Between Gods: A Memoir (15 page)

I look up at him; his face shows a mixture of confusion and love. “I want to get married,” I repeat. “Let’s set a date.”

“Soon?”

“Sure,” I agree. “Soon.” I don’t want to wait. “Let’s do it,” I say.

Degan laughs. “Okay!”

“Okay?”

“Okay.”

We make love to seal the deal.

After, we lie in bed in the candlelight. Degan reads aloud from Abraham Joshua Heschel’s famous book
The Sabbath:
“The higher goal of spiritual living is not to amass a wealth of information but to face sacred moments.” How long has it taken me to face this moment, to give myself to it completely?

The next day we are quiet in our wonder. We write a draft of our wedding invitation and include the date: May 19. It is like sending a single tea light, a small flame in a shallow glass dish, out across the blustery ocean. What kind of wedding will we have? One that honours the complexity of our lives. I thrill at the thought of a
chuppah
, a Jewish wedding canopy that symbolizes the home we will build together as a couple, and the home we will build with all of Israel.

In the early afternoon I crawl back into bed, turn out the lights and try to nap. I can hear Degan upstairs, singing Gillian Welch, and Ryan Adams, and a song he wrote about the rainy ocean town where we used to live. The guitar trails off and I hear the clink of dissonant strings as he leans it up against the desk. He comes down and finds me shivering. Pulls back the covers and gets in, wraps his arms around me. He begins to sing softly into my ear, a beautiful song about a man picking his guitar while his lover lays low beneath him.

I realize he is singing about me.

“Did you just write that upstairs?” I ask.

“No.”

“Where did you write it?”

“Right here.”

“Now?”

“For you.”

The cliché applies: the more I learn about Judaism, the less I know. Still, it occurs to me that in our ignorance, in the absence of an entrenched family tradition, Degan and I now have a unique opportunity: to make a
new
tradition, our own, to give to our children. We are acquiring the tools. The language, the history. Our love will build the rest from there.

In the wake of the huge decision to move forward with the wedding, part of me expects that my psyche will recoil, that I will feel numb or afraid, but instead I feel love and intense relief. I sleep in Degan’s arms on the sofa while he reads a book about Prozac. When I wake, he’s gone out to meet a friend: there’s an envelope propped up beside me with a heart drawn on it. A Degan heart: lopsided, like the letter B.

B
for brave, for bravo, for best.

I am with the best man for me.

We learn in class that Adar is the month when joy increases; it takes hearing this for me to realize I’m actually feeling better. I buy a new desk, with a roll-out tray for the keyboard so my shoulder won’t hurt when I work. My editor writes to say that she will have a copy of my new poetry book any day—and instead of shame and dread, I feel excitement. I choose books on the Holocaust to review for both
The Globe and Mail
and
The Walrus
, and accept two offers to judge literary contests, which I regret when I see the bulk of manuscripts. With my own book and the upcoming wedding, I’ll have enough on my plate.

The upcoming wedding!

Degan seems funny and smart again—which is to say, I emerge from my dark haze and can see him as he is. I want to get married, finish my novel and have a baby.

three

I
DECIDE TO TRY OUT
S
HABBAT
N
ATION
, the Friday-evening service Rabbi Klein recommended so many months ago. It is held in the same solarium where Eli gave his talk, against the glittery backdrop of Toronto’s skyline. By the time I get there, things are under way; several bearded men in white linen shirts are up on the makeshift stage. Their instruments are exotic: a kind of harp, a long bamboo tube. In the middle of the cluster of linen-clad men, a tall glossy-haired beauty is letting loose a bright ribbon of song. I look at her, look again. Finally I recognize her as the woman who was arguing with Eli after his presentation. Sarah? No, Shayna.

“I’m a singer,” she’d said.

No kidding.

Shayna beams at the participants, seated in a circle of plastic chairs, and motions for us all to stand. People shift nervously in
their seats. She comes down from the stage and takes us, one by one, by the arms, still smiling. She instructs us to put our arms around each other and sway, and we willingly do it, wanting to please her. She must make a dynamite kindergarten teacher.

I look around the circle: men with colourful, Guatemalan-style
kippot
, and women in long, flowing skirts. There are toddlers running around behind the bimah. The proceedings wind down into a
kiddush
of sushi and wine. I cannot get enough of the challah, dense with yeast and white flour.

My mouth is full when Shayna approaches me. “We’ve met,” she says. “Where?”

Her height matches her presence. Up close, she seems even taller than on stage; she must be six feet.

“I think it was—”

“This always happens to me,” she says. “Why can’t I remember where I’ve met you?”

I try again. “I’m pretty sure—”

“Weird,” she says. “Isn’t it?”

“I guess. But—”

“I always like a mystery!”

She grins, popping a piece of sushi into her mouth, and I take my chance. “We met after Eli Bloomberg’s talk.”

Shayna’s face changes, a slight reconfiguration of features, which I can’t read. She chews carefully, her palm flat against her chest, as though to prevent herself from choking. “Oh!” she says, when she has managed to swallow. “Right. You’re Eli’s friend.”

I nod.

“I just had an email from him,” she says. “Sounds like he’s happy to be away.”

I have just received an email saying the opposite—that he’s having trouble adjusting to the residency in Paris, that he misses
Toronto and his friends—but something tells me to keep quiet. There’s a strained silence. Shayna finally says, “I should go help the guys pack up the instruments.” She gestures behind her to one of the bearded men trying to cram an oversized pair of cymbals into a wooden box. “It was nice talking to you.” She pauses. “I’m sorry. Remind me of your name?”

“Alison.”

“Right. Good Shabbos, Alison.”

I have been taken as a real Jew.

“Good Shabbos to you, too,” I say.

When I arrive home, the apartment is dark. I go into the kitchen, turn on the light and look at the calendar on the wall. It is January 20, the date my great-grandparents Oskar and Marianne were deported to Auschwitz.

The following week the Jewish Information Class begins. The first meeting takes place in a small, hot classroom in the elementary school wing of the synagogue. The walls are covered with Hanukkah decorations and tourism posters of Israel. Degan and I try to wedge ourselves into the child-sized orange plastic chairs and schoolhouse desks, our knees doubled up underneath them. Around us, other couples are attempting the same contortion.

Debra is the only single person. I wave to her on the other side of the room.

A heavy-set woman with a flop of red curls enters and introduces herself as Harriet. She is wearing a purple track suit and matching lavender UGGs. “Welcome, everyone,” she says brightly. “Shalom.”

I have been warned against this particular teacher in no uncertain terms. A prominent editor at one of the city’s biggest publishing houses took the class with her fiancé, and it almost
split them up. “Try to get another teacher,” the editor advised me. “
Any
other teacher.”

Yet despite having known that Harriet would be our teacher this session, I want to start as soon as possible. Degan has agreed to take the class, but he’s prone to changing his mind. And the road to conversion—if that’s where I’m headed—is long. Besides, Harriet seems friendly enough. “Shalom!” she says again, in case anyone missed it the first time. I don’t see what the problem is.

We go around the desks introducing ourselves. “I’m Andrew,” says a big man with earrings and a shaved head. “I’m here to support Lindsay in her path to conversion.”

His bride-to-be, a bleached blonde, blushes, although I can’t tell if it’s in response to the conversion or the impending nuptials.

The man to Lindsay’s left says, “I’m Ari. I’m here to support Layla, who hopes to convert before we are married next June.”

His fiancée flushes in turn.

The class, it turns out, consists entirely of couples engaged to be married.
“Mazel tov!”
Harriet says, over and over again. As we continue around the circle, I notice that the Jewish partner is almost always the man; I realize that because of matrilineal descent, these men want their fiancées to convert so their children will be Jewish. The only exception is Tom and Diane, the couple Rabbi Klein told us about. Their baby has fat cheeks and a slick of drool on her chin. A Jewish baby. Because her mother is Jewish. Her father is studying to convert.

Diane catches me making faces at the baby, sticking out my tongue to try to make her smile. “What’s her name?”

“Krista,” she whispers.

I can’t tear my eyes away.

After the introductions, we launch into our first Hebrew lesson. Harriet draws several characters on the board. “The first letter of the aleph-bet is what?” she asks.

“Aleph!” the Jewish men recite reluctantly, collectively. They can already speak Hebrew. I see immediately how this will work: each potential convert, each bride-to-be, will have her own personal tutor.

We take a short break, during which the Jews in the class compare notes on summer camps and day schools, and then return for the lecture portion of the evening. Harriet comes back into the class stuffing the last part of a banana into her mouth. “How do you become a Jew?” she asks.

She answers her own question: “Only one way. You’re born a Jew.”

She places her hands on her belly. “The way to become Jewish if you’re not born Jewish is to be born Jewish,” she says smugly, pleased with herself.

I look around the class. Furrowed brows. Does this mean there’s really no way in?

The answer to Harriet’s “who’s on first” riddle is eventually revealed: the mikvah. Through immersion in the Jewish ritual bath, you can be reborn as a Jew. There’s a collective sigh of relief from the partners of the potential converts. Harriet giggles over the class’s anxiety, her earlier conviviality having taken a fast turn to the passive-aggressive.

Now that we’ve established anyone can—theoretically—become Jewish, she says she will tell us a little more about the course. “It will be rigorous,” she says. “You will have to attend synagogue. You should live as Jews in your home.”

Here she looks at the clock: there are two hours left.

“Live as Jews,” she reiterates. “Go to synagogue.”

She keeps us until ten in the evening, finding new ways to make the same point.

Degan drives home. He can barely keep his eyes open. “I don’t know about this,” he says.

One week down and twenty-nine more to go.

four

T
HE FOLLOWING
F
RIDAY
there’s a special contact improv workshop with a teacher visiting from another town. When I arrive, the studio is freezing, with frost on the inside of the windows. “We just turned on the heat,” Michael says.

“Shabbat Shalom,” I say in reply.

“Oh,” he says. “I didn’t grow up with that.”

I try again with his friend. “Good Shabbos, Ariel.”

Ariel looks blank. “I’m not really religious.”

The next morning I go home to Kitchener for a spontaneous visit. I mention to Mum and Dad that Degan and I are considering a
chuppah
for our wedding ceremony. Dad wrinkles his nose. Mum turns back toward her cooking. She is making borscht. The heel of the cabbage sits discarded on the cutting board. How many calories, I wonder reflexively. How many people could the pile of refuse feed? The bright red skins of the
beets. The compost bin under Mum’s sink could make soup for probably fifty people. I try to stop myself, but soon I am thinking about the hunger of the children in the camps; about what it would be like to have a child beg for food and have nothing to give—although here my mind trembles and capitulates to fiction. The scene in
The Shawl
by Cynthia Ozick when the toddler escapes and runs toward the electric fence. The titular scene in
Sophie’s Choice
when the Nazi guard forces her to choose between her two children.

If she refuses to choose, both will be killed.

For the moment, at least, my psyche protects me, allows me to see these as scenes in books, not as actual events in history, events that have something to do with
me
.

Writing and depression feel unrelated to me, like stars in separate constellations. When I’m in the throes of the darkness, I never think to draw a line between the two. And when I’m feeling sunny, despite knowing the correlation—that artists of all stripes are more depressed than the general population, that a higher percentage will take their own lives—the relationship seems intellectual, abstract.

In certain historical periods, conversations about melancholia emphasized creativity over depression. And it’s true that at the start of any project, during the process of generation, I am often flooded with the bad blood. Yet, paradoxically, the act of writing also feels like an island to rest on, an oasis of hours, even a single hour, in which I experience pleasure. And it occurs to me that the relief I experience when writing is not just about holding the darkness at bay but about ordering it, controlling it. As I writer, I can take the horrors of the Holocaust—for example—and place them within the strictures of plot, character,
tension. I can render them believable, and imbue them with a moment of redemption—not in terms of the outcome of the story but in terms of narrative tension. Ah.
This
is how it ends. And we close the book and set it aside, satisfied.