A Thread of Grace

Coda

NORTH TORONTO, CANADA

2007

This is what they remember about their mother: she never cried.

Each of her children tells of some crisis that failed resoundingly to elicit maternal compassion. The cancer. The divorce. The miscarriage. In their mother’s mind, nothing that happened in Canada could ever justify lament. “Safe your tears,” she always said. “You may need dem later.”

A hospice rabbi learns a lot about the families he serves. In the long hours old bodies require to die, gray-haired children take turns sitting at their parent’s bedside. Some are genuinely devoted, distressed at the pending loss but determined to make those final hours comfortable and serene. Others go through the motions, hoping to mitigate their own postmortem guilt. Some are frustrated, almost angry at the dying parent, desperate to know what forces deformed their childhood. This is their last chance to understand, and it is slipping away.

Claudia Kaplan’s three children returned from Vancouver, from Montreal, from Windsor, to sit at their stricken mother’s bedside. Her face is like marble against the pillowcase. She will never speak again; cerebral hemorrhage, suffered alone, went untreated too long to remedy. Her silence feels familiar to her children. All three have gravitated toward careers that probe secrets or plumb silences. The eldest is a prosecutor, the middle child a psychologist, the youngest an interpreter for the deaf.

Their mother had many fine qualities, they were quick to tell the rabbi. Despite an endless series of part-time menial jobs, she attended every school event and checked every bit of her children’s homework. She studied English from their basal readers, and helped them with arithmetic and geography. “I didn’ get no school past fourteen,” she’d say. “I gotta learn what you learn.”

Comically— even stereotypically— tightfisted at home, she was generous to a fault with strangers. She’d squeeze a few dollars from her own meager earnings and those of the gentle tailor she married in a DP camp. She sent contributions to the Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society every year. “And that woman could not pass a panhandler without giving him some change,” her son told the rabbi. “I’d say, ‘Ma, he’s just going to buy booze.’ ”

“ ‘If you can help, you gotta help,’ ” his sisters chorused. They’d heard it a million times.

Their mother was always busy— sewing, cooking, gardening, canning. She knew the Latin binomials for every plant, but never bothered with their common English names. Given how bad her English was, her children were repeatedly surprised by how many languages she knew. Occasionally, there’d be a long-distance phone call, and she would speak at length and mysteriously. “Was that Arabic?” David asked once.

“Turkish,” she told him.

“When the hell did you learn Turkish?”

“After d’ war,” she said. “An’ don’ talk ugly— I don’ like dat hell stuff.”

“That was her modus operandi,” David said. “Get too close, she’d change the subject.”

Every Passover, they returned to North Toronto— the prosecutor, the psychologist, the interpreter for the deaf. Their mother provided a vast amount of food, but she seemed alone, no matter how many people were in the room. Maybe she was quiet because she couldn’t get a word in edgewise, with her kids debating and arguing and making wisecracks. Asked about her life, she’d only shrug. “Nossing e’citing, sank Got! I had enough ’citement in d’war.”

“C’mon, Ma, tell us about the war!” David would urge.

She wouldn’t be drawn. The prosecutor could ask leading questions or say something provocative to get a rise out of her. The psychologist and interpreter watched her face and hands for clues. She knew they hoped to trick her into revealing something. She had a way of laughing questions off— a short chuckle that did not convey amusement.

History was their father’s domain, and Claudia disapproved of his obsession with the war. “Abe, you gonna get bad dreams,” she’d predict, and she was always right.

“What was your father like?” the rabbi asked Jacqui.

“He was never really there,” she said. “A lot of camp survivors were like that. You had to learn not to be noticed.”

“Was your mother in a camp as well?”

“She was hidden in northern Italy during the war. Her mother and two brothers were deported from France in 1942— we’re pretty sure they died in Auschwitz, but we never found out for certain. Mom’s father died of some kind of disease. Typhoid, I think. Something like that. That’s all she ever told us.”

Since her final illness, her children searched their childhood home, hoping for some hidden memoir: a stash of old letters or a box of remembrances that could reveal their mother’s soul. An emotional Rosetta Stone to decipher. They’ve found only a cheap spiral-bound notebook with a few cryptic lines in their mother’s small, cramped handwriting. “The bells rang day and night,” she wrote. “The others danced and sang. As for me, I thought of ice.”

“Ice is the right word,” David said bitterly. “A coldhearted bitch, that’s what she was.” He blames himself for being unable to elicit her affection.

“An emotional deaf-mute,” his sister Paula concluded. She prefers to believe in some disability that rendered their mother incapable of giving what her children craved.

“She never really dealt with her losses,” Jacqui said, intellectualizing. “All that aggressive cheeriness was a front. She used to tap her fingers on her lips— as though she was reminding herself not to talk.”

The rabbi has his own ideas. Claudia Kaplan is yet another casualty of a war that began long before it started, and has not ended yet. Immense, intractable, incomprehensible, that conflict remains the pivot point of two centuries, the event that defines before and after. Hundreds of millions killed, wounded, maimed, displaced. The last survivors are dying now. Their children and grandchildren are fulfillment of Ezekiel’s prophecy that the dry bones shall live again, but the poison still seeps down, contaminating generations. So much evil. So much destruction, and at its heart—

Struck by a thought, the rabbi straightens. Years of study. Books, documentaries, interviews. It seems impossible, but he searches his memory, and nothing comes to mind… The Austrian corporal was a courier in the First World War, running through tunnels and trenches, delivering messages from one officer to another. There were rumors about his cousin Gelli’s death, and yet, in the end, did Klara Hitler’s sickly son ever fire a gun?

One hollow, hateful little man. One last awful thought: all the harm he ever did was done for him by others.