Between Gods: A Memoir (36 page)

“Changed his mind about what?”

“About eventually converting.”

I’m worried there’s been a misunderstanding, so I clarify. “He doesn’t think he
will
convert.”

They nod. I’m confused and decide to use the opportunity to tell them about Degan’s support. His intellectual curiosity. The pieces of Judaism that resonate deeply for him.

“Can you give us an example?” the pregnant rabbi asks.

From outside the closed door the photocopier takes up its humming again, followed by a series of loud beeps.

“Tzedakah,”
I say. “ ‘Righteous giving.’ He grew up in a family of activists. So, on Shabbat, it’s always Degan who says,
‘Don’t forget the
tzedakah
box,’ or ‘Let’s talk about where the
tzedakah
will go.’ ”

I am about to elaborate, but the rabbis’ faces show that they are satisfied. I wait for the next question. We’ve not spoken about Israel, about the commitment to synagogue, about my father’s response to all of the above. But the stern one looks to her younger colleagues, who both nod. Outside the window a siren screams by.

“That’s great,” the pregnant one says. “Is your husband here with you?”

“Yes.”

“Then step into the waiting room and we’ll call you both in a minute.”

I find Degan reading a magazine article about Obama and the auto workers union. I tap his shoulder and he looks up, expectant. “So?”

“They’re going to call us in.”

A frown crosses his face. “Both of us? Are they going to ask me questions?”

“I think they just want you there.”

But he closes his eyes to prepare himself, just in case.

The deliberations last
maybe
five minutes. When we enter the boardroom again, the pregnant rabbi speaks. “There’s good news,” she says.

I brace myself for the logical conclusion to the phrase:
And bad news
. She sees my concern and laughs. “There’s only good news. Welcome to the tribe!”

I start crying right away. The relief is so strong. It is all the months of waiting, not knowing, the ambivalence, the uncertainty. The weight of the past on my back. I reach for Degan’s hand, and feel the cool lip of his wedding band against his warm
fingers. Marianne in the cattle car.
Stuckerl
—“piece of work.” Granny’s silk handkerchief embroidered with an A. Gumper, who was not, it turns out, the very last Jew on earth.

My girl jabs a foot into my heart: I’m here.

The pregnant rabbi clears her throat. “Rachel brought your case to the board,” she says. “I’ll be honest, there was some hesitation. There were rabbis who chose not to sit on your
beit din
today.”

Rabbi Glickman’s face appears before me, her features tight and pinched.

“They didn’t want to be part of making an intermarriage, which is, in effect, what we are doing.” The young rabbi pauses; we both touch our pregnant bellies. “But we’re convinced you will have a Jewish family, and we want to welcome both of you.” She looks at Degan and then at my belly: “All of you.”

My tears fall, unhindered. Degan hugs me hard. I can see the older, sterner rabbi eyeing us, pleased with their decision. A good day’s work.

She signs the papers, passes them to me, and it’s official.

On the way out I ask the pregnant rabbi when her baby is due. “In two weeks!” She stands up. “So you’ll understand that I need to leave and pee.”

I laugh, wiping away my tears. “Absolutely.”

Debra has left me a present with the secretary. I open it in the car on the way home. It’s a beautiful coffee table book about Jewish mothers, from all different backgrounds, with all different stories. For a moment I think, But why has she given it to
me
? And then the gladness rushes through me again and I understand.

seventeen

B
ACK AT THE APARTMENT
, a letter waits for me on the hall table. It’s from Women’s College Hospital. I rip it open. It announces unceremoniously that I have tested negative for the BRCA breast cancer gene.

That’s that. A wave of relief.

That evening Degan and I get ready for the Griffin poetry gala, the place where I first met Rabbi Klein two years ago. I try on a series of identical black maternity dresses to see which makes me look less enormous. Degan stands in front of the bathroom mirror, tying and re-tying his tie. At the last minute, he walks up to St. Clair to get me takeout. I can’t wait the two hours until dinner.

The party this year is Mexican-themed; the warehouse is decorated with sombreros and piñatas and colourful crepe paper streamers. We sit with fellow writers and poets, one of whom
has a four-month-old baby girl sleeping beside her in a basinet. I look, look away, then look back again. The only thing able to distract me is the piece of rare steak a waiter sets down in front of me, my appetite for red meat verging on ferocious. Mark Blume, who first introduced me to Sol Jalon, who introduced me to his wife, Rachel, is on the jury this year. The prizes are awarded; the band strikes up and the music begins. Everyone who is now part of my Toronto world is here. Throughout the evening people want to touch my stomach. They ask me when I’m due and if they can get me a glass of … water. They tell me that pregnancy suits me, and although I know they are lying, it is good to be in my element, with my people.

Including Rachel, who is here again with Sol. At the end of the night, after champagne and dancing, I notice her packing up to go home. There’s a kind of reassurance in seeing her out of context, or rather, in her role as a person, not a rabbi.

I cross the glitter-speckled dance floor toward her.

“I heard it went well today!” she says.

I grin. “It was
fast
.”

“I primed them. They knew you were a good candidate.”

“They had to get through lots of people.”

“Maybe,” she says. “But also, I told them you were good.”

“I realized it’s been two years since I met you. To the
day
.”

She smiles.

“Bashert,”
I say. “Fate.” And then: “I guess you don’t need me to translate.”

The rabbi reaches out and gives my shoulder a squeeze. She picks a piece of pink confetti from my hair, and I smile at the intimacy. “So you’re happy? About the
beit din
?” she asks.

“I’m happy,” I say.

She nods. “The only thing left is to get in the bath.”

eighteen

T
HE NEXT MORNING
there’s a call from our real estate agent. The market is so crazy that we’ve given up looking, but there’s a small three-bedroom in the Annex he thinks we should take a peek at. It has exposed brick in the kitchen, and lovely hardwood floors, and a park with a playground directly across the street. We don’t need long to decide. In three short weeks we pack up the apartment; I work for five minutes, rest for ten, work for five, rest for fifteen. I’m so fogged up with hormones I can barely remember my name. It’s a beautiful feeling, though, hazy around the edges. Despite being more bound by my body than ever, I feel an accompanying sense of absolution, as if the tethers of the material world have momentarily slipped me free.

My mikvah is set for a clear spring day in June. I wake early and lie quietly for a few minutes, breathing in the fresh air from
the open window, luxuriating in the sense of unhurried imminence. The future is coming for me; I don’t have to chase after it. I think of the long months of darkness behind me, and how they have transformed into the light pushing in through the screen. I feel lightness inside me, too, spreading through my limbs, my face, the tips of my eyelids. I know my depression isn’t over for good, isn’t somehow solved like a puzzle, but I am grateful for the respite.

Degan rolls over on the other side of the bed. I heave myself over to hug him.

“Take that, Phil,” he says.

Phil is the name we’ve given to the long maternity pillow I sleep with my belly propped up against.

Degan leaves for work, but I linger in bed, listening to the robins outside our window and the sputtering cough of a motorcycle someone is trying to start. I eventually get up and send a few emails as the baby throws her punches and jabs inside me. I go out for groceries, fill the car with gas, review the blessings I will have to recite later this afternoon. I struggle to remove my toenail polish, my stomach almost too big for me to reach my feet. But the rules are clear: for immersion in the mikvah, the body must be unadorned.

Degan and I drive forty minutes north to the mikvah. We have to sign in at the front desk; there is a hundred-dollar fee. Downstairs, Degan kisses me goodbye and goes to wait in the small room adjacent to the mikvah. Rabbi Klein greets me, shows me into the change room. With effort, I reach behind me for my zipper and slowly step out of my dress. The enormity of my naked body, a world unto itself. My big breasts and my belly. The child huge inside me.

I look in the mirror and think of Granny:
If I start crying
,
I will never stop
. Of Gumper:
Not if I was the last Jew on earth
. Of his mother, Ruzenka, fasting quietly, secretly on Yom Kippur.

I think of what Judaism has come to mean to
me
. Of Shabbat, of
tzedakah
, of the shivers down my spine when I hear the prayer for the dead. There’s a knock on the change-room door. “Ready when you are,” Rabbi Klein says.

I look around for a robe and realize I’ve forgotten to bring one. I improvise and wrap my blue flowered maternity dress around me like a toga. Rachel laughs when she sees me. “Full points for creativity.” Then she says, in a serious voice, “I’ll turn my back. You can enter the pool.”

I have been picturing a beautiful green stone pool, but the mikvah looks more like something from a health club or a physiotherapist’s clinic. Cream plastic with an armrail on the stairs. I let my dress fall and take my first steps in. The water is lovely and warm. It rises up over me: ankles, knees, hips. The huge bulb of my daughter, ready to burst. Once I am standing up to my shoulders, Rachel turns to face me. She shows me a pipe I haven’t yet noticed, shunting rainwater gathered according to Jewish law into this holiest of baths. “Flowing water is fitting for this particular day. For
you
,” she begins.

I swallow.

“A river symbolizes continuity,” she says. “Today we are thinking of your family. Your father, his parents and grandparents behind you. The life within your belly, flowing forward to the future.

“In the Torah we learn that the mikvah waters are called
living
waters. Living waters come from one source and are propelled to another, stopping along the way at many junctures. You are standing in the mikvah, at the juncture to official conversion. This is not a beginning or an end in itself, but rather, a
beginning out of something that has existed, and that will continue to exist in the future.”

She reads a beautiful passage from the Torah, and then it is time for the dunks. She tells me to spread my fingers and toes so the water will touch every part of me. I have read so many things about immersion having to be kosher, not a strand of hair allowed to graze the surface, about dunks being annulled because a toe bumped the floor of the pool, but Rachel is very casual. “Make sure you’re immersed, but don’t stay under too long. Ha ha!”

But once I am under I never want to come up. I churn my arms to stay beneath the surface. The water holds me; my water holds my child. Finally I need to breathe. When I break the surface, Rabbi Klein says the blessing concerning immersion. I repeat it.

Then it is time for the third and final dunk.

When I come out of the water, I will be a Jew.

As a writer, I believe in the power of words, but there are things words cannot speak to, worlds that language cannot name. The mikvah, for me, is one of them. In the long year of classes, of learning Hebrew and making Shabbat, it has not occurred to me that the bath would be more than a rite, that I might truly be transformed. But when I emerge, I am different. My skin shines, as though every inch of me—inside and out—has been purified. I think of Shayna’s wisdom at my wedding, how she preserved the ritual so I could appreciate it fully at the proper moment. She was right. I turn to Degan now with the face of his wife, and with another woman’s face altogether.

Outside, the June day is blustery and bright. I blink in the sunshine. There is a playground beside the school, and beyond it a small grove of trees. We linger on our backs, looking up at the sky. The clouds make a canoe, a mother duck followed by a
trail of ducklings. I twirl a thick blade of grass between my thumb and forefinger and lazily brush an ant off my calf. Basking in the warmth, the sense of completion. Degan rolls onto his side, props his head up with his elbow. He pushes a gift-wrapped bag toward me. Inside are two small packages. I unwrap them carefully: a Magen David, or Star of David, to wear on a chain around my neck, and a beautiful mezuzah for our new home. I touch each object, my fingers taking them in, learning what they mean about who I now am.

Eventually we get in the car to drive home. On our way, we stop at the downtown synagogue where we will be picking up our organic vegetable share every Tuesday throughout the summer. I look around at the families choosing peppers and pears, children up on their fathers’ shoulders, a small boy in an even smaller
kippah
. After my long exile, these are my people. There is no uncertainty, nothing halfway about it. All at once, I belong.

At home, I fall into bed in utter exhaustion. I sleep on my side, my belly out in front of me like a huge crystal ball. An oracle. I feel our daughter’s foot, the curved world of her head, and dream the colour orange and the smell of baking cardamom. I wake to a phone message from Shayna. She tells me
mazel tov
, and to check outside my front door. I find blueberries, kosher cookies, a huge bouquet of lilies.

I turn on the computer. An email from Rabbi Klein is waiting: “You’ve worked hard for this, Alie. Fighting history isn’t easy.”