ON IMPULSE, I MAKE AN APPOINTMENT to meet Rabbi Klein again in person. I bike up Bathurst Street: it’s under heavy construction, the street clogged with orange pylons and honking SUVs, their shiny flanks coated in dust. I’ve driven past her synagogue before but have never been inside. The front hall is twice the size of the church I attended as a girl, brightly lit and hung with modern art. There’s a tastefully placed kiosk selling pricey Judaica, and a front desk manned by a uniformed security guard. He checks my purse, for what I can’t imagine, then politely directs me up a wide spiral staircase lined with framed portraits of all the synagogue’s earlier rabbis. The secretary shows me in.
“Have a seat,” Rabbi Klein says.
I sit down in a red armchair and start to cry right away.
“It’s not you—it’s me,” she says. “I have this effect on people.”
I have forgotten how gorgeous Rabbi Klein is. She has the kind of beauty that is hard to nail down: it’s not just her long curls, or her dimples or creamy skin, but the way she holds herself, the openness in her face. Her aura is both innocent and refined.
“So,” she says. “Catch me up.”
I lean back in the armchair and start talking. I tell Rabbi Klein about the Doing Jewish class, how sad I feel reading the textbook. I tell her about my conversation with my father, about the Jews he feels most comfortable with in the world. I also find myself telling her about meeting Eli, and the validation he gave me that what I’m experiencing is meaningful.
“I’m just reading his book,” the rabbi says.
I nod. “Judaism used to be invisible to me,” I say. “Now it’s everywhere.”
We talk for a while about the legacy of denial, about how the grief I am feeling isn’t just my own but my father’s and grandparents’, as well. About how a secret, passed down the generations, grows until it’s impossible to hold. About the sudden desire I have to fix the past, to undo the wrong that’s been done.
“I think I might want to convert,” I hear myself say.
I pause. The word conversion makes me think of thunderbolts, of door-to-door salesmen peddling salvation and of women with their eyes rolled back in their heads. I hesitate. “At least, I’d like to learn more about my options.”
From somewhere down the hall, someone knocks on a door. We hear it open, then slam closed.
The rabbi gathers her dark curls in a fistful at the side of her neck. “Refresh me,” she says. “Do you have a husband?”
“A fiancé.”
“And he’s Jewish? Not Jewish?”
A little frown wrinkles her forehead. “How does he feel about all this?”
“He’s supportive,” I say. Which Degan is. Absolutely.
“He wants me to be happy,” I say. Which he does.
The rabbi smiles a Botticelli smile. “He sounds wonderful.”
“So anyway,” I continue, “the people in my Doing Jewish class are all signed up for the Jewish Information Course this winter. I was thinking I might like to take it. That it might clarify things, shed some light. I wanted to ask—” I swallow, my throat all at once dry. “—I wanted to ask if you’d sponsor me.”
I’m surprised to hear myself say this. The JIC is a long and exhaustive class, and I’ve reached the hardest part in the novel I’m writing, the place where I really need to focus. I have no extra time at the end of my days, not to mention energy. But something else has taken over, an instinctual part of me I know to defer to, so I submit and wait for the rabbi’s reply.
“Yes,” she says finally. “I’d be happy to sponsor you. And Degan.”
“And Degan?”
“He’d also have to take the class.”
“Okay,” I say uncertainly. Still, I’m relieved. I’ve been warned that getting a rabbi on board is difficult, that it’s their job to push you away as a test of your sincerity, so I’m especially chuffed. What was all the fuss about?
“The class starts in January,” she says. “We’re already halfway through the fall. But I like you. And you’re obviously sincere.”
Good. Fantastic.
But I see there’s something else.
“They probably haven’t told you this in your Doing Jewish class,” she says.
“No beit din,” she starts to say but stops again, realizing I don’t know the term. “Beit din—literally ‘house of judgment.’ It’s a Jewish court. A panel of rabbis.”
I nod.
She continues. “No beit din here in Toronto would agree to create an intermarriage.”
I exhale, relieved. “I’m not married,” I remind her.
“No. But you will be.”
I pause, not understanding.
“We don’t want Judaism to be a wedge between you and your fiancé,” she says.
I am silent. How would it be a wedge between us?
“Degan is …” I pause. Didn’t I already say this? I repeat it, just in case. “Degan is incredibly supportive.”
“Is he interested in raising a Jewish family?” the rabbi asks.
I stare blankly. We don’t even have a date for our wedding. Suddenly just the thought of a wedding is scary. But Rabbi Klein persists. “Is he interested in being Jewish?”
This is like asking if our postman is interested in becoming the king of England. I continue to stare blankly, but no more help is forthcoming. And then it dawns on me. Slowly. She makes me say it myself. “I can’t convert unless Degan does, too?”
“Right,” Rabbi Klein says, relieved I have finally figured it out. “We want to make sure you are on the same path. Together.”
And what if we aren’t? I wonder.
I leave the rabbi’s office in a daze. Biking down Bathurst Street, I almost get run over by a delivery truck; it whizzes past me, horn blaring. I feel there has been a mistake, that I didn’t make myself clear. My family died in Auschwitz. My father is Jewish. Frankly, I am surprised that I can’t just call the religion my own and have that be the end of it.
Degan also receives the news with incredulity. “What’s she saying? You’re not good enough by yourself?”
“I guess.”
“What does she—” he begins. “What’s her name again?”
“Rabbi Klein. Rachel.”
“It sounds to me like Rachel is saying you’re not good enough for them.” He scratches his beard. “No. They’re saying I’m not good enough because I’m Christian.” He shakes his head. “It’s ridiculous.”
“The religion is very family based,” I say.
“And your family died in Auschwitz.”
“They were Jewish enough for the Nazis,” I agree.
“And how would it hurt them? To have you?”
I shrug. Mentally I do the math: right now, in our household, there are two people. And no Jews. If we have a baby, that baby will not be Jewish.
If I alone could convert, there would be one Jew in our home. In that scenario, if Degan and I have a baby, the baby will be Jewish. Two Jews where before there were none. Two sincere Jews, in the rabbi’s own words.
It’s hard for me to see the harm done.
I do a bit of reading online. The Reform Movement’s 1983 Resolution on Patrilineal Descent is clear. It allows for the child of a Jewish father and non-Jewish mother—a child like me—to be accepted “as Jewish without a formal conversion, if he or she attends a Jewish school and follows a course of studies leading to Confirmation. Such procedure is regarded as sufficient evidence that the parents and the child herself intend that she shall live as a Jew.”
In other words, such a child is taken at her word. Couldn’t the same concept hold for an adult who decides to apply herself?
The document refers to the Reform Jewish community of North America but in practical terms seems to apply only in the United States. In Toronto, apparently, the maternal line is all that matters.
I do some more digging and discover that in biblical times Judaism was patrilineal: any child sired by Abraham (who had multiple wives and concubines) was an Israelite. The change came in the rabbinic period, and its impetus was the need to be certain of parenthood. You can never be sure who fathered a child: a woman might lie or might not be certain. Whereas maternity is obvious and indisputable. It’s a sexist notion, but it isn’t a surprise to me. What is a surprise is that my own religious identity is suddenly tied up with Degan’s. Like runners in a three-legged race, we are bound together by someone else’s rules. My fate will be his. Or his will be mine.
I sit in Charlotte’s office with tears running down my cheeks. I unfold the crinkled piece of foolscap on which I have written a dream about my great-grandmother Marianne. As per Charlotte’s instruction, I’ve included as much detail as possible. In the dream I am in a cattle car, walking backward toward my great-grandmother, but when she finally meets my gaze, she wears my own face. It’s not that she looks like me; she is me.
I feel like a fourth grader reciting an awkward, exaggerated composition. The dream is full of all the things I try so hard to avoid in my writing: a hackneyed setting (an empty train!), obvious metaphors (my face where hers should be!). Still, as I read, the atmosphere in the room changes. Charlotte’s chair rocks. The air is like soup, or some kind of weird clingy water. I strain to keep my mouth at the surface. I sense that the density, the deadness that threatens to pull me under, is related to the dream and to my history. “What does it mean to you?” Charlotte asks. “That your great-grandmother looked at you with your own face?”
“Isn’t it obvious?”
Still I resist saying it. The concept of the intergenerational transmission of trauma seems so fantastical, like saying that Marianne tripped on her shoelace seventy years ago and my ankle is sprained as a result. My happy life, my privilege: how could things that happened so long ago, to people I never knew, affect me?
Layers of fog close in when I try to engage the details of my history. I feel physiologically unable to remember the structure of our felled family tree, the many severed branches, who was related to whom and in what way. Perhaps it’s a kind of defensive amnesia, a psychic version of a runner’s cramp.
“I did some reading this week,” I tell Charlotte. “About a therapist who works with second- and third-generation survivors. Their marriages crumble, their children are troubled. But they fail to see how their struggles are related to their parents’ Holocaust experiences.”
“Sound familiar?” Charlotte asks.
My psyche bucks and heaves.
This has nothing to do with me.
This has everything to do with me.
Charlotte: Rock, rock, rock.
I think about the traits I have that I am almost unconscious of, traits that nonetheless govern my daily life. For example, last week there was a plastic bag with old apple slices and almond butter in the fridge. The almond butter was smeared on the inside of the bag, and extracting it would have been a hassle and made a mess. I threw the whole thing out. But the apples were good. If not good, then edible. I thought about the calories, about how long they could keep a body going. Even if the apples were rotten. How it would be possible to extract every ounce of almond butter from the bag. An apple filled with worms. It could be eaten. Would have been eaten. Devoured.
I threw it out, but I thought of it for hours.
Bread was Granny’s downfall. She could never say no to dinner rolls, to the crusty baguette on the cutting board.
When she ate a chicken breast, nothing remained. The bones on her plate so light as to barely exist, pale and nearly weightless, picked clean.