Between Gods: A Memoir Read Online Free PDF Page A

struggling and thrashing as though being drowned.
    But if my father’s dissociation was related to the family history with the Holocaust, it wasn’t something Ben and I discussed.
    Dad had done some psychotherapy himself as a young man. He had been part of one of the T-groups that were popular in the seventies, a group led by a man named Dr. Martin Fischer. “He was good,” Dad would often say. “It’s so hard to find someone good .”
    When I was a newborn, Dad sometimes took me to group. I picture myself as a baby asleep in my bassinet, my little hands curled up at the sides of my head, and try to imagine what it meant that Dad, who could easily have left me with my mother, chose to bring me along.
    It was, I think now, a kind of pledge. He would work through his past. He would not pass it down to me.
    Does every parent dream this impossible dream?
    When depression first came for me, Dad was the one who encouraged me to find someone to talk to. He never asked for details about my sessions with Ben, but he asked if I was still going, and whether it was helpful.
    And one day, a few months in, he called me on the phone. “If you want me to come, I will.”
    I put down the bowl of grapes I was painstakingly washing.
    “Where?”
    “To a therapy session. If there’s anything you want to talk about with me there.”
    In the background the dog barked. “Go beddie!” Dad reprimanded her.
    “Oh,” I said, mortified. “I don’t think so.”
    “Are you sure?”
    “Yep,” I said. And then something occurred to me. “Why don’t you go alone?”
    “What do you mean?”
    “You’re always saying you’d like to find someone good. I think Ben might qualify.”
    I was thinking, of course, of Dad’s own “bad blood,” and of the futile pledge he had made to me as a baby. I was thinking of the long gaps between sentences when we talked, gaps that Dad seemed to fall headlong into, disappearing from both himself and from me.
    Eventually he agreed. But he saw Ben only once. He was interested in the puzzle of the psyche, he told me, in figuring out how the pieces of a family story fit together. Ben was too focused on feelings. And Dad was done with feelings. There wasn’t anything soft and subterranean left inside him that he needed to express.

    Dad found out by accident that he is Jewish. In his early twenties he toured Europe with some college friends. At the Jewish cemetery in Prague, the tour guide pulled him aside. “Don’t you know that Pick is a Jewish name?”
    I can see it so clearly. Dad pauses, his eyes on one of the tombstones, its stylized menorah. It’s a fall day and he pulls his sweater tight around his chest. His heart is suddenly pounding. He feels both that he is being told something ridiculously, impossibly implausible, and something that makes his whole life make sense. He looks around for his friends, and finally spots them over by the iron gates, rolling cigarettes.
    “I’m not Jewish,” he says.
    The tour guide shrugs. “Your name is.”
    “Well, I’m not.”
    The guide shrugs again. “Suit yourself.”
    Back home in Canada, Dad needed not weeks, not months, but years to work up the nerve to ask whether what the guide said was true. When he finally approached his mother in the kitchen, she got a look in her eye—part fear, part relief—and called upstairs to her husband, “He knows!”
    Dad asked and his parents confirmed what the guide had said. They told him about their relatives who were killed in the concentration camps. Dad’s grandparents, the aunts he’d never known.
    I try to imagine what this must have been like for Dad. To spend your whole life thinking you were one thing, only to find out you are something completely different. That everything you thought you knew—your church, your school, the food your family ate—was a carefully constructed fabrication, designed to mislead even the most casual observer. Implicit in this charade, unspoken and therefore all the more