(WARNING: MAJOR SPOILERS AHEAD!)
Dear Reader,
Thank you for reading Golemcrafters! It’s always so surreal to think of my work being read by people I’ve never met before. I’m humbled that you took the time to visit this web page as well. Here, I’ll be sharing a bit more information about the citations at the back of the book. I hope you find something interesting to think about.
Golemcrafters follows one of the most common migration paths of Jewish Americans, beginning with the Roman destruction of Judea after the Bar Kokhba revolt and ending in New York City. It’s always worth remembering that Jewish people are not a monolith, and that even among Western Jews, migration paths and experiences vary widely. The Jewish people have a diverse set of experiences and memories, all of which deserve to be honored.
Our rich history is best shown through the Diaspora languages we developed. Some Jews, like my ancestors, lived among many different denominations of Christians, adhered to the Ashkenazic rite, and spoke a language called Yiddish. Here’s the Yiddish featured on page 217: a quote from Sholem Aleichem, whose short stories were the basis for the Broadway musical Fiddler on the Roof.
“A Kasrílevker, vibáld er medt fun nit keyn yidn…”
I found this quote in a fascinating linguistics paper by David M. Bunis. In it, Sholem Aleichem pokes fun at how Jews in Krasilevke (Western Ukraine) seem to use different variations of Yiddish depending on whom they’re talking to.
But Yiddish isn’t the only Diaspora language. On that same page, you’ll see Ladino, the language that developed in the Iberian Peninsula (Spain and Portugal) among Jews who followed the Sephardic rite.
“Ay un lingwaˇzw partikolar entre los bené amenu.”
Those are the words of Mose Cazes, a writer in Thessaloniki, who noted something similar to what Sholem Aleichem described, only among Judezmo (Ladino) speakers. In his paper, Bunis points out commonalities in how Hebrew and Diaspora Hebrew were mixed into conversation, even among Jewish people living so far away from each other.
“But wait— Thessaloniki isn’t in Spain or Portugal, it’s in Greece!” I hear you saying. And yes, that’s true! Diaspora communities rarely lost contact with each other, and we mixed quite often in multicultural places like the Mediterranean. In some cities, you might see Ashkenazic-rite and Sephardic-rite synagogues on the same block. And although Mose Cazes was writing in Ladino, Romaniote (Greek) Jewish people had their own Diaspora language, called Yevanic—Judeo-Greek. They followed the Romaniote rite, which was different from the Sephardic and Ashkenazic rites. Meanwhile, Mizrahi Jews, who spent millennia living among Muslims and Zoroastrians, also follow the Sephardic rite, but their ancestors spoke Diaspora languages like Judeo-Arabic and Bukhari (Judeo-Persian).
In short, not all golemcrafters would see the massacres in Kishinev while sculpting their golems, and they might use different variations of Hebrew to bind their memories to the clay. Ashkenazi and Yemeni golemcrafters would both see the Roman occupation and the Bar Kokhba revolt, for example, but they’d pronounce their Hebrew slightly differently from one another; Indian Jews, meanwhile, might see the Seleucid Greek occupation and the Maccabean revolt instead. Not all American golemcrafters would see scenes from the Holocaust if they touched the clay; some might see the Farhud in Iraq instead. I chose to portray the experiences of Ashkenazi Jewry because that’s what my own lived experience informs.
Generally speaking, Ashkenazi Jewish people are the descendants of Judeans who were born free from slavery in Rome, who moved north in search of a safe place to live. In this book, I chose to portray three key moments of our history— instances of violence that significantly altered our geography and culture.
1. The Kishinev pogrom (in Moldova) was part of several waves of violence in 20th century Europe that pushed millions of Russian Jews to emigrate to the United States. Have you ever seen that old animated movie, An American Tail? If not, you should check it out. The music is really good.
2. The Khmelnitsky Uprising was revolution in which the Cossacks, a Ukrainian people, pushed back against the Polish nobles who were exploiting them. Unfortunately, the Jewish people living in Ukraine were also caught up in the violence, since they were foreigners whom the nobles had used as an easy scapegoat. Survivors of the carnage surrendered to the nearby Tatars and were sold to their Italki (followed the Italian rite, spoke Judeo-Italian) relatives, who pooled their resources in order to help.
3. The Black Death pogroms (almost everywhere in Europe) are pretty self-explanatory. When times are tough, people look for a convenient “Other” to blame, and the bubonic plague was one of the toughest times in European history. Jewish people, sequestered in ghettoes away from their European Christian neighbors, were easy to blame for this unimaginable horror that no one seemed to be able to explain. Jews were accused of poisoning water from wells and rivers, tortured until they confessed, and burned alive with their families. Some communities in the Rhineland killed their Jews before the plague even arrived, hoping that this human sacrifice would prevent the plague from spreading to their villages. (It didn’t work.) Europe’s entire population saw a massive decrease in numbers, but for Jews—who were forced to live in isolation, and who faced not only the disease but the hatred that came with it—it was an especially harsh population bottleneck.
I chose these moments in time because they were evenly spaced out from each other, and because they led to mass migrations and/or changes in Jewish demographics. Sometimes, they even led to changes in the Ashkenazic rite itself: fast days were dedicated and prayers added to the liturgy. It wasn’t easy to choose just three, however. I have a whole set of deleted scenes from Golemcrafters that take place at other pivotal moments, from the First Crusade in the eleventh century (which led to migration from the Rhineland to Eastern Europe), to the revolutionary ambitions of the Sicarii (a.k.a. Jewish ninjas) and the Zealots at Masada. Usually, the reason I rejected scenes was that they were either too sad, too scary, or both. (As cool as “Jewish ninjas” may sound, the stuff they did was actually pretty bleak.)
I didn’t include any scenes more recent than Kishinev. I feel it is not my place to write directly about the Holocaust, or the Farhud, or the experiences of Soviet Jews. You can find descendants and survivors whose testimonies do better justice to those experiences than I ever could.
However, I did include some quotes and phrases from survivors and witnesses not just of Kishinev, but of what happened afterward. I chose words that I feel are deeply, inextricably embedded in the collective memory of modern Jewish people. Every time Faye wakes up from a dream, she hears one of two voices: either Chaim Nachman Bialik, or Abba Kovner.
Chaim Nachman Bialik was a Hebrew poet and journalist whose poem, “In the City of Slaughter," greets Faye after she witnesses Kishinev. That’s because “In the City of Slaughter” was written about Kishinev. Bialik went to interview survivors and collect testimonies in the wake of the massacre. Although his journalism included firsthand stories of organized resistance among Kishinev’s Jewish community, which I used to write the Other Realm scene, his poem—which portrayed Jewish men as weak and passive—became far more popular.
Abba Kovner was a Hebrew poet and partisan fighter imprisoned in the Vilna ghetto decades later, where he tried and failed to stage an uprising against the Nazis. His rallying cry wakes Faye after she realizes that the Other Realm is, in fact, our own reality. The Hebrew phrases on page 155 are variations on the refrain, “do not go like sheep to the slaughter,” both the version spoken by Kovner and the sentiment he was echoing, spoken some forty years earlier.
“Like sheep to the slaughter” was controversial even in its time. As for Bialik’s poem, it has often been used to portray Ashkenazi Jewish men as weak, watered-down shadows of their sabra cousins. The popularity of the poem kicked off a movement to “re-masculinize” European Jewish men. Reading a lot of this stuff was really uncanny, since I’ve seen it reflected in conversations about Asian-American masculinity in my own lifetime. And you know what? I hate it! You shouldn’t have to be physically strong to be a man, and you shouldn’t have to fight back to be seen as a “worthy” victim. And on top of that, it didn’t even work! Those self-defense squads they formed stood no chance against the German army, because of course they didn’t. How could a dozen Jews with guns beat a thousand soldiers with tanks?
But these metaphors and symbols are deeply embedded in the self-image of surviving Jews. Even those of us who are staunch pacifists are susceptible to victim-blaming, whether it’s the kind Faye engages with on page 168, or something more subtle. So much of how we talk about Holocaust education, from never forget to that it may never happen again, implies that if only European Jewry had educated their neighbors better, those neighbors might not have turned on them. In truth, our neighbors knew we were human beings—we’d lived side-by-side for centuries, after all. They just didn’t care.
We want so badly to believe that there’s something we could have done differently, because the alternative is too horrible to believe. As much as I hate the toxic rhetoric of people like Kovner and Bialik, I can’t blame them for wanting to believe there was something they could do to change the seemingly inevitable.
There is one other Jewish author quoted in Golemcrafters. On page 211, Shiloh unknowingly echoes the words of Holocaust survivor and Nobel Peace Prize winner Elie Wiesel. From The Golem: the Story of a Legend (1987):
“As usual the year promises to be one of punishment; I feel it in every bone of my body. I have lived through too many ordeals not to be able to predict what the future has in store. Oh, of course, I have faith in God: I would not be a Jew if I did not have faith. But neither would I be a Jew if I were not afraid. What can I say? I read the signs and I know how to interpret them; I am used to them… Ah, if only the Golem were still among us… I would sleep more peacefully. Why did the Maharal take him from us? Did he really believe that the era of suffering and injustice was a thing of the past? That we no longer needed a protector, a shield? Tell me, please: our Maharal who knew everything, did he not know that exile, after him, would become harder than before, even more cruel?” (Wiesel 13-17).