Snow in August by Pete Hamill
Callery, Sean
BOY, RABBI, GOLEM Snow in August Pete Hamilt Little, Brown and Company, $23.95, 325 pp. Sean Callery For now, Michael stood quietly in the hot Brooklyn night while clouds tried to become angels...
...Rabbi Hirsch asks Michael to flick on a switch that will illuminate his home...
...Hamilland" is the working-class neighborhood in Brooklyn where the author spent his childhood and young adulthood...
...Hamill's attitude toward the clergy in this work is far more friendly than it has been in the past...
...For decades, literary critics have referred to Graham Greene's milieu as "Greeneland...
...Michael learns something of Jewish history, religion, and mythology, and the rabbi begins to understand both good English and slang...
...The book is a good read, and such a technicality will not matter to many readers...
...The Falcons smear swastikas on the wall of the synagogue...
...I grew up just slightly north and a bit east of "Hamilland...
...The goings on in "Hamilland" are familiar to readers of Hamill, Jimmy Breslin, and a few others...
...Hamill's mixture of reality and fantasy will not yield easily to conventional appraisal...
...For instance, Brooklyn's Methodist Hospital is referred to as Wesleyan in the text...
...In fact, Snow in August is almost immune from criticism...
...A strength of this tale is the author's unabashed romanticism...
...Sean Callery For now, Michael stood quietly in the hot Brooklyn night while clouds tried to become angels and birds talked and stones became roses and white horses galloped over rooftops, and the rabbi, at last, danced with his wife...
...The Falcons, who are suspected by the police of being the perpetrators, erroneously conclude that Michael has singled them out as the culprits...
...Natives are sharply divided between good guys and bad guys...
...A Shabbos goy I need in here," says Rabbi Hirsch...
...The bad guys are the Falcons, a rowdy and lethal gang...
...The golem and Michael terrify and humiliate the gang...
...The golem then accompanies Michael to the pool hall, which is the Falcon's headquarters...
...He does not go to the trouble to disguise sites convincingly...
...In this novel, its inhabitants include, chiefly, a hardworking widow raising her preadoles-cent son, Michael Devlin...
...In the code of honor among such people, cooperating with the police is a mortal sin that must be punished...
...The supernatural creature blows three long alarming notes on the shofar and...well, you can guess what happens...
...Michael enters the dark synagogue by himself and quickly finds the hidden materials necessary for bringing the golem to life...
...To write disparagingly of Snow in August would be akin to telling a child there is no Santa Claus...
...Now Michael is a target in his own neighborhood, as is his mother, who endures a near-rape from some of the Falcons...
...How to judge where romance and fantasy end and reality begins is not always apparent...
...The neighborhood is familiar to this reviewer...
...Shortly after this, as Michael is passing a synagogue, he encounters a rabbi...
...Some good guys are importuned by the priest to accompany him and Michael to the synagogue and wash and scrape away the vicious graffiti...
...Is this a symptom of advancing age and the terror we sometimes feel when many things remind us of our own mortality...
...So ends Snow in August, Pete Hamill's new novel...
...But this might be of little account in the end...
...The bad guys are utterly defeated...
...This, along with complicated chanting and detailed ritual, will create a golem...
...Soon Rabbi Hirsch is beaten savagely, and so is Michael...
...The rabbi has told Michael of the powers of a golem, the creature from Jewish lore who is forceful and intelligent enough to attack successfully persons who threaten a Jew who invokes the mysterious power...
...The Falcons beat an innocent Jewish merchant almost to death...
...This is the beginning of enlightenment for both the rabbi and Michael...
...Soon the violent world intrudes...
...Michael is first to see the outrage and tells Father Heaney, for whom he is about to serve as an altar boy...
...Greeneland" is a metaphysical concept easily transportable to anywhere on the map, but "Hamilland" is a fixed location and the author all but identifies armories, churches, hospitals, and other public institutions...
...As the severely injured rabbi lies in the hospital, Michael enters his room and beseeches him to reveal the secret name for God...
...An assortment of decent folk includes a socially responsible priest...
...Pete Hamill's body of work, both as a journalist and as a novelist, deserves a similar designation...
Vol. 124 • August 1997 • No. 14
