Heaven forbid anyone should spend his life in perpetual expectation of meeting the Golem - Gustav Meyrink's The Golem

The golem story is so flexbile. Gustave Meyrink's novel The Golem (serialized 1913-4, published as a book in 1915) somehow manages to omit the golem entirely. Or else it's narrated by the golem. Whichever way, this golem is not the big clay fellow we've grown to love - see left.


The Meyrink novel is wild stuff. A gem-cutter, our narrator, lives in an apartment in Prague's Jewish ghetto. He is schizophrenic and has lost all memory of his past due to a hypnosis cure (he doesn't remember that either). A mysterious stranger, who may very well be the Golem, or is the narrator himself, gives him a mystical book to repair (right). A beautiful woman wants his help covering up her affair with a doctor. A young lunatic wants revenge against the sinister Jewish junk dealer, who, it turns out, is his father. Um, there's a saintly rabbi, and his beautiful, miracle-attuned daughter. And, let's see, several murders. Our hero ends up in prison for one of them. But it turns out that it's all a dream, or is it, and although one might be likely to groan at that old chestnut, I didn't, not in this case.

This is pure E. T. A. Hoffmann, in some ways quite derivative. A not-quite-ordinary person gets caught up in some tangled supernatural plot involving characters who constantly transform into other characters and strange powers that somehow set everything right at the end. There must be a dozen Hoffmann stories that work this way. The Golden Pot is the most famous, maybe. The Devil's Elixir is better. Meyrink knew them both, very well, too well.

The Golem has its own originality, though. First, Hoffmann is the great pre-Freudian Freudian fiction writer. Meyrink gets to filter Hoffmann through Freud. The schizophrenic narrator is key - a good part of the effective horror of the novel is that every scrap of reality, every stray phrase or gesture, becomes imbued with significance. The narrator lives in a state of perpetual uncanniness. Readers familiar with Nabokov's "Signs and Symbols" will pick this up immediately.

Second, the Prague setting is interesting. The golem story is just one local detail of many. The actual 1890 collapse of the medieval bridge over the Moldau, for example, is inserted into the plot - the narrator thinks he caused it, mentally. The strange ending, with the gem-cutter, disoriented after months in a dark prison, wandering through a Jewish quarter destroyed not by a pogrom but by modern urban renewal, ironically invokes the golem without even mentioning it.

Finally, sometimes Meyrink's prose is really good, even aside from the horror-story atmosphere business:*

"For answer came a sound as though a rat had scampered over the keys of a piano." (36, Dover edition)

"The snowflakes sped like regiments - little miniature soldiers in white furry coats - past the panes of my window, on and on, one behind the other, always in the same direction, as though in universal retreat from a particularly formidable foe." (75)

"A man with a long beard, and official sword, coat, and cap, but with bare feet and trousers tied together at the ankles, stood up, put down the coffee-mill that he was holding between his knees, and ordered me to remove my clothes." (140)

The bare feet and the coffee-mill - to me, that is the stuff.


Meyrink was a genuine occultist, and at times The Golem plunges into a bog of will o' the wisps, strange gases, and mystical claptrap. At its best, the Kabbalistic Buddhist Egyptology or whatever it is provides Meyrink with striking, original images; at its worst, its empty and dull. A reader with more patience for tarot and whatnot may think otherwise.

There are also a fair amount of anti-Semitic stereotypes. E. F. Bleiler, in the introduction to the Dover edition, thinks that the philo-Semitic stereotypes balance things out, and points out that the Nazis agreed, gleefully banning and burning Meyrink's books. The split is consistent with the divide in the mind of the narrator, but an artistically superior book might dispense with the stereotypes completely, no?

The Dover edition includes more of these dramatic lithographs, by Hugo Steiner-Prag. Who is he? Maybe you can find out and let me know. The illustrations do fit the text, exactly.


I'll end golem week with some different illustrations, from David Wisniewski's 1996 Golem, although neither my little thumbnails nor my scanner can do justice to his amazing work with cut-paper. Wisniewski tells the Yudl Rosenberg version of the story, basically, with one amusing amendation. The golem, once de-activated, usually has to be stored somewhere. In Meyrink's version, for example, there is a secret golem storage room, accessible only by tunnels, where the narrator somehow ends up spending the night. I. L. Peretz covers the golem with dust and cobwebs.

Wisniewski buries the golem in books, which I thought was an appropriate metaphor for Golem Week, and, frankly, for everything else I do at Wuthering Expectations:

Actually, click to enlarge - they came out better than I thought.

* Postscript: I forgot another first-rate device, the sculptor theme. The narrator makes cameos; another character is a puppeteer and carves a puppet head that represents either the narrator, or the Golem, or both; wax figures pop up in unexpected places. There's also a "hanged man" theme that links the prison scenes, the tarot cards, and other odds and ends.

What made me supplement the endless series of symbols with one more? - Borges and the creative golem, Peretz and the destructive golem

The golem, it really is everywhere. I certainly did not expect it to see its clayey head pop up in Abdourahman A. Waberi's In the United States of Africa (2006), a short, clever alternate history by a novelist from Djibouti, the premise of which is in the title. The progtagonist is a sculptor; sculpture imitates divine creation, see Golem, Legend of - that's the link.

Jorge Luis Borges follows the same thread in his poem "The Golem" (1964), except he's interested in writing, not sculpture:

"Thirsty to know things only known to God,
Judah Léon shuffled letters endlessly,
trying them out in subtle combinations
till at last he uttered the Name that is the Key"*

The resulting golem is a pathetic everyman, mute and uncanny, it's eyes "less human than doglike." It scares the rabbi's cat. Borges admits that he has no textual authority for the cat, "but across the gulf of time I make one out."

This sounds like a parable about creation, the writer's (and in the end, God's) ongoing failure to get things right:

"What made me supplement the endless series
of symbols with one more? Why add in vain
to the knotty skein always unraveling
another cause and effect, with not one gain?"

Sort of an unpleasant question.


I. L. Peretz's tiny story "The Golem" (1893), barely a page, is about destruction, not creation. "Great men were once able to perform great miracles," it begins. No more. Rabbi Loew creates the golem to save the Jews of Prague, and it goes to work:

"Prague filled with corpses. They say it went on like this right through Wednesday and Thursday. On Friday, with the clock striking noon, the golem was still intent on its labors."

The Rabbi, a pious man, has in the mean time been studying. His congregation finally requests that he stop the golem's slaughter, because "[s]oon there won't be any Gentiles left to heat the Sabbath ovens or to take down the Sabbath lamps." That's signature Peretz irony, as is the sterile end, where the Rabbi's grandson, long after the golem's deanimation, "still deliberates whether it is proper to include such a golem in a minyan or in a company for the saying of grace."

I mentioned that this story is only a page long, right? One of Peretz's modes is to add layer after layer of meaning to seemingly simple stories. His golem is stored in The I. L. Peretz Reader, a great, great book, which I have not yet written about, probably because it is difficult and slippery.

* The Borges poem is from Selected Poems, pp.192-7. In this stanza, "only," "endlessly," and "trying them out" are inventions of the translator; not a hint of them in the Spanish. Here's a vers libre alternative by blogger James Honzik.

It is said that the golem lives everywhere and in all times - the golems of H. Leivick and Dovid Frishman

Writers use the golem story for all sorts of purposes. He's a blank slate, created from nothing, so the author can inscribe anything he wants on the golem.

In H. Leivick's verse play The Golem (1922), the poor golem is a sort of existentialist, tormented by his inability to understand his purpose, even though he is specifically created to save the Jews of Prague from the blood libel. But that is not what he means, exactly:

"You don't see who I am? I'll be another.
Beware of looking at my face, my features.
I am condemned to lie here on the ground.
I do not want to lie here any longer.
I am repelled, disgusted by my flesh,
Revolted by my glassy, bulging eyes,
By my own muteness, by my dark sign language...
The moment has come. See, I repel
Myself as I would repel any worm..."

The whole play is like this. I can guess how it would work on stage - abstract sets, flashing lights and sudden plunges into darkness, bizarre electronic music. Tough stuff.

In the long climactic scene, in which the golem is sent on his mission (destroying the false evidence of the blood libel), he experiences some kind of Walpurgisnacht, as in Goethe's Faust. The golem is taunted by CAVE SPIRITS and debates an INVISIBLE FORCE. The final crisis is shared with the YOUNG BEGGAR, who represents idealism or something, and Christ, I mean MAN WITH BIG CROSS. I was not expecting him, but I didn't expect Byron to show up in Faust, Part II either, yet there he was.

In Leivick's play, the golem is psychologically damaged by his heroic feat, so his deactivation, a standard part of the golem story, is perhaps merciful. Dovid Frishman* lets the golem stick around in his 1922 story. Just barely - he nearly drowns, but is rescued, and now "[i]t is said that the golem lives everywhere and in all times."

Frishman's golem story reminds me of Frankenstein, assuming that Victor had not behaved so strangely after he created his monster. Rabbi Leyb creates the golem to be the perfect student. Bu the golem cannot resist the rabbi's granddaughter Eve, who possesses a different kind of knowledge:

"Eve was holding and wiping a huge sacred tome. She stood there absorbed for a minute. Good Lord! Why so many books? Why does a person need them? Eve stood there, pensive. Her granddad was simply crazy! He had taken a long, blossoming life of seventy years and inundated it in such nonsense. Why, for one long minute, the dear, radiant world with the golden sun was a thousand times dearer and smarter than all these tomes put together."

Eve doesn't win the argument, but neither does the rabbi. The mind-body dualism is never resolved, even after the golem tries to solve his dilemma by, I love this part, writing his memoirs.

Many golems for many purposes.

The Leivick play and Frishman story are in Neugroschel's anthology The Golem. That brick golem is from the streets of Prague; the charming plump one is from one of many Prague paintings by the artist Natalia Povalyaeva.

* Who is Dovid Frishman? Who knows? His collected works, mostly in Hebrew, runs to six volumes, but this story is the only thing I can find in English. It's good; maybe there's more.

Golem Week! Golem Week!

It's Golem Week! Why? Because Joachim Neugroschel put together a collection of Yiddish golem stories (The Golem, 2006) and I read it. And one book led to another, as always seems to happen.

The 16th century Rabbi Leyb (or Loew) wants to save the Jews of Prague from the blood libel, or some other peril, or he has wood that needs chopping, so he creates a man out of clay and animates him by writing God's name on the golem's forehead, or on a piece of paper which he puts in his mouth, or perhaps he whispers the name in the golem's ear. At some point, the golem goes out of control and has to be destroyed. Or it doesn't. There are a lot of variations.

I've never been to Prague. My understanding is that it is now crammed with golems. See left, see right, see everywhere. Actually, the image on the right is from the 1920 movie The Golem. I've been scrounging golem photos from the internet. Some of the little Prague golem souvenirs are pretty cute.

How strange to finally read a golem story, then, and find that the golem looks perfectly human. His name is Joseph. He has a beard. He eats and sleeps. If you prick him, does he not bleed? He does. That's in Yudl Rosenberg's The Golem or the Miraculous Deeds of Rabbi Leyb (1909), at least.

The Rosenberg book is sort of like a dime novel. It's clumsy, pulpy. A bunch of folktales about Rabbi Leyb are strung together in a more or less logical order, the language is standardized, and Joseph the golem is shoehorned into every adventure whether he is needed or not. In one familiar story, the Rabbi's wife plays Mickey Mouse and the golem plays the water-carrying broom. I see why the book is important - it's a lot of golem stuff in one place - and I enjoyed it, even if it's not exactly good.

What's coming up this week? H. Leivick's golem-in-crisis; Dovid Frishman's golem-in-love; I. L. Peretz and Jorge Luis Borges; and one of the craziest novels I've ever read (or will read, inshallah, since it's in process). And more golem pictures, pilfered from the internet.