Between Gods by Alison Pick

Author:Alison Pick [Pick, Alison]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-0-385-67789-9
Publisher: Doubleday Canada
Published: 2014-09-02T04:00:00+00:00

thirteen

A WEEK LATER, I go away to speak at a conference on the life of Bronwen Wallace, a remarkable Canadian poet and short story writer in whose memory an award for emerging writers is given. On the drive home, I pass a United Church with a sign outside advertising Sunday-morning services. I think: I will not go to church anymore. I think: I am finished with church.

But although my wedding is imminent—a few short months away—I am no closer to solving the dilemma of what comes next in terms of conversion.

Degan meets me at the door of the apartment. I feel a rush of pleasure on seeing him after my time away. We print out a list of wedding guests and look online for a professional photographer. While he downloads Mendelssohn’s “Wedding March” for me to listen to, Degan laughs at the cliché. He wants me to consider whether it’s something I might want to process to.

“What do you mean, ‘process’?”

He grins. “Walk down the aisle.”

He has read about someone whose chuppah was covered in the handprints of their families and friends. A lovely idea, we agree. Even if no rabbi would marry us, nobody can stop us from doing as we please in our ceremony. We decide that Degan will break a glass underfoot once we are married, as per Jewish custom.

We huggle on the couch—hug + cuddle—and try to memorize the Hebrew letters we’ve been assigned for our latest Jewish Information Class. To our untrained eyes, the letters look maddeningly similar. For example, there are two sideways Cs. One makes the quintessential guttural Hebrew ch, as in the composer Bach or the bread eaten on the Sabbath, challah. The other makes a k sound, as in the philosopher Immanuel Kant. How will we remember the difference?

The k sound, kaf, has a single dot in its centre. It looks, we decide, like a Cyclops. And the curled-up edges of the C look like little girls’ hair. So the Cyclops must be female.

We search for a name that begins with the k sound, and come up with Kitty Sherbatsky from Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina. When we see the girl Cyclops, the hard k of Kitty Sherbatsky will remind us of the hard k in kaf.

Obviously.

Degan tells me about the class I missed while I was away. Harriet taught “the shva,” a baffling bit of punctuation indicating a pause that occurs mid-word in some places and not in others. He recounts being dragged up in front of the class to recite prayers.

“You’re a trooper,” I say.

“You’re away cavorting with the writers and I’m stuck here singing and dancing in Hebrew.”

He does a little vaudeville imitation, shuffling and tapping his feet.

I laugh at the thought of my pale British boy dancing at the front of the class. “What?” he asks.

“Nothing.” I giggle some more.

Try as we might, we cannot make sense of the shva. We pour over Degan’s class notes. Finally I email Harriet to ask for help.

She writes back, “That’s what you get for being absent!”

I reply, apologizing, and invite her to my upcoming book launch.

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