Between Gods

by Alison Pick

  I decided to go meet Vera myself, to interview her for the research paper I needed to do for the class. Predictably, perhaps, I’ve forgotten almost everything about the meeting other than the psychic exhaustion I experienced; the intense desire to know coupled with an even more intense desire to not know, to cling to the ignorance that my father had, it occurred to me then, been wise to foster.

  Only the briefest impressions of that visit remain. Vera’s apartment had a huge candle in the main room. I didn’t know then about the yahrzeit candle, a memorial candle a Jew lights on the anniversary of a loved one’s death, but I understood immediately and implicitly that this was what it was for. It was on fire around the clock, and I knew, too, that Vera thought of her lost family all the time; that the flame did not stand in for memory so much as accompany her every moment of every day in the gruelling task of never being able to forget.

  Vera was short and stooped, with gnarled knuckles and the telling blue number tattooed on her forearm. She had a suitcase of photographs of her dead children that she brought out to show me as part of our interview. It sounds implausible, all these years later, the suitcase—why would she not have put the photos in albums or in frames?—but for whatever reason, she didn’t. The suitcase was the small, compact kind meant for travelling overnight on a trip you planned to return from shortly. It held hundreds of loose photos. Vera showed them to me cautiously, wanting me to see these images of her children, to possess them even, while at the same time barely able to stand letting me hold them. This was fifty years after her children’s deaths.

  Still, she allowed me to leave that afternoon with the gift of two postcard-sized black-and-whites. In the first, Vera’s daughter, Eva, who was five when she was killed in the gas chambers at Auschwitz, smiles into the camera. The entire field is filled with her face: the chubbiest cheeks you have ever seen and a halo of wild brown curls.

  In the second photo her son, Jan—ten when he was killed—appears as a young child. He stands on a cement pier, wearing a bathing suit with straps, like something you might expect to see on a Russian weightlifter. His small tummy protrudes. His hands—the knuckles still plump with baby fat—rest on his hips. He looks sideways at the camera, the slightest of smiles on his face. The look is not quite pride, but almost—a look of confidence. He knows he is wanted; he knows the world will treat him well.

  These two framed portraits hang in my hall now. I look at them every day. I look at them, but I cannot really see them. When I try, my mind again capitulates to fiction.

  I pull out Sophie’s Choice and flip through the pages. I find the scene where the narrator must choose between her children:

  “You may keep one of your children,” he repeated. “The other one will have to go. Which one will you keep?”

  “You mean, I have to choose?”

  “You’re a Polack, not a Yid. That gives you a privilege—a choice.”

  The distance fiction provides lets me imagine the scene rather than reject it, lets me graft my own experience onto it so firmly that I am almost not surprised to come across the name of Sophie’s boy: Jan. The same as Vera’s son.

  And her daughter, Eva.

  Sophie’s children, Eva and Jan.

  Vera’s children, Eva and Jan.

  I picture Vera on the platform, faced with this impossible dilemma. I picture little Eva, with the fattest cheeks in the world. Her face, by then, would have been gaunt and pinched. And Jan, his small tummy, his unwavering trust in the world. How could you choose?

  And then I remember: Vera had no choice. Both her children are gone.

  five

  AS I WRITE MY NOVEL Far to Go, Dad embarks on his own research into our family history. We exchange a steady flow of emails each morning, me asking questions and him answering them. Soon he begins his own attempts at documenting what he learns, including the first chapter of a book recounted from the point of view of Granny and Gumper’s shared passport.

  The passport left out on a desk, its pages riffled by the wind.

  Later, Dad sends me drafts of his chapters. Accompanying the thorough research are small boxes of text, containing the fates of various relatives.

  Ella was gassed, meaning suffocated, to death on March 8, 1944, at Auschwitz. May Ella’s soul be bound in the bond of eternal life.

  And:

  May he rest in peace and not be forgotten. Alfred was murdered, at Svatobořice in 1942 at the age of 78 … those bastard Nazis.

  For my part, as I work on the novel, I am also taking a second set of notes, more personal, about my depression as it relates to our family. As I write, however, I am assailed by doubts about my own qualifications to tell this story, as though my father and my older cousins have a lease on “truth” because of their increased years. As though my dead relatives have taken the truth to the earth and my opinion is entirely irrelevant.

  A photographer from New York comes to interview me as part of a project on hidden Jews. I confess my uncertainty to her. She assures me that my version is not inferior, only different. It is mine. I counter that it is inferior precisely because it is mine—which is to say, I have learned my position in the family. I feel an oppressive, relentless psychic weight, a nagging voice that I have to somehow override each time I set pen to paper.

  Every family has its own mythology; adding a writer to the mix means that the mythology becomes externalized, that a trace of it exists physically, in the larger world. The material version—the book—accrues the sheen of truth, despite the fact that it is just one of many possible stories. Who am I to claim the official version?

  In reading William Styron’s depression memoir, Darkness Visible, and his daughter Alexandra’s Reading My Father (there is an essay by Styron’s wife, Rose, as well), you notice the divergence between the stories but also the overlap. The books act as a documented inheritance; a reader can follow the lineage directly, tracing a line from origin to output, a crude furrow in the dirt from cause to effect. Of course, William Styron is not the bona fide origin, only a juncture in the river, and his daughter recognizes as much, going back a generation further to expose what she comes to see as her grandfather’s undiagnosed depression. The decision where to begin a family story is arbitrary. There is always a previous generation to excavate, like a never-ending series of lost civilizations buried deeper and deeper in the sand.

  But a shovel only digs so deep. And a story, any story, has to start somewhere.

  six

  GRANNY AND GUMPER settled in Sherbrooke and summered in nearby North Hatley, an affluent hamlet populated in July and August by cottagers from Montreal and the American South. Granny and Gumper would eventually build their own house there and live in North Hatley permanently, but in the summer of 1945 they began by renting a cottage—belonging, as fate would have it, to the family of famed literary agent Andrew “the Jackal” Wylie. The cottage is still there; its shuttered windows, its big colonial wraparound porch overlooking Lake Massawippi. This is where Granny was sitting, her glass of rye beside her, when the telephone rang one lovely July afternoon. Sailboats dotted the water below her. The war was over. Gumper had returned to Europe to see what he could find out. He was calling from across the ocean to report on his findings.

  We don’t know what words were spoken, what information exchanged, only that after Granny hung up, the phone rang again. It was Miss Cinnamon, the county operator. She was breathless. “Mrs. Pick, Mrs. Pick. Was it okay?”

  It was the first transatlantic phone call she had ever placed.

  As I continue writing my novel, Dad finds a cache of letters from Gumper addressed to Granny in Canada during this time. The letters are in Czech. Dad sends them off to the translator and they come back one at a time. In our family, we collectively hold our breath. We are all amazed by what Lucy calls Gumper’s “schmaltzy-ness,” the way he dotes on Granny. “I look at your photo every night,” he writes, “and talk to it when I first wake up in the morning.”

  I add this line to
my novel, ascribing it to a secondary character.

  Partway through the correspondence is a document titled Report from England. Under the heading “Conditions in Czechoslovakia,” sandwiched between sentences about the efficiency of the postal service and the equal efficiency of the trains, is the blunt sentence “Unfortunately there is no trace of the Bauers and we must assume they are no longer alive.”

  “The Bauers” are Oskar and Marianne. Granny’s parents.

  “No longer alive” sounds so much safer than “dead.” So much safer than “murdered.”

  Even Dad is shocked by Gumper’s curtness. “How could he have referred to Granny’s parents’ murder in such abstract terms?”

  We are afforded a glimpse sixty years back in time, to the early days of the family strategy: Minimize. Deny.

  Freud’s seminal essay “On Mourning and Melancholia” considered the difference between the two states. In mourning, he suggests, a loss is felt consciously, keenly, whereas in some cases of melancholia, a loss has been experienced, but the analyst cannot see clearly what it was. Freud supposes that the patient, too, while beset by longing and sadness, cannot consciously perceive what it is he has lost.

  In our family we didn’t even try.

  It’s possible, of course, that Granny’s mourning process was completed years before my birth. Possible that I’m surmising, speculating about something I cannot know. My reluctance rears its head, my fear of saying the wrong thing, of saying anything at all. In this area of interpreting my family history I possess a marked lack of confidence, an uncharacteristic undermining of my own observations, so it pains me to say what appears quite obvious: that no grief process occurred; that instead of mourning there was an attempt to halt the unbearable trauma in its tracks; that the denial of Judaism was not just a tactic to adapt to the New World, with its antisemitism, but to erase the existence of the pain itself.

  When I learned our family secret—first via Auntie Sheila’s words over my head and later from Jordan on the playground—I was full of questions. Over and over I asked Dad how my grandparents could have done what they did; how, after what they’d gone through, they could have denied who they were. And I was told, over and over, that their denial of Judaism was a forward-thinking decision, one meant to buffer against future eventualities. If my grandparents weren’t Jewish, they could join the clubs they wanted to join, could socialize however they desired. Their children would be protected against prejudice both small and monumental.

  Yet I see the decision not just as forward-thinking but as reactionary. If you weren’t Jewish, Jewish history did not apply to you. If you weren’t Jewish, there was nothing to mourn.

  After reading Granny and Gumper’s correspondence, I insert a series of letters into Far to Go. The relationship of these fictional letters to the real letters from my family’s history is ambiguous, in the way that the relationship between a writer and the world she creates always is. The letters are written between various characters; major, minor, offstage.

  A writer has to understand her characters deeply in order to make them come alive. A character is a splinter off the self, sure. A shard of the author’s self, lived or unlived, repressed or desired or disdained. Still, a character is a fiction, a fabrication: she grants me the chance to avoid speaking in the first person. Characters exist in the symbolic realm, which, it does not escape me, is also the realm in which my family lived, their lives not so different from those in fiction or the lives of actors in a play. Acted with authenticity and enthusiasm, a bang-up performance, but a performance nonetheless.

  It occurs to me that this performance, and the secret it protected, has been a boon to my writing. I work at my book as though taking dictation, the novel’s symbols appearing on the page as though dug up like prehistoric weapons perfectly preserved in mud and clay. Rail as I might against my grandparents’ silence, there is something about it that helps me now, that lets the well-trod, trampled terrain of the Holocaust feel fresh. “Make it new” is Ezra Pound’s famous dictum—antisemite that he was—and I am able to make it new precisely because it is new. Not to anyone else, but to me.

  seven

  THE BOOKS EDITOR from a Toronto magazine emails to ask me to a movie. I take it as a friendly gesture—we’ve crossed paths at several book launches in the past weeks, and each time ended up talking about this particular film. But when I get to the theatre, I find him sloppy drunk. “How are you?” he breathes, reeking of his poison.

  “I’m depressed,” I answer, too tired to lie. Because of course the joy I felt in the month of Adar has faded; the sliver of black slipped back in.

  The editor leans over and grips my arm. “That makes you a good Jew.”

  The lights go down; he tries to hold my hand. I shake him off, lean forward in my seat with my arms hanging over the empty chair in front of me. I bury my fingers in the popcorn. I am repulsed by his breath and his desperate eyes, and enraged by what he seems to expect. But I stay for the duration of the movie, frozen in my seat. At the end, he asks about the book I’m working on. This, I realize, has been the purpose of the exercise, his end of a transaction that I haven’t let myself be conscious of. He wants to spend time with me; I want a review in his magazine. I’m disgusted with myself, and too ashamed and angry to make the pitch.

  “It’s about the Holocaust,” I say with a sigh, which is exactly what I’ve vowed not to say, having internalized the idea that people are sick of the topic, that the last thing we need is another book on that.

  “I grew up with the Holocaust,” the editor says. “My father’s parents came from a family of Polish Jews who all died.”

  The editor becomes immediately interesting to me again, his transgression entirely forgiven. I see every Jew, every survivor, as a potential saviour, thinking they might know something I don’t, might be the one with the piece of information that allows me to understand the nightmare.

  I try to engage him in a conversation about his history. “I don’t want to talk about it,” he says.

  Degan gets home from work and we drive up to the synagogue for our class, listening to Paul Simon singing, “I’ve reason to believe / We all will be received / In Graceland.” We jam ourselves into the tiny desks and start in on our lesson. We learn that a new vowel, vaguely similar to the English o, can appear with or without a line beneath the dot, although the rule to distinguish the scenarios remains unclear to us. Krista, the baby, has the best pronunciation in the class, babbling out the new vocabulary from her sling on Diane’s chest. After the break, Harriet tells us it is “Jewish Partner’s Night” and sends the crowd of baseball caps away into an adjacent room. They will be talking about the responsibilities of being supportive to their converting partners.

  “Where’s my supportive partner?” Debra pouts.

  And I find myself wondering the same thing. Where is the person who will guide me in this process, bring me home for Shabbat, correct my Hebrew? I am the one coaching Degan on the difference between the two- and three-dot vowels as he crams in the minutes before class. I don’t judge him: he’s doing this for me; he’s giving up a night every week when he’d rather be doing a hundred other things. But I, too, would like someone to relax into.

  As a teenager, I didn’t think about marrying a Jew. Jordan would kiss anything in a skirt, but we all knew that one day he’d make a Jewish girl his bride. We listened to a lot of Moxy Früvous in high school, getting out of our car at abandoned intersections in the middle of the night to dance to “King of Spain” while the traffic light turned red, then green, then red again. We listened to Neil Young and Paul Simon. I loved the songs “America” and “American Tune,” and the opening line of “Hearts and Bones”: “One and one-half wandering Jews / Free to wander wherever they choose.” I liked the melody, and how it named me clearly. Pick, from the acronym pic, perigrinus iudei confessionis, Latin for “traveller of the Jewish faith.”

  Sometimes I would imagine I could find a Jewish boy. He would be the
one, and I the one-half. But I didn’t think about it seriously. It might happen. Or it might not.

  Suddenly, though, it again feels crucial—just as it did during my obsession with Eli. I tell Degan as much in the car on the way home. “If I were single, I would only date Jewish men,” I say, staring out the window with my arms crossed in front of my chest.

  Degan swerves out of the turning lane. “You’re kidding me, right? I go to that ridiculous class with you and this is what I get in return?”

  “You said you weren’t taking the class for me,” I retort.

  “You’re serious.”

  I’m silent.

  He slams his palm down on the horn. A minivan speeds past, the driver giving us the finger. “Fucking unbelievable,” Degan shouts.

  I see that I’ve gone too far, but it’s too late to take my words back.

  “This is about that writer, isn’t it?”

  My stomach sinks. “Which writer?” I ask. But I know full well who he’s talking about.

  “Eli Bloom.”

  “Bloomberg,” I mutter.

  “Oh! I got his name wrong! Please accept my apology.”

  I see immediately what is happening. All the long months when Eli posed a real threat, Degan had to pretend otherwise. He didn’t want to lose me. But now that the threat is gone, it’s safe for his rage to appear. I brace myself and inhale, choosing my words carefully.

  “It isn’t about him,” I say. “It has nothing to do with him. You know that.”

  “Don’t tell me what I know.”

  I swallow.

  Degan says, “He’d make a good Jewish husband, though, you have to admit.”