The County of Birches

by Judith Kalman

  “I can’t be here for the test tomorrow. A Jewish holiday. I have to stay home.”

  Heads craning for a view of my face that was suddenly not commonplace but worth staring at. Flushing because the teacher didn’t really get the message and I was going to have to pronounce the Hebrew words with the accent on the second syllable making it sound more foreign—Yom Kip-púr—because in Ville d’Anjou there were parents who ate kippers and otherwise someone was bound to hold his nose.

  Donna Tait was Jehovah’s Witness. She had to wait outside the door while we sang hymns. It was against her religion. I felt sorry for her standing out in the hall just like the kids who got punished. But it gave me an idea.

  “I have to do a project about Jesus.”

  “So?” said Mummy. She had been teaching in my school since I was in grade two, and she made it her principle not to request favours on my behalf.

  “I have to make it into a book and put in pictures.”

  “Good.”

  “What do you mean, good? It’s about Jesus.”

  “So?”

  “I shouldn’t have to do that.”

  “You’re too lazy, Dana. You know, that’s what you are.”

  “But it’s not my religion. It’s against my religion,” I corrected myself.

  “I wish it were against your religion to have such a mouth.”

  The best change at school was when the Bible Ladies came. Assemblies were always a welcome distraction, but the Bible Ladies were genuinely entertaining. Two middle-aged ladies stepped on stage in grey flannel skirts and plain blouses buttoned to the chin. They were greeted with thunderous applause. They ducked back into the wings as though they’d forgotten something, then returned, each dragging an easel with a felt flipboard. Unlike the simple felt boards we had in class, the Bible Ladies’ boards held a stack of colourful scenes. Each felt page flipped up to unveil a fresh felt picture beneath. There was always the hint of a story at the bottom of the pile, one that we would have to wait to hear at their next visit. Cheering echoed off the high gymnasium ceiling, until one Bible Lady sat down to the piano and thumped a few chords. The whole school broke into “The Wise Man Built His House upon the Rock.” Why, I wondered, would anyone bother to do otherwise?

  Their stories were about Jesus and the loaves and fishes, and Thomas the doubtful, and Jesus when he walked on lovely, light blue, rippling felt waves. There was one about the moneylenders. Moneylenders were Jews, I heard someone near me whisper. And that awful heart-pounding flush swept me up, and there I was in the great big gymnasium, in front of the whole school, the only one with my hand in the air.

  “Jesus was a Jew too.” My voice sounded too loud in the hush of hundreds of schoolmates. An uncomfortable pause as children squirmed on their bottoms, unsure what to make of this assertion.

  The Bible Lady hardly missed a beat. “Of course he was, dear, but he was also the Son of God.”

  I sat down, not convinced that she had gotten my point. I was rock-certain of what was credible. If my poor schoolmates thought a man could really be a God, they lacked essential mastery over the evidence of their senses. Talk about building on shifting sand.

  From my perspective—one row up from the teacher with the other officious girls currying her favour at the front of the class—my sister and I were solidly Jewish. Living in Ville d’Anjou had heightened our sense of uniqueness, as though our family were the only Jews left.

  Before bed I poked my head into Lillian’s room, dim except for the desk lamp shining on the deep black of her crown. “Night,” she murmured without looking up, absorbed in effort to get through the day’s assignments.

  She managed what she had to, but the cashmere-clad girls at the McGill chapter of B’nai B’rith weren’t part of the prescribed liberal arts curriculum. Mummy didn’t want to believe that at B’nai B’rith Lillian didn’t count as a Jew. These boys and girls, Lillian tried to explain, knew each other from high school, or elementary school, or Talmud Torah. They went to the same synagogue youth groups or had bumped into each other at bar mitzvahs of cousins or friends. They lived in Hampstead, Westmount, Côte St. Luc. They came from St. Laurent, Town of Mount Royal or Nôtre Dame de Grace, all municipalities west of St. Lawrence Boulevard. “Ville d’Anjou? Is that on the island?” they questioned dubiously. It was enough to make Lillian’s second venture among them her last.

  What exactly was a Jew? I caught Mummy off guard one afternoon while she was still resting after school before starting to make dinner.

  “Don’t ask stupid questions, Dana. It’s bad luck to pretend you’re an imbecile.”

  But I wouldn’t try to ask Apu, because he’d get a hurt remote look that made me feel I’d failed him.

  “Are Cimi-néni and Uncle André Jewish?”

  “Why do you want to make trouble? You know what they are. They go to church on Sundays.”

  “But Cimi-néni’s your sister. She was in Auschwitz too. You said so. And Uncle André’s family was Chassidic.” I snorted, although I knew I was moving onto a minefield. The thought of Uncle André, with his painterly, French-style beret, deriving from a clan of caftan-robed Chassids was more than ironic; it was hilarious. “What about them? Do they still count as Jews?”

  “You are what you are. Hitler proved that. It didn’t matter what you called yourself.”

  “But then what about my cousins? Simone and Gérald don’t even know they’re Jewish!”

  “Don’t be ridiculous, Dana, they’ve been baptized. Their parents are, God-forgive-me-from-having-to-say-so, Christian converts, just like their beloved Paul the Apostle as they keep telling me. How can the children be Jewish?”

  “You tell me. Look who’s asking stupid questions!”

  Mummy laughed appreciatively. She didn’t like my big mouth, but she couldn’t resist the bald-faced truth adults had too many reasons to dance around.

  “Don’t you dare say anything to your cousins. You know Uncle André and Cimi-néni are crazy when it comes to this Jewish question. Just be happy you don’t have to go pretending.”

  But for Lillian to fit in at B’nai B’rith, she’d have to pretend lots of things that she wasn’t. She’d have to pretend that all her friends weren’t gentile, that her relatives weren’t Christians, that we didn’t celebrate Christmas with them, and that we belonged to a synagogue. She’d have to pretend that she was Jewish in ways besides the single most important one by which history had defined her.

  “Mummy, why do you want Lili to go to B’nai B’rith? She’s not like those Jewish kids. She didn’t grow up among Jews.”

  “And what do you call us, you little know-it-all? What do you call your family?”

  * * *

  The temple in Westmount suited Mummy and Lillian’s taste for the vernacular. In the ultra-modern sanctuary, the light-studded domed ceiling that resembled the night sky shed a soft light over red plush seats that flipped up and down like the seats at the new concert hall downtown where Mummy had taken us to see the Bolshoi. Mummy and Lillian appreciated the temple’s choral music and its magnificent organ. Apu mustn’t have realized that the pipes zigzagging up, down and over the ark housing the Torahs were anything other than a modern design. When the first reverberating chord rocked the air under the dome of the sanctuary, he started, jarred to the nerve by a sound he had never before encountered in shul. And then the leaders of the service mounted the dais, decked out in prayer shawls, but heads naked in the Lord’s Temple. Apu was fully aware that this was a Reform congregation. Only a few men in the aisles wore kippahs; Apu was the only man in a formal hat. But he had not imagined that a rabbi of any Jewish school of worship would stand before an open ark without a shred of covering for his head. As the rabbi began to intone the words of the Shm’a, I happened to glance down at the old, mud-stained prayerbook that Apu held in his hands. It had been his father’s, and Apu had salvaged it after the war from the debris of his family’s estate. The prayerbook shook, and the dark hair on Apu’s wris
t stood on end.

  “What a beautiful choir,” Mummy exclaimed as we left the temple that first night.

  “Choir!” protested Apu. “Who ever heard of a choir in shul? They don’t know the difference between a synagogue and a basilica.”

  “And you won’t accept any change. For you everything has to be just like it was or else it is worthless. But this synagogue is beautiful. The music is beautiful. The rabbi speaks in a language we can all understand. But for you this isn’t good enough because you didn’t do it this way when you were a boy on the Rákóczi Tanya. Nothing, not even such a palace for God, is good enough for you.”

  Apu sighed. Again, the new world had bested him. Not Reform Jewry, nor even Mummy, but the adulterated North American rendering of values he held dear. If this was Canadian Judaism, and if it contented his womenfolk to sit through a service conducted in English, he’d have to settle for what he could get.

  But, as it turned out, I was the one who got the temple. It hadn’t occurred to me when we started going to the odd Shabbat service, nor when we attended at Purim, or, in the spring, at Shavuoth, that I was going to have to take up a kind of permanent residence in the beth Adonai.

  At Shavuoth I had watched the temple’s confirmation class make its procession through the congregation. It was like a wedding with seven or eight brides. The boys in their blue gowns held little interest for me. It was the girls I studied, their long hair swept back off their faces to reveal sweet, open grace. Heavy locks fell forthrightly, gleaming, to shoulders. Smiles broke from flawless, tooth-straightened mouths. Gold signet rings adorned the fingers that guilelessly held their bouquets. The girls were the incarnation of virginal charm. I doubted that I would achieve this transformation from the smart-alecky little pest I recognized as myself, never guessing that this was my parents’ very expectation.

  The confirmation class moved down the sloping incline of the sanctuary, not with pride exactly, and certainly not solemn. They basked. They soaked up the admiration that hit them from both sides of the aisle lined with their families. They descended by twos, boy and girl, girl and boy, in a blue gown–white gown alternating pattern splashed with the deep red of the roses the girls gathered to their breasts. The boys’ arms swung by their sides. No one looked ahead. The confirmants focussed on their families and the congregation, winking at younger siblings and cousins, acknowledging generous grandparents with disarming smiles, narrowing their eyes at parents as though they shared an inside joke. I twisted in my seat to avoid their glances, conscious that our only extended family would never step into this sanctuary, let alone fill up an aisle.

  Lillian successfully completed her first year at McGill, aceing Latin although her swim stroke still lagged. The following September, to my surprise, found me on the bus every Saturday bound for the temple’s religious school. Two buses and an hour and a half took me across town along Sherbrooke Street from Ville d’Anjou to the temple in Westmount. Sherbrooke was an endless strip of dark canvas the bus wove in and out of the disparate strands of the city. By the time I reached the temple, I felt dazed from displacement, but one point was clear. I owed this journey to Lillian because, for the first time in her life, she had failed. Not at university, but in the eyes of our parents. She had failed to leap the social barrier into the McGill chapter of B’nai B’rith, and Mummy and Apu weren’t going to make that mistake twice.

  Within a few weeks, the teacher from temple called to speak to my parents. I had stopped going to religious school. I had missed two weeks.

  Mummy took his side. “Dana, there has to be more than a few bratty kids you don’t like. What a pleasant young man this teacher is. There’s nothing wrong with him. See how he bothers. It upsets him, your not going. He wants to know what’s the matter.”

  Apu looked downcast. “Already you knew your aleph bet,” he said ruefully.

  Why didn’t the teacher mind his own business? I had thought I was shut of religious school, until he decided to call. It was easy for him to show his sympathy now by approaching Mummy and Apu. They didn’t know what went on under his long nose, and he wasn’t going to tell them. I hadn’t told them either.

  The next time he called, he asked to talk to me.

  “Dana,” he said softly, “this is Mr. Sherman.”

  “Yes,” I said, steeling myself against persuasion.

  “We all miss you in class.”

  Who did he think he was kidding?

  “I miss you in class. Now no one listens to what I’m saying.” He laughed encouragingly, so I could feel free to joke too. “Dana, are you with me?”

  “Yes.”

  “Have we done anything to offend you?”

  Had they done anything to offend me? More like had they done anything not to offend me. The children ignored me. They shoved ahead of me in line. They made snarky comments on the pattern of the tights that had come in the last parcel from England. They mimicked me when I courteously answered the Hebrew teacher’s questions. What a laugh. They offended everybody, as he well knew.

  “Dana?”

  “What?”

  “Has anyone hurt you?”

  What I had felt was something different. Getting hit when you least expected. Not so much pain, as the shock of it. This was a Jewish school. It wasn’t like Ville d’Anjou, where I had to be on guard against slurs, jokes, misconceptions stemming from ignorance. These were Jewish children, and I had assumed a common ground. I knew that however different these children were from me on the surface, I was stuck with them. If the ocean liner started to list, we’d be forced into the same lifeboat. But they didn’t get it.

  One of the boys had brought in a magazine with an article that had more photographs than writing. It was called “Remembering—Twenty Years After.” The class clustered around him to look at the pictures. I knew plenty enough not to look.

  “Lampshades. That’s what they did with the skin.”

  “Wow, look at this guy: ‘Look ma, no hands.’ It says they did experiments.”

  “They could gas a hundred at a time in one of those rooms.”

  “Cool.”

  “What do you mean cool, you idiot, it was an oven.”

  I sat numb and stunned, not even thinking to tell them to stop. How could they be so interested, so detached? How could they not know? Didn’t every Jew in the world know in their blood that it could happen to them?

  “Hey, Janet, how’d you like that hairdo? Just wire her up.”

  “They took little kids and smashed their brains out on walls.”

  “Nothing would come out of your head, stupid.”

  I went to the washroom and sat. I must have sat awhile, because the teacher sent Tracy Cooper to see if I was okay. When I came back they were reading out captions.

  The teacher had no right to call our house after he had let the deaths of Mummy and Apu’s families be turned into an amusement for ignorant Jewish children. He wanted to know now what I felt? He was asking if anyone had hurt me?

  I felt a very hot shame that I had to keep from my parents. They had been violated again, but this time by next of kin in the land that made them free to do so.

  “Will you come then?” I heard him ask as though he were repeating the question. “Will you give us another chance?”

  I had done many things before now to please Mummy and Apu, but always to humour them. When it came to appeasing our parents, Lillian and I had a habit of rolling our eyes. Mummy and Apu were comically out of step with the brash, smugly assured world Lillian and I were daily growing more to be a part of. They took offence easily at the gestures of their neighbours and colleagues, mannerisms that were merely colloquial and not meant to insult them. Lillian and I had taken to viewing our parents ironically through the amused lenses of our adopted country. I didn’t feel so much like laughing right now.

  With a sinking sensation, I hung up the phone.

  * * *

  Apu took the bus with me. He came along Sherbrooke as far as St. Lawrence Boulevar
d where he worked half days on Saturday. He read the Gazette on the Ville d’Anjou bus, but then he folded it into his briefcase, and began, once we were settled comfortably in a double seat on our course west, to talk. Over the length of the religious school year, on those Saturday bus rides, he painted a picture of his version of what it was to be a Jew.

  I had always known about Apu’s lost world. Year in and year out he noted for us the birthdays of each loved one.

  “Today your grandmother of sainted memory would have turned seventy-one.” How was I supposed to respond to this? “That’s nice”? Or “What a shame”?

  “On this day in nineteen hundred and eight your uncle Bandi, my beloved brother, was born.” Did he expect me to feel something? I had never met this uncle outside of Apu’s anecdotes.

  “Today my little Clárika would be a woman of twenty-seven.” A woman of twenty-seven, yet I was eleven, almost twice the age my half-sister had been when she died in Auschwitz.

  These would-have-been birthdays were as ungraspable in their own way as six million or infinity, but my father stubbornly fumbled at them. He showed us photographs, some sepia-toned, but not all. Most were black and white like ours. All the faces were familiar as though I too had known them in a previous existence.

  But although I had heard anecdotes, seen photographs and picked up many references to the people and places Apu had loved dearly, he had never before recounted from the beginning the story of his truncated life. I didn’t know if this was his express purpose on the Saturday bus rides, to prepare me for my religious education; perhaps finding himself alone with me for uninterrupted periods simply put him in a storytelling frame of mind, for he was by nature a raconteur. It was much later, after my head swam with images of a world that seemed superior in all ways to the one in which we lived, that it occurred to me my father wasn’t as naive or as vulnerable as I had supposed. I guessed he had heard from the teacher at temple what had put me off, and, over the course of those Saturday mornings, formulated a response to my dilemma.