THE PLANE DEPOSITS ME, like a wadded-up tissue, at the airport in Toronto. I’ve barely slept all week, my eyes puffed up and bleary from crying. I catch a cab downtown and hurry to my appointment with the woman who is sewing my wedding dress. She gets down on one knee to measure me, as though she is the one proposing. “Who are you marrying?” she asks, speaking around a mouthful of pins.
I can barely remember Degan’s name.
On my finger is my grandmother’s wedding ring, engraved with my grandfather’s name and the month and day they were married in 1936.
After the fitting, I lug my suitcase to my hotel. I fall into a heavy slumber and dream of train stations, missed connections. When I wake, the sun is just starting to set. I’m supposed to be at the Griffin Poetry Prize gala, the literary event of the season, by 7:00. It’s 6:45.
I throw on my little black dress, lipstick and concealer—a futile attempt to hide the evidence of my tears.
My taxi whisks me south to an enormous warehouse in the heart of the Distillery District. Inside, the building is gussied up to evoke a romantic Tuscan street fair, bright baubles and streamers hanging from the ceiling, crepe paper butterflies hovering over the tables. I’m handed a glass of wine at the door, which I down in one swallow. The room is wall-to-wall bodies, a who’s who of the literary scene.
I head for the bar.
Mark Blume is ahead of me in line, a writer I know casually among a sea of writers. Curly brown hair, a blue silk necktie. We say our hellos. “You’re in town now?” he asks.
“We’re moving back to Toronto.”
“You’re leaving Newfoundland?”
“Yes.”
“Where’s Degan?”
“He’s coming next week.”
And then, for some reason, I tell him, “I’m wondering about the Jewish …” I pause, searching for the right word. “The community. Here in Toronto.”
He looks at me as if I’m drunk—and it’s true: I haven’t eaten and the single glass of wine has gone straight to my head. It’s too late to take the question back, though. I relieve the barmaid of a tall frosted glass and lean my elbows on the bar.
He hesitates. “I wish I could help you. But I don’t really …” He hesitates again. “I don’t really do anything Jewish.”
Mark is a funny man who likes to hold forth with a stiff drink in his hand. He wants to holler while cleavage bumps against the limbo pole, not to discuss theology. I hiccup softly into the back of my hand. He looks at me more closely. “But I know who you should talk to,” he says.
We elbow our way through the tangle of guests to an enormous chocolate fountain. Among the writers dunking their strawberries is a poet Mark introduces as Sol Jalon. I know next to nothing about him: not that he’s Jewish, certainly not what his wife does as a living. Later in the year, when I learn about bashert, the Hebrew word for fate, this moment is what I will think back to. Being just broken enough to spill my question to a near stranger, who takes me by the arm, heavy and reeling, and introduces me to Sol. Who in turn introduces me to his wife.
A rabbi? Her?
Rachel Klein has dimples and lovely dark curls. She’s in her early thirties, like me, or maybe a few years older. She looks like the popular girl in my cabin at summer camp, like a kid I might have gone to ski school with or invited over for slumber parties on the weekend.
The revelry has escalated into a din over which conversation can’t be heard, so we push our way outside to the booze-soaked pavement, where the glamorous faction is smoking. Don McKay, one of the prize-nominated poets, is being interviewed by the press. There are flashbulbs, smoke rings, lots of little black dresses. But the rabbi’s attention is on me.
She says, “Tell me everything.”
I want to die, I think. I’m tired of being alive.
But I know this is not what Rabbi Klein is asking.
“I grew up not knowing I’m Jewish.” I hesitate. “Half Jewish.”
I fiddle with Granny’s wedding ring, spinning it on my finger.
Rachel beams at me, her focus undivided, and I force myself to keep talking. “My grandparents escaped Czechoslovakia in 1939. They bribed a Nazi for visas, came to Canada and renounced their Judaism. They spent their lives posing as Christians—going to church instead of synagogue, eating plum pudding at Christmas instead of matzah at Passover.”
Rachel sighs. Quietly, but I hear it. “And you grew up knowing nothing about it?”
“As a kid I was forbidden from discussing it. But now I’m going back and asking questions.”
“Why now?”
“I’m writing a novel.”
She squints at me. “And?”
Already she can read me. Already she sees there’s something else.
“I get … depressed,” I tell her. I don’t know how else to say what has recently made itself clear to me: that the ancestors lined up behind me, the ones my family pretended had never existed, the ones who died in the gas chambers, are also the ones pulling me into my darkness.
Rachel peers at me. “What are you thinking now?”
I take a deep breath and exhale slowly.
“Secrets cause such pain,” I say finally.
“Yes.” Rachel smiles. “But here you are, telling me about it. So it’s not a secret anymore.”
“That’s true,” I concede.
“You’re feeling a pull? Toward Judaism?”
I nod.
She beams at me. “What a happy story.”