by Alison Pick
fourteen
THE NEXT DAY I go down to my publisher’s to sign the contract for my new novel. My editor Lynn hugs me hard in the hallway. “I love the book,” she says. “I’m so thrilled for you. And for us.”
She takes me by the arm and leads me through the office, introducing me to the publicity people, the marketing people, the interns. She gives me a pile of free books and says she’ll have the substantive edits to me by the end of the month. When I get home, there is a message waiting from Shayna. She’s been thinking of me all day. She has something she wants to talk about.
I call her back and tell her all the news: the book is sold; the baby is healthy. A girl!
“Oh,” she says. “That’s amazing. I’m so happy for you.”
My phone beeps; another call, which I ignore.
“And the conversion stuff?” she asks. “Any news?”
“Nothing new,” I say. “I can’t see a way around the policy.”
There’s silence over the phone line and then another click, the other caller leaving a message. “That’s what I wanted to talk to you about,” Shayna says.
“Oh?”
“I was having a conversation with my rabbi in Peterborough,” she says. “I was telling him I felt sad about you and your situation. That I wanted to help you.”
“Thanks,” I say. “I appreciate it.”
There’s a pause. It sounds like Shayna is trying to decide whether to say more. She clears her throat, then finally says, “He said the policy was changed.”
“Which policy?” I ask.
“On just one spouse converting.”
I swallow. “Changed how?”
“Changed to give the sponsoring rabbi more leeway. Leeway to assess each case individually. So Rachel could potentially convert you.”
I pause. “Really?”
“I didn’t want to meddle. And I wanted to be sure, too, so I called the head of the board. He had the paper in front of him, the new draft resolution. He confirmed that the sponsoring rabbi has the final say.”
“Wow.”
“I know.”
I pick at a hangnail, trying to absorb this information. “So the end of the story is not that I’m denied.”
Shayna laughs, a bright peal of bells. “I’m not a writer. But even I can see that’s the wrong ending!”
“So I just have to be patient?”
She says, “You and Degan are at the forefront of a change. You’re the ones helping us learn.”
At our next synagogue meeting, we plunk ourselves down in the red armchairs. “So,” Rachel says, “catch me up.”
“I’m pregnant,” I say.
She laughs. “I gathered!”
I look down at my belly. “I guess you can tell.”
“I was waiting for you to announce it.”
I tell her about the miscarriage, how it made me wary. How I didn’t want to tell anyone about the new baby until I was sure.
“That’s wonderful,” she says. “B’sha’a tova.”
“Why not mazel tov?”
“The Talmud states babies are born at either seven or nine months, so we hope the baby will come at its own right time. May it be at a good time.”
I nod. We chat briefly about morning sickness, about the marvels of Diclectin, with which she seems familiar. “And what else?” she asks, turning to Degan.
“We finished the class.”
“I heard,” she says. “Mazel tov.” She smiles. “In this case it applies.”
“So now is when people convert,” I say. “Tom and Diane, for example.” Rachel is sponsoring them, too, so she knows they’re proceeding, but her face remains noncommittal. She is a consummate professional.
“I’d like to go ahead, too,” I say. “Especially now that …” I put a hand on my belly.
The rabbi’s face falls, not in disappointment or disapproval but inner conflict. She sighs heavily. “And you?” she asks Degan. “How are you feeling about proceeding?”
Degan is quiet. And Rachel’s expression shows she already knows the answer. “I’m sorry,” she says, looking at my palm resting on my stomach. “But now more than ever it’s important you be on the same page.”
I am struck by this unfairness: first my partner and now my child will be used against me. I know this is not what Rachel intends, but it’s how it feels to me. I try not to cry; I don’t want to cry.
Rachel passes me the Kleenex box from her desk. “I was clear about the policy from the beginning,” she says.
I sniff, take a breath. “About the policy,” I say.
She looks up.
“I heard something. And I wanted to ask if it’s true.”
She holds her body still. Her beautiful eyes wide.
“I heard that the policy has changed,” I say. “For situations like ours. For cases where just one spouse wants to convert.”
Her jaw tightens. “Where did you hear that?”
I’m silent. I can’t divulge my source.
She sighs. “No,” she says finally. “Not changed. Just revisited. So that rabbis who feel they have an exception can bring that particular case before the beit din.”
It is clear from her voice that she doesn’t think we count as such an exception.
Now I start to cry in earnest, tears rolling down my cheeks faster than I can wipe them away. I give in, and put my face in my hands and sob. I’m overcome with helplessness and despair. I think of Gumper’s words: “Not if I were the last Jew on earth.” And of Lucy’s dream: “Mrs. Liska Pick regrets that she is unable to attend.” Of Marianne’s bare legs in the cattle car. Maybe it’s I who am wrong to want to go back there. I could push Degan more, help him wrestle with his doubts. The truth is he would probably do it for me if I asked him. But I don’t have the energy; I don’t have the comfort or the confidence. I am different from the other Jews, who have something concrete, a roof and walls, to invite their new spouse into. My Jewish home is built of straw and grass, of the flimsy cobwebs of dreams.
I look up and blow my nose. Degan holds out a hand for me and puts my snotty tissue in the wastepaper basket. “So you won’t take our case to the Board,” I say to Rachel flatly.
She looks me in the eye and then her gaze moves for a second time down to my belly, straining the waist of my new maternity jeans. I see her face change, a series of emotions moving across it like weather. She sighs and squeezes her eyes shut. When she opens them, her eyes are soft. “I will,” she says. “If you want me to.”
I sniff, and nod, surprised. “Really?”
“I will.”
She sees my skepticism. “It might be hard for you to believe,” she says, “but I really do want what’s best for you.”
I remember our first meeting: What a happy story.
I nod again, wipe my nose.
“Trust me,” she says. “I’ll represent you well.”
fifteen
AS MY PREGNANCY PROGRESSES, my hunger to learn more about my ancestors grows. I find myself wondering about Granny’s parents: her mother, Marianne; her father, Oskar. They, like Vera, lived a life of privilege. In the fall of ’38 and the winter of ’39, they would have met the same string of restrictions Vera described, with the same disbelief: no servants, no radios, a curfew.
In her video interview with Lucy and Dad, Granny doesn’t speak much about her parents—nothing about what they liked, what they were like as people. To evoke them would have led her into a darkness she couldn’t bear. My own depression has retreated in recent months, and I think I understand Granny’s desire to keep it at bay. She does so by sticking to the realm of anecdote in the video, talking about her childhood friend Nena, whose grandfather was ambassador to Argentina. Granny recounts going to Nena’s house during the occupation and seeing something sticking out from under the sofa.
“I said, ‘What’s that, Mr. Proskowitz?’ And he said, ‘That’s the Nazi flag. I’m supposed to put it out. There’s nobody will make me do that.’ ”
&n
bsp; “Like in The Sound of Music!” I hear Lucy laugh, invisible to the camera.
Granny continues. “The other thing about Nena was that she had a very heavy—” Granny points to the camera and mock-whispers, “Is that thing on?”
“No,” I can hear my father reassure her, both of them in on the joke.
“She had a very heavy bust. When I came back from my honeymoon, I went to see her, and she opened the door and she was naked. She said, ‘Look!’ She’d had the first breast reduction I’d ever heard of.”
Granny is less forthcoming about her own story. It emerges slowly. Her father, Oskar, had a business colleague who was a Nazi, and Oskar used this connection to procure paperwork permitting the family to leave. There was also a Viennese lawyer involved. This lawyer was ennobled two days before the Hapsburg Empire fell and was president of the largest bank in Austria. “He had a beautiful Belgian wife,” Granny says. And then, as an afterthought: “He was a little bit after me.”
On April 24, 1939, with Gumper already out of the country, Granny flew from Prague to Zurich. She had my uncle Michael with her, still in diapers. From Zurich she travelled to Paris, where Gumper met her and then brought her to England. In 1941, they travelled by boat to Canada. Granny expected her parents would meet her there. They never arrived.
Granny says to the camera, “They didn’t believe and they refused to go until I was gone. And then I was gone and they procrastinated. They had visas to Cuba. I was sure they were in Cuba when we arrived in Canada. Only, they weren’t. By that time …” She trails off.
“They procrastinated,” she says again. “They just wouldn’t go. I remember my father saying, ‘What do you expect me to do? Sit in a lobby of a hotel for the rest of my life?’ ”
On October 12, 1941, Oskar and Marianne were transported from Prague to Theresienstadt.
When I try to imagine them there, my mind skitters away from the horrible things I know. Instead, I see another story, the one Granny told my cousins, the one she must have used herself, late at night, thinking of Marianne: her beloved mother, dirty but healthy, her head wrapped in a paisley kerchief, looking after the chickens.
Then on January 20, 1943, Oskar and Marianne were transported from Theresienstadt to Auschwitz.
Here it becomes harder to find another story.
Joseph Mengele did not arrive in Auschwitz until April of that year, so it was not “the Angel of Death” who met them on the platform but some other monster.
Our family lore has it that they went “straight to the gas.”
I strain and strain for an image of Marianne. I can see her laughter, her face tipped up to her male companion: Stuckerl—“piece of work.” I picture her arm thrown around Granny’s shoulder. That she was a woman, like my own sister, my cousins, like me, full of failure, full of feeling, does not make her easier to imagine.
It occurs to me that as Marianne went to her death, she would have assumed her own children were safe—her son in the United States, Granny in Canada—and in that there’s a small shred of mercy.
sixteen
THE SPRING PASSES QUICKLY, like the pages of a calendar in a silent movie blowing away in the wind. I edit my novel, and feel pleased with my progress. The baby goes through a phase of vigorous hiccuping, the sensation inside me like the quick drawing of breath—only, in my womb instead of my lungs.
Degan and I begin our childbirth classes, where we plunge our hands into buckets of ice and count how many seconds we can tolerate the pain. I have the hazy suspicion that this is a poor approximation of a contraction but don’t bother to articulate this to him. Rachel is set to plead our case in late May, but I am distracted by my sore hips and strange dreams, by the child taking up more of my body and more of my thoughts. Two days after the date passes, I realize I haven’t heard from Rachel.
I email her to ask the verdict.
She writes back right away: “I have good news for you.”
My heart dips and leaps. I’m going to be a Jew.
Degan and I bike up to the synagogue to talk with Rachel in person. She is calm and relaxed again, as though, having navigated through this point of contention, she can now return to the generosity that is so obviously her nature. It’s possible I have never loved anyone more. “You’ll have to decide on a Hebrew name,” she says. “Have you thought about that at all?”
I have. A Hebrew name. For me.
“My great-grandmother Ruzenka’s last name was Bondy,” I say. “Which came from bon dia in Catalan. Meaning ‘good day.’ Or in Hebrew, yom tov.”
She nods.
I pause, suddenly nervous. I take a deep breath. “I thought about taking the tov, and being called Tova.”
A smile breaks out on the rabbi’s face. “A beautiful Israeli name. That sounds just about perfect.”
The next task will be a Hebrew name for Dad so I can, as Rachel says, “secure his line.”
Normally a Jewish name references both mother and father. Jordan’s Hebrew name is Shimon ben Michael Anshel V’Tzivia—meaning Michael Anshel is his father and Tzivia is his mother. Shayna’s full Hebrew name is Shayna Gila bat Tziyon Lev V’Chana Rivka. In my case, the name will just reference Dad. I will be Tova, daughter of Thomas. But in place of Thomas we need something Hebrew.
After a handful of emails back and forth, Dad settles on the simple Thom. He seems both pleased and abashed, like a child bestowed an unexpected gift.
For his imminent role as a grandfather, he decides on the Hebrew word saba. I have suggested zaide—the Yiddish word I remember Jordan calling his grandpa when we were growing up—but Dad asks his Jewish dermatologist, who tells him zaide would be “going overboard.”
But Dad isn’t ashamed.
Better: He’s happy.
On the morning of the beit din, I open this email from Dad.
Dear Alison:
Good luck today in your new life as a Jew. I am proud of you, and admire the courage that you have shown in pursuing this venture. Your ancestors up in heaven are applauding!!
Mum joins me in wishing you much happiness and health as well. Love Dad.
P.S. You might want to bring the poem you wrote that refers to Auschwitz and the smoke and ashes etc. I think the Rabbis would be impressed with the depth of your feeling, and also the fact that it was published in Israel.
P.P.S. I’ve just finished a 500 page history of Israel, written by Martin Gilbert. What courage these people showed, and show today, in building their oasis in the sand, against almost universal lack of caring.
P.P.P.S. Remember to bring your poem.
Before the beit din, I go get my nails painted red. Then I pick Degan up at work and he quizzes me as we drive north. Rabbi Klein has assured me the questions will be easy, but part of me expects to be asked about the history of the Temple between 529 and 502 BCE.
“What church do you go to?” Degan asks.
I laugh. “Trick question.”
Moving north on Bathurst, we pass bagel shops, stores where you can buy tallitot (prayer shawls) and neirot (candlesticks), Orthodox men talking on their cell phones. The Canadian Council of Reform Judaism is housed in a brick building, square and red, unassuming. Inside, we find another couple, also here for the beit din, camped outside the third-floor office. The woman pulls on the handle. The door remains closed.
“Is it locked?” I ask.
“They must really not want us,” she says.
We laugh, united in our nervousness.
Finally, someone inside the office answers our knock. I’ve been told to expect an assembly line, that today is the big day for all the prospective converts in the city, and true to promise, the tiny waiting room is crammed with people. I notice a woman with red hair who has a lap full of sippy cups and board books and stuffed animals, her daughter plunked on top of the pile like a cherry. I hold my pregnant belly with both hands as I squeeze my way past.
Several people offer me their seat, but I want to stand. Degan leafs through a magazine. My pa
lms are sweaty, and I swallow repeatedly, unable to clear the lump from my throat. I feel someone tap my shoulder and I turn around. It’s Debra. She has just emerged from the boardroom. “They took me!” she says.
“Congrats!” I say. “I mean, Mazel tov!”
She smiles.
“What was like it?” I whisper.
“Easy,” she whispers back, and leans in to tell me the questions, but from across the room I hear my name being called. It’s my turn.
I hug Debra, kiss Degan goodbye and follow the secretary through an office jammed with photocopiers and fax machines. There’s the whiz—thunk! whiz—thunk! of copies falling into a tray. I enter the boardroom and see three women, the rabbis assigned to my case. Two of them are around my age, one also very pregnant. We exchange conspiring smiles. I exhale. She motions for me to sit down.
The third rabbi is much older, and wearing wire-rimmed glasses in the fashion of a schoolmarm. “What brings you here today?” she asks.
I launch into my family history, beginning with my great-grandparents, Oskar and Marianne. The rabbis shift, clear their throats. The pregnant one heaves herself into a different position. It is clear from their collective body language that they want the abridged version. I sense interest from them, and authenticity, but more overpowering is the feeling that we’re pressed for time.
Their minds are made up already. I’m just not sure in which direction.
“What do you love about Judaism?” the second young rabbi asks.
“Shabbat,” I say right away. I explain, in as few words as possible, about “24 Hours Unplugged.” There’s a collective gasp. I’m encouraged.
“That really sealed the deal for me. Although,” I add hastily, “it’s been clear all along. Like recognizing something that was always mine but got lost along the way, along the generations. Of course there have been challenges, but—”
The rabbi with the wire-rimmed glasses interrupts me. “Tell us about one of those challenges.”
