Wandering Stars

by Jack Dann (ed)

  Of course, between us, they knew they had to come in with a something. The Congress was at a standstill, the delegates didn’t know how many delegates there were, and they were arguing the matter out every day along with the Court. There were fights over the Bulbas, there were factions over the Bulbas, and a lot of people had gone home already saying they were sick and tired of the Bulbas.

  So.

  The decision reviewed all the evidence, all the commentaries, all the history, from Ezra and Nehemia on. It showed what was to be said for the conservative group in the Court, the group which began and ended with the traditional proposition that a Jew is someone who is provably the child of a Jewish mother. Then it went into what was to be said for the liberal-radical wing, the people who felt that a Jew is anyone who freely accepts the ol, the yoke, the burden, of Jewishness. And then the decision discussed a couple of positions in-between, and it pointed out that there was no way to sew them all together.

  But do they have to be sewn together? Is there any chance that a human being and a Bulba will mate? And what happens if we go deeper and deeper into space, to another galaxy even, and we find all kinds of strange creatures who want to become Jews? Suppose we find a thinking entity whose body is nothing but waves of energy, do we say, no, you’re entirely unacceptable? Do we know for sure that it is?

  Look at it another way. Among human beings there are Jews and there are goyim, gentiles. Between Jews there are a lot of different types, Reformed, blue, Levittown, Williamsburg, and they don’t get along with each other so good, but measure them against goyim and they’re all Jews. Between Jew and goy there are a lot of differences, but measure them against any alien and they’re both human beings. The word goy does not apply to aliens. Up to recently.

  We’ve all seen, in the last century or two, how some creatures from the star Vega have adopted an Earth-type religion, two different Earth-type religions, in fact. They won’t let Jews into the land of Israel, they maneuver against us, they persecute us. Are these ordinary aliens, then? Certainly not! They may look nonhuman, like crazy giant oysters, but they definitely have to be put into the category of goyische aliens. Aliens may be aliens, but the Vegans are quite different as far as Jews are concerned: the Vegans are alien goyim.

  Well, if there are alien goyim, why can’t there be alien Jews? We don’t expect human goyim to marry alien goyim, and we don’t expect human Jews to marry alien Jews. But we can certainly face the fact that there are aliens who live as we do, who face problems as we do, and—if you won’t mind—who worship as we do. There are aliens who know what a pogrom tastes like, and who also know the sweetness of our Sabbath. Let’s put it this way: there are Jews—and there are Jews. The Bulbas belong in the second group.

  These are not the exact words of the decision, you understand. It’s a kind of free translation, provided for you with no extra charge by Milchik the TV man. But it gives you enough to gnaw on.

  Not everyone went along with the decision. Some of the Bulbas complained. And a whole bunch of Williamsburgniks walked out of the Congress saying, Well, what could you expect? But the majority of the delegates were so happy to have the thing settled at last that they voted to let the decision stand and to accept the Bulbas. So the Bulbas were also happy: they were full Jewish delegates.

  The only trouble was, just as they were finally getting down to the business of the Congress, an order came down from the Viceroy of Venus abolishing it. He said the Congress had gone on too long and it was stirring up bad feelings. All the delegates were sent packing.

  Some excitement for a planet like this, no? Rabbi Smallman is still our rabbi, even though he’s famous now. He’s always going away on lecture tours, from one end of the galaxy to the other. But he always comes back to us, every year, for the High Holy Days. Well, not exactly, you know how it is, once in a while he can’t make it. A celebrity, after all. The Great Rabbi of Venus. He’s in demand.

  And so’s my Aaron David, in a way. He finally made it to a yeshiva. The Bulbas are paying for it, they sent him to one on the other side of Venus, in the Yoruba Burrow. Once in a while I get a letter from him. What he plans to do, it’s the agreement he has with them, he’s going to go to Rigel IV and be their rabbi.

  But of a possible bride he says nothing. Listen, maybe I’ll turn out to be the grandfather of a lumpy brown pillow with short gray tentacles? A grandchild, I guess, is still a grandchild.

  I don’t know. Let’s talk about something cheerful. How many people would you say were killed in that earthquake on Callisto?

  AVRAM DAVIDSON

  The Golem

  The Golem is the Jew’s Frankenstein. (Indeed, the Golem legends might have prompted the idea for Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein.) Legend has it that the Golem was created out of clay by Rabbi Löw of Prague for the protection of persecuted Jews. Its dreadful corpse is said to be still lying in the attic of a synagogue, ready to be raised again if needed. The Golem is one of the most powerful symbols to come out of Jewish lore. It is a symbol of fear and dread, but also of love and pride, for it was created with God’s consent. The Golem is a clay mannikin, an automaton infused with life to become man’s servant and, hopefully, an instrument of God’s will. Upon its forehead is written the sacred word Shem, the life-principle. If this word is rubbed out, the Golem will sink into a lump of clay. Thus man retains ultimate power over his clay servant. But each day the Golem increases in strength and size. One day the owner might find that he cannot reach its forehead to erase the sacred word. So the Golem becomes a threat, even when it is dutifully performing good deeds. In the end, the Golem goes mad. The creation of an artificial being becomes a tragedy.

  Avram Davidson has blended the legend into a warm, poignant, sometimes comic story set in a modern land of Jewish make-believe, that warm country called California where everything is stable and quiet and filled with hours of sweet-sad reminiscence. There, white-haired couples who have always been in love can hold hands and count nephews and speak Yiddish. A place of simple expectations and, of course, no surprises. Sometimes.

  —J. D.

  *

  THE GRAY-FACED PERSON CAME ALONG THE STREET where old Mr. and Mrs. Gumbeiner lived. It was afternoon, it was autumn, the sun was warm and soothing to their ancient bones. Anyone who attended the movies in the twenties or the early thirties has seen that street a thousand times. Past these bungalows with their half-double roofs Edmund Lowe walked arm-in-arm with Leatrice Joy, and Harold Lloyd was chased by Chinamen waving hatchets. Under these squamous palm trees Laurel kicked Hardy and Woolsey beat Wheeler upon the head with codfish. Across these pocket-handkerchief-sized lawns the juveniles of the Our Gang Comedies pursued one another and were pursued by angry fat men in golf knickers. On this same street—or perhaps on some other one of five hundred streets exactly like it.

  Mrs. Gumbeiner indicated the gray-faced person to her husband.

  “You think maybe he’s got something the matter?” she asked. “He walks kind of funny, to me.”

  “Walks like a golem,” Mr. Gumbeiner said indifferently.

  The old woman was nettled.

  “Oh, I don’t know,” she said. “I think he walks like your cousin Mendel.”

  The old man pursed his mouth angrily and chewed on his pipe stem. The gray-faced person turned up the concrete path, walked up the steps to the porch, sat down in a chair. Old Mr. Gumbeiner ignored him. His wife stared at the stranger.

  “Man comes in without a hello, good-bye, or howareyou, sits himself down, and right away he’s at home.... The chair is comfortable?” she asked. “Would you like maybe a glass tea?”

  She turned to her husband.

  “Say something, Gumbeiner!” she demanded. “What are you, made of wood?”

  The old man smiled a slow, wicked, triumphant smile.

  “Why should I say anything?” he asked the air. “Who am I? Nothing, that’s who.”

  The stranger spoke. His voice was harsh and monotonous. “When you learn who�
��or rather what—I am, the flesh will melt from your bones in terror.” He bared porcelain teeth.

  “Never mind about my bones!” the old woman cried. “You’ve got a lot of nerve talking about my bones!”

  “You will quake with fear,” said the stranger. Old Mrs. Gumbeiner said that she hoped he would live so long. She turned to her husband once again.

  “Gumbeiner, when are you going to mow the lawn?”

  “All mankind—” the stranger began.

  “Shah! I’m talking to my husband..... He talks eppis kind of funny, Gumbeiner, no?”

  “Probably a foreigner,” Mr. Gumbeiner said, complacently.

  “You think so?” Mrs. Gumbeiner glanced fleetingly at the stranger. “He’s got a very bad color in his face, nebbich. I suppose he came to California for his health.”

  “Disease, pain, sorrow, love, grief—all are nought to …”

  Mr. Gumbeiner cut in on the stranger’s statement.

  “Gall bladder,” the old man said. “Guinzburg down at the shule looked exactly the same before his operation. Two professors they had in for him, and a private nurse day and night.”

  “I am not a human being!” the stranger said loudly.

  “Three thousand seven hundred fifty dollars it cost his son, Guinzburg told me. ‘For you, Poppa, nothing is too expensive—only get well,’ the son told him.”

  “I am not a human being!”

  “Ai, is that a son for you!” the old woman said, rocking her head. “A heart of gold, pure gold.” She looked at the stranger. “All right, all right, I heard you the first time. Gumbeiner! I asked you a question. When are you going to cut the lawn?”

  “On Wednesday, odder maybe Thursday, comes the Japaneser to the neighborhood. To cut lawns is his profession. My profession is to be a glazier—retired.”

  “Between me and all mankind is an inevitable hatred,” the stranger said. “When I tell you what I am, the flesh will melt—”

  “You said, you said already,” Mr. Gumbeiner interrupted.

  “In Chicago where the winters were as cold and bitter as the Czar of Russia’s heart,” the old woman intoned, “you had strength to carry the frames with the glass together day in and day out. But in California with the golden sun to mow the lawn when your wife asks, for this you have no strength. Do I call in the Japaneser to cook for you supper?”

  “Thirty years Professor Allardyce spent perfecting his theories. Electronics, neuronics—”

  “Listen, how educated he talks,” Mr. Gumbeiner said, admiringly. “Maybe he goes to the University here?”

  “If he goes to the University, maybe he knows Bud?” his wife suggested.

  “Probably they’re in the same class and he came to see him about the homework, no?”

  “Certainly he must be in the same class. How many classes are there? Five in ganzen: Bud showed me on his program card.” She counted off her fingers. “Television Appreciation and Criticism, Small Boat Building, Social Adjustment, The American Dance … The American Dance—nu, Gumbeiner—”

  “Contemporary Ceramics,” her husband said, relishing the syllables. “A fine boy, Bud. A pleasure to have him for a boarder.”

  “After thirty years spent in these studies,” the stranger, who had continued to speak unnoticed, went on, “he turned from the theoretical to the pragmatic. In ten years’ time he had made the most titanic discovery in history: he made mankind, all mankind, superfluous: he made me. ”

  “What did Tillie write in her last letter?” asked the old man.

  The old woman shrugged.

  “What should she write? The same thing. Sidney was home from the army, Naomi has a new boy friend—”

  “He made Me!”

  “Listen, Mr. Whatever-your-name-is,” the old woman said, “maybe where you came from is different, but in this country you don’t interrupt people the while they’re talking.... Hey. Listen—what do you mean, he made you? What kind of talk is that?”

  The stranger bared all his teeth again, exposing the too-pink gums.

  “In his library, to which I had a more complete access after his sudden and as yet undiscovered death from entirely natural causes, I found a complete collection of stories about androids, from Shelley’s Frankenstein through Capek’s R.U.R. to Asimov’s—”

  “Frankenstein?” said the old man, with interest. “There used to be Frankenstein who had the soda-wasser place on Halstead Street: a Litvack, nebbich.”

  “What are you talking?” Mrs. Gumbeiner demanded. “His name was Frankenthal, and it wasn’t on Halstead, it was on Roosevelt.”

  “—clearly showing that all mankind has an instinctive antipathy toward androids and there will be an inevitable struggle between them—”

  “Of course, of course!” Old Mr. Gumbeiner clicked his teeth against his pipe. “I am always wrong, you are always right. How could you stand to be married to such a stupid person all this time?”

  “I don’t know,” the old woman said. “Sometimes I wonder, myself. I think it must be his good looks.” She began to laugh. Old Mr. Gumbeiner blinked, then began to smile, then took his wife’s hand.

  “Foolish old woman,” the stranger said, “why do you laugh? Do you not know I have come to destroy you?”

  “What!” old Mr. Gumbeiner shouted. “Close your mouth, you!” He darted from his chair and struck the stranger with the flat of his hand. The stranger’s head struck against the porch pillar and bounced back.

  “When you talk to my wife, talk respectable, you hear?”

  Old Mrs. Gumbeiner, cheeks very pink, pushed her husband back in his chair. Then she leaned forward and examined the stranger’s head. She clicked her tongue as she pulled aside the flap of gray, skinlike material.

  “Gumbeiner, look! He’s all springs and wires inside!”

  “I told you he was a golem, but no, you wouldn’t listen,” the old man said.

  “You said he walked like a golem.”

  “How could he walk like a golem unless he was one?”

  “All right, all right ...You broke him, so now fix him.”

  “My grandfather, his light shines from Paradise, told me that when MoHaRaL—Moreynu Ha-Rav Löw—his memory for a blessing, made the golem in Prague, three hundred? four hundred years ago? he wrote on his forehead the Holy Name.”

  Smiling reminiscently, the old woman continued, “And the golem cut the rabbi’s wood and brought his water and guarded the ghetto.”

  “And one time only he disobeyed the Rabbi Löw, and Rabbi Löw erased the Shem Ha-Mephorash from the golem’s forehead and the golem fell down like a dead one. And they put him up in the attic of the shule and he’s still there today if the Communisten haven’t sent him to Moscow....This is not just a story,” he said.

  “Avadda not!” said the old woman.

  “I myself have seen both the shule and the rabbi’s grave,” her husband said, conclusively.

  “But I think this must be a different kind golem, Gumbeiner. See, on his forehead: nothing written.”

  “What’s the matter, there’s a law I can’t write something there? Where is that lump clay Bud brought us from his class?”

  The old man washed his hands, adjusted his little black skullcap, and slowly and carefully wrote four Hebrew letters on the gray forehead.

  “Ezra the Scribe himself couldn’t do better,” the old woman said, admiringly. “Nothing happens,” she observed, looking at the lifeless figure sprawled in the chair.

  “Well, after all, am I Rabbi Löw?” her husband asked, deprecatingly. “No,” he answered. He leaned over and examined the exposed mechanism. “This spring goes here … this wire comes with this one …” The figure moved. “But this one goes where? And this one?”

  “Let be,” said his wife. The figure sat up slowly and rolled its eyes loosely.

  “Listen, Reb Golem,” the old man said, wagging his finger. “Pay attention to what I say—you understand?”

  “Understand.....”

  �
�If you want to stay here, you got to do like Mr. Gumbeiner says.”

  “Do-like-Mr.-Gumbeiner-says....”

  “That’s the way I like to hear a golem talk. Malka, give here the mirror from the pocketbook. Look, you see your face? You see on the forehead, what’s written? If you don’t do like Mr. Gumbeiner says, he’ll wipe out what’s written and you’ll be no more alive.”

  “No-more-alive.....”

  “That’s right. Now, listen. Under the porch you’ll find a lawnmower. Take it. And cut the lawn. Then come back. Go.”

  “Go....” The figure shambled down the stairs. Presently the sound of the lawnmower whirred through the quiet air in the street just like the street where Jackie Cooper shed huge tears on Wallace Beery’s shirt and Chester Conklin rolled his eyes at Marie Dressler.

  “So what will you write to Tillie?” Old Mr. Gumbeiner asked.

  “What should I write?” Old Mrs. Gumbeiner shrugged. “I’ll write that the weather is lovely out here and that we are both, Blessed be the Name, in good health.”

  The old man nodded his head slowly, and they sat together on the front porch in the warm afternoon sun.

  ISAAC ASIMOV

  Unto the Fourth Generation

  The mystique of the assimilated Jew: He’s polished, urbane, suburban, modern, middle-class, mildly—if at all—religious, well-educated, politically liberal, socially insecure, and a second-generation American. He identifies with, and embodies, American culture. He’s Mr. New Yorker, the man on the way up, the cultural catchall. But his roots are carefully hidden, his links to the old world and his rich heritage seemingly severed. He must still come to terms with himself, his modern lifestyle, and his ancestral culture.

  So here is a parable for that mythical assimilated Jew, an answer to the question: assimilation or continuation? Isaac Asimov, one of science fiction’s foremost yarnspinners, blends folk spirit with city sophistication to create a dream-distant New York where shadows of the past leave their imprints on Madison Avenue shop windows and old men can come back for one last look at the young.