I SPEND THE FOLLOWING MORNING at my desk, researching therapists. I’ve come to recognize the signs that I’m going to need one. I’ve left it later than I should have, though, and the Googling, the calling and speaking to candidates, the locating of their various practices on a map of the enormous city takes a lot of energy. Still, I am determined to find the right person. Somebody—as Dad would say—good. There is a woman named Eileen who lives close to our new apartment, but my psyche demands something even more subterranean, and I settle eventually on Charlotte, whose office I get to by subway, taking a long, steep escalator down, down, into the series of tunnels that run beneath the city, before emerging again, north, in the sunshine.
Charlotte is a proper British lady of indeterminate age, with a pin skewering the bun on the back of her head and stockings under her sandals. Her office is decked out in full Jungian regalia, with a sand table and a mandala on the wall. She sits in a rocking chair; where Ben would nod or murmur, Charlotte rocks.
Me: “I feel so awful.”
Her: Rock, rock.
Me: “I can hardly get out of bed in the morning.”
Her: More rocking.
She asks me what else is going on in my life. I tell her about our recent move, about my newfound attraction to Judaism. Unlike Ben, she alights on my Holocaust history immediately, questioning me about it in detail. “Your relatives died in Auschwitz?”
I nod.
“Is there a way you remember them in your family? With a yahrzeit, maybe?”
“With a … pardon?”
She explains about the memorial candle lit on the anniversary of a death. I shake my head: no.
“Why do you think you’re so suddenly drawn to Judaism?”
I tell her how I identify with Dad’s side of the family. I’ve always been a Pick. I do share some of my mother’s qualities: her particular brand of remoteness, her fixation with maintaining a good appearance. I love, as she does, to go to an early movie or crawl into bed in the evening and read. But my personality traits are all from my father. I’m dramatic by nature, and don’t care much what people think of me. Prone to bursts of vigorous activity followed by long inert spells of brooding. If you put me beside my Martin cousins, nobody would think we were related; whereas my Pick cousins could be my sisters.
This Pick resemblance goes back several generations. We four granddaughters are sturdy brunettes with an uncanny likeness to our great-grandmother Marianne, the one who was killed in Auschwitz.
I say to Charlotte, “I wonder what else I inherited from her besides looks.”
The fifty-minute hour flies past. I leave with instructions to pay attention to something Charlotte calls “the still-small voice within.” Close attention. And I am to sleep with a notebook beside my bed, and to write down my dreams, in as much detail as possible, as soon as I wake up in the morning.
That night I dream of Dad’s dog Moushka, “little fly” in Czech. She has been skinned, all her fur removed. She whimpers in pain. Dad is holding her. The vet stands above her, about to end the suffering, his long needle poised.
The following Tuesday, I go back to my hometown to present a writing award I have judged for local high school students. My father takes one look at me and sees I am depressed.
“When did it start?” he asks.
I shrug helplessly. “I’m not sure.” I falter. “I’m taking this course. About Judaism,” I say. Tears start to slide down my cheeks.
“Oh, sweetie,” Dad says. “I’m sorry.”
We are standing in the back hall. He has just come in from walking the dog; he’s wearing a fluorescent orange lumberjack coat meant for hunting season. He has not bothered to do up his boots, and the tongues loll heavily forward.
“It’s only an introduction,” I say. “The basics. But I seem to be having a strong reaction to it.”
“I can see that,” he says. “I can’t say I understand it, but I see it.”
“I know it’s not logical.”
“Here!” he calls to the dog. “Lie down beddie!”
“This might sound weird,” I say, “but it feels genetic. Like my body is remembering the loss of my tribe.”
I am thinking of Eli, the kind of instant recognition I felt when we met. Of my sudden desire to observe Shabbat with someone who has grown up doing so. Can these reactions be a biological imperative? Something in my genes suddenly asserting itself?
Dad says, “It’s funny, but I think I know what you mean.”
“How so?”
He lists the people he’s most comfortable with in the world: his cousins and several friends from Czechoslovakia. “They’re all Czech, so I thought that was why I felt close to them. Hearing you talk makes me wonder, though.” He pauses. “They’re Czech, but they’re also Jewish.”
I bite my lip, my face wet with tears.
“Do you remember anything?” I ask. “About your parents practising?”
“They didn’t practise,” Dad says. “That’s the point.”
I nod at the well-worn line.
“But my father’s mother …”
“Ruzenka?”
Dad nods. He squints, concentrating. I can see he wants to please me, wants to offer up a detail. Any detail.
“I think she used to come for dinner on the High Holidays. And we would eat … latkes?”
“Latkes are for Hanukkah.”
Dad shrugs. “I’m sorry, sweetie. They were just trying to forget it.”
He lines his boots up neatly, turns toward the kitchen. He pauses for a second, then looks back at me, his face suddenly bright. “I did hear a story about my father,” he says.
“Oh?”
“Before the war, when the political tide was turning, lots of Czech Jews were converting to Catholicism. Dad apparently scorned this. He said—get this—he said that he wouldn’t convert to Christianity if he was the last Jew on earth.”
Dad laughs at the irony. His father did convert, essentially, and spent the rest of his life celebrating Christmas and Easter. Still, my eyes widen at this revelation. There was a time when my grandfather vowed he would never renounce his faith?
To hear this second side of the story is like spotting a small light flickering far out at sea.
Someone in my family, at some point, cared deeply about being Jewish.
I have only a handful of memories of my grandfather. We called him Gumper, after my eldest cousin’s first attempt at “Grandpa.” I remember him waltzing with Granny beside their swimming pool in Quebec. He wore high rubber boots and work pants, but I could see, even then, that he knew how to lead a lady, just the right amount of pressure on Granny’s lower back to move her where he wanted her to go.
And Granny wasn’t an easy lady to lead.
The morning Gumper died, I wet my bed. I was ten years old, and I remember the surprise, the intense shame as I sniffed around in my sheets and realized what had happened. I bundled up the urine-soaked bedding and tiptoed in to tell my mother. It was very early, before dawn, and I was confused by the lamp already lit in my parents’ bedroom. Dad was on the phone, in his green plaid flannel pyjamas, his face slack. “I’ll be on the next flight,” I heard him say.
“Where are you—” I started to ask loudly, but my mother shushed me. “He’s gone,” she said.
“Gumper.”
“Gone? Where did he go?”
“He died, sweetie.”
And just like that, the shame of the peed bed disappeared, eclipsed by something entirely adult, the implications of which I didn’t understand.
Gumper was a sportsman who loved fly-fishing and hunting: we have silent video footage of him on safari in Africa, dressed in khakis, his motions jerky from the old-fashioned camera as he lifts his fist in a cheer. He also loved mushrooming, that quintessentially Slavic pursuit. At camp one summer I made him a toadstool out of clay, glazed it and brought it home for him in my trunk. I remember the pride on his face, and the pleasure.
Gumper was passionate, and wildly successful. The grandson of an itinerant merchant, by the time he came to Canada he was so distinguished that the local newspaper ran a headline about him: “Jan Pick, millionaire manufacturer of Prague, will establish a factory in Sherbrooke.” His wealth and his smarts got Granny and him out of Nazi-occupied Czechoslovakia. They escaped to France, then to England, and finally on to Canada. On the day of their arrival in Sherbrooke, the mayor assembled a welcome party to greet them at the station. But Gumper was too busy staring out the window of the train, looking for exotic Canadian wildlife, plotting his next hunting expedition. They missed the stop entirely and sped past in the blackness, on to the bright metropolis of Montreal.
Three years later—back in Sherbrooke—my father was born.
In the Holocaust’s aftermath, babies were often given the names of relatives who had perished. Granny and Gumper had lost almost everyone, but they called Dad Thomas, after Thomas Masaryk, the first president of Czechoslovakia, their beloved and forsaken homeland.