by Alison Pick
As soon as we are seated, Sylvie lights the candles and we make kiddush. Next is the hand-washing ritual. We move single file into the kitchen, where a special two-handled goblet has been placed beside the sink, along with a tea towel embroidered with the Hebrew blessing. The rest of the crowd speeds through the process; when it is my turn, I look to Aaron. I have just met him; we’ve exchanged maybe two hundred words. But he seems to know I need help. He recites a line of the blessing; I repeat it after him. He recites another line; I repeat that. We are looking in each other’s eyes; the call and response is like saying wedding vows. Heady and intense. I turn away from him to hide the size of my pupils.
Back at the table, the Motzi is said over both plain and whole wheat challah. Apparently there is also a difference between egg challah and water challah; one tastes better but leaves more crumbs. Aaron says to the assembly, although I get the sense it’s for my benefit, “There is a blessing for everything. If you were really religious, you would do nothing all day but say blessings.”
“For example?” I ask.
“There is a blessing for going to the bathroom, to thank God for giving you a body that works.”
The Hamburger King, a small man with watery eyes, says, “No small thing! A body that works!”
Aaron scoffs. “You don’t say it? The bathroom blessing?”
“I do. At least once a day.”
“Are you kidding?” Aaron asks. “Really?”
I can see that Aaron doesn’t like being caught out as deficient in terms of his observance.
I sit with my tongue thick in my mouth while words fly like coloured ribbons snapped high over my head. Half the guests are American, and talk turns to the American primaries, Obama versus Hillary Clinton. “Would the American people ever vote in a black president?” someone asks.
And someone else answers, “No. If Obama gets the Democrats, then John McCain will take the presidency.”
The son of the Hamburger King, it is revealed, once went on a date with Monica Lewinsky.
The meal starts with bowls of clear chicken broth, a single sprig of dill suspended in the centre. We polish off the salad of walnuts and cranberries and go into the kitchen to serve ourselves for the main course. A Filipina maid is loading the dishwasher. This would be considered forbidden work for a Jew on the Sabbath, but it’s okay for a Gentile to do it in a Jewish home. I help myself to melt-in-your-mouth meat the texture of pulled pork. But of course it can’t be pork. It’s beef brisket.
Back at the table, a second maid hovers in the corner. Something about her strikes me as odd. I manage to sneak another look and then I see: she is made out of papier mâché. A life-sized, looming model of a maid.
The dummy is tilted precariously toward the table: my pupils yawn wider. I look again and could swear I see her wink. I think of Marta, the hired help I am writing about in my novel—and the woman around whom all the action turns.
As we eat, I am enticed by Sylvie—God, I love that New York accent!—to tell my story to the assembly, which elicits a deluge of name-dropping and story after story of Jews who were raised Christian. The journalist Katherine Ashenburg has written an essay about it. The cardinal of Paris, it turns out, was a Jew.
Aaron, at the head of the table, has been quiet throughout. But now he turns to me. “I’ve just come back from Israel,” he says.
I feel I am expected to give a particular response but am unsure what it is. I shift in my chair.
“I was there on a mission!” His mouth is smiling, but his eyes betray a deadly seriousness. “I’m a Zionist. Unabashed.”
“So the mission was …” My voice trails off.
“The mission was, and is, to bring lapsed Jews back to Judaism. Baal teshuvah—it literally means ‘master of return.’ Bringing secular Jews back to the religious element.”
I clear my throat. “That’s interesting.”
Aaron calls me by name—“Alison,” he says, and I sit up as though being called on at school. “Alison, I believe in the idea of a Jewish soul.” He puts his cutlery down. The table has fallen silent. “I don’t just believe it. I know it to be true.”
I want to trust this, but I don’t quite dare.
“How do you know?” I ask.
“I just do.” He looks me in the eye. “And I can see that you have one,” he says.
I draw a sharp breath. How can he tell? We’ve only just met. I’m silent, composing myself. The rest of the table falls away into political debate—I hear the names of congressmen, senators. It is just Aaron and me again, our eyes locked.
“A Jewish soul?” I say.
He nods. And this time I allow myself to believe him.
At the end of the night I give Aaron a copy of my first book, Question & Answer, which contains a series of poems about Granny’s life after the Holocaust. I’ve brought it along at his request. “Shall I sign it for you?” I ask.
“Yes, please. But not now.”
“I can just—” I dig around in my bag. “I’m sure I have a pen.” I squint; the light from the crystal chandelier is not as glaring as it was when I entered. The first hint of darkness is filtering in at the corners of my eyes.
“We’ll do it the next time we meet,” he says.
I suddenly clue in. “No writing on the Sabbath.”
He smiles. “No work of any kind.”
He has the demeanour of a joker, but I see he is serious: the chandelier is on a timer so they don’t have to turn it off manually, which would also technically count as work. I make a mental note to wait until I’m out on the street to call myself a taxi.
I thank Aaron profusely and go down into the night. The chemicals are leaving me quickly now; dread nuzzles at my neck. That familiar, silky black snout. I open my eyes wide and try to see the blinding light again, but its absence is as palpable as its fleeting presence was. As big and as empty.
When I arrive home, Degan is out, but there is a plant with a single pink blossom propped up on my keyboard, and a note: “Good Shabbos, my love.”
ten
MY MOTHER LOVES NOTHING MORE than to clip articles from the newspaper and send them to her daughters in the mail. Flood insurance, flu immunization, the dangers of eating tomatoes from a tin: they are notes of caution, dispatches of disaster narrowly averted. When I open today’s mail, I find an article about the photography exhibit at McMaster University, Roman Vishniac: A Vanished World. Its subject is Eastern European Jews in 1938 and 1939.
Mum has included a short note: “Do you want to go?”
It takes us several weeks to arrange a time that works for her, Dad and me. On the way there we stop in at Mum’s parents’ house in Hamilton. My Martin grandparents are both ninety years old, and have been married for sixty-six years. I give them a copy of my new book, The Dream World; I’ve dedicated it to them. Poetry is foreign to them, but they are pleased, I think, by the tribute.
In some ways I belong to the Martins, to our raucous and spirited family gatherings. My Martin cousins Lindsay and Heather were two of my best friends growing up. Still, as I sip tea and help Gramps with his puzzle, I wonder again about my general lack of interest—at least in terms of my own creative work—in this side of the family. It is not for lack of stories: my great-great-great-great-grandfather on the Martin side was the founder of the modern-day Humane Society. He was known as “Humanity Dick”—a nickname bestowed by his friend King George IV. Humanity Dick’s life included all manner of intrigue: political office, romantic scandals, shipwrecks. A new biography has been written about him; I have not even made the time to read it. Gramps lent me his copy and I return it now, sheepish, with nothing to say.
The Vishniac exhibition is smaller than I’d expected. The photos show Hasidic Jews, rabbis with long beards and tefillin strapped to their foreheads. The children look raggedy and hungry. Dad calls me over to a picture of a skinny man with a box of wares displayed at his feet.
“This was us.”
“What do you mean?”
“Four generations ago your Bondy ancestors were peddlers. And on the Pick side, three generations ago.”
“Really?”
He nods. “These are our genes,” he says, pointing at the photos. “The genes that make me a go-getter. Proactive, resourceful, successful.”
Perhaps because of the secrecy he grew up with, Dad is acutely attuned to antisemitism, to any sort of stereotype or generalization about his people. Now, though, he says, “If you want to talk about race, well, each race develops traits. The Jews were cheap—because they had to be!”
Uneasy with this line of thinking, I change the topic. “Do you think it would have been important to Gumper to marry a Jew?” I ask.
“Why do you ask?”
“No reason.”
“Yes,” Dad says. “Of course.”
I hear Mum behind us, facing one of the photos, humming the same three notes in rapid succession.
“And you, his son? Did Gumper want you to marry a Jew?”
“Of course not!”
So I’m not wrong in being a little confused.
“And he wouldn’t have wanted you to get married under a chuppah,” Dad says. He pauses. “And neither do I. If you want my opinion.”
I swallow. Digging around in my bag, I pull out a book I have recently read, a graphic memoir called I Was a Child of Holocaust Survivors by Bernice Eisenstein. I show Dad the opening quote, from Deuteronomy. “It’s powerful, isn’t it?” I ask.
He reads the quote aloud: “ ‘Only guard yourself and guard your soul carefully, lest you forget the things your eyes saw, and lest these things depart your heart all the days of your life, and you shall make them known to your children, and your children’s children.’ ”
I watch his face: it’s slack. I notice that his hair, which I used to think of as grey, has now turned predominantly white.
“So?” I prompt.
“It’s powerful,” he concedes. “But I don’t see what it has to do with me.”
I take a deep breath. The connection is so obvious that I’m at a loss even to articulate it. I venture, “I don’t quite buy Gumper’s transformation. Is it possible for anyone to change so deeply? How could the man who said he wouldn’t convert if he were the last Jew on earth suddenly make such a radical shift?”
“The historical context was powerful,” Dad says.
“Yes. But there must have been a part of him that longed, a little part, well hidden away.”
But Dad won’t give an inch.
eleven
I CONSIDER THAT I AM WRONG. Maybe none of this applies to me, to us, at all; maybe I’m a dog barking at imaginary squirrels. I know how to check. Back at home, I pull out the tape of Gumper’s cousin Vera; she was interviewed for Steven Spielberg’s Shoah Project, a massive documentation of most of those still alive who lived through the Holocaust. I’ve had a copy of the tape for years but have been unable to bring myself to watch it. But now is the time. I’m finally ready.
I prop myself up in bed with Degan’s laptop and slide in the disk. The opening shot is Vera’s enormous, gnarled hand, the knuckles I remember from when I first visited her, holding a piece of cardboard with her name written on it. Vera Feldman. The camera pans up to her face. Grey curls, lipstick, round eyeglasses. There is something childlike in her awareness of the viewer; she sits up straight, tentative but smiling. Heartbreaking in her willingness.
She tells the interviewer slowly about her privileged girlhood. Her house in Malá Skalice had a bowling alley, a tennis court. I know from her daughter-in-law that Vera once owned “a suit to match her racing car.” Imagine.
She tells the camera haltingly that there were only two Jewish families in Skalice; they went to nearby Náchod for the High Holidays. Her grandfather was religious “in his own way.” There was no Jewish community where she lived, but Jacob, who was Gumper’s grandfather, too, taught her what she needed to know.
As the subject of the 1930s comes up, Vera bites her lip, tears up.
“In May of 1933 my son, Jan, was born,” she says.
Jan—or John, in English—was also Gumper’s name. She looks back at the camera and continues. “In 1938 my daughter, Eva, was born.”
A pause to let the date sink in.
“Jews from Germany started coming to our town in ’33, ’34, ’35,” Vera says. “They told horrible stories.”
“Did you believe them?” the interviewer asks.
“Yes!”
But then Vera tempers her answer. “We helped, we gave money, but part of us did not want to believe.”
“And did you believe the same thing could happen in Czechoslovakia?”
Vera inhales, aghast. “No,” she replies, as though she has been asked whether she believes in the Tooth Fairy.
Vera describes the slow deterioration of Jewish rights. First they could have no servants. Then there was a curfew.
They had to give up their radio.
They were forbidden from owning a dog.
Eventually the Nazis took Vera’s husband. He was gone several months. When he returned, he had lost thirty kilos. He had been beaten so badly that both his eardrums were broken.
“Then,” Vera says, “on September 17, 1942 we were taken away from our children.”
The unseen interviewer does not extend condolences. There are no soothing sounds, no murmurs of empathy. The goal of the project is just to get every fact down.
They were removed to an internment camp in Moravia, Vera says. The interviewer makes her stop and spell the name of the camp, which she does ploddingly, mechanically. She and her husband could have been anywhere; the important point was that little Jan and Eva were not with them. Vera and her husband were housed in a stable; there was nothing to eat. The beatings were awful. They were with her parents; her father was diabetic.
Vera tears up as she says this. I hold my breath.
“They took away his insulin,” she tells the camera, weeping. “They beat him. They took away his insulin and beat him.”
Daddy.
“He couldn’t stand it. He died.” Tears running down her face. “It was the eighth of November. I was with him. After the war I tried to find out what happened to the commander. Tunz was his name. I hoped he’d died, but all the Nazis fled. Maybe he’s living here,” she says, hopeless, gesturing around herself to refer to her apartment building, the state of New York, the whole country.
I pause the video and email my cousin Lucy. She writes back right away, saying that the Central Database of Shoah Victims’ Names has a file on Hermann Bondy: “beaten and starved to death. D. Nov. 8, 1942, age 66.”
Hermann was married to Ella Kafka.
Yes, that Kafka. Vera’s mother, Ella, was Franz Kafka’s cousin.
When I press Play again, Vera is talking about the literary legend. He used to stay in his room whenever anyone visited, so nobody ever got to talk to him. And Vera remembers going to his funeral and crying because his mother looked like a witch.
Later, Vera and her husband were sent to Theresienstadt, a fortress town that was just a stop on the way to Auschwitz for most Czech Jews. They arrived there in December of 1942.
The interviewer asks about how they got there: did they have to walk?
“Yes, yes,” Vera says, impatient, but the only thing that mattered was that they got to be with their children.
There was very little food, of course. Some of the Czech gendarmes helped to smuggle in supplies. Vera had a mysterious high fever. Finally it was discovered she had three broken ribs from being so badly beaten in the previous camp.
Vera’s husband was put in a military barrack. The overcrowding made everyone sick. Gumper’s best friend dubbed the general sickness “the Terezinka,” but Vera knows the individual diagnoses of the ailments her family suffered from and tells the camera. Her husband caught infectious hepatitis. Little Eva caught scarlet fever. Jan got pneumonia.
They did not die from these conditions—although that might have b
een preferable to what came later.
twelve
THE FOLLOWING DAY Dad has a meeting with an old client in Toronto and we decide to have lunch. I wait for him at the Second Cup inside the Jewish Community Centre at Bloor and Spadina. He arrives twenty minutes late, the collar of his long down coat caught awkwardly under the strap of his backpack. “I went to the wrong Second Cup,” he shouts.
I put a finger to my lips to show he should lower his voice.
“I had to get out my computer and look at your email again,” he continues, still shouting. “If you want some good people-watching, go to the Second Cup across the street!”
He tries to take off his backpack, but his arm gets caught. “There was a man,” he yells, as I help him untangle the strap, “a man with a big beard and dirt on his face. But he was wearing a suit and tie!”
“A homeless man?” I ask.
Dad nods. “He looked really neat!”
I know he is thinking of our ancestors, the peddlers.
We walk along Bloor Street to the restaurant in companionable silence. A car swooshes past, throwing up a spray of slush. I pause, squint into the bright winter sun, shielding my face with my eyes. When we pass the other Second Cup, Dad cranes his neck. I know he’s looking for his homeless man.
“I brought you that book,” I say. “Remember the one I told you about?”
“No,” he says.
“I Was a Child of Holocaust Survivors. With that beautiful Deuteronomy quote, about teaching your children.”
“Oh,” he says. “No, thanks.”
I swallow.
“Why don’t you want to read it?” I ask, unable to drop the subject.
“It has nothing to do with me,” he says.
There’s a roar as a snowplow passes; this time we step sideways and dodge the slush. The bright sun glints off the plow’s mirror, throwing out a rainbow prism. A skinny teenager dekes around us, hands in his jean-jacket pockets, his music playing so loudly we can hear the thunk of the bass from his ear buds.
