The Golem by Gustav Meyrink
The Golem was created by the Prague rabbi using alchemy and the incomprehensible word “G*d” written on his forehead. A gigantic being known as the Golem protected Jews from anti-Semites. He fell in love with Esther, the rabbi’s daughter, and when he was rejected, he went on a violent rampage. The Golem split into pieces when the rabbi removed the word from his forehead; some of these fragments are still stored behind bars in the synagogue’s attic in the Prague ghetto, which the Nazis intended to turn into a museum of a long-extinct race after they exterminated all the Jews. Meyrink anticipated both the impending disaster and the Golem’s potential resurgence.
The Golem by Gustav Meyrink
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Nothing I’ve ever read does a better job of capturing the terrifying, unavoidable irrationality of a nightmare than The Golem. That is its truly outstanding achievement. It’s one of the strangest books ever written, and a large part of its weird mood comes from the reader’s ongoing doubt regarding the line between “reality” and a dream. Pernath is an elderly gem cutter who may be a talented artisan or maybe a crazy who was freed from an asylum after being treated with hypnosis. He claims to be the scion of a wealthy family but has practically complete amnesia. Pernath resides among Jews with the strangest racial and cultural characteristics in the historic ghetto of Prague…
A literary Gothic work from the early 20th century is “The Golem” by Gustav Meyrink (published in 1915). However, he explores the significance of identity, mystically speaking, in the guise of a highbrow 19th-century book written in the style of a psychological gothic of the era rather than the horror or monster drama that we, gentle readers, may be expecting.
The typical method for creating a golem monster from a fairy tale involves putting the word “truth” somewhere, sometimes on a piece of paper that is inserted into the mouth of a clay or mud statue that resembles a man, and other times on the forehead of the statue. This magical technique turns the statue into an animated being, but as a slave, it is subject to the will of the person who initiated its animation. By changing the inscription from “Truth” to “Death,” the golem is rendered inactive. Jewish folktales, particularly the myth of Adam being created from mud by a god, are where the earliest variants of the golem-making legend can be found.
