The Golems of Gotham

Based on ancient kabbalistic practices, the legend of the Golem reappeared in many versions, and may have inspired Mary Shelley's "Frankenstein, as well as other modern-day "horror" stories. In "The Golems of Gotham," Thane Rosenbaum has woven the legend of the Golem into a mystical, comedic, and deeply thoughtful novel set in contemporary Manhatten — a ghost story of the highest caliber that delivers its own haunting message of horror and of humanity's power to create and destroy. It is the eve of the new millennium. In New York City's Upper West Side, in a brownstone on Edgar Allan Poe Street, a teenage girl performs an ancient ceremony using a hunk of river mud, an old violin, candles and a picture of the tattoos on the arms of her dead grandparents, Lothar and Rose Levin. Ariel's purpose is to bring her grandparents — Holocaust survivors who committed suicide before she was born — back to life, and in doing so, to rescue Oliver, her father, a famous but now blocked mystery writer, from demons of his own.

Ariel's scheme works better than she could have imagined. Not only do her grandparents materialize, they are accompanied by a group of other ghosts — among them the legendary Primo Levi, Jerzy Kosinski, Jean Amery, and Paul Celan — writers who committed suicide after having survived Nazi concentration camps.Together these golems turn Ariel's house on Edgar Allan Poe Street into a museum of gruesome Holocaust images and artifacts, complete with blood running down the walls and relics of a sixteenth-century synagogue in the attic. The entire neighborhood gets treated to an assortment of post-Holocaust ideas and life lessons.

Like the monster created by Mary Shelley's Dr. Frankenstein, the golems that Ariel creates surpass their creator's expectations. They frolic about the city, carping on the trappings of modern Jewish-American culture, and on the many ways Jews and others have trivialized the Holocaust and diluted its memory. Like family members bickering at the dining room table, the Golems debate the purpose of their return to earth, reviewing their lives and deaths, and ruminating on what they lost. They go to work on Oliver, filling his house and stirring his imagination with gruesome visions that not only vanquish his writer's block, but also give way to an unstoppable literary outpour. And they wreak dangerous havoc on New York City, filling its streets, buildings, bridges, and skies with reminders that the potential for evil is still with us, even as memories of the Shoah slip farther into our unconscious.

Eventually the Golems realize that they have gone too far just as Oliver has gone too far in simulating their fateful experiences in writing his new novel. Perhaps he is the one who has actually created them? Order is restored in Manhattan and the Golems gather at Oliver's table for a Passover seder. As they go through the ancient rituals, the Golems make provocative suggestions for updating the holiday's observances. They ask questions for which there are no answers, evennow. But in his novel Rosenbaum shows that these questions demand our attention nonetheless. Filled with relevance and immediacy, they make a connection between religion and reality, tradition and moral compromise, and between horror and its intersection with everyday life. Rosenbaum encourages all of us — not just Jews — to remember that the horrors of the Holocaust extended way beyond the act itself because spiritual and moral damage continued on throughout the century and only memory itself is a possible antedote.

Questions for Discussion

Thane Rosenbaum is the author of Second Hand Smoke and Elijah Visible. He lives in New York City with his daughter, Basia Tess.