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Friday
The Washington Post headline could not fail to catch the eye: “Antisemitism is rising. Time to summon a 10-foot-tall crisis monster.” The subject, as author Adam Mansbach explained, was The Golem of Prague, a giant figure from Jewish folklore who is created out of mud and clay and “animated through secret incantations to defend the Jewish people in times of crisis.” Mansbach says stories of the golem date back to the 1500s.
Reading Mansbach’s article brought to mind the handling of the Golem legend in Michael Chabon’s Pulitzer-prize winning novel The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay. More on that in a moment.
Mansbach’s interest in the Golem has been spurred by the increasing number of anti-Semitic incidents in the United States:
I started writing about golems in the spring of 2022 —before Ye, formerly known as Kanye West, and Kyrie Irving dominated the news cycle with antisemitic screeds and Holocaust denial — and finished my project the week former president Donald Trump had dinner with Ye and white supremacist Nick Fuentes. I’m writing this two months after Robert F. Kennedy Jr. claimed the coronavirus had been engineered to exempt Ashkenazi Jews; a month after audio transcripts filed in a Manhattan court revealed Rudy Giuliani mocking Jews for celebrating Passover and Robert G. Bowers was sentenced for killing 11 people at the Tree of Life synagogue in Pittsburgh; and the day Elon Musk threatened to sue the Anti-Defamation League for costing X, formerly known as Twitter, ad revenue by calling attention to rising hate speech on the platform.
In this list, Mansbach doesn’t mention Trump’s “good people on both sides” characterization of the Charlottesville marchers chanting, “Jews will not replace us.” Or his recent Rosh Hashanah message, with its implied threat:
Just a quick reminder for liberal Jews who voted to destroy America & Israel because you believed in false narratives! Let’s hope you learned from your mistake & make better choices moving forward!
If the Golem looms so large in the Jewish collective imagination, it is because, Mansbach says, it
represents vigilance against the inevitable, cyclical return of injustice. His myth is born of an understanding that antisemitism is ineradicable — that as long as there are people who feel embittered about their lives, constrained by forces they cannot control, they will come to blame the Jews and then to enact violence upon us.
Our contemporary challenge, Mansbach concludes, is for we ourselves to internalize golem vigilance:
In the absence of a giant clay superhero, our only choice is to become the golems we need. This doesn’t just mean physical confrontation, though there are times when that might be necessary. Nor does it consist simply of vigilance against Jew haters. Instead, it requires Jewish people to enlarge and modernize our watchfulness, to understand that every vehicle of hatred is built on a chassis of antisemitism, and that violence — in word or deed — against any marginalized group will always be a harbinger of tragedy for us.
Kavalier and Clay informs us that, whether we know it or not, we are familiar with the Golem. Superman, created in 1938 by a couple of Jewish artists (one of whose parents had fled Russian pogroms in 1900), inspired by this myth of a strongman saving the downtrodden. Chabon makes the link Jewish resistance and comic book characters even more explicit. It begins with the story of a Houdini-like figure spiriting a golem statue out of Prague before the Nazis find it. Chabon lets us in on some of the deliberations behind the decision. Some want to keep the Golem in Prague since that’s where it has always been. In fact, there
were even a few in the circle who, when pressed, admitted that they did not want to send the Golem away because in their hearts they had not surrendered the childish hope that the great enemy of Jew-haters and blood libelers might one day, in a moment of dire need, be revived to fight again. In the end, however, the vote went in favor of removing the Golem to a safe place, preferably in a neutral nation that was out of the way and not entirely devoid of Jews.
The escape artist in charge of the transfer also uses the occasion to help one of his students, Josef Kavalier, to escape Czechslovakia. The Golem is transferred in a coffin, as though it is a corpse, with Kavalier hidden at one end. Through that means he crosses the border, takes the Siberian railway to Japan, and then finds his way to New York, where he connects with his cousin Samuel Klayman. As Kavalier is a gifted artist, the two invent a comic book series that proves to be wildly successful.
The protagonist of their comic book is “the Escape Artist,” who, Houdini-like, escapes all manner of confinements to make war on the Nazis while helping the innocent escape. On the cover of the first issue, Kavalier vents his frustration by showing the Escape Artist unloading a punch on Adolph Hitler. After that, Chabon writes,
it had been total war. The Escapist and his gang fought on land, at sea, in the skies of Fortress Europa, and the punishment taken by the minions of the Iron Chain grew operatically intense.
And:
It was Joe’s battle scenes—the type of panel or sequence known in the trade as a slugfest—that first got his work noticed, both in the business and by the boggled young manhood of America. These scenes have been described as wild, frenetic, violent, extreme, even Breughelian. There is smoke, fire, and lightning. There are thick flocks of bombers, spiky flotillas of battleships, gardens of blooming shell bursts. Up in one corner, a bombed-out castle looms stark on a hill. Down in another corner, a grenade is exploding in a henhouse as chicken and eggs go flying, Messerschmitts dive, finned torpedoes plow up the surf. And somewhere in the middle of it all struggles the Escapist, lashed with naval chain to the business end of a prescient Axis rocket bomb.
At first, Sam’s boss worried that the direct references to Hitler and the Nazis is too political (America has not yet entered the war), but Kavalier and Clay insist on it, although they compromise a little. At first the Escapist and his company fight “the Razi elites of Zothenia, Gothsylvania, Draconia, and other pseudonymous dark bastions of the Iron Chain,
arranging jailbreaks for resistance leaders and captured British airmen, helping great scientists and thinkers out of the clutches of the evil dictator, Attila Hakoff, and freeing captives, missionaries, and prisoners of war.
Chabon refers to the two comic book creators as “golem makers,” and their Golem does a version of what he’s supposed to do, which is to come to the rescue of European Jews. In its small way, the comic book character helps prepare Americans to embrace the war effort, which will culminate in ending the Final Solution. Chabon writes,
[Kavalier] wanted [their boss] to understand the importance of the fight, to succumb to the propaganda that he and Sammy were unabashedly churning out. If they could not move Americans to anger against Hitler, then Joe’s existence, the mysterious freedom that had been granted to him and denied to so many others, had no meaning.
Many of today’s comic book heroes, whether Batman or Iron Man or the Incredible Hulk—pretty much anyone with bulging muscles and a mission to defeat evil—can be traced back to the Golem of Prague. And yes, we need him now as much as ever.
