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Hebrew National, Heal Thyself Arthur Saltzman Golem Song Marc Estrin Unbridled Books http://www.unbridledbooks.com 320 pages; paper, $15.95 How do you make a golem? If you are the legendary sixteenth-century Rabbi Loew, you compound one out of specially designated earth and inscribe its brow with vitalizing words ofdivine worship. Ifyou are novelist Marc Estrin, you take Ignatius J. Reilly from A Confederacy of Dunces (1980), retain the erudition, the corpulence, the motherdependency, the narcissism, and the elitism, but transplant the specimen from New Orleans to New York, stuff him with White Castle hamburgers and Russian novels, then circumcise. Fold in Kafka, Nietzsche, Lenny Bruce, and sugarcereal, add adash ofAlex-Li Tandem from Zadie Smith's The Autograph Man (2002), with his endless work-in-progress distinguishing Jewishness from Goyishness in contemporary culture, perhaps a sprinkle ofPhilip Roth's complaining Portnoy, set the batter on constant heat, and serve ranting. What results may be something akin to Alan Krieger, the profane, appetitive, self-approving protagonist of Golem Song. Asometime emergency-ward nurse and full-time scourge ofhypocrisy and political correctness , Alan intends to one-up the sixteenth-century rabbi who purportedly concocted aJewish saviorout ofclay (not to mention recent novelists like Cynthia Ozick and Michael Chabon, in whose fictions golems were transported and variously employed, too) by trying not only to manipulate a monster but to remove the massive intermediary and become one himself. The ongoing joke of Estrin's novel is that whereas Alan purports to operate as an antidote to anti-Semitism—a monster on a mission—he comes off as one more manic declaimer on the streets of declamatory New York. (It bears mention that in modem Hebrew, the word golem can also mean "fool.") Puffed up with bluster and indictment, he deems himself a warrior, but he tends to trouble mostly those closest to him, who accord him status and give him leave to act outrageously. And what are those actions, after all? Unsteady, pompous, and brimming with Biblical reference, belles lettres, blasphemy, and gas, Alan seems less dangerous than vexing, less forgivable than the louts he treats, streets, and scorns, and less likely to save the Jews from prejudice than to inspire it—particularly among blacks, for whom he reserves his vilest complaints. In short, he is a golem wannabe, downsized into a foul-mouthed clown, whose golem song, variously aggrandized as a "Talmudic fugue state" or as the testament of a "genius of Jewish restlessness," comes down to a spew, rendering Alan but another update (and the subways are full of them) of his beloved Dostoevsky's underground man: "an irate, claustrophobic consciousness in strained polemical battle with some imagined enemy, the condition, he thought, of modem man." Hence, Alan Krieger: more mischief maker than assailing saint, the man who puts the "mess" in "messianic." Golem Song rises andfalls on the strength ofAlan's voiceassociative and sensationalizing, panting andprofane. "You have such a strong allegiance to your conscience. And you're so grandiose about it." This diagnosis comes from one of the women who are unaccountably drawn into Alan's orbit and who cater to his railing. (Even ethicist-philosopher Martha C. Nussbaum, in one of the novel's better episodes, agrees to an extended cameo and lunch with blathering Alan, who in rangy conversation with the scholar mostly manages to hold his own.) Perhaps the toughest given we are asked to grant in Golem Song is that so many surrounding characters find the guy magnetic and are nearly as compelled by his agenda and his judgments as Alan himself is. Personally, coming within range of him, I'd more likely take the long way around. That Alan is able to anatomize his own failings as well does not prevent him from finessing mem. He is like other Virgos, he admits, who "are not above using their inability to achieve perfection as an excuse for their own idleness and unproductiveness. Out of character with their true nature, these Virgos are sloppy, disorganized, and irresponsible. See? Not Detailfrom cover my fault." Ultimately, Golem Song rises and falls not on Alan's achievements, his insights, his religious exegeses, or his politics but on...

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