We Made a Golem

When young ladies would come there, I would sit down at the first floor and watch the door for him. I couldn't tell how many times I have watched the door for him…

—Jim Conley's testimony, 1913

We did it at a slumber party, one of our birthdays. No one wanted to turn fourteen anymore. We used to call the younger ones babies and when it was too hot to lift a finger, we'd say Babies, go run and fetch us some lemonade. Babies, be sweet and bring us a damp flannel for our forehead. Those of us who were still thirteen stayed up late, tried not to close our eyes as the days changed over. Birthdays had become a solemn affair. Not even the hot attic of my house, its moon-soaked floor once so mysterious, could thrill us now. We sighed out our candles, ate dutiful forkfuls of lemon cake and wiped our mouths clean.

It was Saturday. Two weeks since they hanged him and we wondered if we had already seen the last new picture of him we'd ever see. The last distant gaze.

One of us, bored with frowning around in the attic, cleared her throat but none of us were talking anyway. Have your parents told you this story? And, in fact, our parents had, or versions of it. Mostly, it was before bed that they would kneel down beside us and say, Whenever you're afraid, think of the Golem of Prague. Only in the last few years when Leo's picture first made the paper did they start telling bedtime stories. It used to be they would tell us, No nonsense before bed. Imagination is a fool-proof recipe for nightmares. And now this. What was there to be afraid of? And hadn't we outgrown magic already? It was strange to hear them tell it. They seemed hardly to know the story anymore, like it was something they'd learned in school and mostly forgotten. It was poorly cobbled together, the details always changing, and what was Prague to us but a star on our geography maps? None of us actually believed it, we swore. It was childish, a fairy tale. Still, we agreed, it was a good story.

Once we all had our nightgowns on, we sat cross-legged with all our bare feet touching like praying hands. One of us said we all had a bad case of cold feet and we laughed and our feet began to sweat. Then we went around the circle and each one of us said whatever we knew. Some of us took extra turns, some of us were shy to speak. I was the last one, so I wrote it all down:

All golems are made from dust

They're made of mud, everyone knows that

Rose called Anna a golem once

Rose called Anna a goylem because she stepped on Rose's toes once while they were dancing and bruised her toenails blue

They protected the Jews in the Prague story but sometimes they go bad, like milk

Golems can't speak

It's only that they couldn't answer the rabbis who made them. So they probably can't speak Hebrew or Yiddish or German or Czech or any of the old bubbe languages

To make a golem, you must write down the correct shem on a slip of paper

Which is 42 letters long

Which is 72

Which is 216 letters long and that's that

Then feed it to him

Then fix it to his forehead

On the Sabbath, golems need sleep

On the Sabbath, the golem must die

None of us know why, none of us know how

To make a golem is to bring yourself closer to God

There was the man, Leo Frank. He had been the superintendent of the National Pencil Company, in the newspapers quite a lot. For three years, we had known him: his dress, his whereabouts, so many private things. He was a dead man now but we all knew his photograph. It was a very handsome photograph in which...