by Alison Pick
I see immediately that I have crossed a psychic boundary. Dad’s jaw tightens, and he clears his throat several times in rapid succession. “Don’t say it in Hebrew,” he says. “Gumper wouldn’t like it.”
I acquiesce and we read the prayer together in English. Dad’s face is flushed with the effort that I know he’s making for me. There’s a long silence when we finish.
“Shall we light the candle now?”
Dad shrugs. “It’s up to you,” he says.
I touch the match to the wick. The flame rises. “Would you like to say a few words about your father?”
Dad is clearing his throat with urgency now, as though afraid he will choke. “Last night I had a dream,” he finally manages. “I was hunting with Gumper. He was flushing pheasants, rattling the bushes so they would fly up into full view, but I was scared and didn’t take a shot.”
On our way to synagogue we stop at Costco to exchange a printer. In the parking lot we see several Orthodox men with black hats and beards. Dad ogles them. “This Costco is way better than the one in Kitchener! Better people-watching!”
We arrive early. “There’s a school in the synagogue?” Dad asks.
The kids are just getting out of class, and the halls are full of teachers and parents. The faint smell of peanut butter sandwiches.
I nod.
Dad says, “It’s a busy place.” He stops a teacher to ask how many members there are.
“Seven thousand?” she guesses.
“Wow. A lot more than my church.”
Downstairs in the main sanctuary he looks around, evaluating. A huge stained-glass window throws splotches of pink light over the rows of polished oak pews. I can see he likes the place. Feels at home on a gut level. There is money here, and reverence, but not the stiff formality of Catholicism.
We nod hello as people shuffle in: silk scarves, dark suits, a lone woman in a blue track suit and Nikes.
The service, held in an alcove off to the side of the sanctuary, is almost entirely in Hebrew. We sit and stand, sit and stand, understanding nothing. But then the reader begins to recite the names of the dead. We recognize the names of prominent Toronto Jews: Barbara Frum, Bora Laskin. Shivers break out along my neck and arms as the reader moves through the list. The names are listed alphabetically, and as we move into the Ps, I worry that Gumper has been forgotten. But then the reader says it, sombre and sincere: “Jan Pick. May his memory be for a blessing.”
After the service, we turn around to see Aaron and Sylvie in the pew behind us. I introduce them. Aaron and Dad shake hands, the Jew who goes to church and the Jew whose mission it is to bring lapsed Jews back into the fold. “We’re going out for dinner,” Dad says. “Would you like to join us?”
Aaron smiles. “It’s tradition to go for Chinese.”
Dad agrees. It’s settled.
At the restaurant I eat my dumplings in silence, fumbling with my chopsticks while Dad tells Aaron and Sylvie about Granny and Gumper’s arrival in Canada. “It was 1941.”
Sylvie raises her eyebrows. She asks, in her New York accent, “Did they come as farmers?
“No.”
Her eyebrows go up even farther. “Almost no one got into Canada in 1941.”
“Maybe their passports were forged,” Aaron says. “Maybe they entered as Christians.”
Dad shakes his head. “Their documents are stamped with ‘Israelite.’ ”
“Did they change their name when they arrived?”
“It was always Pick. An acronym, from the Latin, standing for ‘traveller of the Jewish faith’—perigrinus iudei confessionis.”
Aaron knows that I’m studying, that I’m hoping to convert. “This must all be a lot for you to absorb,” he says to my father.
Dad lifts a dumpling expertly to his mouth. “Not really,” he says. “I’m happy to support Alison.” He points at me with his chopsticks, as though singling me out from a crowd. “But for me it’s nothing more than curiosity. I was telling a friend about coming to the service today. As I was speaking, the feeling went out of me. I felt suddenly empty, flat. I don’t really care about the religion.”
I hear the far-off churning of a dishwasher in the restaurant’s kitchen. We are quiet. I wonder if Aaron and Sylvie are thinking what I’m thinking: that a sudden numbness signals not an absence of feeling but a deluge of it.
I come home and find the yahrzeit candle still lit. Degan is asleep, his form obscured by a pile of pillows and blankets. I move the candle to my desk, beside the SunBox, and write for a few minutes in its sadder, smaller light. There’s an email from Shayna, asking how the service went. I reply that it went well, and write to tell Rabbi Klein the same thing. She answers right away: “Good on you for making the moment happen.”
I crawl into bed beside Degan but am awake into the early hours. The yahrzeit candle’s light dances wildly on the ceiling. When I finally manage to fall asleep, I dream that it is not Gumper but Dad who has died. There is no content to the dream, no storyline, only a sea of blistering grief. I wake to the truth that one day he will leave me forever.
A wave of dread comes over me then, in the middle of the night; there is something unfinished between us, something more that needs saying.
fifteen
ON THURSDAY AFTERNOON I have an appointment with the woman who is making my wedding dress. The skirt still needs hemming, and adjustments made for the fact that my right breast turns out to be larger than my left. She tries to reassure me this is normal; I’m unconvinced. But out of the pile of silk and thread and lace, something beautiful is beginning to emerge.
Later, Dad calls to say they are talking about my poetry book on the radio. Three panellists, a whole half-hour show dedicated to The Dream World. “They’re referring to you as ‘Pick,’ ” he says, guffawing.
His voice goes serious. “Granny would have been so proud,” he says.
Granny loved nothing more than being seen, being known to the world, and I think how she would have phoned everyone she knew. We have a video of Dad and Lucy interviewing her. “Nobody ever calls me,” Granny huffs, fluffing her hair, while the phone rings off the hook in the background.
The interview is entirely different from Vera’s, focusing on the logistics of escape rather than the details of imprisonment. Granny gossips about affairs, infidelity, and chastises my grown father like he’s a child: “Your shoes are always dirty. Every time you’re here I have to use the …” She flicks her manicured fingers at the carpet, unwilling to say the words vacuum cleaner.
“I know,” Dad apologizes off-camera. “I was on the island yesterday.” He’s referring to a piece of land Gumper owned for pheasant shooting.
“It’s full of mud there. Dreadful! Look at it.”
“Okay, okay, okay,” Dad says.
“Just look at it!” she scolds.
In the interview, as in life, Granny shies away from discussing her inner experience. But there are so many things I’d like to ask her: What did she long for? How did she feel about marrying my grandfather?
Just before their wedding, Gumper’s father died. They went ahead, but his aunts all showed up dressed in black and crying. The honeymoon to the ski resort in Italy had to be called off. Granny didn’t resent the intrusion, though. She had loved Gumper’s father, too. He had shown a special interest in her, almost courting her alongside Gumper, taking her out on the town just the two of them. “Very modern,” she confides to the camera. “He wrote me poems on postcards. I wish I’d kept them.”
Granny’s lavish watch, which I will wear at my own upcoming nuptials, was made entirely of diamonds and sapphires, a gift from her father-in-law.
Degan gets home from work and we drive through the warm green evening up to the north of the city for what is called, on our course outline, the Passover “workshop.” The neighbourhood is opulent in the worst kind of way, full of houses that Granny, who had wealth and good taste in equal measure, would have called “monstrosities.” Some are built from uti
litarian concrete, with sharp points of glass or steel pointing out at odd angles. Others have enormous porches and pillars out front, as though Jews had colonized the American South. The houses inspire a rant from Degan about the meaning of tzedakah—“righteous giving”—and how inequality remains unaddressed in Jewish Toronto. We pull up to the temple, enormous and ugly in keeping with its surroundings, and cross the parking lot with a blond girl from our class. “This is the strangest place,” Degan says. “Don’t you feel like you’ve landed on the moon?”
An awkward pause follows. “This is my temple,” the girl says.
Inside, we pay five dollars, put on a name tag and enter a cavernous room that reminds me of the preaching hall in the documentary Jesus Camp. There is a young rabbi at the front, plugged into a mic so she can walk around and gesture with her hands. Our class has joined up with the Thursday-night class, and it takes all eighty of us several minutes to find our seats, eight at each round table. I look around and wave at Diane, with baby Krista asleep on her chest. Once everyone is settled and the whispering and shuffling have ceased, the rabbi, a skinny brunette with a slight overbite, beams at us. She throws her arms in the air like some Southern Baptist. “Welcome!”
The microphone squeals in protest, and a loud peal of feedback echoes through the room.
She frowns and fiddles with the wires. “Can you hear me now?” she shouts. We nod unhappily.
Satisfied, the rabbi begins in earnest. “You will SEE …” she says. “You will SEE …”
There’s a long pause, as though we are about to see the face of Adonai himself, before she completes the sentence: “You will see some FOOD items on your table.”
We look down dutifully. I notice for the first time that each table has been furnished with a Seder plate, featuring a limp sprig of parsley, an egg, an orange and several paper muffin cups filled with suspicious-looking goopy substances.
“Who can TELL me … WHO can tell me the MEANING …” the rabbi says, throwing her arms wide as though to indicate the scope of the heavens.
The meaning of what? Of life? Of death?
“WHO can tell me the meaning of the EGG?”
Total silence. I brace myself for a long and painful night, as though for a visit to the dentist.
“Nobody?” she asks, incredulous. She tries again.
“What about—” She pauses, her eyes closed, her face tilted to the heavens. “What about the green vegetable? What is the BEST green vegetable to have on your Seder plate?”
I recall how our last class with Harriet focused entirely on the fact that there is no best anything, no one correct way. All Seders are based on custom and geography. Harriet managed three straight hours reiterating this point in different ways.
At a far table someone’s hand goes up. “Horseradish?”
We hear little Krista gurgle.
“No!” the rabbi shouts, triumphant. “WHO knows why not?”
Nobody knows why not, but someone else suggests that romaine lettuce might be the best. “Yes,” the rabbi proclaims. “And do you know WHY?”
She does not wait for an answer but carefully elucidates the merits of romaine: it is sweet at first, with a bitter aftertaste, and reminds us that the Egyptians did take the Jews in at first; that the story wasn’t all bad, only the ending.
We slowly and painfully work our way through the other items on the Seder plate. The orange is to welcome women and “lesbian folk.” The pink cup is Miriam’s cup, to go along with Elijah’s, and it is filled with water as opposed to wine, for a reason that is never made clear. The exercise requires several hours. In all her endless pontificating, the rabbi says one thing that really strikes me: “For those of you on the verge of marriage and children, now is the time to learn. Now is the time to get good and COMFORTABLE, so you can give your children a sense of wonder and awe, a sense that THIS is what we DO.”
After the interminable lecture, we split into groups for the “participatory” component of the evening. One group will be talking about designing your own seder. Another group will be doing a “craft”: colouring a piece of fabric for a matzah cover using fat markers suitable for five-year-olds. Degan and I choose to attend the music session. Maybe we can take back a song for Music Night with the writers. We are ushered into a room where orange plastic chairs are arranged in a circle around a bongo drum. “Singing and dancing in Hebrew!” I whisper.
Degan shuffles his feet.
Our workshop leader enters: Rabbi Glickman. “Shalom!” she says brightly.
Krista lets out a loud squeal in reply. Tom and Diane pretend to shush her, but their faces betray delight in their daughter’s precociousness. Two Jews and a Jew-to-be. A perfect family.
We make our way through a book of songs, one for every part of the seder: Sanctifying the Name of God. Washing the Hands. Eating the Green Vegetable.
The customary song “Dayeinu”—meaning “it would have been enough”—is a long list of things God did for the Jews.
We shake the maracas Rabbi Goldstein has distributed and belt out the words in a rough approximation of Hebrew that I imagine would be incomprehensible to a native speaker. After the long lecture, it’s a blissful kind of release; people stand, and dance self-consciously, and then begin to dance in earnest. Degan shimmies toward me, his earlier mood lifted by the music, his head and shoulders tipped back. “I forgot to tell you something,” he says under the din of the singing.
“What?”
“At work last week someone told me I’m a snobby WASP on the outside, but inside I have a warm Jewish soul.”
At the end of the evening, when we’re getting our coats, Rabbi Glickman approaches us.
“How are the wedding plans going?”
I hesitate. “We’re trying to decide if we should get married under a chuppah,” I say.
She nods. “What kind of wedding are you having?”
I describe what we’ve been discussing for the ceremony.
She says, “It sounds strange. To have a Unitarian wedding when you’re on the way to becoming Jewish.
I look at Degan. Are we on the way to becoming Jewish?
“Not Unitarian,” I say. “Interfaith.”
“Interfaith how?”
“We’re not sure yet.” I decide to appeal to her authority. “What Jewish elements should we include?”
“You could get married under a chuppah,” she says right away, and then pauses. “You could get married under a chuppah. You could break a glass. But I don’t know if I would.”
“Why not?”
“You’re not Jewish. What kind of message does it send?”
“That I’m half Jewish?” I’m unable to keep the irritation from my voice. “We’re paying tribute to the multiplicity of our religious backgrounds.”
Rabbi Glickman straightens her spine, squares her shoulders, as though about to deliver a soliloquy. “Another option would be to get married now and have a Jewish wedding later. When you’re actually Jewish.”
I’m silent, but inside me a voice shouts: No—this might be our only chance.
sixteen
PESACH IS UPON US. The greatest of all Jewish holidays, and the most celebrated. After scheming and shame-filled emails and thinly disguised begging, we’ve managed to get ourselves invited to two separate tables: Jordan’s parents in Kitchener for the first night and Shayna’s parents in Peterborough for the second.
In the car on the way to my hometown Degan and I talk again about the chuppah. “I don’t think we should have one,” I say.
I expect him to put up a fight, but this time he just shrugs. “Okay.”
“I thought you were attached?”
He looks at me over his newspaper. “There are other things that are more important to me.”
It’s hard to tell whether I feel disappointment tinged with relief, or the opposite.
We leave the car at Mum and Dad’s and walk the few blocks through the leafy neighbourhood to Jordan’s parents’ house. Whe
n Jordan and I were teenagers, we dubbed this area “the laundry district” because of the warm smell of soap and steam escaping in the darkness as we carried on our nightly escapades. Jordan and his wife, Ilana, are at the door to meet us, with their two beautiful curly-headed babies and Jordan’s mother, who I called “Dr. Ross” when we were teenagers. I don’t know what to call her now as an adult.
“Chag Sameach,” Jordan says. He’s tall, with the same droopy eyelids, although his sandy hair is now receding—the child I once knew, then the teenager, now rendered in an adult form. He grins at me and kisses my cheek. “Whoever thought I’d be welcoming you at my seder table?” he says.
Seeing the inside of the house after fifteen years is like seeing the contents of an earlier life. In grade eleven we founded The Spaghetti Group, five of us meeting for intrigue at the home of whoever’s parents were gone—which was almost always Jordan’s. As I pass through the rooms, I catch glimpses of our teenage ghosts splayed out in front of the fireplace with bottles of wine. I have to be introduced to Jordan’s grown siblings, even though I went to elementary school with them, too. I don’t recognize them in their adult iterations. An aunt and uncle from Toronto arrive with a bag of wrapped boxes.
“Passover gifts?” I ask.
Jordan laughs. “It’s our daughter’s birthday.”
“You have to be careful with us,” Degan says, “or twenty years from now our kids will be getting presents on Pesach.”
Passover tells the story of the enslavement of the Hebrews, and Pharaoh’s decision to kill the firstborn sons of Jewish slaves. Baby Moses is set adrift in a basket, discovered by Pharaoh’s daughter and raised as a prince of Egypt. I am struck by this second tale of concealed identity: in Purim, Esther’s Judaism is hidden from her husband, the king. In the Passover story, Moses is raised unaware that he’s a Jew.
The Ross Seder is warm, and chaotic in a way that reminds me of shul: people coming and going, listening or not listening to the leader as they see fit. I feel a childlike thrill at seeing the seder plates adorned with egg and maror, the bitter herbs, just as we have learned. On my behalf, Degan gags down the gefilte fish, a traditional Ashkenazi dish of ground fish formed into balls. We follow along with the proceedings as best we can, and are gratified when the crowd bursts into a rousing rendition of “Dayeinu,” the song that we learned at our Passover workshop. After dinner, Jordan and Ilana walk Degan and me back home through the wide dusky streets. The smell of laundry drifts up from someone’s vent: Jordan smiles at me and I know what he’s thinking.
