Maps and Legends

by Michael Chabon

  To this day, I’m not sure what became of Mr. Adler. When I asked my mother recently, she said she thought he had eventually died in a convalescent home. She also remembered having heard sometime afterward that Mr. Adler’s original accuser had later recanted, saying she was mistaken in her identification. “I think the woman was actually mentally ill,” my mother said. My father, on the other hand, claims that while Mr. Adler may well have been Victor Fischer, he was certainly not C. B. Colby—that C. B. Colby was a well-known journalist and author whose works, many of them on military subjects, were only some of the books that Mr. Adler falsely claimed to have written. All those pseudonyms, according to my father, were actually the real names of writers whom Mr. Adler had chosen to claim to be. As for the golem that I saw them carrying out of his house that day, the three strapping men staggering under its weight as if it were a granite boulder, a chunk of iron fallen from outer space? Well, even if it did exactly resemble the little manikin I’d caught a glimpse of that day as I was leaving his house, then surely the first was a model of the second, a small preliminary work undertaken by the late Mrs. Adler before she began work on the large finished piece.

  Now we come, finally, to the Golem of Prague itself. This is the part where things get weird, and I confess to being a little hesitant, having come this far, to press on. The first two golems I’ve told you about I encountered as a child, and you can blame the things I saw or thought I saw on my youth, and pardon them on the same account, and go along your way secure in the knowledge that stories of golems are myth, folklore, and the hokum of romancers like me. Up to this point, I am not a lunatic or even, necessarily, a liar—except of course to the degree that, professionally, I am both. From here on, however …

  It will be recalled that on the day of my uncle Jack’s funeral, my father consoled me with one of his standard accounts of our fabulous ancestry, in this case our connection to the great rabbi known as the Maharal, Rabbi Judah ben Loew of Prague. Later, my father would extend this branch laterally, to entangle the popular composer Frederick Loewe, and Marcus Loew, the man who cofounded MGM. For the twenty years that followed, I never had any more evidence to believe or disbelieve his claim of there being some kind of personal connection between me and Rabbi Judah than I did for any of the other claims he made. I grew up, and kept writing. In time, to our mutual regret, I found myself estranged from my father and from the unbelievable things I had once believed about him.

  In the meantime, I had begun to publish stories of my own, stories, in some cases, about fathers who disappointed their sons. The fathers in these stories were golem-fathers. I wove alphabetical spells around them, and breathed life into them, and they got up and walked out into the world and caused trouble and embarrassment for the small man of flesh and blood in whose image they had been cast. Or maybe it was I who was the golem, my father’s golem, animated by the enchantment of his narratives and lies, then rising up until I posed a danger to him and all the unlikely things that he, strangely enough, believed in.

  Along the way I met a woman, and we decided to get married. She was not a Jew. To us—to the woman in question and me, I mean—this fact did not pose a problem. Of all the relatives of mine then living to whom it might have posed a problem, only the opinion of my grandfather mattered to me. But if he had any reservations about the match on religious grounds, he kept them to himself. Resistance, or at any rate a hint of misgiving, arose from an unexpected quarter: my father, perhaps the least observant self-identified Jew I’ve ever known, and believe me, that’s saying a lot.

  He waited to voice his doubts, as has always been his wont in such matters, until the last possible moment, when it was for all practical purposes too late to do anything about them. On the night before the wedding, at the rehearsal dinner, which was held at a French restaurant on Lake Union (I was marrying a Seattleite), he took me aside. His approach was oblique. “You know, you’re a kohen,” he said, meaning a member, by tradition, of the hereditary caste of Jewish high priests, a distinction that supposedly dates back to our forty years spent refusing to stop for directions in the Sinai desert. By now, you can’t be too surprised to find my father including us among them. “Right,” I said. “Rabbi Judah.” “Oh, it goes back much farther than that,” he said, and I thought, We’re related to Moses himself. But instead of making the expected flight into the genealogical empyrean, my father’s face softened, and his eyes grew wistful, and he looked unaccountably sad. “All those generations of Jews marrying Jews,” he said. “Thousands and thousands of years of people like your mother and me.” “Yeah, well, you and Mom divorced,” I said. Oh, I was feeling very cocky. Then it was time for the toasts, and my father turned away from me. Three years from that day the Seattle girl and I would be divorced too.

  After we had been married for about a month, and were living in Laguna Beach, a package arrived. In The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay I would employ the powers bestowed on me by Napoleon or my father and transform it into a crate, a massive wooden crate big enough to hold the huge clay man that I had seen them carrying out of Mr. Adler’s house that afternoon. In reality it was just a small parcel, about the size of a paperback book—about the size, come to think of it, of Strangely Enough! It was wrapped in brown paper, with a pasted-on label that seemed to have been typed on an old manual typewriter. There was no return address. When I opened it I found, wrapped in a wad of cotton battings—can you guess?

  It was a small, rough tablet of clay, half as big as a credit card and three times as thick. The clay was dark and worn smooth at the corners. On one side you could make out the traces of some characters—Hebrew letters, I supposed—that had been cut into the surface with a stylus or pin.

  At this point, after everything I’ve told you so far, I expect that you realize at once what the thing was, or what it purported to be. But at the time, years removed from Uncle Jack and Mr. Adler, from golems and my heritage real and imagined, I had no idea what it was supposed to be, only that holding it gave me a strange sense of uneasiness. My then wife and I were graduate students, and some of our friends were artists, and I figured that somebody was having a joke at my expense. My then wife walked in on me as I was staring at it, and before I could think about what I was doing, I threw the tablet into the trash, along with the junk mail and circulars from Thrifty Drug. For some reason I didn’t want her to see it.

  About two years later, we had moved, trying to outrun the doom that was on us. We were living up in Puget Sound, on an island. It was a beautiful place, but I think I may have been, at the time, the only Jew living there; that, at any rate, was how I felt. One day when I drove into town to check our mailbox at the P.O., I found another small parcel awaiting me. It contained another small tablet. Actually, though I knew it was impossible, it seemed to be the same tablet, only this time the letters were so effaced as to be no more than scratches, nicks in the thing’s dusty surface. I had given no thought to that other mysterious gift since throwing it away in Laguna Beach, but I had been giving increasing thought—furtively, secretly, lying awake in the middle of the night with my goyish wife sleeping beside me—to my father’s words at the rehearsal dinner. The subject of children was beginning to come up, more and more insistently as my wife got older, and somehow, magically, every time it did we ended up having a painful, sticky, difficult argument—about religion! A subject I had never argued about with anybody in my life before! How can you tell me it’s important for our children to be Jewish, she would say with perfect justification, when it doesn’t seem to be at all important to you?

  This time I recognized the tablet for what it was: a magic tablet for animating a golem, to be placed under its tongue by the hand of an adept. A reminder of Mr. Adler and his wishful lies, of the place where he claimed to have suffered. A reminder of all those who truly had died there, or at the next evil stop down the line. A reminder of all those generations of Jews, circling one another under the marriage canopy, intoning their spells, in order to br
ing into existence a golem, me, the embodiment of an ancient and simple wish: let there be more of us. Let us not disappear. I wondered who could have sent it—if perhaps old Mr. Adler was out there somewhere, busily forging magic tablets and keeping track of my whereabouts. Or perhaps the culprit was my father. In any case, this time—my heart, my conscience, my thoughts weighed down by the golem-heavy burden of memory—I put the thing in my pocket. I carried it there as the marriage dissolved. I was carrying it when I met my present wife, Ayelet, herself the product of generations of Jews marrying Jews and no doubt, though my father has never said anything about it, a third cousin three times removed.

  Brother, you’re thinking. All this nattering on about golems and wishes and lies, and in the end the point comes down to one of your own kind, stick to your own kind. But that isn’t the point. I don’t know what the point is. All I know is that one sunny afternoon, not long after we met, I found myself in Jerusalem with Ayelet, at Yad Vashem, the Israeli national museum of the Shoah, or Holocaust, and my heart was broken. I came out into the sunshine and burst into tears and just stood there, crying, and the weight of the thing I carried, that tablet compounded of wishes and lies, that five-thousand-year burden of mothers and fathers and the wondrous, bitter story of their lives, almost knocked me down.

  Our next stop before coming home was, of all places, Prague. Duly we made our way down to the ghetto, or what’s left of it, and trooped around the old Jewish cemetery, with its snaggled headstones lying like teeth in a jawbone. That’s where they buried old Rabbi Judah, and his grave is now a kind of pilgrimage site, strewn with memorial stones and penciled notes and withered flowers.

  I knelt down beside the grave there, and in a patch of dirt I formed the hasty outline of a man. Where his mouth would be I opened a hole, and worked the clay tablet down into it. Then I took Ayelet’s hand in mine and walked away.

  I haven’t received another one since, though I’m still looking out for it in the mail. I’m still listening to my father, too, and wishing as he wished—as we all wish, Jews and non-Jews alike—to be part of something ancient and honorable and greater than myself. And, naturally, I’m still telling lies.

  POSTSCRIPT, AUGUST 2007

  The preceding is the text of a talk that I delivered publicly several times over the course of 2003–04. Its subject is the interrelationship between truth and lies, memory and invention, history and story, memoir and fiction, the sources of narrative and the storytelling impulse; the inevitable fate of liars to be swallowed up or crushed by their lies; and the risks inherent both in discounting the power of outright fiction to reveal the truths of a life, and in taking at face value the fictions that writers of memoir present as fact. The matter struck me (some three years before the exposures of J. T. Leroy and James Frey) as valid and important but hardly novel or surprising, and rather than deal with it in a straightforward expository manner, for my talk I elected to put on a kind of demonstration. Instead of just making commonplace assertions like “writers of fiction are professional liars” or “there is a kinship between lies and stories,” I wanted to try to show an audience just how tangled the interrelationship can be. I was hoping, mostly, that it might be more fun that way, for audiences and for me.

  So I crafted a narrative in the form of a memoir, one constructed partly from the materials of my actual biography—my having lived in Flushing in 1968, grown up in Columbia, Maryland with a father given to the cultivation of what Freud called “family romance,” loved a book called Strangely Enough! by C. B. Colby, married a woman (my first wife) who was not Jewish—and partly from pure invention. This is, of course, a technique common both to liars and writers of fiction: to give credibility to invented details by blending them with factual ones.

  This talk was written to be performed, and in writing and performing it I was always conscious of my audience. It has often been observed that the writing of fiction is akin to the work of a stage magician, a feat of sustained deception in which by imagery and language the trickster leads the audience to believe in the existence or possibility of a series of nonexistent or impossible things. In fiction and in stage magic, one result of this deception, if it works, is the experience of pleasure in the audience at the verisimilitude of the effect. In both cases the pleasure is possible—indeed, it depends entirely—on the audience’s knowing perfectly well that it is being fooled, on its avid willingness to be fooled, to participate in creating the illusion of reality. This, of course, is the essential difference between fiction and lies. There is a contract between the writer of fiction and the readers he or she lies to, as there is between a magician and the audience he hoodwinks; they are in it together. They are helping each other to bring a story to apparent life or an edible orange to grow from the branch of a clockwork tree.

  It was never, in giving this talk, my hope to make people actually believe that I had, for example, once known a Holocaust survivor who passed himself off as a writer, but who then turned out to be a different writer who was passing himself off as a Holocaust survivor who had himself been a writer, with all of the progress of this ever-widening gyre of lies marked and measured by the growth of a clay homunculus to prodigious size. The possibility that somebody would believe or even half believe the semipreposterous tale never occurred to me; but making somebody believe it wasn’t even remotely the point. The point was to try to tangle and disentangle and tangle again the lines of truth and fiction before the audience’s very eyes, so to speak, and let them feel (or so I hoped) the excitement that comes from handling the raw materials of golem-craft, of bringing inanimate facts of clay, through imagination and invention, to a fabulous kind of life.

  Magicians have different ways of acknowledging, while performing their tricks, that they are tricks. That’s part of the fun. They tell the audience that they are going to be fooled, and they challenge the audience to spot the mechanism, to see through the deception. Or they guarantee that all the marvels the audience is about to see are verifiable feats of magic, and insist, deadpan, that the lady has in fact been sawed in two. Or they pile it on, using grandiose language, hyperbolic and preposterous claims about the provenance and genuineness of the tricks in their repertoire. All of these are ways of engaging the audience to maintain and participate in the deception.

  Beginning with its dubious title, and throughout the talk, I engaged in the fiction writer’s versions of these magical strategies. I repeatedly—to the point of absurdity—insisted on the truth of everything that I was saying, no matter how ridiculous, impossible, unlikely, or strange. Indeed it was usually at the most unbelievable moments in the story that I made such assertions. I also employed the common magician’s device of asking the audience to assent to a premise that I had not bothered to demonstrate or prove, telling them, for instance, that some of them might remember the case of my fictitious liar, Joseph Adler, from reading about it in the newspaper. Once I even took from my pocket a small chunk of brown brick I had found in the parking lot outside the lecture hall, brandished it, and claimed that it was the lost toe of the Golem of Flushing; but afterward I lost it and never repeated this particular flourish.

  Furthermore I employed a number of nonverbal cues in the course of the performance to signal my intentions to the audience. As a friend who attended my talk in Seattle wrote to me, “Pursuing all this on the page really leaves out a huge part of the performance—your timing, your facial expressions, your body language. It’s funny, but those are the elements I remember most.”

  My sense, in giving the talk all over the country to diverse audiences of literate, intelligent, engaged people, was that the talk was taken exactly in the spirit in which I intended it. They understood that it was not a “real” memoir but an avowedly fictional one, right up to the very last word, and I think that almost everyone understood the literary arguments in the service of which the fictional memoir had been offered. I make this assertion on the basis of the audience reaction as I perceived it during the course of the talks,
and on the comments that people made to me afterward. A typical remark was something like “That part about writing the story about Sherlock Holmes and Captain Nemo was true, though, right?” or “I know the part about you living on Vashon Island is true!” When people said things like this, I would laugh and say something like “Are you saying you didn’t believe the rest of it? I’m outraged!” or “What do you mean that part was true?” I was teasing them, in a very obvious way. There was so much about the talk and my style of delivering it that was obvious, sometimes I worried I was hamming it up too much.

  Nonetheless, there were people who did not seem to catch on entirely. There is no denying that. I believe that there were not very many such people. But there were a few who came up to me after the talk was over, and asked me about Joseph Adler, or the location of the candy store that I had said my uncle had owned in Harlem, or even about my claims of having seen golems. I will confess that, at first, I felt a mild sense of exhilaration when this occurred. If you made a man out of clay, and it really did get up and walk around, you would probably feel the same way—at first. But shortly thereafter you would begin to feel uneasy, and that is what I came to feel when somebody—and of course it really didn’t happen very often—asked me about Joseph Adler.

  I’d had a similar experience with The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay. To my surprise, I discovered that there were readers who came away from the novel believing that Sam Clay and Joe Kavalier had really existed, that they had really created a character known as the Escapist back in the ’40s, and that somewhere out there you would be able to find and purchase old Escapist comic books and perhaps even original artwork drawn by Joe Kavalier. These people wrote me letters and emails asking me how they could obtain such things. I confess that I tended to view people like this as having a certain amount of the sucker in them. I was not looking for suckers. God knows I was not trying to sucker anybody. But the suckers are out there, and they will get suckered whether you want them to or not.