religion. Socialism was her god. And charity. So tzedakah is very familiar.”
The rabbi gives a nod of acknowledgement at Degan’s correct use of the Hebrew term. He’s been reading up. Or perhaps he already knew the expression. He often surprises me with his breadth of knowledge. He couldn’t fix a toaster to save his life, but he knows the intricacies of the stock exchange, the relationships among all the pre-Socratics, the play-by-play of the Battle of Britain.
“I’ve been a spiritual seeker all my life,” Degan is telling Rabbi Klein. “In my teenage years, I would sneak off to church without telling my mother. I loved it. The community, the quiet reverence. For me, spirituality is a crucial part of our human existence. And church was where I first found that.”
I worry that he is going a little heavy on church, which he hasn’t attended in a decade, but who am I to say? The whole charade is so ironic. We are performing an identity of people with spiritual sides, with aptitudes or readiness for Judaism. We’re trying to make ourselves appear good enough, Jewish enough. According to the Nazis, I would already be Jewish two times over. Debra has emailed me a quote from the book None Is Too Many, its title taken from the Canadian government’s immigration policy during the Second World War. Under a Nazi decree in Germany in 1933, anyone with as much as one Jewish grandparent was legally defined as a Jew.
One.
My family history for the past three generations has been a long performance of Christianity. Now it seems we will have to enact the opposite performance. In order to be accepted, we will have to perform a Jewish identity in much the same way my grandparents performed a Christian one.
Rabbi Klein says to Degan, “Sorry if this seems like a silly question, but I just want to be sure. You want to take the class? The JIC?”
He nods. “I’m up for it.” He touches his glasses where they rest on the bridge of his nose. “Although I’m nervous about how much there is to learn.”
She gathers her long curls, holds them for a moment next to her neck. “The learning is the easy part,” she says. “Especially for someone as smart as you obviously are.” She lets her hair go. “It’s the identity reconstruction that’s harder.”
I draw in my breath sharply. Degan’s right arm is pressed up against my own; I feel his muscles tighten. Identity reconstruction? It’s like something out of Ray Bradbury, George Orwell.
“Of course, there’s no pressure,” she says. “Some people convert right after the class. For others it’s a much longer process. This is a happy story. Please know I’m with you regardless of the outcome.”
“I won’t be converting,” Degan says. “I’m just supporting Alie.”
The rabbi smiles knowingly but doesn’t say anything. Then, as we move to get our things, she asks, “How is Hanukkah going?”
“Good.” I nod. “We’re fumbling along.”
As I’m zipping my coat, I tell her about the visceral fear of putting the menorah in the window, how the fear turned to excitement and back to fear on the edge of a dime.
“Yes, I can imagine. That sounds intense.”
She hands Degan his bag and picks up the synagogue’s monthly bulletin, then leafs through it randomly, telling us about everything going on. Hebrew classes. Torah study. Then, all at once, she says, “Oh! You know Eli Bloomberg!”
I freeze with a hand halfway into my leather glove, trying to remember how she knows this. I give as small a nod as possible in acknowledgement.
“He’s reading here in January,” she says. “You know he wrote this great book about his Hasidic upbringing and what happened when he began to question it?” She searches my face for a reaction. “You do know him, right?”
Degan has turned his back and is busying himself with his scarf.
I point to the opposing page in the bulletin. “And what’s this? Shabbat Nation?”
She searches my face, then plays along.
“It’s a Shabbat service for people in their twenties and thirties. You should go. I think you’d love it.” She doesn’t know exactly how she’s blundered, but she looks as relieved as we are to change the subject.
One person’s certainty makes room for another’s reluctance. This is true of dynamics within a relationship, and true of the existence of the relationship itself. Degan’s ambivalence about conversion lets me be the one to hold the certainty. I can be sure precisely because he isn’t.
If I were with Eli, a born Jew, he would hold the strength around identity. What would have room to rise up in my psyche then? Fond reminiscences of Sunday school? Family memories from Christmas? A reverence for the elegance of the Holy Trinity as a symbol?
Am I denying myself the love of what’s already mine?
I am writing a novel about a Jewish boy who is baptized. Meanwhile, I find myself going in the other direction. We Picks are like a swing. Forward, then back. Joining a group, leaving it for another. It is the stuff over which wars are waged, over which civilizations rise and fall.
And I’m not the only one practised in shape-shifting. Driving home, Degan and I debrief our meeting with the rabbi. “I felt so uncomfortable,” he says.
“You did?”
“Like it was all a big show.”
“You seemed so present. So interested.”
He shrugs. “I do that for a living.”
sixteen
I CONSTRUCT AN ELABORATE FANTASY in which I attend shul with Eli’s family. His mother invites me back to dinner after the service, and from then on I have a standing invitation, a place to make Shabbat every week.
The only way to get it back would be to marry a Jew.
Small hitch: I still have not yet met Eli’s mother.
Second small hitch: I have only a few weeks in which to meet her before Eli leaves for Paris.
I call him on Thursday to ask if he wants to go to synagogue with me the following night. He doesn’t pick up. On Friday, I wait at home, too depressed to face the service alone. Degan has to work late. Eli doesn’t answer my call all weekend. On Monday, his message is a string of excuses: his ph
one died; he didn’t have a charger.
He pauses. “I went to yoga. And then …” More silence. “And then I was tired,” he says.
When Granny died, she left an extensive will, her substantial assets distributed carefully among her progeny. Still, there were riches remaining, jewellery and clothes, and we four granddaughters were invited to divide those belongings among us. The cashmere stoles, the bracelets. But the thing I love most is a thin white handkerchief embroidered in blue with her initial.
A for Alzbeta.
A for Alison.
I cry into its cottony folds.
There are things I used to care about: That the bills were paid on time. That we ate the kale in the crisper before buying more. I once nagged Degan about ironing his shirt before work. I remember this through a fog of incomprehension, stunned that I would have noticed such a thing, let alone felt compelled to do anything about it.
Challah = carbohydrates. I eat the whole loaf before the Sabbath arrives.
seventeen
IN THE SEVEN YEARS of our relationship I’ve always made Degan a scrapbook for Christmas, a painstakingly detailed chronicle of our adventures together over the preceding year. I save ticket stubs and receipts, photos of where we’ve travelled, and cut and paste them into the story of us that we’re writing together, that is always being written. This year I don’t make the book. I—someone who is usually prepared months in advance—don’t do anything to get ready for the holiday, have not bought a single present. I decide at the last minute to “give the gift of time” to Mum and my sister Emily, inviting them out for meals on me. I rush out and buy books for Degan and Dad. I panic secretly that I don’t have anything to give Eli, and then I remember: no yuletide gifts required for Jews.
On December 23, Degan and I drive to Sudbury to see his mother. The suburbs of Toronto slowly fall away, replaced by pine trees, and granite, and the inscrutable Canadian Shield. In Crystal Beach we stop at a Tim Hortons for coffee. There’s a long line of travellers at the counter, kids in snowsuits begging for doughnuts, everyone en route to whomever they call family. On the radio, Emmylou Harris sings a haunting rendition of “Silent Night.” Back on the highway: snow and bare spruce, an empty, gunmetal sky. Degan drives with his hand on my knee. Tears slide down my face.
Christmas is upon us. It’s not the holiday itself that I mind, but the fact of not doing Hanukkah properly, as well; of having missed out on the parties—Eli’s mother’s in particular—and skipping synagogue because I couldn’t stand to go on my own.
I imagine Gumper on Christmas morning in the years after the war, lost and bewildered among the presents.
Degan’s mother has a tiny apartment, so we stay at a cheap roadside motel. At night we lie in bed without touching. We spend two nights there, trucks rumbling past our bed, down the long highway in the darkness, and then we drive south, back to my family, to celebrate Jesus Christ’s arrival.
For potential converts to Judaism, December is the litmus test. It’s simple enough to bid adieu to the Easter Bunny, and giving up Lent is only easy irony. But the big box of Christmas, with its wrappings and trappings, its stuffing and turkey and mistletoe …
When we arrive at my parents’ house in Kitchener, Handel’s Messiah is playing on the stereo. Coloured lights and pine boughs decorate the mantel, and bowls of candy canes dot every available surface. A red poinsettia perks its ears up by the sofa. The atmosphere is so comforting, so familiar, like a favourite pair of wool socks worn until the toes are full of holes. I know that a spiced beef will be waiting in the fridge, having soaked up the flavour of cloves for the past two weeks; I know before entering that the living room is sweet with the smell of the pine tree. Degan sings along with the stereo, “ ‘And He shall reign for ever and ever!’ ”
“I guess we should ask them to turn this off,” I say half-heartedly.
“ ‘And ever!’ ” he sings.
I laugh; Degan stops humming. “I’d be sad to lose Christmas carols,” he says. His way into life is through music.
Our family’s traditional Christmas Eve dinner is a mixed grill. I pass on the pork chops. Mum, who has spent the day overexerting herself in the kitchen, asks, “Are you kosher now?”
“No. Just not that hungry.”
My sister, Emily, arrived earlier in the afternoon. She is between boyfriends, so it is just the five of us, a cluster of comfort before my mother’s larger family arrives in the morning. Over the meal, talk turns to the foundation of Christianity, the letters of Paul, who met Jesus on the road to Damascus. Degan swallows his mouthful of beef and creamed onions. The Gospels, he tells us, were written sixty or seventy years after Christ. At that time, there were other people similar to Jesus—other charismatic leaders with disciples and pedagogies—but their stories didn’t catch on the way Jesus’s did.
“You really know your Christianity,” I joke. “Must be all those years you spent sneaking out to church.”
Degan has told me he really believed. Then, all at once, his faith wore off and he abandoned it. Easy as that. It’s unnerving.
“Who wants a dividend?” Dad asks, his monetary word for a last small bite of turkey.
“I’m stuffed,” Em says.
A chorus of agreement.
Dad places his cutlery, monogrammed with his mother’s initials, parallel on his plate and pushes his chair back. “Speaking of church,” he says, “who’s coming?”
Dad’s maternal grandparents died in Auschwitz. His paternal grandmother, Ruzenka Bondy, of the yetzer tov, made it out. She came to Canada, where, as our family lore has it, she became a pillar of the United Church. She taught her grandson—Dad—that the particulars of faith matter less than having faith in general: a prayer practice, a community with whom to worship.
Dad learned from Ruzenka that faith is in the doing.
“Anyone?” he asks again. “Church?”
Mum says she is too tired and has potatoes to mash for tomorrow’s Christmas dinner. Emily doesn’t want to go, either.
“Degan?” Dad asks, appealing to the only other man in the family.
“Sorry, Thomas. I’m beat.”
Mum gets up to clear the plates.
“Alison?” Dad asks.
I pause. “Did Gumper ever go?”
Dad scrutinizes my face. “Where?”
“To church.”
“He did. To the United Church, with his mother, Ruzenka.”
“Really? Why?”
“Why what?” Dad looks mildly impatient.
“Why did he go?”
“Why do you think?”
“I don’t honestly know.”
“What’s your hunch?”
“My hunch? He went so people would think that they were Christian.”
It is ten o’clock on a snowy Christmas Eve. The dishes are cleared and coffee has been poured. The one or two cars passing by in the street make angel wings with their headlights.
“Sure,” I say finally. “I’ll come with you.”
Dad and I mount the newly shovelled stone stairs into St. John the Evangelist, the big Anglican church where I grew up, where I attended Sunday school and made crosses out of Popsicle sticks and glue. At the age of eleven, old enough to reason, to consciously make decisions, I studied for Confirmation here and committed myself to Christ’s teachings for life.
At the entrance to the sanctuary, there’s a row of mailboxes for the members’ families. I locate the Ps, then the box marked Pick. I put my hand in, feel around. From the far back corner I fish out a name tag. Alison, it reads. How long has it been sitting there, waiting to be claimed?
Although Anglican in denomination, St. John’s is Catholic in formality. The huge stained-glass windows show Christ suffering through his stations. The pews are cushioned with red velvet; the organ’s brass pipes shine. Growing up, I remember the church as a bastion of WASP pretention, but looking around I see that the congregation has changed. We find our place between a Chinese couple with a small
son and two black women who look to be sisters.
One of my fondest memories of Granny is being at church with her on Christmas Eve, when she would sing the carols in a selection of the various languages she could speak: “Silent Night” in German, “O Come, All Ye Faithful” in Latin. High above us in the balcony now, the choir opens with the English version, their voices clear, like birds calling out across water. In all my years of attending church on Christmas Eve, I have never not been overcome by this. The haunting melody has always brought me to my knees. Sure enough, shivers spread across my neck and down my arms as the words ring out: “Come and behold him, born the King of angels”—gathering us in, one and all.
The Gospel is read from the centre of the aisle. The minister gives a sermon about going to Jerusalem and being greeted not by an innkeeper, but by guards with submachine guns and the wall of barbed wire. Dad crosses himself when the priest does. In the intercession, he takes his glasses off, kneels with his eyes closed. I notice, though, that he does not repeat “Lord, hear our prayer” along with the rest of the congregation.
It’s been so long since I attended church that the words of the prayers take me by surprise: “We are not worthy so much as to gather up the crumbs under thy table.” I have forgotten this emphasis on sin, so harsh in contrast to the beautiful carols, this emphasis on the inherently wicked nature of humanity. “Grant us therefore, gracious Lord, so to eat the flesh of thy dear Son Jesus Christ, and to drink his blood, that our sinful bodies may be made clean by his body.” Judaism, I think, is more forgiving.
I lean over to Dad and tap him on the shoulder. “Did Gumper take Communion?” I whisper.
He opens his eyes. “No,” he whispers back.
“What about Granny?”
“No.”
I nod. Dad closes his eyes again. After a minute I nudge him a second time.
“Do you?” I ask.
“Yes,” he whispers back, without hesitation.
The quiet organ music filters through the church’s lofty rafters. “I take Communion because I like the tangible feeling of receiving something from God.”
