ON THURSDAY AFTERNOON I have an appointment with the woman who is making my wedding dress. The skirt still needs hemming, and adjustments made for the fact that my right breast turns out to be larger than my left. She tries to reassure me this is normal; I’m unconvinced. But out of the pile of silk and thread and lace, something beautiful is beginning to emerge.
Later, Dad calls to say they are talking about my poetry book on the radio. Three panellists, a whole half-hour show dedicated to The Dream World. “They’re referring to you as ‘Pick,’ ” he says, guffawing.
His voice goes serious. “Granny would have been so proud,” he says.
Granny loved nothing more than being seen, being known to the world, and I think how she would have phoned everyone she knew. We have a video of Dad and Lucy interviewing her. “Nobody ever calls me,” Granny huffs, fluffing her hair, while the phone rings off the hook in the background.
The interview is entirely different from Vera’s, focusing on the logistics of escape rather than the details of imprisonment. Granny gossips about affairs, infidelity, and chastises my grown father like he’s a child: “Your shoes are always dirty. Every time you’re here I have to use the …” She flicks her manicured fingers at the carpet, unwilling to say the words vacuum cleaner.
“I know,” Dad apologizes off-camera. “I was on the island yesterday.” He’s referring to a piece of land Gumper owned for pheasant shooting.
“It’s full of mud there. Dreadful! Look at it.”
“Okay, okay, okay,” Dad says.
“Just look at it!” she scolds.
In the interview, as in life, Granny shies away from discussing her inner experience. But there are so many things I’d like to ask her: What did she long for? How did she feel about marrying my grandfather?
Just before their wedding, Gumper’s father died. They went ahead, but his aunts all showed up dressed in black and crying. The honeymoon to the ski resort in Italy had to be called off. Granny didn’t resent the intrusion, though. She had loved Gumper’s father, too. He had shown a special interest in her, almost courting her alongside Gumper, taking her out on the town just the two of them. “Very modern,” she confides to the camera. “He wrote me poems on postcards. I wish I’d kept them.”
Granny’s lavish watch, which I will wear at my own upcoming nuptials, was made entirely of diamonds and sapphires, a gift from her father-in-law.
Degan gets home from work and we drive through the warm green evening up to the north of the city for what is called, on our course outline, the Passover “workshop.” The neighbourhood is opulent in the worst kind of way, full of houses that Granny, who had wealth and good taste in equal measure, would have called “monstrosities.” Some are built from utilitarian concrete, with sharp points of glass or steel pointing out at odd angles. Others have enormous porches and pillars out front, as though Jews had colonized the American South. The houses inspire a rant from Degan about the meaning of tzedakah—“righteous giving”—and how inequality remains unaddressed in Jewish Toronto. We pull up to the temple, enormous and ugly in keeping with its surroundings, and cross the parking lot with a blond girl from our class. “This is the strangest place,” Degan says. “Don’t you feel like you’ve landed on the moon?”
An awkward pause follows. “This is my temple,” the girl says.
Inside, we pay five dollars, put on a name tag and enter a cavernous room that reminds me of the preaching hall in the documentary Jesus Camp. There is a young rabbi at the front, plugged into a mic so she can walk around and gesture with her hands. Our class has joined up with the Thursday-night class, and it takes all eighty of us several minutes to find our seats, eight at each round table. I look around and wave at Diane, with baby Krista asleep on her chest. Once everyone is settled and the whispering and shuffling have ceased, the rabbi, a skinny brunette with a slight overbite, beams at us. She throws her arms in the air like some Southern Baptist. “Welcome!”
The microphone squeals in protest, and a loud peal of feedback echoes through the room.
She frowns and fiddles with the wires. “Can you hear me now?” she shouts. We nod unhappily.
Satisfied, the rabbi begins in earnest. “You will SEE …” she says. “You will SEE …”
There’s a long pause, as though we are about to see the face of Adonai himself, before she completes the sentence: “You will see some FOOD items on your table.”
We look down dutifully. I notice for the first time that each table has been furnished with a Seder plate, featuring a limp sprig of parsley, an egg, an orange and several paper muffin cups filled with suspicious-looking goopy substances.
“Who can TELL me … WHO can tell me the MEANING …” the rabbi says, throwing her arms wide as though to indicate the scope of the heavens.
The meaning of what? Of life? Of death?
“WHO can tell me the meaning of the EGG?”
Total silence. I brace myself for a long and painful night, as though for a visit to the dentist.
“Nobody?” she asks, incredulous. She tries again.
“What about—” She pauses, her eyes closed, her face tilted to the heavens. “What about the green vegetable? What is the BEST green vegetable to have on your Seder plate?”
I recall how our last class with Harriet focused entirely on the fact that there is no best anything, no one correct way. All Seders are based on custom and geography. Harriet managed three straight hours reiterating this point in different ways.
At a far table someone’s hand goes up. “Horseradish?”
We hear little Krista gurgle.
“No!” the rabbi shouts, triumphant. “WHO knows why not?”
Nobody knows why not, but someone else suggests that romaine lettuce might be the best. “Yes,” the rabbi proclaims. “And do you know WHY?”
She does not wait for an answer but carefully elucidates the merits of romaine: it is sweet at first, with a bitter aftertaste, and reminds us that the Egyptians did take the Jews in at first; that the story wasn’t all bad, only the ending.
We slowly and painfully work our way through the other items on the Seder plate. The orange is to welcome women and “lesbian folk.” The pink cup is Miriam’s cup, to go along with Elijah’s, and it is filled with water as opposed to wine, for a reason that is never made clear. The exercise requires several hours. In all her endless pontificating, the rabbi says one thing that really strikes me: “For those of you on the verge of marriage and children, now is the time to learn. Now is the time to get good and COMFORTABLE, so you can give your children a sense of wonder and awe, a sense that THIS is what we DO.”
After the interminable lecture, we split into groups for the “participatory” component of the evening. One group will be talking about designing your own seder. Another group will be doing a “craft”: colouring a piece of fabric for a matzah cover using fat markers suitable for five-year-olds. Degan and I choose to attend the music session. Maybe we can take back a song for Music Night with the writers. We are ushered into a room where orange plastic chairs are arranged in a circle around a bongo drum. “Singing and dancing in Hebrew!” I whisper.
Degan shuffles his feet.
Our workshop leader enters: Rabbi Glickman. “Shalom!” she says brightly.
Krista lets out a loud squeal in reply. Tom and Diane pretend to shush her, but their faces betray delight in their daughter’s precociousness. Two Jews and a Jew-to-be. A perfect family.
We make our way through a book of songs, one for every part of the seder: Sanctifying the Name of God. Washing the Hands. Eating the Green Vegetable.
The customary song “Dayeinu”—meaning “it would have been enough”—is a long list of things God did for the Jews.
We shake the maracas Rabbi Goldstein has distributed and belt out the words in a rough approximation of Hebrew that I imagine would be incomprehensible to a native speaker. After the long lecture, it’s a blissful kind of release; people stand, and dance self-consciously, and then begin to dance in earnest. Degan shimmies toward me, his earlier mood lifted by the music, his head and shoulders tipped back. “I forgot to tell you something,” he says under the din of the singing.
“What?”
“At work last week someone told me I’m a snobby WASP on the outside, but inside I have a warm Jewish soul.”
At the end of the evening, when we’re getting our coats, Rabbi Glickman approaches us.
“How are the wedding plans going?”
I hesitate. “We’re trying to decide if we should get married under a chuppah,” I say.
She nods. “What kind of wedding are you having?”
I describe what we’ve been discussing for the ceremony.
She says, “It sounds strange. To have a Unitarian wedding when you’re on the way to becoming Jewish.
I look at Degan. Are we on the way to becoming Jewish?
“Not Unitarian,” I say. “Interfaith.”
“Interfaith how?”
“We’re not sure yet.” I decide to appeal to her authority. “What Jewish elements should we include?”
“You could get married under a chuppah,” she says right away, and then pauses. “You could get married under a chuppah. You could break a glass. But I don’t know if I would.”
“Why not?”
“You’re not Jewish. What kind of message does it send?”
“That I’m half Jewish?” I’m unable to keep the irritation from my voice. “We’re paying tribute to the multiplicity of our religious backgrounds.”
Rabbi Glickman straightens her spine, squares her shoulders, as though about to deliver a soliloquy. “Another option would be to get married now and have a Jewish wedding later. When you’re actually Jewish.”
I’m silent, but inside me a voice shouts: No—this might be our only chance.