The Golem Awakened

Abstract

The Golem Awakened Małgorzata Stępnik (bio) I am a guest from afar;I forgot everything that happened to me earlier … (Lejwik [Leivick], 72)1 The text is home; each commentary a return….The seeming nomad in truthcarries the world within him, as does language itself. (Steiner, 102) In Josefov, the Jewish district of Prague, time seems to flow backward, just like the direction of Hebrew script. The golden hands of the clock on the tower of the Jewish town hall are moving from right to left, taking us back into the past, shrouded in a veil of parables and legends. The thoughts of Shylock, a Shakespearean character, travel in the same direction, reinterpreted and in a way appropriated by Roee Rosen in his latest book, The Blind Merchant (2016).2 The town hall is directly adjacent to the Gothic walls of the Old-New Synagogue (Czech: Staronová Synagoga), the oldest active synagogue in Europe. Inside its raw, Gothic interior, in the immediate vicinity of the bimah, there is a chair on which once the chief rabbi of Prague sat—the famous Yehuda Löw ben Bezalel, called the Maharal (c. 1520–1609). It is with the charismatic figure of the Maharal that the most widespread version of the legend of Golem is associated (Hebrew: גלֶֹם); the legend of a monster made of clay and brought to life with the word "truth" (Hebrew: emet, אֱמתֶ), a mute guard of the Prague ghetto. A monster that (and that is essential) rebelled against its creator. The interest in this mythical figure is reflected in literature: from the romantic narratives of Jakob Grimm or Mary Shelley (Frankenstein [End Page 26] or the Modern Prometheus, 1818), to the post-Holocaust literature publications—with the most notable examples being the famous novel by Isaac Bashevis Singer (Golem, 1969) and Michael Chabon's Pulitzer Prize–winning The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay (2000), which combines the themes of demiurgic actions and escapism. The image of a rebellious android—and sometimes also a gynoid—has also impregnated the imagination of filmmakers for almost a hundred years. After all, the same genre also includes expressionist works by Paul Wegner (Der Golem: Wie er in die Welt kam, 1920),3 and Fritz Lang (Metropolis, 1927), some later adaptations, such as Julien Duvivier's Le Golem (1936), as well as numerous science fiction productions, including Rupert Sanders's Ghost in the Shell (2017)—a story of a female cyborg, inspired by a Japanese manga. Recalling further examples would obviously go far beyond the subject undertaken in this article. Yet I will take the liberty of mentioning two other emblematic works from the field of traditional plastic arts. The first one is an oil painting titled The Jewish School (Drawing a Golem), painted in 1980 by Ronald B. Kitaj, a cofounder of the School of London, and, above all, the author of two Diasporist Manifestos.4 The second one is a bronze statue representing the Golem, erected in 2010 by David Ćerny in Poznań to commemorate the birthplace of the great Maharal. It is significant that as many as 136 artworks drawing on the clay monster were gathered at the exhibition Golem! Avatars d'une légende d'argile, displayed at the Musée d'Art et d'Histoire du Judaïsme in Paris (March 8–July 26, 2017). As rightly pointed out by the organizers of the exhibition, where the works of, among others, Ronald B. Kitaj, Philippe Guston, and Christian Boltansky have been presented, "The legend of the Golem has always fascinated artists, who have seen it as a metaphor of their role as creators capable of bringing inert matter to life."5 It is worth adding that, at almost the same time, an exhibition devoted to the figure of Golem was also hosted at the Jüdishes Museum Berlin (September 23, 2016–January 29, 2017). Martina Lüdicke, in chapter 7 of a catalogue published on this occasion, associates this mythical creature with the figure of a doppelgänger, which, incidentally, fits the canon of the psychoanalytic theory perfectly (see Otto Rank's essay on the doppelgänger, 1925, written 1914). As Lüdicke asserts: [End Page...