Under the Influence of Golems

Here’s a confession: I haven’t read that many golem stories. Or at least, as many as someone who’s written a book called 
The Golem and the Jinni
 probably should’ve. I haven’t read Cynthia Ozick’s 
The Puttermesser Papers
, or Marge Piercy’s 
He, She and It
. I haven’t cracked Thane Rosenbaum’s 
The Golems of Gotham
, or the more golem-centered volumes of Terry Pratchett’s 
Discworld
 series.

When I started writing The Golem and the Jinni, I was really, really unsure of myself. I was embarking on what I knew was my first real book, and it was like all newborn things, delicate and easily disturbed. Something warned me that if I filled my head with the golem stories of other, far more talented writers, I would crowd my own barely-formed golem right out of my brain, or unintentionally mash it into a different image.

Over the years, that intimidation became an almost superstitious avoidance. Maybe now that the book is finished, I can finally crack The Puttermesser Papers without worrying that Ozick‘s golem will feel more real to me than my own. But in any case, here are a few golem stories that I do know, and that added their own particular flavors to my book, whether I meant them to or not.

1) 
The old, classic stories of Rabbi Loew and his golem. 
Honestly, I’m not sure when I first heard these stories. At Sunday school? That sort of Old World folk culture didn’t fit with our modern Reform curriculum. My grandparents? My mom’s parents were cosmopolitan German Jews; this wasn’t really their thing. My dad’s folks were the Yiddish speakers, but I don’t remember them telling me folk tales. Usually they were too busy trying to get me to eat things. So where did I learn them? It feels like the stories were always there, floating through the ether: Rabbi Loew and his golem, the protector of Prague’s medieval Jews during the pogroms. Years later, after I’d started writing The Golem and the Jinni, first my parents and then my in-laws visited Prague and brought me back little translated volumes of golem stories. A few were variations I hadn’t read before, but mostly they were already familiar.

2) Michael Chabon, The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay. If you haven’t read this yet, seriously, treat yourself. The golem in Kavalier and Clay is the golem, Rabbi Loew’s legendary creation. It’s a real-world presence in the first part of the book—one of the characters attempts to smuggle it out of Prague—and a recurring motif through the rest of the book, one of its many threads of longing and sadness. (Really, you’ve read this, right? Because I can lend you my copy if you haven’t.)

3) 
James Sturm, 
The Golem’s Mighty Swing.
 Sturm’s graphic novel follows a 1920s all-Jewish baseball team facing anti-Semitism as they travel the Midwest. Going broke and looking for a gimmick to fill the seats, they dress the team’s one African-American player as a golem, and advertise his prowess. Then, of course, things start to go awry. It’s a sad but satisfying tale, and a good baseball yarn as well.

4) Naomi Kritzer, “The Golem.” “The golem woke on December 1st, 1941, and saw the future before her like an unrolled scroll.” With a first line like that, how can you not read more? This particular golem—the first female golem I ever encountered—is built by two women in Prague who hope to survive the unsurvivable. Kritzer (whom I’ve known since college) uses her prescient golem to examine ideas of free will, destiny, and choice. (You can find “The Golem” in 2001’s Year’s Best Fantasy, and in Kritzer’s digital collection Comrade Grandmother and Other Stories.)

5) 
The X-Files, “Kaddish.”
 Maybe I’m cheating a little here, but shows like The X-Files have been as formative to my imagination as the books I’ve read. In this fourth-season episode, Mulder and Scully go to Brooklyn to investigate the strangulation of a neo-Nazi who murdered a Hasidic Jew. I remember feeling proud that the show was tackling a golem story, but also thinking that the supporting players suffered from the unfortunate exoticization that happened whenever The X-Files dealt with an ethnic beastie. That golem, though: pretty creepy.