Between Gods: A Memoir (4 page)

“But what about conversion?” another woman asks. “I really want to convert. Or at least, my boyfriend really wants me to.”

Around the circle, several of the women nod in recognition.

The conversation quickly progresses to conversion, which is, I learn, the reason everyone else is here. To officially become Jewish in Toronto is a complex process. You have to take a yearlong, intensive class called the Jewish Information Course, or the JIC. To take
that
course, you have to be sponsored by a rabbi. Our class, it seems, is full of engaged couples—one partner Jewish, the other hoping to sign up before they get married—whose sponsoring rabbis have suggested they take this course first, as a kind of trial run.

The whole process is news to me. I have always assumed that I could reclaim my family’s Judaism when I wanted, like a lost suitcase at an airport security desk.

We go around the table and introduce ourselves properly. A man with dreadlocks and an Israeli accent says he is totally secular, but that he and his wife—the Asian woman—want to raise their children in a one-religion home. The next four women say they are dating Jewish men who encouraged them to sign up for the class. Debra tells us that she’s the daughter of a minister but wants to explore other faiths. She feels inexplicably drawn to Judaism, though a friend told her she could never be Jewish. Conversion or not. To forget it.

And what about me? I wonder. Will
I
ever be Jewish? Am I already?

A few years back, at a writing residency at the Banff Centre for the Arts, an older writer I admire told me that I had no choice
in the matter. I
was
Jewish. Because my family died in Auschwitz. Because it’s in my blood.

La sangre llama
.

But when it’s my turn to introduce myself, and when I explain my background to the rabbi, her reaction is more stayed.

“You’re Jewish,” she says. “
Sort of
. But to really be accepted, you would need to go through a process.” She clears her throat. “Because your mother is Christian.”

six

I
RONICALLY
,
I FIRST STUMBLED ON
our family secret at Christmas. I was maybe eleven years old. We were at my aunt and uncle’s house; a huge Christmas tree shone with a hundred white lights in the corner. Over my head, in the crowd of adults, my auntie Sheila was speaking to my mother, saying something about a couple they both knew, the husband Jewish, the wife a Gentile.

I was cruising a plate of Black Magic chocolates, trying to guess which one would have a pink centre.

Above me, I heard Auntie Sheila: “So their daughter isn’t Jewish. Because Judaism always comes from the mother.”

I bit into a chocolate and screwed up my face: marzipan.

My mum: “So our girls …?”

“Our girls aren’t technically Jewish, either,” Auntie Sheila said. “Secret or no secret.”

“Even though their fathers …”

“Right,” Auntie Sheila said.

I remember this moment as if it were in a cartoon: a little light bulb appearing in the air above my head, and the sound effect, the clear
ting
of a bell. My brain was working fast, trying to process this information. Who did they mean by “our girls”? They meant my cousins. They meant my sister. They meant
me
.

I put my half-eaten marzipan back on the plate.

I was not Jewish because my
mother
was not Jewish. But my
father
, the implication seemed to be …

Then, when I was twelve, my friend Jordan stopped me on the playground. “Your dad is Jewish,” he said.

I remembered the conversation between my mother and my aunt but still wasn’t sure what it meant. I had a crush on Jordan, and I weighed my possible responses and their various consequences. Jordan was Jewish. Would he be offended if I denied it? Would I get in trouble if I agreed?

“No, he’s not,” I said at last.

“Yes, he is. My mum says.”

“No, he isn’t.”

“He is, too.”

“No, he’s
not
,” I repeated, my desire to protect my father finally outweighing my desire to find common ground.

“What you need—” Jordan said, slinging an arm around my shoulder; he was more confident than the other twelve-year-old boys were “—what you need is a good Jewish name. We should call you Rosie.”

Rosie, I knew, was the English translation of my Czech great-grandmother’s name, Ruzenka. I giggled.

I denied the truth several more times and then managed to divert Jordan with a game of kissing tag. It was easily done. But I felt a growing unease. The clues were beginning to add up. Something wasn’t right in our family. Something was lurking, biding its time. It seemed to be pulling at me, a persistent tugging I wasn’t sure I could resist much longer.

I was born in the middle of the 1970s, but my home life was straight out of the fifties. My mother cooked and took care of the children. My father worked and made money. In our house the values that are archetypically masculine—assertiveness, agency, success—were prioritized at the expense of the feminine traits of nurture and interdependence.

Feelings were tolerated as one tolerates a needy aunt who comes to visit yearly: we put up with her, we were polite, but behind her back we were all rolling our eyes.

Predictably, the feminism I cleaved to as a young woman was the variety in which a woman gained purchase by behaving like a man. I’d spent my childhood as Daddy’s girl, prized for my chutzpah (although this, of course, is the last word he would have used). I wasn’t made to feel explicitly ashamed of my softer feelings; but, on the other hand, I was never asked about them, never invited to explore or express them.

“What’s all
that
about?” Dad would ask if I ever fussed or cried.

So by the time depression came for me in my early twenties, I already had two decades of unexpressed grief accumulated inside me, the grief of small pains and sleights. Yes, in the big picture I was a content child with a very happy childhood. None of the classic traumas had ever darkened my door. But it turns out Granny was right. Life is inherently painful. And several generations of unshed tears eventually become a flood.

Luckily, my psychotherapist Ben was an exceptional listener. He barely spoke. He nodded. He sighed empathetically. Every now and then he suggested a connection between the present and the past, his suggestion so subtle I was sure I’d come up with it myself.

“How are you feeling?” he would ask, and then he would wait, his hands folded quietly in his lap, while I fished around inside myself for something.

“I’ve been thinking,” I’d start to say, and he’d let me continue.

When I was done, he’d repeat the question: “And how are you
feeling
?”

Our meetings exhausted me. I arrived home wrung out like a dirty old rag. Once, I thought to record a session—an attempt to hang on to the insights that erupted so fast and furious, breaking briefly into the air, only to be swallowed back up by the great ocean of unconsciousness. There was nowhere for them to go but back to where they came from. Several years later I listened to the tape, anticipating a deluge of psychological insight. Instead, there was silence. The odd muffled sniff. Heavy sighing. A statement by Ben or me, followed by such a long period of quiet that I thought the recorder had broken. Such intense, tiring inner labour and nothing to show for it on the outside.

Ben was Jewish. I knew this at the same level that I knew he had grey hair and sported comfortable corduroys. I told him about my “interesting background”—I must have—but it didn’t form the basis for any of our work. The Holocaust is unfathomably deep material. I was still toiling away at the upper reaches of my blindness, admitting that my childhood had not been as perfect as I’d always assumed. It took twelve, or perhaps twenty,
sessions to distinguish between what I
thought
I’d had—parents who were perfect—and the reality—parents who were human. Hundreds of dollars. Hours of mental anguish untangling the threads of acceptance and blame. There is no perfect parent. To exist is to get hurt. And the extra confusion of a case like mine: more money than we knew what to do with, everybody smiling and apple-cheeked. Not a whiff of anything remotely like abuse.

And yet. Turns out my father was not at all consistent. Turns out he was absent, then present, then absent, like the sun moving in and out of the clouds. Turns out he could sit through a half-hour of dinner-table conversation with a blank look in his eye, not registering a single word that was said. To admit this meant admitting that the parent I had idealized was other than how I had needed him to be. Another five sessions on that alone. Long, pregnant pauses, tears, my psyche struggling and thrashing as though being drowned.

But if my father’s dissociation was related to the family history with the Holocaust, it wasn’t something Ben and I discussed.

Dad had done some psychotherapy himself as a young man. He had been part of one of the T-groups that were popular in the seventies, a group led by a man named Dr. Martin Fischer. “He was good,” Dad would often say. “It’s so hard to find someone
good
.”

When I was a newborn, Dad sometimes took me to group. I picture myself as a baby asleep in my bassinet, my little hands curled up at the sides of my head, and try to imagine what it meant that Dad, who could easily have left me with my mother, chose to bring me along.

It was, I think now, a kind of pledge. He would work through his past. He would not pass it down to me.

Does every parent dream this impossible dream?

When depression first came for me, Dad was the one who encouraged me to find someone to talk to. He never asked for details about my sessions with Ben, but he asked if I was still going, and whether it was helpful.

And one day, a few months in, he called me on the phone. “If you want me to come, I will.”

I put down the bowl of grapes I was painstakingly washing.

“Where?”

“To a therapy session. If there’s anything you want to talk about with me there.”

In the background the dog barked. “Go beddie!” Dad reprimanded her.

“Oh,” I said, mortified. “I don’t think so.”

“Are you sure?”

“Yep,” I said. And then something occurred to me. “Why don’t you go alone?”

“What do you mean?”

“You’re always saying you’d like to find someone good. I think Ben might qualify.”

I was thinking, of course, of Dad’s own “bad blood,” and of the futile pledge he had made to me as a baby. I was thinking of the long gaps between sentences when we talked, gaps that Dad seemed to fall headlong into, disappearing from both himself and from me.

Eventually he agreed. But he saw Ben only once. He was interested in the puzzle of the psyche, he told me, in figuring out how the pieces of a family story fit together. Ben was too focused on feelings. And Dad was done with feelings. There wasn’t anything soft and subterranean left inside him that he needed to express.

Dad found out by accident that he is Jewish. In his early twenties he toured Europe with some college friends. At the Jewish cemetery in Prague, the tour guide pulled him aside. “Don’t you know that Pick is a Jewish name?”

I can see it so clearly. Dad pauses, his eyes on one of the tombstones, its stylized menorah. It’s a fall day and he pulls his sweater tight around his chest. His heart is suddenly pounding. He feels both that he is being told something ridiculously, impossibly implausible, and something that makes his whole life make sense. He looks around for his friends, and finally spots them over by the iron gates, rolling cigarettes.

“I’m not Jewish,” he says.

The tour guide shrugs. “Your name is.”

“Well,
I’m
not.”

The guide shrugs again. “Suit yourself.”

Back home in Canada, Dad needed not weeks, not months, but
years
to work up the nerve to ask whether what the guide said was true. When he finally approached his mother in the kitchen, she got a look in her eye—part fear, part relief—and called upstairs to her husband, “He knows!”