New in the World of Golems

I've been reading about the history of golem stories in fiction and popular culture. Besides looking into some serious literary history and criticism, I have checked amazon.com for recent publications in popular lit including some sort of golem. Science fiction, thrillers, literary rehashes of the Golem legends, and more are being written all the time.

Below is some information about a selection of these works. There are many more, including iPhone covers, music, jewelry, and so on.

Clay Lord: Master of Golems,
Volume 1, April 21, 2015
by Jun Suzumoto.

It appears that some type of golems have a role in Japanese manga and games. Clay Lord: Master of Golems is described thus:

"An all new manga series about alchemy and adventure for fans of Full Metal Alchemist. The young and impressionable Clay is nothing short of enthralled by the outside world. Finding interest in the most mundane of details, Clay is a young man with a mysterious past and an awesome power to boot: he has the ability to create and shape golems."

There's evidently a Pokemon character of a golem, as reflected in the trading card above.

About Jonathan Kellerman and Jesse Kellerman's thriller The Golem of Hollywood, Steven King blurbed:

“An extraordinary work of detection, suspense, and supernatural mystery. I spent three days totally lost in the world Jonathan and Jesse Kellerman have created. This is brilliant, page-turning fiction with mythic underpinnings that give it a special resonance; a rare collaboration where the sum is truly greater than the parts. The book is like nothing I’ve ever read before. It sort of took my breath away.”

The two Kellermans have also written a sequel to this titled The Golem of Paris, which is scheduled for publication next November.

I bought this graphic novel. It's
very disappointing.

An unofficial Minecraft book:
Diary of a Mincraft Golem.

A Minecraft
Golem Action Figure

Not to mention the Minecraft Golem tee shirt!

And finally: a Golem Game for PC

My pick for strangest item: a golem on a pillowcase. I guess it would be good for a kid who wants to have nightmares:

Recent Golem Reading

• Benjamin Ivry, "How the Golem Got Hist Groove Back," Forward, Mach 5, 2015.
• Elizabeth R. Baer, The Golem Redux, Detroit, 2012.
• Cathy S. Gelbin, The Golem Returns, Ann Arbor, 2014
• Gershom Scholem, "The Idea of the Golem" in  On The Kabbalah and Its Symbolism," New York 1965.
• S.Y.Agnon, To This Day, Transl. Hillel Halkin, New Milford CT, 2009. (Original publication in Hebrew, 1952)

Two Golem Stories

Two famous books about the golem of Prague:

• The Golem by Gustav Meyrink (1914), translated by Mike Mitchell
• The Golem and the Wondrous Deeds of the Maharal of Prague by Yudl Rosenberg (1909), translated by Curt Leviant.

Pursuing my fascination with the development of the golem story, I've recently read both of these books. Each one has an extremely useful and fascinating introduction, offering insights about the authors' originality and background.

I believe that both books had great influence on the huge number of adaptations and appropriations of the Golem story during the last 100 years -- a history that's documented in detail in Wikipedia (accuracy as always unknown and stability of the article unpredictable).

Meyrink's Golem tale is phantasmagorical. The narrator sees words in a book emerge like living creatures. The houses of Prague appear to him to squat like animals. The narrator is never even certain of his own identity.

The appearance of Meyrink's golem is preceded by "eerie portents which presage the irruption of that spectre into the physical world." (p. 59) And people who see the golem are paralyzed with fear at the sight of the hulking figure with a smooth, round head. They are never sure they have witnessed its presence, which manifests only every 33 years.

You can read Meyrink's book as one of those dreams where you keep waking up but you wake up into another dream, becoming more and more disoriented and frightened, and indeed the character of the Puppetmaster, a tale teller in the story, says: "dreams carry within them dark truths, which when I am awake, glimmer faintly in the depths of my soul like the after-images of brightly coloured fairy tales." (p 42)

Yudl Rosenberg's Golem is narrated by an eyewitness to the legendary events in Prague in the days of Rabbi Judah Loew. Rosenberg invented many of the now-classic heroic deeds in which the Rabbi outsmarted the antisemites of Prague by using the Golem to do his bidding. The golem had an invisibility cloak and massive strength, two features that made him especially effective in carrying out his trickster duties and revealing the machinations of Jew-hating evildoers to the more sympathetic authorities. Rosenberg was so effective at making his original tales sound like old legends that most people attribute his creations to folklore.

These two approaches to the Golem as either a figure of fearful danger or as a helpful tool in protecting the Jews are both very fascinating. The straightforward folkish narrative style of Rosenberg contrasts to Meyrink's unreliable narrator: a man who isn't sure of his own identity, much less capable of really explaining what's happening to him. So many other approaches to the idea of a Golem have followed, from serious treatments to those bordering on silliness -- a literary history to savor, I think.

Anniversary of Gustav Meyrink's "The Golem"

One hundred years ago, Gustav Meyrink began serialized publication of his fantasy novel The Golem. I haven't read it, but I've seen a very bizarre film based on it.

Both the novel and, briefly, the film are discussed in today's Guardian,in an article titled "Meyrink's The Golem: where fact and fiction collide." The author, David Barnett, calls Meyrink's book "one of the most absorbing, atmospheric and mind-boggling slices of fantasy ever committed to print." Some of the interesting material in Barnett's article:

"Although Meyrink's Golem is part of a long line of Prague golem stories which begins with Rabbi Loew in the 16th century, the legend of the golem goes back to Biblical times, the word appearing in Psalms to mean an "unshaped form" in God's eyes. According to the Talmud, Adam was the original golem, created from mud and 'kneaded into a shapeless husk'. The myth of the golem was prevalent in the Middle Ages, and Jakob Grimm of the fairytale brothers fame also wrote on them. 

"In Meyrink's hands, the Golem becomes a strange recurring presence, a being which manifests in Prague every 33 years. It appears with the face of Pernath, a doppelganger who adds to the increasingly unreal quality of the story. There is the sensation of secret machinations in the darkness; of being watched by persons unknown and for reasons unknowable. Events are being directed and shaped by powers beyond our perception."

"The Golem" -- A Silent Film

"The Golem: How He Came Into the World" (Der Golem, Wie er in die Welt Kam) is a 1920 silent film by Paul Wegener, a German director. It's a mixture of  the classic Golem legend with additional conventions of silent movies and German cultural references.



The Golem in Wegener's version is made by sorcery, using a book titled "Necromancy" and spells and rituals that don't have much connection to Jewish lore, though the walls are sometimes covered with Hebrew words.  Rabbi Loew fits the stereotype of a sorcerer or a witch more closely than that of a medieval Jew -- for example, indoors he wears no hat.

In the street, all the Jews wear pointy hats like traditional witches, but also wear the circular badge that was one of the marks required by medieval Jews. (Hitler's reintroduction of the star-shaped badge was a few years in the future, so it's not a reference to that). Their image is negative -- though there may be a bit of sympathy for their impending exile, announced by the emperor. The Jews gather in masses, blow huge shofars, engage in breast beating and hand waving which all do at once, and seem pretty out of control sometimes.

I felt as if the stereotypes were mixed together. In the more Jewish versions of the story, the spell that makes the clay statue turn into a living Golem is a dangerous imitation of God's creation of Adam by breathing life into a clay man; Rabbi Loew wrote the word "Emet" (Hebrew for "truth") on the creature's forehead (or sometimes on a paper under his tongue).

In Wegener's version, the spells are executed more as if by traditional witchcraft or black magic. The final bit of magic that creates life in the Golem is to place a paper with the word "Emet" in a star, which is fastened on the Golem's chest. The Jewish version decommissions the Golem by removing the first letter (aleph) from the beginning of the word Emet, changing it from "truth" to "Death." The film version has small blonde children pull the star off of his chest, making a happy ending in which the children are no longer endangered by a creature who has become a dangerous and angry murderer.

In the film, Rabbi Loew has a daughter, Miriam. Beautiful Miriam falls in love with Florian, a knight who brings rolled up parchment messages from the Emperor to Rabbi Loew. Like in Ivanhoe, The Merchant of Venice, and other stories, the "Jewess" is a temptress -- beautiful, forbidden, enchanting. Miriam falls for Florian, lets him into her bedroom, doesn’t resist like Rebecca or marry like Jessica, daughter of Shylock. The end result is disastrous for Florian -- the rabbi's assistant discovers them in bed and has the Golem throw him from a tower.

 

The plot is complicated -- the Rabbi and some of the Jews, threatened by the edict of expulsion from their Ghetto, are invited to bring the Golem to entertain the Court. They show hallucinatory images of "Ahasuarus the Wandering Jew" which appear to be like movies projected on the wall. The rabbi warns them not to speak or laugh, and when of course they do, the roof starts to fall, and the Golem must hold it up like Samson in the Philistine palace, shown below.



I've tried to stick to just talking about the content of the movie. The visuals are impressive in early-silent-movie style, like the works that appear in the currently popular film "Hugo" about the early silent film-maker Georges Melies. Studio sets with slight special effects, high contrast between light and dark images, and in the reissued edit of the film from 2000, hand-tinted scenes (based on a surviving copy of the film) so that the entire color changes constantly.

Trying to understand the film historically, I've read a bit of analysis in the book The "Jew" in Cinema: From The Golem to Don't Touch My Holocaust by Omer Bartov.

"The Golem is not an overtly antisemitic film," Bartov writes. "On the contrary, in some ways it is sympathetic to the plight  of a community threatened by the power and whims of an arbitrary and frivolous ruler." Though Wegener, who directed and played the role of the Golem, later became an "Actor of the State" in Nazi Germany, here Bartov believes he was only reflecting "existing notions about Jews" and further popularizing them, providing stereotypes that have driven large numbers of films and filmmakers subsequently. The three main themes that emerged and lasted, says Bartov, are Jews as malevolent outsiders, anxiety about Jewish transformation, and obsession with sexual relations between Jews and gentiles. (p. 3)

Golems keep coming up? A review with digressions

“You’ve got something in common with Kafka, there,” says an old man in the tale Kafka’s Leopards by Moacyr Scliar. “When I told him the story of the Golem, I warned him: we shouldn’t create things we can’t control. And fiction is just that, something that can’t be controlled. You start to write, to imagine, and who knows where it’s going to end? And then, more books for what? Everything important has been written in the Torah.”

Yesterday afternoon I read Kafka’s Leopards. It’s a fantastic story: I mean really a fantasy, as well as highly enjoyable and imaginative. Like many fables it reads very smoothly on the story level, and begs you to read in a variety of meanings – like the one in the paragraph above.

In the tale, for rather involved reasons, Benjamin, a poor tailor from Chernovitsky (a Bessarbian shtetl near Odessa) travels to Prague, thinking he has an assignment from a revolutionary cell led by Trotsky. His trip to Prague is challenging – World War I is going on in between the two places and (like my father also a poor tailor in his story of going from his own shtetl to Pinsk) Benjamin must first overcome a challenge: to cross a river by hiring a ferry rowed by scary men who could easily steal his money or push him into the river. Realism in the middle of the story? Or is a ferry boat symbolic? Real to me.

Once in Prague, Benjamin has no idea what to do to complete his mission for his idol Trotsky, but thinks he’s supposed to contact a leftist writer and obtain “a text.” He left his instructions on the train. But somehow, he goes to a synagogue to find out – and the author he hears of is Kafka. The shammes of the synagogue, who gives tours in exchange for tips, tells him of Kafka and much else, including what Kafka said. Benjamin asks for Kafka’s response: “What did he say?”

The shammes answers, “Nothing. Didn’t say anything. Didn’t pay any attention to me. … Speaking of treasure and tips, you could contribute a bit more.”

Soon afterwards, Benjamin actually meets Kafka and asks him for “a text.” Kafka gives him a mysterious piece of writing – later explained as a contribution to a Yiddish newspaper, one of many mix-ups in the tale. While the story is pure fantasy, the one-sentence Kafka story is a real Kafka story: “Leopards break into the temple and drink up the offering in the chalices; this happens again and again; finally, one can predict their action in advance and it becomes part of the ceremony. – Franz Kafka.”

The remainder of the story is about the poor tailor’s experience in Prague, his return to Chernovitsky, and finally about the end of his life in Puerto Alegre, Brazil (where the first few paragraphs of the story had already given away his end – as the uncle of another radical in an oppressive country – repeating his own experiences, sort of). And about a variety of ways to look at Kafka’s "text."

You can read all sorts of meanings into it. Or not. After all, it’s a story by a Brazilian Jewish magical realist twentieth-century writer, what would you expect?

Though Scliar's work was written long ago (and he died last year), the story was only recently translated into English. Sad that he’s so unknown and underappreciated. And so sad that this book is published so obscurely and at such a high price. Another digression: the sad state of publishing, where this single story less than 100 pages long costs $26.07 on amazon.com (88 cents off list price), no Kindle edition. Lucky for me the library had it.

Cynthia Ozick (April 17, 1928)

Cynthia Ozick has written a number of novels that I find enjoyable. In particular, The Puttermesser Papers is the only tale I know of about a female golem. It's also amusing and a good read.

Rabbi Judah Loew of Prague (1525)

The scholar Rabbi Judah Loew of Prague appears to have been born around the beginning of Passover in 1525. Today, he is mainly known for his creation of the Golem of Prague. Many authors have written about this clay man, brought to life by dangerous kabbalistic spells, and brought down by rubbing off one letter of the word written in Hebrew on his forehead. The word "truth" can be changed by removing one letter into the word "death" -- that's what the story says the rabbi wrote and changed.

I'm especially fond of the version by Elie Wiesel. According to some legends Loewe's Golem still remains hidden in a Prague synagogue attic. The Golem idea is very much alive in modern fiction, as I wrote here:

A Word on Golems in Science Fiction and other Fiction

“The Golem” Computer

“The Golem” computer was dedicated at Weizmann Institute on June 17, 1965. The dedication ceremony for this new marvel of technology included a lecture by Gershom Scholem on the history of the Golem and parallels to the computer.

One quote from the very long comparison:

What makes the Golem work? In both cases it is energy. In the old Golem it was the energy of speech, in the new one it is electronic energy. In the case of the Kabbalists it was the Shem ha-Mephorash, the fully-interpreted and expressed and differentiated name of God. Now, it is still differentiation according to a given system and interpretation of signs and ciphers which makes the Golem work.

Michael Chabon (May 24, 1963)

--Michael Chabon on the Simpsons

"I saw my first golem in 1968, in Flushing, New York, shortly before my fifth birthday," Michael Chabon wrote in "Golems I Have Known...A Trickster's Memoir." The last sentence of this essay is: "And, naturally, I'm still telling lies." In the essay, Chabon describes his direct encounters with clay statues created by possibly practicing Kabbalists -- and also claims to be related to Rabbi Loewe of Prague, most famous golem creator. He also describes the progress of his awareness of both the Holocaust and the American civil rights struggle through his experiences with various people during his youth: these things are knit together in the memoir.

Chabon explains that a golem is among other things (and especially for modern or post-moderns) a metaphor for artistic and literary creation. Originally, the kabbalists made golems as an imitation of god's work creating Adam, also from clay. God animated the inert clay Adam; thus, the rabbis pretended or imitated him in the incantations they used over their statues. Of course the legends had it that they were sometimes successful, and the statues really came to life. After a childhood of encounters with golems, Chabon used the story of Rabbi Loewe and his golem in his Pulitzer-prize-winning novel The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay. The Holocaust played a role in that book, as it did in the memoir.

I'm a big fan of Chabon. Besides Kavalier & Clay, I loved his book The Yiddish Policemen's Union, an alternate, comic, ironic history of the Jews in the twentieth century where settlement in Alaska takes place instead of the Holocaust and the founding of Israel. His playful treatment of Jewish history and identity really appeals to me. I'm especially amused by the fact that the essay, which ends "I'm still telling lies" has been attacked for being false.

Marge Piercy (March 31, 1936)

Marge Piercy's novel He, She, and It is about a golem-type entity in a computer some time in the near future. Many of its characters have a Jewish or Israeli identity, and the action takes place in partly-destroyed world after "the Two Week War a terrorist had launched with a nuclear device that had burned Jerusalem off the map, a conflagration of biological, chemical and nuclear weapons that had set the oilfields aflame and destroyed the entire region." I find the use of golem motifs in modern fiction to be very intriguing, and this is one of my favorite examples.

Piercy's other novels also often have interesting secular Jewish characters, such as City of Darkness, City of Light about the French Revolution and Gone to Soldiers about World War II. I'm very fond of the way she puts Jewish characters in the books naturally, without dedicating the book to Jewish themes and concerns. In fact, she might be one of the best writers when it comes to integrating characters who just happen to be assimilated Jews into an ordinary plot.

The only book by Piercy that disappointed me was Pesach for the Rest of Us, which talks about alternative Seders, but which I found rather disorganized and lacking in focus. This one, to my knowledge, is her only explicit Jewish book.

Overall, she's a really excellent secular Jewish author-hero!

A Word on Golems in Science Fiction and other Fiction

I'm fascinated by the way the Jewish legend of the Golem has been adopted in modern literature, and in connection with Karel Capek's birthday today, I've put together a list of some of the works where golems of various sorts have appeared:

• Anthony, Piers: Golem in the Gears
• Borges, Jorge Luis: Dreamtigers
• Brin, David: Kiln People
• Chabon, Michael: Kavalier and Clay
• Davidson, Avram: “The Golem”
• Dick, Phillip: The Cosmic Puppets
• Hamill, Pete: Snow in August
• Handler, Daniel: Watch Your Mouth
• Isler, Alan: The Bacon Fancier
• Lem, Stanislav: The Golem
• Mieville, China: Iron Council
• Mulisch, Harry: The Procedure
• Piercy, Marge: He, She, and It
• Pratchett, Terry: Feet of Clay
• Rosenbaum, Thane: The Golems of Gotham
• Stroud, Jonathan: The Golem’s Eye
• Sturm, James: The Golem’s Mighty Swing

Other, more obscure books with "Golem" in the title appear in a keyword search at ABE books, and other places. I have read some of these, and plan to read more, out of curiosity about how this legend has fit so well into a modern genre, and in fact how it fictionally prefigured a whole area of modern technology.

Karel Capek (January 9, 1890)

Capek was a Czech writer. In his most famous play, RUR, he invented the modern sci-fi idea of a robot. Moreover, he invented the word ROBOT.  Capek, not himself Jewish, credited the Jewish legend of the Golem -- associated with Prague -- as one source for his imagining of the robot.

Isaac Asimov (born January 2, 1920) expanded on Capek's idea of robots in a number of his works. I think of the legend of the Golem, which appears in a vast number of 20^th century works of fiction, as a Jewish contribution to general literature, along with many others.