Holding My Breath Tapa dura - 2008

Chapter One

when my parents, Goldie and Saul Levy, got married in 1947, there was no gown. My mother wore a simple white dress, and my father wore the first suit he had ever owned. They didn’t get married at the Royal Alex Hotel, and there was no ballroom luncheon. Baba, my grandmother, hosted the wedding at the house with the chuppah in the living room. Everyone stood around them while they were blessed like their forefathers before them. It was August, and Goldie, even though her dress was knee-length, almost fainted from the smell of musty suits, alcohol, cigarettes and cologne. Saul almost fainted, too, but that was out of disbelief. He held his own hands behind his back, while under the chuppah, to stop himself from reaching out to touch my mother. Her face glistened with sweat; her hair up off her face was damp where it met her neck. Nobody else thought of her as a doll except for my father, who wondered the entire ceremony what she was doing standing beside him.

The chuppah was one of my grandmother’s tablecloths, which she planned to give to the couple for their Shabbos table. My parents didn’t want a religious wedding, but Zaida, my grandfather, had insisted on the chuppah, which was at least traditional. He made the poles himself, treating the wood and sanding it in the backyard for two weeks before the wedding day. He made dowels for the poles, too, and carved little Stars of David on each one. On the wedding day, four men—two uncles, a cousin and a neighbour recently bar mitzvahed—held the chuppah up over the couple’s heads so that neither of them could see the stars. My zaida thought of them as bits of God watching over the marriage without my mother and father knowing.

Unfortunately, God forgot to watch over the chicken soup Baba had intended to serve for lunch. On the hot August day, with the house packed with melting guests, the soup stayed out too long and nearly boiled in the heat alone. When my father broke the glass and everyone clapped around them, Baba ran to the kitchen to get the soup ready in the bowls. She lifted the lid off the pot, and the soup almost jumped out and grabbed her nose. That was the smell: rotten dill, grey chicken. It was enough to make my iron-willed grandmother the third almost-fainting casualty. She had other food to serve. That wasn’t the issue; it was having her soup spoil on a day meant to be as sweet as the first challah dipped in honey that upset her. She did not believe in omens, and she felt that the dybbuk and the evil eye were for women from the Old Country who refused to leave. She was here, in Winnipeg, Canada, at her oldest daughter’s wedding. She did not let a single tear drop when she poured the liquid from the soup down the sink. Drops of her sweat mixed with it instead.

“Yichud!” Zaida called because everyone was crowding around the new couple. Religious or not, my parents were permitted their first few moments alone as a married couple and my grandfather attempted to usher them up to their room. The room had been my Uncle Phil’s and was recently converted slightly to accommodate a double bed (which my zaida also made) and new curtains—white with embroidered yellow daisies, a gift from a cousin in the United States. My parents would live in that room for the first five years of their marriage until my father managed enough savings to get them a small apartment. Until then, they were to live on Alfred Avenue, in the two-storey, three-bedroom house with white stucco and blue shutters. They would eat dinner at my grandparents’ dark-stained dining-room table with matching hutch, and they would share the one small, pink bathroom on the top floor with everyone else. And at night, they would lie in bed, in their room, sandwiched between my grandparents, my aunts, Carrie and Sarah, and the ghost of my mother’s recently dead brother, Phil, the war hero.

My Uncle Phil died during the Second World War in a plane that crashed somewhere in North Africa. Growing up, I didn’t know anything about Africa, except that it is a long way from Winnipeg and that there are deserts. Somewhere in one of the deserts, there is a plane buried in the sand with my uncle’s bones beneath it.

He died two years before my mother and father got married. At the wedding, no one talked about the presence they felt, each in their own way. For my grandfather, it was the extra pair of hands holding the chuppah he had made himself. He couldn’t deny that leading up to the wedding, he felt as though another hand guided his own while he sanded the poles for the canopy. He kept this to himself, partially because if he told anyone about his son’s ghost, they would think he was crazy; but also, he liked to think that he was the only one who felt it.

For my grandmother, it was the feeling that someone was sitting at her kitchen table while she poured her soured soup down the drain. Someone with long legs, wrapped around her wooden chairs. Someone chuckling softly, kindly, at her mishap. That laugh, like a whisper right by her ear, kept her from crying.

For my parents, it was the pair of eyes they could both feel, if not actually see, when they stood together, alone, for the first time as husband and wife. My mother, who for her whole engagement had wanted nothing more than for her older brother to be alive and celebrating with them, couldn’t understand why right then she wished him far away. She just wanted to be alone with my father, for once, without feeling guilty and without worrying that if she kissed him, everyone would be whispering about how they had behaved so inappropriately. That afternoon, my mother closed her eyes, leaned her head against my father’s chest and said goodbye to her brother. It was then that Phil’s eyes, his long legs, his hands, they all disappeared and no one even noticed him leave.

“Will it always be like this?” Goldie whispered to Saul. They heard the voices of the guests downstairs, eating sponge cake instead of spoiled soup. My father laid his wife’s head on his shoulder. They had sat this way many times before, dreaming of their future, worrying about the present.

“Not always,” he promised her. And then he told her about the house they would have one day, the one on McAdam Avenue that she had her eye on—three storeys with an eat-in kitchen and a covered, screened-in porch in the back. He promised her a tomato garden and lilac bushes, and he told her that when (not if) they bought the house he would fix up the garage himself (they always commented on how it was crumbling to pieces; how some people just don’t know how to take care of what they’ve got). The more he talked, the more my mother’s back muscles relaxed, followed by her face and then she looked up and all over again fell hopelessly in love. It happened like that—my father telling her her dreams and my mother living in them long enough that she saw everything through her dreaming eyes. She pulled his face toward hers and kissed him deeply, only concentrating on her lips entirely feeling his. She wanted only to breathe him in and to ignore this house, which was starting (even upstairs) to smell like fifty guests, sweaty and nearly spoiled like the chicken soup. My father smelled like everything she thought she wanted in her life—the McAdam Avenue house, four children, a membership to Hadassah. If my grandfather hadn’t knocked on the door right then, they would have undressed so that they could feel each other, and their dreams, all over their bodies.

i have grown to understand that expectations can develop very early in a person’s life, even before they are born. This scene—my two parents newly married and out of breath with excitement, desire and anticipation of their unfolding future—is the beginning of my life, even though it happened long before I was conceived. I see them sitting on that bed and the promises they are making to each other. They know, should they not fulfill them, then their children will, and that is nearly as good. Of course, they didn’t have children. They only had one child. Me. But on that afternoon, those promises got packaged up and stored away like love letters at the back of a spare-room closet, to be taken down periodically, reviewed, adored and then stored away again.

“Sidura Ludwig's first novel, Holding My Breath, is a lovely coming-of-age story told in a voice that is tender, sad, and funny. In understated prose, Ludwig convincingly portrays a time and a place. Narrator Beth Levy is growing up in Winnipeg in the 1950s and '60s, the youngest member of a Jewish family that holds its secrets close….The deceptive simplicity of Ludwig's style illuminates her novel's emotional depth.”
—The Boston Globe

“Holding My Breath peels back the lid on the Jewish Canadian experience in the 1950's and 60's, exposing the often unfulfilled lives of several generations of women in this charming, dysfunctional Winnipeg family. Each has her own dream: to be accepted by the Hadassah ladies, to sing on the stage, or simply to have a place of her own. Even the smallest dream can make a woman delusional, especially in this small community at such a confining moment in history, but Beth, our delightful narrator, stakes her own claim early on and the reader is instantly smitten. Holding My Breath is a sweet, sad and compulsively readable tale that manages, along with its lovely, unbreakable characters, to soar.”
—Jennifer Gilmore, author of Golden Country, a New York Times Notable Book and Los Angeles Times Book Prize Finalist