The Golem Redux: From Prague to Post-Holocaust Fiction by Elizabeth R. Baer (review)

The golem has returned. He fills the shelves of gift shops throughout Prague in the form of little clay statues. He inhabits the pages of recent comic books and novels. He appears on television shows and is written up in numerous newspaper and magazine articles. And he has been the subject of several scholarly studies in recent years. Although the term golem first appears in Psalm 139 and has been used to refer to an artificial man made of clay and animated by ritual incantation since the Middle Ages, it is the most recent reappearance of the golem that interests Elizabeth R. Baer in The Golem Redux. Noting that the golem has had a tendency to be brought back to life at certain key historical moments (such as the Middle Ages, the Romantic era, and the early 20^th century), Baer wonders why the golem has once again achieved such a high degree of popularity today (3–4).

Baer’s argument is that the modern-day golem is a profoundly post-Holocaust figure that allows Jewish-American writers to appropriate, adapt, revise—and above all to reimagine—Jewish traditions and thereby make sense of human nature after the Holocaust (15). Baer locates the modern return of the golem at the intersection of three key terms: intertextuality, imagination, and the Holocaust. For Baer, intertextual relationships are inherent in all versions of the golem legend: the golem himself is a text (indeed, in many versions of the tale he has words inscribed on his forehead) and “a repository of literary memory” (15). When writers invoke him, they also thereby invoke centuries of tales associated with his legend. Baer further argues that there is something inherently provocative about deploying these fantastic, imaginative tales to explain Jewish identity and human nature after the Holocaust. Citing Adorno’s and Wiesel’s famous assertions about the impropriety of writing (post-)Holocaust fiction, Baer sees the return of the golem in imaginative fiction as an explicit counter-statement to these claims. Baer argues that by locating himself at the juncture of intertextuality, imagination, and the Holocaust, the golem confronts us with “the profound challenge of post-Holocaust literature and its equally profound necessity” (183).

Baer’s study is the second book on the resurgence of interest in the golem to appear in the past couple of years. Cathy S. Gelbin argues in her similarly-titled study, The Golem Returns (Ann Arbor, MI 2011 [ed. note: see review in Monatshefte 104.3, Fall 2012, 437–439]), that for centuries the golem has functioned as a cultural touchstone by which to address questions of Jewish identity in the diaspora. Gelbin’s and Baer’s studies address many of the same issues and consider some of the same texts. However, they also differ in significant ways. Whereas Gelbin devotes the bulk of her study to the 19^th- and early-20^th-century golem stories, Baer concentrates on the late-20^th-century reemergence of the golem. And whereas Gelbin considers mostly high-cultural texts, Baer focuses on the pop-culture golem of popular fiction, Marvel comics, and television series. Finally, while Gelbin approaches her topic from the field of Jewish Cultural Studies, Baer takes a more traditional humanistic approach. The two studies thus make useful companions to each other, tackling many of the same questions with different methodological approaches and by using different texts. Both Gelbin and Baer agree, however, that the golem is a vibrant and productive figure through which to (re)imagine identity, history, and human relationships today.