This all happened so long ago, and I was, it will be recalled, so young at the time that it’s hard for me to remember just how I contrived to convey myself down there under the house, into the basement, which I had been told in no uncertain terms was filled with all kinds of deliciously dangerous power tools and chemicals, and hence strictly off-limits, to have a look. If I were writing a short story, I would figure out how to get the parents out of the way, start them arguing bitterly about Vietnam or civil rights at the dinner table, and then have my fictionalized self slip away unnoticed, perhaps with a vague murmur about going to look at the money plants in the backyard, to head down the long dark stairway into the basement, with its smell of iron filings and cold linoleum. Since this is a memoir, though, I will be truthful and say I don’t know how I managed the trick. But I remember the dark stairs, and the cold iron smell.
I’m sure you will doubt what I tell you next, putting it down to the flawed memory of a small boy with a big imagination, or perhaps even, considering what I am about to say, thinking it all nothing but a pack of lies. That’s precisely why I’ve never said anything about the real golems in my life before now. There was a golem—the most famous golem of all, the Golem of Prague—in my novel The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay, and since it was published a lot of people have asked me about my interest in that golem and in golems in general. And, because I was afraid to tell the truth and more interested in sounding smart than in sounding crazy, I usually said something about having seen, as a child, a still image from Paul Wegener’s 1915 film Der Golem in a book about fantastic cinema, as if that explained anything, and then after that I would often say something sort of profound and sententious about how the relationship between a golem and its creator is usually viewed as a metaphor for that between the work of art—in my case, a novel—and its creator, and how my ideas about golems had been shaped by reading Gershom Scholem’s famous essay “On the Idea of the Golem,” and blah, blah, blah. When the truth is that golems are real, they are out there now, and they are everywhere. Well, not everywhere, perhaps, but I’ve seen a bunch of them in my own lifetime, and that’s without even trying—believe you me—to find them. As for the Golem of Prague, and the thinly fictionalized role it plays both in Kavalier & Clay and in my life, I’m going to come to that in time.
I’m aware, in making this confession, that I’m revealing something that some of you already know perfectly well, something that is generally agreed to be better left undiscussed. I don’t think it’s exactly taboo for me to reveal the truth about golems—God, I hope not—but what do I know? I’ve never studied Kabbalah. If you see shadowy people follow me out of the hall tonight, or if a blow dart suddenly appears in my larynx and I keel over mid-sentence, you will know that I must have transgressed. I don’t know what exactly is prompting me to come forward now and come out with the truth. I think it has something to do with turning forty, with the growing desire I feel to look backward over my life and to try to shore together, if I can, some kind of retrospective understanding, some sense of meaning and perhaps even wisdom to impart to my children as they grow into full consciousness of the pain and mystery of life. Maybe it has something to do with having won the Pulitzer Prize, which gives a guy a sense, however mistaken, of authority, and which, as far as I know, they will not take away from you even if it is determined that you have lost your mind.
In any event, what I saw when I reached the inner sanctum of Uncle Jack’s workshop, with its tools hanging neatly from their hooks, its table saw and drill press, its swept pile of sawdust in the corner, tidily awaiting the dustpan, was a golem. For those of you who may not, still, be aware of or understand just what exactly a golem is, let me briefly state that a golem is an artificial being, usually but not necessarily human in shape, made from a lump of clay or earth—the word “golem” comes from an ancient Hebrew word meaning “lump”—and brought to life, or to a semblance of life, by mystical means. Some golems are animated by the placing under their tongues of a tablet with one of the names of God written on it, others by having the Hebrew word emet, “truth,” graved onto their broad foreheads, still others by some combination of the two. But in common all golems require above all that a complicated series of alphabetical spells be chanted over them, in the proper order and combination, for hours and hours and hours. Now, according to the great Herr Scholem, the point of golem-making has been greatly exaggerated over the years, embroidered by liars and legend-tellers and romancers. Originally one—and when I say “one” I mean “a trained adept acting in concert with at least one other trained adept”—originally one made a golem not in the hope of bringing it to life but in the hope of bringing oneself to life. It was a kind of meditative exercise designed, like other kinds of chanting rituals, to free the consciousness. One imitated God’s creation of Adam in the hope of approaching knowledge of the ecstasy and power of that creation.
At any rate, looking back on it, I don’t seriously think my uncle Jack could have had any sincere expectation of bringing his own golem, the Golem of Flushing, to life. I am certain that it was intended only as a vehicle for expanding his consciousness of the Ineffable Name. It lay, as I have said, on his workbench, a big pine slab which he had nailed together himself years before. Honestly I don’t remember all that much about how his golem looked; it had big feet, each with five clay toes; its head was squarish, its nose flat, its hair scratched in with some pointed tool in wiggly swirls. I remember the color of its skin, or rather of the clay from which it had been formed, hardened curds or handfuls of clay that were a rich dark brown like coffee grounds. A colored, I thought. The thing that impressed me the most about the thing was the air of utter inertness that it gave off, something more than lifelessness, heavier and more oppressive. In later years I would think of this golem when I saw cigar-store Indians, and again when I saw the giant lumpy head of John F. Kennedy in the lobby of the Kennedy Center in Washington, D.C. Its eyes were a pair of horizontal slits, slightly bulging, meant to suggest, I suppose, that it was sleeping.
What did I make of it, at the time? I knew, of course, that it was not a real person—Uncle Jack was clearly not the most talented sculptor in the world—but there was something about it that troubled me; it had presence. I wasn’t quite afraid of it, or rather I feared it obscurely, and with a stab of bright curiosity, as I feared and wondered about all kinds of other elements of the world of adults—my mother’s pressing ham, filled with mysterious sand; the heavy wooden trays in which my father kept his microscope slides, smeared with the lung tissue of monkeys. There seemed inherent in that dark clay doll on the table a purpose and a power beyond my imagining.
What can I say? I reached out to touch it, grabbing clumsily at the thing’s left big toe, and the toe came off with a dry tinkling of dust. That was the kind of kid I was. I had poked a hole in my mother’s pressing ham so that forever after it leaked sand; I had broken five or six of my father’s pneumococcus slides. And in my horror at this act of accidental mutilation—and I’m perfectly willing to admit that it was only this, the action of horror and dismay on a childish imagination—I saw the Golem of Flushing open its eyes. I will never forget the sight of the dull, wet gaze, blank, ignorant, afraid, that lighted on my face at that instant. I have no idea how I managed to get out of the basement again. The next thing I remember is sitting in my aunt’s living room, on the slick crinkling plastic of her slipcovered sofa, and hearing my uncle Jack cry out, his voice ragged and cracked, “They killed King!”
“Oh, no,” I heard my mother say. “Oh, that’s just awful.”
“King who?” I asked, thinking that they were lamenting the death of some monarch.
The night I broke a toe off the Golem of Flushing was the night, as it turned out—April 4, 1968—on which James Earl Ray shot Martin Luther King Jr. There was some rioting over in Harlem, in the course of which somebody set fire to the block that comprised Mount Morris Candy and News, and Uncle Jack’s last-chance enterprise was burned
out. In the jumble of misunderstood and half-interpreted news reports, anxious talk, and curt whispering that surrounded this calamity and that seemed to make up the bulk of adult conversation in the week that followed, I heard repeated references to “the black man.” Inevitably, I guess, I was forced to the conclusion that it had been the dark man of clay in Uncle Jack’s basement, angered perhaps by the loss of his toe, who had gone out to Harlem and burnt down the candy store. And it was all my fault.
I was beginning to learn the bitter truth about golems. A golem, like a lie, is the expression of a wish: a wish for peace and security; a wish for strength and control; a wish to know, in a tiny, human way, a thousandth of a millionth of the joy and power of the Greater Creation. And nothing I have learned since has ever been able to dissuade me that on that April night a golem, charged with all the wishes, dark and light, of a suffering people, was created and set loose in the world.
Soon after his world was set on fire, my uncle Jack fell while chasing after a young black neighborhood kid who had, or so he imagined, called him “Hymie.” He broke his hip. He went into a rapid decline after that, and was dead before the following autumn. It was around that time that I managed to get down into the basement again. This part may be the embroidery of a guilty recollection, but I remember it as being on the actual day of Jack’s funeral, when we all went back to the house to start the weeklong period of shiva. As I had suspected it would be, the giant doll with the dead, fearful eyes was gone. I got down on my hands and knees and looked around, and there, under the now barren workbench, lay the toe.
After a while my father came downstairs looking for me. Since he didn’t seem to be angry at finding me in such close proximity to dangerous tools and chemicals, not to mention trespassing into forbidden zones of mystic knowledge, I told him the whole story. He laughed, and reassured me that I was not in any way responsible for my uncle’s death, explaining that Uncle Jack had had his little eccentricities when it came to religion. But I could see that my father was not taking me seriously. So I showed him the toe.
“Well,” he said, studying it, taking me a little more seriously now, it seemed to me. “If you had brought it to life, that wouldn’t be too surprising, I guess. You know, Michael, we’re descended on my father’s side from Rabbi Judah ben Loew.”
It was then and there, and not from any book on fantastic cinema, that I first learned about golems and in particular the Golem of Prague. My father explained to me that it was the great Rabbi Judah of Prague who, sometime in the sixteenth century, created the best-known of all golems to do his bidding around the synagogue, sweeping up the dooryard and readying the sanctuary for the Sabbath, and to help protect the Jews of Prague’s ghetto against those who sought to harm them. This golem, like a lie, grew to a tremendous size, and in its vengeful might came in time to threaten the security of those it had been made to keep safe. Rabbi Judah lost control of it, and eventually he was obliged to destroy the life he had talked into being, in order to keep it from destroying everything else. And it was from this great wonder-working rabbi, through a grandson who left Prague and traveled across the Austrian Empire to settle in Lodz, that we were descended. Or so my father said. He had told me such things before, about other famous Jews from history, and he would continue, as I grew older, to periodically reveal new and ever more startling connections.
A writer of science fiction named Philip José Farmer once devised the amusing or tedious conceit of tracing the lineage of Lord Greystoke, better known as Tarzan of the Apes. Mr. Farmer postulated that an ancestor of the future lord of the jungle was among the passengers of two coaches that were passing Wold Newton, England, in 1795, just as a radioactive meteor fell from outer space into a meadow on the outskirts of the village. The radiation from the space rock, and the genetic mutation it caused, Mr. Farmer posited, affected all the descendents of those passengers, among them the eventual John Clayton, Lord Greystoke—Tarzan. Mr. Farmer then extended his conceit by claiming that not only Tarzan but all the great heroes and villains of popular nineteenth- and twentieth-century literature—the Scarlet Pimpernel, Sherlock Holmes and Professor Moriarty, Doc Savage, Phileas Fogg, Fu Manchu, Sam Spade, James Bond—were descended from the people riding in that pair of coaches, a superhuman lineage of siblings and cousins descended from that common ancestor and that catastrophic event.
When, as a boy of nine or ten, I encountered Mr. Farmer’s hypothesis in his amusing mock biography of Tarzan, it came as no surprise to me at all. My father had already articulated, in considerable detail, a similar startling theory of our own lineage.
Over the years my father has informed me—generally with no warning and without offering any explanation for the information’s having gone unmentioned until that moment—that we Chabons are connected, distantly perhaps but with a kind of telling intimacy, to the following people: the great tragedienne Rachel, the humorist Art Buchwald, the vicious murderer Lepke Buchalter, Rabbi Eliyahu, known as the Gaon or Genius of Vilna, the aforementioned Rabbi Judah ben Bezalel ben Loew, Harry Houdini, the first-class spy and third-rate baseball player Moe Berg, and, most gloriously of all, Napoleon Bonaparte, through his nephew Napoleon III, who—or so my father claims—fathered an illegitimate child, my ancestor, of the above-mentioned French actress, Rachel.
I won’t bother with the question of whether my father is telling the truth, or believes he is telling the truth, when he says such things. Nor is it germane to my point to ask if I believe him. After all, what he says could be true; if plausibility is good enough for me as a reader, and good enough for you as listeners, it’s good enough for me as a son. The importance to me, now and as a child, of my father’s stories is and was 1) their peculiar, detailed beauty, from the quirkiness of the famous personalities they involved to the complicated ways in which my father attempted to map out our relation to these people, and 2) the sense of incredible connectedness I derived, as a kid, from his stories. Listening to my father describe the deeds, crimes, and achievements of our famous cousins, scattered as they were across continents and eras, gave me an almost vertiginous sense of simultaneity, of our family’s and my own small self’s existing in all times, at all places.
When I was ten years old—shortly after reading Philip José Farmer’s biography of Tarzan, with its genealogy of heroes and criminals almost as fantastic as my own—I produced my first sustained work of fiction. This was a short story, about twelve pages in length, entitled “The Revenge of Captain Nemo.” It recounted a meeting between Verne’s Captain Nemo and Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes (first cousins, according to Farmer). I won’t make any claims as to its merits, but two great things happened to me in the course of writing it. One was that I consciously adopted, for the first time, a literary style: Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s, or rather that of the good Dr. John Watson. I think I had always been sensitive, before this, to variations in writers’ diction and to the mood and tone of a paragraph. I was alert to the difference in vocabulary and idiom one found in British storybooks, could tell when language was trying to sound antiquated, jocular, or hard-boiled. I could hear the difference between words of Latin origin and those that came from Anglo-Saxon. I knew how Doyle’s writing sounded. I could hear the tune of it in my head. Now I just had to sit down and play.
Getting the style down—that was more than half the fun for me. I used words like “postulated” and “retribution.” I wrote “had the odor of” instead of “smelled.” I went on about railway schedules, the harbor at Portsmouth, the fog. I referred to the infamous Moriarty as “the Napoleon of Crime,” thus linking him, in my imagination, to my own family tree. When I finished it, “The Revenge of Captain Nemo” went over pretty well. I had the satisfaction of being praised by my parents and other adults and of having actually completed something that struck me as admirably substantial, even huge. The work of typing it alone had nearly killed me. But more precious to me than praise or completion was the intense pleasure I had derived from attempting to impersonate Sir Arthu
r Conan Doyle, from putting on his accent, following his verbal trail. It was the pleasure that a liar takes in his lie as it enters the world wearing the accent and raiment of the truth, sounding so right and plausible that—if he is any kind of liar at all—he begins, himself, to believe it. It was the pleasure that a maker of golems takes as the force of his words, the rhythm and accuracy of his alphabetical spells, blow life into the cold clay nostrils, and the great stony hand unclenches and reaches for his own. At some point in the exercise the power of Doyle’s diction resounding in my ear carried me away. I felt intimately connected to him, as though it was not I inhabiting his literary skin but, somehow, the other way around. It was like something out of a ghost story—a child sitting down at a haunted piano and feeling a spectral hand guide his own over the keys.
People of the Book: A Decade of Jewish Science Fiction & Fantasy Page 39
