Shulie

I met Shulamith Górecki in late summer 1997 at the dinner party where my father publicly denied the Holocaust for the first time.

I had known of the possibility of both things before, obliquely. Shulamith was soon to be Jacob Bloom’s new stepmother. Jacob and his elder brother David were my next-door neighbours and my oldest friends, although neither of them were in Liverpool that summer: David was on a finance internship in London after his first year at Cambridge, and Jacob was at their mother Miriam’s house in Haifa, where he’d been staying since we sat our A-Levels. Usually I would have been there with him—for many years we had alternated summers there and at my grandfather’s apartment in Paris—but this year I’d been on a month-long stint teaching piano at a summer school in Belleville.

One day, on the phone from London, David told me that his father was planning to marry again. It was a blow that silenced me. It knocked me an inch or two back in my chair, in my father’s study at the top of our house overlooking the gated garden in Falkner Square.

“Hasn’t he told you?” David sounded genuinely surprised.

“No. I’ve barely seen him. I only got back from France on Monday.”

Images of my young students crossed my mind, brows low in the naïveté of concentration, starfish fingers reaching for the keys.

“Well, you’ve missed a scoop, Tasha,” David said, with the syrup of sarcasm that told me instantly his feelings on the matter.

“I didn’t know your dad was even seeing anyone.”

“Yep.”

“But why?”

David laughed....