Lauren Yanofsky Hates the Holocaust (3 page)

I find Zach in the front hall, threading red K'Nex pieces through the rails of the banister up to the second floor. “Adding some color?” I say. He ignores me and keeps adding pieces and making airplane noises until I get in his face and tell him we're having pasta. Zach is twelve and kind of bizarre. You can call him for dinner all you like, but if he's engaged in something he'll tune you out. Zach doesn't have interests, he has obsessions. Lately he's been into flight. It started with birds—bird-watching, bird books, hawks, the Audubon Society, endangered wetlands, migration and hawks.

Zach's bird fixation began because Mom got this nutty idea that the eagles living down the street were my grandparents—Dad's parents—reincarnated. She wasn't serious; she just liked the idea. Well, Zach had a hard time with the distinction between Mom greeting the birds as if they were my grandparents and the eagles really
being
my grandparents.

Anyway, Zach is done with birds now and has moved on to flying machines: planes, helicopters, jets, rockets, etc. He started with a grand survey of all flying machines and is now fixated on biplanes. Zach can talk at length about planes like the Fairey Swordfish, a torpedo bomber used during the Second World War. This fall he is supposed to start studying for his bar mitzvah, a celebration that marks the beginning of adulthood for Jewish boys when they're thirteen. You have to read a blessing over the Torah—a sacred Jewish text—and there's a party afterward. Most kids also lead the service and chant part of the Torah. Girls have a similar celebration, except it's called a bat mitzvah. Zach isn't very keen on having a bar mitzvah, but my parents have promised him a ride in a biplane if he'll go through with it.

After dinner I leave the whiteness of the main floor and head downstairs to the basement, which is unfinished. I guess Mom couldn't imagine an all-white basement too, so it's just for storage. Sometimes Zach and I play floor hockey on the concrete floor, when he's in the mood.

I head to Dad's workbench, where tools are stored next to old paint cans and extra flooring. The workbench is a bit of a joke. Dad can't do anything more complex than change lightbulbs and tighten screws. Mom doesn't even let him paint anymore. Dad likes to hold up his hands and say, “These are the hands of an academic.” He thinks this is superfunny.

I'm using the workbench to make a lantern for next summer's lantern festival at Trout Lake Park. Brooke took me to the festival this summer, and I loved it. At first I couldn't imagine what a lantern festival would be like. A bunch of kids with Chinese lanterns hanging out in a park? It sounded lame. Then we got to the park, and I saw people walking around with all kinds of different homemade lanterns. There were cupcake lanterns and animal lanterns and lanterns shaped like the moon. Brooke had brought a lantern she'd made to look like a basketball. When she put an led light inside it, the whole thing glowed. It was supercool. I'd wished it had a real candle in it, but Brooke said she couldn't figure out how to keep it from catching fire.

The lantern festival wasn't just about lanterns. There was music too, and people were wearing costumes and doing weird theatrical performances. Women dressed as fairies with big wire-and-net wings gave out handfuls of silver powder to blow for making wishes. A marching band of accordions and drums passed in a cacophony of sound. Brooke and I stopped by the lake to listen to a Chinese percussion band with chimes and gongs and other instruments I couldn't identify. There were stilt-walkers and fireworks and a troupe of women gyrating in hula hoops lit on fire. “Wow, it's like the circus,” Brooke said.

“Yeah, but better.” I'd stared at the women with the fiery hula hoops and wondered what it would be like to be surrounded by fire and not get burned. Maybe it was like pulling your finger through a candle flame so quickly that you didn't get singed, except you would be pulling your whole body through the flame.

When we were heading out of the park to leave, I saw a group of people picnicking, surrounded by glowing paper-bag lanterns. Sitting away from the crowds, they had marked their area with a circle of light. I stopped and looked and let out a long sigh.

I'd seen candles used a zillion times before, but never like this. Mom was always lighting candles for the different Jewish holidays, marking those special times, but these candles in the park were marking a special space. I'd looked longingly at the paper-bag lanterns, and then one of the picnickers, a young woman, noticed Brooke and me. She beckoned. “Come join us.” The woman stood up and carefully moved a few of the lanterns to make the circle bigger. I looked at Brooke and she shrugged, so we sat down on the grass inside the ring of lanterns. The people kept chatting softly, and Brooke and I sat without talking, staring at the glow of the flickering flames. We sat there for a long time, until we had to leave to make our curfew.

So now I've got tissue paper, some light wood, glue and a saw. I even took a lantern-making course with Brooke, but I haven't quite decided what to make.

I stay downstairs until after ten, trying to sketch an idea for a lantern, and then I go to the kitchen to get a snack. The house is quiet, and most of the lights are off. I pour myself a bowl of cereal and sit at the counter in the dim light. Then Dad comes in and turns on the lights under the cabinets. “I thought I heard you in here.” He sits down next to me.

“Hungry,” I say, eating more cereal.

Dad taps his fingers on the counter and then runs his fingers through his beard the way he does when he's thinking about something. Finally, I say, “Is Mom really mad?”

“I think just frustrated.”

I shudder. “I hate it when she's mad at me.”

“She just wants you to be involved, to do something in the community.”

I make a face. “I'd rather try archery or knitting.”

“What about the youth group? You could try that again, couldn't you?”

“Um, I could think about it.”

Dad pats my hand. “That would probably make Mom happy to hear.”

“I said I could think about it,” I say cautiously.

Dad sighs. “That's a good first step.” Then he grabs my head before I can protest and kisses me on the forehead. “Don't stay up too late.”

I sit for another few minutes in the kitchen and then head upstairs to bed, turning out lights as I go.

I wish I could tell Dad the real reason I won't go to Jewish high school and why I don't want to be involved in the Jewish community. It's the most important reason, but not one I'm ever going to tell my parents.

Reason number seven: I'm not Jewish anymore.

If I had to answer a census, then yes, I, Lauren Yanofsky, come from Jewish heritage, but I stopped being Jewish three and a half years ago. People who convert to Judaism are called “Jews by choice.” Well, I decided to become a “non-Jew by choice.” This doesn't mean I've just assimilated and want to be like everyone else. It means I'm really, truly, not a Jew.

And it's all because of the Holocaust.

I decided not to be Jewish the year I was thirteen, shortly after my bat mitzvah. Dad had promised me pro-basketball tickets if I agreed to visit a new Holocaust memorial at the Jewish cemetery with him. So one very damp April afternoon, I reluctantly got into the car with him and Grandma Rose.

Because Dad is a Holocaust historian, I already knew too much about the destruction of European Jewry during the Second World War. I was always being dragged off to see some Holocaust memorial or attend some convention. I'd been to the Holocaust museum in Washington and to Yad Va'shem, a huge Holocaust museum in Israel, and I'd even been on a tour of Polish concentration camps. My mom and Zach and I had done some fun stuff on those trips while Dad was doing research, but only after we'd endured our share of death, destruction, remembering and commemorating. Some kids got Disney. I got Hitler.

On the way to the cemetery, Grandma Rose sat in the front seat and clucked her tongue against her teeth as she and Dad discussed my cousin Molly's bat mitzvah. I slouched in the backseat, trying to ignore their conversation. Grandma Rose was horrified that there would be no Sunday-morning brunch or Friday-night dinner.

“What about the out-of-town guests?” Grandma Rose said. “You have to entertain.” I could see her lip curling.

“I think they want to keep it a small affair,” Dad said.

Grandma Rose sniffed. “You mean a cheap affair.”

“Well, that may be true,” Dad admitted.

Grandma Rose had strong feelings about how things should be and look. My own bat mitzvah, which she'd help my mom plan, had been a multiday, highly coordinated series of dinners and parties with matching flowers, napkins and invitations, all in baby pink, my least favorite colour.

My Jewish friends all called their grandmothers Bubbie, or Bubba, and their grandfathers Zeydi, the Yiddish words for grandmother and grandfather. I couldn't imagine calling Grandma Rose Bubbie. She was too formal, and she never spoke Yiddish. Grandma Rose was tall, with great legs and beautiful white hair that she had styled weekly. She owned a vast collection of raincoats and matching umbrellas. I didn't know Grandma Rose well, even though she lived only ten minutes away by car. She was quiet and liked listening to classical music. She found our house, and my brother and me, too loud. This was weird, because her husband, our zeydi, had been a very loud guy. He had a big tummy and a big voice, and he gave such strong bear hugs, your back cracked. When we were little, he was always pulling nickels out of our ears or tossing us over his shoulder and yelling, “Sack of potatoes for sale!” Zeydi would give us Reese's Peanut Butter Cups and not care if we got the leather seats of his Cadillac sticky. When Zeydi passed away a few years ago from prostate cancer, Grandma Rose became even more quiet and reserved.

When we arrived at the cemetery, it was so damp outside, it felt like the rain was suspended in the air. I unenthusiastically got out of the car and pulled my hood over my hair. Dad offered me a spot under his big golf umbrella, but I held back and let him and Grandma Rose walk ahead. We made our way past the section where Zeydi was buried and over to a stone monument where the rabbi and a bunch of people from my parents' temple were gathered. I wondered how long this would take. Half an hour? More? It started to drizzle, and I wished I'd listened to Mom and worn my boots. I tugged the drawstrings around my hood tighter so that my hair wouldn't frizz and moved under Dad's umbrella.

The rabbi started making a speech about the Holocaust, how we should always remember the six million who had died. I tuned him out. I knew what he was going to say: forgive but never forget. I thought instead about going to Whistler for a last weekend of spring skiing, and how great basketball camp was going to be that summer. I wondered if I'd be able to convince Mom that colored contact lenses were a “need” and not a “want.” The rabbi began the Kaddish, the prayer for the dead, and I murmured the words, thinking about which pictures I'd hang in my locker when I finally got to high school. I'd heard the Kaddish a million times, at each of the Holocaust memorials I'd been dragged to and a zillion times at my Jewish day school. Yeah, yeah, yeah, I thought. All people die eventually. Then the rabbi started reading out a list of the dead people whose names were carved on the stone memorial. I dug my toe into the wet grass and stared at my sneakers. I was wondering how rude it would be to check my phone when I heard the rabbi call out the name Leibowitz, Grandma Rose's maiden name. It's a pretty common Jewish name, but I remembered Grandma Rose having said she was the only one in Vancouver with that name. I let go of my phone, stopped pawing at the grass and looked up at the rabbi. He was reading out more Leibowitz names. Five, six, seven…I pressed my fingers into my palms, counting. I looked up at Dad's face. His eyes were blank, staring straight ahead. His lips had disappeared into his beard the way they did whenever he was angry. Then I looked at Grandma Rose. Her lined face had crumpled like a crushed piece of paper. I stared in amazement. She'd always been so composed, and now she looked like one of those wizened apple dolls. Tears streamed down her cheeks, her mascara flowing like dark rivers into her wrinkles.

When the rabbi began the final prayers, Grandma Rose's quiet tears changed to long wailing sobs, drowning out the rabbi. Dad wrapped his arm around her shoulders. The rabbi finished reciting the prayer, and Grandma Rose kept crying. Then she walked very slowly to the stone monument, dropped to her knees and lay down on the base of the stone. I hung back, stunned. I'd never seen Grandma Rose cry or express any emotion stronger than distaste, and there she was with her legs splayed on the stone, her pumps hanging off her heels. Dad ran and leaned over her, trying to get her up. He was crying too, the tears running down his face. His beard must be getting wet, I thought. Then Dad was down on his knees too, sort of trying to get Grandma Rose up, but rocking back and forth with her. Grandma Rose was stroking the words engraved into the stone:
Lydia Leibowitz
. And below them,
Sol Leibowitz, Yuri Leibowitz
—a whole line of Leibowitzes. I counted eleven names.

I just stood there, staring down at Dad and Grandma on the stone. Grandma was speaking in Yiddish and English. She said, “They killed my Lydia.” Lydia was her sister; I was named in her memory. Both of us had the same Hebrew name, Leah. Luckily, my parents decided to call me Lauren. Lydia sounded so old-fashioned.

I'd always thought the Holocaust was a disaster that happened to other people's families. Grandma Rose and Zeydi had each emigrated separately from Russia before the Second World War and then met in Vancouver. Mom's parents were born in Canada. Yet I'd known Grandma Rose came to Canada without the rest of her family. Why hadn't I ever wondered about them? Even though I was named after Lydia, I'd never thought about how she died or how old she was when she died.