Between Gods: A Memoir by Alison Pick Read Free Book Online Page B

rabbinic period, and its impetus was the need to be certain of parenthood. You can never be sure who fathered a child: a woman might lie or might not be certain. Whereas maternity is obvious and indisputable. It’s a sexist notion, but it isn’t a surprise to me. What is a surprise is that my own religious identity is suddenly tied up with Degan’s. Like runners in a three-legged race, we are bound together by someone else’s rules. My fate will be his. Or his will be mine.
    I sit in Charlotte’s office with tears running down my cheeks. I unfold the crinkled piece of foolscap on which I have written a dream about my great-grandmother Marianne. As per Charlotte’s instruction, I’ve included as much detail as possible. In the dream I am in a cattle car, walking backward toward my great-grandmother, but when she finally meets my gaze, she wears my own face. It’s not that she looks like me; she is me.
    I feel like a fourth grader reciting an awkward, exaggerated composition. The dream is full of all the things I try so hard to avoid in my writing: a hackneyed setting (an empty train!), obvious metaphors (my face where hers should be!). Still, as I read, the atmosphere in the room changes. Charlotte’s chair rocks. The air is like soup, or some kind of weird clingy water. I strainto keep my mouth at the surface. I sense that the density, the deadness that threatens to pull me under, is related to the dream and to my history. “What does it mean to you?” Charlotte asks. “That your great-grandmother looked at you with your own face?”
    “Isn’t it obvious?”
    Still I resist saying it. The concept of the intergenerational transmission of trauma seems so fantastical, like saying that Marianne tripped on her shoelace seventy years ago and my ankle is sprained as a result. My happy life, my privilege: how could things that happened so long ago, to people I never knew, affect me?
    Layers of fog close in when I try to engage the details of my history. I feel physiologically unable to remember the structure of our felled family tree, the many severed branches, who was related to whom and in what way. Perhaps it’s a kind of defensive amnesia, a psychic version of a runner’s cramp.
    “I did some reading this week,” I tell Charlotte. “About a therapist who works with second- and third-generation survivors. Their marriages crumble, their children are troubled. But they fail to see how their struggles are related to their parents’ Holocaust experiences.”
    “Sound familiar?” Charlotte asks.
    My psyche bucks and heaves.
    This has nothing to do with me.
    This has everything to do with me.
    Charlotte: Rock, rock, rock .
    I think about the traits I have that I am almost unconscious of, traits that nonetheless govern my daily life. For example, last week there was a plastic bag with old apple slices and almond butter in the fridge. The almond butter was smeared on the inside of the bag, and extracting it would have been a hassle andmade a mess. I threw the whole thing out. But the apples were good. If not good , then edible. I thought about the calories, about how long they could keep a body going. Even if the apples were rotten. How it would be possible to extract every ounce of almond butter from the bag. An apple filled with worms. It could be eaten. Would have been eaten. Devoured.
    I threw it out, but I thought of it for hours.
    Bread was Granny’s downfall. She could never say no to dinner rolls, to the crusty baguette on the cutting board.
    When she ate a chicken breast, nothing remained. The bones on her plate so light as to barely exist, pale and nearly weightless, picked clean.

ten
    M Y LITERARY AGENT Anne has teamed up with a prominent British agency that will represent her authors in the European markets. One of the British agents, John, is in town, and on Sunday night Anne invites a handful of us to the Spoke Club to meet him. The room is dark and filled with beautiful men in suits. The writer Andrew