Tellingly, Chabon notes, in his essay “The Recipe for Life,” “I went looking for information about golems, and found an insight into the nature of novel writing itself” (151). He argues that, though the words and letters used to animate the Golem have changed from telling to telling, language brings the figure to life. For Joe and Sammy, their words animating the Escapist’s freeing people in the pages of the comic book will give those oppressed and downtrodden readers hope for salvation.
Through the accrual of so much money, Joe is given a ray of hope that he might be able to afford to bring his family over from Czechoslovakia. Similarly, Sammy is able to move out of his mother’s apartment and to support his mother and grandmother. Yet they move beyond using their Golem as a moneymaker by using it to transmit their political message: getting the United States, and its citizens, involved in the war effort against Nazi Germany. Whereas the Escapist can perform these additional duties, it cannot be controlled. It is impossible to control the emotional reaction of readers to their pleas for intervention; they can only make their case though the Escapist’s battles and pictures of Nazi cruelty in the pages of their comics. The result is that while millions are reading and exalting in the Escapist’s monthly drubbing of Hitler and his Nazi goons, there is a destructive quality as these same exploits enflame the rage of the various Nazi sympathizers in America. This is first evidenced by the one-man bund Carl Ebling’s fake bombing of the Empire State Building, later his real attempted bombing of a bar mitzvah, all in the name of destroying those he sees responsible for maligning the Nazi cause.
The negative response to the Escapist’s Nazi fighting has an indirect effect on Sammy. As a result of the arrest and conviction of the hapless Carl Ebling, his sister Ruth is flushed with a new rage at those whom she blames for his imprisonment: namely, the creators of the Escapist. Chabon remarks, “The bubbling motor of Ruth Ebling’s hostility toward Jews was being fueled not merely by the usual black compound of her brother’s logical, omnivorous harangues and the silent precepts of her employer’s social class. She was also burning a clear, volatile quart of shame blended with unrefined rage” (402–3). As housekeeper for the host of a party attended by Sammy, her anger compels her to call the police, who raid the house and arrest them for the then crime of homosexual behavior. Sammy had slowly come to terms with his homosexuality thanks to a relationship he struck with the radio voice of the Escapist, Tracy Bacon. The raid leads to Sammy’s humiliation and rape at the hands of two police officers, as well as precipitating the destruction of his relationship with Bacon, and Sammy’s return to rejecting his own sexuality.
First for Joe, and later for Sammy, the Escapist’s failure at its secondary task is demoralizing. Joe realizes that no matter how many Nazis the Escapist pounds into paste it does not result in the desired effect on American political discourse. Joe becomes disillusioned by this thinking: “If they could not move Americans to anger against Hitler, then Joe’s existence, the mysterious freedom that had been granted to him and denied to so many others, had no meaning” (172–73). Sammy comes to feel the same impotence at their endless imaginary battles with Nazis: “Though futility was not an emotion Sammy was accustomed to experiencing, he had begun to be plagued by the same sense of inefficacy, of endless make-believe, that had troubled Joe from the first” (296). In the above cases of Carl and Ruth Ebling, the Escapist’s war on the Nazis works too well, causing chaos. Yet as a political motivator it is an utter failure. In each case, the comic book Golem proves ill suited for the job.
The attack on the Golem comes at the hands of groups of moralizing reactionaries who come to blame comic books, and the Escapist specifically, for any and all societal problems. This attack leads directly to the character, in effect, running amok. Yet for Joe, the destructive power of the Golem occurs earlier in the novel, when his brother Thomas’s ship is sunk by a German U-boat. He essentially blames the Escapist for killing his brother, reasoning that had he not made so much money, he would not have been able to pay for Thomas’s ill-fated place on the ship. It was the Golem’s stated duty (making money) that was the catalyst for Thomas’s death.
For Sammy, the Senate Subcommittee to Investigate Juvenile Delinquency hearings, and his televised testimony, prove to be the direct downfall of his career in comics. The subcommittee, convened in 1954, sought to prove that popular entertainment was the root cause of juvenile delinquency and leaned heavily on the work of Wertham as evidence.[3] Their questions were loaded, such as one senator’s suggestion, speaking of the relationship between Batman and Robin, that “perhaps they are just good friends” (614). After his inevitably disastrous testimony, Sammy is led out of the hearing room, having been “publically identified as a lifelong homosexual, on television, by members of the United States Senate” (617). While this marks the end of Sammy’s career in comic books, Chabon leaves the door open for a new beginning, as Sammy plans to venture to Hollywood and a new stage in life.
Eventually, like Rabbi Loew’s Golem, the Escapist is destroyed. As Sammy and Joe are clearing out Joe’s office at the Empire State Building, the publisher of the Escapist comics, Sheldon Anapol, stops by to visit and admits that “today . . . I killed the Escapist” (588). Like Rabbi Loew’s Golem, which had protected the Jews of Prague from the coming attack from the followers of the priest, Thaddeus, the Escapist had fulfilled its original obligation, to earn enough money for the creators to move them out of poverty. Anapol adds, “I’ve been losing money on the Escapist titles for a few years now . . . his circulation figures have been in a nosedive for quite some time. Superheroes are dead, boys” (588). At first they are surprised, but come to realize that the Escapist has run its course.
The Golem of Prague reappears at the end of the novel, in the very box that hid the young Joe Kavalier during his escape from Prague to America; only the Golem no longer maintains its humanoid form. Having traveled too far from its place of origin, the river Moldau, it has crumbled back into a pile of dirt. This final return of the Golem to the narrative occurs just as Joe is thinking about buying Empire Comics with the money he had saved in order to buy his family’s freedom. Joe notices that the box is significantly lighter than it had been all those years ago, recalling Kornblum’s “paradoxical wisdom about golems, something in Hebrew to the effect that it was the Golem’s unnatural soul that had given it weight; unburdened of it, the earthen Golem was light as air” (611). Here Chabon suggests that the so-called magic cannot be reclaimed. Like the Golem, too far removed from its origins, through his forays into radio, television, and postwar campiness, the Escapist has lost its soul. This is underscored by Sammy’s decision to leave comics all together.
Interestingly, the parallels that Chabon draws between the superhero and the Golem are not the only means by which he asserts the mythic status of superhero. Many scholars have suggested that the characters, Joe Kavalier and Sammy Clay, are modeled after specific, historical creators. Some suggest that they are meant to be representative of Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster (which is untenable considering Superman exists in the novel and is the inspiration for Sammy Clay to write his own comics); others have suggested Joe Simon and Jack Kirby. Yet it is clear that Kavalier and Clay are actually composites of the aforementioned teams, with the addition of Will Eisner. This approach is critical to Chabon’s assertion that superhero comics are essentially American folktales, and is of particular interest in terms of his linking superheroes to the Golem of Prague. Whether referring to King Arthur or Moses, many of the best known legends have some basis in history and have been appropriated and retold to fit a specific time and place. Scholars believe that an historical Arthur was likely a Welsh king or warlord, first adapted to suit a twelfth-century audience by Geoffrey of Monmouth. Sir Thomas Malory later revised the story to reflect England during the Wars of the Roses. With each adaptation, the story of Arthur changes slightly, becoming more mythic in scope, though maintaining familiar footing in earlier interpretations.
The same
can be said about the story of the Golem of Prague. Gershom Scholem notes that the Golem of Prague legend “has no historical basis in the life of Loew or in the era close to his lifetime” (“Golem” 737). Rather, it is an appropriation of an earlier Golem legend from Rabbi Elijah of Chelm in the mid- to late eighteenth century. As is the case with King Arthur and other legendary figures, a kernel of truth is combined with mythology to form a story that is significant because it reflects the culture into which it is born and retold. Chabon performs a similar trick in Kavalier & Clay. Joe and Sammy share character traits as well as experiences with many prominent figures from the early days of comics, yet the two of them are wholly fictional, and the Escapist is purely Chabon’s creation. By blurring the lines between fact and fiction, Chabon creates the context in which he can stress both the specific concerns of those American Jews of the time, and also the quintessential Americanness of the characters they created out of those Jewish legends. In effect, Chabon highlights the universality of their American experience through the cross-cultural resonance of these stories.
There are a few seminal moments in comics’ history that Chabon recreates that are worth noting. His first nod to comics’ history is the sale of the Escapist to Empire Comics, which offers to buy the rights to the character for 150 dollars, and eighty dollars for all additional characters. They stress, “That’s just for the rights. . . . We’ll also take you both on, Sammy for seventy-five dollars a week and Joe at six dollars a page” (158). This is, of course, exactly what happened to Siegel and Shuster, who sold Superman to National Publications (now DC Comics) for 130 dollars. Suggesting just how dramatic the Superman sale was, and insinuating the mythic status that Superman has achieved, Tye notes that it was “the original sin” that defined the creator/owner relationship (29). True to form, this became the common practice. Stan Lee recalls that there “were no royalty payments at the end of the road . . . no residuals . . . no copyright ownership. You wrote your pages, got your check, and that was that” (qtd. in Sturm). Lee notes that the same applied for artists.
The politicizing of superhero comics recalls the early collaborations of Jack Kirby and Joe Simon while at Timely (later Marvel) Comics, particularly Captain America. Like the Escapist, the first issue of Captain America Comics showed the titular character socking Hitler in the jaw and appeared prior to U.S. involvement in the war. Brod notes that “Simon and Kirby intended that cover and all their Captain America stories to be recruitment posters and inspirational stories for U.S. mobilization for the war” (66). Joe Simon recalls, “The United States hadn’t yet entered the war when Jack [Kirby] and I created Captain America, so maybe he was our way of lashing out against the Nazi menace” (qtd. in Ro 16).
In Sammy’s initial pitch to Sheldon Anapol, who would become Empire Comics, Anapol orders him to “just get me a Superman” (88). After the wild success of Superman, this very directive was given to countless young artists. Most famously, Victor Fox (of Fox Publications) “wanted [Will] Eisner to create a character that was more than just a Superman knockoff; he wanted a character that was virtually identical to the Siegel and Shuster creation” (Schumacher 51). Eisner created Wonder Man, and Fox was sued. And like Eisner, who was told by Fox to “lie about Wonder Man’s parentage when he was asked to testify” (Tye 54), which he did, Sammy offers to perjure himself in exchange for a larger slice of the Escapist moneymaking machine.
Finally, as noted above, Chabon re-creates the Kefauver Senate Hearings on Juvenile Delinquency. According to David Hajdu, in his excellent book The Ten-Cent Plague: The Great Comic-Book Scare and How It Changed America (2008), since the first comic books appeared on newsstands parents and the arbiters of good taste railed against them as vehicles for poisoning the minds of America’s youth. Yet it was the 1954 Senate hearings that nearly destroyed the industry. As a result the comic book industry created the Comics Code, a list of forty-one draconian rules governing the acceptable content of comic books. Hajdu remarks, “The Code was an unprecedented (and never surpassed) monument of self-imposed repression and prudery” (291). At issue were images of violence, horror, sexuality—particularly in the horror and crime comics such as Crime Does Not Pay and Tales from the Crypt. However, superheroes were not exempt and of particular interest was the relationship between Batman and Robin and other superhero/ward pairings. Though this was just one of many concerns about comics, and far from the most prominent, Chabon cleverly makes this the focal point of Sammy’s testimony and in so doing he calls attention to the rampant homophobia of the time. Yet it also calls to mind the continued homophobia that exists in contemporary America.
Ultimately, by borrowing many of the most important events of comic book history, Chabon gives his novel a sense of historical authenticity. He adds to this sense by including occasional footnotes remarking on fictional events that occurred after the novel’s end, like a decades-later sale of Mighty Midget Radio Comics #1 at auction. Similarly, through creating, in Sammy and Joe, characters that are composites of many historical comics artists and writers, he is able to take a wide-ranging and complex history and distill it into something that can be more easily grasped and understood. Like the storytellers who took the Golem tale and transplanted it into the time and life of Rabbi Loew, Chabon creates out of history a story about the creation of folklore.
Alan L. Berger, in his essay “Michael Chabon’s The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay: The Return of the Golem,” notes that while Chabon is “on firm ground” in his employment of the Golem in his novel, his interpretation of the Golem of Prague is, at times, problematic (83). Most notably, as Joe and his escapist mentor, Bernard Kornblum, rescue the Golem and ship him out of Prague, the Golem, in effect, “flees the enemy, whereas traditional assertions contend that the golem’s fearsome-ness causes the enemy to flee” (85). Yet Berger’s reservations miss Chabon’s larger point. Chabon’s Golem of Prague is representative of the social and psychological need for myth. It is the nature of folklore to evolve with time and the storyteller. As we have seen, Chabon’s retelling of the Golem of Prague legend in the context of the superhero is a fitting adaptation of a familiar story to a contemporary context.
In The Hero with a Thousand Faces (1949), Joseph Campbell writes, “It has always been the prime function of mythology and rite to supply the symbols that carry the human spirit forward” (1968; 11). He notes that mythical heroes of all cultures show striking commonality in character and their stories share a general narrative structure. The Golem of Prague and the superheroes inspired by it are no different. Superheroes and the comic books that tell their stories are all pieces of an American folklore, borrowed from other traditions and reinvented to fit American culture.
Danny Fingeroth, in his book Disguised as Clark Kent, writes,
The superhero was more than a cop with a cape. . . . In part, he was an expression of the mostly unconscious messages that the immigrant Jews and their descendants were sending out to America. These messages included: Look out for the Nazis! Have some compassion for the victims! Don’t you understand we are just like you? You have to help! Here is how you can use your gifts, America—to help those in need and distress! (18, emphasis in original)
The idea of a superhero—a man with a secret identity, often an outsider, hiding in plain sight, who has a power unseen by the masses, and uses those powers to help those who might otherwise reject him or her—is a natural byproduct of the predicament and mentality of many of those first- and second-generation, often poor, American Jews who found themselves in the comic book business.
In making his case that Superman is fundamentally a Jewish character, Brod asserts, “I am not claiming Superman for a Jewish tradition, I am not reducing Superman to being only a Jewish character, not taking away from his more universal appeal. One always arrives at universal appeal from some particular place, and I am demonstrating how the Jewish tradition is Superman’s ancestral home” (52). This seems to me to be Chabon’s essential point as well.
Through the illustration of the Jewish origins of the superhero and recalling the wild popularity of those American Golems, he highlights the universality of the American experience. The Escapist, like Superman, Batman, Green Lantern, Wonder Woman, and all their super-ilk, reaches beyond ethnicity and taps into a quintessential, unhyphenated Americanness.
In 1941, child psychologist Dr. Lauretta Bender refuted much of the fearmongering regarding comic books and their purported responsibility for encouraging juvenile delinquency and perverting young minds. Arguing that comics may actually prove beneficial to young readers, she writes, “The comic . . . is the folklore of the times,” and adds, “Comic books may be said to offer the same type of mental catharsis to [their] readers that Aristotle claimed was an attribute of the drama” (qtd. in Hajdu 44–45). The latter assertion may strike some as hyperbolic, but it is nevertheless suggestive of what Chabon demonstrates throughout the novel: the comic book is not only a work of art, but also a distinctly American cultural artifact. In a sense, the story of those who created those mythic figures fits into the greater story of America, a story that is made up of equal parts history and myth. Folklore speaks as much about the people that produce it and retell it as it speaks to them. The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay offers a window into the America into which superheroes were born, as well as clues as to why they continue to resonate today. Chabon’s novel suggests that the real power of the Golem and his superhero descendant lies in the hope and comfort of storytelling itself.
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