The Hebrew word golem,53 meaning rudiment, embryo, or merely earthly 'substance',appears in Psalm 139:
My substance was not hid from thee, when I was made in secret, and curiously wrought in the lowest parts of the earth.
Thine eyes did see my substance, yet being un-perfect; and in thy book all my members were written, which in continuance were fashioned, when as yet there was none of them.
Rabbi Loew was a great scriptural scholar, and also an adept of the Cabala, a mystical philosophy based on visionary writings which originated among the Jews in thirteenth-century Spain, and which had a widespread vogue during the Emperor Rudolf's reign. Cabalistic teachings reached well beyond the Ghetto, and were a strong influence in Neoplatonism, for instance, and even on the magical thinking of John Dee. Rudolf, needless to say, was deeply interested, and in 1592 summoned Rabbi Loew to the Hradcany and had a lengthy, secret meeting alone with him.54 How one longs to have a record of that conversation.
The Cabala might be said to be the underground religion of the Jews. It is a creation myth and a Jewish form of Messianism, and incorporates numerology and a complex science of alphabetical combinations known as gematria. The legend of the Golem's creation speaks of complex rituals in which permutations of the Tetragram-maton, the four-letter symbol of God's name, was of paramount importance. From this and other hints it seems clear that the Golem story is a debased, popular version of a Cabalistic creation myth. How peculiar, then, that the never less than dogmatic Ripellino should insist that the legend of Prague's Golem 'goes back no further than Romanticism', making its appearance first in a five-volume collection of tall tales and anecdotes, in German, not Yiddish, entitled Sippurim, published by Wolf Pascheles in the middle of the nineteenth century. There is no mention of the Golem, Ripellino points out, in David Gans's 1592 chronicle of the Jews of Prague, Zamach David ('Descendants of David'), nor in a biography of Rabbi Loew published in 1718.
However, Ripellino is speaking only of the written legend. Yossel the Golem is as old as the Prague Ghetto. There had been Jews in the city from at least the tenth century; indeed, Ghetto lore had it that the Jews had come to Prague after the destruction of the Temple of Jerusalem. Following the Third Lateran Council of 1179, a papal ordinance directed that a wall should be built to separate the Ghetto from the southern, Christian, parts of the city. Despite persecution and anathema, the Ghetto flourished, stretching from the north side of the Old Town Square up to the banks of the Vltava. In 1781 the Emperor Joseph II abolished the law under which Jews were confined to the Ghetto. The imperial aim was not to liberate the Jews, however, but to assimilate them fully into Christian society as a means of destroying their culture and their languages - Hebrew and Yiddish were banned, and the Jews were forced to Germanise their names. By the beginning of the nineteenth century only ten per cent of the population of the Ghetto was Jewish, and in 1850 the area was turned into a municipal district and renamed Josefov. However, as the Blue Guide pointedly observes, the reforming Emperor 'would not, perhaps, have entirely appreciated the honour, for the district was by now a festering slum . . .' In the 1890s, despite protests from architects and artists, most of the hovels and warrens of alleyways had been cleared to make way for the somewhat soulless, Haussmannian avenues of the present-day Josefov, although some of the finest buildings were spared, including the OldNew Synagogue and Meisl's splendid Town Hall. Surprisingly, perhaps, the Nazis too, after the invasion of Czechoslovakia, decided to preserve the surviving monuments, with the intention of turning them into a Museum of Jewry which would be an ironic commemoration of a race soon, they thought, to be extinct. During the Nazi occupation nearly 80,000 Jews were murdered, and today only a tiny community of Orthodox Jews remains in the area. More Jews would have died if not for the underground efforts of brave and decent people such as my friend who in the 1990s was honouredby Israel for his wartime work on behalf of Prague's Jewish population.55
Yossel the Golem, this kosher version of Frankenstein's monster, had both a benign and a bad side. Having thwarted Friar Thaddeus, he took to patrolling the streets and back lanes of the Ghetto, keeping guard over the houses of the poor so that no malignant goy could come creeping in to hide the bodies of Christian children in Jewish homes. One night he surprised the butcher carrying the corpse of a baby hidden in the belly of a slaughtered pig into the house of Mordechai Meisl, to whom he was indebted, with the intention of denouncing the banker as a ritual murderer. There came, however, that Friday evening when Yossel went on the rampage. Rabbi Loew had forgotten to give him his Sabbath eve instructions for next day, and in his boredom Yossel ran amok, stamping everything in his path to pieces, until the Rabbi was called upon to quell his monster. Eventually, like a pet that refuses to be house-trained, the Golem had to go. One night at the beginning of 1593 - the designation of a particular year is a nice touch on the part of the legend-maker - Rabbi Loew instructed Yossel to sleep not in his own bed in the Rabbi's house but to spend the night in the attic of the Old-New Synagogue. Two hours after midnight, Rabbi Loew, with his henchmen Isaac and Yakob, climbed to the loft where the Golem lay sleeping. First the Rabbi removed the shem from under the creature's tongue, then the three men performed the same ceremony by which they had brought the Golem to life, but this time in reverse, and by morning all that was left of poor Yossel was a pile of clay.
The Rabbi himself met a more poetic end, when he bent to savour the perfume of a rose his granddaughter had presented to him, only to discover that Death himself was hiding among the petals. A better way to go, certainly, than the ignominious end that befell, literally, his Polish colleague, the famous miracle-working Rabbi Elijah of Chelm, called Israel Ba'al Shem Tov, who had his own Golem. When the latter's time was up, Rabbi Elijah chose to destroy him by erasing the first letter of the word emet graven on the creature's brow, leaving the word met, that is, death. However, the Rabbi made the mistake of ordering the Golem to erase the letter himself; when he did so, he turned back at once into a load of clay which promptly collapsed on Rabbi Elijah, crushing him.
In the Josefov today there is little of the atmosphere of the Ghetto left, apart from an oppressive sense of absence, of emptiness, despite the poet Nezval's assertion that Rabbi Loew's shem is still here, 'under the tongue of all things, even of the pavement, though made of the same stone with which all Prague is paved.'56 Only in the imagination does the old world live on. Ripellino, lover of twilight and crowded streets, prowls the place in his fancy. 'I feel I lived in that Ghetto long ago; I see myself as a Chagallesque Jew at Succoth with an etrog, a yellow cedar branch, in my hand or at Chanukkah, lighting an eight-armed menorah with a shammes candle, or as one of the shammosim in the many synagogues, or wandering through the foul, gespenstisch darkness of the narrow streets.'
insists on driving me to Bratislava, where I shall attend my academic conference. He arranges for us to motor down in the morning, and after lunch he will drive back to Prague; this is a round trip of six hundred kilometres. I insist it will be excessive kindness, but Jindra laughs and says her father is not being kind, only seizing the opportunity to take a good, long drive. The summer day is soft and still; by noon the sun will scorch the roof of beloved green, or blue, car. At a crossroads we stop and points across the fields to his family's farm, confiscated from his father in 1948 and given back to the family after 1989; shakes his head, bemused that he should have lived to see such wonders.57 At the border with Slovakia there is a passport control booth. I ask what he thinks of the separation of Czechoslovakia into two states, and he shrugs; the Czech Republic is the richer half, but the Slovaks wanted their autonomy, and they got it. Later, in Bratislava, I shall be given a different account, in which the wily Czech Prime Minister, Vaclav Klaus - whom in tones of high, icy irony, refers to always as 'Mister Klaus' - tricked the Slovaks into a bad deal because he wanted to be shot of them and their economic problems. As we drive through the Slovak countryside, there are farmers and their families in the fields making
hay; not since my earliest childhood have I seen a hand-made haystack. The scene might have been painted by Millais, or one of the less cloying Socialist Realists.
Bratislava is not Prague. The Old Town, in the centre, is handsome and charming, but all around, the city, at least in the time that I was there, resembled a sprawling construction site. After lunch I was driven into the countryside, to a nineteenth-century mock-Gothic castle, the entrance to which was guarded by a pair of mighty steel gates that opened before me in slow, menacing silence. In communist times the place had been a retreat for authors favoured by the State, that is, apparatchiks and hacks. My third-floor bedroom was enormous, dotted here and there with looming items of black-lacquered furniture. A tall window looked down with what seemed a melancholy gaze upon a scene of heat-hazed woodland and a pond with ducks. I spent a restless night, lying stiff as a board in my shiny black bed. In the morning my friend Igor, one of the organisers of the conference, cheerfully enquired if I had slept peacefully, and when I said no he chuckled and said he was not surprised: previous guests in the Black Room had included Khrushchev, Brezhnev, and a crazed writer, one of the last of the privileged pre-eighty-niners, who had leapt from the window to a messy death beside the duck pond. Shakily I descended to the conference room and delivered my paper on Synge and the Aran Islands; when I was finished, a Canadian academic with a mien of steely ambition attacked me for what he claimed to believe was my rabid Irish nationalist views. Not a pleasant experience, at ten in the morning after a night spent in a bed once occupied by Leonid Brezhnev.
That evening, back in Bratislava, I was invited to a party, where I spent an agreeable half hour chatting to a writer and translator, I shall call him Mr H., who had just published his translation of a Modernist Irish classic into Czech, a task that had taken twenty years of loving labour. He complained that before 'the changes', that is, before 1989, when the State controlled publishing, only the finest, most edifying works of Western literature were translated, but nowadays every kind of American trash was being allowed into the country. Afterwards I mentioned this conversation to Igor, who chuckled again - I was learning to interpret Igor's many modulations of chuckle - and said that certainly Mr H. would know all about State publishing policies under the communists, since he had been the official Censor.
When the conference ended came down again from Prague to collect me. I told him how another man I had met at that party - oiled black hair en brosse, thick spectacles, a peculiar, silvery suit that seemed made of tinfoil, and a manner that inevitably made me think of Big Phil, the Man Who Knows the Inside Story - had informed me, with the air of one who is merely repeating a matter of common knowledge, that in the final months before the 1989 revolution, Havel in prison had been conniving with the Czech intelligence service to take over the Presidency when Husak's regime fell, as everyone had known it very soon would. however, was adamant: such a thing was not possible. I did not persist, but privately I thought that even if it had been true, I would not have thought any less of the President. Politics is politics, even if you are a playwright of the Theatre of the Absurd. By now we were on the outskirts of Prague. As we drove down through a smoky industrial suburb, pointed out the spot at a bend in a road where the Gestapo chief Reinhard Heydrich had been assassinated by Czech partisans in 1942; in reprisal for his killing the Nazis razed the coal-mining village of Lidice, twenty kilometres northwest of Prague, and shot 184 men, the entire male population of the village, the oldest a man of eighty-four, the youngest a boy of fourteen. In the following days German troops buried the charred remains of the village under soil, and the name Lidice was expunged from the map. Today, the memorial erected on the site in 1947 is one of the most frequently visited war memorials in the Czech Republic.
The Writers' Festival is closing, and I am invited to a British Council party. It is held in a handsome house - not the Embassy, but someone's home - on one of those leafy streets off behind the Castle, that part of Prague where the tourists do not go, and which many Praguers consider to be the true heart of their city. I had tried to avoid the party - the novels of Malcolm Bradbury have jaundiced me for ever against such occasion - but my friend Claudio Magris, writer, Germanist and Triestino, who also has been taking part in the Festival, says I must be there, 'to meet '. I do not know who this is, and am not eager to be introduced to yet another new person at the end of a week of mostly baffling encounters with voluble strangers. However, my host and hostess - the SmithJones, let us call them - turn out to be remarkably unlike the usual run of British Councillors, being funny, irreverent, and discerning in their choice of wines.58 The party is small, a couple of dozen guests sitting about on chairs and sofas in what appears to be the Smith-Jones's living room - I find a child's sock under my chair - so that it is possible to engage in something like real conversation. I am recounting my Slovakian adventure, Black Room and all, to an attractive young woman whose name I did not manage to catch but who laughs rather prettily at my shameless exaggerations, showing an interesting fleck of lipstick on her upper incisors, when Claudio grasps me by the arm and drags me away. 'Come come come, you must meet him, come!'
Professor Doctor Eduard Goldstiicker is a handsome man with a large, squarish face, eyes of a clear, marine blue, and hands that are also squarish and large; he is in his early eighties, and looks twenty years younger. He sits on a sofa in the middle of the room, those big hands resting on his knees, looking before him with such a tranquil gaze, his head tilted slightly upward, that for a moment I wonder if he might be blind. Quite the contrary is the case, as I discover: I think I have never met anyone more sharp-eyed. There is another quality he possesses that is harder to describe. He somehow contrives to fill with extraordinary exactitude the space that he inhabits; compared to him, I realise, most people seem to be rattling around in the ill-fitting envelope of themselves, like astronauts in their space suits. I am introduced, and Goldstiicker invites me to sit beside him; he is, he says, a great admirer of Irish literature. He points to a painting on the wall opposite where we sit - he has been studying this picture, which explains the upward tilt of his gaze as I approached - an unremarkable landscape, with polders, and a rainbow arched over a misty, dull green distance. He had been wondering, he said, if it might be an English scene, for it reminded him of the Sussex Downs. I stared, I suppose, and he produced what I can only describe as a basilisk smile: eyes electric with amusement, nostrils flared, the lips compressed and turned not upward but down. He had taught at Sussex University throughout most of the 1970s, having fled Czechoslovakia the day before the Russian invasion in August, 1968, and later settled in Britain. 'Hence,' he said with arch self-mockery, 'my impeccable English.'
Over the following hour or so, Goldstiicker told me his story, and since then I have filled in some of the details from other sources. It strikes me as being, in certain significant and appalling ways, the story of Prague itself in the second half of the twentieth century. He was born in the village of Podbiel, in Slovakia, in 1913, the son of a Jewish timber merchant. In 1931 he moved to Prague, to study German and French literature. At university he became the leader of a communist student group, and in 1933 joined the Czech Communist Party. He taught in a secondary school until 1939, when he and his wife escaped the German occupation and fled to England via Poland and Sweden; the members of his family who remained behind were to die in Auschwitz. In London Goldstiicker edited the journal Mlade Ceskoslo-vensko (Young Czechoslovakia). Later, in 1943, he worked in the Foreign Ministry of the Czechoslovak government in exile in London, and in 1944 became cultural attache at the Czech embassy in Paris. After the war he returned to Prague and became a civil servant at the Foreign Ministry, returning to London as attache at the embassy there from 1947 to 1949. Following the communist takeover in 1948 his career as a diplomat flourished briefly. He was appointed Ambassador to Israel in 1950, and to Sweden in 1951. It was in 1951, however, that Stalin ordered a purge of Jews from the Communist Party. Along with a number of others, was r
ounded up in December 1951 and taken to the headquarters of the secret police, where he was kept in almost total isolation and subjected to constant interrogation.
'When I first arrived at police headquarters, out near the airport,' he told me, 'I asked them why I had been arrested, and on what charges. The chief interrogator smiled at me - such an ironic smile! - and said, That's not for us to tell you, but for you to tell us.' He laughed, remembering it. Then, glancing sideways at me, he held up a hand. 'Please,' he said, laughing again, 'please don't mention Kafka.' The interrogations went on around the clock, three teams of questioners taking eight-hour shifts. Luckily, he said, he had been something of a mathematician at school, and was able to keep himself sane by working out equations in his head. What did they want from him, I asked, what did they expect him to confess to? 'That I was an enemy agent bent on undermining the regime. They were preparing me for a show trial, and in order for my court confession to sound to some degree authentic, I must produce the evidence against myself. You see?' There was a brief silence, and then he answered the question I dared not ask. 'Oh, of course,' he said, 'I did "confess". There was no other way out.'
Prague Pictures Page 15
