Ghost Story

In the Bible’s telling, Adam was the first creature into which God breathed a soul. Before that, the Talmud notes, he was a “golem”--an animated mass without the divine gift of a human spirit. Later, Jewish tradition suggests, certain spiritual data were passed from Adam to the patriarch Abraham and down to the ancient and medieval Jewish sages explaining how to give life (but not a soul) to inanimate matter.

Thane Rosenbaum in “The Golems of Gotham,” takes liberty with this traditional definition of a golem. His characters are more like ghosts, disembodied spirits, in this simple, comical but not funny story padded with pretentious meditations on the nature of art. Rosenbaum’s protagonist is 14-year-old Ariel Levin of Manhattan’s Upper West Side. Her father is novelist Oliver Levin, whose wife left them when Ariel was a toddler. Oliver is haunted by the double suicide of his father and mother, Rose and Lothar, both Holocaust survivors. Hoping to save her father from repressed grief, Ariel employs cabalistic spells to raise the ghosts of her father’s mom and dad. How exactly she got hold of these spells goes unspecified.

Without meaning to do so, Ariel also unsettles the spirits of six writers who, in historical fact, survived the Holocaust only to take their own lives. These six ghosts, Primo Levi and Paul Celan among them, join Rose and Lothar as a posse of “golems” to liberate Oliver from his case of grief-induced writer’s block.

As plot developments arise, Rosenbaum often doesn’t bother to link cause with effect. At some point, the golems turn from saving Oliver to improving New York City, deciding to eliminate any features of urban life that remind them of the death camps, even doing away with smoking and tattoos, which call to mind the crematoria and the numbers the Nazis tattooed into their victims’ arms.

But Rosenbaum never tells us how they do this. It just happens. Sometimes these spirits are incorporeal, other times they exert physical force. Rosenbaum doesn’t feel obliged to be consistent. As he asserts in one of his ruminations on art, “a real artist doesn’t care about facts, details, adventure, or even plot--just truth.”

But the book would have benefited from more attention to such matters. It is full of repetitive or extraneous passages, like the cliched phrases Rosenbaum loves to play with. Then there are his frequent recaps of what’s already happened, as if the novel had been serialized. So Rosenbaum gives us reminders of Ariel’s prowess in mysticism, as if from chapter to chapter we might have forgotten about the powers of this “heroic pied-piper cabalist of the Upper West Side.”

The most convincing parts of the book have nothing to do with the Holocaust or with cabala. Rosenbaum may actually have had it in him to write an affecting story simply about a man whose wife abandons him and their young daughter. This is his third fictional work on the theme of the Holocaust and its grievous effects on the children of those who lived through it. Alas, another legacy of Nazi genocide is its lasting influence on a segment of American Jewish culture that seeks to paint Judaism solely in terms of the Holocaust and the Eastern European shtetl culture it erased. For example, in “The Golems of Gotham,” Rosenbaum is big on having characters run out to buy yahrzeit memorial candles or talk about the kaddish, a prayer associated with mourning.

This not only makes for overwrought fiction, this book and many others like it have taken Jewish literature in a new and unfortunate direction. The classic texts of Judaism, from the Talmud to Maimonides to modern philosophical reflections like those of Rabbi Joseph B. Soloveitchik, are luminously spare and emotionally reserved despite suffering that long predated the Holocaust. This ancient literary tradition has no place for schmaltz--that wonderful Yiddish term for melted chicken fat, in other words, sentimentality without bounds. As a cultural artifact, Rosenbaum’s “The Golems of Gotham” is of interest only because it illustrates that sentimentality so well.