Monstrous Borders Hopes — Even to Rebellion,” and He Suppresses Her Joy with a Blow
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This action-packed panel from a 1977 Invaders comic book entitled “The Golem Walks Again!” (Roy Thomas, writer, Frank Robbins and Frank Springer, illustrators) features a colossus emerging from the rubble of a lightning-struck house in the Warsaw ghetto. “It has no name,” the last narration box states, but the following panel immediately provides it with a name: “It is a golem, come to protect us!” cries a Jewish girl. “I have heard that foolish legend you Jews have,” proclaims the Nazi guard standing next to her. “Such old wives’ tales can lead to false Monstrous Borders hopes — even to rebellion,” and he suppresses her joy with a blow. The “foolish legend” of the Maya Barzilai Jews can have a psychological impact, the Nazi recognizes, for it invites Jews to imagine them- selves as potentially powerful. Fast-forwarding three decades to Quentin Tarantino’s film Inglourious Basterds (2009), the golem legend is again evoked in the context of Jewish revenge. This time the “Bear Jew” character acted by Eli Roth—calling card: beating Nazis to death with a baseball bat—is rumored to be the golem of lore. The rumor even reaches the character of Hitler in the film who scoffs at the “fear-induced delirium” of his soldiers, who believe that the Nazi-killer is “an avenging Jew angel, conjured up by a vengeful rabbi to smite the Aryans.” In both these pop culture examples the golem legend provides the mythic basis for a fantasy of overturning power relations between Jews and Aryans. The golem itself is not created in the stereotypical image of the Jew, however, since it is a new entity that defies definitions. In the words of the comics’ narrator (see above): “It is hard to say what the grim, stone-grey apparition is….It is not Jacob Goldstein — for he is not ten feet tall, with the proportions of some fearsome gargoyle. Nor is it necessarily the cold clay….It seems rather to be some merging of the two.” The creator of this particular golem, the Polish Jacob Goldstein, has merged (in a Superman 44 Publisher: Marvel Comics Group Publisher: Marvel Marvel Comics, The Invaders, “The Golem Walks Again!” (Vol. 1, No. 13, February 1977). fashion) into his creation, endowing the of Jew and Nazi. But once the mission of the “gargoyle” with his own features, particularly “vengeful Titan” has been completed, he reverts with his Jewish payes (side-locks) and yarmulke back into Jacob Goldstein who promises “the (or kippa). But whereas Jacob is a well-propor- golem may walk yet again” when his people tioned, blond, and blue-eyed male, already “revolt against the Nazi conqueror.” embodying a non-Jewish Western male ideal, The danger of the monster, writes the comics’ golem is a hyper-masculine, Jeffrey Jerome Cohen in Monster Theory: Reading grotesque monster that towers over American Culture, is that it “threatens to smash distinc- superheroes and Nazi perpetrators alike. Cre- tions” (not merely walls); its hybridity as a ated through a combination of clay from the “freakish compilation” or “mixed category” ghetto, heavy water stolen from the Nazis, and resists binary systems and demands “a radical a “secret” obtained from “ancient Kabbalistic rethinking of boundary and normality.” This texts,” this hybrid golem is both a newfound lesson also applies to the golem legend itself (nuclear) war weapon and a menacing double and not only to the monster that stands at its 45 center. Indeed, the golem as a giant—one that the attraction of the golem legend for Paul grows in height and strength until it threatens Wegener, the German actor who produced its creator, even crushing him to death in cer- and starred in three golem films spanning the tain versions — is a product of Jewish-Christian years 1914 to 1920. For his first film, simply interaction, first mentioned in a Christian- entitled The Golem, Wegener collaborated authored 17th-century Latin letter that harks with the Jewish scriptwriter and actor Henrik back to Polish Jewish accounts. The word Galleen, and the two created a tale of Jewish “golem” originates in Jewish scriptural sources, integration in which the golem needs to be and medieval Jewish commentaries on the destroyed to allow for the happy union of the ancient mystical treatise, The Book of Creation, Jewish daughter with the local German baron. describe the process of animating and de-ani- Wegener’s famous postwar film, again a col- mating a clay entity. The golem of 20th-century laborative product, endows the golem with a popular culture, however, is the outcome of greater national-Jewish mission, that of saving centuries of Jewish and Christian rewritings of the ghetto Jews from the threat of exile. As a the tale of artificial creation in the process of quasi-Maharal director, Wegener reinvested negotiating Jewish difference. Jewish symbols with historical and religious The golem was first imagined as significance in his 1920 film, using the golem a protector of a Jewish community in late legend to advance German cinema as a newly 19th-century literature. The Polish writer emerging space of visual ethics. Wegener’s Yudl Rosenberg cast the golem as a savior of romantic endeavor had an immense appeal the Jews from blood libels in the early 20th abroad, not only in his native land. The Golem, century (The Wonders of the Maharal, 1909). In How He Came into the World achieved a huge post-Holocaust and post-Cold War comic success among Jewish American audiences in books, like the 1977 Invaders, the golem is an 1921. It was repackaged with a new musical expression of a form of Jewish power that score that recycled one of the biggest hits of ultimately needs to be curbed and cannot alter Jewish American popular music of the period, the course of history. Nonetheless, the comics’ Jacob Sandler’s “Eli, Eli,” a “quintessential Jew- golem was not merely an emblem of Jewish ish lament” according to Irene Heskes. self-protection, but also of Jewish revolt and revenge. Perhaps for this reason, the hybrid “avenging Jew angel” only made a few appear- ances in the Marvel Comics universe, and the golem legend was relegated, in the America of the late 20th century, to the realm of chil- dren’s literature and sci-fi novels. The threat of the golem as an entity that can “smash distinction,” rather than merely as a figure of extreme physical power, can perhaps explain an ongoing need to affix a Jewish, preferably Eastern European, story of origins to the golem legend and overlook its complex evolution. In my book The Golem: How Advertisement, New York Tribune, June 19th 1921. Popular Culture Came into the World, I examine 46 The American distributors enhanced the film’s pathos and turned it into a spectacle of Jewish difference, “a photograph of Jewish hopes and Jewish despair,” in the words of The New York Tribune. They sold Wegener’s golem, moreover, as a figure that both re-presents and disobeys God’s commandment not to make graven images, thereby sanctioning the Jewish reverence for the moving image itself. The American Jewish community embraced the European golem and in December of 1921, actor Max Gabel premiered in a Yiddish musi- cal entitled Der goylem, donning a costume almost identical to that of Wegener’s. Gabel’s tamed golem is “programmed” to protect the weak and needy; it does not run amok or turn against its Jewish creators and community. The romantic musical integrated the European golem legend into American modes of popular entertainment, but the golem itself remains a hybrid figure that stands at the (monstrous) border between Jewish and non-Jewish so- cieties, inviting multiple re-adaptations and reinterpretations. Thus, around the millennial turn, the clay golem has been explicitly reimagined in Michael Chabon’s “Golems I Have Known” and in James Sturm’s graphic narrative The Golem’s Might Swing as African American. From Marvel Comics’ purple and grey golems to Chabon’s “dark brown” “golem of Flushing,” this legendary figure is currently used not only for unconven- tional assertions of Jewish power à la Tarantino, but also for narratives interrogating the com- mon theatricality and uncertainty of Jewish and African American identities. 47.