The New Spice Box: Contemporary Jewish Writing 9781487538729

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Praise for The New Spice Box

“The New Spice Box is state of the art. It travels no tired ground; it ­presents a range of genres; and it brings writerly voice and place into sharp focus.” Norman Ravvin, author of A House of Words: Jewish Writing, Identity, and Memory and The Girl Who Stole Everything “The New Spice Box is essential reading for anyone interested in contemporary Jewish literature. This anthology illuminates an exciting spectrum of Jewish writing, showcasing the diverse spaces, languages, histories, experiences, and literary forms of Jewishness.” Emily Robins Sharpe, Keene State College “This sparkling new collection of writing by Jewish authors illuminates diverse aspects of Jewish tradition and experience through its astute and wide-ranging selection of poetry, short fiction, and memoir. I have no doubt that The New Spice Box will be an important contribution to modern Jewish literature.” Goldie Morgentaler, University of Lethbridge “Though they come from a particular place and what appears to be a particular vantage point, these pieces by Jewish writers are as broadminded and universal as a collection could be. They speak to universal themes and do so beautifully, often poignantly. What a fine collection this is for any sensitive and intelligent reader.” Joseph Kertes, former dean of the School of Creative and Performing Arts at Humber College and author of Last Impressions

OTHER BOOKS BY RUTH PANOFSKY

Non-fiction The New Spice Box: Canadian Jewish Writing (2017) At Odds in the World: Essays on Jewish Canadian Women Writers (2008) The Force of Vocation: The Literary Career of Adele Wiseman (2006)

Poetry Radiant Shards: Hoda’s North End Poems (2020) Laike and Nahum: A Poem in Two Voices (2007) Lifeline (2001)

THE NEW SPICE BOX CONTEMPORARY JEWISH WRITING

E D I T E D B Y R U T H PA N O F S K Y

New Jewish Press An imprint of University of Toronto Press Toronto Buffalo London utorontopress.com © University of Toronto Press 2020 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise) without the prior written permission of the publisher of this book.

Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication Title: The new spice box: contemporary Jewish writing / edited by Ruth Panofsky. Other titles: New spice box (2020) Names: Panofsky, Ruth, editor. Identifiers: Canadiana (print) 20200256882 | Canadiana (print) 20200256904 |  Canadiana (ebook) 20200256904 | ISBN 9781487508661 (hardcover) | ISBN 9781487526009 (softcover) | ISBN 9781487538736 (EPUB) | ISBN 9781487538729 (PDF) Subjects: LCSH: Jews – Literary collections. | LCSH: Jews – Canada – Literary collections. |  CSH: Canadian literature (English) – Jewish authors. | CSH: Canadian literature (English) – 21st century Classification: LCC PS8235.J4 N493 2020 | DDC C810.8/08924 – dc23

ISBN 978-1-4875-0866-1 (cloth) ISBN 978-1-4875-2600-9 (paper)

ISBN 978-1-4875-3873-6 (EPUB) ISBN 978-1-4875-3872-9 (PDF)

Printed in Canada We acknowledge the financial support of the Government of Canada, the Canada ­Council for the Arts, and the Ontario Arts Council, an agency of the Government of ­Ontario, for our publishing activities.

CONTENTS Introduction

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Bernice Eisenstein, “Yiddish Holds the World” Daniel Goodwin, “Isaac” Elaine Kalman Naves, “Silent Witness” Naomi Guttman, “Lot’s Wife” Norman Ravvin, “Glendale, North of Alhambra, East of Burbank” Isa Milman, “Yiddish in North America” Nancy Richler, “Life’s Promise” Lauren Kirshner, “Marilyn Monroe Stuttered” Jacquie Buncel, “In the Closet with My Relatives on the French Riviera” Jessamyn Hope, “The Reverse”

3 17 21 37 39 47 49 57 65 69

pa r t t w o : p l a c e

David Rakoff, “Arise, Ye Wretched of the Earth” Isa Milman, “A Daughter Recognizes a Father Who Spoke” Bob Bossin, “Sweet Lilies’ Advice”

87 95 97

Carol Lipszyc, “Feather Boy” 107 Ruth Panofsky, “Pearl” 121 Ruth Panofsky, “Immigrant” 123 Cary Fagan, “Nora By the Sea” 125 Daniel Goodwin, “Heritage” 151 Mireille Silcoff, “Shalom Israel!” 153 David Bezmozgis, “An Animal to the Memory” 167 p a r t t h r e e : p r a c t i c e

Alison Pick, from Between Gods 179 Jacquie Buncel, “Children of Holocaust Survivors” 185 Renee Norman, “Lottery” 187 Renee Norman, “Prayers for the Almost Dead” 189 Ayelet Tsabari, “Brit Milah” 191 Adam Sol, “Simcha” 209 Adam Sol, “Taking Down the Sukkah” 211 Jason Camlot, “Distinctions” 213 Jason Camlot, “Etrog” 215 Jacob Scheier, “The Language of Our People” 217 Jacob Scheier, “My Mother Dies in Reverse” 219 Naomi Guttman, “Prayer” 223 Sigal Samuel, “Wor(l)d Salad: A Writer’s Love Letter to the Hebrew Language” 225 Biographical Notes 233 Permissions 243

INTRODUCTION Nearly four decades have passed since 1981, when Lester and Orpen Dennys issued The Spice Box: An Anthology of Jewish Canadian Writing under its historic imprint. At the time, few such anthologies existed and The Spice Box, edited by Gerri Sinclair and Morris Wolfe, was hailed as a landmark collection.* Among other works, it included English translations of Yiddish verse by J.I. Segal and Rokhl Korn, poems by A.M. Klein, Irving Layton, and Miriam Waddington, and prose by Ted Allan, Adele Wiseman, and Mordecai Richler, authors widely recognized for having brought Jewish writing to the fore in Canada. The Spice Box marked the growth of Jewish literary activity in Canada over the course of the twentieth century. It was instrumental in delineating the field of Canadian Jewish writing and soon became an important title for Lester and Orpen Dennys. In 2015, when the Anne Tannenbaum Centre for Jewish Studies at the University of Toronto launched the New Jewish Press, co-publishers Andrea Knight and Malcolm Lester invited me to edit an anthology that would pay homage to its predecessor – long out of print – and * Both were trained as literary scholars. At the time, Sinclair taught at Simon Fraser University in Vancouver and Wolfe at the Ontario College of Art (now OCAD University) in Toronto.

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bring together distinctive contemporary voices. The publishers knew of my abiding interest in Canadian Jewish writing. I had published a scholarly study of novelist Adele Wiseman’s literary career, a collection of essays focused on writing by Jewish women, as well as a two-volume critical edition of the collected poems of Miriam Waddington. They also knew that as a published poet, I mine my own Jewish inheritance when writing verse, in particular the hardships faced by my maternal grandparents who emigrated from Russia to Montreal in the early twentieth century. I happily accepted the invitation, agreed to follow the model established by Sinclair and Wolfe, and set about assembling a volume of Canadian Jewish writing. The New Spice Box, an aptly resonant title for the second iteration of the anthology, appeared in 2017. That collection featured contemporary writing that is reflective and open: poems by Susan Glickman, Robyn Sarah, and David Solway; stories by Gabriella Goliger, Seymour Mayne, and J.J. Steinfeld; and essays by Eva Hoffman, Naim Kattan, and Kenneth Sherman. These writers look back on the past and read it anew; they also partake fully of the present moment in Canada and cast outward to the future. In 2018, the University of Toronto Press acquired The New Jewish Press, giving the imprint a new authority and a wider reach. As one of the first titles to be issued under the rebranded imprint, this anthology, the third in The Spice Box series, widens its lens to include Jewish authors who write across borders, claim new identities, and join ritual practices with secular beliefs. The titular spice box remains a fitting metaphor for this project. Used during Havdalah, a religious ceremony marking the symbolic end of the Sabbath and the start of the new week, the spice box contains an aromatic blend of spices: cardamom, cinnamon, and clove, myrtle and nutmeg. Havdalah requires that the decorative box be handed around so everyone in attendance can smell the spices. In the same way that the spice blend elicits a sensual response from congregants, so too will the evocative and exciting material gathered here engage readers.

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The driving force behind The New Spice Box: Contemporary J­ewish Writing was the desire to uncover the twin touchstones of original ­expression and writerly craft, and to balance the representation of genres, styles, and authorial perspectives. In selecting material for this volume, I was guided first by its title, with its emphasis on newness. The New Spice Box showcases recent work written in English that is fresh and relevant, profound and lasting – problematic as it may be to assign such literary merit. Although it reproduces extracts from several works of creative non-fiction, it omits excerpts from novels, since I do not believe excerpts best represent a novelist’s work. The date of first journal or book publication always follows each selection. Across this anthology, all writers identify as Jewish – no matter where they were born or raised, have lived or travelled – through cultural and/or religious affiliation. In their work, they address Jewish ­subjects – some do so more obliquely than others – by treating historical events, probing their cultural heritage, scrutinizing gender roles and sexuality, observing or critiquing religious custom. Several return to Europe and the subject of the Holocaust. Many others reach beyond that past and write as North Americans who grapple with a complex, ever-evolving sense of self. All acknowledge the unshakable influence of memory, both communal and individual, on Jewish identity. Since all literature of the Jewish diaspora – that of Canada and the United States, Britain and Australia, as well as the former Soviet-led countries – emerged from the disruptive experiences of exile, immigration, and settlement, it is understandable that contemporary Jewish writers are especially attuned to global shifts that continue to affect demographics and politics, cultures and economies. In the pages that follow, readers will find original and varied responses to the intersectional complexities of cultural and national identity that ground this project. They will see that there are innumerable ways in which literature is Jewish in orientation, multiple ways in which writers identify as Jewish, and countless ways in which Jewish experience is written into literature.

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Subject matter and literary perspective, style and setting range widely to reflect the variation and ingenuity that have come to characterize contemporary Jewish writing. Individual pieces, for example, conjure the private thoughts of the biblical Isaac at the moment of near sacrifice by his father Abraham, consider the symbolic meaning of the brit milah or circumcision for a newborn male, recall the foul taste of a mistakenly eaten etrog during Sukkot, and reimagine a mother ­dying of cancer “in reverse.” Narrators include a witness at the trial of f­ ormer SS officer Oskar Groening, a daughter abandoned by her mother, a former stutterer, and the son of a bookie. Stylistically, the writing is mixed: comic and tragic, realistic and imagistic, expressionistic and surreal. Short stories are set in Ontario, Quebec, and California, France, Germany, and Poland. In an attempt to stay true to its eclecticism and divergent moral attitudes, poetry, short stories, and creative nonfiction appear together under the thematic groupings of voice, place, and practice that structure this collection. Although each piece in this anthology appears in English, at times the language is inflected by the lilt and syntax of Yiddish. The effect is to summons a formative Eastern European past that either will not or cannot be relinquished despite countless border crossings, both real and imagined. At the same time, Jewish identity becomes visceral and corporeal through the expressive and embodied use of the English language. Thus, part one, “Voice,” refers broadly to the artistic foregrounding of language and idiom to establish identity. Enter graphic memoirist Bernice Eisenstein, for whom Yiddish is her mamaloshen or mother tongue. Though it carries the weight of the ancestral past into the present, Yiddish is also “the soul and substance” of family life in Toronto’s Kensington Market neighbourhood, which as a toddler Eisenstein experienced as a “veltele, a world within a world.” The dominance of Yiddish adds to Eisenstein’s sense of living in a world circumscribed as much by language as geography. Consequently, language becomes her true home and serves as an invaluable bridge, simultaneously reaching back in time and forward to the present.

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Poet Isa Milman also hears Yiddish first as the language of her “cradlesongs” and later as the “breath” of her “parents’ loss” in the Holocaust. A “tremble-throated song” and “remnant of the ember-world,” the sounds of Yiddish awaken nostalgia for Milman’s North American childhood, as well as an Eastern European past she knows only through her parents. In part two, “place” is used conceptually and acquires multiple meanings. Literally, place denotes geography. Adapting to the environment of North America can confer a sense of continuity and stability through connection with the past, appreciation for the present, and belief in the future. Lack of adjustment, however, may lead to a heightened sense of disruption and isolation. Figuratively, place also refers variously to historical crises and cultural memory, to the lived experience of immigration and settlement, to persistent feelings of exile and marginalization. In “Arise, Ye Wretched of the Earth,” essayist David Rakoff recalls his fifteen-year-old self coming of age during a summer spent working on a kibbutz. The demands of physical labour and life in the new country of Israel bring a new awareness to the adolescent raised in the comfort of Toronto. Apprehension also comes in Mireille Silcoff’s short story “Shalom Israel!” which invokes several phases of immigration as it moves from Russia to Tel Aviv, then on to a number of American cities en route to Miami, and finally to Montreal. In doing so, it unveils the historical and cultural layers – as well as the personal losses – that tie the narrator to her mother, who is a guest in the daughter’s Montreal home. Rooted in events of the past but grounded in the present, the story unites daughter and mother through their separate experiences of anguish and shared knowledge of grief. Mark Berman is the thirteen-year-old Latvian-born protagonist of David Bezmozgis’s short story “An Animal to the Memory.” For Mark, Jewishness is an imposed sensibility, linked inextricably to distress that is more personal than communal. In Latvia, where he spent the first six

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years of his life, Mark’s family members were forced by law to conceal their Jewish identity. He therefore arrives in Canada with little if any sense of his ancestry. Mark’s inculcation into Canadian Jewish culture is through ­violence, verbal abuse, and emotional trauma. First, in the north end ­Toronto suburb where he and his parents settle, he is “pummeled” by former friends of similar Soviet background, seemingly in response to the incongruous “white tuxedo” he wears in the bar mitzvah portrait hanging in his home. Second, at Hebrew school he is humiliated by ­Canadian-born boys who insult his homemade lunches of “smoked Hungarian salami, Polish bologna, [and] roast turkey” that violate kosher dietary laws, and is further provoked into fist fights by relentless bullying. Finally, and most significantly, Mark is traumatized by Gurvich, the school principal who dishonours the sanctity of Holocaust commemoration by inflicting his particular view of suffering on his vulnerable charge. In the end, Mark is brought to a shattering realization of what it means “to be a Jew.” The works included in part three, “Practice,” emphasize ritual and/or tradition. At the core of this section is prayer, expressed through thought and emotion as much as ceremony. Here, Passover, which commemorates the biblical passage to freedom, is observed as a holiday that continues to give structure and meaning to Jewish life, while Sukkot, a joyous holiday that celebrates the harvest, is simultaneously tinged with sadness. A wedding gives rise to emotional release, manifest as the ecstatic and frenzied dancing of male guests. Several poems educe the pain of losing a loved one and the comfort that comes from observing the rituals of lamentation, less through the Mourner’s Kaddish (or prayer) and shiva (the seven-day mourning period following the death of an immediate family member) than the redemptive power of verse. In several instances, poems serve as secular prayers. In an excerpt from Between Gods, the compelling account of Alison Pick’s quest to reconstitute her religious and cultural identities,

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­ istory is reclaimed through discovery that is equal parts wrenchh ing and redemptive. As a teenager, Pick, who was raised Anglican in Kitchener, Ontario, learns the truth of her father’s Czech Jewish origin. In adulthood, she embarks on a personal journey to uncover her father’s suppressed history, which leads her to the shocking revelation that European relatives were lost during the Holocaust and the eventual decision – even as she declares “I already am [Jewish]” – to undergo formal conversion to Judaism. For Pick, Jewish memory arises as embodied knowledge that she must first “excavate,” then recover, and finally reclaim. Her memoir recounts the elaborate process of coming to terms with her hidden family trauma while “graft[ing]” herself onto Judaism. Of all the writers represented in The New Spice Box, none more than Pick shows that Jewish consciousness can be acquired, as well as inherited. Although her Jewish patrimony lay secreted in the inconsistencies and gaps in her family narrative and interrelationships, it called out to her for exploration. That she willingly engaged in the disquieting task of retrieval – research that led her to review her most intimate bonds, past and present – suggests the degree to which Jewish identity is at once painful and lasting, resilient and sustaining. For Pick, the turn to Judaism, its history, rituals, and sense of community, was a true homecoming. In the closing essay, suitably titled “Wor(l)d Salad,” Sigal Samuel revels in the knowledge that “Jewish tradition is obsessed with language. It loves to language; it takes pleasure in languaging.” Samuel’s “own internal music” is the Hebrew language. It structures experience and gives “syntax” to her feelings, as well as her dreams. Samuel venerates Hebrew as her mother’s first language, her own mother tongue, and the language of modern Israel, but especially as a “magical” historical language that contains “the seed of all languages.” As readers will undoubtedly note, many pieces traverse the classifications of voice, place, and practice that shape this anthology. In fact, the headings are intended as readerly guides through this gathering of

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poetry, short stories, and essays by writers who probe the multifaceted complexities of contemporary Jewish identity. If there is one thing the assembled authors share, however, it is their sense of comfort in w ­ riting openly about Jewish experience. This is no small freedom, sought over centuries and finally held as a right. ∞ I extend thanks to Andrea Knight and Malcolm Lester for spearheading the New Jewish Press, and to Natalie Fingerhut and Lynn Fisher of the University of Toronto Press for supporting The New Spice Box. I am also indebted to Shannon Martin and Kathryn Stagg for their invaluable research assistance.

PA R T O N E · V O I C E

Yiddish Holds the World Is it funny enough, is it sad enough? Am I too whiny, too angry, too petulant? Boo hoo, poor little survivors’ child. Have I managed to avoid using every cliché there is out there relating to the Holocaust? You see, I have this problem – growing up in the household of my parents was not tragic, but their past was. My life was not cursed, theirs was. They were born under an unfavourable star and forced to sew it onto their clothing. Yet here I am, some Jewish Sisyphus, pushing history and memory uphill, wondering what I’m supposed to be, and what I really feel like is a rebellious child, wanting to stand before my parents and say, Here, take it – it’s yours, I don’t want it. But all I have to do is look up ahead and catch a glimpse of Primo Levi and Elie Wiesel, Founding

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Fathers of Memory, fixed at the very top, in order A tsigayner melody to realize my folly. iz azoy sheyn A GYPSY MELODY IS SO BEAUTIFUL Look what it has hert ir es, fargest ir es nit, neyn THAT ONCE taken for them to YOU HEAR IT, YOU WILL NEVER FORGET IT find their words. At the same time, I can’t help myself from wondering: What did the floor around Primo Levi’s desk look like? Was it littered with hundreds of wrinkled-up pieces of paper, git es keyn ru, ideas thrown AND IT GIVES NO REST, out because s’farkisheft aykh di melody YOU’RE SPELLBOUND BY THE MELODY. he felt his words lacked, did not even come close to the truth of his experience. Did Elie Wiesel feel the frustration of having to find new ways of saying the same thing over and over again, causing him to put his pen down and roll his eyes heavenward. Did he happen to have a thesaurus on the Holocaust as a guide, and every time, stymied, he could look up a word, say like “crematorium,” and find just the right fresh noun. “See under oven: an enclosed



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compartment of brick, stone, or metal for cooking food; furnace; kiln.” And then he would try out a sentence: Auschwitz’s enclosed compartments made out of brick and stone for cooking Jewish flesh worked 24/7. The sentence is crossed out, deleted, vayl zi iz varem, hartsik, ful mit another one begun ... kheyn BECAUSE IT IS WARM, SOULFUL, FULL Did either one of OF CHARM. A modne kraft, A STRANGE CRAFT, zi git aykh libe un oykh lebnshaft IT GIVES YOU these writers consider LOVE AND ALSO A LUST FOR LIFE. Hert ir es nor whether something they eyn mol HEAR IT BUT ONCE said or wrote might be in bad taste, or did they write jokes in private that they knew could never be uttered outISN’T SHE BEAUTIFUL, MY AUNT side their studies? Like this one: JENNY? YOU CAN’T TELL THAT Max and Abe are walking towards SHE HAS ONLY ONE ARM. MAYBE THAT’S WHY MICHAEL IS HOLDan enclosed compartment made ING MINE. JENNY CAN SING. out of brick and stone, and Max SHE WON A PRIZE ON THE TED MACK AMATEUR HOUR. turns to Abe and says, “What do THE PROGRAM THAT SELLs you get when you lubricate an GERITOL, THE ELIXIR OF LIFE— auditorium with a million Jews? “ARE YOU TIRED, LISTLESS, RUN-DOWN? TRY GERITOL!” A creamatorium.” A real kneeTOO BAD IT DOESN’T WORK. slapper. Thankfully, this would MICHAEL GREW UP TO HAVE have been crumpled up and CROHN’S AND A COLOSTOMY, AND JENNY NEVER TIRED OF added to an ever-growing pile WORRY. BUT JUST LISTEN TO of rejects. HER SING A LONG-FORGOTTEN It’s difficult enough to discover YIDDISH SONG. the right words for what is to be remembered, but even harder

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when each word longs to shelter and sustain the memory of a generation aged and now dying. I was born in October 1949, in an area of downtown Toronto called Kensington Market. Bordered by Spadina Avenue, one of the city’s main north-south arteries, the streets to the west – Augusta, Kensington, Baldwin, Nassau, Oxford – held a maze of narrow alleys and densely packed-together houses. Eastern European Jewish immigrants arrived in the early twentieth century and made their first homes here. Residents quickly set up shop with bolted-down pushcarts in front of their houses from which they sold a variety of goods. Those who prospered over time left their frame houses and moved north, to other parts of the city. After the war, room was made for the next wave of immigrants and, with them, shtetl life became transplanted and took root. The day of my birth that year happened to coincide with Yom Kippur. I don’t know whether or not my mother fasted on the eve, but her Day of Atonement provided a new name for the Book of Life. I’ve never been quite sure if being born on this auspicious date meant that from then on I was off the hook for feeling guilt over any deed or thought or so riddled with it that I believed

“yiddish

h o l d s t h e w o r l d ”

The Guide for the Perplexed, written centuries before my arrival by the Jewish philosopher Maimonides, was intended for me. Whatever. A state of confusion seemed an appropriate place to start from, especially within the labyrinth of Kensington Market, which was home for the first four years of my life. Kensington Market is my babysitter, while my father and mother are in their shop just around the corner, plucking feathers from chickens. I’m standing in front of the Lottmans’ bakery on Baldwin Street, a pintsized version of the Michelin Man, unable to move in my quilted snowsuit. Silver-coated sugar ball bearings – the kind that decorate wedding cakes and break your teeth when you bite into them – roll around in my hand. Someone from the bakery must have given them to me, and anyway, the broken baby tooth of a child would not be such a tragedy. The warm smell of baked goods escapes each time a customer goes in or comes out, and instead I wish I had been given a Nothing – a puffed baked confection sprinkled with sugar,

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manna from heaven. Who would have named something “nothing”? Probably the same person who first tasted the sweet and then, with a shrug, said in Yiddish, “Vus eppes” – literally, “What something.” It should have been called a Something from the start, but that would have been too simple. Vus eppes, go figure. It must be itself and its opposite at the same time, both present and absent, much like this place from the past where I stand. Across the street is the cheese emporium, displaying giant wheels of cheese in the window. From the market’s small, narrow stores, all crowded one on top of the other, everything can be purchased. Fish fresh from a tank or scaled and filleted, chicken plucked and trussed or sectioned into parts, barrels of herring – brined and pickled – barrels of pickles – brined and pickle-pickled – bagels, braided breads, rye bread, with or without kimmel, black bread, with or without raisins, and a cornucopia spill of fruit, vegetables, and nuts. Shopkeepers wear long white aprons, which are stained with the colours of their wares by hands wiping off blood from freshly killed poultry, meat, and fish or the pigmented juice of overripe fruit. Chickens, trying to cheat fate, can be seen roaming the concrete sidewalks and streets that might as well have been made of the straw and mud of the past. The Anshei Minsk Synagogue on St. Andrew, with its Russian- Romanesque architecture, watches over the streets half a century before its windows will be broken, its books burned, in 2002. But for now it is still able to pulse klezmer music into the air and over the rooftops

“yiddish

h o l d s t h e w o r l d ”

of the market, cadences of the Yiddish soul, another kind of sweet Nothing. Marc Chagall must have floated paint onto his canvasses in Russia with these sounds on his brush.

Our first home in Kensington Market is an apartment on the second floor of a house on Wales Avenue. There are two bedrooms, one for the four of us, the other for a boarder, Mr. Pick, with whom we share the kitchen and bathroom. He was alone and old and I would come to think of him as Mr. Toothpick, wanting to complete his name so that he more closely resembled how I saw him – skinny and tall. Sometimes after my mother bathed me, while I was being dried off and changed, our lodger would appear with a LifeSaver tied to the end of a string, which he dangled over my head to lick.

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We lived on Wales for less than two years. In 1950, my mother’s parents, Moishe and Machele, and my aunt and uncle, Jenny and Jacob (whom we called Jack), and their son, Michael, arrived from Sweden, where they had found themselves after the war. Finally, they are all reunited, and from then, my parents, my grandparents, and my aunt and uncle will live within close proximity to one another, no matter how often moving house was entailed. My father and his brother buy a building on Spadina Avenue that has a grocery store on the street level. Jack will run the store while my father continues to work in his shop nearby on Kensington Avenue in the market. My grandparents find a home for themselves just a few streets away. When our family and Jack’s merge under one roof, filling the two floors above the store, Mr. Pick is invited to gather his few belongings and move into the room in the attic, and the taste of candy on a string will sweeten a new home. The wallpaper of my bedroom has cowboys and Indians on it and I’m crying. I am in a crib and my sister, Sharon, three years older than I am, is next to me, lying on her cot. My father is here, leaning close to Sharon with a doll in his hands, and when he sees me crying as he is about to give the doll to her, he turns and gives it to me. Just as he bends towards me, and before he places the doll in my arms, cowboys and Indians surround him. This is the moment when I first begin to ally my father with westerns.

“yiddish

h o l d s t h e w o r l d ”

SO, SANTA, HERE’S WHAT I WANT—A DREYDL THAT PLAYS MUSIC WHEN IT SPINS. HAVE MY PARENTs STOP ARGUING SO MUCH.... SANTA, BRING THEM ALL BACK. AND IF YOU CAN’T DO THAT, THEN MAKE ONE SNOWFALL TURN INTO ASH.

Yiddish was the soul and substance of the life in our home. A veltele, a world within a world. Looking back, it is embodied in the intense gaze of my father and in the resilience of my mother. It is in the stern silence of my mother’s father and in the endurance of his wife, and in the close presence of my aunt and uncle. It is every bar mitzvah, wedding, picnic, and weekend gathering of my parents’ friends. Yiddish is spending the summer at Wasaga Beach, where several cottages make up a shtetl of Greenie families, and watching overweight, overtanned sunbathers bend, knee-deep in the lake,

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abluting themselves with scooped handfuls of water and sighing, “Ah, what a mechaieh,” what a pleasure. Yiddish was our home. It was outrunning my mother to the bathroom and locking the door so that she couldn’t patsh my tochis again, and it was the shreklech shrieking of my parents’ anger. It was the dining-room table laden with memorial yorzeit candles on Yom Kippur, the day’s serious meaning relived for the rest of the year when we drank juice out of the small glass containers that once held enough wax to burn for twenty-four hours. It was the toasted rye bread rubbed with knobl, garlic, that I had for breakfast before being sent off to kindergarten with a salami sandwich, thickly sliced, spread with shmaltz. Yiddish was the medicinal remedy my mother used when she hollowed out a potato and placed it over my throbbing, badly burned thumb. Five pounds of potatoes later and a sizable infected blister, she finally allowed a doctor to prescribe antibiotics. I don’t remember hearing English as a language until I went to school. As my parents’ English vocabulary grew they attached these words to YOU MEAN YOU UNDERSTOOD Yiddish, although at the time I was only aware of WHAT I WAS SAYING?

WHO KNEW SHE WAS ALWAYS LISTENING!

“yiddish

h o l d s t h e w o r l d ”

one harmonic language being spoken. From an early age, my ear became tuned to hear words voiced with a certain cadence and pitch. To this day, any time my mother and I have a conversation, I absorb what she says without any consciousness of her mixing in Yiddish words. The primary residence of Yiddish in our home managed to affect my relationship to English after I began to go to school. Example: Imagine that you’ve gone on holiday, a stranger in a strange land. You’re all dressed up – fartrasket – ready to go out for an evening of exploration. You get into your rented car and drive for a while until you run out of gas on the highway on a country road in the middle of who knows where – that’s a farshtinkener (really lousy) situation. Then you realize that you have fargessen (forgotten) to take your cellphone with you, having left it in your farkrimmt (crowded) hotel room, and you start to feel the whole holiday is farkuckt (screwed up). In hindsight, the excursion was poorly planned and the fault is yours and now you feel farblondjet (not only lost, but way off track). Suddenly a swarm of wasps comes out of the finster (dark) and you are completely farpotshket (messed up) OF COURSE. YOU WERE ALWAYS SPEAKING YIDDISH. WHAT IS IT WITH ALL THE ALTES! DON’T THEY KNOW THEY CREATED THE AIR I BREATHE? THE CHUTZPAH NOT TO THINK IT MATTERED. BUT I’VE ONLY JUST BEGUN TO LET THEM KNOW.

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from head to toe. All is farfolen (lost). The day is fertig (finished) and you lie down in a farkrimmt, farshtinkener, farkuckt ditch by the side of the road. Farshtaist? Understand? With its syllabic repetitions, Yiddish often rattled the way I heard English when it was being spoken. Now in order to experience the full flavour of my predicament, start to speak and then sneeze at the same time. Try it: far-fetched, far-flung, far be it, forspent, foreshadow, for shame, furnish (could be confused with gornisht, nothing), forlorn, forbidden, foreplay, furtive (often confused with fertig), and fermented – one of my favourites because it sounds as if it should really mean something that was intended to be, as in fate. In the late 1950s, I used to watch a TV show called The Millionaire. Every week, Michael Anthony was handed a cheque to deliver to some deserving individual, changing a life forever in American-dream-come-true-land. The only things revealed about the magnanimous benefactor, at the beginning of each show, were his voiceover, the sight of his two hands, and his name: John Bears Fartipton. Or, at least, that’s what I heard. Only much later, during a conversation about TV trivia, was I corrected: John Beresford Tipton. Even so, my spliced-together interpretation made more sense, since to be fartipt means to be askew, off-centred, which this man had to be if he was handing out one million dollars weekly. But instead of being a meshuggener, a crazy person, perhaps he was a televised version of the ultimate do-gooder, a genuine tzaddik, someone who will magically do God’s bidding

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and then vanish, since a deed done anonymously is deemed the worthiest. “Heaven will know and God will remember.” Yiddish defines the world that I came from. It was the language that was spoken for most of my childhood years. It was my parents’ mother tongue, their mamaloshen, filling every step they had taken from one country to the next. Once, when I was very young and never again, I saw my father sweep up crumbs from the living-room floor, using the wing of a goose, a fledervish, as a dust broom. He then burnt the small pile of crumbs, the chometz, on a plate, symbolically ridding our home of the last remnants of cereals and grains, the final readying of the house for Passover. As my father crouched low over the small fire in the corner of the room, I felt the wonderment of a strange sight and sensed for the first time the way the past and a language are fastened together. This is where the aleph bet begins. Bernice Eisenstein 2006

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Daniel Goodwin, “Isaac” My father was unlike the other fathers. Older and less humorous. Rationed out his words like sips of water. Didn’t listen to our music or play ball hockey with us on the streets. Locked himself in his study each morning like a human caterpillar with his cocoon of books and meditations. But that day, was even less himself. Woke me before the alarm rang, and saddled up the mules. Told me we had a mountain to climb. We left before my mother was awake. Even at that time the day was hot iron and I remember being thirsty and stupid with sleep. But what I remember most were my father’s eyes, dark like words on the pages of his books, or sodden as earth after rain, and how he didn’t glance at me

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that morning as we rode. We passed other gods along the way, with swollen mouths and bellies that swallowed up the world. They leered at us and I watched them curiously and half-afraid, but my father went on as if they were not there, as if the wood and stone were cheap hallucinations dreamed up by amateur magicians. I asked him our purpose for the day and he was silent for a while. Finally he said “Sacrifice,” and – unusual for him – almost stumbled on the word. We moved on, the only sound the mules’ footsteps and the eternal human buzzing of the flies. I looked back and didn’t see a lamb or goat. I feared the effects of Alzheimer’s or drugs with unpronounceable names. When I called his bluff he said nothing. Then he leaned towards me and smiled, held my impertinent gaze for the briefest time and said “God will provide.” We spoke even less after that. My thoughts now strayed to nervous breakdowns and mid-life crises delayed, but he was my father. So I obeyed. When we reached the mountaintop we stopped. The sky was wide open like my mother’s arms at the end of the day. Our village far below an easy target for a lightning bolt or flood. (I must confess I wanted to fly like a boy

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in someone else’s myth.) When my father gathered the small pieces of wood and then the big ones without smiling, like a priest, I expected him to ask for help. But he declined and let me be a boy. I kicked the dirt and pulled the grass. Bent the world of ants and grasshoppers to my untested will like a god. Even when he asked me to lie down on broken wood and bound my arms gently with rough twine I did not second-guess or doubt. Only after he unsheathed his knife and brought it near did I begin to wonder. I searched his dark eyes but they were dead. There was only the two of us and the voice inside his head. The sun wandered boldly across the sky like one of the tribal kings my father lived in fear of. And he and I began to sweat. He was this close. ∞ In the end, my father nodded, as if on cue. Bowed his head and put away the knife. He unbound me, and a ram conveniently appeared. We rode back that night without words. Neither of us ever spoke of this to my mother. For the rest of my days, no matter where I began or ended, I could never forget that morning at the top of the world, and the strange power of my father’s invisible and jealous God. 2015

Elaine Kalman Naves, “Silent Witness” Centuries-old brick houses with stepped-gable facades rise higgledypiggledy from the cobblestone streets of Lüneburg, Germany. Just an hour’s drive southeast of Hamburg, the town is a preserved jewel of medieval architecture. Neat as a pin and burgeoning with early spring greenery, Lüneburg feels oddly disorienting in these early days of May. For hundreds of years it was a salt mining town, and, as the trove beneath the surface was extracted, the earth shifted and the ancient buildings began to tilt. The result is wonky angles and tipsy spires at every turn. It’s hard for me not to read a seismic metaphor into this shifting landscape. Beneath Lüneburg’s charm, the town has a dark side, one not mentioned in the guidebooks. On the eve of World War II only ten Jewish families lived here, but subtle references take the form of tiny brass memorials engraved with names and set into the paving stones. (Gunter Demnig, an artist from Cologne, fashioned some 48,000 such stolpersteine, or stumbling stones, across Europe in memory of victims of Nazism.) During the war, a concentration camp stood at the centre of town, and a local historian who is trying to lay to rest personal ghosts – his father was a policeman during the war – observes casually that there must still be a hundred people alive who remember it, “but won’t

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Marika and Évike Weinberger on the family estate in Vaja, Hungary. Image courtesy of Elaine Kalman Naves.

say a word.” Lüneburg was also the site of the famous Belsen Trial in ­September 1945, the first war crimes trial that prosecuted members of the SS from the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp, which was located just an hour’s drive south. And now by an eerie coincidence, Lüneburg is once more hosting a war crimes trial. Oskar Groening is ninety-three years old and a former SS guard. He has been dubbed the “bookkeeper of Auschwitz” and charged with complicity in the murder of 300,000 Hungarian Jews. His trial is why I’m here. ∞ Lawyers, witnesses, and members of the public line up patiently to get into the congress hall where the Groening trial is being held. There is a

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heavy police presence, both outside and in, but the queue is quiet and respectful. Rumour has it that in addition to the airport-style security within, there are plainclothes officers in our midst; in the early days of the trial, a group of Holocaust deniers were removed from the premises. It’s hard to imagine that kind of scene, when all I see is a town and a country trying to live down its past. I’m here to play a small part in helping that process. Perhaps something I say will leave a mark on those in the courtroom, and possibly beyond, about the enormity of losses suffered by families like mine. But I’m filled with trepidation. I’m here to confront my past as well. Though not a survivor, I am nonetheless qualified to testify because of the death of my half-sister in Auschwitz on June 3, 1944. I was asked because a close blood relative of mine died under Groening’s watch. On May 6, the head judge, Franz Kompisch, announces that Groening is feeling weak and may not be able to make it through the day. The lawyers representing both sides confer with the bench. It’s decided that the historian who was scheduled to present that morning will be bumped, as there will be no afternoon session. I am to follow Ted Bolgar, a spry ninety-year-old who lives in Montreal and is a survivor of Auschwitz-Birkenau, Dachau, and other stations of hell. Silence reigns except for Bolgar’s words and a simultaneous translation into German. He tells his story. When he speaks of sharing a bowl of soup among six men with no spoon to scoop out the contents, I glance at Groening across the room, dressed neatly in a white shirt and burgundy vest. Bolgar continues in a steady voice, “Because they called us ‘hunds’ and we should eat like dogs. I wish they had treated us as well as they did their dogs.” During a previous session a week earlier, Groening was animatedly taking notes during the testimony. Now he appears grey and exhausted. Before I came to Lüneburg, I dreaded even the thought of breathing the same air as Groening, an individual who might have gazed with contempt upon members of my family as they emerged, parched and dazed, from a cattle car on the Auschwitz ramp. But delivering my testimony now feels matter-of-fact.

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I sit at a small table, with my lawyer, Thomas Walther, beside me. We are directly beneath the dais with the five judges – three professionals in robes, and two lay judges. On a balcony at the back of the room in soundproof boxes the translators ply their trade in German, English, Hebrew, and Hungarian. To our left are eleven lawyers representing fifty-one co-plaintiffs; and off to the side, the two prosecutors. To our right sits Groening, between his two court appointed lawyers. Walther entered my life last August. A former judge in Germany, he retired from the bench in 2008 and turned his formidable skills and energy to the cause of bringing Nazi perpetrators still at large to justice. He played a crucial role in the conviction of the Sobibór camp guard John Demjanjuk by a Munich court in 2011, a ruling that established legal precedent for the prosecution of individuals such as Groening as accessories to murder. When Walther began looking for Canadian co-plaintiffs in the Groening case, a mutual friend put me in touch. His first email to me revealed a persuasive blend of passion and sincerity. In his endearingly fractured English he wrote: People cannot imagine what it means: 1,000 killed Jews or 3,065 Jews in a Train 3 days to Auschwitz or 80 Jews in a cattle car without food and water. They cannot imagine what it means “three hundred thousand” (300,000) murdered Hungarian Jews during the time from May 15 until July 10, 1944 on the place of the death-factory of Auschwitz. He added that he wanted those who perished “to get back some of their faces, some of their voices ... and their dignity by being part of the Trial not by the Figure ‘300,000’ but by the co-plaintiffs and their lawyers inside a Trial in front of a German court.” Walther came to Montreal on three separate occasions this winter. From the initial meeting I trusted him completely. What he was trying to bring home in a courtroom – that the Holocaust is not about the cataloguing of numbers, but the recounting of precious individual

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lives – I had tried to achieve in books I’d written about my parents’ lost families. If he, a non-Jew, could immerse himself so thoroughly in the landscape of the Holocaust, surely it was my responsibility to go to Lüneburg to speak of the shadow family that has furnished my imagination ever since I can remember. Yet the idea of going filled me with deep unease. Germany was where my mother had been a slave, where my uncles and an aunt died, and where the plans for their destruction had been hatched. Only the closest blood relatives – parent, sibling, child – of victims could testify. I qualified as a witness not because my parents were survivors or that all four of my grandparents and dozens of close family members were murdered in Auschwitz, but because of a little girl named Évike. ∞ Nine months after Walther’s first email, in a silent courtroom, I speak about the short life of Évike Weinberger, my father’s daughter from his first marriage, the half-sister I never knew. I begin my statement, concentrating on the words I prepared back home in Montreal. Walther only has to press my hand once to remind me not to rush. I am overwhelmed to be present in this courtroom at this moment of historical reckoning. I am here to honour the memory of dozens of members of my family, who perished in Auschwitz. I never imagined that I would travel to Germany. From childhood, I have been familiar with the sound of German place names. Gelsenkirchen, Sömmerda, Glauchau, Buchenwald, Flossenbürg, Bergen-Belsen – these names punctuated stories my parents and their friends told about the war. They were stories of almost unimaginable horror. I want to thank the court and the German people for the opportunity you are giving me to speak to you about the loss of the many members of my family whom I never knew, because I was born into loss. Unlike most of the other co-plaintiffs, I am not a survivor, but the child of two

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The author’s grandparents Ilona and Kálmán Weinberger with their granddaughters Marika and Évike. Image courtesy of Elaine Kalman Naves.

survivors. I was born after the war in Hungary, to parents who met after the war, and who had each been married to other people before the war. My father Guszav, or Guszti, Weinberger had been married to a woman called Margit, or Mancika, Mandula, and they had a little girl together called Éva Edith, or Évike, Weinberger. I am here to speak primarily about Évike, who would have been my older half-sister had she not perished along with her mother in Auschwitz on June 3, 1944. How, you might ask, can I speak authentically about someone whom I never knew? It’s a good question. Évike somehow is both my sister and not my sister. She is my sister because she was my father’s daughter, but I clearly could not have a relationship with her of the

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kind that you have with a sibling with whom you grow up. And yet, Évike has been a singular presence in my life from the time that I came into the world in November 1947 to this day, here in Lüneburg charged with telling you about her short life. I was about six years old when I first really understood who Évike was, and she was six years old when she was murdered. Over the years, I have become older, but she has stayed six years old. So even though today she would be seventy-seven, in my mind now, she is a child like my grandchildren, not like an older sister at all. I feel a great sense of responsibility towards her, a little girl like so many other children who perished – but also a little girl like nobody else in the world, a unique individual, a unique person. Évike was born in the city of Debrecen on April 19, 1938, a much desired, much loved only child to Guszti and Mancika. They were prosperous, hard-working, modern Orthodox, educated Jews who were completely integrated into Hungarian life. Guszti and his two brothers were third-generation farmers on an estate in northeastern Hungary, in a village called Vaja. Mancika was an accomplished, well-educated young woman who had attended a finishing school in Switzerland. She was an adoring wife to my father and a devoted mother to Évike. Évike’s childhood encompassed dark and menacing events in the world: anti-Jewish laws in Hungary, Kristallnacht in Germany and Austria, and the outbreak of war. Guszti was frequently away from home, serving in the special labour battalions into which Hungarian Jewish men were inducted: the munkaszolgálat. Because of this, Évike and Mancika moved to the family estate in Vaja, where my father himself had grown up, and where there also lived my grandparents, and my uncle Pál, his wife, Mary, and their little girl, Marika. Despite the gravity of the situation, life remained relatively normal for them right up until a month before Évike’s sixth birthday, relatively normal until March 19, 1944. The two little girls, Évike and Marika, were playmates, and they were doted upon by our grandparents and by the other many members

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of the large extended family, who visited the estate regularly. There are many pictures of the two little girls playing together, and also many photographs showing them with members of the extended family, ­everybody wearing big smiles. I have known about Évike ever since I can remember. There were photographs of her on the walls of the apartment in which I grew up in Budapest, including many in the room in which I slept. There were albums, photo albums, of my father’s dead family, and of my mother’s dead family. I have memories of myself from a very young age leafing through the pages of their albums, and asking for the names of the people depicted in the photographs. I even remember my mother smiling and saying I had the same sticking out ears and same bow legs as Évike did, and that we had inherited both these features from our father. When, many years later, I began to research Journey to Vaja, my book about my father’s family, I learned about the unusual way Guszti and Mancika brought up their little girl. When I interviewed my father’s cousins, they commented on the fact that instead of hiring a nanny and leaving the upbringing of Évike to the nanny and Mancika, my father had wanted to be fully involved in her care. Unlike stereotypical fathers of the 1930s and ’40s, Guszti had bathed the baby, and rocked her and played with her, in a way that was unusual for the time. I recognized the portrait of my father that his cousins painted for me, because he had been the same kind of father to me and my sister, very protective and very involved. My father was a wonderful storyteller, who loved to talk about the family he had come from. Among my first memories is of him telling me stories about his family – and these were invariably happy stories. He evoked festive occasions on the estate and especially liked to talk about the adventures he and his brothers had growing up on a large farm. Still, even though these were positive stories, he would preface them with the words, “I feel sorry for you because you don’t know what it is to have grandparents. I feel sorry for you because your world starts

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only with me and with your mummy.” I didn’t understand at all what he was talking about. I didn’t want him to feel sorry for me. I didn’t feel I was missing anything. But of course he was right. I didn’t have any grandparents. My father’s parents and my mother’s parents had all perished in Auschwitz. And most of my aunts and uncles had also been murdered. As I matured, I came to know more about Évike. She had been a sweet-natured, rather shy and reserved little girl. She had also been exceptionally intelligent, and though she was too young to have started school, she had actually taught herself to read and write using her storybooks and the daily newspaper. This is important to Évike’s story as I will try to explain later, because since she had learned to read and write, we can actually know a little bit about her from her very own words. My father was a member of a close and very loving family, who continued to support him and his two brothers while they were in slave ­labour service during the war. They sent him parcels with food and clothing, and many, many letters. In 1944 alone my father received more than 150 letters and postcards from his family. More than 150 ­letters. I know this because my father kept them all: he managed to keep them in his knapsack through his entire wartime ordeal. These letters came from his mother and his father and his wife, and yes from his little girl Évike. The little girl who had never gone to school. He kept them, not just during the war, but afterwards too. And, many years later when he saw that I was very serious about writing a book about the family – this was back in 1982 – my father told me he still had these letters. I began reading them with him. They were all in Hungarian, so I began to translate them all into English. And while I was doing this, I had a kind of breakdown. Working with the letters prostrated me, almost literally. I couldn’t function for months, because of their impact on me. Because these letters were from the people that my father had been telling me about from the time that I was very young. And when I read them, I saw how right he had been, because indeed, it was a very sad thing that I never knew my grandparents. And here they were, in these

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letters. I could touch the paper that had been in my grandmother’s hand and in my grandfather’s. I could see what good people they were, how courageous, how very hopeful and determined to find each other again after the cataclysm. They kept on sending my father messages of encouragement that I could read for myself. And I knew what they didn’t know, what they couldn’t know. I knew. I knew that history was going to eat them up. I knew that they were all headed for Auschwitz. Évike was one of my father’s correspondents. Her notes and letters were enclosed with the grown-ups’ letters. She wrote on decorative children’s stationery, very similar to the flowered children’s notepaper my own daughters wrote on when they were little. Miniature envelopes contained Évike’s first written communications to her favourite person in the world. She knew how a letter should look. She wrote my father’s address at his labour service company on the tiny envelopes in block capitals all running together: FOR WEINBERGER GUSZTÁV, MAROS HÉVIZ, MAROS TORDA COUNTY, and on the back she printed her name and return address: “WEINBERGER ÉVA EDIT VAJA.” Inside she wrote in the same large, block capital letters messages that speak of her love and confidence in her daddy. She clearly adored him: she had named both her teddy bear and favourite doll for him. In her notes she shares jokes, and describes her latest achievements and activities. In one of them, she writes how she lost her first tooth. In another she says that she’s taking good care of her mummy and that she has crocheted a hat for her teddy bear. And in all of them, she signs off: I KISS YOU MANY TIMES YOUR ÉVIKE. There were three generations of the Weinberger family who were forced to leave their home for the ghetto in Kisvárda on April 25, 1944. Évike had celebrated her sixth birthday six days earlier, on April 19. On April 19 her mother, Mancika, wrote to Guszti that they were packing up their bags and that it was hard to know what to take along. She was particularly upset that she would have to give up her wedding ring, but she wrote, “You will buy me another one some day if God willing, we meet again once more. Today is the darling child’s birthday, we

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congratulated her in tears, and I wish that all her future birthdays, she will attain under happier circumstances, than today’s, until she’s 120 years old.” Until 120 years old, Évike’s mother wrote. That is the traditional Jewish greeting on someone’s birthday. Both Évike and Mancika would die forty-five days later on June 3, 1944. The family wrote again, a long farewell letter on April 23 to my father, in which Évike added her own greetings: MY DARLING APUKA HOW ARE YOU I AM THANK GOD WELL, I THANK YOU VERY MUCH FOR THE BIRTHDAY WISHES. I AM VERY SORRY THAT WE CANNOT BE TOGETHER KISSING YOU VERY MANY TIMES YOUR ÉVIKE. We know what she chose to take with her to the ghetto. In that same letter, her mother wrote that they were all packing their parcels for the big journey. “My poor little Évike has also packed up her Guszti teddy bear and a book, so that I should take it for her.” There is a final vignette of Évike that I will share with you in a few minutes, but first now I would like to talk about the family I come from. Évike was a child cherished not just by her parents, but also the whole extended family and especially by our grandparents. I would like to speak about my grandparents. They were very religious people with a great deal of faith in God, but they were also educated people, who could express themselves beautifully in writing. My grandmother Ilona, after whom I’m named, wrote in her farewell letter to my father: “If you could see me, you would say I am a veritable hero and I owe this to the fact that, thank God, I am perfectly healthy and also to my unshakable faith to which I cling ... We all have to fortify ourselves so we can bear it all. Don’t worry, I will do everything for the two sweet children [Évike and Marika], after all, they have always been the light of my life, along with all of you.” She promised she would do everything for her two little granddaughters, not realizing that she would be powerless to do anything to help herself or anyone else. There are many photographs of my grandparents with their two little granddaughters. And in all those photographs, Évike is always

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sitting on our grandfather’s lap and Marika is always in our grandmother’s lap. They all look very happy and contented together. My grandfather Kálmán was the head of the family – a serious, well-read man who by this time had retired from farming actively, and given over the management of the estate to his three sons. Kálmán wrote long, detailed letters or postcards to them every day that they were away in labour service. He kept on urging them to be strong and he kept on assuring them that the family was well. On this last day in this farewell letter, I think he had no illusions about what was in store, even if he had never heard of Auschwitz. Here are his words: “Let the Almighty in His mercy watch over your precious wife and precious gifted Évike and help you so that you may delight in them for 120 years and that you may find only happiness with them. Thank you, my precious good son for the great joy which you have given us and let the precious Évike and your yet to be born children also give great pleasure to you.” My heart breaks every time I read these words, and think of the agony that my family went through at that time – the agony that my grandfather must have felt writing these words. It touches me profoundly that my grandfather even had a blessing for me and for my sister Judith, who testified here last week. Because we were the “yet to be born children,” the children he would never know and who would never know him. Of course he could not imagine that the mother of these children would not be Évike’s mother, my father’s first wife, Mancika. I want to say a few words about Évike’s mother, Mancika Mandula Weinberger. She was a devoted daughter to her parents, an adoring wife to my father, and a completely dedicated mother to Évike. She was patient and thoughtful. She knew many languages because she had attended a finishing school in Switzerland where she had mingled with girls from many different nationalities. She was thirty-five years old in 1944, and she was strong and fit, and had she not been the mother of a six-year-old, she would’ve had a chance to live. I don’t think she would’ve wanted to live without her child, but in stark terms, the child whose hand she was holding condemned her to death in Auschwitz.

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The cattle car that brought the Weinberger family from the ghetto town of Kisvárda in northeast Hungary contained thirty-four members of my family, of whom two survived the war. One of these survivors was my father’s cousin Susan Rochlitz Szöke. Cousin Susan was nineteen years old and completely traumatized by the horrors of the journey. But still she remembered clearly Mancika and Évike in the wagon. Évike was irritable and tired and thirsty and unable to understand what was happening. She asked over and over again where they were going. And Mancika repeated over and over again, with bottomless patience, “We’re going to a place where we’ll work until we will be together with Apu. Perhaps daddy is already waiting for us there. We’re going somewhere where you’re going to see Apu.” We all know what happened next. It was not my father who met them on the ramp in Auschwitz. I cannot bear to put words to what I know happened next. I have been asked to talk about the impact of the Holocaust on me, to talk about how it has damaged me. To try to answer that question places me on the horns of a dilemma. I have not come to Germany to elicit your pity. I don’t think of myself as a damaged person. I am a happy person and I have a full life. It would be ethically wrong to call myself a victim in a courtroom where you are hearing from survivors. I am not a survivor of the Holocaust; I was born three years after the events we are describing. Any pain that I have suffered cannot be compared to their suffering. But if I’m going to be honest with myself and with you, I must face the fact that indeed the impact of the Holocaust on me has been foundational. The very circumstances of my birth are predicated on the death of others. If Évike and her mother had lived, I would not have been born as myself. If my mother and her first husband had not been separated, but if I had been born to them, I would also not have been born as myself. And yet I feel enormously fortunate to have been born, and to have been born to my parents. And I know I was a great source of happiness to them simply by token of my birth. When he learned that my mother was

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pregnant with me, my father said to her that he felt the kind of joy that God must have felt on the day of creation. And despite their grief and the enormity of their losses, my parents went on to build a solid new life for themselves and their children in a new country. In the course of building this new life, they never forgot the family members from their former lives, nor what had happened to them. It was important to my parents to communicate to us a rich legacy of family memory. For the formative years of my life, the Jewish holidays meant sitting at a table for four: my father, my mother, my sister, Judy, and myself. The table would be festively set and there would be a nice meal, during which my father and my mother reminisced about what the holiday had been like in the days before the war. They talked of all the many people who had congregated around the large dining-room table back home, and the copious amounts of delicious traditional food. It was as if the Holocaust were a visitor sharing our meal with us. Before my father died at the age of eighty-four, I had hardly ever attended a funeral. A friend of my parents came to pay a condolence visit during the week of mourning that we call shiva. She had been a child survivor and had lost everybody in her family. When she came into the room where the mourners were sitting on low chairs as is the custom, with all the mirrors in the house covered as is the custom, this friend of my parents made a gesture with her hands to encompass the signs of mourning, and she said, “We don’t know how to do this. We’ve never done this before.” She didn’t have to explain what she meant, because we understood perfectly. Having lost virtually everybody, all at once, my parents’ generation – and by extension, us, their children – had never had a chance to express grief in a normal way, as one does when generations pass away in their natural order. We had never had experience with the normal rituals of mourning, because everybody was already dead. Nowadays, when my family gathers together to celebrate the Jewish holidays and in particular Passover, a holiday celebrating freedom from slavery, there are once more three generations grouped around

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a very long table. There is a passage in the Passover Haggadah in which it says that in every generation a Jew must feel as if he had personally been liberated from slavery. In the era when my father led the family seders, he always paused at this passage to remark that this was not some remote thing that happened thousands of years ago. He said that in our times he and my mother had suffered from a slavery that was incomparably crueler than anything in the time of the pharaohs, and he told us to never forget to guard our freedom and the freedom of others with our last breath. I think this is what I have come to say to the court: that justice and freedom are our highest societal values. They must be regarded as precious as life itself. Having the opportunity to tell my family’s story here – having the opportunity to speak to you of Évike, Mancika, and my ­grandparents – is an affirmation that their lives, so cruelly cut short, mattered. They were not statistics; they were flesh and blood, individuals with personalities, temperaments, frailties, and strengths. There is no way to go back to undo the catastrophe that befell them. There is no way to fix what happened to them. But acknowledging the enormity of what happened to them in this courtroom and before the world is a source of a certain consolation. ∞ After testifying, I emerge from the courtroom into bright sunshine, flooded with relief that my part, for now, is over. It comes as a shock that I had been almost unaware of Groening as I spoke. It was as if he were the least important part of the process, like a pebble caught in the jaws of history that ground my family into pulp. My husband and I join up with Bolgar – the man who testified before me – and his two children to stroll towards town. Bolgar’s family strides ahead of us, and when we catch up with them, they are deep in conversation with a woman of about fifty. She is telling him that she attends the trial every chance she gets, and was greatly moved by his testimony. “This is so important,” she says to him. “I go home and I tell my children.”

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As night falls, we all dine together: witnesses, our accompanying family members, and our legal team. We are joined by sixteen-yearold Anna Werner, who drove from Frankfurt with one of our lawyers to attend the day’s session. What piqued her interest? I ask. She tells me that she had a very good history teacher two years ago in the ninth grade, when the war and the Holocaust were topics on the curriculum. “Our teacher took us through it step by step. We have the impression that it was Germany’s fault and we have to continue to look at this part of our history.” What struck her about the day in court? Nodding her head in the direction of Bolgar, she says, “Everyone should hear it from the survivors themselves to understand the pain.” ∞ The next day court is cancelled because Groening doesn’t show, citing ill health. Irene Weiss, a survivor from Washington, DC, who is supposed to testify, is unable to do so in the absence of the defendant. But our lawyers don’t think he is malingering. Walther is convinced that the man is being affected by the victim statements, and believes that Groening will yet make history by admitting to a fuller measure of culpability than he has to date. But that may have to wait: the ­German court has suggested a new set of dates to run through November. I hope that Walther is right. Nothing can change what happened in 1944, but perhaps Groening will have the decency at least to say the right thing at this late date. He will make history, if he stops parsing the extent of his own guilt by calling himself a small cog in a bigger works. He will make history, if he admits to being an essential part of an evil machine that would not have worked if its small cogs had refused to engage. He will make history, if he does what no SS camp guard has done before him. 2015

Naomi Guttman, “Lot’s Wife” For weeks I watched you calculate and scratch on graph paper the square footage of the van examine maps, pack and sell our books. The date you’d picked to leave for the flamingo pink apartment came, but I wouldn’t speak or look at you. Raging from the truck I ran back to our abandoned flat. What did I think I’d see? Walls scarred yellow, a lonely key? You were the one who planned it, and it burned that you’d remove me from familiar seasons. Like Klee’s historic angel, I had my reasons: ahead I saw a scroll of desert road. So, as we flew west my back was turned and from my lips flaming torrents flowed. 2007

Norman Ravvin, “Glendale, North of Alhambra, East of Burbank” I went to Glendale because my great-aunt F had died, and I was the only one who could pick up on such short notice, fly down, and clean up the mess. Everything had been complicated by the quake, although F was already in hospital when the ground buckled – her house locked up tight, her two cockatoos boarded at a pet store in Burbank. F’s house had taken quite a shaking. When I opened the front door, I found what was left of her collection of crystal spread across the adobe tiles in her front room. Everything was off its moorings. Armchairs had jumped off their legs and rode the rug, low and useless. The china cabinet had been smashed, face down, like a knocked-out boxer. A framed portrait of the cockatoos – nearly four feet square – had slipped from its place on the wall and rested on a brocaded cushion in the middle of F’s sofa. In the kitchen the cupboards had opened and emptied their contents all over the floor. I would have laughed, but the mess was mine to deal with, since F had given up her last and lay now, washed and polished and wrapped as the custom demands, at a suburban chapel. As I crunched and crackled across the wreckage toward the open front door, I saw a woman coming up the walk. A bright apron dropped over her shoulders was untied and flapped in the hot wind. Her grey hair had come unclipped, and it flew too, a fuzzy halo above her ears.

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I knew at once. This was the woman who had nursed my great-aunt in her final months. She was F’s only friend, and possibly her lover, though this had never been said outright and we hadn’t felt comfortable asking. F had been unhappily married to a tyrant who wore highrise slacks and wide ties that stopped at his breastbone. When her husband finally died, F and her friend had become inseparable, relying on each other for support and companionship as old age and the pressures of the city made life more and more difficult. My great-aunt F had been one of the first of our ­family to leave the old home in Europe. She was a pretty and v­ ivacious blonde – a true Galician oddity – and she thrived like bluegrass in the New World air. I forget how she found her way to California, but her brassy superficiality, her ­unselfconscious acquisitiveness, had always seemed perfectly at home in the American west. She had made a little income on the side by perfecting a distinctive con, in which she went into a store, pulled some piece of stock down on herself, and then cut a wicked settlement in lieu of a lawsuit. I’d never visited her in California, but she’d always joked on the phone about her good life there. “Aunt F for ­phoney,” my dad used to whisper as he handed me the ­receiver. “Say something nice, son.” The doctors at the hospital where F died would not say whether it had been the quake that finished her off. They, and the nurses as well, kept asking, “Family or friend?” I could have had our whole ancestral line with me in my rented car, an entire family tree plucked off the continents of the world and resurrected from the best and the worst ends, and I’m sure it wouldn’t have been enough to tempt the hospital staff to admit that yes, the machine had come unplugged as the earth shook, the bed had rolled across the room like an out-of-control chuckwagon, and they, ­nowhere near the scene, had been running, clutching their hair and screaming into the street as buildings ejected their roofs and cars bounced like toy balls. I decided not to press the issue. Dead was dead, and I wasn’t about to sue the hospital corporation if l did ­uncover any negligence. That

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would only mean furthering my entanglement in F’s affairs. And I wanted it all to be over as soon as possible. My great-aunt’s friend, her nurse, her comforter, stood on the front step of F’s house, waving a recipe card at me. On the card was the phone number of F’s son – an obscure number, beginning, as phone numbers did in F’s youth, with two words: FITZROY WESTERN 6 8 5 5 7. The area code was unknown to me but my informant explained: ­Nebraska. The boy was in Nebraska. When I called later in the evening, carefully figuring out the time difference between the coast and the Midwest, the man who answered was obviously flabbergasted to learn that someone wanted to speak to my great-aunt’s only child. The phone dropped, and he went off for what seemed like half an hour. Then a voice I recalled hearing once as a child – F had ordered her son to say hello to his cousin in Vancouver – came on the line, conveying an astonishing degree of fear, along with a hint of hostility. The first word F’s son spoke was “Mother?” I tried to put things straightforwardly but we got nowhere. Before I’d finished a sentence, before I could explain that F was dead, my cousin launched into a haphazard narrative that had to do with a hospital, pine board, a warm coat for winter, government benefits, stovepipes, and UFOs. He was whirling off on a subplot that included going down to South America to make tires with Ronald Reagan, when he paused to ask if he might buy a cigarette off me for a dime. I finally hung up, exhausted. Though my cousin had thought at first that his mother was on the line, he’d asked for the cigarette in the muttering tone panhandlers use with strangers. The funeral was set for Thursday. The chapel had contacted a rabbi who agreed to officiate if he didn’t have to give some trumped-up eulogy, as he put it, because he’d never set eyes on my great-aunt. The fellow at the chapel told me, with a hint of embarrassment in his voice, that he’d accepted these terms. He didn’t expect many people to attend. I told him that this was all fine with me.

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After I’d checked on the funeral arrangements, I called F’s lawyer and received an earful of legalistic niceties that did nothing to help me understand the terms of my great-aunt’s will, so I arranged to visit him at his office. F’s lawyer worked out of a pyramid-shaped building sheathed in glass that reflected the cars roaring by on the freeway. From there we drove in his soot-black BMW to view the two properties which, aside from my great-aunt’s home, had been the sum of her worldly wealth. One of these was near the curious Gaudi-like towers a local character had built out of bits of metal and plaster and thousands of seashells. As we circled, looking for F’s property, the tips of these creations appeared over the rooftops of bungalows, before us and behind us. One of the houses my great-aunt owned in Watts had been torn down by the city – an event that happened so rarely the municipal counsellors had been forced to invoke a law that originated in wartime – when she refused to maintain it and the heaps of garbage in the yard were condemned by health authorities as a breeding ground for bubonic plague. Interestingly enough, the house had been removed while the piles of rubbish, and, one would imagine, the plague, remained on site. We viewed the lot from the car, windows tightly closed, air conditioner whirring, and then fled like heartless tourists. F’s second house stood proudly, spared by time and the shuttling of the earth’s plates. It was covered in green shingles and resembled the little one-and-a-half-storey houses that had been built all over Vancouver between the wars. The house was worth something, the lawyer assured me, though he wouldn’t say exactly how much, since we couldn’t account for the economy or for the nearby neighbourhoods, which had cooled after a recent gang truce but might explode at the slightest notice. If, for example, the sister of one gang member wore makeup that offended the sister of an opposing gang member – BANG! – that would do it. He pointed at the graffiti scrawled on the siding beneath one of the house’s windows, fat letters ingeniously shaded to give off a steely glint.

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“The cops’ll be interested in that,” he said. “It’s a cross-out. One guy sprays over another guy’s tag. Next thing you know, one of them’s dead.” After our real estate viewing the lawyer dropped me off at his office. I spread a city map on the front seat of my rented car and headed off in search of downtown L.A. But somehow I kept driving past it. Bodegas and body shops wrapped around rundown corners, and the streets were full of sunburned stragglers. I never found Melrose or Westwood, and as I looked for Laurel Canyon Drive – Philip Marlowe territory – I found only road signs directing me back toward Glendale. The motel F’s lawyer had booked me into reminded me of a horror film I’d seen where a man died of a head-crushing fall in the bathroom – brought low by a neatly placed bar of Zest. I lay down in the dark on the wide, concave bed as headlights swept across the window. Someone in the room above me alternated between a low moan and a smoker’s hack. In the morning I put on my dark suit and drove to the cemetery, leaving myself an extra hour to get lost. But the fellow at the chapel had given me excellent directions, and I found its huge parking lot still empty. I stood in the sunlight at the edge of the burial grounds, watching airplanes follow a neat diagonal line across the sky. When the sun had risen to the very centre of the sky and had heated the hill of graves and dry grass to the temperature of a sauna, the participants in our little service began to appear. A man I took to be the rabbi marched athletically up the path between the parking lot and the graveyard and introduced himself to me with a weight-lifter’s handshake. My great-aunt’s friend got out of a taxi, and an elderly man said he was the chapel representative I’d spoken with earlier in the week. A few of the graveyard staff rounded out our group. We gathered by the grave and did the job, perfunctorily and without fanfare. The sun remained at its fierce zenith throughout, and we were all most certainly irradiated, the slow-witted victims of a cancer doctors would marvel at in the coming years. Let’s get it over with, the rabbi’s eyes seemed to say, as he read the prayer for the dead. Only F’s old companion cried, inconsolably at

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first, a sharp, unvarnished grief shaking her all the way through the service and during most of the ride back to the street where her life and my great-aunt’s had become entangled. I drove to the top of her long white driveway, and F’s friend looked shocked when I said I would call her once the lawyer had sold off the property and calculated the amount she was to inherit. Her mind was on something else. The question she most wanted to ask was, Wouldn’t I like something from F’s house? This idea sounded ridiculous to me, considering the smashed and shaken condition of everything inside it. F’s friend told me that after my great-aunt had been hospitalized she had gone into the house and taken all the family photographs. These she had stored in her basement, where they had survived the quake undamaged. Would I like to have them? If I were a completely honest man I would have said no. Goodbye. They’re yours along with whatever else F set aside for you in her will. And for emphasis, I would have recounted an incident I often heard described when I was young, which took place on a Vancouver street one elm-coloured autumn afternoon, before F’s migration south. She is running after her brother, trying to stop him before he can post a package to Poland. In the package is a money order that will buy their sister – along with her baby, my mother – ocean passage to Canada. It is 1935 or thereabouts. One of those nasty, ominous years. If F had gotten her hands on the mail that day, I probably wouldn’t exist. But I relented and agreed to take the photos. My great-aunt’s friend rushed inside her house, visibly relieved that somebody seemed to care about poor dead F. She came trudging across the grass with her offering and handed a dusty, battered box through the car window. “I didn’t put them like this,” she said, pushing her wild hair behind her ears. “They were in her basement. Until I found them, I thought the birds and me were her only family.” After we parted, I drove with my box full of photographs back to the motel, where I packed up the underwear and socks and T-shirts I’d left lying around the room. On the TV I watched an impeccably coiffed

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newswoman interview a liquor store owner who’d been burnt out of his business, and on the room’s big front window I followed a tiny tailless lizard as it crept slowly up the outside of the glass. The collection of photos bristled by the door, a little forest of heads in hats, in wigs, in braids. I put the box on the bed and shuffled through its contents until I found a photo of my mother, whose infant face looked oddly serious – almost sad – among cousins I didn’t recognize. Twice in her long life F had considered that face and thought, No, down you go to the bottom. I made room in my bag for the group portrait with my mother, setting the rest of my great-aunt’s forest of silver faces back on the floor, where I forgot them behind the sagging bed. As I drove to the airport I could think only of the birds – the two technicoloured cockatoos that had found pride of place in F’s home. Posed shoulder to shoulder in their portrait, like an old married couple, their beaks jauntily raised, they seemed to smile as if they knew that, above all else, they were beloved in Glendale. 1997

Isa Milman, “Yiddish in North America” Is it really my fault if by error sheyn happens to rhyme with geveyn? That longing, genuine longing is always alone with its pain? – Itzik Manger O language of my cradlesongs, breath of my parents’ loss, sweet cry from the burnt over-there, beckoning call from the grine clubhouse, tongue of our difference O graceful script of quill and black ink your letters identical to the holy ones, but shameless double agent, pick up artist of the local lingo, cleverest fool, you couldn’t foresee your disappearance from just about every Jewish home

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Despised old-country survivor, clobbered by Hebrew’s upper hand, the return to Zion your worst extinguishment. I count on the salty-tears of you, to prod my heavy tongue awake, yearn for the sound of your tremble-throated song, last remnant of the ember-world Now you’re a seasoning for our fusion table, found in every good cook’s cupboard, zaltz un fefer to sprinkle in the soup, your fridge-magnet words amusement for kitchen poets, while your libraries have been packed up, shipped to Massachusetts, your faded script from ledgers and tombstones saved in an archive in Winnipeg, soon to be closed. I’m in the kitchen, wiping my eyes, listening as you sing. 2008

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Nancy Richler, “Life’s Promise” Written for my mother on her sixty-third birthday Our great-grandmother was how we weren’t supposed to turn out. Two of our aunts told us, nodding gravely over tea one Rosh Hashanah. “It was this time of year,” Aunt Millie began. “Right after the harvest.” “The harvest is earlier in Russia, don’t forget,” Aunt Bertha continued. “It’s not earlier,” Aunt Ruth called from across the room. “What do you know about the harvest anyway? What, you’re farmers now?” Ruth was the oldest. She argued with everyone. “So the harvest was in,” Millie went on. “The one time of year their bellies were full.” “Not that it was an easy time of year,” Bertha cautioned. “Times were never easy over there.” “Of course not. I wasn’t saying it was an easy time of year, just that for once the children weren’t crying from hunger, she had the strength, after a day of work, to take a short walk.” “If it had been such a short walk she may have lived to raise her children,” Bertha murmured. Millie sighed and patted her moist face with a tissue.

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“So she took a short walk,” our cousin Mandy prodded. She already knew this story. All our older cousins did. “To the edge of the forest,” Millie continued. “The village was surrounded by forest.” “Forest like you’ve never seen,” added Bertha. “Never dreamed about,” said Millie. “What they call a forest here, there we would call a few trees.” They both paused to sip at their tea. Millie reached for more honey cake. Bertha tapped at her hand. “So then what happened?” I asked. “So then, instead of just walking to the edge of the village and stopping to admire the forest, she continued walking.” “Into the forest?” I asked. “She just walked right into the forest?” They both nodded. “And then?” “And then, nobody knows. What was she doing, or where she was when the wolves got her, we don’t know.” “The wolves? Wolves got her?” They nodded again. I glanced at my other sister Sara. She’d already told me about the wolves who lived under the stairs. “Don’t believe them,” Ruth called from across the room. “Two old maids with nothing better to do than make up stories.” “It’s not a story,” Millie hissed. “Did they ever find her bones?” Ruth asked. “No. They never found her bones. You think wolves eat bones now?” “In a forest so huge, they’re going to find the bones of one woman? And such a small woman? Pheh!” Bertha waved her hand dismissively at Ruth. “Maybe in Russia, wolves eat bones,” I ventured, shuddering in terrified delight. “Maybe,” Millie agreed. “Why did she go into the forest when there were wolves there?” Sara asked.

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Our own mother, passing through the room with a pot of fresh tea, interrupted at this point. “That’s enough now,” she told her sisters. “Nobody knows what really happened to your great-grandmother,” she told us. Bertha and Millie didn’t argue with our mother. They never did. After she left they swore it was because they had always suspected their grandmother’s spirit had resurfaced in her. Not that our mother got eaten by wolves. There were no wolves roaming around the streets of Montreal in the ’60s eating stray women. Not as far as I knew. Had there been, though, who knows what might have happened. Because she did stray. And like her grandmother, she didn’t return. “Sophie was always different,” Millie said about her at another family gathering, after she’d already left us. “Wild. She was always wild, even as a little girl,” Aunt Millie contributed. “What wild?” Ruth joined in. “Sophie was quiet. Very quiet. But curious too. Too curious.” She was a painter. She would sit for hours in front of a window, a wall, a bowl of fruit, and create fields of colour and texture that looked nothing like anything any of us had ever seen before. “Your mother’s eyes are different from ours,” our father told us once, before she left. When friends and relatives claimed not to understand her work, she just shrugged. I never knew what there was to understand or not to understand. Anyone sitting or standing in the same room as her huge “Sunlight II” could feel the oozey heat of July reaching to envelop them. No one who had seen “Sunlight I” would ever be able to go outside in early June light and not see the dance of colours in the air. “It’s too complicated for me,” the rabbi said. “But she’s not hurting anyone and it keeps her out of trouble,” he added, winking at my father. My father didn’t wink back. ∞

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Before she left, I thought she was just different from the other mothers – more like us kids, more fun. When she wasn’t too busy painting or thinking about something, that is. I didn’t know about her kind of difference in our kind of world. There were clues, of course. Just none I noticed. Everyone could see she was the only married woman who didn’t cover her hair with a hat or a kerchief – although sometimes she wore a baseball cap, until Aunt Ruth told her to stop. And she was probably the only mother who never managed to get the candles lit on time on Friday nights. Friends and relatives sometimes made comments which she ignored. So I did too. Our father was no help at all in this regard. He loved our mother, after all, and continued to love her even after she left. He seemed to see nothing abhorrent in her behaviour. He said it was all too easy to condemn what we can’t understand. And that was his final word on the matter. Or almost his final word. When Sara or I would try to get him to admit what he must know about her, what everyone knew about her, he’d sometimes say that everyone had to find their own way to life’s promise. He had this thing about life’s promise. He obviously wasn’t quite right himself. For one thing, he never complained about his work the way other fathers did, not even a tired sigh at the end of the day. He sold fruit for a living and seemed to think this was the highest calling possible. He didn’t talk to us much either. Not with words. He could be embarrassing – like he’d make the blessing over the first pomegranate of the season. Pomegranates were his favourite fruit. He’d bring home the ripest, richest one, make the blessing and slice it open. Then he’d slice it again, into quarters and eighths, crimson juice spilling onto the table. He’d hold it up to us then as if it were the most precious item of creation. His point was anybody’s guess. It probably had to do with life’s promise. Most things did. Or it could have just been the beauty of the pomegranate. Like our mother, he’d been born in Russia, but he hadn’t come to Canada until after the war. His unwavering belief in life’s promise now

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seems one of the small miracles of our childhood. At the time, though, it was just another example of our abnormality. Other parents lived their lives regularly. Ours had to go sniffing around for some promise we didn’t know for sure anyone had ever made. Lucky for us, our father’s way to life’s promise didn’t involve making a public spectacle of himself and us. In his view, it lay in the dailiness of life. Wives had left husbands before, mothers had left children. In the meantime, there was still work to be done, meals to be cooked and enjoyed, lessons to be learned, prayers to be spoken and sung. “Life is to be lived, not mourned,” he said in a wordy moment not long after our mother left. “And we should never forget we have plenty to thank God for.” “Like what?” challenged Sara, not feeling at all thankful. “For one thing,” he answered promptly, “we can thank him that we don’t lack for helping hands.” There was no disputing that. We had our mother’s six sisters and their families (none of our father’s eight brothers and sisters had survived the war) as well as a community around us eager to share in our misfortune. So we lived and went to school and Sara and I began to look and act more like our friends. Over time we even gained a bit of a reputation, the good kind, for how well we took care of our house, our father, and our younger brother Yonatan. It began to seem like maybe our greatgrandmother’s spirit really had resurfaced in our mother and departed our family when she did. Probably no one was fooled but me. Jews have notoriously long memories and our mother’s, if not our great-grandmother’s, behaviour was never far from anybody’s mind. Certainly not Mrs. Horowitz’s when she wished us “good shabbes” that time several years after our mother left. “Good shabbes, David,” she said to our father. “And good shabbes, Sara and Anna,” she said, kissing our cheeks. “You’re both looking lovely,” she added, looking us up and down. “How old are you now?”

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she asked. I could tell she had her son Sammy in mind for Sara. At the time I still thought this was what we should be hoping for. “I’m sixteen and Annie’s fourteen,” Sara answered. “Such beauties,” Mrs. Horowitz said to our father. “Like pearls. Two beautiful pearls,” she murmured and went on her way. “You know what pearls are,” Sara commented on the walk home. Of course I did. “Beautiful jewels,” I said, still glowing from the compliment. “Oh right,” Sara giggled. “With dirt in the middle. They start out as an irritation to an oyster. Did you know that? A piece of shmutz. Right at the core.” “Oysters aren’t kosher,” Yonatan contributed. I should have known then. But still I didn’t. I continued to try, for years, in the best way I knew how. But spirits like our great-grandmother’s, it seems, aren’t so easily put to rest. They can’t leave well enough alone and beckon teasingly from the murky unknowns they inhabit. It was at Yonatan’s engagement party that it finally began to dawn. I had flown in from Utah where I’d been living for two years, climbing and photographing canyons. Sara had decided not to come to Montreal for the occasion. She was preparing an important court case in Toronto. Had she not been busy, she probably wouldn’t have come in anyway. “The community’s charm is lost on me,” she told me before she left for Toronto and she’d not been back more than once or twice in the eight years since. Sara wasn’t the type to be haunted by nostalgia. The aunts had gathered at my father’s house to toast Yoni and his bride-to-be. A long letter had arrived from our mother wishing Yonatan a life of love and happiness and telling us about her most recent show (a modest success) and about the home she’d made for herself in the hills of Portugal – something about the light there, I’m sure. Her sisters began discussing her with the usual mixture of awe and anger. Minnie described something our mother had done some forty years earlier, proof-positive that she’d always been wild. Ruth said she’d

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never been wild. Different, yes. Discontent, maybe. But never wild. Bertha waved her hand about in excitement. “Wild, shmild,” she said. “She just had no respect for tradition. You tell me what woman with an ounce of respect would name her daughters after a woman who was eaten by wolves. Tell me that. And don’t give me that it was her grandmother’s name.” “She wasn’t eaten by wolves,” Ruth maintained. “Wait,” I interrupted. “Which daughter?” “Which daughter what?” Ruth asked, impatient to get back to the argument about their grandmother’s demise, this still their favourite topic. “Which daughter was named for her, me or Sara?” “Both of you. You’re both named for her. Hanna Sara was her name. You know that.” And she turned back to her sisters. “She was not eaten by wolves. I happen to know that for a fact.” She paused for effect. As if we all didn’t know what came next. “I happen to know for a fact that she was chased through the forest by a pack of dogs and died of fright.” Ruth sat back, satisfied with her contribution, and reached for another piece of sponge cake. Voices rose and crackled around me as the argument ensued. It wasn’t a huge thing for the aunts to have let slip all these years later. It wasn’t going to change my life or Sara’s to know we’d been named for her. Still, as the plane circled and descended on the red eroding earth I was now calling home, I thought about my mother entrusting us, her daughters, with such a restless, unwieldy soul, dividing the burden to lighten the load. I drove to my home and felt the hot, endless space open around me. My life, which I’d believed unbound, severed from all I’d been taught to hold close, felt suddenly my own and deeply rooted in the past and living hopes, dreams and spirits I had yet to discover. 1992

Lauren Kirshner, “Marilyn Monroe Stuttered” Around the time I began to speak, in that part of early childhood that I remember as a grove of animal crackers and pink snow pants, a tiny iron fence grew on the tip of my tongue. I don’t remember noticing it at first. What I remember more is the tape recorder that arrived at the same time. Dark grey, the size of an LP cover, with chubby buttons shaped like Pez, the tape recorder sat on a table in a windowless room I would enter once a week while my father waited outside in his great brown bear-like parka. “You have a stutter,” I remember being told. “This is going to help it.” My father had a stutter too. His had developed around the same age mine had, but in another era, when the most famous stutterer was still Elvis, c-c-crying all the time. Speech therapies then were still limited, and stuttering misunderstood, classified variously as a mental, neurological, or nervous illness, with little in the way of treatment. Nevertheless, my father’s parents, his mother with her waved apricot hair and pearly determination, his father, a master tailor with a fading ­Auschwitz tattoo, took my father to speech therapy, beginning our little family tradition. I had what is called the repetitious stammer: a hammering attempt on vowel or consonant sounds. Trouble began for me at the beginning

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of a word. Imagine the sound of a CD skipping, only apply that repetition to the pre-fix, the sound “mmm” in the word “mouse”: the first syllable doggedly repeats, m-m-m, until, thoroughly frustrated, I would substitute the impossible word for an easier one. Sometimes, the word, for no reason, would easily pop out. My successes were comets, as were my flubs. There was no predicting it. In one of my early memories of stuttering, I am talking to a boy in the lunchroom. I am pointing to a pillar that’s painted to look like a nutcracker doll, complete with gigantic jaw and gold felt–trimmed jacket, when the boy suddenly breaks into a weird, excited smile. “M-m-m-m-m-my name is L-l-l-auren!” he laughs. I think, “But his name is David!” When I suddenly realize that I’m being imitated, I hunch back to the garbage, where I remember taking a very long time to peel a tiny tangerine. ∞ In another memory, I’m putting up my hand to give the answer in a lesson about telling time. When the teacher calls on me, I start speaking. Eyes around me shift. My mouth stops. No sound is coming out of my mouth. No sound has come out at all. The teacher is smiling. Waiting. I have the sense that time has completely stopped. I can hear the shh sound of my classmates shifting on the rug. Finally my breath slams through the little iron fence on the tip of my tongue and out comes the word. It seems like two hours have passed and now I wish I hadn’t put up my hand. Later, someone in the schoolyard asks me, “Why do you talk so weird?” I don’t remember talking directly to my parents about my stutter. I was afraid to worry them. But mostly I didn’t want to seem weak, especially in light of my older sister, who I looked up to in the way a fuzzy, wax-coloured duckling aspires to become a gliding gardeniawhite swan. She didn’t have these problems, and I wanted to seem as cool and together as she did, with her steady baby newscaster voice and shiny penny loafers. I was also concerned that my mother, being one to

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confront problems head on, would march into the schoolyard and give one of my tormentors a piece of her mind, which I knew, like my bowl cut and “huggable” sweatshirt, would not improve my social standing. What complicated things, too, was my growing awareness of my father’s stutter. What I had seen before as natural now became noticeable in my journey to overcome what we shared. I worried that if I talked about disliking my stutter, my father would feel bad about his own or, worse, think that his stutter bothered me. His stutter didn’t matter to me at all: I’d barely ever thought about it. His far more interesting qualities – his willingness to buy me horsey rides on the orange plastic moulded horse at the grocery store, put Jos. Louis cakes in my lunch, read me bedtime stories, draw hamsters smoking fat cigars, and entertain my tedious favourite game of the moment, The Name Game (“What name do you like more? Esther or Kelly? Madrid or Danny?”) – took precedence in my mind and made me love him dearly. Yet our shared struggle was never more pronounced than on Friday nights, when we visited my grandparents at their condominium, high up in the suburbs where great patches of land ticked with electricity towers and plazas glowed with signs for “wigs” and “fresh challah.” To enter the parking lot of my grandparents’ building, we had to first pass through security, which consisted of a booth and a gate that the attendant would raise after checking our credentials. It was a simple enough task for the hundreds of families who passed through it every day with red carnations, Manischewitz wine, and brisket entombed in tin foil and CorningWare. But my grandparents lived in apartment 803 and, for my father and me, the sounds “eigh” and “th” were enemies. Yet there was no getting into the parking lot without saying those difficult words: “eight-oh-three.” “What apartment?” the attendant would ask, leaning out her booth window, in her Safari beige uniform. I was safe from this inquisition in the back seat, but I shared my father’s struggle silently. For us, “eight-oh-three” never came out right on the first try, yet never failed in the same way. Sometimes the “eight”

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sound would repeat, the word stubbornly dissolving into thin air. But usually it was the “th” sound in three that would become entangled in the invisible iron fence on the edge of our tongues. The security booth attendant would sometimes interrupt and put us out of our discomfort. There was a man with Elvis sideburns who knew us, and who just smiled and raised the gate, no questions asked. And later, there was the woman with the cream-cheese-coloured curls who spoke for my father – “803?” she’d chirp – giving him an opportunity to meekly participate in the entry ritual with a “yes” before raising the gate. Then, as if to show how trivial the 803 crisis was, my father would put the car into drive and jazzily snake around the corner and into a parking space. But later I understood that it wasn’t trivial because my father had spent time in speech therapy as a child himself, though the therapy had not eliminated his stutter. And now, I also took leave for speech therapy. The Clarke Institute, today called the Centre for Addiction and Mental Health, had its main hospital building on Toronto’s College Street, an imposing vertical slab of modernist bulk, with little peeper windows etching out of the cold grey concrete. I was glad to have my appointments in the house next door, a storybook-style Victorian with a turret, bay windows, and a wraparound porch. Going into that house made me feel grown-up. I liked the attention from the women who worked there with their plastic name badges, their lipstick, and the soft way they said my name, “Lauren?” a flower wrapped in a question just for me. I felt special. My speech therapy, aside from teaching me to slow down, enunciate, and pronounce, also had a secondary benefit, I felt, of improving my social standing at school. When I showed up late and my friends asked me where I had been, I felt a surge of pride in telling them. I never said, elusively, “I’ve been at the doctor” – which technically would’ve been true. I also never said, specifically, “I’ve been having an intensive, one-hour session with my speech therapist.” I simply said, “I was at speech,” leaving my friends to look at me with newfound respect

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because no other girl at school got to miss class for “speech” and show up with a half-eaten strawberry muffin. The mere activity of coming and going from “speech” gave me confidence I’d been severely lacking. In my mind, my friends imagined me conducting very important scientific business. Maybe they saw me giving a speech, a grander version of show and tell. Or did they think of me more as a human guinea pig, strapped to a machine with wires protruding from my head? I speculated freely, since nobody asked me questions about what I did at “speech.” And ­ultimately I was glad for that because had I told them, they would’ve thought me much less mysterious. This is why: in speech therapy, I did almost nothing but play with toys. Truly, I had never seen such a toy collection. As I recall, there were board games, coloured blocks, plastic dolls, beanbag girl dolls, and, my favourite, a good old-fashioned chesty Barbie doll with hair the colour of sunflowers. My speech therapist, whom I will call Leslie, would offer me several toys to play with. I remember gravitating toward a wonderful dollhouse with a spine across the top, which opened like a book to reveal secret inner chambers. I could stick furniture into that house, as much as I wanted, in any formation. I could put a couch in the bathroom, a dresser on the lawn. I could hang tiny carpets from windows and nobody would stop me! I loved speech therapy. I loved Leslie. And unlike my friends at school, she always wanted to play what I wanted to play. She let me pick my dolls first. They were all mine. The only condition was that I had to talk it all out. “Talk it all out?” “Yes,” Leslie said. “As you play with the dolls, tell me what you’re doing. Tell me about their story.” So that’s what I would do. The dolls and dollhouses were used for role-playing, an activity that encouraged me to speak as I would when alone. Only then could Leslie learn my rhythms, trigger words, and patterns. Each time I moved a couch into a tiny dollhouse room, I

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would say, “I’m moving the couch into the living room,” and later, after I’d developed personalities and lives for my dolls, I’d say, “This couch is far too large! We should get a new one! What do you think?” – turning my doll to her partner doll for a lengthy home décor discussion, like I’d never seen my own parents do. Every few sentences Leslie would stop me and ask me to repeat something back and I would. It all seemed like a terrific game that also happened to be tape-recorded. Leslie pressed the chunky buttons of the black tape recorder before I started playing, and sometimes during our session she would switch the tape. I paid no attention to the tapes. I didn’t mind how Leslie would gently interrupt me and ask me to repeat a word: “Again, again, again, again ... okay, good, big breath.” I was so absorbed by my play I didn’t even notice the gigantic sheet of glass lining one wall. It was a two-way mirror. My parents would watch me from behind it as I talked it out for lovely Leslie. At the time, I had no consciousness of that mirror, or of my parents’ feelings about the process they watched through its glass. I asked my mother about it many years later. She told me she had prayed. “I prayed God would take your stutter away,” my mother said. “I would get down on my knees and pray to God to take your stutter and give it to me.” “Mom, you don’t even get on your knees to exercise. You sure you got on your knees?” “Okay, on the knees of my soul then. To give you something literary.” At night, my mother read pamphlets and books about stuttering that she got from the Clarke Institute and the public library. I had just learned how to read myself, but I didn’t have any interest in reading those books. They looked boring. But my mother, who is as at home with a caulking gun as she is with her teacher’s chalk, likes to fix things. She felt empowered by her reading. She felt that the more she knew, the more she would be able to help me. But in those books my mother found only Aristotle, who believed the tongue was as thick

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as wood. She found the Roman physician Celsus, who recommended gargling with saltwater and massaging the delinquent tongue. She found Francis Bacon, who opined that the tongue was in a sorry state of refrigeration and recommended dousing it in hot wine. She even read about the nineteenth century surgeon Friedrich Dieffenbach, who decided stutterers’ tongues were too large and tried cutting a few down to size. As an adult, I read excerpts of these books and could imagine how relieved my mother must have felt to finally learn that even Marilyn Monroe stuttered. Because if Marilyn Monroe, that effervescent, extroverted, easily lovable blond bombshell, stuttered, then surely there was hope for me, this shrimp stuttering away to her toy monkey in the next room. My mother, on the recommendation of the Clarke, bought blank cassette tapes from the dollar store and encouraged me to record myself at home for extra practice. Sometimes my sister recorded herself too, inspiring my awe. I bleated songs and meandering stories cadged from cartoons, but my sister took on the persona of a newscaster, reporting fictional plane crashes and other disasters, her smooth voice flowing onto the tape like crisp, fresh vines. Admiringly, I pressed my mouth into the microphone hoping to sound like her, but I heard only my own voice crackle and snag as I sang a Bulgarian nursery rhyme. When I sang I didn’t stutter and I was happy: Alla balla nitza! Tooz-kapa-nitza! Hey giddy vuncho! Nash-kappy-tancho! ∞ By the time I was eight, my stutter had almost completely disappeared, a process so gradual I barely noticed how that little iron fence on the tip of my tongue collapsed and hitched south, down my throat, into my

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gut, as a memory. Or perhaps I shouldn’t use such a smooth metaphor to explain something so rocky and baffling. I should just quote my father: “You got over it; I didn’t.” Last week, my father and I went to visit my grandparents. When we drove up to the security booth, I didn’t worry about the crisis of 803. If anything, this event is now a touchstone of our shared experience. This is perhaps why, when I hear my father say those everlasting words today – “eight-oh-three” – I hear less of our struggle and more of our bond in the comforting sound of his voice. 2013

Jacquie Buncel, “In the Closet with My Relatives on the French Riviera” There are no mirrors in this small retirement town. Only he and she in matching T-shirts pushing baby strollers along the boardwalk. No women buzzed by the local barber in jeans and leather jackets, trying to catch my eye. No men walking two by two, rolling their hips from side to side. On the beach, the rock barrier juts out into the sea. I listen to the waves, receding one stone at a time, milky lather rushing over the pebbles, the water opaque, blue and green expanse surrounds me, fills me. I set out from my aunt and uncle’s apartment walk under the narrow stone overpass, skirting the dog droppings, houses enclosed by neatly trimmed bushes, pungent with growth. Crossing the main road, I join the couples promenading on the boardwalk, men and women, arm in arm, talking quickly.

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I walk past them. My stride protests that femininity. My nylon windbreaker challenges their fashionable wool jackets. I climb down the cement stairs, leaving the paved walkway behind, scramble on giant boulders. My running shoes find their footing. The moon almost full reflects in the still water. The sea separates me from home where I walk openly with my pink triangles, my rainbow tra-la-la necklace, home, where I do not have to hide. My uncle drives me to the train station for my outing in Nice, telling me not to get my haircut there, saying I should go to my aunt’s hairdresser. I want to know, but don’t dare ask, “Does she know how to give a good dyke cut?” My grandmother asks if there are places in Toronto to meet single men. At the synagogue for Yom Kippur my grandmother asks the rabbi’s wife to help her find me a husband. “Husbands for all Israel’s daughters” they croon together joyously. They pray for the new year “Peace for all the children of Israel.” On the beach, I vow to the moon: I want to be as insistent as the waves pounding, erode old hatreds through persistent relentless force.

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I want to hold a giant mirror to the world. See a man and woman smile at two men in a tonguing kiss see two women with short hair push a two-year-old in a stroller as an elderly woman coos over the child. And there I am dancing on a boulder hair shaved close to my head a labrys swinging merrily from my ear. 2010

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Jessamyn Hope, “The Reverse” 3:30 “Today’s the day,” said Andrea, my diving coach, standing with her thick legs apart, back arched, meaty arms crossed over her large bosom. “Today’s the goddamn day.” I nodded. My crotch tingled as if I needed to pee, but I knew that was impossible. Before leaving the locker room, I had balanced over the toilet three times, the last time u ­ nable to squeeze out a single drop of fear. Andrea squinted at the bleachers on the other side of the indoor swimming pool, where my friend Theresa sat like a small sun, her lightblond bangs shooting ten centimetres into the air and fanning open. To achieve this g­ ravity-defying look Theresa would soak her bangs in hairspray and then press them, panini-style, between two books. The rest of her hair fell softly to her shoulders, framing her small, vulpine face, which was twisting around a ­jawbreaker. Without the bangs, scrawny Theresa barely made five feet. Andrea ran her hand through her short, russety hair and said, “What is that punk doing here again? Does she have a crush on you? Tell your lesbo friend to take off.” “She’s not a lesbian,” I said, having only a vague idea of what a lesbian was and no idea of what a lesbian did. Actually, my sole image of

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a lesbian was Andrea, because that’s what one of the older divers had called her last week, the same boy who, to my utter bafflement, always called Greg Louganis “Greg Loose-Anus.” Andrea clapped her hands and pointed at me between the eyes. “Listen, my little Star of David, if you don’t do the reverse dive today, you’re out. Off the team! You’ve been wriggling your way out of it for months. If you don’t do the dive by” – Andrea looked toward the big round clock hanging high on the cement wall – “four o’clock, that’s it. You can walk your coward’s ass on out of here, clean out your locker, and never show your face at this pool again.” ∞ 3:36 I took my time going through the warm-up exercises on the blue gym mats to the left of the boards. I grimaced through twenty lunges and fifteen push-ups. While ­doing my sixty sit-ups, I pictured how nice it was going to be two hours from now – diving practice behind me, Theresa and I down at the shops, eating poutine out of Styrofoam ­containers, a full twenty-two hours to go before I had to be at the pool again. The Pointe-Claire municipal pool had no windows, yet somehow a sense of the January outside – already dark at this early hour and twenty-five below – mingled with the smell of chlorine. Under a very steep, church-like roof, high enough to accommodate a ten-metre diving platform, lay Canada’s first Olympic-sized swimming pool, built in 1967. Twenty-one years later, it was still the training ground for the country’s best swimming and diving team, and a number of Olympic medalists and World Record holders were diving off its boards that very afternoon. All around me were strong, beautiful bodies: practicing handstands, somersaulting high above the trampoline, bounding off the springboards and soaring into the air as if they had a different relationship with gravity, seeming to suspend a ­moment, arms spread open, before falling toward the ­water straight as a spear. After emerging from the pool, wet and glistening, they would grab their pastel

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shammies and whip each other’s bums, joking and laughing as if we were doing something fun here. I lay back on the blue mat and stared up at the roof ’s crisscrossing rafters. That I would sooner or later have to do a reverse dive – where a diver jumps off the board ­facing forward, but then flips backward, toward the board – had been haunting me for over a year. When I set off for my first diving practice, my dad said he was allowing me to take up the sport on one condition: that I never, ever do a reverse dive, which in his South African English ­accent he called “a gainer.” To make doubly sure I obeyed, he claimed that on any summer day, half the people in an emergency room were there thanks to gainers. Why was Dad so alarmist about reverse dives? Probably because five years earlier in Edmonton, a diver from the Soviet Union named Sergei Chalibashvili smacked his head while doing a reverse dive and died. I was too young to remember the accident, but it must have been in all the Canadian papers because Chalibashvili, to this day, is the only diver to be killed during an international competition. What happened after the medics carried C ­ halibashvili away is diving lore: Greg Louganis, who’d been standing on the ten-metre platform when Chalibashvili’s head hit it, after peeking over the edge and seeing the water filled with blood, had to go ahead and do the exact same dive – a reverse with three-and-a-half somersaults – a dive L ­ ouganis himself had hit his head doing a few years earlier in Tbilisi, USSR, which just so happened to be Chalibashvili’s hometown. I had recently seen the video of Louganis hitting his head back in 1979 in Tbilisi. They had replayed it on TV that past October after he once again hit his head d ­ oing a reverse at the Summer Games in Seoul. If I hadn’t a­ lready been terrified of the dive, I would have been a­ fter seeing that old black-and-white footage. It came to me again as I lay on the blue mat. Louganis smashing his skull against the hard platform and then, head joggling as if he were a bobblehead doll, losing consciousness in midair and just falling, limply falling, until he met the water with a flat back.

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“Hey there, Sleeping Beauty.” Andrea’s ruddy face stared down at me. She was bent over, hands on her knees, the roof sloping up behind her. “Would you like a pillow?” ∞ 3:41 My first warm-up dive – a simple front dive from the one-metre – did not go well. “Like piss hitting a plate,” Andrea said as I pushed out of the pool. She was leaning back in her steel fold-up chair, one ankle resting on her knee, her hands propped on her wide waist. I grabbed my blue shammy off the bleacher and wiped down my arms and legs. Eyeing my white thighs, Andrea said, “You’re not the skinnymalink you were a few months ago. You’re getting boobs and hips, eh? Too bad. Harder to slice the water like a knife when you’ve got bags of fat hanging off you. Not impossible, but harder.” I nodded as if I were to blame for the new breasts pushing against the plasticky white windmill on the front of my swimsuit. The team emblem was the Pointe-Claire W ­ indmill, “the oldest windmill in Montreal,” built by S­ ulpician priests in 1709, when the only other people leaving snow prints on this part of the island were the Iroquois. That was hundreds of years before the land became a suburb of the city, covered in track homes and strip malls, and more than 250 years before my parents would immigrate to Canada, but it never occurred to me that this windmill wasn’t a part of my history. I was very proud of that team swimsuit. The first time I put it on, I stood in front of my bedroom mirror, hands down at my sides, chin raised like a soldier at attention, thinking, Look at that, you’re an athlete now. Back in line for the board, I waited behind Jackie, a buck-toothed girl who was, it could not be denied, a truly good diver now. When the two of us first made the team, I had been a far better diver. I had been the best of all the rookies. Until recently I had always been the best

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at whatever I did: the fastest runner on the street, the highest climber of trees, the top student in Greendale Elementary. I had played Snow White in a production downtown, singing and dancing for an audience of hundreds while an understudy almost twice my age waited in the wings. But lately, everything had become a lot harder. My last report card, hidden under my mattress since the summer, had been a column of Cs. My parents were too preoccupied, first fighting over Dad’s friendship with his new secretary, then driving Mom back and forth to the Royal Vic for “treatments,” to notice I never gave it to them. Six months later I was still debating whether I had the moral obligation to bring the shameful report to their attention. The director of my drama school, after failing to give me a lead role in West Side Story, asked, “Whatever happened, Jessamyn, to your beautiful voice?” And all the other new divers had gotten better, executing dives with higher and higher degrees of difficulty, while my dives stayed the same, leaving me the worst diver on the team. I have to do this dive today, I thought. I have to do it. It would be proof that I wasn’t going to be a failure from here on out, that I wasn’t going to be the remarkable l­ ittle girl who grew up to be a big sad disappointment, that I was still on track to be a remarkable woman, the kind of woman who didn’t let fear stand in her way. If I didn’t do this dive, I would officially be a coward. Never to do anything great. Never to be admired. Or loved, not truly loved, the way Gilbert Blythe loved Anne Shirley. Gilbert never would’ve been so taken by Anne, yearning for her year after year, if she hadn’t been the bravest and most talented girl he had ever met. This was my last chance to prove that I was an Anne of Green Gables, Jo March, Scarlett O’Hara. ∞ 3:47 After messing up another front dive, I swam for the pool’s edge without coming up for air. The world above was a muffled blur. As long as I was underwater, everything was on hold.

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Andrea pretended I was invisible when I climbed out of the pool, looking all around except at me, as if my dive had been too terrible to be real. I got back in line for the board, teeth chattering. Squeezing the water out of my black braid, I peeked up at the clock. Thirteen more minutes. Maybe I really did have to pee now? I looked over at Theresa, still sitting on the bleacher, chewing her jawbreaker. Catching my eyes on her, she lifted her small hand and turned up her small mouth. I smiled back, thinking, Why? Why did she come with me, every ­afternoon, across the slushy boulevard from our high school to the pool? I knew Theresa was needy, everybody knew it. There wasn’t a girl in our grade Theresa hadn’t dragged into a photobooth, as if she required evidence she had friends. Still, lonely or not, how could she stand it, sitting on that bleacher, day after day, watching other kids work hard to get good at something? Didn’t it bother her that she wasn’t good at anything? When I first started spending my evenings with T ­ heresa, hanging at the shops and staying late at her townhouse, often sleeping over since Theresa lived around the ­corner from our high school, my mom didn’t like it. She said, ­“Theresa’s mom’s never home. All you eat there are microwaved hotdogs” – a comment so out of character for my mother, a woman who made Toblerone fondue for dinner, that it still niggles at me decades later. My mother was an Italian immigrant, a stay-at-home mom, but she never said conventional “mom” things, never scrunched her nose at other women and their homes, and there’s just something about that microwaved-hotdog comment that I can’t quite put my finger on. Mom didn’t press the point, though. How could she, when we weren’t eating much better at home? Not since the breast cancer came back for the third time, and Mom and Dad finally told me about the other two times, ­because this time was guaranteed to be the last. If Mom wasn’t at the hospital, she was either sitting in the family room on the puffy black recliner, wearing her oversized auburn wig, a neck brace, and a scowl, or she was locked in her bedroom with the silver vomit

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dish, mostly in silence, though once I heard her cry out, “Please, dear God, just kill me already!” As for Theresa’s mom, I had no idea where she was. I never asked. I just made the most of her absence. A full year of school nights at Theresa’s townhouse, and all I’m left with now are a few flashes: my hands bringing a plate of frozen hotdogs up to the microwave; Theresa cackling as she pulled a strand of condoms out of her mother’s half-packed suitcase; sitting cross-legged on the beige carpet, passing the telephone back and forth while we talked on the Party Line to “Nine-Inch Brian,” whom Theresa told, unable to suppress her cackle, that we were Catholic schoolgirls. Who would have thought that an adult man would desire a schoolgirl? But Theresa knew things at a time, in those last years before the internet, when it wasn’t so easy to find things out. It wasn’t a prudish era; sex was everywhere – Calvin Klein ads, slapstick comedies, music videos (George Michael wanted yours) – but exactly what everybody was talking about could remain, sometimes for years, unclear, a little fuzzy, like those scrambled soft-core movies that came on after midnight. Only Theresa, between “fuck this” and “fuck that,” bandied about terms like blowjob and rimmer and double-team like she totally knew what they meant, always followed by her machine-gun HA HA HA HA HA! That’s why it was such a surprise when, earlier that year, in the middle of Sex Ed, while we were watching a close-up of a baby’s hairy head pushing out of a stretched vagina, Theresa fainted. She timbered out of her chair – the shadow of her spiky bangs passing over the screen – and landed with a crash in front of the film projector. ∞ 3:50 “Show time!” Andrea said, when I popped my head out of the water after finally doing a decent front dive. “Time to shine, Star of David.” I looked to the clock. “You said I had until four!” “Jessamyn!” “Please,” I begged, clasping the side of the pool. “Can’t I do a few more warm-up dives?”

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“One more,” Andrea said, holding a finger up in front of her face as if I didn’t know what one meant. I glanced back at Theresa who shook her head like “fuck that.” Andrea followed my eyes and ordered me to go tell my loser friend to get lost. I said, “I won’t look at her again, I promise.” “She’s creepy. Tell her to go home.” I walked around the pool, hunched, arms twisted in front of my chest. Instead of walking around the boards, I took the long way, circumnavigating the swimming lanes with their furious back-and-forth of goggled swimmers. At the far end of the pool, I paused to watch Katherine, only one year older than me, all the way up on the ten-­metre platform, standing still, mentally preparing for her dive. When she started to run, my chest rose and the breath caught in my throat. She leapt off the platform with her arms above her head, whipped them forward, and started falling while spinning, not in a ball, but bent in two at the waist, arms wrapped around her straight legs, going round and round, and opening up just in time to pierce the water. I exhaled, and thought about how good it must feel to be a work of art. “Coach says you have to go.” Theresa’s eyes were as blue and clear as the pool. Judging by her tongue and lips, her jawbreaker had been blue too. “Bitch,” Theresa said. “I still don’t get whey she keeps calling you Star of David. Who the fuck is David?” “Seriously, you have to leave right now.” “You don’t have to do it, you know.” “Yeah, I do. You need a reverse to compete.” “Why do you have to compete?” “Because that’s what it means to do a sport, Theresa,” I said, ­although I knew that I no longer had to do the reverse to compete. I had to do it to quit. Do this one last dive, and I could walk away with dignity. “I told you, I have to push myself.” “Why do you have to push yourself?”

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I glanced back at Andrea who opened her hands in a “What’s taking so long?” gesture. Turning back to Theresa, I said, “Honestly, I don’t know why I hang out with you.” “Fuck you!” Theresa said with a cackle-laugh and picked up her army backpack. “I’ll wait for you in the foyer.” As I walked back around the pool, again the long way, again hunched with my arms folded in front of my chest, a doughnut popped into my head – a soft white yeasty doughnut topped with chocolate ­icing and pink and blue sprinkles. Without fail, this doughnut came to me every practice. I could see it, smell it, almost taste it. The vision of this doughnut, sitting on a piece of wax paper on a red counter in front of a giant mirror ­bordered by vanity lights, was at once ironclad and hazy, as first memories tend to be. When I was four years old and taking swimming lessons at the indoor pool closer to our house in Dollarddes-Ormeaux, my mom would buy me a doughnut to eat afterward, and this ­doughnut would be in the locker room waiting for me to finish changing into dry clothes. Cavernous indoor pool, fear of drowning, followed by a doughnut. ∞ 3:57 Upon my return, Andrea said, “That took too long. No more warm-up dives.” I looked to the clock. “You said I had until four!” “Jesus Christ, Jessamyn! Have some mercy on me.” “You said I had until four.” “By the time you’re on the board, it’ll be four.” ∞ 3:58 Jackie climbed onto the green springboard, and I moved to next in line. One year younger than me, Jackie still had her childhood body. She

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adjusted the fulcrum, moving the knob back with her pale foot and spindly leg. Crossing my legs against the pee feeling, I ran through the reverse in my head, because that was what all the great athletes said you should do. Never think while moving, they said. Imagine yourself doing the perfect dive (or dunk or catch or whatever) over and over again, so when the time comes, your body just does it, automatically, with grace. I’m standing in the middle of the board, facing the pool. I take the first step of the three-step hurdle. The second step, the third. I jump onto both feet at the end of the board and, as it’s bowing beneath me, I bend my knees and jump as it springs back, jump high, not out, and when I’m as high as I’ll go, no sooner, I open my arms while­ looking back ... But if I did as I was supposed to, and only thought about jumping high off the board, not away from it, how was I supposed to make sure I didn’t hit my head? And if those great athletes were right, that you’ll naturally do what you’ve been imagining, then what was going to happen after I’ve been imagining smacking my head all day? ∞ 3:59 Jackie stood at the end of the board, her back to the pool as if she were going to do a back dive, but she was preparing to do an inward, where a diver jumps backward and then flips inward, toward the board. Her pale, freckled face was stern, her big blue eyes focused. Her long black lashes were in wet, doll-like clumps. Jackie would have been one of the prettiest girls on the team if not for the gigantic buckteeth that prevented her from ever fully closing her mouth. When she raised her hands above her head, I thought, oh god, here we go. In two seconds, she’ll be done, and I’m up. Jackie jumped,

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whipped her hands forward, somersaulted in a fast tight tuck, and opened up – I gasped. Andrea did too. Jackie’s face met the board. She didn’t skin her forehead. Her entire face smashed into the board, flat down. The board bent under the pressure and lobbed Jackie off, in an arc, blood sputtering off her face like a summer sprinkler. She landed on her back, the water swallowing her and blooming red. It felt as if I had wished this on her, as if my imaginings had been that powerful. And yet, that wasn’t why I felt so guilty. No, the guilt came with the sweet giddy relief, the weightless tingly sense of good fortune. Now I wouldn’t have to do the reverse. Maybe tomorrow, but not today. “Call 9-1-1!” Andrea shouted as she ran and dove into the water. She surfaced with Jackie and sidestroked back with her under her arm. Jackie fumbled for the steel ­ladder – at least she was conscious. After managing to climb a rung, Jackie stopped, opened her mouth, and the blood waterfalled out. All of her ugly teeth were gone. A lifeguard pressed a towel against Jackie’s mouth, while another lifeguard, wrapping a towel around her shoulders, said, “You’re okay, you’re okay, you’re okay.” “An ambulance is on the way,” came a cry from across the pool. Everyone stood and watched from the deck, the one-metre boards, the three-metres, the seven, and the ten, as the lifeguards escorted Jackie out. ∞ 4:14 “Okay, your reverse,” Andrea said, towelling off her hair. I widened my eyes at her. The rest of the divers, after respectfully waiting for Jackie to ­disappear into the locker room, had gone back to work. The blood had

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dissipated into the giant pool, been disinfected by the chlorine. The place was loud again with the thud of boards and the swimming coaches’ impatient whistles. Andrea said, “If you don’t do it now, you’ll never do it. It’s a falling off the horse sort of thing.” Louganis after Chalibashvili. This had become an even bigger test of my heroism. “Go on,” Andrea said. “The longer you wait, the scarier it’s going to be.” I turned from Andrea and walked toward the board. I climbed its ladder with my heart pounding hard and fast. No urge to pee. I hardly felt my body. Only the thudding heart. How was I going to control my body if I couldn’t feel it? “Hey!” Andrea said, approaching the side of the board with her hands held high, making a triangle with her thumbs and forefingers. I made the same triangle but upside-down, and we brought our triangles together. She said, “Star of David! Powers activate!” Andrea forced me to do this ritual she had ­invented every time I was attempting a new or difficult dive. Was she laughing at my b ­ eing a Jew? Maybe a little. But mostly, I think, she was trying to give me a laugh and wish me good luck. Whenever she said it, I thought of this gold pendant Dad used to wear, a rather large, slanted Star of David that nestled in his chest hair while we played in the swimming pools of Daytona. My favourite game was “The Rocket,” where Dad would crouch underwater and I would climb onto his shoulders and he would spring up and I would go rocketing into the air. That was back when I wore a Wonder Woman swimsuit and Mom still had hair, dyed-red, carefully curled hair, which is why she would only wade around in the shallow end, careful to keep her head above the water and out of the way of The Rocket. But I ­always assumed she was watching me soar into the air, thinking, My ­daughter, such a daredevil!

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Andrea stepped back. I took my position in the middle of the board. I brought my feet together, straightened my back, and ­lowered my hands by my sides. ∞ 4:16 “ONE!” shouted Andrea when minutes later I was still standing in place. I didn’t turn to look at her. I stayed in position, eyes f­orward, but she haunted my peripheral vision with her hands cupped around her mouth. “TWO! If I get to ten and you still haven’t done it, that’s it! You’re done!” What was she doing? How was I supposed to concentrate with her yelling like that? “THREE!” Her voice boomed everything else into silence. The thud of the boards ceased again. I tried not to look, but my eyes leapt about against my will. Everyone, the Olympic hopefuls and medalist, the other coaches, the newbies who were far better than me now, had all stopped to watch. Even a few swimmers had gathered to the right of my board. “FOUR!” You have to do this, I thought. You have to do it. Do it. “FIVE!” The doughnut. What? Why the doughnut now! “SIX!” I knew what those great athletes meant by not thinking. I really did. Once I had been able to do it, to simply be, simply move, trust, trust that things were going to be fine, better than fine, good, perfect, but now I couldn’t get my mind to shut up to shut up to shut up just shut up and go go go “SEVEN!”

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Go go go go go go go “EIGHT!” Oh my god, oh my god. I’m going. I’m going! Look, my bare foot taking the first step. “NINE!” The second step, oh oh am I really doing this, the third step, I’m still not sure, I’m jumping onto both feet at the end of the board, bending my legs, and – There I remained. Frozen. On bent knees. The very picture of a cower. Andrea didn’t bother with “Ten.” Everyone watched as I straightened my legs, but not my shoulders, turned around, and made my way back down the board. Andrea shook her head. “Go pack your stuff.” ∞ 4:33 Alone in the communal showers, under a jet of hot water, I stood for a long time, half hoping Andrea would come and tell me that it was okay, she was just trying to play hard ball, I was still on the team, and half hoping I would never lay eyes on her again. It dawned on me that I was in the middle of a second test, that Andrea was out there right now, standing by the board, waiting to see if I would come back and beg for a second chance to prove myself. ∞ 5:00 Out in the foyer, Theresa looked up from her paperback copy of Cujo. She asked, “Did you do it?” I shook my head. My backpack was filled with all the things I wouldn’t be needing anymore: Ultraswim shampoo, the shammy, the swimsuit with the iron-on windmill. “Good,” Theresa said, slipping her arm through mine.

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I shoved her arm away and pushed through the glass doors into the wintery night. Since it was considered nerdy to acknowledge the cold, neither one of us wore hats, mitts, or boots, just acid-wash jean jackets, Theresa’s hanging off her shoulders, and Converse high-tops. In seconds my wet hair would harden into Medusa-like icicles. The sidewalk in front of the building was lined with cars, parents waiting in the drivers’ seats, headlights on. My mom’s face used to wait for me behind the windshield of an old boxy white Buick – her high, plump cheeks, thin lips, green angora beret over her red hair, black winged eyeliner magnifying her already big, black eyes. I could always tell when her eyes caught sight of me coming toward the car. She didn’t smile or wave, but she just looked happier, reanimated, as she turned the key in the ignition. I would climb into the heated Buick and Billy Joel would sing us down Saint John’s Boulevard, past the big shopping centre and fast food huts. If we didn’t pick up Harvey’s or McDonald’s on the way home, she would make a huge bowl of her chunky french fries with the skins still on, which I would soak in salt and vinegar and eat sitting on the brown ­carpet behind the coffee table, watching Today’s Special, followed by The Cosby Show, Family Ties, Cheers, Night Court. There were no quotas on TV in our house. And it hits me, not then, but today, thirty years later. Thirty years too late. I’m lying on my side in bed, my husband asleep behind me, and I’m nodding off after a day spent writing out this memory – the reverse, the reverse – when my eyes pop open. I clutch the comforter and stare into the darkness of the bedroom, a dark bedroom in New York City, so far away from there, from then, from that autumn morning Mom stood in the sunlit foyer in her red velvet housecoat and, watching me put on my jean jacket, asked whether I was planning to go to Theresa’s again after diving. Mom probably no longer filled out the red housecoat; it probably hung on hunched, bony shoulders. She probably no longer filled out her face, but I can’t say for sure because I wouldn’t look at her face, at those harrowed black eyes. She said, “I don’t like it. All you eat there are microwaved hotdogs,” as I walked

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out the door. No wonder those words wouldn’t go away. How could I have been so slow? Knowing she had only a few months left with her daughter, Mom was saying, hey, instead of going to Theresa’s every night, I would really like it if you came home. But she couldn’t say that, knowing the whole reason I wasn’t coming home was because she was there, dying. Theresa said, “Hey, Jess. You have no reason to be mad at me. I didn’t do anything. I didn’t kick you off the team.” Theresa was right, so I nodded, but I still couldn’t look at her. We crossed the snowy parking lot, its streetlamps throwing small circles of light on the compacted snow. Empty white spotlights. The grief was breathtaking. Not for Mom yet, but for me. I was gone. 2014

PA R T T W O · P L A C E

David Rakoff, “Arise, Ye Wretched of the Earth” Friday nights of childhood and early adolescence in Toronto were spent at the weekly gathering of the socialist youth movement of which my brother, sister, and I were members. Meetings were spent having earnest discussions of Marx and the great Labor Zionist thinkers like Theodor Herzl and A.D. Gordon; “bull sessions” about who in the group had hurt whose feelings; and air guitar contests to “Come Sail Away” by Styx. Occasionally the more dogmatic among us might even rise from one of the oily seat-sprung sofas and, with right index finger shaking and pointing heavenward, intone like Mayakovsky, “On Yom Kippur, we must go to a restaurant, sit in the front window, and eat pork!” A public treyf chow-down that would send an appropriate fuck you to the soporific comfort of our middle-class friends and families. We never actually went through with anything ­remotely like this, of course, but in such teapot tempests are burgeoning political consciousnesses formed. We became deeply committed young socialists, ready at the age of fifteen for the ultimate prize the movement could bestow – a ­summer living and working on a kibbutz, one of the c­ ollective farms that were a central part of settling the Jewish state. We had been drilled in all the facts: the kibbutz was the last bastion of left-wing Israeli idealism; children lived in group houses away from their parents, a scenario

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of ­autonomous high jinks reminiscent of Pippi ­Longstocking; kibbutz was the Great Experiment in Action. Once there, we would meet other members of the movement from all over the world and spend many a happy hour engaged in honest labor – laughingly baling sheaves of wheat, picking olives, oranges, peaches, grapes, the sweat on our brows a shining reminder of the nobility of collective farming. In the evenings we would gather together and dance around the fire while singing Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young songs and, if one’s older siblings were any indication, lose our virginity. Years later we would renounce our bourgeois upbringings and return to Israel, making lives of simple agrarian bliss. The kibbutz I was assigned to was one of the oldest in Israel, settled in 1928 by Jews from Russia, Poland, and Germany. For the most part, our arrival was met with little to no notice. We were just another group of volunteers, no different from the countless Europeans and Australians just passing through, taking time out to pick fruit, work on their tans, and contract cystitis from their rampant and unchecked coitus. But we were different; we were members of the movement! I thought that our political ardor would be immediately apparent. I had visions of our bus being greeted by garlanded folk-dancing youth, so happy to have us there to share in their lives. I had been raised on a fairly steady diet of just such socialist utopian Ziegfeld numbers: songs, film strips, and oral histories that all attested to just this scenario. Trees weren’t simply trees, they were jungle gyms of plenty with smiling children clambering over their b ­ ranches; a field was somewhere you brought your guitar, so that your comrades could dance down the rows after the day’s work was over. I was assigned to pick pears. Work would begin at four A.M. and ­finish sometime midmorning, before the heat had set in. How filled with fervor I was that first day, the light barely dawning as I headed out in the back of the truck, wearing my simple work shirt, a pair of shorts, and the traditional sunhat worn by so many pioneers who had come before me to make the desert bloom. (I should point out that

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we ­actually said things like “Make the Desert Bloom” all the time. In fact, the most mundane activities were habitually accorded classical, romantic, politicized descriptions: “Breaking Bread with Your Brothers and Sisters”; “Drinking Deeply of the Sweet Water”; “Harvesting the Fruits of Your Labor,” and so on.) I know I sound like the Central Casting New Yorker I’ve turned myself into with single-minded ­determination when I say this, but the main problem with working in the fields is that the sun is just always shining. Dyed-in-the-wool northerner that I am, it became apparent a­ fter about two days that I was completely unsuited to working outside, and I was moved around among the kibbutz’s various interior jobs: the furniture factory, the metal irrigation parts factory, and the kitchen, ­assured all the while by the group leader that there was nothing emasculating or jack socialist in being moved inside. After all, each according to his needs, each according to his abilities. My abilities seemed to lie in passing out from heat stroke after a scant two hours in an orchard. This continued for weeks. It was a somewhat idyllic, if not a mite monotonous, existence. Until the dreams of my socialist future came to a crashing halt. Brought on, not surprisingly, by an uncomfortable brush against the harsh realities of nature. The Long Night of the Chickens. The boys of our group were gathered and told in the hushed tones reserved for trying to avert impending disaster that we would forgo our regular work details and spend that night from midnight until dawn packing truckloads of poultry. Why this needed to be done with such urgent ­secrecy, u ­ nder cover of night, and why the girls were excused was never ­explained to us. And we didn’t ask. We greeted the news with that ­respectful Hemingway Silence of the Y C ­ hromosome. No dopey girls allowed. It was all imbued with nocturnal, testicular melodrama, like some summer stock production of Das Boot. We slept that evening from nine to ­eleven – what I would come to know years later, in a far different context, as a Disco Nap. We rose and drank of some tea. The girls sprayed perfume into handkerchiefs for us to wear around our noses and mouths,

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and we were off in trucks to do battle with the insurgent chickens. The scene had everything but the diner waitress standing in the road watching us go, worriedly ­wiping her hands on her gingham apron. The chicken coop of the kibbutz was a one-storied structure of corrugated iron, about half the size of a football field. It emitted a low rumbling, a vague buzz that you could hear from far away. And of course, from even farther away, there was the smell. A smell of such ­head-kicking intensity as to make a perfume-sprayed handkerchief ­almost adorable in its valiant naiveté; Wile E. Coyote warding off a ­falling boulder with his paper parasol. And the combination of floral scent and dung merely increased the vileness. Chicken shit is horrible stuff. Unlike cow manure, which, according to David Foster Wallace, smells “warm and herbal and blameless,” chicken shit is an olfactory insult: a snarling, saw-toothed, ammoniac, cheesy smell. Needlessly, gratuitously disgusting; a stench of such assaultive tenacity that it burns your eyes. Even the light inside the coop was smudged and grimy through the haze. Rather than making you never want to eat a chicken again, it simply makes you angry. It makes you hold a grudge. You’ll eat chicken again, by God, and you’ll chew really, really hard. One of the barrel-chested Israelis shows us what to do: pick up four chickens in each hand. This is done by grabbing hold of the birds by one leg. “If the leg snaps,” he says, “it doesn’t matter, just to get four in each hand, b’seder?” he says. “Okay?” He faces us holding the requisite eight, four in each hand, living masses of writhing feathers, looking like some German expressionist cheerleader, his pom-poms alive, convulsing, filthy. Who will see their dreams fall away into the abyss and eventually succumb to the crushing sadness and meaninglessness of it all? We will! And what does that spell? Madness! Louder! I can’t hear you! He crams the chickens roughly into a blue plastic crate smeared with wet guano. “And you close the lid, and tchick tchack,” he tells us, clapping his hands with “that’s that” finality.

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Before I even try, I know that I will not be able to do this. It is midnight, and we will be here until dawn or until the truck is piled to ­capacity with crated birds. I walk out into the sea of chickens. I reach down to grab one, its leg a slightly thicker, segmented chopstick. I recoil and stand up. I take a fetid breath, regroup, and bend down with new ­resolve, grab the chicken by its body with both hands, thinking somehow this might be preferable, although how I think I’m going to get eight of them this way, I’m not sure. Its ribs expand and contract under my fingers. A dirty, warm, live umbrella. I drop the bird as if it were boiling hot. My friends are all grabbing handfuls of poultry and shoving them into crates, unmindful of splayed wings, attempted pecking of their forearms, and the horrible pre-morbid squawking of birds on their way to slaughter. My sensibilities are not offended by the processing of animals for food. I don’t care about the chickens. I fairly define anthropocentric. I’m crazy about the food chain and love being at the top of it. But like the making of sausages, federal legislation, and the film work of Robin Williams, there are some things I would just rather not ­witness firsthand. I leave the coop and go out to the trucks. Hoisting myself up on the flatbed, I start to help with the stacking of the full crates. I know that my unilateral decision to change my task is met with displeasure on the part of the men who run the coop, but I do not care. Their muttered comments are predicated on a direct poultry-penile r­ elationship. I might as well have spurned the stag party whore, gone to the wood shop, and fashioned myself a sign that said “fag.” “Ma ito?” “What’s the matter with him?” the head of the work d ­ etail asks when he sees me on the truck. “Ha g’veret lo ohevet ha tarnegolot.” His friend has answered using the female pronoun when referring to me. “The lady doesn’t like the chickens.” It would be years before I was referred to as “she” again. And then very rarely and only as a joke by friends. Calling each other “she” is not

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quite the mainstay of the lexicon of the urban homosexual as people think. It is not our “Make the Desert Bloom.” I turn around to look at the men, making it quite clear to them that I understand what they are saying. The man who called me “she” avoids my eyes and busies himself with straightening a pile of crates and tightening the ­tarpaulin on the side of the truck. “You’re right,” I tell him in Hebrew. “She doesn’t like the chickens.” ∞ Have you ever had one of those moments when you know that you are being visited by your own future? They come so rarely and with so little fanfare, those moments. They are not particularly photogenic, there is no breach in the clouds to reveal the shining city on a hill, no folk-dancing children outside your bus, no production values to speak of. Just a glimpse of such quotidian, incontrovertible truth that, after the initial shock at the supreme weirdness of it all, a kind of calm sets in. So this is to be my life. At that very moment I saw that I would never live on a kibbutz. I would not lose my virginity that summer to any of the girls from the group. Indeed, I would not care to do so. I am grateful to that macho blowhard. He made me consciously realize what I had always known but been somehow unable to say to myself: He’s right, I don’t like chickens ... I like men. Now I live in the city that might best be described as the un-kibbutz. Where nobody would dream of touching a live chicken. Where whatever spirit of collectivist ­altruism people might have had dried up long ago, and where the words Karl and Marx generally bring up associations of L ­ agerfeld and Groucho. At socialist summer camp in northern Ontario, I and the ­other children of affluent professionals would g­ ather u ­ nder the trees e­ very day to sing before going in to lunch. One of the songs was always “The ­Internationale,” that worldwide hymn of the proletariat. One summer we were even taught to sing it with our left fists raised. We were, none of

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us, by any stretch of the imagination what could be ­described as prisoners of starvation or enthralled slaves, admittedly, both catchier metaphors and easier to scan than “Arise, ye children of psychiatrists.” But they had little to nothing to do with us personally. Yet for those few moments when we were singing, those words seemed so true. How can I describe to you that eleven-year-old’s sense of purpose? Like the patrons of Rick’s bar in Casablanca who manage to drown out the Germans with the “Marseillaise,” I was overcome by the thrill of b ­ elonging to some larger purpose, something outside of my own body. The sheer heart-stopping beauty of a world of justice and perfection, rising on new foundations. And that one line, “We have been naught. We shall be all.” Naught. What a wonderful word to d ­ escribe my insignificance. It spoke as much about my wish to be delivered from this preadolescent self as it did to any consciousness of liberating the masses, but it held such promise of what I might hope for that even now, as I write this, I can still call up that old fervor. It still makes my breath catch in my throat. 2001

Isa Milman, “A Daughter Recognizes a Father Who Spoke” For Paul Celan from Czernowitz, Bukovina I see you writing your Jew-heart with the executioners’ pen, carving words snatched from a thousand darknesses. My own father’s heart a private honeycomb kept out of sight, entombed after that which happened, your choices. I read your heart’s inscriptions: mandel-eyed mother scar, barbed-wire father scar, whose hand you let go, heart scar a perfect globe complete

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like the tattooed man I saw in a book of inspiration, every skin surface needled with pigment, an ocean, fish, waves. Shirtless, a living poster: I am beauty made flesh, the tattooed one announced. 2008

isa milman

Bob Bossin, “Sweet Lilies’ Advice” Tom Stein had the biggest book in Alberta ... I can still hear my father’s voice. We are at the Sea Hi Chinese ­Restaurant on Dundas Street, in what was once the Ward, the Toronto slum where my father grew up in the early years of the twentieth century. Back then it was Toronto’s Jewish ghetto, but by the 1950s the Jews had moved west and north, and Dundas had become the heart of Chinatown. That night, we sat at Davy’s regular table with half a dozen of his pals. Among them were my uncle Hye, Paul Grosney, the Winnipegborn trumpet player, a long-faced horse-player I called Mr. Sniderman (everyone else called him Sack), and at the end of the table, taking two places, Sam Shopsowicz. Shopsy was the biggest man I had ever seen, and the most famous. A cartoon of his jowly face adorned every package of Shopsy’s Hot Dogs (it still does today, a half-century later). S­ hopsy had inherited his p ­ arents’ delicatessen in the mid-1940s, and, advertising himself as “The Corned Beef King,” he turned it into the city’s premier Jewish deli. He then started his own ­meatpacking business, which he would eventually sell to Lever Brothers, who would sell it to Maple Leaf Foods. Shopsy died young. Looking back over that t­able, I realize most of them died young: my uncle Hye, Sack

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S­ niderman, and my father as well. But that night they were all hale and happy, ­relaxed in each other’s company, enjoying the Sea Hi’s ­familiar fare and, even more, enjoying the stories that went back and forth. ­Particularly Davy’s stories. “ ... Stein had the biggest book west of Winnipeg. He was a tough guy and he had done real well for himself out west. He even had his own string of horses, including a big grey gelding named Peachstone. Peachstone was a very fast horse. He won so often that, after a while, nobody in Alberta would bet against him. “So Stein ships Peachstone out to Vancouver. He figures, out there, he can still get some action. He hires the best jockey – in those days that was Scotty Craigmyle, hands down – and he enters Peachstone in the feature. Then he sits back to watch the fun. “But just before the race, Stein gets a call from back in Calgary. His book is way overloaded on Peachstone, and they can’t lay any of it off because all the other bookies are swamped with bets on Peachstone too. If the horse comes in, Tom is in deep shit. So he jumps in a cab, rushes out to the track, and catches Scotty Craigmyle in the paddock. He grabs the halter, points a finger at Scotty, and says, ‘Under no condition can dis horse win dis race!’ “Meanwhile, they’ve called the horses to the starting gate. Scotty is trying to figure out what the hell to do. He knows he has to pull the horse, but how, without making it too obvious? All the way to the gate, he’s thinking about it. Finally, with the race about to start, he decides he’ll break Peachstone so fast, and push him so hard for the first halfmile, that he runs himself out. “No sooner does he decide this than the bell clangs and the gates spring open. Scotty gives the horse the boot and Peachstone takes off like a bat out of hell. Then, sure enough, by the half-mile, Peachstone starts to flag. ­Another eighth and he’s wheezing like an old squeeze box. Scotty sneaks a look over his shoulder, but what he sees is not good. The closest horse is ten lengths behind and dropping back like a fat cop chasing a schoolboy. None of the horses are gaining so much as

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a yard. That’s when it hits Scotty that the other jockeys are all pulling their horses too. They had all bet on Peachstone!” There my father pauses to take a bite of Sea Hi fried rice. Davy is very good at pauses. It is unclear whether he intends to go on. Eventually Shopsy says, “Davy! So? What happened?” I suspect my father has been waiting for this. “So,” Davy says, “what happens is, Scotty does the only thing he can. He eases over to the rail, pretends to bump, and falls off the horse.” The men roar. Grosney claps the tabletop. Even the taciturn Sack Sniderman’s mouth twitches. Davy laughs as heartily as the rest. I think these men like nothing better in the world than sitting here, bullshitting with each other. Davy is in his element. At this table he is a star. I feel proud. ∞ If I could time-travel, it would be back to the Sea Hi that night, or another like it. I loved Davy’s stories. I suppose it is because mostly he said nothing. When he did speak, he was gruff. But when he was with Shopsy, Sack Sniderman, and the others, Davy could run neck and neck in a field with Sam Levinson, Damon Runyon, and Sholem Aleichem. At least that was so by the 1950s. By then he was legal, out of gambling and booking acts into supper clubs. It was a short walk from the gambling business to show business in those days. In the 1940s and ’50s, much of the entertainment industry – clubs, agencies, record companies, even The Ed Sullivan Show, by some accounts – was underworld controlled or financed. The supper clubs were home turf to the hoods. On Saturdays, they brought their wives for dinner and a show. Fridays, they brought their mistresses. Davy acquired his talent agency, Theatrical ­Attractions, as payment of a debt owed to him from his gambling days. Or so the story goes. He took readily to his new line of work. He had always loved shows – ­vaudeville, musicals, nightclubs. It was a taste he inherited from his ­father, ­Zussman Bossin. My grandfather, who was born in

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the Ukraine in 1866 and emigrated to Canada in 1904, was a righteous and stiff-necked Old World Jew, a pillar of Toronto’s russische shul, yet every ­Friday night ­after shabbes dinner, Zussman rose from the table and walked to the Gaiety Theatre to catch the vaudeville show. He had struck a deal with the Gaiety: he displayed their playbill in the window of his junk store, and in return, they gave him a Friday-night ticket. Thus he could ­attend the show without touching money on the Sabbath. Zussman cut an incongruous figure in the Gaiety’s a­udience, ­sitting at the back with his beard, derby, and gabardine coat, drumming his fingers to the band. In 1884, when he was a conscript in the Russian army, he had won a battalion-wide drumming competition. However, when the judges realized that he was a Jew, the prize was given to someone else. It was the only story from his army days my grandfather ever told. ∞ My father’s office, Theatrical Attractions, was on the ­second floor of the Barclay, a threadbare hotel on Front Street, midway between Union Station and the ballpark. Its l­ocation and low monthly rates made it a favourite haunt for the underpaid players who made up the roster of the Toronto Maple Leaf Baseball Club. I would see them snoozing in the lobby’s cracked leather armchairs. This made the Barclay one of the grand hotels in my ten-year-old’s estimation. To grown-ups, the Barclay was the home of the Club Indigo, the city’s hottest nightclub. The Indigo boasted its own band, its own chorus line, and a fresh headliner every week – booked by my father. In the mid-1950s, the Barclay and the Club Indigo were owned by Al Siegel, who was said to be a cousin of Ben “­Bugsy” Siegel. Al was reputed to be “connected.” Though my father booked the shows, he had as little to do with Siegel as possible. Most people did. But one time in the early 1960s, Joey Bishop came to town to headline a benefit for the ­Variety Club, the show business charity, on a Sunday

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night. At the last minute, trouble arose with the stagehands’ union concerning overtime, and it looked like the show might be cancelled. ­Desperate, someone at the Variety Club called my uncle Hye, who was a member. Hye called Davy, who called Siegel, who called New York, and the union problem vanished. I watched the show from the wings with my father. By then I was working for Davy Saturdays and ­holidays, helping out around the office. I have never understood why he hired me. The workload was non-existent. From time to time, I would be handed something to file, or sent to the hotel kitchen to pick up coffee. I suspect Davy just wanted to get me out of the house, or out of my mother’s hair. Maybe he wanted me to learn a little about business. Or maybe, since he was not a demonstrative man, this was his way of being close. So Davy and I would take the bus downtown to his office in the Barclay, where I would sit on the couch and listen while he hollered into the telephone, his ­preferred mode of negotiating. Once, a Montreal club owner r­ efused Davy’s offer of Lena Horne because, he said, “We don’t hire coloured girls.” Davy turned the air blue. A ­ nother time, Davy was auditioning a young black s­ inger in an empty Toronto club, when the owner – another mobbed-up character – came in. “Get that nigger out of my club!” he ordered. The singer was Harry Belafonte. Davy was good at his job. He had an eye for ­talent and a head for figures, though he did not seem to work a lot harder than I did. Many of the afternoons at T ­ heatrical Attractions were spent sitting around with the visiting acts, Sandman Sims, Mel Tormé, or the Deep ­River Boys – whoever was in town with the afternoon to wile away. I loved those sessions, even if I have forgotten the stories they swapped. In fact the one time I remember clearly, my father told a story he made sure I didn’t hear. It was in the late ’50s, just after Tommy Dorsey died. There were four or five men sitting around Davy’s desk, including Davy’s pal and the Club Indigo’s bandleader, Paul Grosney. The news of Dorsey’s

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death was a shock. At fifty-one, Dorsey led the biggest big band in the business. He had choked in his sleep. “Unless,” Grosney said, “one of the musicians did it.” “I wouldn’t be surprised,” one of the others agreed. “He was a mean, cheap bastard. Even his brother quit him.” “I bet he made Jimmy buy himself out of the contract too.” “Like Sinatra. You know that story?” It was a rhetorical question. Paul Grosney had once played a gig with Dorsey and he relished telling the Sinatra story. “When Frank was just starting out, he was singing in a carpet joint in Hoboken. Bugsy Siegel took a shine to him. Bugsy introduced Frank to Harry James, who signed him for $75 a week. Frank cut his first record with Harry, ‘All or Nothing at All.’ Things were really starting to roll for Frank. Dorsey got wind of it. He checked Sinatra out and hired him away from Harry. Harry just let Frank go. He wasn’t ­going to hold him back. Harry was that kind of a guy. “But Dorsey – what a prick he was. He signed Sinatra for $150 a week and, in return, he made Frank sign over a third of his earnings for life, plus another 10 per cent on top to Dorsey’s agent. Talk about a rotten deal. “Well, a couple years go by, and Frank does ‘I’ll Never Smile Again.’ He does ‘Blue Skies,’ he does ‘Stardust.’ The kids love him. So he wants to go out on his own, but D ­ orsey won’t let him out of the contract. Frank offered Dorsey $60,000 to let him go. Dorsey turned him down flat. So Frank went to see Bugsy. Siegel goes to Dorsey and hands him a paper with an offer to buy Sinatra’s contract for a dollar. Then he takes out a gun and points it at Dorsey’s head. ‘In one minute,’ he says, ‘either your signature or your brains will be on the paper.’” “That really happened?” somebody asked. Everyone, including Grosney, turned to Davy. Davy didn’t say anything at first. Then he said, “It wasn’t Siegel, it was Willie Moretti. He grew up in Hoboken and knew Dolly, Frank’s mother.

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If it had been Siegel, he would have whacked Dorsey around first and then got out the paper.” “Yeah, Bugsy was a piece of work. And so was she.” “Who, Sinatra’s mom?” “No. Virginia. Virginia Hill, Siegel’s girl. What a dame. Davy knew her. Right, Davy?” Davy didn’t speak. “Was she as beautiful as they say?” somebody said, filling in the silence, urging Davy along. Everybody was still looking at my father. “Yeah,” Davy finally answered, “she was a knock-out. And she had a head on her shoulders and a lot of moxie. She used to run layoff money between Chicago and New York.” Then Davy noticed I was there, and stopped. “Davy,” Grosney said, “tell the story about her and Senator Kefauver.” Davy looked at me, then at Grosney, then back at me. “Bobby, go get some coffees.” I took their orders and hurried downstairs to the ­Barclay’s kitchen. I got the drinks in no time, put them on Davy’s tab, and ran back upstairs to the office. The door was locked. I knocked. No one answered. Through the door, I heard the rumble of my father’s voice. I knocked again. There were no footsteps, just Davy’s muffled words. Then there was a burst of laughter, and my f­ ather unlocked the door. There was no more talk about ­Virginia Hill. I didn’t hear of her again until twenty-five years later, when Annette Bening played her opposite Warren B ­ eatty in the movie, Bugsy. There was no story about Senator Kefauver. ∞ Davy kept his past to himself, at least around me. He was not embarrassed by his history – not in the least – nor was he troubled that many of his friends and colleagues had been criminals, some of them notorious. Just the opposite: his whole life, Davy respected crooks

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more than judges. So there was no shame in his secrecy. It was more like modesty. My father was a truly unambitious man. He had, at least by the time I was old enough to recognize it, no interest in wealth or status. He had only a sporting interest in politics. His brother, my uncle Hye, was a supporter of the socialist CCF and had been some kind of communist in the 1930s, but Davy thought all governments corrupt, having, no doubt, done some of the corrupting himself. And yet he was a highly moral man, with a sense of propriety you would not expect in a man who made his living the way he did. He hardly drank, did not smoke (except cigars), and I never heard him tell a dirty joke. When I got old enough to ask him about sex, he sent me to my mother. Gambling, however, was another story. Davy was not a gambler, not at all, but he made sure I knew all about it. In Davy’s books, though it was no sin, gambling was deeply foolish. “The track is the one place the window cleans you,” he liked to say. Or he would repeat the advice Sky Masterson’s father offered in Guys and Dolls, words I have known by heart for as long as I can remember: “Son, someday, somewhere, a guy is going to come up to you and show you a nice brand-new deck of cards on which the seal is never broken, and this guy is going to offer to bet you that the jack of spades will jump out of this deck and squirt cider in your ear. But son, do not bet him, for as sure as you do, you are going to get an earful of cider.” All the while I was growing up, my father conducted a personal, inhouse, anti-gambling crusade. “Don’t never bet,” Davy liked to warn me, in an accent that would raise eyebrows today. He was quoting and imitating Sweet Lilies by the Wayside, the old man who once tended the water barrel in the backstretch at Dufferin Park. “‘Don’t never bet. How you think them hosses gets feeded?’” It is ironic that this is the fatherly advice I remember because, by all accounts, Davy knew more about betting on horses than anybody. And yet, he never bet when I knew him and rarely bet before that. The cops

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liked to call people in the gambling business “gamblers,” but for the most part, they were anything but. Abe Orpen would say, “If you ask my advice, it is do not gamble; however, if you insist upon gambling, I’ll take your action.” Mister Orpen, as he liked to be called, was, in his time – the last part of the nineteenth and the first part of the twentieth century – Ontario’s most revered bookmaker. And he was the man who gave my father his start. In 1916, when he was eleven, Davy peddled papers at the corner of King and York, just down the street from Orpen’s King Street gambling club. Mister Orpen would buy his daily paper from Davy, and he ­noticed the ease with which the boy made change. Davy was born with a head for figures. Orpen started testing him, getting him to calculate payouts on bets laid at different odds. Davy answered instantly. And so Abe Orpen took him under his wing, and into the bookmaking business. Or so the family story goes. Another version of Davy’s induction into the gambling business goes like this: When he was a boy, Davy was ­crazy for horses. He loved their rippling muscle, their satin skin, and their intelligent eyes. So he would hang around the shed rows at Dufferin Park, “Little ­Saratoga,” the half-mile track Abe Orpen opened in downtown T ­ oronto in 1903. The men in the backstretch – there were no women allowed in those days – called my ­father “­Little ­Jockey,” which is what he wanted to be, but he grew too big, too soon. Still there was never a shortage of work around the stables for an eager kid, and no shortage of lessons about horses for a boy with an observant eye and a keen mind. Davy took it all in, and everything he learned confirmed Sweet Lilies by the Wayside’s counsel, offered gratis to any young hot walker or stable boy passing through his domain: “How you gonna know what a critter gonna do dat sleeps standin’ up?” There is a third path that could have led Davy to the bookmaking business. In those years, it was common for bookies to use newsboys as their “front ends.” A punter would place his bet with the newsboy,

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who would ­record it – in my father’s case, in his head – and pass it on to the bookie, the “back end,” when he did his rounds. A newsboy with a head for figures was as good as gold to a bookie, and a job with a bookie was food on an otherwise lean table for an immigrant Jewish kid who slept on a row of boxes in the corner of the kitchen of a tenement in the ­Toronto slum called the Ward. 2014

Carol Lipszyc, “Feather Boy” On the day he was to be officially inducted into Andrusz’s unit of Polish partisans, Dawid climbed up as high as he could on the moss-covered trunk of a pine tree. He stretched and twisted his limbs to adjust to the tree, until the dark undergrowth of brushwood below was a mesh of net-like veins and the dead branches lay like a heap of white-crossed bones. The air was moist in the Bialowieza forest, heavy with the scent of rotting wood, ferns, and fungi. Dawid wedged his hand in a halfcavity of the tree. If he had been given a gun, he imagined, it would fit there, and if at that moment a German were to target him, he would aim and fire his gun in self-defense. Hidden and protected among the green-needled leaves, he practised being invisible in the thicket, which was easy to do since he had not climbed high enough to catch the sunlight. He had been with the unit through the last winter and summer months, and he wished to remain. In the woods, he wore no white band of shame with the ink-stained Star of David. He could hunt for rodents: yellow-necked mice, bank voles, and herbivores; he could eat anything the forest offered: herb plants, wild ramsons, and purple hepatica. In the forest, he might have it in his power to lengthen the time he lived. That past summer of 1943, when the Germans retaliated with their own ambush, the partisans turned for sanctuary to the marshes. Their depth was unknown to the Germans, who seldom ventured there, but

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the partisans stayed close to the trees to avoid sinking into the mud. They took naturally to the trees and water, hanging on to the branches like monkeys, floating below the water’s surface like fish. Dawid was proud he could breathe without making bubbles. Air bubbles sent a message directly to the Germans. So he learned that if he lay just underneath the islands of water, hung to a branch, and put his mouth among the flowers and the vegetation, he could breathe in between them. Dawid was determined to throw himself into whatever challenge was put before him. If a test of courage lay ahead, he would meet it without complaint, fulfilling his duties as a fellow partisan. Early on a fall morning in 1943, he joined the other men as they gathered together. Some, like him, climbed down from the trees; ­others emerged from their bunkers, small shacks camouflaged in tree branches and peeled bark, dug into the ground or on the side of a hill. The partisans had collected dry wood, which produced less smoke, to cook their breakfast. After they had eaten porridge from a shared ­basin with spoons they stored in their boots, and chewed off some of the dark peasant bread they broke with one another, bread they learned to keep for the duration of the day, Andrusz approached Dawid, who was only too happy anytime Andrusz chose to show him attention. A ­ ndrusz sat down on a log next to the boy, rolled up a thick cigarette made of dried green tobacco leaves, and looked into the forest past the clearing. Smoking calmed him; his thoughts of Dawid that morning were ­burdensome, and a part of him wished they could be lifted from his shoulders. Once an idea was planted in his mind, he could not abandon it. In fact, it was a matter of principle to him that if an idea were a reasonably strategic one, it should lead to action. Here, where the woods could give a false sense of comfort, a commander had to be vigilant, his action swift and decisive. But did this idea involving Dawid have any real tactical value? He puffed his cigarette and considered this question with the brand of mischievous s­ eriousness common to his nature. While Dawid waited for Andrusz to speak, he thought little of what plans Andrusz might have for him, of how important or u ­ nimportant

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they might be, concentrating instead on his uniform. Andrusz’s military tunic and civilian trousers looked shabby. A former officer of the Polish Home Army, the Armia Krajowa, Andrusz wore no sign of the honoured Polish eagle emblem on his clothing. When Dawid had been in the ghetto, he couldn’t help but steal admiring glimpses of the G ­ ermans, never daring to let them catch him. Anyone staring would be hit. The Germans always appeared about a metre taller to him than the Jews; especially since they walked straighter. Their spines were made of steel, and their boots and buttons shone. Their uniforms were stark and clean, and the authority they commanded impressed him in the same way that his ­father’s suits once impressed him before the war. ­Andrusz did not look polished like the German officers, but then, D ­ awid was not afraid to look into Andrusz’s eyes. “You have been with us for a number of months,” ­Andrusz began. “Yes. I am one of you.” “Exactly how old are you?” “Seven, but I am one of you.” Dawid thrust his chest forward. The child’s conviction triggered Andrusz’s impatience and frustration with the waste of life he had seen. “You were captured in the woods – you are here because your father is a doctor and we are in constant need of them.” “My father has been away for a long time.” “He is working at the hospital that we patrol and will continue to guard at all costs.” Andrusz stamped his cigarette on the ground and then leveled his eyes at the boy. “We brought you here, Dawid, because the village of B ­ ialowieza was unsafe. The Germans have set up their headquarters in the town. So, in these woods we do what must be done. Your eyes are young, but if you wish to be one of us, as you claim, they cannot remain shut.” “I have seen dead people before.” Dawid spread his hands over his knees. Andrusz leaned forward. “And when you saw those corpses, did they frighten you?”

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Pensive at first, Dawid gained speed. “In the ghetto in Lublin, I looked out the window every morning and saw them. The old people and the children. I thought they were sleeping. But then a cart would come and pick them up. They were naked and very thin. I have seen plenty of dead people,” he assured Andrusz. Andrusz studied the child’s face. Dawid returned his gaze with a steadfast attention Andrusz could not help but soften to. “Every pair of hands is valuable to us – yours no less than others. We have a job for you, Dawid, if you are ready to take it on.” “I am a fast climber and a careful guard, Andrusz. I am ready.” ­Dawid clasped his hands together in a show of solidarity. The commander laughed at his young disciple’s obvious desire to please. He liked the boy, unquestionably, yet he had found in this child, who was not estranged to death, an opportunity to avenge his people in a small way for what the Germans had done, an opportunity he could not let pass. He slipped his hand inside a pocket in his trousers and took out a silver white feather. “Have you ever used one of these?” “A feather?” “Yes. It is light, but it will have great significance. This will be your tool of war. Hold it. Feel it.” Andrusz handed it to Dawid. The boy handled the feather delicately. “Tomorrow, before dawn, you can join a small group of us on an ambush. Take nothing but your feather. ­Remember this. Your eyes and ears are your other weapons. Sharpen them. Do you know the motto of the partisans?” Dawid shook his head. “We are the seers who are not seen. We listen but cannot be heard. Repeat it.” Dawid did so as his oath of allegiance. “We are the seers who are not seen. We listen but cannot be heard.” “If you must, keep your mouth covered with your sleeve. Sit still in hiding until the enemy is close enough. When it is your turn to act, I will give the command.”

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There were two edicts or laws of operation in a partisan unit if ambushes were to succeed. First, as Andrusz instructed, there had to be an element of surprise; the blow was to be delivered without allowing the enemy any o­ pportunity to cry out. Second, the partisans were to launch an attack only against a small group of Germans, no more than four to five targets at any given time. The attacks were made possible only because the Germans came into the dense forest on foot and not with their regular tanks and armies. A squad of partisans, including Andrusz, gathered around a pitched tent and navigated their plan through the woods. Two of the partisans were sons of families living in the vicinity; they knew the woods, the edges of the forest, and the depth of the streams. They pointed to a route that would provide a detour. A horse was tied to a tree by the tent. One of the two young men would be sent that day by horse as a scout. The other partisans would scatter and hide in the woods and thickets, in places remote from any paths. They would meet again by the tent and, according to their findings, decide on the next operation. Under the stars that night, they headed out for the raid, each partisan carrying either a knife or rifle. ­Dawid carried his single white feather and followed silently, trusting the partisans knew where the Germans would be overtaken. The men weaved their way through the labyrinthine dark, till they stopped at an a­ greed-upon point in the woods. The troops were nearby, they claimed. Each of them climbed a tree, ready to ambush the ­enemy. ­Dawid now climbed as fast and far as any of them. He waited and watched. Despite their rough appearance, these were not wild men. Their timing and movements revealed the cunning and instinct of animals on the offensive, perfectly synchronized and relatively soundless. As predicted, two German soldiers soon came onto the path. They wore helmets and carried guns and appeared to be on rotation, testing the ground and trees ahead of them with suspicion. Ready for their prey, and empowered by their advantage from a height, Andrusz and another partisan lunged from a tree and attacked the soldiers from the back,

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their full weight hitting the Germans like ­boulders, so that they all but tumbled forward. The partisans gripped their necks with one arm in a chokehold, breaking their fall. Before the pair of G ­ ermans realized what form of man or animal had assaulted them, their throats were cut. There was a split-second struggle, one of the soldiers flayed his hands in the air, made a choking sound, and it was over. Two metres away, another German appeared. The mode of ­attack against him was duplicated, culminating in the same death rattle. The partisans were swift killers. S­ tepping in the pools of blood, they removed the prized treasure of boots. In a matter of minutes, all the armaments of the ­enemy were stripped. Once the Germans’ possessions were taken away, the last phase of the operation remained. Andrusz called Dawid down from the tree and over to one of the soldiers. His mouth was contorted, his limbs strung out at unnatural angles. “Take out your feather and put it under this one’s nose. Then count to 100. If the feather moves at all during that time, call one of us and we’ll finish the job.” Dawid knelt down over one soldier who lay silently on his back, his blood trickling around him. His eyes were closed. Dawid put the feather under his nose and concentrated. The feather remained stationary. He counted, whispering the numbers. His father had educated him when they had hidden in the cupboard, so he knew them well. For thirteen months, in complete dark, he had learned letters and numbers by feeling them on the palm of his hand. He could draw them on his hand or on his father’s hand, but he had never seen them. He could feel their shape on the palm of his hand the way the partisans knew the forest. His schooling in the cupboard had been useful. He counted to 100, remembering the sequence. The soldier did not move. Dawid looked up to ­Andrusz, awaiting his order. “This one is dead. But sometimes it is the shock alone that gives you the impression that they are dead. Call us then and we’ll finish the job.”

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After his first expeditions, Dawid became truly known as a feather boy, and he was skilled at his job. Both ­Andrusz and Edek, another partisan, a carpenter from Bialystok, explained to him they had to kill the enemy because the enemy was there to kill them. On a larger scale, if they were to liberate the country, this had to be accomplished. Even when the German soldiers pleaded with him, Dawid understood the reason for killing. As the official feather boy, he acquired his first ­German words. Never having spoken Yiddish, German was foreign to him. At times, when he bent over soldiers with his feather, the dying men managed to retrieve photographs from hidden places. Groping in anguish, they turned pictures of their loved ones towards the young witness. ­“Meine frau, meine kinder.”* They whispered what Dawid called blood words from the backs of their throats. The photos sometimes had to be pried from their fingers. Dawid usually placed them back in the soldiers’ pockets, miniature black-and-white faces belonging to an already ­expiring life, a life that held no meaning to him or the other partisans. If the men below him twitched, convulsed, he estimated they would die within the half-hour. And if they did, it was his job to report any movement in order for the others to deal the final blow. His purpose on the mission was clear. He continued his guard and brought back necessities, stripping the dead men of their boots or shoes, wrapping them around his neck, snatching their watches, and returning the bounty to the others. Nothing detracted him from his purpose. He calculated that what he brought back was a measure of how well he could carry out his duty, and secretly fantasized about what he could capture that would be treasured, perhaps the most coveted submachine gun, one that he had only heard about, the German Schmeisser. The miracle of it for Dawid was that they were staying alive while the enemy around them was dying, that the reverse from what he had known until then was possible. Not that there weren’t casualties on * My wife, my children.

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their side, sorties that went out and never returned, people that went foraging for food and never came back. At times, they executed their own for safety. Like the partisans who came back drunk one morning and well-fed, without food for the other men. They were tied to a tree and executed for setting a bad example. He had known the two men and was surprised by the ­severity of punishment, by what Andrusz explained was the military administration of justice without appeal, but he was eventually converted in this thinking when A ­ ndrusz ­explained the probable consequences of their actions. “If we do not have food, what will happen?” “We will starve.” “And once men are drunk, how could they endanger our lives?” “They could lead the Germans to the rest of us.” “Unwittingly, but they could do it. There are laws of survival in the woods – laws that cannot be broken.” This detachment of partisans, whose main objective was the ­defense of the hospital, had suffered sporadic casualties, splinters of men who disappeared, but the g­ reatest number of dead on their side came on a cold snowy night in 1944 during the last winter of the war in the region. For Dawid, beguiled by the winning war of the partisans, that night climaxed in events he felt inwardly he had prepared for. His shoes outgrown, he was sitting in the hollow of a spruce tree, his feet wrapped in ­layers of rags with pieces of wood at the bottom for soles. He rarely slept well at night in trees, always moving to keep his toes from freezing, but on the whole he was accustomed to the cold. That night, a stillness pervaded, as though the enemy had succumbed to the winter and had fallen temporarily asleep. When the bombs began to fall, D ­ awid had almost dropped his guard and joined the slumbering trees. At first, in his near-waking state, he imagined they were deadly curses whose power lay only in their sound but within seconds they bolted across the sky and the trees, jetting long and longer streaks of light and fire. They shot down into the tall snowy fortresses the partisans had until now safely inhabited, and a rumble tore through the

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earth. Balls of fire leaped upwards past the trees, and pyres of smoke hissed and burned his eyes. Exposed, he hugged the tree and tried to move his toes as he could think of no other defense. Though the night was not dark enough, the trees not thick enough to elude the enemy, the tree was all he had. He clasped its trunk and locked his feet around its branches. At dawn, hours after the bombing had ended, he climbed down. A number of disorientated partisans were already searching for casualties on ground pockmarked with black craters. The morning light, like an undertaker lifting the shroud of the dead, revealed that many partisans had been blasted off the trees. Bits of bodies were scattered everywhere. A low wail hummed through the air. Some partisans were trying to carry the wounded to the hospital, heaving them on top of their shoulders, carrying them in their arms. Dawid wandered through the woods strewn with the dead, searching for anything that could help the others. He stepped over the remains of men who had been picked out from among the trees like birds, scanning for any remnant of the living when his eye caught sight of a leg, a full size leg to the hip. It was frozen stiff with the trouser and boot still on it, which made it all the more human to him. He stood up the leg, measured it against himself and realized it reached the same height. The idea came to him that this leg would provide a new tool his father could use. He would surprise his father, make him proud when he delivered the leg on his own. Many patients in the hospital had had limbs amputated, and here was something he could do for the wounded. Convinced that his father could stitch a man up whole again, Dawid set out on his duty. His plan re-energized him; he could always be relied upon to deliver useful items to the partisans, and he would not fail in his responsibilities now. ­Dawid began dragging the leg. It was heavier than he had anticipated, and the snow that had fallen the night before was deep and thick. He sank into the frozen milk cakes of snow, lifted himself and tried once more, this time with the leg in hand. Again he sank, half-buried in the snow. He was pitted against everything, the snow-covered trees that stretched out like white

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scaffolding, the snow-packed ground that consumed both his own legs along with the one he carried. “I am not getting to where I need to go,” he uttered, exasperated. “Try again. Are you a partisan or aren’t you?” This reproach somehow veered him in the direction of the hospital. He devised a system of steps. First he pitched the leg in the snow, tilting it so that it would not lodge as deep; then he raised himself up with the help of the leg like a crutch, pulled the leg out of the snow, moved a few steps forward, and repeated the actions in the same sequence. Slowly, as his body adjusted to the rises and falls, he became calmer; the distance ahead could be slowly meted out. He measured his progress by periodically looking back at his footsteps and the imprint of the frozen leg. Since he wore no shoes, and he was short and the leg was large, the trip to the hospital, a mere kilometre away, took over four hours. He was exhausted by the time he reached his destination. The hospital was partially hidden, half underground and half above ground. Built from a forest dugout, it rose above the icy surface like a seal. Dawid plodded in with the severed leg, his clothing and face coated in patches of snow, his face beaming with pride and anticipation. “My father, I wish to see him. It is important. Tell him that ­Dawid, his son, is here.” A number of nurses, frightened by the sight of the boy holding the leg like a biblical staff, hurried to find Dr. Reikovsky. The sickroom was the main artery of the hospital, swelling with the dying and injured. Rows of beds were filled with men whose flesh had been torn apart by exploding bullets, whose arms and legs were missing, those whose wounds had been anesthetized sometimes with vodka when all else was unavailable, then covered in what precious bandages there were. Some who were recovered were now making their way towards the boy with the standing leg. Dawid’s father too was heading towards his son. Images of his father practising medicine before the war in Radom, where he was born, flashed before Dawid’s eyes. His father, shaven, with a moustache, wore decent shoes, trousers, a clean shirt and tie, and over his clothing, a white gown. Around his neck was the

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instrument Dawid had always cherished and feared: his stethoscope. The father of his past had come back to a son who was grown and who had important news to offer. The doctor was panting and running, his anxiety apparent from a distance. Once he was within arm’s length, and not wanting to alarm the boy, he asked in as restrained a manner as he could, “What has happened, Dawid? Where have you come from?” “Father, I have come with some help ... ” “ ... Are you all right?” “Yes, Father. There was bombing and I found a leg.” The doctor’s eyes moved to the severed limb. “I don’t understand what you are saying.” He reached over to ­embrace his son, but his grip was tight and he shook him instead. Dawid drew back, still holding the leg protectively. His father had to listen to reason. “I found it, Father. I climbed down from the tree and found it on the ground. It belonged to a partisan.” “Were you injured?” “No, Father. Others were, but not me. I have walked all the way. But this leg, it is still in one piece. You can fix people with it. You know how. Quickly, Father!” His father was asking too many questions. He never had patience before when Dawid asked him questions. His father took the leg and held it consolingly. Turning his face away, his voice cracked with emotion. “Thank you, Dawid. It was good of you. I am grateful for what you have brought me.” “I looked very carefully for it. It was a lot of trouble bringing it or I would have been here sooner. Can you give it to someone?” “Give it ... Yes, of course.” Dawid pointed excitedly at a man standing on crutches with one leg. “Like him. He is tall. It will fit him.” His father was by now mumbling to no one, it appeared to ­Dawid. He dropped the leg, distractedly, the full weight of the ghoulish thing,

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its truncated shape falling with a heavy thud. Then, he ­covered his face with his hands. “What sort of world did I bring you into? What sort of world?” Dawid’s father repeated. In his voice was the despair Dawid had heard in the ghetto and in the closet when his father had pleaded with the peasant woman to keep them longer. No one had listened either time. ­Dawid thought it unlikely anyone would listen now. He looked around the hospital, at the men and the nurses, before swerving back at his father with a stern and embarrassed expression. “Father, we are among the partisans here. Partisans don’t cry.” “Yes, you are right, Dawid. You are right to remind me.” “These men are living. And the man to whom this leg once b ­ elonged is dead. Isn’t that right? Partisans live or die, Father, but they don’t cry.” His father appeared to come back briefly. He wiped his eyes, bent down and held Dawid firmly by the elbows. “Son, return to the woods. Go back to the men in your unit. I will stay here. There are people that need me. Many operations ahead. I haven’t a moment to spare.” With these words, he turned and walked away. “But Father, you have forgotten the leg,” Dawid picked up the limb and called out after him, “take it with you, Father.” Dr. Reikovsky continued to walk and did not look back at his son. Dawid appealed to a nurse to intervene on his behalf. “You’d better go now,” was all she said. Dawid set the leg carefully down on the floor and left the hospital dejected. It had all been a waste. His father didn’t listen. If he had been older, he might have. And now what alternative did he have but to obey his father and ­rejoin what remained of the troops. He had one small consolation. The trip back would be easier without the leg. D ­ awid felt some relief about that. He talked to himself quietly on the way as he had in the ghetto, to keep himself company, to occupy the time and set things straight. As he walked, he became more convinced his father was not right in the

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head. His actions spoke for themselves. He replayed them in his mind to be certain. First, his father cried. Then, he mumbled. Finally, and this was worse than anything, he left the leg behind. He was careless to do that. If any one of the partisans were careless, if anyone forgot something, the others died. His father could learn a thing or two from Andrusz and the other partisans. Dawid hoped to see Andrusz when he returned. He hoped that ­Andrusz had survived the bombing and that he could tell him about the leg and what he had tried to do. His father could no longer be counted on. Perhaps, if the hospital were in jeopardy, he could protect his father. A ­ ndrusz had only to give the order. He would be ready. 2014

Ruth Panofsky, “Pearl” I heard that during the war while aboard one of those trains when you could do nothing else you threw your four-year-old daughter out the window Rather than shield her on the ride toward death you chose otherwise to release her into life however horrible however brief 2001

Ruth Panofsky, “Immigrant” Soon after his arrival my Bolshevik grandfather brazen young man bit into the thick yellow peel of a banana and consumed it entire much later when he learned the fragile fruit ought to be pared carefully from its smooth outer skin its softness enjoyed on its own he hid his humiliation in a planished exterior that concealed a tender, fleshy centre 2001

Cary Fagan, “Nora By the Sea” From the window Nora watched the car, a mustard Citroën, jerking out of the hotel drive as if it were in one of those Mack Sennett comedies they had once laughed over. The Citroën paused where the drive met the road, beyond which rose a tangled wall of subtropical trees and, farther, the tiled roofs of private estates. Directly below, when Nora leaned against the window, she could see new guests tumbling out of a taxi and the hotel porter starting to unload their baggage. When she looked again the Citroën had disappeared. And with it her husband, Michael, who only yesterday had learned how to drive a standard shift when Nora had endured the ninety minutes down to Cannes. Not again; Michael would have to go without her, and besides, she looked forward to being alone – if keeping an eye on four children and a seventy-two-year-old man could be called being alone. This morning for the first time she had put on the yellow dress purchased in Paris, sandals on her feet, and silver earrings like seashells made by one of her own craftspeople. She felt light and summery; perhaps for once she even fit her name, Nora, like one of those cheerful English girls in wartime films that Michael used to tease she’d been named after. She turned from the window and walked – waddled, the children exaggerated when they wanted to be mean – through the bedroom

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and across the hallway to the facing room whose door was unlocked. Her children’s room was, as expected, a disaster, the three beds and extra cot like separate war zones, yesterday’s underwear strewn about, and the wrappers from the chocolates left each morning on the pillows heaped on top of the television set which had been left on to a bicycle race. Nora turned off the television and picked up the underwear, not because she had failed in resisting the inheritance of her own mother’s fastidiousness (at home her kids could make as much mess as they cared to live in), but out of respect for the maid. Then she stepped onto the balcony. How odd that this hotel, with its air of archaic charm, should ­actually be quite modern, having been built in the early ’70s in the ­international style that, according to the better magazines, was now discredited. Perhaps it was the way the hotel nestled into the cliff, its series of levels connected by stairs and escalators. Nora stood against the aluminum rail and felt her dress flutter against her legs. The sea was turquoise and dotted with boats. She could hear gulls. All of it – the view, the softness of the air – gave her a feeling of both stillness and movement. Just as she had wanted; just as she had hoped. This stretch of shore, far below the hotel, was all rock and cliff, too dangerous for swimming. To the children’s disappointment there wasn’t a decent beach for twenty miles but Nora was glad of the isolation and the touch of wildness. From here down to the water there was no path, just glinting rock and scrub and, on either side of the hotel property, more estates with flat rectangles behind them that were tennis courts. The hotel pool two levels below was, at this time of morning, deserted. Nora could also see the informal garden, canopied with palm leaves, the stone steps that ran down to the pool, and the hotel’s outdoor café with its round tables and wicker chairs. She also saw, sitting at one of those tables, her elder son. Ananda, she could see, was writing in the journal she had given him before the trip. Her purpose had been to focus his attention on a family holiday he had resisted joining and to improve his writing skills, for

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his grades were poor. But she never could have predicted that Ananda would hardly put the journal down since the trip’s beginning and that he would be there now, scribbling away, with a demitasse cup and a croissant set before him. She was, of course, pleased about the journal, if not with the sight of a fifteen-year-old drinking espresso. That was too much, even if the management was French. She couldn’t forbid Ananda, that wasn’t how the family operated, but she could open a little reasoned discussion on the effects of caffeine. Nora, about to turn away, paused: from inside the hotel the waitress had appeared. She wore the typical black dress complete with frilly apron that showed a lot of stockinged leg and Nora recognized her as the same young woman who, dressed in grey and with a kerchief holding back her hair, came in to make the beds. Apparently the staff, despite the hotel’s size, did double duty, like a family-run pension. The waitress had a rather sweet round face and a good figure and Ananda, who had refused to look happy for days, smiled. Nora was again about to turn away when a man appeared, sweeping the café floor with a twig broom. He was another who did double service, for she recognized the same young athletic fellow who acted as porter. This was becoming a little drama; the waitress said something to the athletic man and then disappeared into the hotel. The athletic man leaned on the broom, next to Ananda but without speaking as Ananda, to his mother’s amazement, tore a page from his journal, folded it, and placed it in the athletic man’s back pocket. The man, carrying the broom, disappeared by the same door as the waitress. That her own chronically shy Ananda had the courage to send a note to the waitress deserved his mother’s admiration, accompanied by a perceptible tightening of anxiety. Certainly he deserved a relief from the months of moody silence, the evenings alone in his bedroom engaged in what seemed hours of desperate masturbation. Nora would not interfere now except to watch and, if she could, prevent her son from being hurt. No, not even that; this was her son’s experience, not hers. She felt her heart beating, as if a car had brushed her. Yet a

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moment later she was already pleased with her decision. What a good day it would finally be, she was sure of that now. A blueprint of the hotel’s complex series of levels, its multiple staircases and escalators, would have appeared as confusing as a labyrinth, but the orienting views of the sea or road from the high windows allowed guests (Nora had gone in search of her other children) to know just where they were. The colours of the hotel’s interior were desert – white, grey, beige, yellow – the windows like lush paintings on the walls. For a hotel this size the halls seemed quiet to Nora, perhaps the result of a lower occupancy than the developers had anticipated, owing to the distance from Cannes. But this morning she liked feeling that any moment might bring an unexpected meeting round a corner and, indeed, she had two on her way down to the first level. The first was with the widow from Switzerland who yesterday had confided to Nora that she had not taken a holiday since the death of her husband. The second was not really a surprise for she heard the party of Germans before she saw them yawning their way into the dining room. Nora took the next door outside – there seemed to be dozens leading to the paths around the grounds – and breathed in the fecund air that sent a run of shocks along her thin allergic nose. Nora started and looked down; the hotel’s sleek tom was rubbing against her legs. She believed that cats (not dogs, including their own Lhasa Apso – they like everybody) were innate judges of character and as she bent down to scratch this one’s gingery ears she was happy to take its appearance as another omen for the day. And looking ahead she saw, just before the gravel path disappeared round a corner, the twins. Nora never said “the twins” aloud and had always insisted on their being treated as individuals; but as even now, at the age of eleven, they spent all their time together, it seemed natural to think of them as a pair, not the same but complementary. “What’s up?” she said coming towards them. Gordon gave his infamous grin. Eileen giggled. “Look, Mom,” Gordon said, getting up to drag her over by the hand. He still wore the cabbie’s cap that he had insisted on buying from

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a street vendor in London, his hair tucked inside and the brim turned up. With his wide face, big eyes and tremendous smile he looked – goofy. “I almost caught a lizard. We’ve been trying all morning. But he got away, see?” On the ground a lizard’s tail. Writhing. “Do you think it hurt when the tail came off?” Eileen said, her face a frown of concern. She had a sprinkling of freckles across her nose that could be accounted for in the family even if the fragile blondish-red hair couldn’t. “No, he didn’t even feel it, did he, Mom? The tail just grows back.” “I don’t suppose he enjoyed it much. Gordon, why do you wear your hat like that?” she said, fixing it. But he pushed her away and tipped up the brim again. Gordon liked to look goofy. “Did you two have breakfast?” “Uh-huh,” Eileen said and began a careful explanation of how the four languages on the cereal box required different amounts of space. “Can we go swimming?” Gordon asked. “A little later. Where’s Rose?” “Outside Grandpa’s door, waiting for him to wake up. Boy, does he ever sleep late.” “Mom,” Eileen said and as she hesitated Nora could tell she was working out her thoughts. One needed a good deal of patience to have a conversation with Eileen. “Why do different languages take different room? I mean, aren’t they just different words for the same thing?” “I don’t think so,” Nora said – had she made a mistake not enrolling Eileen in French immersion? – “Languages aren’t like pairs of shoes all the same. They’re – let’s see, now – like shoes of different colours and when you put them on you dance in a whole different way.” “Oh,” was all she said, but she was thinking. “Can we go swimming?” “I said later, Gordon. Right now I’m going to have some breakfast with Ananda. Where are you two going to be?”

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Gordon squinted up at her. “That’s classified information.” Eileen giggled. The path that Nora continued on wound past the kitchen window that opened on hinges like elbows and from which drifted the same Madonna tune the kids were listening to on their Walkman these days. The café was entered through a trellis of vines in blossom beneath which Nora stood for a moment, the sound of a bee near her ear, looking at her son. The half-eaten croissant forgotten, he was absorbed in writing, his left hand clutching the pen near its nib and his face inches from the page. He wore army shorts picked up at some secondhand shop back in Toronto and a T-shirt imprinted with a grainy portrait of some new-wave band, just bought in London. How Nora loathed that haircut of his, shorter than a marine’s, his scalp visible in spots and a little tuft at the back. Why couldn’t he see that the haircut violated his beautiful and gentle face? Besides, the vaguest sense of history ought to have told him what such a military look signified to her generation; his own father had come to Canada to avoid the war, a story he had heard for years. Why, he looked just like the students they had once called – she could hardly say it, even to herself – fascists. But fascists didn’t wear earrings, at least not in her day, two bronze studs in a single lobe. These Nora liked, almost. “Ananda,” she said, but too quietly for him to hear. She loved his name that was so like a poem and that she and Michael had carried back with them from India where they had lived for eight months after her graduation. Of course she had returned to Toronto and the competence of Mount Sinai Hospital for the birth, but the name – meaning “joy” and in India as common as “Frank” – still meant for her that state of grace in which she and Michael had lived. As for Ananda himself, its vague femininity and foreignness would have been embarrassments enough, but as he grew older his name became a reminder of the appalling fact of his own conception. When he came home at the start of every school year, complaining, she and Michael would give the same

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response: “It’s nice to be a little different.” “No it isn’t,” Ananda would grumble. He still hadn’t forgiven them. It was seeing Ananda so withdrawn into the privacy of his journal that caused the first uneasiness of the day, that it could be something other than lovely. But she refused to let his slapping shut of the journal or the suppressed little frown as she looked up wound her. “Good morning,” she kissed his cheek while he slipped his pen into a pocket on his shorts, meant for a bayonet or something worse. The speech on caffeine could wait for another time. Besides, how could she talk, who with Michael and two of his college friends had once dropped acid while hiking up Mount Rainier in Washington? “Don’t you want to finish your breakfast?” “I’ve had enough,” he said. “Where’s Dad?” “Gone to Cannes. He won’t be home until this evening. I’ve got an idea. Since you’re so interested in films, why don’t you go in with him tomorrow? You can see a film at the festival, maybe even attend one of the press conferences and see a director.” “I don’t think so. I’d rather just stay here. We’re leaving the day after tomorrow, aren’t we?” “That’s right. We fly to Paris and then home.” “You aren’t going to change the ticket and make us stay longer?” “Has it been so horrible to be with us?” “I didn’t mean it that way.” “I know. That’s not what I meant to say either. I think it’s been our best holiday in a long time.” “Sure.” He pushed his chair back and rose. “Where are you going?” There was, against her will, the slightest note of panic in her voice. “Won’t you keep me company?” “I want to go for a walk.” “Where?” “Just around.” He walked away with that springy gait of his, bouncing on the balls of his feet. Nora watched him cross the café and hesitate before the

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trellis, not because he was reconsidering, as Nora momentarily hoped, but because the waitress was coming through from the other side. She smiled at him – it seemed to Nora conspiratorial – as he let her pass. But Nora would not let herself brood over Ananda, nor over the failures of the holiday, for the weather was too fine and she could not think of a prettier place to sit than at this café table. She had looked forward to a day alone but now she wished that Michael was here and that they could have the kind of talk that had once been so frequent and expected between them. When she and Michael had met she was the only Canadian student at the small Massachusetts college and he was a teaching assistant from New Jersey who made experimental films. One of his films had won an award at a state film festival and he was trying to raise money for a more ambitious project which already had the name Quantum. He wore his hair in a ponytail and was prepared to leave the country to avoid the draft. They leave after Nora graduated, using the money he had raised to take them to Europe, the Middle East, India. On returning to Toronto they had moved into a cooperative house and Nora, waiting for the birth of their child, began to make jewellery, imitating the designs she had studied in her fine arts courses and had sketched in India. Michael started hunting for more money to make Quantum and took a job as assistant manager of an art cinema. Eight months later he was working for the country’s largest movie-house chain, soothing his conscience with calculations of the money he could save. The job meant cutting off his ponytail. He began wearing ties. Michael got promoted and Quantum never got made. At present he was vice-president in charge of Ontario distribution, had developed an obsessive interest in espionage films, and wore his hair, if not in a ponytail, at least elegantly long. They had renovated their third house, in Moore Park. Nora, between bearing children, had gone from selling her own work to hiring other jewellery makers and opening miniature boutiques in department stores. She now had twenty-one craftspeople, eleven stores, and her designs had just been featured in Toronto Life.

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The trip to Cannes had been something of a perk for Michael, who was only peripherally involved in choosing films for distribution. But he was spending a few days attending screenings and lunching with producers, getting, as he told Nora, a larger sense of the business. Yesterday she had accompanied him to Cannes only to endure frantic crowds, soundtracks blaring from speakers, traffic jams caused by Finnish and Israeli television crews. In a hotel lobby a young woman, hoping to be discovered by a Hollywood director, had dropped her robe for the newspaper photographers. Nora and Michael had entered the hushed ambience of the hotel restaurant whose prices had been doubled for the festival and where Michael received the supplications of an independent filmmaker from New York. She was surprised to see her husband, author of the never-made Quantum, play with him so ruthlessly. Nora wanted some coffee but lacked the courage to attract the waitress’s attention and merely pulled apart the end of Ananda’s croissant, leaving a buttery gleam on her fingers. The waitress appeared just outside the trellis but turned her back as Nora waved; the gentleman at the next table raised a sympathetic eyebrow and returned to his Italian newspaper. Three weeks ago Nora had sat on the living room sofa, holding the small brass Krishna that usually stood on the mantle next to the menorah, and waited for Michael to come home. She had heard the sound of his Mazda pulling into the drive and watched him come through the door, briefcase and squash racquet under his arm as he juggled his keys. “Michael,” she had said. “I’m not happy.” Michael had stood there, his smile frozen, looking so much like Gordon, a clumsy enthusiastic boy. He put the racquet on an armchair. “What we need is a little vacation,” he had said, still smiling. “It’s been years since we’ve gone to Europe. How about it?” Nora had looked down at the Krishna, waving its arms and legs. “All right,” she had said. And then as an afterthought, “If we can bring the kids. And my father.”

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Six days in London, six days in Paris, and now the Riviera. They had waited hours to get into the Tower and the Louvre, had been swindled by no fewer than three taxi drivers, while the children, spitefully she was sure, had pointed out every billboard for McDonald’s and CocaCola. That was what children remembered, not the British Museum or Rodin’s drawings; what they remembered was the Guinness spilled into Daddy’s lap, the pigeon with a deformed foot, free chocolates on the pillow. “Morning, daughter.” Her father, sauntering between tables, handsome in white slacks, blazer, cravat flowering at the neck. He moved a touch stiffly as always, his pencil moustache precisely trimmed and his white hair combed back. “God, what’s all that sun for?” he rasped, sitting down and crossing his legs. He peered at the other breakfasters as if incredulous that anyone could be up at such an hour. “I need coffee.” “Did you sleep well, Dad?” Her father just narrowed his eyes, as if to keep out the light. He hadn’t slept well since Nora’s mother died, but perhaps it was simply age. The waitress arrived, allowed this handsome old man to flirt with her, and went for coffee. How did he look so right, so at ease here? “You ought to eat something,” she said. “You’re getting too thin.” “My dear, I’m simply in fashion,” he chuckled, lips barely parted. “The only thing I can digest first thing in the morning – ” “Is the news, I know. Where’s Rose? I thought she was waiting for you.” “Yes, I found her sitting in the hallway outside my room just like a little orphan, that’s what I told her. She watched me shave.” “She never watches Michael shave.” “Michael, Rose informs me, uses an electric razor.” “But where is she now?” “I sent her to the kiosk to buy me a Herald Tribune and a packet of cigarettes.”

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“I can’t believe this, Dad. You know I don’t want you smoking around the kids.” “She likes doing errands for me.” This time the waitress’s appearance didn’t even elicit a glance from him. He picked up the cup almost as she set it down and closed his eyes for a moment. Before the trip they had seen her father only two or three times a year since he had returned to Montreal and the old, unrecognizable neighbourhood. He only taught part-time now, to “gifted” students as he put it, and he liked to joke that the other teachers treated him politely out of deference to his Russian accent and impeccable manners. As for Rose, Nora had never known a more serious child. Rose’s first-grade teacher had even telephoned Nora to tell how her daughter shunned friendships with the other children. To Rose her grandfather should have been almost a stranger. But from the moment of their rendezvous at the Toronto airport Rose had taken to him and barely left his side. Nora’s father, to her surprise, submitted to her presence. He slowed to her walking pace, talked in a reasonable tone, even occasionally held her hand. Nora discovered what could only be a previously hidden and ugly side to herself, for only that could explain her not being absolutely delighted. “Rose doesn’t like Hebrew school,” her father said. “But it’s only her first year, and just Sunday mornings.” “I don’t like to interfere but I’m afraid I couldn’t help agreeing with her. What does she need it for?” “That’s pretty obvious, I should think. To learn about being Jewish.” “Ah,” was all he said, and tipped back the cup of coffee. How he could make her furious. If her father wished to cling to whatever views he picked up in some dingy Moscow restaurant half a century ago that was his business, but to undermine what she and Michael taught their children was inexcusable. But what could she say – “Hello, orphan.” Rose came running, through the trellis, past the other tables, and into her grandfather’s arms. Chuckling, he patted her fraternally on

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the back. Rose wriggled around to sit between his white-trousered legs on the edge of the chair. “Just think, making me wait all this time for my newspaper.” Rose was breathless. “The lady gave me a green package – menthol. But I know you won’t smoke them, Grandpa, so I wouldn’t take it. You should have heard her swear, in French but I could tell. She had to look on all the shelves.” For the first time Rose looked up at her mother, the corners of her mouth turned down. Nora leaned over to brush the hair from Rose’s forehead, a reason to touch her. Of all the children Rose looked the most like her – the thin nose, high forehead, the dark crescents under her eyes. “Rose, honey,” Nora said, “you’ve got your shirt inside out.” “I don’t care.” “Where’s the waitress? I want some breakfast.” “Grandpa doesn’t eat breakfast.” “Grandpa is very stubborn. We love him but we don’t agree with him. How about we order you some cereal and fruit?” Rose didn’t protest, her sign of acquiescence. Nora’s father deftly tapped a cigarette from the package and drew a box of wooden matches from his blazer. “You’d better shift into the next seat, orphan,” he said. “I don’t want you to get my smoke.” “Smoking is bad,” Rose said, pulling herself into the wicker chair. “Yes, very bad.” “But it won’t hurt you, Grandpa?” “I’m ancient, it’s too late for that. Just being alive hurts me.” “Please, Dad,” said Nora. “Your mother protests my small act of self-dramatization. She’s right, of course. Ah, here’s that pretty waitress.” Rose’s breakfast was duly ordered and delivered and, once the strawberry halves had been arranged by her into a pattern whose meaning was necessary but obscure, she began to eat. Nora’s father leaned back in his chair, cigarette held aloft, and scanned the

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newspaper headlines. “I hope Michael is finding his excursions to town productive,” he said. “I think so. If you’d like to go in, I’m sure he’d love to take you tomorrow.” “Oh, I don’t think so. It’s rather pleasant here. No sights to see, no galleries to look serious in. Right, orphan?” Rose looked up and smiled, her teeth red with strawberry. “Not one bit of Canadian news,” Nora’s father said and rattled the paper. “We don’t exist, we’re still a few handfuls of snow. No, here’s something, a profile of the West Edmonton Mall. Biggest in the world, apparently. That ought to boost our international image.” Rose inexplicably laughed and kept eating. She had wild hair that defied brushing and skin pale as wax. God, Nora loved her children, she loved Rose, but they made her – how, she hardly understood – afraid to show it, as if something fragile would fissure and crack. Rose looked up to make sure her grandfather was still there, and began to eat again, tipping the bowl to capture the last sweetened spoonful of milk. No, there really was nothing wrong, it was she who didn’t appreciate all that she had. “Nora, dear. Morning!” Nora saw Malcolm Moriarty waving as he drew out a chair for his wife. Just when she did not want to move, but Malcolm Moriarty was the sort of man who treated bare acquaintances like the best of friends and meant it. Nora sighed, “Be right back,” she said and got up smiling. “How rude of us not to come over,” Malcolm said. “We wanted to greet your father and your daughter, what is her name again ... ” “It’s Rose, dear.” Dorothy Moriarty’s apologetic tone was warm and polished from years of use. She had aged very handsomely, hair in white curls and a soft, highly coloured face. “What Malcolm is saying, or rather not saying, is that we would have come over if my silly knee hadn’t been asserting itself all morning. He wanted me to sit down.” “Yes, that’s it,” Malcolm smiled broadly. The dip and rise of his vowels no doubt identified in just which English town he had been raised.

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“Dorothy suffers, you know, but not a peep out of her, she’s not a complainer. You’ve got quite a father, Nora, he looks just the musician. I must have a chat with him about Ravel. I don’t know a blessed thing about music but I do love Ravel.” “Nora, if you’d like sit down a moment. Your children have such interesting names and so diverse. There must be a story behind that.” There was a story, of sorts anyway, and the Moriartys, who really were sweet, listened with so much interest that as she spoke of her children Nora felt herself flush with emotion. Malcolm had introduced himself in the dining room last night after she and Michael had returned from Cannes. Malcolm’s red hair had receded to the very back of his head and he had a scrubbed, shining scalp. They were such a nice couple, fussing over one another; childlessness seemed their one sadness. “Dorothy must show you the things she bought in the market yesterday. Last year we went to the Costa del Sol, but talk about crowds. A rumour went along the beach – well it’s true, Dotty – that someone had spotted human faeces floating in the water. The plumbing system can’t take the numbers, you see. Now, in England ... ” Nora listened, about cottage rentals in Penzance, the influx of hooligans to London, but in spite of her instinctive liking for Dorothy especially, she was conscious of her father and daughter at their own table and, as soon as she could, excused herself. The table had been cleared, although Nora had hoped for a last cup of coffee, and her father and Rose had pushed their chairs together to the point of touching. Rose, her bare legs pulled up beneath her, rocked slightly as her grandfather spoke, his cigarette held just before his lips. Nora’s expectant smile of return, having gone unnoticed, seeped away, and she stood like an unwanted listener at a party while her father spoke in that calm and formal voice she had always known. “Wait a minute and I’ll tell you. Your mother used to wait on the front steps for me to come home. On our street there was always something interesting for a young girl to see. The houses had rails and stairways running up their fronts – that’s how apartments were built in

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Montreal, because of fire. Our door was on the second storey and Nora used to look through the rails at the boys playing hockey below or the girls skipping rope. She could speak some French then, picked it up by listening. At the end of the street, three or four blocks away, there was a small church that no one outside the neighbourhood knew existed, and sometimes the nuns would walk past. Nora said they looked like angels. But when the street really looked its best was after the first snowfall. Nora would stand with her nose pressed to the window and watch the people come out of their doors with brooms and sweep the snow away. And she would ask, “Why are they doing that, Daddy – ” Nora fled; how else to describe the sight of a woman running flatfooted with her skirt flying, hands in the air as if someone were flinging stones at her? Down the path and into the garden, not the formal garden on the other side of the hotel with its immaculate bushes of cubes and spheres, but the “English” garden with its wildflower beds and dusty path, surrounded by an ivy-hugged wall. She stood against the wall to catch her breath, a hand stretched across her breast. Why had her father’s talk been so distressing? She knew only that she could not breathe, as if they had somehow sucked away the air from around her. All she could examine rationally was that she and her father had in the last years been anything but close. Their arguments had started when she was a teenager, the break when she and Michael had flown to other worlds. If the arrival of the children had introduced a formal truce and even, eventually, cordial relations, not even after her mother’s death had they settled their oldest resentments. What had made this separation hurt so much and for so long was the affection she had known from her father, and how she had adored and admired him. She had never felt that way again until Michael. A bird, of a startling green, lighted on a branch and began to trill. Another appeared, duller, and the two chased one another about before skimming over the wall. A shame Eileen hadn’t seen, she loved birds. Rose was afraid of them, they fluttered in her dreams. Nora began to think her reaction exaggerated and even to feel as if she had made herself ridiculous. After all, a mother should be glad when a

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daughter shows an interest in the mother’s childhood. Hearing about those years in Montreal that Nora had forbidden herself to dwell on might even bring Rose closer to her. If only Nora could have patience. She had let the day get away from her again, but if she could just be a little stronger she could rescue it. She was sitting on an iron bench and lacing on her sandal when the hotel dog, a wooly hulk with a flat smiling face that must have been the descendent of some obscure European breed, came pounding down the path, followed by her hooting twins, Gordon with his cap pulled to the side and Eileen waving a paper flag on a stick. The dog ran over Nora’s feet but the twins stopped before her in a little mushroom of dust. “We want to go swimming but Ananda won’t watch us even though he’s just sitting at the pool writing in that dumb book.” “I was just coming down. You find Grandpa and Rose while I change.” “Mom,” Eileen said, tracing a line on a path with her shoe. “I don’t like my bathing suit.” “Why not?” “It’s too thin. I mean up here.” She pointed to her chest which was flatter than chubby Gordon’s. So self-conscious already, the daughter of a generation that had tossed away its bras. “You can wear a T-shirt overtop,” Nora said. “That’s a good idea. Let’s go, Gordon.” “I’m going to wear a T-shirt too.” And they were off, back the way they had come. Light everywhere, on the surface of the pool, on the pink deck that was as porous as coral, on the glittering rail that overlooked the cliff and the sea. Nora, a bathing suit beneath a tie-dyed shirt, squinted from her lounge at a view as bleached out as a colour photograph left in a window. She saw Eileen hugging herself by the edge of the pool as Gordon, still wearing his cap, threw himself over the water and accomplished his object of making a big splash. The cap came up first and beneath it a grinning Gordon. Closer to Nora sat her father, his trousers rolled up and his feet dangling in the water. A breeze from the

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sea crossed Nora’s ears, bringing Rose’s voice, “ ... but if Mommy was afraid of these boys ... ” Nora turned her head, not wanting to listen, and saw the young man who acted as porter and, apparently, pool attendant, scurrying down the stone stairs balancing a tray of drinks. He distributed them to the tables pulled together by the family of Germans who were judging two of their wives in a diving contest. When the young man had one drink left he brought it to the chair beneath the umbrella where Ananda sat. Her son’s hairless chest looked narrow next to the athletic man in his tight tennis shirt with the crest of the hotel on the pocket. They spoke for a moment until Malcolm Moriarty, sitting with his wife under the awning, called the attendant who, after taking their order, bounded up the stairs again. Nora shifted the lounge so the sun fell across her face. With her eyes closed she could smell the sea and, when the breeze picked up, something stronger, like gutted fish and diesel fumes. The sound of wet feet slapping, voices in German and French, the faint whine of music. “Quick, Mom, you’ve got to come.” She opened her eyes to see a dripping Eileen. “What’s wrong?” The image of a child, Gordon, Rose, at the bottom of the pool, drowned. “Gordon wants to show you something. I’m not allowed to tell what.” Eileen pulled Nora along, past the tables of Germans who were counting, “Ein ... zwei ... drei!” and then an arc of spray, down to the end of the deck where Gordon stood on a stool to peer through a telescopic viewer meant for spotting ships. “Look at this, Mom. Topless.” “What are you talking about?” When Nora looked through the viewer she could see the hazy image of a sun deck and two women who had laid their tops aside. “Pretty funny, eh Mom?” Gordon said. “Who else can we tell?” “It isn’t necessary to tell anyone,” Nora said, her hand already swinging the viewer towards the sea. “We shouldn’t spy on people.” “Come swimming with us,” said Eileen, wishing to make amends.

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“Yeah!” said Gordon. “I want to go back in the pool.” “A swim would be nice. Let me just take off my things.” “Mom?” “Uh-huh?” Gordon pointed to the party of Germans. “Are those people really Nazis? Ananda says they have keys to our rooms and could come any time in the night and take us away.” “Ananda told you that? Jesus. You two go ahead and I’ll meet you in the pool.” Back at her lounge Nora dumped her sandals and, pulling her shirt over her head, saw the world go pink and red. On her way to the pool she stopped by Ananda, who sat with the journal in his lap, sipping his drink from a straw. From above, Nora spoke to the bristly curve of his scalp. “I would appreciate you not telling your brother and sister nonsense about Nazis and God knows what else. Kids have a hard enough time understanding these things without being encouraged in stupid prejudices. If that’s all you have to say then you better keep to your silent routine.” When Ananda looked up, Nora was shocked by how stricken he looked. “I’m sorry,” he said. “It’s all right, you didn’t mean it.” “But I did. Don’t – don’t – uh, I’m a shitty person, Mom.” “Ananda, how can I – ” But when she tried to put her arms around his shoulders he twisted away in his chair. “I’m going swimming,” Nora said and headed for the pool. She walked to the deep end and slipped over the edge, the water passing over her legs, her breasts, her eyes. She felt hands tugging at her and, opening her eyes, saw the bubbling grins of her two children, their hair wisps of seaweed. They all came up together. “Let’s play underwater charades,” Gordon said, paddling furiously to keep afloat. “Mom goes first,” said Eileen. “Yeah, and make it a hard one.”

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“You want hard?” Nora said. “You got it.” And held her breath. By the time Nora hooked her arms over the side of the pool and hung there she had little enough wind to spare for words. “That’s it,” she gasped as the twins bobbed beside her. “I’m waterlogged. You dolphins will have to cavort without me.” “Aw, Mom.” But Nora wasn’t listening. She had seen Ananda, still under the umbrella, talking to the pretty waitress. Her tray was covered in empty glasses and she and Ananda were having a tug-of-war over his. Which meant, Nora realized, that even as she appeared to give him a lecture in French manners, their hands were touching. “Everybody out,” Nora said. “After we dry off it’s time for lunch. A family lunch.” Rounding up the family, yanking dry shirts over their heads and herding them around a table on the café patio required the tenacity of a schoolmistress. And just when they had settled down, the hotel dog came lumbering across the café, to be pounced upon by the twins while Rose climbed shrieking into her grandfather’s lap. Nora got the children seated again while the dog settled contentedly beneath the table so that she had to straddle it with her legs. “That isn’t a dog,” Nora’s father said. “That’s a rug in need of a beating.” He looked, as usual, regal, hair wetted and combed back, cravat a perfect topsail. “Hmm,” he mused, considering the menu. “On such a splendid day lobster seems appropriate.” Nora sighed; the children didn’t eat shellfish. She kept a kosher house not from some religious superstition but to give the children what Michael called cultural definition. Her father, on the other hand, defied such signs of faith with the same glee he had felt as a sixteenyear-old music student newly arrived from the village. Rebellion made him nostalgic. “What are you going to order, Ananda?” Nora asked. “I’m not very hungry.” “But you didn’t eat breakfast.” He shrugged.

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“Ananda, please.” “All right, I’ll have a hamburger.” “There’s no hamburger on the menu. Can’t you be a little adventuresome?” “No.” “Look at this, Andy,” his grandfather – who knew how he infuriated Nora by using that name – pointed to the menu. “I think this steak frites ought to be pretty good. Just like a hamburger only they forgot to grind it.” Ananda looked reluctant to give in. “Okay,” he finally said. “I want that too,” said Gordon. “And me,” said Eileen. “That was easy,” said Nora. “What about you, Rose?” “I want lobster,” Rose said. “Honey, lobster isn’t kosher. Besides, you’ve never eaten it and you won’t like it.” “I want it.” Nora pressed her fingers against her brow. It was at moments like this that theories of child-rearing proved less than adequate. “I don’t think so. You’ll have what the other kids are having.” Rose fixed her mouth shut, a bad sign. Her grandfather leaned over. “You can try mine, orphan.” “Don’t interfere, Dad.” “I simply thought – well, you know best. Perhaps I’ll indulge in a glass of wine.” From their side of the table the twins watched this drama in which they were not participants with their different proportions of fear and interest, but its finale was merely the waitress’s arrival to take the order. Nora was not so preoccupied with Rose that she could not keep an eye on Ananda in the young woman’s presence, but he did not even look up. “Mom,” Gordon said after lunch had arrived and he had stuck two fries under his lips to look like fangs. “Are we ever going to go to the beach?”

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“Maybe Dad can take the afternoon off tomorrow and drive us. Does everyone want to go?” “I do,” said Eileen. Ananda shrugged. “Sure, why not.” “How about you?” Nora said, running a hand over Rose’s hair. Rose shook her head. “You don’t?” Rose tilted her head to look at her grandfather. He peered down at her through half-closed eyes. Rose nodded. “Okay.” “Ah, the beach,” said Nora’s father. “Sand in your bathing suit” (the children giggled) “no bathroom for miles. That’s my idea of paradise.” “Mom?” said Rose. “Yes, love?” “Do you think they have ice cream for dessert?” “You know, I think I saw ice cream on the menu.” “Strawberry?” “Sure,” said Gordon. “And they also have cabbage flavour.” “Yech,” said Eileen. “And dog food flavour and medicine flavour ... ” Rose laughing, Eileen banging her fork, the dog barking under the table. “Nora,” her father said, wiping the edge of his mouth with his napkin, “I am not related to these hoodlums.” If only she could have kept them around that table forever, but it was enough, that hour, she wouldn’t ask for more. The twins ran off together to investigate a rumour that the pond in the formal garden was inhabited by a turtle; Ananda bounded away, hands buried in the oversized pocket of his shorts and the ties of his sneakers dragging behind; and her father and Rose got up together in silence, as if speech weren’t necessary, like an old couple. With the others gone the waitress dropped her smile and, leaving the chit among the table’s debris, turned her back. Nora signed a

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generous tip and retreated to her room where she undressed by the afternoon light diffused through the sheers. The lunch had gone off so well and here she was, sitting on the edge of the bed, a breath away from weeping. It happened with an increasing frequency that terrified her. She was breathing quickly, gasping almost, and felt a rising curl of nausea. Think of something good; think of Michael. Those conversations in the college dormitory, late at night, when the deep regularity of his voice had soothed her out of loneliness. From those first days she had been grateful for Michael’s interest in her; she still was, when he showed it. Remembering the book she had once read to the children over many nights, she wondered if she were like Tinker Bell, who, if she were not believed in, would fade and fade. The telephone sounded, two short and foreign trills. Nora lifted the oversized receiver and held it to her ear. “Hello?” “Hi, sweetheart.” “Michael. I didn’t expect you to call. Oh, I’m glad.” “I’ve just got a few minutes between meetings. If you thought this place was crowded yesterday – today it’s a madhouse. But Nora, you won’t believe who I met not half an hour ago.” Michael’s voice sounded far away, as if he were calling from the end of a tunnel. “Who did you meet?” she said. “You’ll never guess.” “Please, Michael.” “James Bond.” “Who?” “Come on, Nora, you know – Sean Connery. The original. He’s here promoting a new film. I couldn’t believe it, he even signed an autograph for me. It was incredible. Nora?” “I’m listening, Michael. When will you be back?” “In time for dinner, so hold the kids until then. After we put them to bed we can have a little time to ourselves and straighten everything out. All right?”

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“All right, Michael. Be careful driving.” “No problem, I’m getting to be a real pro with the shift. See you later.” After Nora hung up the receiver she lay down on the bed, head on the pillow, eyes closed, and whispered into the room, not a word but a sound. She was asleep. The light through the sheers grew dimmer; she did not move. When finally Nora stirred, the sensation was of pulling herself up from the bottom of a well. She groped for her watch on the dresser and stared, hardly believing that it could be almost seven. She must have been more tired than she knew; perhaps that had been the cause of her mood. Mechanically she sat on the toilet and then turned on the shower, first cool, and after the shock, hot. As her head cleared Nora even began to anticipate the evening if not with pleasure at least without dread; after all, the day so far really had been as fine as she had hoped. After the children had gone to bed she and Michael could sit in the bar and talk and she would order something nice, a glass of champagne. Nora brushed out her hair, put on stockings and slip, and shimmied into the evening dress that Michael had insisted she buy in Paris. And she who still preferred jeans and old sweatshirts stood in front of the mirror and had to admit that she looked ravishing. The dress was of heavy satin, large shoulders, a low neckline, belted at the waist and finished in a full skirt. Nora put on her heels, a silver necklace, and looked again. “My God,” she said aloud, for she remembered the days when her father still gave concerts and Nora would watch her mother, who always accompanied him, standing before her own bedroom mirror, just like this. Gordon and Eileen she found in their room, sprawled on the beds watching Dallas dubbed into French. “Where are Ananda and Rose?” she asked. “I don’t know,” Gordon said without looking away from the television. “Get dressed for dinner, you two. And we’re eating in the dining room, so put on your good things.”

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“Aw, Mom.” “I want to see you moving.” She began a hunt for the others, through the hotel corridors, in the sitting rooms, even out to the café where the young athletic man was closing the umbrellas for the evening. It was while considering where to look next (and a gaggle of tennis players entering the lobby looked her satin figure up and down with, she was sure, amusement) that Nora looked through the revolving glass doors and saw Rose and her father, standing at the edge of the hotel drive, watching the cars coming back from the city. Her father had always loved automobiles, and as Nora made her way down the drive, heels catching between bricks, she could see him oblivious to the billows of exhaust, pointing at each arrival and describing its history and handling. “Well, hello there,” Nora said, but a convertible gunning up the drive drowned out her voice and her father, who seemed not to have noticed her, kept talking to Rose. “Now there’s a nice Mercedes, you don’t see that colour in North America. Reminds me of our first new car, ’53 Dodge, a real beauty. We’d only bought used until then. Now those were real cars, the size of battleships. When I leaned on the horn all the neighbours came running and your grandmother brought Nora down the stairway. ‘Is this your car, Daddy?’ she said. ‘Are you becoming a salesman now?’ We laughed and laughed ... ” Whatever Nora shouted, it made both her father and Rose turn and stare. After a moment her father said, “Yes, Nora?” “Dinner. You have to get ready.” “Of course.” And Nora turned around, back to the hotel. She did not know where to go, or rather where to hide, and so she stood before the newspaper kiosk, so close that the words blurred before her eyes. She was now only this myth, a little girl on an iron stairway, and the Nora who stood before the papers was fading and fading, leaving only a satin shell – “Without my glasses I can’t see, only the big words.”

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The woman from Switzerland, the widow, appeared beside her, peering at the hanging newspapers to read the headlines. “Nothing so important, I think,” she said. “No,” Nora said. “Are you and your family having a good holiday?” “Yes, thank you.” “They always treat me well. My husband, he was once printing the menus for the hotel, the bills, everything. He was demanding of perfection.” “You must miss him.” “This is natural.” “I don’t know what I’m doing here,” Nora said and raised her hand as if to stifle a laugh. “I’m looking for my son.” “The big one?” “Yes, I have to go.” “I saw him just some time ago, on the upper level. I always take a room on the upper level. The stairway is good exercise.” “Are you sure it was my son? I don’t know what he could be doing there.” “Perhaps he is making a friend.” Nora just looked at her and a moment later was tripping up the escalator, holding aloft her skirt. Why she was going after him, whether she would yank Ananda and the waitress apart if she found them – all she did know was that she wanted to slap them across their faces until her own hands became real again. The corridor of the upper level was more narrow than the others because of the angle of the cliff and as Nora looked down she realized that she had expected to know in which room Ananda would be. She started to walk, stopping to listen and try each door before passing on to the next; on one she pounded with the flat of her hand but received no answer. Before the second to last she paused and heard what might have been a moan or merely the scrape of a chair. She put her hand on the knob – the bolt was only half turned in the lock and with pressure slipped out – and opened the door.

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When she had last seen her son naked she did not know. He was tense as a bow, kneeling before the still-made bed, the window behind open to the darkening Mediterranean. The young athletic man had neatly folded his porter’s uniform and left it on the chair and as he sat on the bed he turned his head – apparently only he had heard the door – and looked at Nora with what seemed to her the most inconsolable grief. When she returned to her own room she pulled a chair from the desk and for the next hour watched through the window as evening turned to night. The curving drive of the hotel was traced by merging circles of lamplight and the awning had turned a luminous gold. After a time the athletic man appeared in his uniform to relieve the doorman and when a car pulled up he would strike forward to open the door. What Nora felt about him, or her son, did not matter now; they were silhouettes turning end to end against the sea. An arc of headlights appeared on the road and, sliding into the drive, became the mustard Citroën. Nora rose, paused before the mirror to brush her hair, and left the room. The whisper of satin accompanied her to the main level of the hotel, past the dining room where white cloth and crystal glasses waited. Gordon and Eileen came skipping from the lobby, dressed decently, and ran into the sitting room, from which she could hear the unmistakable touch of her father’s hand on a piano, precise and formal. He was playing Scriabin, as he always did when he wanted to show off, and when Nora entered she saw a dozen enraptured guests. Rose, in a white dress and with a ribbon in her hair, sat on the piano bench beside him, watching not his hands but his stern face. Nora listened and when Michael came in from the opposite doorway she did not move but waited for his eyes to find her. When they did he smiled and mouthed across the room, so that she could read the words, you look beautiful. 1988

Daniel Goodwin, “Heritage” You wear the burden lightly, my son of those who went before you: Dutch and Jew, masters of light and shadow, fussers over fairness, deft peddlers and cyclists, proud of succeeding where Canute failed. Tall farmers and soldiers, scholars and lawyers, merchants and bankers and masons who know what it means to be occupied, to sweat and serve on spongy land without defence or to have no land at all but to value (wherever they are, in peat hut or city) the portable wisdom of forbears long displaced. Hard-working and industrious people: builders of windmills,

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not tilters at them; two small nations scattered or squeezed between empires, the domestic sphere the only safe harbour, strewn with children, tulips and books, manoeuvring carefully through the narrow straits of civilization like a rolled-up Torah or canal boat. 2015

Mireille Silcoff, “Shalom Israel!” After my husband left, I really didn’t mind the quiet. There is a guilty static that builds up in the spaces where a couple’s come apart, and it was a relief to be free of it. At night, I slept with my bedroom window open, feeling the blue mineral air come in like an unfurling ribbon. In the mornings, I would open the curtains or look up from my teacup and wonder what was going to come next. The person who conquers illness asks: Am I now saved or do I still need saving? Time felt open and luxurious, a plane ripe for development. I knew, somehow, that something good was going to happen. Then my mother moved in. My mother moved in with me. She’d sold her square, sound house of forty years. She said she needed some time to figure out where she’d live next. I didn’t ask why she didn’t think this through before putting the old house up, before accepting an offer, before packing her decades up, and sending everything into storage. Sometimes you have to do things in a certain way for reasons that don’t withstand explanation. At any rate, I couldn’t tell her no. A mother does not raise a child to be turned away from her door, valise in hand, at sixty. And I was after all idle, greeting my dawning survivor status with a remnant delicacy, nudging around a large house in my bathrobe. Plus, there was something going on with my mother. She seemed like a woman who was

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giving herself trouble, experiencing some kind of welling up that was rupturing a system that had always worked for her before. For starters, she was exercising too much, more than her normal regimen – she was now counting steps, and putting a good deal of faith in various weights and scales for measure, trying to outrun the unacceptable truth that at sixty her body magic was flattening, the space that once contained so much hard wonder was now filling with lumpier problem material. There were daily injuries: a frozen shoulder, an inflamed knee, a cold flash emanating from her hip, a broiling poker at a neck nerve. She liked to say these were old dance grievances, turning what in anyone else would be a symptom of age into a reminder of beautiful youth. A few times I saw her examining herself in my hall mirror, smoothing her sweater down and sideways over her hips, looking for some remembered effect. She’d once made me press her belly so that I could understand what she’d convinced herself of at the YMHA that day: “You see?” she’d said, bearing down, holding her breath. “It’s all muscle. Just a little fat on top. What makes it thick is the muscle.” ∞ Back when I was afraid that my sickbed was growing pink padded sides and a cover, I asked my mother what she thought happened after death. In my faltering state, I had decided that my own feeling was that what happened was conditional on your disposal. If you were buried, you became earth. If you were sunk at sea, you became shark food. My mother fished for her car keys in her purse. “So you become a shark?” she asked. “Until it shits you out. Then you become sand – ” “This is stupid,” said my mother, who finished the conversation by telling me that she couldn’t imagine a time when she was not or would not be her. “Even before you were born?” “I don’t know,” said my mother. “I have tennis.” ∞

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When she moved in, her effect on my house was explosive and immediate. She fired the maid because she said she didn’t like some extra body around the place all the time. She claimed the guest room with a detonation of clothes inside out on the floor and newspapers in Hebrew and open tubes of lipstick and spilling bottles of jojoba oil and the straps and bands that are the effluvium of the contemporary fitness nut. She filled the fridge with beige tubs of eggplant in various states of purée. She left whatever novel she was reading face down in front of the toilet. Lately this was one by a famous Israeli writer, a tragic tale about losing a child to war. I knew about the writer: in an excruciating turn, one that for a split second obliterates all rational ideas about the limits of parental influence, he’d lost his own son in Lebanon while writing the book. My mother and I were, at first, shocked at the happiness of our living arrangement. Perhaps afraid to rock our unlikely ark, we watched hours of television together, camping out in the carpeted den that used to be my husband’s warren, sometimes with sandwiches on our knees, as delighted as young girls getting away with something. We watched all of the dance competition shows, my mother telling me which dancers had real training, and which had no chance. “This dancer is disgusting,” she’d said of one. “She’s not disgusting, she’s just a little heavy.” “She looks fat like an elephant,” said my mother. “Mom, stop it, be nice.” “What nice? She’s on stage.” On one of the local channels, there was a commercial for the upcoming season of shows at Place des Arts, including a nostalgic songand-dance stage spectacle for Israel’s sixtieth birthday entitled Shalom Israel! I looked it up on the Internet. The show was created by the Israeli choreographer Ronen Chen, and on tour, it was stopping in Montreal for one night only. For my mother, it was major. My mother called Chen “the man of my career.” He was the one who had discovered her some forty-five years earlier on a Tel Aviv beach, grabbing her by her ponytail and telling her about auditions. My mother knew all the

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performers in the Shalom Israel! show. When the Place des Arts commercial came on again, she pointed at the television mutely, bottlenecked by so much life stuff coming up. A few days later, my mother came into the kitchen dressed in exercise clothes. “I am making a power walk to the box office,” she announced, putting her leg up on a chair to fasten the Velcro on an ankle weight. “What box office?” “At Place des Arts. I want for us tickets for the Israel show.” “Isn’t that a bit far to walk?” I asked. “It’s the other side of the city.” “Don’t worry,” said my mother, zipping up a leather fanny pack, ignoring my words about slippery sidewalk sleet and too many kilometres. “I’m going to buy the cheapest tickets for the show.” Buying the cheapest tickets was my mother’s favourite trick. Pay for a nosebleed seat and then move to a better one that had remained vacant after the show’s start. “You know last year I sat in the front row for The Barber of Seville for fifteen dollars,” said my mother. “The Barber of Seville didn’t have an audience filled with other Israelis planning on doing exactly the same thing.” “So? We’ll be more quick,” said my mother, forgetting my slowness, my story, the wheelchair folded in the coat closet, still too fresh from use to give away just yet. ∞ Later that afternoon, I found my mother sitting in the kitchen with her ankle weights loose on the table along with a ticket envelope from Place des Arts. I looked at the tickets (X48 and X46). My mother was staring out the window, her face ashen. It was a gloomy northy 5:00 P.M., cold and salt grey. My mother was holding a heating pad to her right shoulder and a bag of frozen peas to her left knee. She actually looked rueful. I stood awkward in the kitchen doorway, unused to ­seeing her like this – what was it? Melancholy? Something having to do

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with thinking and feeling at the same time. She usually moved too fast for that sort of thing. “Did you get good tickets for the show?” I asked. “No,” she said, her voice like a puddle. “Well, I’m excited,” I said, lying. My mother shrugged, then winced, her shoulder. “For you it’s normal to be in the audience.” “You know, if you hadn’t moved to Canada, you’d be onstage in the show for sure – ” I said. I put on a waxy announcer’s voice: “‘And now, presenting the star of Shalom Israel 2009! The lovely ... ’” “Of course I would,” said my mother, fussing with her heating pad. “This is not a question that I would.” “Then there’s nothing to regret.” “I don’t regret. I don’t like talking about this.” “About the past?” “It’s already finished. There is nothing to talk about.” ∞ My mother was never a fan of memory in general. Of her past, she relayed little to me as a child. Where she’d come from; where she’d been. I knew only a toy history, a jack-in-the-box phoenix-from-ashes: how she’d been saved from a trap of filthy poverty by her body’s physical brilliance; how at the stroke of sixteen her dancing had freed her from her mother’s cruel and unhealthy apartment. Not surprisingly, my mother had never been any good at keeping photos properly. In the basement of her house she’d had only a couple of coming-apart shoeboxes stuffed with a disarray of decades: frillyedged colour shots of her as a Tel Aviv beach babe stuck on the back of ancient black-and-whites of shocked-looking people off a boat from Russia; me at six, toothless and grinning in a red snowsuit, hanging by a loop of dry tape to a picture of my mother as my father’s bride, her hair freshly cut for her Canadian wedding into a curled-under ­pudding-bowl style.

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Over the years, I had taken a few of the pictures I liked most from my mother’s neglected stash, making small ordered collections for myself. “I want to show you something,” I now said, leaving the kitchen for the oak cupboard in the hall, taking a string-tied packet from a drawer and rushing back to the table before my mother lost interest. It was a series of pictures of my mother in a black leotard and a high ponytail on the sand, probably promotional shots. She is such a knockout in the photos, I used to keep one in my wallet, to impress upon a certain sort of boyfriend just what kind of genetic pool they were dealing with. “Look at my waist!” said my mother, shuffling through the blackand-white photographs, nodding at her figure. She then stopped to peel off a small coloured snapshot stuck to one of the leotard pictures. “This one is something different,” she said. “This is a different time. This is not in Tel Aviv. This is Miami.” On inspection it looked like Miami, my mother reclining poolside on a chair made of orange plastic spaghettis, pecan-brown in a yellow knit bikini, her metres of hair rolled atop her head in a bun the size of an American car turbine. She’s staring straight at the camera and lying next to a man who is looking at her. His hair is brushed back into a small bouffant. He wears short trunks. “This is Ronen Chen,” said my mother, taking the photo and holding it in front of her face, her eyes round past the picture’s edges. “This is in Miami. This is when we were in Miami.” I nodded. I wondered if my mother knew that I knew about the time this picture was taken. I knew about my mother and Ronen Chen in ­Miami. The Miami story was related to me by my mother’s sister in Tel Aviv, offered in consolation one weepy afternoon during a teenaged summer of lovesickness, boys coming and going, waves crashing on the beach. Before flying back to Canada, I had asked my aunt for the story two more times, my own heart pain mitigated by the story of my mother’s. The story takes place during the last section of a six-month world tour. Ronen Chen had by then asked my mother to marry him. She

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had said no. Her life was only just beginning. Inside herself, she believed there would be many other loves like Ronen Chen. The dancers were painting a thick stripe along the North American East Coast, beginning in Montreal, where the newspapers called the Chen Israeli Folkloric Dance Troupe peace ambassadors from a country at war, and raved about the barefoot lead dancer with the ponytail that grazed the deeply curved small of her back. My father had been only one of her backstage courtiers in the city. She accepted his invitation for a late dinner on a whim. Nerdy and awkward, having read books on dating etiquette, he took her out for steak Diane in a dark French restaurant downtown. He urged that they drink a strong drink before the meal and after the meal a sweet liqueur. Between those, he ordered a bottle of red wine for just the two of them. My mother was unused to liquor and I imagine my father confused my mother’s fine bone structure with experience. Had he known of her deep virginity, he likely would not have pressed on to her hotel. ∞ The troupe’s tour continued for many weeks. Quebec City, Ottawa, and Toronto whizzed by, the dancers more exhilarated with every sold-out show. But after a two-week stint in New York City, my mother felt ­uncommonly spent. By Washington, DC, she was skipping the after-show receptions in the homes of Outstanding Members of the American Jewish Community for early nights. In Richmond, the troupe stayed in a plaster-columned hotel called the Dixie Motor Lodge, and my mother suffered from nausea from the ham and the milky-white gravy on the breakfast plates. Miami was the tour’s last stop, and there was a daylong break before the final shows began. The troupe was put up in a high, white resort hotel that curved around a swimming pool which was the shape of a perfect circle. In the morning, my mother and Chen sat poolside. Instead of the usual aqua, the bottom and sides of the pool were painted a dark blue, which created a mysterious, lake-like effect that made my

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mother uncomfortable. When Chen jumped in to cool off, my mother gasped, for a moment believing he might never re-emerge. Chen had just told my mother that he wanted her to do an extra solo in the Miami shows, something special for the tour’s finale. “No, no, the other dancers will be jealous,” she said, just to say something. Chen took my mother’s demureness as bitchy obstinacy, another rejection. But my mother didn’t want to tell Chen how sick she was feeling; as if to bring it into words was to permit it, and to permit it was to strengthen it. A virulent nausea was by then eating into her, so discombobulating she felt both too heavy and too light at the same time. Her period had disappeared. She was drinking water by the gallon, but her skin was strangely parched and her nails had become dry with ridges. My mother left Chen at the pool. She needed to wash her hair; it would take the best part of the afternoon, the washing, the oiling, the ironing, the arranging. Padding back to her room, she steeled herself for the event. Her hair had been coming out, every day, more. When she brushed it at night, the brush’s bristles would become entirely knit over with strays after only a few strokes. Through fear of what might happen, she hadn’t washed her hair in two weeks, putting in her suitcase the hotel shampoo bottles that maids across America liked to leave every day like a reminder. Now rinsing out the shampoo in the bath, strands of hair were swimming around her, sticking to her skin. My mother carefully collected her hair in the bath, gliding her hand through the water. When she unplugged the drain, she made sure not to let any strands go down. She sat on the edge of the big Miami hotel bed and began picking apart the mass, counting. If there were more than two or three hundred at the most, she told herself, she’d know something was wrong. Every few strands she’d find a hair that felt different than the others, like an old woman’s hair, crinkly and desiccated, as if its moisture was being sapped from the root. When she reached 400 hairs, there was a knock at the door and without waiting for an answer Ronen Chen came right in with his stage directions for her extra solo. He saw my

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mother, sitting in a sagging towel with spiders of wet hair all over her hands and a plastic hotel wastepaper basket between her legs, crying. Wordlessly, he left my mother’s room, folding up her solo. ∞ Once when I was a child, having my hair endlessly brushed by my mother, I asked her why she kept her own hair so short, in a haircut like a bowl, when she would not let me get a haircut at all. “When there is a baby in a mommy’s tummy, mommy has for hair no energy,” said my mother. I asked my mother why she didn’t grow her hair back, now that I was a big kid. My mother shook her head no, as if in a family unit there was only so much energy to go around. She reminded me how much I liked it when she did my hair in hundreds of tiny braids, with beads and orthodontist elastics, like Bo Derek on the beach. “If I want to brush hair,” she said, “I can always brush your hair.” ∞ As the Shalom Israel! night approached, the emotional pitch of the house began changing. Some timely hormone was filling in spaces, the smell of something beginning or ending. It didn’t matter that my mother had not been in contact with Ronen Chen for several decades, she’d convinced herself of something, and now she was in the throes of a self-generating checklist of minute personal preparations, so hyper she couldn’t even sit to watch TV. She said the dance competition shows had become boring and she didn’t like hearing about the war in Gaza during the newsbreaks, but the truth was her heart was pounding through her chest. With the TV den free of my mother, I spent my days lying there on the sofa, trying to stay out of the airstream of her spinning wheels. Sometimes, when I emerged from the room, I’d find things in the house changed, small things, an umbrella stand taken out of the vestibule and put into the front closet, plants moved from hall to landing, pictures rearranged. While I’d been in hospital, I’d made a small ­collection of

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op-art needlepoint pillows, sending my husband out for more intricate patterns with every failed surgery and botched procedure. My mother had now taken them off the living-room sofa and put them into the linen cupboard. I then caught her throwing out a tea cozy that I actually used almost daily and she said she had to because the tea cozy was both ugly and weird. I recognized my mother’s impulse as a kind usually having to do with shame: the sudden need to empty a closet of various evocations, to not live one moment longer with a certain bedspread, to repaint a kitchen for reasons nobody else can understand. She’d rolled up the enormous midnight blue flat-weave rug in the guest bedroom, lifting up the queen bed herself to do it. “I don’t like this dark blue carpet in my bedroom,” she’d said, pointing to my exquisite Italian rug, now reduced to a flaccid cylinder leaning on the upstairs banister. “Don’t you feel like the floor is hard on your heels?” I asked, feeling something like outrage. “No. I have very strong feet,” she said. “I’m not like you with the slippers.” ∞ The evening of Shalom Israel!, I sat on the guest room bed in my housecoat while my mother sat at the vanity, getting ready. I flipped through her novel by the Israeli writer about the child lost to war and saw that my mother was on the same page she’d been on a week before. I imagined my mother lying where I was, trying to read, the same paragraph looping like a scratched record, and getting up exasperated and ready to wreak a bit more havoc on my decor. I looked at the bare floor and felt my heart bleed a little, thinking how no comfortable state could lead a woman to pull up the carpet in a house that isn’t even her own. I had told my mother earlier in the day that I didn’t feel well enough to go to Place des Arts that evening. I knew she had a plan in mind for the night, and it did not really involve a slow-moving daughter inching her way out of some vapourish ghetto of illness. It involved more swanning into places to joyous shrieks of delight. If I had been my mother, I

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would have imagined the same thing for myself, the dramatic reunion. Ronen Chen would see how fit and lovely and preserved by the Canadian cold my mother was and over cocktails at the hotel later that night he’d invite her to join the tour, and they’d pick up where they left off so many years prior. My mother turned from the vanity and reached for a black glossy shopping bag on the bed. Over the week, she’d been shopping. “Look,” she said, removing a wide leather belt, studded with gold and patched with ovals of faux zebra fur. “This belt you wear on your hips,” she said, lowering her knees to get a good view in the vanity mirror. She laid the belt on the bed, near a new cowl-neck sweater dress and new nylon pantyhose still in the package. The photo from Miami was set atop her purse. She’d already told me that the picture was her ticket backstage. “Did you phone anyone to make arrangements to get to the performers?” I now asked, watching my mother lick a cotton swab and grind it into a small pot of crumbly kohl. “For what arrangements?” she asked, expertly stroking the swab over her eyelid. “I know Place des Arts. Very good I know it.” “Mom, there’s going to be crazy security. How are you going to get backstage?” “Don’t make in your head problems,” she said. “Somebody will see me. I have the picture.” ∞ My mother left the house wearing my most glamorous coat, full-length mohair with a braided gold-tasselled belt and a fox collar, a coat for high heels and deep impressions. I hadn’t worn it in six years. It would be big of me to give the coat to my mother, I thought, kissing her goodbye, already anticipating how the house would be lighter after Shalom Israel!; the static of anticipation tamped down. I went back up to my mother’s room to make sure none of her dirty Q-tips or crumbling kohl had landed on the carpet, and felt

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­ aradoxically relieved when I arrived upstairs to remember that the rug p had been rolled up. My heart was tired, my legs weak for some familiar reasons and some reasons I could truly barely fathom, something having to do with mothers and daughters, about who gets to pull more at any time. I made up her messy bed, and folded all the clothes on the floor and put her books and papers in neat piles by her bedside. I lay on the bed for a minute to rest, careful not to wrinkle its smoothed spread. I wanted my mother to come home to a nice room. Among her papers, I had found pamphlets for condo properties in Tel Aviv, my mother once again giving new life to an old challenge. She had threatened to move back to Israel so many times when I was young that even now I imagined that if she went, I would go too. I still carry with me a scene, another from that heartbreaking summer in Tel Aviv, sitting with my mother at my aunt’s house in a sweltering heat wave. Across a plate of watermelon sat a fat, horrible woman, a real estate agent with visible drips mingling with stretch marks down her cleavage. She was showing my mother pictures of high-security tower apartments, apartments she said were good for a woman with no husband. Between these depressing properties, the fat woman kept on remarking how my mother’s Hebrew was so quaintly ’60s, how listening to her was like a time warp, and how it was so wonderful that my mother knew all the old milk-andhoney songs and dances, those old patriotic cultural concoctions that had nothing to do with the country anymore. ∞ I returned to the TV den, and turned on the evening news. There were demonstrations outside Place des Arts, a burning flag, hundreds of placards: ISRAËL CRIMINEL DE GUERRE! PALESTINE LIBRE! ISRAËL TERRORISTE! I imagined the packed concert hall, not a seat to spare, the plainclothes security mingled in with the audience. I imagined the bag-checking guards sealing every door, the picture of my mother and the choreographer of her career meaningless to them as they rifled through her purse looking for lipstick grenades. I imagined my mother

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in her nosebleed X seat in the hot, heavy mohair coat, trapped in an airtight atmosphere of expertly forced Israeli elation. ∞ The following morning, she wasn’t up before me. I made a nice breakfast for us, French toast and maple syrup, coffee and juice, fabric napkins, and saucers under the cups. I listened to the radio while preparing it. There was an interview that I didn’t want to miss, one with that Israeli author my mother had been reading, the one who had lost his son in the last Lebanon war while writing a novel about a parent losing their child to war. Even though the author was in North America doing readings and giving interviews, it felt almost cosmically coincidental that his voice would be in my kitchen that Sunday, as if the preoccupations of my house and that of the world outside were finally on the same page. I got my mother out of bed, and gave her coffee quietly so that we could listen together. “You know his son was killed in Lebanon, in the last war,” she said, loudly scraping excess syrup off her toast during an interlude between the author’s words. “You missed that war, you were too sick. It was a stupid war – ” “Well, I – ” “Shhh!” said my mother as the author began speaking again. He talked about the strangeness of having a bestseller and a dead son. My mother held her toast unchewed in her mouth to better hear. His Hebrew sounded exactly like hers. “He doesn’t understand why his life became the way it is,” said my mother, swallowing during a pause in the author’s words. “I can hear in his voice – he doesn’t understand what happened at all.” Satisfied with what she knew about the author, having made her decision about the state of him, my mother began leafing through the paper. There was no review of Shalom Israel!, just coverage of the demonstrations outside it. I understood that my mother never got backstage. She watched the show, just an audience member, and then came home.

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“You don’t feel like you need to get out of the house?” she asked me, still peering deeply into the Weekend section. She said there was a place that was having 75 per cent off Persian rugs; there was a new pedestrian path along the Lachine Canal; there were three open houses in the neighbourhood. She licked the tip of a pencil and began circling things in the paper, some new plan forming. “You should go and get dressed,” she said, gathering our breakfast dishes. “I’ll wash these.” I went upstairs. I ran the bath. My mother then yelled up and told me to stop running the bath because I was making the kitchen-sink water run cold. I turned the faucet off and sat on the tub and waited for her to finish. 2014

David Bezmozgis, “An Animal to the Memory” On the railway platform in Vienna, my mother and aunt forbade my cousin and me from saying goodbye to our grandparents. Through the window of the compartment we watched as they disembarked from the train and followed an Israeli agent onto a waiting bus. The bus was bound for the airport, where an El Al plane was waiting. We were bound for somewhere else. Where exactly we didn’t know – Australia, America, Canada – but someplace that was not Israel. As my mother, aunt, cousin, and I wept, my father and uncle kept an eye out for Israeli agents. These agents were known to inspect compartments. Any indication that we had close relatives on the buses would bring questions: Why were we separating the family? Why were we rejecting our Israeli visas? Why were we so ungrateful to the State of Israel, which had, after all, provided us with the means to escape the Soviet Union? The answer to these questions, for my father and uncle, was 150 million angry Arabs. For my grandfather, a lifelong Zionist, this was no answer. Back in Riga, packing our bags, he had decided that he would not go chasing us around the globe. At least in Israel he knew there would be a roof over his head. And at least in Israel, surrounded

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by 150 million angry Arabs, he would have no trouble identifying the enemy. In the days leading up to our departure, a common argument went: Grandfather: There, I’ll never have to hear dirty Jew. Father/Uncle: So instead you’ll hear dirty Russian. Grandfather: Maybe. But where you’re going you’ll hear one and the other. Though I never heard dirty Jew, dirty Russian tended to come up. Particularly at Hebrew school. Not very often, but often enough that I felt justified in using it as an excuse when I tried to convince my parents to let me transfer to a normal public school. This was a campaign I started in earnest in the seventh grade. The year before, we had finally moved out of the apartment building and into a semi-detached house. Geographically, the move was n ­ egligible – looking out my bedroom window, I could still see our old building – but we now had a backyard, a driveway, a garage for my bicycle, and a carpeted basement. We also now had a neighborhood. Across the street, my aunt and uncle bought a similar house. In other houses lived other Russians who had succeeded in accumulating down payments. Their children became my friends: Eugene, Boris, Alex, Big Vadim, Little Vadim. In the evenings and on the weekends, we roved the streets, played wall ball, road hockey, shoplifted from the Korean’s convenience store, and abused Fat Larissa, the neighborhood slut. My new friends were all Jewish, but after my mother framed my bar mitzvah portrait – in which I wore a white tuxedo – they took me outside, held me down, and pummeled my shoulders until my arms went numb. ∞ My mother was categorically against me leaving Hebrew school. This was partly out of deference to my grandfather, but also because of

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a deep personal conviction. There were reasons why we had left the Soviet Union. She believed that in Canada I should get what I could never have gotten in Latvia. As far as she was concerned, I wasn’t leaving Hebrew school until I learned what it was to be a Jew. My father, I knew, was more sympathetic. For years, because of special considerations made for the poor Russian Jews, the Hebrew school had subsidized my tuition, but after we bought the house, the subsidy was revoked. And even though my mother had secured a better job and my father’s business had improved, I saw the irritation on his face every time I started complaining about the school. – He knows the language. He can read all the prayers. If he wants to leave maybe we should let him leave already? – Take the money from my salary. – I didn’t say it was the money. – Take the money from my salary. – You want to redo the kitchen. That’s also from your salary. – If that’s my choice, I can live without the kitchen. My mother was resolute. Nothing I said helped my case. So that April, just after Passover, I put Jerry Ackerman in the hospital. ∞ Most days, on his way to the office, my father would drop me off at school in his red 1970 Volvo. On a Friday, after gym, Jerry Ackerman said something about Solly Birnbaum’s small hairless penis and Solly started to cry. Solly was fat, had webbed toes, and was reduced to tears at the end of every gym class. I had never defended him before but I seized my chance. – Ackerman, if I had your tweezer-dick I wouldn’t talk. – Why are you looking at my dick, faggot? – Ackerman thought he had a pubic hair until he pissed out of it. – Fuck you, Berman, and that red shitbox your father drives. In Rabbi Gurvich’s office, Dr. Ackerman said that I had banged Jerry’s head so hard against the wall that I had given him a concussion.

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Dr. Ackerman said that Jerry had vomited three times that night and that they’d had to drive him to the hospital at two in the morning. Dr. Ackerman asked, What kind of sick person, what kind of animal would do this? When I refused to answer, my mother apologized to Dr. and Mrs. Ackerman and also to Jerry. This wasn’t the first time my mother and I had been called into Gurvich’s office. After our move into the new neighborhood I had begun to affect a hoodlum persona. At school, I kept to myself, glowered in the hallways, and, with the right kind of provocation, punched people in the face. Less than a month before I gave Jerry Ackerman his concussion, I’d gotten into a fight with two eighth graders. Because of dietary laws, the school prohibited bringing meat for lunch. Other students brought peanut butter or tuna fish, but I – and most of the other ­Russians – would invariably arrive at school with smoked Hungarian salami, Polish bologna, roast turkey. Our mothers couldn’t comprehend why anyone would choose to eat peanuts in a country that didn’t know what it meant to have a shortage of smoked meat. And so, I was already sensitive about my lunch when the two eighth graders stopped by my table and asked me how I liked my pork sandwich. For my fight with Jerry Ackerman, I received a two-day suspension. Sparing words, Gurvich made it clear that this was never to happen again. The next time he saw me in his office would be the last. To hit someone’s head against a wall – did I ever think what that could do? If I got so much as within ten feet of Ackerman he didn’t want to say what would happen. He asked me if I understood. My mother said I understood. He asked me if I had anything to say. I knew that what I had to say was not what he wanted to hear. On the drive home my mother asked me what I was trying to do, and when my father got home he came as close as he ever had to hitting me. – Don’t think you’re so smart. What do you think happens if you get expelled? You want to repeat the grade? We already paid for the entire year.

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On the street, I told Boris, Alex, and Eugene, but they weren’t impressed. – Congratulations, you’re the toughest kid in Hebrew school. ∞ I returned to school the week of Holocaust Remembrance Day – which we called Holocaust Day for short. It was one of a series of occasions that punctuated the school year beginning with Rosh Hashanah in September and ending with Israeli Independence Day in May. For Chanukah, the school provided jelly donuts and art class was spent making swords and shields out of papier-mâché; for Purim, everyone dressed up in costume and a pageant was organized during which we all cheered the hanging of evil Hamman and his ten evil sons; for Passover, every class held a preparatory seder and took a field trip to the matzo bakery; for Israeli Independence Day, we dressed in blue and white and marched around the school yard waving flags and singing the Hatikvah, our national anthem. Holocaust Day was different. Preparations were made days in advance. The long basement hallway, from the gymnasium to the pool, was converted into a Holocaust museum. Out of storage came the pictures pasted on bristol board. There were photocopies of Jewish passports, there were archival photos of Jews in cattle cars, starving Jews in ghettos, naked Ukrainian Jews waiting at the edge of an open trench, Jews with their hands on barbed wire waiting to be liberated, ovens, schematic drawings of the gas chambers, pictures of empty cans of Zyklon B. Other bristol boards had Yiddish songs written in the ghettos, in the camps. We had crayon drawings done by children in Theresienstadt. We had a big map of Europe with multicolored pins and accurate statistics. Someone’s grandfather donated his striped Auschwitz pajamas, someone else’s grandmother contributed a jacket with a yellow star on it. There were also sculptures. A woman kneeling with a baby in her arms in bronze. A tin reproduction of the gates of Birkenau with the words Arbeit Macht Frei. Sculptures of flaming Stars of David,

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sculptures of piles of shoes, sculptures of sad bearded Polish rabbis. In the center of the hallway was a large menorah, and all along the walls were smaller memorial candles – one candle for each European country. On Holocaust Day, the fluorescents were extinguished and we moved through the basement by dim candlelight. Holocaust Day was also the one day that Rabbi Gurvich supervised personally. Gurvich’s father was a Holocaust survivor and had, that year, published his memoirs. We were all encouraged to buy the book. When the copies arrived, Gurvich led his father from class to class so that the old man could sign them. Whereas Gurvich was imposing – dark, unsmiling, possessing a gruff seismic voice – his father was frail and mild. In our class, the old man perched himself behind the ­teacher’s desk and smiled benignly as he inked each copy with the double imperative: Yizkor; al tishkach! Remember; don’t forget! Even though I had spent the two days of my suspension fantasizing about killing Gurvich and Ackerman, I returned to school and avoided them both. Gurvich was easy to avoid. With the exception of Holocaust Day, his primary role was that of disciplinarian and – unless you were called into his office – he was rarely seen. Ackerman was different. The only class we shared was gym, but in the mornings I saw him grinning as I got my books from my locker; at lunch I sat across the cafeteria as he conspired against me; and at recess, if he was playing, then I abstained from tennis-ball soccer. ∞ For Holocaust Day we were called down into the basement by grades. The hallway was long and, arranged in orderly columns, an entire grade could fit into the basement at one time. After Gurvich made the announcement over the intercom, we followed our teachers down. We were quiet on the way and silent once we got there. Some people started crying before we entered the basement; others started to cry when we reached the dimness and saw the photos on the walls. As we filed in, Gurvich stood waiting for us beside the menorah. When everyone was

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in the basement, the double doors were closed behind us and we waited for Gurvich to begin. Because the hallway was extremely reverberant, Gurvich’s deliberate pause was filled with the echo of stifled sobs, and because there were no windows and the pool was so close, the basement was stuffy and reeked of chlorine. Gurvich began the service by telling us about the six million, about the vicious Nazis, about our history of oppression. His heavy voice occupied the entire space, and when he intoned the El Maleh Rachamim, I felt his voice reach into me, down into that place where my mother said I was supposed to have the thing called my “Jewish soul.” Gurvich sang: O God, full of compassion, who dwells on high, grant true rest upon the wings of the Divine Presence. And when he sang this, his harsh baritone filled with grief so that his voice seemed no longer his own; his voice belonged to the six million. Every syllable that came out of his mouth was important. The sounds he made were dictated by centuries of ancestral mourning. I couldn’t understand how it was possible for Gurvich not to cry when his voice sounded the way it did. After Gurvich finished the prayer, we slowly made our way through the memorial. I stopped by photos of the Warsaw ghetto during the uprising and then beside a portrait of Mordecai Anilewicz, the leader of the ghetto resistance. I noticed Ackerman behind me. He was with two friends and I turned my head to look. – What are you looking at, assface? I turned away. I concentrated on moving down the hallway but felt a shove from behind and lost my balance. I managed to catch myself along the wall. My hand landed safely on top of a child’s crayon drawing, but my foot accidentally knocked over the Czech memorial candle. Everybody in the hallway froze at the sound of the breaking glass. I turned around and saw Ackerman snickering. Matthew Wise, ­Ackerman’s friend, stood between me and Ackerman. Wise was bigger than Ackerman, and I was sure he was the one who had pushed me. Instinctively, I lunged at Wise and tackled him to the ground. I was on top and choking him when Gurvich grabbed the back of my shirt and

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tried to pull me off. Even as Gurvich pulled me away I held on to Wise’s throat. And when Gurvich finally yanked me clear, I saw that Wise was still on the floor, trembling. While the rest of my class finished going through the memorial, I waited upstairs in Gurvich’s office. I waited, also, until the sixth grade went down to the memorial, before Gurvich returned. I sat for half an hour, maybe longer. I imagined the horrible consequences. I foresaw my mother’s reaction and, even worse, my father’s reaction. I didn’t regret what I had done, but the fear of squandering so much of my parents’ money made me physically sick. When Gurvich finally walked into his office, he didn’t sit down. Without looking at me, he told me to get up out of my goddamn chair and go back downstairs. I was not to touch anything, I was not to move, I was to stay there until he came. Back in the basement I waited for Gurvich by the menorah. I didn’t know where else to stand. I didn’t know where in the memorial my presence would be the least offensive to Gurvich. I stood in one place beside a picture of Jews looking out of their bunks, and somehow I felt that my standing there would anger Gurvich. I moved over to the sculptures and felt the same way. I wanted to strike some sort of anodyne pose, to make myself look like someone who didn’t deserve to be expelled. I was tracing the ironwork on the menorah when Gurvich pushed the double doors open and entered. Very deliberately, as if he didn’t know what to say first, Gurvich walked over to where I stood. I took my hands off the menorah. – How is it that all of this doesn’t mean anything to you, Berman? Can you tell me that? – It means something. – It means something? It means something when you jump on another Jew in this place, on Holocaust Day? This is how you demonstrate it means something? He raised his voice.

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– It means something when you act like an animal to the memory of everyone who died? – What about Wise? He pushed me into the wall. – Wise had to go home because of what you did, so don’t ask me about Wise. Wise wasn’t the one choking another Jew at a memorial for the Holocaust. I didn’t say anything. Gurvich tugged at his beard. – Look around this, Berman, what do you see? I looked. – The Holocaust. – And does this make you feel anything? – Yes. – Yes? It does? – Yes. – I don’t believe you. I don’t believe you feel anything. He put his hand on my shoulder. He leaned in closer. – Berman, a Nazi wouldn’t do here what you did today. Don’t tell me about how you feel. – I’m not a Nazi. – No, you’re not a Nazi? What are you? – A Jew. – What? – A Jew. – I can’t hear you. – I’m a Jew. – Why so quiet, Berman? It’s just us here. Don’t be so ashamed to say it. – I’m a Jew, I said into my shoes. He turned me around by my shoulder. I may have considered myself a tough little bastard, but when Gurvich gripped me I understood that mine was a boy’s shoulder and that his was a man’s hand. He put his face very close to mine and made me look at him. I could smell the musky staleness of his beard. For the first time, I felt I was going to cry.

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– So that my uncles hear you in Treblinka! he commanded. He tightened his grip on my shoulder until he saw it hurt. I was convinced he was going to hit me. The last thing I wanted to do was start crying, so I started crying. – I’m a Jew! I shouted into his face. My voice rang off the walls, and off the sculptures and the pictures and the candles. I had screamed it in his face wishing to kill him, but he only nodded his head. He kept his hand on my shoulder and waited until I really started to sob. My shoulder shuddered under his hand and I heard the repulsive sound of my own whimpering. Finally, Gurvich removed his hand and backed away a half step. As soon as he did, I wanted him to put his hand back. I was standing in the middle of the hallway, shaking. I wanted to sit down on the floor, or lean against a wall, something. Anything but stand in the middle of that hallway while Gurvich nodded his rabbinical head at me. When he was done nodding, he turned away and opened the double doors leading up to the stairs. Halfway out, before closing the doors, Gurvich looked back to where I hadn’t moved. – Now, Berman, he said, now maybe you understand what it is to be a Jew. 2004

PA R T T H R E E · P R A C T I C E

Alison Pick, from Between Gods The following Friday 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

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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 write, 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. Maybe writing fiction serves a dual function: letting the author excavate her psyche while at the same time functioning as a kind of psychic shield. A writer digs up the contents of her unconscious mind, and then attributes it to someone else – not to a family member or friend, mind you, but to a character. Which is to say,

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someone who does not even exist, someone who comes from the imagination entirely. ∞ In the midst of my first depression, I moved to Montreal to take a course at McGill on the Holocaust. My nights were dogged with dreams of Nazis; I spent my days eating Mr. Christie Pirate cookies and putting on weight. It was during that semester that I first really registered that someone in our family had survived Auschwitz. Gumper’s cousin Vera lost her husband and both her children, aged five and ten. Later, after the war, she moved to New York. Granny and Gumper visited her occasionally, but they never invited her to their home in North Hatley. Probably because they couldn’t “risk” an openly Jewish relative. I decided to go meet Vera myself, to interview her for the research paper I needed to do for the class. Predictably, perhaps, I’ve forgotten almost everything about the meeting other than the psychic exhaustion I experienced; the intense desire to know coupled with an even more intense desire to not know, to cling to the ignorance that my ­father had, it occurred to me then, been wise to foster. Only the briefest impressions of that visit remain. Vera’s apartment had a huge candle in the main room. I didn’t know then about the ­yahrzeit candle, a memorial candle a Jew lights on the anniversary of a loved one’s death, but I understood immediately and implicitly that this was what it was for. It was on fire around the clock, and I knew, too, that Vera thought of her lost family all the time; that the flame did not stand in for memory so much as accompany her every moment of every day in the gruelling task of never being able to forget. Vera was short and stooped, with gnarled knuckles and the telling blue number tattooed on her forearm. She had a suitcase of photographs of her dead children that she brought out to show me as part of our interview. It sounds implausible, all these years later, the suitcase – why would she not have put the photos in albums or in frames? –

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but for whatever reason, she didn’t. The suitcase was the small, compact kind meant for travelling overnight on a trip you planned to return from shortly. It held hundreds of loose photos. Vera showed them to me cautiously, wanting me to see these images of her children, to possess them even, while at the same time barely able to stand letting me hold them. This was fifty years after her children’s deaths. Still, she allowed me to leave that afternoon with the gift of two postcard-sized black-and-whites. In the first, Vera’s daughter, Eva, who was five when she was killed in the gas chambers at Auschwitz, smiles into the camera. The entire field is filled with her face: the chubbiest cheeks you have ever seen and a halo of wild brown curls. In the second photo her son, Jan – ten when he was killed – a­ ppears as a young child. He stands on a cement pier, wearing a bathing suit with straps, like something you might expect to see on a Russian weightlifter. His small tummy protrudes. His hands – the knuckles still plump with baby fat – rest on his hips. He looks sideways at the camera, the slightest of smiles on his face. The look is not quite pride, but almost – a look of confidence. He knows he is wanted; he knows the world will treat him well. These two framed portraits hang in my hall now. I look at them every day. I look at them, but I cannot really see them. When I try, my mind again capitulates to fiction. I pull out Sophie’s Choice and flip through the pages. I find the scene where the narrator must choose between her children: “You may keep one of your children,” he repeated. “The other one will have to go. Which one will you keep?” “You mean, I have to choose?” “You’re a Polack, not a Yid. That gives you a privilege – a choice.” The distance fiction provides lets me imagine the scene rather than reject it, lets me graft my own experience onto it so firmly that I am

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almost not surprised to come across the name of Sophie’s boy: Jan. The same as Vera’s son. And her daughter, Eva. Sophie’s children, Eva and Jan. Vera’s children, Eva and Jan. I picture Vera on the platform, faced with this impossible dilemma. I picture little Eva, with the fattest cheeks in the world. Her face, by then, would have been gaunt and pinched. And Jan, his small tummy, his unwavering trust in the world. How could you choose? And then I remember: Vera had no choice. Both her children are gone. ∞ The most confusing part of my thwarted desire to become Jewish is the mounting evidence that I already am. In January, out of the blue, my father is awarded money from a claims tribunal that returns assets stolen from victims of the Holocaust. Dad emails me, appending the formal deed, and then writes to my sister, Emily, and me that he wants the two of us to share this award, as we are the furthest away in generations and age from the victim. The deed pertains specifically to the accounts of Friedrich Bondy. I battle against my psychic inertia over the names of dead relatives and pull down the family tree Dad gave me for Christmas. No wonder I’m confused: there were two Friedls, Vera’s brother, who worked for the RAF, and Vera and Gumper’s uncle. The claim pertains to the latter. He lived in Vienna from 1914 until March of 1938, when he fled to Zurich, then London, then finally New York. We have pictures of Uncle Friedl, greyhaired and lolling on the beach, and my cousin Lucy has an old dressing gown that belonged to him. He used to visit his sister, Ruzenka, at the Wylie cottage in North Hatley. Even though Uncle Friedl was almost deaf, Granny remembers him sitting on the porch reading symphony scores. “A true gentleman,” Dad says. “Who do you know today who can read a symphony score?” I smile.

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Dad: “Other than Degan.” Friedl was married briefly to a woman named Auguste Furth, otherwise known as Gusti, about whom Vera, his niece, had a little rhyme: Gusti je tlousty. Dad translates this variously as “Gusty is tubby,” “Gusti is roly-­ poly” and, finally, “Gusti has a fat ass.” “Keep this memory alive,” Dad writes. “Love, Dad.” ∞ I burn through Friedl’s money quickly, and pretty soon I’m scraping around in the dregs of my bank account. Then, in early March, an envelope from the Canada Council for the Arts arrives with the results of my grant application. I know from years of experience that if the envelope is thin, it contains a single page rejecting the application. If, on the other hand, the envelope is thick, it contains acceptance forms to be signed and returned. The envelope is thick. I walk downtown in the late-winter sunshine, floating a half-inch above the pavement. Far to Go will be my fourth book, so I’ve qualified for the heftier sum afforded to “mid-career writers.” The grant, the equivalent of about half a year’s salary for a social worker, maybe, is enough for me to live on for years. I could live off it for the rest of my life if I had to. 2015

Jacquie Buncel, “Children of Holocaust Survivors” We gather together pass around the yahrtzeit candle, stare into the flame, call up faces from black and white photographs. The wind presses against the window behind us. The fire in the stone fireplace now jewelled embers. Even in our names we become the lost. In each other’s stories, we glimpse familiar fragments, recognize the intensity in our gaze. We carry the sorrow of our parents, their strength is passed to us. We are their resistance. In our art, we draw yellow paths beckoning us forward but the red burning trees pull us back.

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I carry those stories with me. At the seder table, friends and family praise the Warsaw martyrs. These fighters are our grandparents. Their souls are with us, hovering around the light of the Passover candles. We don’t need to open the door and pray for them to enter. They are with us. They are in our boisterous chorus as we sing the Chad Gad Ya. They are in the sweetness of the children’s off-key song, in the sadness in eyes, in my father’s silence. They rejoice as we rise to sing their anthem with all our rallied strength. Hirsh Glick’s voice is ours as we sing his marching words. We are hiding in the woods with him. We are here! Mir zaynen do! We are blowing up Nazi trains, fighting with stolen guns. Mir zaynen do! We are holding on. 2010

Renee Norman, “Lottery” year 5766 and the moon blows in a new year a time to think upon all we’ve done/become then God the scriptures say decides the roster for the coming year atone and pray for forgiveness it’ll put you in the asset column Yom Kippur the Day of Atonement a good myth makes you try a little harder pull up those socks or weeds or skeletons pray the deficit out of the ledger: forgive me for the rituals i abandoned long ago the unwritten letters

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don’t cares unkindnesses too self-awares God’s nodding: yeah, yeah i know, i know get to the adultery abuse assassination all the good stuff and that’s just the a’s God’s reading the local newspapers feet up on an airtight reclining chair calling: Yitzchak, come and read this! or God, holding hands with the smallest angels who teach the Holiest of Gamblers the game of marbles they explain to God the exquisite pain of their passage earth to fire dust and ashes spraying as one ruby agate hits another sends it shooting through the universe 2005

renee norman

Renee Norman, “Prayers for the Almost Dead” a devil wind whips up in a hot prairie field carries away whatever is not weighted down by the gravity of childhood while peonies full of ants bow low to the dry cracks in the earth davening like old Jewish men in a mournful prayer for the almost dead who read the morning newspaper (a beloved routine) with a magnifying glass black marks the ants move across an insect page an infinitesimal funeral march 2007

Ayelet Tsabari, “Brit Milah” At the passport check, Reuma Hamami pulled out a folded piece of paper from her purse and handed it to the woman behind the counter. The woman was young, with narrow eyes, Chinese perhaps, and her black, shiny hair was rolled into a neat bun. Her face was caked with dusty powder and her eyebrows were pencilled on. She looked up and eyed Reuma. “English?” “Little,” Reuma said. She reached and pointed at the paper. “My daughter.” “Your daughter lives in Toronto?” “Yes.” Reuma nodded. The woman flipped through the pages in Reuma’s passport, filled with stamps from the organized trips Reuma had been taking over the past three years with a group of women from her neighbourhood of Sha’ariya, many of them widowed like her, all of them Yemeni. “First time in Canada?” Reuma nodded again. Ofra had been living here for seven years, but she had been visiting Israel regularly. There had never been a reason for Reuma to come before. In fact, Ofra had been home just a few months ago, in her second trimester, and Reuma proudly showed her off around the neighbourhood, walked with her down Petah Tikva’s

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main street. In the evenings they had sat in the yard and drunk tea, and Reuma finally got a chance to pass on some of her knowledge. She had raised four children after all. When her daughters-in-law had given birth, Reuma had learned to be quiet, keep her advice to herself, ­especially after Rami, her eldest, accused her of being overbearing. They had their own mothers to consult. But Ofra listened to her, didn’t dismiss her advice as she had in the past, seemed softened by the pregnancy, more forgiving toward her mother. “Born in Yemen?” The woman looked at Reuma. Reuma noticed a small golden cross dangling against her chest. “Yes.” The woman’s lips tightened, she tilted her head to read some of the stamps. She thinks I’m an Arab, Reuma thought and hurried to add, “Jewish.” She looked around for something that would help her explain. “Me ... baby.” She lowered her hand to indicate her height. “Go to Israel with Mother and Father.” The woman flipped another page. Reuma wanted to make conversation, to tell her that she rented the shed in the back to people from China, but she didn’t know the words. Growing up she’d never seen Chinese or blacks in Israel, but now they were everywhere, migrant workers who were filling positions Israelis were too lazy for, jobs Palestinians used to have before the intifada, and Yemenis before them, in Israel’s early days, when she and her parents first arrived in Sha’ariya: cleaning homes, washing dishes, picking oranges. The woman stamped her passport, and Reuma thanked her and continued through tunnels and up escalators to the conveyor belt. As Reuma waited for her suitcase, she imagined meeting Yonatan, her new grandson. For years she had waited anxiously for Ofra to get pregnant, but had been careful not to pressure her, since any attempt at broaching the subject had led to arguments. Speaking with Ofra had never been easy for Reuma; she used to envy Shaul: with her father Ofra was loving, warm, receptive.

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But things had been better between the two of them since Ofra had gotten married, and better still with her pregnancy. Reuma remembered how much closer she had become with her own mother after she had Rami. She was thrilled when Ofra and Matthew asked her if she would come and stay with them for the first little while after the baby was born, glad to be of help, to be needed. She could picture it: once it was time for Reuma to leave, Ofra would realize just how much she needed her mother, and she would beg Matthew to move back to ­Israel. Reuma had seen it happen. Recently her niece – her sister Shoshi’s daughter – moved back from Miami following childbirth, giving up a good paying job and a big house, just so that she could be near her mother. Reuma had it all planned: Ofra and Matthew could have the house, the three-bedroom bungalow where she and Shaul had raised Ofra and her three brothers, and which recently had been ­repainted, the ’50s-style tiles in the bathroom replaced with new cream-coloured ones, and Reuma would move to the rental unit in the back, where the Chinese workers now lived. She could help babysit, cook, and clean. Matthew was a naturopath; Reuma knew there was a demand for his line of work in high places in Tel Aviv, where people might not even mind him speaking English. Finally, she recognized her suitcase, the pink ribbon she had fastened on its handle, and she dragged it onto a cart and followed the exit signs. When she made it out of the arrivals gate, she was disappointed to see Matthew standing alone, his coat open to reveal a plaid shirt, his beard now grown, but his hair starting to recede. In his arm he held a puffy coat he handed Reuma. “Ofra was busy,” he said, rocking an imaginary baby in front of his chest. She beamed and nodded. Matthew leaned over and kissed her on both cheeks, his glasses colliding with hers. “Good to have you,” he said, and Reuma smiled, unsure of the meaning of this phrase. She was frustrated by her inability to speak to Matthew, whom she liked from the moment Ofra had first brought him home for Rosh Hashanah three years ago. From the way he looked at her daughter, tended to her, Reuma could tell that he was a good

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man, and strong enough to deal with Ofra’s temperament. She had ­always worried for her daughter: she was an opinionated woman, too smart for her own good, and a complete failure in the kitchen. Reuma had tried to teach her how to make her spicy schug, bake jichnoon for Shabbat, cook Yemeni soup, but Ofra wasn’t interested. Reuma envied her sister, Shoshi, whose daughters borrowed recipes from their mother and even confided in her about their marital problems. Ofra never spoke to her about such things, had waited until she was thirty-eight to have a child, and had finally married Matthew at city hall a few months ago, already visibly pregnant in a white, shapeless dress, her hair loose and curly and her lips carelessly drawn in red, matching a pair of red high-heeled shoes. “At least they’re married.” Shoshi threw her hand up in dismissal when Reuma showed her the photo and sighed. “Today, some young people don’t even bother. Look at Tsila’s daughter. Even had children. God help us.” They paused before the glass doors, the mass of blinding whiteness outside, and Matthew waited as Reuma put on the large, puffy coat that went down to her knees, arranging the furry hood over her head. She tightened her scarf, put on gloves. She had only ever seen snow in Jerusalem, when she and Shaul had been on vacation, and there – crowning the ancient stone buildings, the tips of cypress trees, the surrounding hilltops – it had seemed magnificent, romantic. Toronto was covered with patches of white, which from the air looked to Reuma as though erased, as though parts of the city were missing. “Ready?” Matthew asked. “Ready,” she repeated, ashamed of how clumsy the word sounded, her r flat, the stress placed on the wrong part of the word. The doors swished open and they were out, the cold assaulting her face, stabbing her exposed calves. She followed Matthew to the car, squinting against the bright, thin light, the greyness of the sky. She sat in the front, smiling at the baby seat in the back. After a few minutes, warm air started blowing from the vents. Matthew didn’t speak to her beyond asking if the flight was good and if she was tired. Reuma wondered if he intended on ­learning

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any Hebrew, now that he had an Israeli son. She wondered too if Matthew would agree to move to Israel. He often told her how much he loved Israel, and at least he had an Ashkenazi name, Levin, even if he wasn’t completely Jewish. Out of her four children, not a single one of them had married a Yemeni. When she looked at her grandchildren she was sometimes surprised. Itay’s daughter, Lilach, had golden curls and grey eyes. Elad’s son, Itamar, had skin even fairer than his ­mother’s. She was delighted when Ofra said, “Yonatan’s a real Yemeni,” and when Reuma saw photos she began to tear up. Her grandchild reminded her of her dead husband. They drove on a multi-lane highway through a graceless monochrome landscape, the view dirtied by slush, spat on their windshield by passing cars, then wiped clean, the wiper blades squeaking rhythmically over the glass. The road curved, hugging the shore of a silvery lake, and the city skyline emerged, jutting out of the earth and moving rapidly toward them. Matthew took an exit, and they were on a busy street with two-storey buildings coloured reds and blues, small quaint stores and cafés, their windows painted over with snowflakes and Santa Clauses, chains of blinking lights framing their edges. Their house was just off the main street, long and narrow and wedged between two other houses, with snow on its turret roof, like something out of a fairy tale. The trees that lined the street were stripped naked, their branches bowed over, weighed down by a thick layer of snow. ­Reuma stepped out of the car and her boots squeaked on the sidewalk. “Careful,” Matthew said, and mimicked losing his balance. “Very slippery.” He carried her bags as she walked up the stairs, holding on to the cold railing. Ofra swung the door open with her arms wide and Reuma fell into them, inhaling the baby and breast milk smell of her. “You look good,” Reuma said, though Ofra was clearly tired, her curly hair unwashed and gathered into a messy bun, her complexion faded by winter.

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“I’m so happy you’re here,” Ofra said. “Matthew’s mom just left yesterday but ... it’s not the same.” “Matthew’s mom?” Reuma felt a stab of jealousy. “I thought she didn’t live in Toronto.” “She doesn’t,” Ofra said. “She came from Winnipeg for two weeks.” “Where is he?” Reuma looked around. “Come.” Ofra smiled as if holding a secret. Reuma followed her up the narrow carpeted stairs to their bedroom, where Yonatan slept in his crib. “My God.” Reuma’s eyes filled with tears. “Isn’t he handsome?” Matthew whispered, poking his head in between mother and daughter. “Bli ayin hara,” Reuma said. “Ugly, ugly. You shouldn’t call a baby beautiful. It brings bad luck.” She smiled, as if aware of how silly this might sound. “I also brought a hamsa you can hang over his bed.” “Okay,” Ofra said. “Later.” Downstairs, her daughter made her tea with fresh mint, served with what Reuma suspected were store-bought cookies. Matthew had left to run errands. “I even bought you Nescafé,” Ofra said proudly. “I brought food too,” Reuma said, bending down to unzip her suitcase, unleashing the sour smell of Yemeni spices. “Ima,” Ofra said. “You shouldn’t have.” “Of course I should have.” Reuma pulled out a jar of green, spicy schug, some jichnoons wrapped in foil, and a bag of savoury ka’adid cookies, dotted with black nigella seeds. “And some Hebrew magazines,” Reuma said, handing Ofra women’s and parenting magazines, “to read when you breastfeed.” “Thanks, Ima.” Ofra leaned over to hug her, and took the food into the kitchen. Snow had started to fall, soundless and slow, sticking to the glass and then sliding down. The fogged-up windows were decorated with a chain of flickering Christmas lights. A Chanukia covered with hardened wax drippings stood on the windowsill. Reuma could tell that someone had made an effort to tidy up, but there was still a layer of

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dust on the furniture, Ofra’s hairs tangled in the carpet. She had her work cut out for her. When Ofra returned, she told Reuma of Yonatan’s sleep patterns, his eating habits, his rashes, his dandruff, his gas, and Reuma asked questions and made suggestions – olive oil for the dandruff, tomato juice for the gas – feeling like an authority, an expert. “I forgot, I brought some baby clothes too.” Reuma hurried to pull the clothes, wrapped in tissue paper, from her suitcase. “And this is from Shoshi, and wait, I have some from your sisters-in-law too.” “So how’s everybody?” Ofra said. “How are you?” “Getting old.” Reuma sighed. “Soon you’ll have to hire me a Filipina, or maybe put me in a home.” “Stop it,” Ofra said. “You’re only sixty-eight. Your mother lived to be 100.” “Or you can come back and live with me, because your brothers sure aren’t going to.” Ofra just smiled. Reuma told her about her brothers, how things hadn’t been so good between Itay and his wife lately, how Rami hadn’t been over for weeks, and Elad’s daughter had been diagnosed with learning disabilities. She shared the neighbourhood news: Arnon the butcher had passed away, Shlomo, their neighbour, had already remarried and it hadn’t even been a year. She was going to wait to tell her about Shoshi’s daughter and her recent move home, but she got carried away, describing the new villa they were building on their grandparents’ lot in Sha’ariya, how happy Shoshi had been since she came back. Petah Tikva was changing too, she said; it was no longer just a sleepy suburb. They even had sushi there now, a Japanese food young people raved about, and good cafés with the espresso drinks Ofra used to go to Tel Aviv to get. Reuma paused, noticing her daughter yawning behind her hand. “You should sleep too,” Reuma said. “If the baby is sleeping ... ” “Yes,” Ofra said. “Let me get you set up.”

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The guest room’s walls were dark blue, the trim a glossy white. A desk with a computer was placed under the window, and a corkboard covered with photos hung on the wall next to it: Ofra and Matthew clinking wine glasses around a patio table with people Reuma didn’t know; the two of them holding hands on some white-sand beach; a black-and-white photo of Ofra pregnant, wearing a sheer white dress that made Reuma uncomfortable. Outside, the snow was thickening, hiding bushes and fences under a soft blanket. Reuma stood by the window and tried to imagine what was underneath the snow, what the large shape in the corner of their backyard was, how deep the lawn was buried. She lay down on the sofa bed, just to rest her eyes, and fell into an easy sleep. ∞ She woke up to the baby crying and lay in bed for a minute, adjusting to her surroundings. The room was dark. She glanced at the clock radio. She had napped for an hour and though it was only just after four, the daylight was already gone. She walked out of the room and saw that the door to her daughter’s bedroom was ajar. The baby was lying in his crib, kicking and crying. She heard the shower running. “Hello, sweetheart.” Reuma picked Yonatan up and placed him against her chest, rocking him and tapping him lightly on his back. “My eyes, my soul.” She kissed his face, his neck, inhaling his smell, and then lifted him and smelled his diaper. “You made poo-poo?” she said, laying him on the chest of drawers. Ofra rushed out of the shower, wrapping her body with a towel as she walked over, her hair dripping a wet trail along the floor. “Finish your shower,” Reuma said. “Why am I here? I can do this. He needs changing.” “He’s hungry.” Ofra extended her arms, and Reuma reluctantly handed her Yonatan. Ofra sat on the unmade bed and gave him a nipple. He latched on to it. Reuma started collecting clothes from the floor.

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“You don’t have to do that,” Ofra said. “I want to help.” “You just got here.” “I can do things. At least I can help with the baby.” Ofra sighed. “Something’s wrong?” Reuma said, heart pounding. “No.” “With the baby? With you?” “No. Well, there is something we need to talk about, but we can do it later, over dinner. But nothing is wrong.” “Did you let Matthew’s mom change him?” Tears welled up in Reuma’s eyes. “Fine.” Ofra took Yonatan from her breast and handed him to her mom. “Change him.” Yonatan started to fuss. Reuma looked at her daughter with suspicion. “Go ahead.” Reuma placed the crying Yonatan on her shoulder and soothed him, whispering words of comfort. Then she laid him on the chest of drawers, buried her face in his belly, cooed at him. Yonatan stopped crying and watched her, intrigued. She lifted his legs up with one hand and pulled the diaper off. She drew a wipe from a box on the chest and cleaned his bum. Then she saw it, a ring of foreskin around her grandchild’s tiny penis, a shrivelled mushroom. She stared at it, counting days. It had been over four weeks. “You haven’t done brit milah yet?” She looked up. Ofra shook her head no. “Was there a problem? Did the doctor say to wait?” Ofra tucked a wet curl behind her ear. “We decided not to do it.” Reuma stared at her, letting the boy’s legs down. He started crying. “I don’t understand.” “We don’t think it’s necessary.” “Not necessary,” Reuma repeated. “Ima – ” Ofra started.

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“He’s Jewish,” Reuma said. Yonatan’s cries grew louder and she turned to him, raised his legs and slid the diaper underneath, ­working in urgent motions. “Of course it’s necessary.” “Why?” “Because ... because this is what you do. You don’t think about it. You just do it.” “That’s not a reason. Why hurt him?” “Because it’s tradition. Because it’s what Jews do. And it’s also more hygienic and healthy ... ” “That’s not actually true.” Ofra spoke quietly, calmly. “And I know other Jews who haven’t circumcised. It’s traumatic for the child. I won’t put him through it.” “But you have to.” Reuma raised her voice. “Who heard of such a thing? A Jewish boy, uncircumcised? Have you lost your mind?” “Maybe we should talk about it later.” Ofra stood up, tightening the towel over her chest. “I printed something for you to read.” “You think I wanted to hurt your brothers? I had to close my eyes to not see how they cried. No mother wants to do it. You just do.” Reuma remembered how faint she had felt when Rami was screaming, his face turning dark red. She had run to the washroom, sobbing until she heard the ululating sounds of the women and knew that it was done. It didn’t become easier with the second or third. But did she ever question it? “But Ima, I’m not religious ... ” “Religious or not, it’s tradition. Your brothers aren’t religious.” Ofra sighed. “I won’t allow it. You should be ashamed of yourself.” She lifted Yonatan and planted him in her daughter’s hands. He kicked his legs and smiled at her. She looked away. “I won’t hold him,” she said. “I won’t.” Ofra stared at her in shock. “You can’t be serious.” Reuma stormed out of the room and down the stairs. “Ima,” Ofra called after her. “Wait.”

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She put on the coat, slid her feet into her boots, wrapped a scarf around her face and walked out the front door. The cold felt like an icy slap. Where was she going? Street lights shone cone-shaped beams on the road, and Christmas lights – dangling from porches and draped over evergreen trees – warmed up the whites, blues, and greys. The snow was piled high, blurring the borders of things, turning the sidewalks into narrow tunnels. Her tears froze on her face. Reuma had prided herself on moving with the times, unlike some Yemeni women from the neighbourhood who held on to the old ways, resisted modern appliances, still dressed as though they were in ­Yemen. Many years ago, when Shaul was still alive, Reuma had taken off the head scarf and learned how to drive; she even drove on Shabbat. She hadn’t asked questions about Matthew’s other half, the non-Jewish part, and she had always been proud of her daughter, saw it as a sign of her own progress and success, that despite Reuma growing up with illiterate parents and never earning a high school diploma, she’d raised a daughter so smart, so successful. Shoshi’s daughters may have married young, but her own daughter had a PhD, which she had acquired in Canada, in English. But this was too much. She pulled the scarf up to cover her stinging nose. She saw the lights of a café on the corner. She just had to make it there. She missed Shaul now, grief gnawing at her as though she’d just lost him yesterday. What would he have done? Shaul, who went to synagogue every Friday, out of habit more than religious duty, his time with the men a reprieve from her and the kids. He watched TV on Shabbat, turned on appliances. He would have been able to talk some sense into Ofra. Perhaps she would have circumcised Yonatan had Shaul been alive; she had always wanted to please him. And when Shaul and ­Reuma fought – and they had fought endlessly when they were y­ ounger – Ofra had always taken his side, always blamed her mother. “You and Shaul are fire and fire,” Reuma’s mother used to say. “You have to give up every now and then, let him be a man. You’re pushing him away.” ­Later,

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in their older days – both mellowed and tired of conflict – they had ­become best friends again. But Ofra was living away by then, in Tel Aviv and then Toronto. She only remembered the bad times. Reuma finally made it to the café, her coat speckled with white and her glasses steamed up. She stood at the entrance, blind, then found a seat by the window and heaved herself onto it. Thinking of Shaul here, in this faraway, cold place, made her feel lonely. Perhaps she had pushed him away. Maybe she had pushed Ofra away too. Across the world. Maybe it had all been her fault. When Ofra was thirteen, she had accused Reuma of treating the boys differently. “Why do I have to help with the dishes after dinner? Why do they just get to sit and watch TV?” Reuma’s mother, still alive, smiled at Reuma and said in Yemeni, “This one is like hot pepper. Worse than you.” Years later, she had overheard her daughters-in-law complaining that their husbands didn’t raise a finger at home, didn’t know how, that it was Reuma’s fault, she had done everything for her boys. “Poor Ofra,” one had said. “Can you imagine?” It was true: Reuma had been harder on Ofra, but she’d done it for her own good. She had thought she was preparing Ofra for marriage, the same way her own mother had done for her. A streetcar rumbled outside, and then stopped across the street, letting passengers off onto the slushy road. The same year that Ofra had accused Reuma of favouring her sons, she had invited her aunt Miri, Shaul’s younger sister, to Mother’s Day in junior high – a school on the other side of town, where kids from an affluent neighbourhood, most of them Ashkenazi, were integrated with Yemeni kids from Sha’ariya. The teacher had called to inquire about ­Reuma’s health because Ofra had said that she was ill. Soon after that, Ofra stopped eating Reuma’s food – Reuma found the sandwiches she had prepared for her in the garbage. “It smells funny,” Ofra said. “Kids make fun of me.” It wasn’t just Reuma she had rejected: she despised anything Yemeni, even her curls, which she began straightening every morning. She even changed the way she spoke; as a little kid she spoke like her parents, with guttural

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hets and ayins. Reuma lost her daughter over and over again: first she became Ashkenazi, then Canadian; it was in her melody of speaking, the polite words she’d started peppering her sentences with, the way she smiled at passersby on the street. Reuma had heard her speaking on the phone to her friends, and then to Matthew, in English, laughing in English. A stranger. And now she was no longer Jewish. Ofra burst into the café, her cheeks flushed. “My God, Ima, you scared me half to death. Let’s go home.” “No.” Reuma crossed her arms against her chest, not looking at her daughter. “We planned a special dinner for you,” Ofra pleaded. “And I need you here. Please.” Reuma stared out the window. “Let’s at least talk about it,” Ofra said. Reuma watched a woman decorating a Christmas tree at a store across the street, hanging sparkly ornaments on its branches. She looked around the café, the young people hunched over their blue laptop screens, the steam rising from the coffee machine behind the bar. She got up and put her coat on. They walked the two blocks silently, the wind whistling between them, their faces buried in their scarves. Everyone they passed was bundled up, faceless, anonymous figures. What a lonely place to live, Reuma thought. The warmth of the house enveloped them. Matthew peeked out from the kitchen and smiled. Reuma hurried in, scowling in his direction, and climbed up the stairs to her room. Ofra followed her. “Don’t be mad at Matthew. We made this decision together.” Reuma scoffed. “He’s not even Jewish.” “Who? Yonatan? Of course he is.” Reuma jerked her chin toward Matthew in the kitchen. “What’s half-Jewish? You and I both know there’s no such thing.” Ofra gave her a hard look. “He was raised Jewish. He feels ­Jewish.”

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“Doesn’t matter. According to the Halacha he’s not Jewish.” “Since when did you become a rabbi?” “Is that why you married in city hall? Like the goyim?” Reuma felt as if she couldn’t stop. “You’d never think not to do brit on your own.” “That’s not true,” Ofra said. “I’ve been thinking about it for years. I’ve done a lot of research. You know, I prayed for a daughter just so I wouldn’t have to deal with this.” “It’s not right.” Reuma sat on the bed, inconsolable. “Your father would have never accepted it.” Ofra looked down. “I know.” “He would have been furious at you.” “Ima, you’re acting like it’s the end of the world. If you just took some time ... ” “It is.” Reuma shook her head. “It is.” “But we’re happy, I’m happy. I have a son, a family, a home. How can you not see that?” “What am I going to say to people?” Reuma started crying again. Ofra sighed at the ceiling. “Who cares?” Reuma glared at her. “Fine, then lie.” Reuma looked at the photos on the corkboard, the strangers hugging her daughter, the photo of Ofra in the sheer dress. It was as though she didn’t know her daughter at all. What a fool she had been to think this trip would bring them closer. From the kitchen she heard water running, dishes clattering. The smell of cooking permeated the room, growing familiar: turmeric and chilies, cumin and garlic. “What are you making?” Reuma said, her hunger awakening. Ofra smiled. “Matthew wanted to surprise you.” “Matthew?” “He’s been making Yemeni soup every Friday. He even learned to make jichnoon. We have a whole Yemeni dinner planned.” “Matthew cooked?”

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Ofra nodded. “He got some recipes from Shoshi – ” “From Shoshi?” Reuma cried. “You should have gotten them from me.” “Then it wouldn’t have been a surprise, would it?” She looked at Reuma. “Are you okay?” Reuma didn’t answer. She looked at her lap, twirling her wedding ring on her finger. Ofra hesitated, then placed her hand on Reuma’s shoulder and squeezed. She left, her footsteps tapping on the stairs. Reuma remained seated a moment longer, then went to the washroom to wash her face. She looked at herself in the mirror; her eyes were red, her skin blotched from crying. She threw water on her face, then pinched and patted her cheeks. Downstairs, Ofra was setting the table with Yonatan strapped to her chest. Matthew poured salt into the soup and smiled at her over his shoulder. Any other time she would have been pleased by the pungent tang of Yemeni spices in her daughter’s kitchen, by the familiar spread on the table: a finely chopped vegetable salad, a bowl of schug, the c­ ilantro in it smelling fresh, as though it had just been prepared, and even a bowl of hilbe, a spicy fenugreek paste none of her daughters-in-law had ever learned to make. But now Reuma slid into a chair, not offering to help, her hands resting in her lap. She couldn’t help it; knowing it hadn’t been her daughter who prepared the meal soured it for Reuma. These recipes had been passed down through the women of their family for generations. “Thank you, honey.” Ofra walked by and kissed Matthew on the cheek. “It looks amazing.” She turned to her mother and said in Hebrew, “Can you believe how lucky I am? And wait till you taste his jichnoon.” “You know,” Reuma couldn’t resist. “My mother always said that women’s hands are better for kneading dough.” Ofra raised an eyebrow. “It’s true,” Reuma continued. “Our hands are naturally colder. Men’s hands are too warm.” Ofra smiled, saying nothing.

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Finally Matthew placed a bowl of steaming yellow soup in front of her, his face open and expectant. Reuma examined the soup. It looked right: a shiny film on top, a yellow chicken drumstick, a ­carrot, half a potato, wilted stems of cilantro. She raised a s­poonful of it to her mouth, feeling the urge to criticize – it could have used more garlic, less turmeric – but holding herself back. It tasted d ­ ifferent, but it was fresh and spicy. “So?” Ofra said. “It’s good.” She nodded, reluctantly, and Matthew grinned, recognizing the word. Reuma said nothing until she finished the soup. Then she pushed away her bowl and leaned back, letting the heat settle in her stomach. Her daughter sat across the table, nursing Yonatan. Reuma knew she had to give it one last try. She owed it to Shaul, at least. “So what’s going to happen if you come back?” she said. Ofra looked up. “Come back?” “Did you ever think about what’s going to happen to Yonatan then? And in the army? He’ll always be different than the other boys. Everyone will make fun of him.” Matthew glanced up from his plate quickly, tensely. Ofra looked at her as if she was studying her. “I’m not coming back, Ima.” “Not now, but maybe later.” “No, Ima.” “How can you be so sure?” “I’m sure. We’re sure. This is my home now.” “But you’re alone here.” “We have good friends,” she said. “We have Shabbat dinners with them.” “You have Shabbat dinners?” Ofra nodded. “Every week.” Reuma felt more confused than ever. “It’s not like having a mom here. To help you.” “Then come here, stay with us. Live with us.” Reuma stared at her daughter in disbelief.

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“You can stay in the guest room,” Ofra said and Matthew nodded. Perhaps he understood Hebrew more than she thought. “And leave my sister and my friends? And your brothers?” “It’s up to you,” Ofra hurried to say. “Even just for a while. I could really use your help.” The snow was falling heavily now. Every time Reuma looked outside she was taken aback. She tried imagining herself living here but could not picture it. She wondered how the city looked in the summer, couldn’t fathom how this bleak landscape could possibly come to life again, though she knew that the trees would turn green and the flowers would bloom. Ofra had told her the summers were hot, sometimes as hot as they were in Israel. “Beautiful, isn’t it?” Ofra followed her gaze. “I just love this time of the year. It’s magic. I can’t wait for Yonatan to grow up, so we can make snowmen and snow angels ... ” She looked at Yonatan and her face softened, her tone changed. “Buy you a tiny little snowsuit.” Reuma looked at her, surprised: Ofra was smitten with the ­weather, with the naked trees, with the season; she felt at home in this cold, strange country. Reuma felt a sharp, quick pinch in her heart. Her daughter wasn’t coming home. Matthew cleared the table and Reuma watched as he began loading the dishwasher, wiping the counters, a towel thrown over his shoulder as Reuma always did. Sleep was tugging at her. “You said you know other Jews who ... didn’t,” Reuma said. “How did their families react?” Ofra glanced at Matthew. “In different ways. Some didn’t mind. One friend’s family didn’t speak to him for two years.” “You see?” Reuma said. “What do I see? Is that what you want, Ima? They’re talking to him now, and they missed two years of their grandson’s life.” Reuma leaned on the table, picking at a hardened turmeric stain on the white tablecloth. “I just ... I don’t even know what to think. I can’t accept this.” Ofra levelled a tired look at her mother. “So what do you want, Ima?”

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“I want you to circumcise him,” Reuma said, taken aback by the question. What she wanted was off the table; she wanted to rewrite everything, she wanted the story she had told herself when she was younger, growing old with Shaul, with her family around her, sharing recipes with her only daughter, watching her grandson being circumcised in an event hall by the same Yemeni mohel who had circumcised her children, celebrating the birth at their local synagogue, among friends and family. “Well, that’s not going to happen,” Ofra said sharply. “Now what?” Reuma thought of Shaul. Though he had always been quicker to lose his temper, he was also first between the two of them to calm down. It was Reuma who held a grudge, who struggled to forgive. She wondered if she had it all wrong. Yes, Shaul would have been furious, disappointed, heartbroken, for weeks, maybe months. He would have yelled, slammed doors, and Reuma would have had to beg him to take it easy. “Your heart,” she would have said. “Your health.” But then it would have been him who would have forgiven his daughter first, his baby girl. He would never have been able to keep it up. “I don’t know,” Reuma finally said. She looked up, stunned into silence when she saw that her daughter’s face was wet. Yonatan let go of his mother’s nipple, hanging off her arm while Ofra wiped her tears with the back of her hand. She had hardly touched her soup. “Here.” Reuma stood up and stretched her arms out to her daughter. “You eat.” Ofra looked up and her face brightened. She handed her Yonatan over the table. “Hello, my soul.” Reuma looked at Yonatan’s face and saw her husband, the dimple in his chin, the wide nose, the dark complexion. “You look just like your granddad,” she said, her eyes watering. Yonatan flapped his arms. “Who’s Grandma’s little angel?” she whispered. She placed him on her shoulder, the weight of his little body against her familiar and comforting. 2013

Adam Sol, “Simcha” The men pogo into each other like wind-up toys, complete with iron smiles. It’s a rough circle: they move in for a turn, snarl, then shift outside to watch and catch their breath. The groom just got his second wind. Both knees in the air, he’s absorbed in his own movement, watching his feet stomp, a whirling Buddha. One man jumps in with his fedora aflame, an old trick. Another, payis slick and gleaming, balances a wine bottle on his head, runs circles, his eyes fixed on a space behind his eyes. The band keeps pace, keyboard switching to clarinet, then vocals: “Moshiach! Moshiach! Moshiach!” The joint is jumping. Even the seventy-year-old rebbe does yoyo tricks and reeks Scotch. Even the clean-shaven relatives from the East do the best they can. Work it.

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Male sweat thick in the air. They lift the groom again to see his bride on the other side – this time without a chair. Calves knotted, he stands on the balancer’s shoulders. His grin is furious, his kipah askew, tuxedo shirt showing damp at the stomach. With the height, he hovers above the amplifiers. Across the divider, the women dance a calmer hora, clap their hands with spread fingers. She sits in the center, grinning at them. It’s so quiet where he is now, he can almost hear her dress shift, the fabric stiff under his fingers when he lifted her veil. She looks up and sees him, her lipstick smudged, her eyes wild and striking. She closes her lips for a moment, and he lets himself fall back into the music, the riot, the sea of hands. 2000

Adam Sol, “Taking Down the Sukkah” Branches we hung from the roof – roof we could see stars through – are dry as burnt chicken skin. Leaves crumble to dust as I begin to hammer down the beams. Never sturdy, the sukkah fast returns to planks with protests only from three-inch nails as they give up their posts. From the kitchen window, my wife watches red-eyed. She is through with crying, and her mouth is taut, impregnable. Down come the cards we stapled to the frame, down the beads and gourds we hung with lengths of yarn. I carry the damp two-by-fours to the garage and stand them upright – once again they enclose only their own space. The cinder blocks fit neatly into a corner, and the lawn table we set inside, now stained by rain and raccoon scat, returns to its place

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in the basement next to the unopened crib. Done. Return the hammer to its drawer, the ladder to its hook, and our lives to a week without dreaming. The last of our near-child bleeds blackly into the pad between her thighs. Our festival of flimsy structures is over, leaving only balled-up tissue, flattened grass on the lawn. 2003

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Jason Camlot, “Distinctions” This morning I was the one who sang the loudest. I sang most ferociously my gratitude for the ability to make rudimentary distinctions, such as between day and night, gentile and Jew, slave and free man, man and woman, naked and clothed, bound and released, bent and upright, earth and water, needful and satisfied, but not finer distinctions – it was early, my eyes still bleary – as between plastic and rubber, muffins and cupcakes, whisky and bourbon, Velveeta and cheese, sorrow and despair, dread and foreboding, mud and muck, pepperoni and karnatzel, pure anger and undiluted rage, life and death.

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I cried to myself as I sang because you would have loved to hear me sing. I sang out loud to turn my sadness into strangeness. I cried within because of distinctions between bound and released, forbidden and allowed. 2013

jason camlot

Jason Camlot, “Etrog” This is to inform you I ate the etrog you left on the kitchen table. It smelled like an exotic, scentless candy. I could not resist peeling it and putting it into my mouth. It is a strange, unpleasant fruit. It tastes like shame. I was unaware one does not eat the etrog, but there is no chance I will repeat this ignorant act. I will never eat an etrog again. 2013

Jacob Scheier, “The Language of Our People” She held the book like an infant, tightly, so the yellow and worn pages would not slip away, but gently, lest they be torn from their spine. She read aloud from it, to it, whispering what she called the language of our people. When she died, the book became an orphan, babeling a story, familiar yet confounded by language, los t/s and distan t/ce. At her funeral, the rabbi spoke in English and the language of our people. He didn’t know she died before Exodus (and would have barely understood a word), that something was, is, always, lost in translation. 2007

Jacob Scheier, “My Mother Dies in Reverse” After Robert Priest’s Reading the Bible Backwards I dig up the dirt & tell the rabbi to recant his prayer I say I do not glorify praise or bless I do not say amen I say a woman & he sews the garments back together & I take her to Mt. Sinai

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oncology before she begins breathing again & I open her eyes & breath enters her mouth & mumbles ravel into words & sentences rejoin each other & she puts her hand into her mouth & pulls from her throat valiums like sapphire beads & she pees morphine like a crystal river & perspires radiation till it’s all gone & she finds her breasts on the operating table & sews them back to her chest like a garment uncut & moonwalks down the corridors

jacob scheier

“my

mother dies in reverse”

& into an ambulance driver’s seat & rides home 2013

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Naomi Guttman, “Prayer” Open to me: rest your ribs into my hands. Sing your sweetest throat on your strongest guitar. Feed me the fruits of your wholeness and draw raw waters for my thirst. Whisper in the voice of softest coinage: a million copper stars. Polish my blood and my breath with your sighs and permit me, permit me to ask you anything. 2007

Sigal Samuel, “Wor(l)d Salad: A Writer’s Love Letter to the Hebrew Language” ‫ּודבָ ִרים‬ ְ ,‫הָ אָ ֶרץ שָׂ פָ ה אֶ חָ ת‬-‫א וַיְ ִהי כָ ל‬ .‫אֲחָ ִדים‬

1 And the whole earth was of one language and of one speech.

‫ב וַיְ ִהי ְבּנ ְָסעָ ם ִמקֶּ ֶדם; וַיִּ ְמ ְצאּו ִב ְקעָ ה‬ .‫ֵשׁבּו שָׁ ם‬ ְ ‫ ַויּ‬,‫ְבּאֶ ֶרץ ִשׁנְ עָ ר‬

2 And it came to pass, as they journeyed east, that they found a plain in the land of Shinar; and they dwelt there.

‫ הָ בָ ה נִ ְל ְבּנָה‬,‫רעֵ הּו‬-‫ל‬ ֵ ֶ‫ֹאמרּו ִאיׁש א‬ ְ ‫ג ַויּ‬ ‫ וְ נִ ְשׂ ְרפָ ה ִל ְשׂ ֵרפָ ה; ו ְַתּ ִהי לָ הֶ ם‬,‫ְלבֵ נִ ים‬ .‫חמֶ ר‬ ֹ ַ‫ הָ יָה לָ הֶ ם ל‬,‫ וְ הַ חֵ מָ ר‬,‫ ְלאָ בֶ ן‬,‫הַ ְלּבֵ נָה‬

3 And they said one to another: “Come, let us make bricks, and burn them thoroughly.” And they had brick for stone, and slime had they for mortar.

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‫ּומגְ ָדּל‬ ִ ,‫לָּ נּו ִעיר‬-‫ֹאמרּו הָ בָ ה נִ ְבנֶה‬ ְ ‫ד ַויּ‬ ‫נָפּוץ‬-‫ פֶּ ן‬:‫לָּ נּו שֵׁ ם‬-‫ וְ ַנעֲשֶׂ ה‬,‫וְ ר ֹאׁשֹו בַ שָּׁ מַ יִ ם‬ .‫הָ אָ ֶרץ‬-‫פּנֵי כָ ל‬-‫ל‬ ְ ַ‫ע‬

4 And they said: “Come, let us build us a city, and a tower, with its top in heaven, and let us make us a name; lest we be scattered abroad upon the face of the whole earth.”

-‫הָ ִעיר וְ אֶ ת‬-‫ה ַויּ ֵֶרד יְ הוָה ִל ְראֹת אֶ ת‬ .‫ אֲשֶׁ ר בָּ נּו ְבּנֵי הָ אָ ָדם‬,‫הַ ִמּגְ ָדּל‬

5 And the Lord came down to see the city and the tower, which the children of men built.

‫ הֵ ן עַ ם אֶ חָ ד וְ שָׂ פָ ה‬,‫ו ַויֹּאמֶ ר יְ הוָה‬ ‫ וְ זֶה הַ ִחלָּ ם לַ עֲׂשֹות; וְ עַ תָּ ה‬,‫אַ חַ ת ְלכֻ לָּ ם‬ .‫יִ בָּ צֵ ר מֵ הֶ ם כֹּל אֲשֶׁ ר יָזְ מּו לַ עֲׂשֹות‬-‫ל ֹא‬

6 And the Lord said: “Behold, they are one people, and they have all one language; and this is what they begin to do; and now nothing will be withheld from them, which they purpose to do.

--‫ וְ נ ְָבלָ ה שָׁ ם ְשׂפָ תָ ם‬,‫ז הָ בָ ה נ ְֵר ָדה‬ ּ ‫ ִאיׁש ְשׂפַ ת ֵרעֵ הוּ‬,‫אֲשֶׁ ר א יִ ְשׁ ְמעּו‬

7 Come, let us go down, and there confound their language, that they may not understand one another’s speech.”

-‫פּנֵי כָ ל‬-‫עַל‬ ְ ,‫ח ַויָּפֶ ץ יְ הוָה ֹאתָ ם ִמשָּׁ ם‬ .‫הָ אָ ֶרץ; ַויּ ְַח ְדּלּו ִל ְב ֹנת הָ ִעיר‬

8 So the Lord ­ scattered them abroad from thence upon the face of all the earth; and they left off to build the city.

“wor(l)d

s a l a d ”

‫שָׁ ם בָּ לַ ל‬-‫ ִכּי‬,‫כֵּ ן קָ ָרא ְשׁמָ ּה בָּ בֶ ל‬-‫ט עַל‬ ‫ה ִפיצָ ם‬ ֱ ‫ּומשָּׁ ם‬ ִ ;‫הָ אָ ֶרץ‬-‫יְ הוָה ְשׂפַ ת כָּ ל‬ .‫הָ אָ ֶרץ‬-‫פּנֵי כָּ ל‬-‫עַל‬ ְ ,‫יְ הוָה‬

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9 Therefore was the name of it called Babel; because the Lord did there confound the language of all the earth; and from thence did the Lord scatter them abroad upon the face of all the earth.

.‫ב‬ First memory: I am five years old, maybe, or six. I am playing with my mother in her wide bed in the apartment on Décarie. The sunlight streams in through the windows as she positions my small body on her extended legs, so that my stomach lays flat on them, and my chin is close to her knees. Slowly at first, then quicker and quicker, she pumps her legs up and down, grasping my hands and holding them outward like wings, so that I’m flying wildly through the morning air. “Aviron!” she says. “Aviron, aviron!” Airplane, airplane! And I laugh and I laugh. .‫ג‬ schizo∙pha∙sia Pronunciation: skit-sO-’fA-zh(E-) Function: noun Jumble of incoherent speech consisting of both real and imaginary words, lacking comprehensive meaning, and occurring in advanced schizophrenic states. Also called word salad. .‫ד‬ Hebrew is my mother tongue. It is what came off the tongue of my mother. Between the ages of ten and seventeen, that tongue was not available to me, and the sounds of the Hebrew words crept into the

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recesses of my brain. For seven years, they bided their time, hiding out in synapses and other silent spaces. Then, two months after my high school graduation, I boarded a flight on an El Al, Tel Aviv-bound ­aviron, and all of those sounds came swarming out. Suddenly I found my own tongue coated with the rich rolling resonance of the letter ‫ר‬ (resh), and found my Israeli roommates baffled and impressed by the native-sounding lilt of my letter ‫( ל‬lamed). That year, I enrolled in a Modern Israeli Literature class at the ­Hebrew University. Our teacher encouraged us not only to read the poems she had assigned, but to learn from them and to write our own ­Hebrew poetry. I wrote. I wrote poems, I wrote my diary, I wrote my own thoughts in Hebrew, until the syntax of my feelings and my own internal music gradually rearranged themselves to fit the contours of this other language. Not only the words I used, but the very structure of the way I experienced life, faces, photographs, vases, clocks, and ­especially dreams, changed radically. When I finally returned to Montreal, I found myself linguistically paralyzed. As English and French crowded in on me again, some of those nascent Hebrew sounds were pushed back into the recesses of my brain. I developed a schizophasic way of speaking. Thinking a simple sentence like “Rain fell quietly on my window yesterday” was ­torture, invariably scribbling itself across my brain as something like: il ּ‫ דּדוֹי‬ait ‫ םֶׁש ֶּג‬quietly sur tout ‫ ינוֹלַח‬hier. I could no longer write in Hebrew, and I didn’t want to write in any other language. I decided not to write at all. For a whole year, my dreams took place in silence. .‫ה‬ The Jewish tradition is obsessed with language. It loves to language; it takes pleasure in languaging. The ancient rabbis believed in the idea of a lashon ha-kodesh, a holy tongue. Before the people of the world built

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s a l a d ”

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their Tower of Babel, and before God scattered them across the face of the earth, “the whole earth was of one language and of one speech” – and that language was Hebrew. A language that contained the seed of all languages, a divine polyvocality, a pre-Bakhtinian heteroglossia. According to the rabbis, Hebrew was not only the original language of humankind – it was also the original language of God. In fact, the twenty-two letters of its alphabet were the original building blocks of Creation. God spoke – and Being sprang into being. God spoke again – and Adam was born. According to the Jewish conception, the human being is not composed of GATC – the Guanine, Adenine, Thymine, and Cytosine that make up every strand of the scientist’s DNA. No: the human being is made out of other letters, out of a ­different sort of nucleotide: ‫א‬, ‫ב‬, ‫ג‬, ‫ד‬, ‫ ה‬and ‫ו‬. .‫ו‬ One day, when I was thirteen years old, I stumbled upon The Early Diary of Anaïs Nin in a dusty Montreal bookstore. Despite its tattered cover and broken spine, something in its first few pages made me beg my father to buy it for me. He did, and my concept of writing has never been the same since. Anaïs’s diary left an indelible impression on me: I found it to be funny, sharp, insightful, and sopping with pathos. What most ­impressed me, though, was the way in which this young diarist (who had just recently emigrated from Barcelona) was able to express each of her strange and idiosyncratic thoughts in English prose. The experiences she was describing were eccentric and unique to her, yet she made herself perfectly understandable and accessible to me. A young diarist myself, I resolved (although it was an unconscious decision, one which I only see now, in retrospect) to record my own experiences in a way that would be equally intelligible to a broad range of readers. One day, I dreamed, someone would wander through a dusty bookstore, trailing their index finger along broken spines, and stumble upon The Early Diary of Sigal Samuel. When

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that day came, I needed my reader (whom I always assumed would be an English-speaking North American) to understand me. I needed my reader to not drown in a primordial chaos of jumbled languages, in a word salad, in a world salad. I needed to write one world – a world from which Hebrew was excised and, I thought, in which the rich myths of the ancient rabbis played no part. .‫ז‬

.‫ח‬ During the medieval period, Jewish culture was pervaded by­ superstition. Demons were everywhere: they would get you while you were crossing the street, taking a piss, or haggling over the price of codfish in the market. As fear intensified, a brisk trade developed in amulets. Potions and panaceas of all kinds grew popular. Jewish mystical “experts” known as Ba’alei Shem (Masters of the Name) performed exorcisms, using God’s names to expel the evil spirits that hid out in kitchen cabinets, menstruating women, and other silent spaces. Triangular amulets containing the four-letter name of God ( ‫ )יהוה‬were placed around the necks of child-bearing women to protect their babies from Lilith, a ravenous demon who strangled Jewish neonates in their sleep. According to one ancient Jewish myth, the destruction of the Tower of Babel was the genesis of demons and malevolent spirits, the beginning of spirits like Lilith. When the first language was shattered and the people were scattered across the face of the earth, some of those people experienced the trauma too deeply. The slaughter of that perfect and unified language, the word and world salad which that engenders, the

“wor(l)d

s a l a d ”

231

pain of cognitive dissonance – all of this hissed in the minds of these people and pushed them to the point of madness. The rupture of language – that is what led them to become evil spirits. It was due to a love for the Hebrew language that demons came into existence, and it was by using the Hebrew language that the Masters of the Name sought to repel them. In those days, it was believed that the letters of God’s name had the power to save lives, and that knowing how to manipulate H ­ ebrew letters, how to work with Hebrew words, meant knowing how to stave off disaster. In those days, it was understood that language is magical, that language is a matter of life and death. I miss those days. .‫ט‬ What to Do Upon Falling in Love with an Israeli in New York City 1. The night before you are scheduled to leave the city, sit down at your West 112th Street desk to write a love letter. 2. Think about all the experiences you shared over the past few months. Think about how you read Yona Wallach poems to each other one rainy morning on the floor of the Strand Bookstore. Think about the time you got to synagogue late on Shabbat morning, because you were busy making out in the Upper West Side. Think about the intertextuality of your conversations, how each thing you said to each other was layered with inadvertent allusions to poems, rabbinic myths, biblical stories, because you spoke in Hebrew and Hebrew always refers to all of these texts, even when you don’t want it to. Think about how when you kissed, it tasted like ‫ירושלים‬, like Jerusalem. 3. Get up. Pace the room. Peer down into West 112th Street. Consider smoking a cigarette, but think better of it. Sit down again. 4. Put pen to paper, and try to write in English in Hebrew in English and Hebrew

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5. Think about T.S. Eliot’s poems. Consider adding exhaustive notes that capture all of your allusions, that make them explicit, so that one day when this letter is published in The Early Diary, everyone will be able to appreciate its pathos. Everyone will become possessed. 6. Feel despair. ‫יִ‬ When I think about writing these days, I am sometimes still tempted to give up and give in to silence. The English language, with all of its abominable precision, never seems able to express what is most essential to me. It is not only the untranslatability of idiosyncratic words – words like ‫“( כביכול‬as it were”?) and like ‫“( דוקא‬specifically”? No, that’s not quite it) – but the untranslatability of the entire mode of thinking and being and loving that those words entail. One loves differently in Hebrew. One is always sadder, somehow, and more ancient. Writing in English, I have not yet found a way to express this ­intimate grammar. Whenever I try, I experience a strong sense of ­resistance, as the deepest things in me hiss: We refuse to live a life in translation, we refuse to live a transliterated life! This sense of resistance is something I carry, but it is no longer something that silences me. For centuries, Jewish exorcists used the letters of God’s name to banish and silence demons. They used language to banish those who were so in love with language, that when language broke, they broke, too. I want to reverse this paradigm, because I do not want to be a silent space, and because I do not want to leave love letters unwritten. As a writer, I am not sure how to effect this reversal, except to realize that if the rupture itself cannot be repaired, it can still be written. I do not have any answers, any solutions – only a commitment not to excise this part of myself, not to edit out this struggle, not to exorcise the demon. 2014

BIOGRAPHICAL NOTES

David Bezmozgis (b. 1973) was born in Riga, Latvia, and immigrated to Canada with his family in 1979. An award-winning writer and filmmaker, he is the author of two short story collections, Natasha and Other Stories (2004) and Immigrant City (2019), and two novels, The Free World (2011) and The Betrayers (2014). Bezmozgis’s s­tories have appeared in numerous publications, including Harpers, the New Yorker, and the Walrus. His books have been nominated for the Governor General’s Literary Award, the Scotiabank Giller Prize, and the Trillium Prize and have won the Toronto Book Award, the Vine Award for Canadian Jewish Literature, the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize, and the National Jewish Book Award (US). Victoria Day (2009), his first feature film, premiered at the Sundance Film Festival and won a Genie Award for Best Original Screenplay. In 2010, the New Yorker named him one of the twenty best fiction writers under the age of f­ orty. Bezmozgis lives in Toronto, where he currently directs the Humber School for Writers. Bob Bossin (b. 1946) was born and raised in Toronto. He is best known as the founding member of the acclaimed Canadian folk group, Stringband. As a musician, Bossin has recorded numerous albums

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and performed all over the world. Most recently, the music video for his song “Sulphur Passage,” directed by Nettie Wild, won seven ­international awards and helped in the fight to preserve the forest of Vancouver Island’s Clayoquot Sound. As a writer, Bossin has been published in both magazines and newspapers. His work was nominated for a National Magazine Award in 2003 and his short story “Latkes” won second prize in the Antigonish Review’s Sheldon Currie Fiction Contest in 2007. He is the author of Davy the Punk: A Story of Bookies, Toronto the Good, the Mob and My Dad (2014), which he adapted and performs nationwide as a one-man musical show. The volume received the Western Canada Jewish Book Award for Non-fiction. Bossin lives on Gabriola Island, British Columbia. Jacquie Buncel (b. 1960) was born and raised in Kingston, Ontario. She is the author of Turning the Corner at Dusk (2010), a poetry collection that explores her family history and her own experience as the child of Holocaust survivors. She has had poems and essays published in numerous journals, including the Amethyst Review, Kaleidoscope: An International Journal of Poetry, and Poetica Magazine: Reflections of Jewish Thought. Buncel lives in Toronto, where she is executive director of the Sunshine Centre for Seniors, a non-profit community-based organization that offers social, recreational, and health programs for seniors. Jason Camlot (b. 1967) was born and raised in Montreal. He is the ­author of four volumes of poetry: The Animal Library (2000), which was nominated for the A.M. Klein Prize for Poetry; Attention All Typewriters (2005); The Debaucher (2008), a finalist for the Expozine Alternative Press Award; and What the World Said (2013), a finalist for the ReLit Award. Camlot is also co-editor of Language Acts: Anglo Québec Poetry, 1976 to the 21st Century (2007), which was nominated for the Gabrielle Roy Prize. He is the editor of Punch Poetry, an ­imprint of DC Books. Camlot lives in Montreal, where he is the Concordia University Research Chair in Literature and Sound Studies.

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Bernice Eisenstein (b. 1949) was born and raised in Toronto, where she lives today. An illustrator and a writer, her artwork has been ­exhibited both in Canada and abroad and has been published widely in magazines and journals. Eisenstein has worked as a freelance editor and an occasional book reviewer for the Globe and Mail. She is the author of the graphic memoir I Was a Child of Holocaust Survivors (2006), which received the Canadian Jewish Book Award for Holocaust Literature and was a finalist for both the Borders Original Voices Award for Non-fiction and the Trillium Book Award. In 2010, under the ­aegis of the National Film Board of Canada, the memoir was ­adapted as an animated short film by Ann Marie Fleming and named one of the Toronto International Film Festival’s top 10 Canadian films of the year. Eisenstein collaborated with poet Anne Michaels to produce Correspondences (2013), providing twenty-six gouache portraits to ­accompany the book-length poem. The volume was short-listed for the Griffin Poetry Prize. Eisenstein is featured in the book Graphic Details: Jewish Women’s Confessional Comics in Essays and Interviews (2014). Cary Fagan (b. 1957) was born and raised in Toronto, where he lives and writes today. Fagan is the author of seven novels, including The Animal’s Waltz (1994), A Bird’s Eye (2013), and The Student (2019), and five short story collections, including The Doctor’s House and Other Fiction (2000), My Life Among the Apes (2012), and The Old World and Other Stories (2017). He is also an award-winning writer for children. In 2014 Fagan received the Vicky Metcalf Award for Literature for Young People for his body of work, which includes picture books and stories. Daniel Goodwin (b. 1970) was born and raised in Montreal. He holds a BA in Political Science from McGill University, a BEd from the University of New Brunswick, and an MA in English from Concordia University. He is the author of two novels, Sons and Fathers (2014) and The Art of Being Lewis (2019), and a volume of poetry, Catullus’ Soldiers (2015), which won the Vine Award for Canadian Jewish Literature.

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His poetry has appeared in the Antigonish Review, CV2, the Dalhousie Review, and the Literary Review of Canada. Goodwin lives in Ottawa, where he works in the energy industry. Naomi Guttman (b. 1960) was born and raised in Montreal. She holds a BFA from Concordia University, an MFA from Warren Wilson College, and an MA and a PhD in English from the University of Southern California. She is the author of three volumes of poetry: Reasons for Winter (1991), which won the A.M. Klein Prize for Poetry; Wet Apples, White Blood (2007), co-winner of the Adirondack Center for Writing’s Best Book of Poems; and The Banquet of Donny and Ari: Scenes from the Opera (2015), which received the Central New York Book Award for Poetry. Guttman lives in Clinton, New York, where she teaches English and creative writing at Hamilton College. Jessamyn Hope (b. 1973) was born and raised in Montreal and has lived in Israel. She earned an MFA in Creative Writing from Sarah Lawrence College and was the Susannah McCorkle Scholar in Fiction at the 2012 Sewanee Writers’ Conference. Her short fiction and essays have appeared in Colorado Review, Descant, Five Points, Ploughshares, and PRISM International. Safekeeping (2015), her debut novel, won the J.I. Segal Award for English Fiction. Hope lives in New York City. Lauren Kirshner (b. 1982) was born and raised in Toronto. Her work has appeared in numerous publications, including Chatelaine, Elle Canada, the Globe and Mail, and Quill and Quire. She has won the University of Toronto’s Hart House Poetry Contest (twice), the Arthur Irwin Award for Distinction in Journalism in 2005, and the Eden Mills Literary Festival Prize for short fiction. Where We Have to Go (2009), her debut novel, was a finalist for the Toronto Book Award. In 2009 she was named Toronto’s Best Emerging Author by NOW, the Toronto weekly magazine, and in 2011–12 was writer-in-residence at the County

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of Brant Public Library. Kirshner lives in Toronto, where she teaches creative writing at Ryerson University and runs Sister Writes, a creative writing program she founded for marginalized women. Carol Lipszyc (b. 1955) was born and raised in Toronto. She published People Express (2006), a literacy/English as a Second Language reader issued by Oxford University Press. Lipszyc is the author of Singing Me Home (2010), a volume of poetry; The Saviour Shoes and Other Stories (2014), a collection of short fiction; and editor of The Heart Is Improvisational: An Anthology in Poetic Form (2017). Her work has ­appeared in journals such as Canadian Woman Studies, Jewish Fiction.net, Midstream, Parchment: Contemporary Canadian Jewish Writing, and Room. Lipszyc taught English teacher education and writing at SUNY, Plattsburgh and now lives in Toronto. Isa Milman (b. 1949) was born in a displaced persons camp in Germany and, shortly thereafter, her family immigrated to the United States. In 1975, Milman moved to Canada. She received an MA in Rehabilitation Science from McGill University, where she would go on to teach ­occupational therapy for over ten years. Milman has ­published three collections of verse: Between the Doorposts (2004), Prairie Kaddish (2008), and Something Small to Carry Home (2012), each of which won the Canadian Jewish Book Award for Poetry. She lives in Victoria, where she is secretary of the Jewish Federation of Victoria and Vancouver Island and a partner at the Milman Sisters Institute, an organization that utilizes creativity as a means of rehabilitation. Elaine Kalman Naves (b. 1947) was born in Budapest, Hungary, and immigrated to Montreal with her family in 1959. She is a writer, journalist, and creative writing instructor. Naves has twice been the recipient of the Mavis Gallant Prize for Non-fiction for Putting Down Roots: Montreal’s Immigrant Writers (1998) and Shoshanna’s Story: A Mother,

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a Daughter, and the Shadows of History (2003). She was formerly the book columnist for the Montreal Gazette and currently conducts workshops in creative non-fiction and memoir writing for the Quebec Writers’ Federation. Naves lives in Montreal. Renee Norman (b. 1950) was born and raised in Calgary. She earned a PhD from the University of British Columbia. Her dissertation, “House of Mirrors: Performing Autobiograph(ically) in Language/Education,” received the Canadian Association for Curriculum Studies Distinguished Dissertation Award and was published as a book in 2001. Norman has published four volumes of poetry: True Confessions (2006), which won the Canadian Jewish Book Award for Poetry; Backhand Through the Mother (2007); Martha in the Mirror (2010); and Hearing Echoes (with Carl Leggo, 2016). Her poetry, short stories, and essays have appeared in numerous academic and literary journals, such as English Quarterly, FreeFall, and Prairie Journal. She lives in Coquitlam, British Columbia. Ruth Panofsky (b. 1958) was born and raised in Montreal. She has published three volumes of poetry: Lifeline (2001); Laike and Nahum: A Poem in Two Voices (2007), which won the Canadian Jewish Book Award for Poetry; and Radiant Shards: Hoda’s North End Poems (2020), which received a Hadassah-Brandeis Institute Research Award. She is the editor of The Collected Poems of Miriam Waddington (2014), the first critical edition of Waddington’s verse. The two-volume edition received the Canadian Jewish Literary Award in the category of Yiddish, the J.I. Segal Award in the category of Canadian Jewish Studies, and the Prose Award for Literature. She is also the editor of the literary journal Parchment: Contemporary Canadian Jewish Writing. Panofsky lives in Toronto, where she is Professor of English at Ryerson University. Alison Pick (b. 1975) was born in Toronto and raised in Kitchener, Ontario. Her work has appeared in a variety of publications, ­including

biographical notes

239

Air Canada’s in-flight magazine enRoute, the Globe and Mail, and the Walrus. Pick has published two volumes of poetry, Question and Answer (2003) and The Dream World (2008), and three novels, The Sweet Edge (2005), Far to Go (2010), which won the Canadian Jewish Book Award and was nominated for the Booker Prize, and Strangers with the Same Dream (2017). Her memoir, Between Gods (2014), won the Canadian Jewish Literary Award. She won the 2002 Bronwen Wallace Award for most promising Canadian writer under the age of thirty-five, the 2003 National Magazine Award for poetry, and the 2005 CBC Literary Award for poetry. Pick lives in Toronto and teaches creative writing at the Humber School for Writers and at the Sage Hill Writing Experience. David Rakoff (1964–2012) was born in Montreal, raised in Toronto, and moved to New York in 1982 to attend Columbia University. Rakoff was a writer, playwright, and actor whose essays appeared in publications such as GQ, the New York Times Magazine, Salon, and Slate. He was also a frequent contributor to the public radio program This American Life. Rakoff won the Lambda Literary Award for Humor for Fraud (2001) and Don’t Get Too Comfortable (2005), and the Thurber Prize for American Humor for Half Empty (2010). He starred in and adapted the screenplay for The New Tenants (2009), a Danish film that won the Academy Award for Best Live Action Short Film. Rakoff’s posthumous publication, the novel-in-verse Love, Dishonor, Marry, Die, Cherish, Perish (2013), was completed before he died in New York City. Norman Ravvin (b. 1963) was born and raised in Calgary. He has published four novels: Cafés des Westens (1991), which won the Alberta Culture and Multiculturalism New Fiction Award; Lola by Night (2003); The Joyful Child (2011); and The Girl Who Stole Everything (2019). His collection of short stories, Sex, Skyscrapers and Standard Yiddish (1997), won the Ontario Arts Council K.M. Hunter Emerging Artist Award.

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He is also the editor of Not Quite Mainstream: Canadian Jewish Short Stories (2002) and co-editor of The Canadian Jewish Studies Reader (2004). Ravvin is general editor of Hungry I Books, an imprint that focuses on Canadian Jewish writing. Ravvin lives in Montreal, where he is Professor of Religion and Cultures at Concordia University. Nancy Richler (1957–2018) was born and raised in Montreal. She earned a BA in History from Brandeis University and an MA in International Studies from the University of Denver. In 1988 she moved to Vancouver, where she wrote and published three novels: Throwaway Angels (1996), which won the Arthur Ellis Award for Best First Crime Novel; Your Mouth Is Lovely (2003), which won the Canadian Jewish Book Award and the Adei Wizo Award (Italy); and The Imposter Bride (2012). She also wrote short stories, which a­ ppeared in magazines and anthologies, including the New Quarterly, Prairie Fire, Room, and the Journey Prize Anthology. Richler died in Vancouver. Sigal Samuel (b. 1986) was born and raised in Montreal. She is a playwright, novelist, and journalist whose work has appeared in numerous publications, including the Daily Beast, Descant, Event, Prairie Fire, Room, and the Walrus. Samuel completed a BA in Philosophy at McGill University and an MFA in Creative Writing at the University of British Columbia. She has written six plays, which have been performed in both Canada and the United States. Her debut novel, The Mystics of Mile End (2015), won the Canadian Jewish Literary Award, the Alberta Book Publishing Award for Trade Fiction Book of the Year, and was nominated for the International Dublin Literary Award. Samuel lives in Washington, DC, and is currently a staff writer at Vox. Jacob Scheier (b. 1980) was born and raised in Toronto. Scheier’s writing has appeared in numerous publications, including Descant, Geist, and Rattle, and he is a regular contributor to NOW, the Toronto weekly

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magazine. When he received a Governor General’s Literary Award for his debut collection, More to Keep Us Warm (2007), Scheier became one of the youngest poets ever to do so. His second collection of poetry, Letter from Brooklyn, was published in 2013. The Toronto Star released his 2013 memoir, My Never Ending Acid Trip: Why I Hallucinate Years After Taking LSD, as an e-book. Scheier lives in Toronto, where he facilitates workshops on writing about grief. Mireille Silcoff (b. 1973) was born and raised in Montreal. She is the author of the short story collection Chez l’arabe (2014), which was hailed as one of the best books of the year by CBC Books, the Globe and Mail, the Montreal Gazette, and the Walrus. The volume received the Canadian Jewish Literary Award, was a runner-up for the Danuta Gleed Literary Award, and was long-listed for the Frank O’Connor International Short Story Award. Silcoff is also a journalist. She was a columnist for the National Post, a contributor to the New York Times Magazine, and the founding editor of the now defunct New York– based Jewish literary magazine Guilt and Pleasure. Silcoff lives in Montreal. Adam Sol (b. 1969) was born in New York and raised in Connecticut. He is the author of four volumes of poetry: Jonah’s Promise (2000); Crowd of Sounds (2003), which won the Trillium Book Award; Jeremiah, Ohio (2008); and Complicity (2015). He is also the author of How a Poem Moves: A Field Guide for Readers of Poetry (2019). Sol has published ­fiction, essays, and reviews in publications such as the Globe and Mail, Joyland Magazine, Lemon Hound, and the Walrus. He lives in Toronto, where he is the Coordinator of the Creative Expression and Society Program at Victoria College in the University of Toronto. Ayelet Tsabari (b. 1973) was born and raised in Israel. In 1998, she moved to Vancouver to study film and photography at Capilano

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University. She is also a graduate of Simon Fraser University’s Writer’s Studio and the University of Guelph’s MFA Program in Creative Writing. Her short story collection, The Best Place on Earth (2013), won the Sami Rohr Prize for Jewish Literature (US). Her memoir, The Art of Leaving (2019), won the Canadian Jewish Literary Award. Tsabari has won a National Magazine Award, a Western Magazine Award, Event’s Non-fiction Contest (twice), and the New Quarterly’s in-house Edna Staebler Award. In 2013, CBC Books named her one of ten Canadian writers to watch. Tsabari lives in Tel Aviv and teaches creative writing at Tel Aviv University and the University of King’s College.

PERMISSIONS David Bezmozgis, “An Animal to the Memory” reprinted from Natasha and Other Stories (Nada Films, 2004) with the permission of HarperCollins Publishers Ltd. and the author. Bob Bossin, “Sweet Lilies’ Advice” reprinted from Davy the Punk (Porcupine’s Quill, 2014) with the permission of Porcupine’s Quill and the author. Jacquie Buncel, “Children of Holocaust Survivors”; “In the Closet with My Relatives on the French Riviera” reprinted from Turning the Corner at Dusk (Wolsak and Wynn, 2010) with the permission of Wolsak and Wynn and the author. Jason Camlot, “Distinctions”; “Etrog” reprinted from What the World Said (Mansfield Press, 2013) with the permission of Mansfield Press and the author. Bernice Eisenstein, “Yiddish Holds the World” reprinted from I Was a Child of Holocaust Survivors (McClelland and Stewart, 2006) with the permission of Penguin Random House Canada Ltd. and the author. Cary Fagan, “Nora by the Sea” (Shaw Street Press, 1988) reprinted with the permission of the author. Daniel Goodwin, “Heritage”; “Isaac” reprinted from Catullus’ Soldiers (Cormorant Books, 2015) with the permission of Cormorant Books and the author.

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Naomi Guttman, “Lot’s Wife”; “Prayer” ­reprinted from Wet Apples, White Blood (McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2007) with the permission of McGillQueen’s University Press and the author. Jessamyn Hope, “The Reverse” reprinted from PRISM International 52.4 (Summer 2014) with the permission of the author. Lauren Kirshner, “Marilyn Monroe Stuttered” reprinted from Mess: The Hospital Anthology (Tightrope Books, 2013) with the permission of the author. Carol Lipszyc, “Feather Boy” reprinted from The Saviour Shoes and Other Stories (Inanna Publications, 2014) with the permission of the author. Isa Milman, “A Daughter Recognizes a Father Who Spoke”; “Yiddish in North America” reprinted from Prairie Kaddish (Coteau Books, 2008) with the permission of Coteau Books and the author. Elaine Kalman Naves, “Silent Witness” reprinted from the Walrus (28 May 2015) with the permission of the author. Renee Norman, “Lottery” reprinted from True Confessions (Inanna Publications, 2005) with the permission of the author. Renee Norman, “Prayers for the Almost Dead” reprinted from Backhand Through the Mother (Inanna Publications, 2007) with the permission of the author. Ruth Panofsky, “Immigrant”; “Pearl” reprinted from Lifeline (Guernica Editions, 2001) with the permission of Guernica Editions and the author. Alison Pick, excerpt from Between Gods: A Memoir (Anchor Canada/ Doubleday Canada, 2014) reprinted with the permission of Penguin Random House Canada Ltd. and the author. David Rakoff, “Arise, Ye Wretched of the Earth” reprinted from Fraud (Doubleday, 2001) with the permission of Doubleday, an imprint of the Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, a d ­ ivision of Penguin Random House LLC and the kind permission of literary executor Ruth Rakoff. Norman Ravvin, “Glendale, North of Alhambra, East of Burbank” reprinted from Sex, Skyscrapers, and Standard Yiddish (Paperplates Books, 1997) with the permission of the author.

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Nancy Richler, “Life’s Promise” reprinted from Fireweed 35 (Spring 1992) with the kind permission of literary executor Vicki Trerise. Sigal Samuel, “Wor(l)d Salad: A Writer’s Love Letter to the Hebrew Language” reprinted from Parchment 16 (2014) with the permission of the author. Jacob Scheier, “The Language of Our People” reprinted from More to Keep Us Warm (ECW Press, 2007) with the permission of ECW Press and the author. Jacob Scheier, “My Mother Dies in Reverse” reprinted from Letter from Brooklyn (ECW Press, 2013) with the permission of ECW Press and the author. Mireille Silcoff, “Shalom Israel!” reprinted from Chez L’arabe (House of Anansi Press Inc., 2014) with the permission of House of Anansi Press and the author. Adam Sol, “Simcha” reprinted from Jonah’s Promise (Mid-List Press, 2000) with the permission of the author. Adam Sol, “Taking Down the Sukkah” reprinted from Crowd of Sounds (House of Anansi Press Inc., 2003) with the permission of House of Anansi Press and the author. Ayelet Tsabari, “Brit Milah” reprinted from The Best Place on Earth (Harper Collins Publishers Ltd., 2013) with the ­permission of HarperCollins Publishers Ltd. and the author.