Michael reported this to Rabbi Loew, but a raven had already delivered the news. All over the kingdom, Jews found outside the ghetto were being killed. Next, the Jew-killers would breach the walls of the Jewish Quarter itself. We will wait three days, the rabbi told Michael, and then we will be forced to do something drastic.
Three days passed. More Jews were killed. There was no word from Rudolf. And then Rabbi Loew took his drastic action.
He decided to make the Golem.
“The what?” Michael asked, in the synagogue in Brooklyn.
“The Golem,” Rabbi Hirsch answered. “The word, it means in dictionary English, like a robot. But the English word, you know, is not really true. Not good enough. Not right. To Rabbi Loew, the Golem has another meaning.”
The story of the Golem had really started a year earlier, when Rabbi Loew made a night visit to Emperor Rudolf in the Castle. Among the Emperor’s collection of thousands of artifacts was a heavy silver spoon, almost eighteen inches long, with Hebrew letters engraved upon the handle. The Emperor asked Rabbi Loew for a translation. Rabbi Loew was astounded at what he saw, but gave Rudolf an incomplete version of the words. He didn’t lie. He just didn’t tell Rudolf all the words. For a good reason: he was afraid of what they said.
The object was laid aside, as the Emperor turned in excitement to show Rabbi Loew a monkey that could play the clavichord and then a portrait of the Virgin Mary that wept real tears. But when the evening was over, the Emperor presented the silver spoon to Rabbi Loew as a gift.
“He says, take it home, use it for soup,” Rabbi Hirsch said. “Rabbi Loew takes it home. He doesn’t make soup.”
All the way home through the foggy streets, Rabbi Loew’s heart thumped with excitement. He knew that he had been given the silver spoon that was mentioned in the Book of Creation. With this spoon, he could shape a man from mud. And by saying the correct words from the Kabbalah, he could bring the mud to life.
That is, through the wisdom of God, he could make the Golem.
The Golem, that huge creature whispered about in secret books and hinted at in the Book of Psalms.
The Golem, who could not be destroyed.
The Golem, who was obliged to do whatever the Jews asked him to do.
“It’s like Frankenstein,” Michael said in a hushed voice. “You know, the movie? Frankenstein, with Boris Karloff?”
“I have not seen this movie,” Rabbi Hirsch said.
Michael told him about the movie starring Boris Karloff as the monster who was created from the parts of dead bodies by Dr. Frankenstein. It played every year at the Venus.
“The Golem,” Rabbi Hirsch said, “was not a movie.”
He talked then about how Rabbi Loew fasted and prayed for three days, purifying his body and his soul. Then one moonless midnight, accompanied by two young and pure assistants, he slipped out of the ghetto through a secret passage. Michael saw him carrying the silver spoon. He noticed that under his coat, Rabbi Loew was dressed completely in white. The three men made their way to the banks of the Vltava. Sweating in silence, they began to shape the body of a man from the pure mud of the riverbank.
Then Michael saw Rabbi Loew take from his jacket a piece of parchment upon which he had written certain words in Hebrew. Letters only he understood. This was called a shem. It included the secret name of God. He inserted the shem in the Golem’s mouth and leaned close to his ear and whispered a secret prayer. With the tip of a pointed tool, he etched a word in the Golem’s brow, a word that Michael could not read. Then Rabbi Loew removed the shem and he and his assistants danced in a circle, moving one way and then another, chanting seven times the secret name of God. Michael could not understand the words.
But slowly, after the mud first turned very red, as if it were baking, and then cooled in a mysterious wind, the Golem rose from the riverbank.
Alive.
“The Golem, he’s almost seven feet tall, his skin is the color of the clay,” Rabbi Hirsch whispered. “He stands up naked on the riverbank and then one of the assistants gives to him a robe. They find out he can’t speak, the Golem, but his eyes, and what he does, tell them he understands everything.”
“Did he understand Yiddish?”
“Of course. And Hebrew. And German. And Czech, and maybe a little Greek too. He understands what he has to understand.”
Shazam!
“It’s like Captain Marvel,” Michael said.
“Who?”
Michael was embarrassed. “A story in the comics.” He leaned forward. “Tell me the rest.”
“The rest?”
“What did the Golem do?”
Rabbi Hirsch looked uneasy.
“What the Jews need him to do,” he said.
And then, leaning back in his chair, his eyes half-closing, Rabbi Hirsch transported Michael to Prague to witness the doings of the Golem. Michael could see the Golem lumbering through the dark nights to rescue a Jewish girl who was being baptized against her will. He could see the Golem summoning a million birds to darken the skies and shit on the heads of the legions of Brother Thaddeus. He could see the Golem in the shadowed doorway of Brother Thaddeus’s house, filling the locks with mortar, so that for three days and three nights Brother Thaddeus could not get out and his followers could not get in to plot against the Jews.
“Could he make himself invisible?” Michael asked, thinking of Claude Rains in The Invisible Man.
“Sure. If Rabbi Loew says is okay.”
But it was clear to Michael that the Golem sometimes acted without orders from Rabbi Loew. The creature knew he was a soldier in a war, and he had a few personal ideas about how to fight it. Once, the invisible Golem entered the house of Brother Thaddeus on an evening when Thaddeus was entertaining another big Jew-hater from Vienna. The Golem made Michael invisible too, and took the boy along as he moved through the huge kitchen. Michael saw him piss in the wine bottles and switch the serving trays. And then saw the great uproar when the gleaming silver dishes were uncovered on the dining table and Brother Thaddeus and his guests stared down at the roasted remains of rats.
“Great!” Michael shouted, laughing out loud.
“Yes, the Golem, he has a sense of humor,” the rabbi said, looking merry. The Golem had magical powers, he explained, but he was not a god; in some ways he was a large boy.
On another visit to Brother Thaddeus’s house, they saw the hairless monk showing some visiting aristocratic ladies his private art collection, which was housed in a vast gallery full of nooks and crannies. The monk was very rich now, because all of the people who hated the Jews gave him money. Under his robe he wore polished leather boots, just like the Nazis, and they clacked as he walked down the halls. Then Brother Thaddeus turned into one corner, with the perfumed duchess and the silken princess and their ladies-in-waiting rustling beside him. All the time he was delivering a running commentary on the great works of art and his own great taste and how art would be better if only they could get rid of the Jews.
They paused in front of a work that even Brother Thaddeus had never seen before: two giant terra-cotta globes, protruding from a perfect rectangle in the wall. Brother Thaddeus began to expound on the glorious discoveries made in Italy of Etruscan culture, the delicate processes of glazing, firing, aging. The ladies leaned in closer, and then one of them reached forward to touch the terra-cotta globe.