Between Gods: A Memoir (21 page)

“It’s Gumper’s
yahrzeit
,” I say. “I’m going to synagogue.”

“Yahrzeit?”

“The anniversary of his death.”

There’s a pause while he calculates the date. “Oh,” Dad says. “So it is.” He pauses again. “Do you mind if I come?”

I hear shuffling in the background, followed by clicking. “Good girl!” he shouts at the dog.

“Of course not,” I say. “I’d love for you to come.”

“Maybe I will.”

“To synagogue?”

I want to be sure he has fully understood.

“Am I Jewish or am I not Jewish?”

I can hear his grin over the phone.

The morning of Gumper’s
yahrzeit
I wake from a dream of two boy rabbis, my father and my uncle. But in the dream they appear as charcoal sketches, empty, with nothing filled in.

I write the dream down—Charlotte will like this one!—then I get up and brush my teeth, make coffee. Degan goes into
the bathroom but leaves the door open; I can see him dabbing his shaving brush in the soap.

“What are you up to today?” he calls.

“Oh, you know. Just taking my father to synagogue for the first time in his life.”

Degan looks up, his chin lathered. “Seriously?”

I cry when he leaves for work, but mostly out of nerves.

An hour later there’s an email: Degan must have written as soon as he arrived at his office. “I love you,” he writes. “You’re in my thoughts, as is your grandfather. I wish I could be with you for the service today.”

He suggests gently that I clean up our apartment a little before Dad arrives. “Even passing the vacuum over the front hall will help,” he writes. And instructs me how to change the vacuum bag.

I do the dishes. Wipe the counters. Make our bed properly, with the corners folded down. After, I go out into the March sunshine, remembering the Mourner’s Kaddish, the prayer for the dead that will be the centre of the
yahrzeit
service:
yit’gadal v’yitkadash sh’mei rabba
—“May the great Name of God be exalted and sanctified.” I take some shirts to the dry cleaner’s, drop a copy of my new book off to a friend for her birthday, all the while repeating the only line I know by heart:
yit’gadal v’yitkadash sh’mei rabba
. Running on the treadmill, reciting it in my head in time to my pounding feet. In the shower, cooking, preparing to welcome my father. Thinking of Gumper and the prayer that does not mention death, that is affirmation of life itself.

In a few short months our apartment has sprouted a profusion of Judaica. Waiting for Dad to show up, I hide the Shabbat handbooks and the
tzedakah
box in the kitchen for fear of overwhelming him. I flip a stack of Jewish-themed books so the titles on their spines aren’t showing. This is a tenuous dance,
and I want Dad’s support. It occurs to me that I will see him wear a
kippah
.

“You’ve never been to synagogue before, right?” I ask when he arrives, trying to sound casual.

“Just once. For a funeral.”

I put the kettle on. “Whose funeral?”

“Dr. Fischer’s.”

“Your old therapist?”

Dad nods. I take this in.

His therapist was Jewish. Of course he was.

“I’m not sure if you’d remember,” I say, “but part of that funeral would have been the prayer for the dead.” I explain about the centrality of the Kaddish. The kettle whistles. I move it off the element. “Maybe we can practise it,” I say.

Dad looks strained. “Now?”

I nod. “Before the service.”

Dad clears his throat. “If Gumper were here, he’d think we were silly.”

He clears his throat again. “No. He’d be touched. But he wouldn’t show it.” Dad pauses. “What’s really touching is that
you’re
interested,” he says.

“I’d like to practise the Kaddish,” I repeat.

“In English?”

“It’s in Aramaic.”

Dad looks confused.

“In Hebrew,” I say, for simplicity’s sake.

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

O
N
T
HURSDAY 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 utilitarian 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!”