Ghost Story
Leviant, Curt
Ghost Story The Golems of Gotham Thane Rosenbaum New York: HarperCollins, 2002. 384 pp., hardcover S25.95 REVIEWED BY CURT LEVIANT The Golems of Gotham is a big, risk-taking work of Jewish...
...384 pp., hardcover S25.95 REVIEWED BY CURT LEVIANT The Golems of Gotham is a big, risk-taking work of Jewish imagination by Thane Rosenbaum, author of Second Hand Smoke and Elijah Visible...
...People stop smoking...
...Now strange things happen in Gotham...
...In succeeding, she also unwittingly brings back a number of Holocaust writers who committed suicide— including Primo Levi and Jerzy Kosinski...
...At the same time, they also discuss what their literature has created and how inadequate were their words...
...In Golems, the author attempts to come to grips with the Holocaust— its mesmerizing and debilitating physical and metaphysical aftershocks— while concomitandy telling a magical story set in contemporary Manhattan...
...The golems, post-Holocaust Peter Pans, bring a kind of Miracle on 34th Street paradisaic ambience to New York (until they go berserk toward the end of the novel...
...The story begins with a bang, literally, as Oliver's father and mother, survivors of the Holocaust, kill themselves with pistol and cyanide, respectively, in a Miami synagogue during Sabbath services...
...We see Ariel playing hauntingly lovely klezmer music on a violin, although she has never taken lessons, and her father, Oliver (a best-selling mystery writer), struggling with writer's block and the awful burden of the Holocaust...
...Auschwitz survivors lose their tattoos...
...Oliver Levin is one of the two narrators of the story—the other is his 13-year-old daughter, Ariel...
...Yankees and zebras lose their (pin)stripes...
...From this, a string of events, invariably magical and incredible, unfold...
...To help her father (still hurting from the loss of his parents and from the disappearance some years back of his wife, Samantha) Ariel attempts to resuscitate her dead grandparents via mud, kabbalah, and basic Golem-Making 101...
...And just as reconciliation is the theme of The Tempest, so is reconciliation between Oliver and his dead parents (who also became airy spirits...
...Curt Leviant is the author, most recently, of Diary of an Adulterous Woman...
...Rosenbaum enchantingly harnesses some of this dream magic to create a haunting and disturbing ghost drama, exploring themes that thoughtful people continually confront...
...In The Golems of Gotham, the dead spirits do what Jews wished they could have done during the German terror—fly, become invisible, stop evil...
...It is no accident that the girl is so named, for this is surely Rosenbaum's nod to the Shakespeare comedy, The Tempest, where Ariel is an airy spirit...
Vol. 27 • February 2002 • No. 1