Small Pieces

A Book of Lamentations

Joanne Limburg

• Publisher: Atlantic Books
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN: 9781786492326
• eBook ISBN: 9781786492319
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Social Science Biographies
• Index: Social Sciences

SHORTLISTED FOR THE JQ WINGATE, 2017 My mother, my family and Judaism are nested inside each other. I am Jewish and always Jewish; it's analogous with family, however hard it is, and however strained, it can never be disavowed... I remain, as my therapist put it, 'enmeshed', all tangled up in the family hoard. This book has been both a continuation of my conversations with them, and an attempt to untangle myself. This is Joanne's account of coming to terms with her brother's suicide and through that process, the entirety of her family life. In Small Pieces Joanne explores her childhood, her Jewishness and her mother's death as well as that of her brother. The life and family Joanne describes is a complex combination of conflicting influences - both scientific and literary; Jewish and humanist impulses; and middle America and North London settings. Small Pieces is a beautiful and searingly honest meditation on family and faith.

Vessel Five

Q: On Yom Kippur Eve, we are supposed to ask forgiveness from those we have sinned against. But what if the person we have injured is dead?

A: In that case, the person seeking forgiveness must go to the graveside of the injured party and make his confession in front of ten witnesses.

Yom Kippur, the most holy day of the Jewish calendar, is the culmination of the High Holy Days, the Ten Days of Awe that begin with Rosh Hashanah. It opens a once-a-year window for Jews to confess, beg forgiveness and get their moral accounts in order, ask please that their names be written in the Book of Life. Not in the other book. Of course, there is another book.

Jews do not, as Christians are instructed to,¹ go into their closets to do their spiritual accounting. They go out, to the synagogue, where the Torah scrolls will be covered in white cloths, the colour of the plain shrouds in which every member of the congregation will one day be buried, and they confess together. It’s not meant to be a fun day, and I never found it so, but I used to rather enjoy the communal confession. It had a certain drama:

We have abused and betrayed. We are cruel.

We have destroyed and embittered other people’s lives.

We were false to ourselves.

We have gossiped about others and hated them.

We have insulted and jeered. We have killed. We have lied.

We have misled others and neglected them.

We were obstinate. We have perverted and quarrelled.

We have robbed and stolen.

We have transgressed through unkindness.

We have been both violent and weak.

We have practised extortion.

We have yielded to wrong desires, our zeal was misplaced.²

I would look around the shul at everyone chanting – the men in their suits and prayer shawls, the women in their hats – thinking how implausible it was to suppose that any of these familiar, respectable and – to me – dull people could ever have done anything as exciting as rob, steal, be violent or kill. I thought robbery was something career criminals did, with knives and crowbars, and that killing meant murder. I had an imagination, but it was full up with other worlds, with time travel, Regency beaux, dead pop stars and dead poets; when it came to the world I actually lived in, I had little or no capacity to imagine what it might be like to experience it as anyone but myself.

One thing I must have realized was that everyone was hungry. Yom Kippur entails a twenty-five-hour fast, commencing on the eve and ending at the following sunset. If the synagogues are full to bursting during the day, it is partly because people are hoping that attendance might distract them from thinking about food. Outside my enjoyment of the dramatic confessions, that never worked for me. And there was little other distraction possible at home or anywhere else. On Yom Kippur you cannot read anything but the prayer book. You cannot write. You cannot watch television, listen to the radio or play music. You cannot make phone calls. You cannot do any kind of work. You cannot handle money.

You shouldn’t drive either, though our father used to drive us all to the synagogue in the morning. He would stay there all day, and sometimes our mother would too. Once my brother and I were old enough, we would walk back home after the morning service: it used up a whole hour. We would get home at about one, and then face the problem of how to fill six more hours…

‘I’m thinking about chicken,’ one of us would say.

‘Shut up! Roast potatoes!’

‘Cauliflower!’

‘Lemon meringue pie!’

‘Challah!’³

‘Cheese!’

‘No, we really have to stop it now.’

What could we do? We couldn’t play Monopoly, Mum had told us, because of the toy money. We decided that we could play cards, as long as we confined ourselves to Snap and to Pairs, as no money was involved. We were allowed to play Trivial Pursuit, so we usually did.

One year someone lent us a special Jewish version of the game, with questions about the Torah, law and tradition, Jewish history, famous Jews and Yiddish wisdom. For the wisdom questions, you had to complete an English translation of one the wise sayings, for example:

‘A rich man’s daughter is always _______?’

‘A beauty.’

It was a slow game – we were very bad at it. We were particularly bad at the Yiddish wisdom, and made very bad guesses. An hour or so in, I landed on yet another Yiddish saying square.

‘Go on,’ I said to Julian. ‘Read it out. I won’t get it.’

Julian picked a card out and read: ‘“Your health comes first _______?”’

‘“Your health comes first… Your health comes first” – nope, nothing, no idea. What is it?’

Julian turned the card over, and burst out laughing.

‘What? What is it? What does it say?’ He passed me the card, and I read aloud:

‘“Your health comes first: you can always hang yourself later.”’

And then we were both laughing.

My sister-in-law wants to talk to me. We’re sitting next to each other on the sofa, and for the first time we are alone.

‘That afternoon here,’ Ayako says. ‘They ignored my wishes. I didn’t want all those photos everywhere, and the food they got – Julian hated that kind of food.’

‘I’m sorry,’ I say. ‘I’m afraid I chose some of it.’

‘No, no, I don’t mean the British stuff! That was nice. It was the other things – cake. And neighbours keep bringing these casseroles. I’ve said not to, I don’t eat them…’

‘I’m sure they only mean to be kind.’

‘Oh yes, yes, of course, but they are so Midwestern – there’s only one way to do things.’

‘I kept getting hugged by people who don’t know me. They didn’t even ask.’

Ayako shudders. ‘I know – I hate that.’

I tell her about the postdoc who talked at me that afternoon, the gifted writer with the silent wife.

‘Ugh, Julian hated that guy – he said he was so self-important, you couldn’t tell him anything… Listen, listen… About your mother—’

‘It’s OK—’

‘But I just want to say, I’m sorry you both had to leave like that, but I just couldn’t stand having your mum here. That morning, after you went to the shower, straight away she started talking to me about the money Julian owed. She always used to upset Julian about money – I couldn’t bear it, he would cry. There was one time when Julian had offered to refund her plane ticket, and she started going on about it the minute she landed – on and on and on about it. She marched him to the cashpoint and she stood over him while he got the money – she stood over him!’

‘I’m sorry, she didn’t mean to be hurtful – she got very anxious about money, that’s all.’

‘Julian couldn’t take it any more – every time he spoke to her, it was, “When will you repay the money?” He was so stressed, he was so stressed at work, he didn’t need that pressure from her.’

‘I didn’t know why he borrowed it.’

‘I don’t know why either, but Julian was terrible with money – he was always coming home with new clothes, stuff for Giselle… He was feeling bad, he would buy something to make himself feel better, but it only made things worse…’

‘Our dad was like that – Julian said he was scared of winding up like him. Oh dear.’

‘He didn’t need the stress from your mum – he had so much to deal with at work.’

‘I’m sorry.’

‘It’s not your fault. He never said anything bad about you. He loved you.’

‘I know it was difficult for him at work…’

Ayako tells me about Julian’s work, about the members of the faculty who voted against his getting tenure despite the good work he was doing, despite the huge grant he brought in.

‘That grant he got, you know, people try for years and years and they don’t get it.’

I tell Ayako that we’ve been spending a lot of time with a faculty wife.

‘Kathy – oh God, she thinks everything is her business. She’s a midwife, and when Giselle was born she kept visiting us at the hospital and asking about breastfeeding, and then after we got home, she got all the other faculty wives to keep phoning me and visiting, asking how the feeding was going, checking up on me…’

‘Perhaps it was meant to be supportive…?’

‘It didn’t feel that way. We just wanted to be left alone.’

It occurs to me that Ayako never asked us to come over here either. Mum and I are invading her space and intruding on her grief, and I don’t know why. There’s no funeral to attend, and nothing we can do to help. We’re just creating work for people.

At some point in the months before my brother’s death, I was telling my therapist about Mum and Julian and the money, how I was sick to death of hearing her talk about it.

‘From the way she talks, ‘I said, ‘you’d think she was going to be on the streets, but that’s hardly going to happen. I wish she would just let it go for a bit.’

My therapist replied that money was never just money.

‘Mum was poor,’ I said. ‘I guess once you’ve been poor, you’re always poor in your head. The money’s her security.’

I remem...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Sister
• Vessel One
• Vessel Two
• Vessel Three
• Vessel Four
• Vessel Five
• Vessel Six
• Vessel Seven
• Vessel Eight
• Vessel Nine
• There Is No Vessel Ten
• Acknowledgements
• Also by Joanne Limburg
• Author’s Note
• Copyright