GRANNY AND GUMPER settled in Sherbrooke and summered in nearby North Hatley, an affluent hamlet populated in July and August by cottagers from Montreal and the American South. Granny and Gumper would eventually build their own house there and live in North Hatley permanently, but in the summer of 1945 they began by renting a cottage—belonging, as fate would have it, to the family of famed literary agent Andrew “the Jackal” Wylie. The cottage is still there; its shuttered windows, its big colonial wraparound porch overlooking Lake Massawippi. This is where Granny was sitting, her glass of rye beside her, when the telephone rang one lovely July afternoon. Sailboats dotted the water below her. The war was over. Gumper had returned to Europe to see what he could find out. He was calling from across the ocean to report on his findings.
We don’t know what words were spoken, what information exchanged, only that after Granny hung up, the phone rang again. It was Miss Cinnamon, the county operator. She was breathless. “Mrs. Pick, Mrs. Pick. Was it okay?”
It was the first transatlantic phone call she had ever placed.
As I continue writing my novel, Dad finds a cache of letters from Gumper addressed to Granny in Canada during this time. The letters are in Czech. Dad sends them off to the translator and they come back one at a time. In our family, we collectively hold our breath. We are all amazed by what Lucy calls Gumper’s “schmaltzy-ness,” the way he dotes on Granny. “I look at your photo every night,” he writes, “and talk to it when I first wake up in the morning.”
I add this line to my novel, ascribing it to a secondary character.
Partway through the correspondence is a document titled Report from England. Under the heading “Conditions in Czechoslovakia,” sandwiched between sentences about the efficiency of the postal service and the equal efficiency of the trains, is the blunt sentence “Unfortunately there is no trace of the Bauers and we must assume they are no longer alive.”
“The Bauers” are Oskar and Marianne. Granny’s parents.
“No longer alive” sounds so much safer than “dead.” So much safer than “murdered.”
Even Dad is shocked by Gumper’s curtness. “How could he have referred to Granny’s parents’ murder in such abstract terms?”
We are afforded a glimpse sixty years back in time, to the early days of the family strategy: Minimize. Deny.
Freud’s seminal essay “On Mourning and Melancholia” considered the difference between the two states. In mourning, he suggests, a loss is felt consciously, keenly, whereas in some cases of melancholia, a loss has been experienced, but the analyst cannot see clearly what it was. Freud supposes that the patient, too, while beset by longing and sadness, cannot consciously perceive what it is he has lost.
In our family we didn’t even try.
It’s possible, of course, that Granny’s mourning process was completed years before my birth. Possible that I’m surmising, speculating about something I cannot know. My reluctance rears its head, my fear of saying the wrong thing, of saying anything at all. In this area of interpreting my family history I possess a marked lack of confidence, an uncharacteristic undermining of my own observations, so it pains me to say what appears quite obvious: that no grief process occurred; that instead of mourning there was an attempt to halt the unbearable trauma in its tracks; that the denial of Judaism was not just a tactic to adapt to the New World, with its antisemitism, but to erase the existence of the pain itself.
When I learned our family secret—first via Auntie Sheila’s words over my head and later from Jordan on the playground—I was full of questions. Over and over I asked Dad how my grandparents could have done what they did; how, after what they’d gone through, they could have denied who they were. And I was told, over and over, that their denial of Judaism was a forward-thinking decision, one meant to buffer against future eventualities. If my grandparents weren’t Jewish, they could join the clubs they wanted to join, could socialize however they desired. Their children would be protected against prejudice both small and monumental.
Yet I see the decision not just as forward-thinking but as reactionary. If you weren’t Jewish, Jewish history did not apply to you. If you weren’t Jewish, there was nothing to mourn.
After reading Granny and Gumper’s correspondence, I insert a series of letters into Far to Go. The relationship of these fictional letters to the real letters from my family’s history is ambiguous, in the way that the relationship between a writer and the world she creates always is. The letters are written between various characters; major, minor, offstage.
A writer has to understand her characters deeply in order to make them come alive. A character is a splinter off the self, sure. A shard of the author’s self, lived or unlived, repressed or desired or disdained. Still, a character is a fiction, a fabrication: she grants me the chance to avoid speaking in the first person. Characters exist in the symbolic realm, which, it does not escape me, is also the realm in which my family lived, their lives not so different from those in fiction or the lives of actors in a play. Acted with authenticity and enthusiasm, a bang-up performance, but a performance nonetheless.
It occurs to me that this performance, and the secret it protected, has been a boon to my writing. I work at my book as though taking dictation, the novel’s symbols appearing on the page as though dug up like prehistoric weapons perfectly preserved in mud and clay. Rail as I might against my grandparents’ silence, there is something about it that helps me now, that lets the well-trod, trampled terrain of the Holocaust feel fresh. “Make it new” is Ezra Pound’s famous dictum—antisemite that he was—and I am able to make it new precisely because it is new. Not to anyone else, but to me.