This novel, like some of my other writings, is about that lost world. In that larger sense, it is, of course, autobiographical. That is, I lived in that world, on those streets, with those people. To be sure, my father did not die in the war; his left leg was amputated in 1927 after a terrible accident in a soccer game, and he worked in a war plant for the duration of the war and then in a factory across the street from where we lived. In 1947, I had two younger brothers and a younger sister. Michael Devlin is me, and he is not me. But there are details in this novel that do come directly from life.
I was, for example, a Shabbos goy. That is, I was a Christian kid who on Saturday mornings would perform the small tasks that were proscribed by a strict adherence to the laws against working on the Sabbath. I turned on the lights. I switched on the gas in the stove. These were small things, but years later I realized their importance. By walking into that synagogue when I was eleven, I was beginning the end of my own parochialism. I was literally walking out of the parish. Out of the life I knew into a life I did not know. And that process began by crossing the street in the midst of a snowstorm.
For years, I wanted to write that story. There were abstract things I wanted to express, but I wanted them to live in a novel, not be written in a tract. I wanted to acknowledge the great gifts that I, and all Americans, had received from the Jews: tenacity, irony, moral intelligence. Starting in that synagogue, and then across a lifetime, I had been challenged, enriched, illuminated by the men and women who had offered us those gifts. To grow up in New York after the war was to live in the shadow of Jewish intellectual brilliance. Through books, articles, essays, fiction, poetry, and teaching, that amazing generation of Jews, most of them educated in public universities, set the terms for American thought and sensibility. They also established standards of excellence that would intimidate all the rest of us for many years to come.
One of those standards was about the insistence on moral intelligence. It wasn’t enough to take a list of commandments in your hand and obey them; you had to think about them. This was essential to the children of other diasporas, because that era, for all the sunniness it retains in our nostalgias, was also a time of unsettling darkness. We had to deal with McCarthyism and witch hunts. We had to think about and understand and confront intolerance, in its crude forms and in its subtle ones. We had to understand racism, which for white kids in the urban North remained something we heard about but never saw. Two momentous events forced us to think in new ways, and both are in this novel. The first was experienced in the dark. In the late summer of 1945, when I was ten, I sat in the RKO Prospect and saw for the first time the films from Buchenwald. I was horrified, and had nightmares for months, awaking in fear and trembling, to be comforted by my mother. Those gray images of skeletal figures, of bony bodies stacked upon each other like offal, of eyes staring from gaunt faces like silent accusations: they drove themselves deep into my mind and my imagination. At school that fall, I asked the first moral questions of my life: How could this happen? Who did this? How could we have let this happen? There were no adequate answers. There are none now.
The other was the arrival of Jackie Robinson in Brooklyn. There were no black people in our neighborhood, other than a tall, silent man who worked as a janitor in one of the large buildings near Prospect Park. We vaguely remembered hearing about race riots in Harlem and Detroit in 1943, but that seemed long ago, back when we were seven or eight years old. We knew very little about race or racism. It was never discussed in school or on the radio. There were few blacks in the movies we saw on Saturday mornings, and these were usually comical figures or “natives” in Tarzan films. There were no black heroes. There were no black villains. As Ralph Ellison would soon make vivid to us, blacks were invisible men.
And here came Jack Roosevelt Robinson. Number 42. That summer our lives changed. Robinson became the closest thing I had to a role model (a phrase that did not then exist). If he could take the insults and race-baiting he had to take that first year, then so could the rest of us when confronted with other forms of stupidity or brutality or evil. If he could defy everything that was placed against him, so could we. He played with controlled intensity, doing everything to the best of his abilities, and then adding something else: desire. That fierce desire was a form of fire. Burning inside of Robinson, it warmed all the rest of us, particularly those of us who were young. It lit up our imaginations. It lit up Brooklyn. It lit up America. So Robinson is crucial to this novel. There is a very Catholic way of reading it: the rabbi is the Father, the boy is the Son, and Jackie Robinson is the Holy Ghost.
Still, the novel was a long time coming. It finally came together for me in 1989, during a trip to Prague, a city that had existed for me only in imagination. I was there as a newspaperman, covering the fall of Communism. Those days and nights were as glorious a time as I’ve ever spent as a journalist, watching the Czech young, led with moral intelligence by the writer Vaclav Havel, as they made their final joyous assault on the cement face of the State. They used language against the State. They used intelligence against the State. They used laughter and irony as their supreme weapons. In contrast, the old Stalinist hacks of the regime looked gray and sullen when they arrived at their palaces, like archbishops who had ceased believing in God.
But during this extraordinary week, there was much downtime. I decided to use those free hours to see where Franz Kafka had lived. There were no guidebooks with this information, because the long-dead Kafka was out of favor with the Communist hackocracy. Still, in the company of a translator who was an ally of Havel, I set out. It turned out that Kafka had lived in many places in Prague, but our search inevitably took us to the old medieval Jewish ghetto, and to the Alt-Neu Synagogue.
And there, something strange happened. I stepped into the cemetery that adjoins the synagogue, a small plot where, I was told, Jews lay buried twelve deep. And I felt a shudder, a pebbling of skin, a sense of immanence, as if I had suddenly connected with all the lost centuries. The dead were not dead. The past was here, in this holy ground. Their past. My past. I had only felt that sense of connection once before, on my first journey to Ireland, as a son of the Irish diaspora. I went to walk upon the hill of Tara, holy place of the pagan past, and trembled: feeling all the mad Celts dancing and singing under the moon. Here in Prague, Jews and Celts danced together.
In one corner of the cemetery there was a statue of a learned man, larger and more imposing than all others, stern, austere. I asked my translator who he was. The translator told me that this was Rabbi Loew. And then he told me about the Golem, pointing to the high stories of the synagogue, where the Golem was said to rest. I said: “God, I wish I’d had a golem when I was eleven.”
And uttering that wish, I knew I had my novel at last.
Here is that novel, set in a time before television, when our imaginations were stirred by talk at kitchen tables, by books, by songs, by an occasional movie, and by the radio. It was a time when boys could believe in magic words. They could believe that Billy Batson would say “Shazam” and become Captain Marvel. They could believe in the extraordinary transformations of Irish legends and myths, often accomplished with magic words. They could hear Yiddish and believe that it was the lost Irish language of the Celts. They could believe in the secret language of the Kaballah.