The profusely illustrated Goilem, Annotated is an iconoclastic hodgepodge tongue-in-cheek parody of the numerous renderings of the golem legend that have appeared over the centuries: the illustrated children's versions, folk-tale narrations, Persian-style stories-within-stories, religious parables, new age fantasies, tourism promotions and scholarly analyses. With an ironic and droll tone and a post-modern attitude the unreliable author amuses and confuses, seduces and abuses, directs, cajoles, intrigues, scolds and shames the reader into exploring some actual history and contemplating some serious philosophical and religious issues.
Today's readers are, of course, all too familiar with
contemporary news reports of war crimes, torture, sexual abuse
by clergy and by caretakers, ethnic slaughter, rape, disparities of wealth, serial killers,
bizarre abuses of power, religious fanaticism and denial of science and reason
(all of which appear in Goilem, Annotated); but
our novel adds accounts of witchcraft, alchemy, lycanthropy, Kabbalah, demonology,
the black arts and such blasphemies as denial of geocentrism in a society,
like ours, not yet free from the accursed legacy of the dark ages
.
The legend of the late sixteenth century Golem of Prague caught fire in the late 1800s and continues to spawn several published renditions annually. The notion of a powerful but dumb animated clay mannequin protecting the Jewish community against the blood libel has variously branched into immensely popular stories about hubris: human creations turning against us (Frankenstein, mad scientists, nuclear annihilation, global warming); about superheroes (Superman was a direct descendant); and even, bless his little heart, about Pinocchio.
Goilem, Annotated departs from the burgeoning Golem literature by presenting, in a pseudo-scholarly, pseudo-intellectual, über-ironic pastiche, an often silly send-up of post-modern writing that is yet a real novel (not a Caldicott Prize children's picture book), with characters that are not just figureheads and driven by a plot that courses through the actual splendor and horror, the blatant contradictions present in the capital of the Holy Roman Empire under the mad Rudolf II and the pressure of the Counter-Reformation and the disruptive economic changes: the pogroms and warfare, the transition from Renaissance to Early Modern culture, and the birth of science.
Around year 1600 the scholar and mystic MaHaRaL
(an actual still-revered rabbi)
deceives his 12-year-old supposed grandson
(the novel's narrator) into believing
he has activated a golem through Kabbalistic incantation
in order to defend Prague's ghetto against attack
by an array of enemies including Jesuit agents of the Pope.
The boy is commanded to train a gigantic (over 6 feet tall—big
for those days) newly-arrived man
(who pretends to be the golem) into being able to pass as a human.
The golem's naïveté pits objective reason
against the blind faith promulgated by religious schooling.
As the golem's apparent sophistication grows, the boy's belief system crumbles.
The giant, an early-modern Prometheus, becomes the boy's mentor,
inverting their relationship.
The Jews are rumored to have created a legion of flying, fire-breathing golems
so they had better not be messed-with.
When the boy discovers he has been deceived,
he threatens to expose the fraud and bring disaster
on the MaHaRaL, the giant and the entire ghetto.
The novel resolves as a coming-of-age story.
Goilem, Annotated includes pictures in order to spare verbiage in portraying the unsurpassed rich culture of Early Modern Europe. It illustrates its points with several tales, some of folk origin but related in a far more complex manner than is traditional ( compare this ). The book’s philosophical issues parallel those we face today, where government is no better managed, those in power are no more enlightened nor less mentally aberrant and religion is neither more credible nor more benign.
The book is couched as a children's tale burdened by sarcastic footnotes, digressions and explanatory asides; gradually darkening to sample much of the horror that people currently actually experience and/or imagine, but ultimately rescuing hope from its prevailing comical cynicism.