The Golem Redux: From Prague to Post-Holocaust Fiction

5. Golems to the Rescue

The golem, you see, has not been forgotten. It is still here. I. L. Peretz, “The Golem” As we saw in chapter 4, comic books of the 1930s and 1940s transformed the venerable Jewish tradition of the golem into Superman and other superheroes , and Marvel Comics returned to the trope of the heroic golem in the 1970s; the merging of the golem with comic images led, in turn, to such writers as James Sturm, Pete Hamill, and Michael Chabon. Writers of post-Holocaust fiction in the 1990s and early twenty-first century again appropriated the golem as a rescuer figure but this time without such comic associations. Cynthia Ozick’s The Puttermesser Papers (1997) is set in New York City, a place that is literally and metaphorically gritty, the latter by virtue of political corruption. For the first time we have a woman character who creates a female golem, and she arrives with mighty ambitions for cleaning up the Big Apple. But her utopian visions go wrong in a most sobering manner; the Holocaust is the shadow of evil lurking behind this novel. With Thane Rosenbaum’s The Golems of Gotham (2002), we encounter a story in which the Holocaust is central: Rosenbaum gives us no fewer than eight golems, most of them the ghosts of famous Holocaust survivors who took their own lives. Rosenbaum is a member of the Second Generation , the dominant theme of his novel, which explores literature and the imagination as tools for working through the trauma of post-memory. The impact of the Holocaust on one’s family is the theme to be found again in a Golems to the Rescue 151 5 01 Text_.indd 151 2/2/12 12:49 PM 152 Chapter 5 curious episode of The X-Files (1997) in which a Holocaust survivor from Prague brings Kabbalah, Jewish mysticism, and the golem tradition from the old country to Brooklyn. This chapter concludes with a brief analysis of Daniel Handler’s novel Watch Your Mouth (2000). Handler is also the child of Holocaust survivors; his vision of the world as harboring dark threats is embodied in his bestselling series for children, A Series of Unfortunate Events (written under the pseudonym Lemony Snicket); discovery of his bawdy golem novel will come as a surprise to some readers. Cynthia Ozick, The Puttermesser Papers (1997) “Not even the Maharal could make a woman out of clay,” Kornblum said. “For that you need a rib.” Michael Chabon, The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay The story itself is a golem, and we are right to be suspicious of it. John Leonard, “Levitation” With Cynthia Ozick we encounter a fiercely intellectual author who writes about the Holocaust almost as if against her will. Having agreed with Adorno and Wiesel that the notion of “Holocaust literature” verges on the obscene, Ozick nonetheless wrote one of the most compelling and widely read stories about the camps, “The Shawl,” and another about the aftermath of the Shoah for survivors, “Rosa,” which Joseph Lowin has insightfully called “a midrash on [‘The Shawl’] . . . a rewriting” (Cynthia Ozick, 109).1 Ozick, like Michael Chabon, is neither a survivor herself nor a member of the Second Generation. She has wrestled with the issues of agency and the authority to speak about the Holocaust. Unlike Aharon Appelfeld, for example, whose fiction is displaced, set on the edges of the Shoah in time and place, Ozick places “The Shawl” in the immediacy of a death camp, with all the attendant tropes of Nazi boots, barbed wire, and the killing of babies: “a highly focused, close-up rendition of concentration camp reality” (Friedrich, 94). Lillian Kremer has noted that “The Shawl” “marks the sole instance in which Ozick locates her fiction within the lice-infested, diseaseridden , death-dominated concentration camp universe and focuses exclusively on the gender-based Holocaust suffering of women and the murder of their innocent children” (Women’s Holocaust Writing, 150).2 Unlike “The Shawl,” The Puttermesser Papers, Ozick’s golem book, is set at a remove: in New York City in the 1970s. 01 Text_.indd 152 2/2/12 12:49 PM 153 Golems to the Rescue After “The Shawl” was published (initially in The New Yorker in 1980), Ozick received a letter from a survivor who essentially told Ozick that she was “falsifying” and “desecrating” the Holocaust by writing about it without having actually experienced it. Ozick responded...