THE NEXT TIME WE GO to meet with Rabbi Klein, Degan wants to stop and look at the Judaica at the synagogue gift store to see if any of it matches his new dish. I finally have to take him by the arm and pull him to the rabbi’s office.
“Mazel tov!” she says when she sees us. “Can you just wait a minute while I go to the bathroom?”
The life of a rabbi: back-to-back meetings.
“How was the wedding?” she asks when she is again settled in her chair.
“Wonderful,” we both say at once.
I tell her how perfect the book of Ruth vows were, and how having Shayna sing in Hebrew felt like a kind of coming out.
“Shayna told me it was a beautiful ceremony.”
Aha. So they’ve talked. There’s a long silence in the room. Outside, we hear cars, horns, the steady beat of a jackhammer.
Rachel peers at me. “You seem so serious,” she says. “What are you thinking?”
I’m thinking of my impromptu self-made mikvah; I’m feeling for the second time the freezing cold grip of the river as I lay on my back to let the water wash over me. How I gasped for breath as I broke through the surface, washed clean. “About conversion,” I say. “How right it feels.”
“That’s wonderful,” she says brightly. “I’m so glad.” She looks to Degan. “And what about you?”
I can see he’s biting his tongue. “I’d rather talk about what we need to do for Alie to move forward,” he says.
Her face darkens—almost imperceptibly, but her frustration is clear. “We’re going to have to discuss your decision, too,” she says to Degan.
At her window, the tree so recently bare has grown a coat of bright leafy green. She focuses on him. “Are you hoping to have kids?”
Degan and I turn to each other, almost shyly, and nod.
“Then let me offer this,” she says. “It might not be clear to you now. But with a baby, it is much easier if everyone is on the same page.”
“How do you mean?”
“Well, for example, when a new baby is born, and the parents are both in synagogue for the baby naming, but the father isn’t Jewish? I can see in his body language that he feels like an outsider.”
The rabbi twists her hair elastic around the bottom of her braid. “Conversely,” she says, “when the whole family is up on the bimah together, united in celebration …”
I well up, blinking to clear my eyes.
“Why are you sad?” Rachel asks, her voice rigid.
“Because I believe you,” I say. “I know that you’re right. But if it isn’t what Degan wants, I don’t want to force him.”
Degan breathes beside me.
“Can I ask you both something?” the rabbi says. “Where do you feel joy in Judaism?” I open my mouth to answer, but she says, “Because our meetings here are often fairly heavy.”
Degan reaches for my hand, squeezes it. I pause, choosing my words. “You’re right. Because the Holocaust is my access point, it’s taking a while for me to learn the joy.” I blink rapidly. “And in some ways I don’t feel very welcome.”
The rabbi is silent.
Degan’s instinct to smooth everything over kicks in. “We’re thinking of going to Auschwitz,” he says, changing the subject. “When we’re in Europe in the summer.”
“I’ve never been,” Rachel says.
“To Europe?”
“To Auschwitz.”
“Really?” Degan says, genuinely surprised.
“I don’t know what could make me go there.”
I get it. I know what she means. There’s an appeal in that refusal, which is the same way Granny coped. Yet I have no choice but to try to face that darkness. It’s my only hope of letting the light shine through.
My therapist Charlotte agrees with Rachel that Degan and I should make the same decision. But she takes the opposite tack about what the decision should be. “Why do you need to actually convert? Why can’t you embrace the multiplicity of your background? Nobody can stop you from enacting Judaism in your own home.”
“It just makes me angry. They’re refusing me. It’s so ironic.”
“Does that remind you of anything?”
Not this again.
“Of my father? Is that what you mean?”
She nods. “The desire for acceptance, to be seen.”
But I disagree. “I don’t think you understand,” I say. “I just feel such urgency. To figure this out.”
“And the urgency,” she says, “is our clue that something is amiss.”
I look at Charlotte, silent in her chair. She has dyed her hair from wheat blond to something slightly paler. It softens her expression, makes her face seem more relaxed.
“Oh,” I say. “You mean the urgency indicates a projection?”
She holds her lower lip briefly between her teeth.
“What about your mother?” she asks. “Where does she come into all this?”
And I retort, without pausing, “What about her?”
I feel frustrated and unheard. “I’m just not as compelled by that side of the family. No, ‘compelled’ is the wrong word. I just relate to them differently.”
Haven’t I already told her this?
She looks at me again. Outside her office, someone leans on a horn. “You know,” says Charlotte, “it’s possible I might be wrong here.”
My ears perk up.
“It’s possible I may be biased.”
She is deciding whether to say more. I use her own technique against her and remain attentively silent. It works, and she confesses, “My husband is Jewish.”
“Okay.”
“And I am not.”
“Right.”
“I, too, have considered conversion,” she says. “And decided against it.”
Her husband! Jewish! The light bulbs are popping: Charlotte is a person! With a life beyond these doors, beyond me.
Charlotte has debated becoming Jewish.
“Thank you for telling me,” I say. “I mean, that makes sense. I understand.”
She opens her mouth to speak. For a moment I think she is about to tell me something else personal, something else about herself, but my excitement at her revealing herself to me morphs quickly into dread. I don’t want to know a thing. I need her to be anonymous. Yet she only says, “We’d better wrap up. We’re almost out of time.” And as soon as the chance is taken away, I am disappointed. I want to be her friend, her confidante. I want to know everything.
That night I watch another video of Vera—not the Shoah Project, but one filmed by Dad, who travelled to Newark, New Jersey, to interview her. In the Shoah Project interview, Vera seemed to identify strongly as a Jew, but in this conversation with my father, she tries to distance herself. Talking about the dirty Polish Jews from the shtetl. How they lived such a different life from her own. How there is only one other Jewish family in her building, and she doesn’t have much to do with them.
She begins talking about “bread that Jews eat”—but she can’t think of the word.
Dad, who is interviewing her, keeps saying, “Matzah?”
“Challah,” I say to the screen.
“Matzah?” Dad asks.
“Challah!” I shout.
Context is everything. Faced with the Shoah Foundation’s interviewer, she was apologetic about her lack of Jewish education. She could not go to religious school since there wasn’t one in her hometown, and her grandfather taught her only some of what she should know. “Not enough, unfortunately,” she said, with genuine regret in her voice. Now, though, she wants none of it. Her voice is small and sad. She touches the bangles on her wrist. I wonder if they are the same bracelets her son sent me after her death, the ones that I accidentally left at a bar when we were living out east. I remember the panic I felt, arriving home drunk and tired and realizing my cold wrist was bare. I called; the barmaid said the lost-and-found box was empty. I went down the next morning, and she let me parse the green and amber bottles, dig among the containers of lemon wedges and maraschino cherries. My hand landed on two big copper hoops, and I couldn’t believe it when they revealed themselves not as bracelets but as earrings, someone else’s lost jewellery, looking so much like my own.
I never found those bracelets, and it still bothers me, still niggles at me late at night. A loss—unlike the other losses—that is bearable. Two copper bangles. A loss I can hold.