That was the second important thing that happened to me when I wrote that story. It was as if I had opened a door and stepped into the room in which all my favorite writers were sitting around waiting for me to show up. They were a disparate bunch, from Judy Blume to Edgar Allan Poe, spread over different eras, continents, and genres. Some were close kin to each other—Lord Dunsany, H.P. Lovecraft—while others seemed to have nothing in common beyond their connection to me. And somehow, I sensed, their intersection defined me. They were, in other words, my family. I derived from them, they explained me. And more than anything else I wanted—I knew it now—to be accounted one of them. This was the wish—to be a credit to that far-flung family of literary heroes—that I have sought to embody, to express in the infinitely malleable clay of language, ever since.
It was around this time, as I was making up my mind to be a writer, that I encountered my second golem. By this time we were living in the then-new town of Columbia, a planned community in the Maryland suburbs, between Baltimore and Washington, D.C. In the waning years of my parents’ marriage—it ended, draw your own conclusions, the year that I began to formulate my wish—one of the only reliable sources of pleasure for my father and me was the weekly trip we took, alone, to the Howard County Public Library’s main branch, then located on Frederick Road, outside of the city limits of Columbia itself. One evening as I was rather sullenly spinning the wire rack of paperbacks intended for a group of readers who were then just becoming known, in the librarian trade, as YAs, I came across a book called Strangely Enough!, written by one C.B. Colby and published by Scholastic Book Services. It was one of those mysterious books that you have loved as a child but which as you go out into the world no one else ever seems to have read or even heard of, although the library’s copy was tattered and well worn and had been checked out, to judge from the number of fading purplish dates stamped onto its tan pocket, by dozens of YAs before me. It was made up of a series of about a hundred short pieces, little essays, each about five hundred words long and devoted to exposing or musing over all kinds of inexplicable and supposedly factual incidents and phenomena: poltergeists, haunted paintings, UFO sightings, rains of frogs and stones, witch scares, phantom hitchhikers, encounters with the devil in which he left his cloven footprint clearly visible in a neighborhood rock. I read a few of the entries— enough to persuade me that it was going to turn out to be one of the best books I had ever read—and then carried it with a few other titles to wait for my father at the circulation desk.
“Strangely Enough!” the librarian intoned, putting a little Twilight Zone wobble into her voice. I nodded. “You know he lives here. C.B. Colby.”
It turned out that C.B. Colby lived not merely in Columbia but right down the street from my family, in the small cubistic house stained dark blue, with the goldfish pond, that you had to pass whenever you went to our street’s communal mailbox. His real name was Joseph Adler, and in time I discovered that in addition to Strangely Enough! he was the author of some 250 other works, fiction and nonfiction, for children and YAs, under a bewildering variety of pseudonyms. All I had known of him before now was that he was a baby chick of a man, with a soft, wavering plume of white hair and a gentle if somewhat stiff manner toward children. A reticent, courtly ghost of him, the first real writer I ever knew, can be glimpsed in the figment of a writer called August Van Zorn, in my novel Wonder Boys. Mrs. Adler had died not long after we moved into the neighborhood, and my mother had made him a roast and carried it down to him. The widower, she told me when she returned from this charitable visit, was a “survivor.” I hadn’t heard the term before, though I had an aunt by marriage who had been interned at Auschwitz as a child, and I knew enough, the next time I saw Mr. Adler, to look for and discover the greenish-black numbers on the inside of his forearm.
I was not a bold child. It took me most of the four-week circulation period to get up the nerve to go to his front door, clutching the library’s copy of his book, which by now I had read at least half-a-dozen times, terrifying myself, ruining my sleep, making the flat, sunny, avocado-and-goldenrod-colored 1973 world of Columbia, Maryland into a strange and marvelous world that contained treasures and ghosts and mysterious bright objects in the sky. Before approaching his house directly, however, I had spent several days furtively lurking nearby, concealing myself behind a bush or the neighbor’s parked car, studying the bare windows behind which nothing ever seemed to move. I saw a piano. I saw a work of iron sculpture that looked something like a mace and something like a gate and something like a twist of barbed wire. I saw thousand and thousands of books. And once I caught a glimpse of Mr. Adler, drinking orange juice straight from the carton.
“Ah,” he said, when he opened the door to me. “My little shadow.”
It would be nice to tell you a story now about how Mr. Adler, the taciturn, intellectual, widowed author of two hundred popular pseudonymous novels, and Michael Chabon, the awkward, unhappy, budding boy-writer skulking around the margins of his neighborhood, his future, and his parents’ divorce, forged an unlikely friendship while teaching each other valuable lessons about literature and life. But it didn’t work out that way; I guess that’s why stories are so much better than life, or rather why stories make life so much better. Mr. Adler invited me in, dismissed Strangely Enough! with a contemptuous wave of his hand, poured me a glass of orange juice that I felt a little bit nervous about drinking, and told me that my eyeglasses were much too big for my face. The house was filled with all kinds of spiky and unnerving sculptures, some all welded steel, like the one I’d seen from the window, others done in wood, plaster, and glass. They were the work, he explained to me, of his wife. Just before I departed his house for the first and last time, he took me into his office and pointed to the neatly stacked pages of a manuscript sitting beside his great steely battleship of an IBM Selectric. “That is the first book I will ever put my own name upon,” he said. There was a faint trace of an accent; it made me think of my aunt Renée, who had been in the camps too. “What kind of book is it?” I asked him. He looked annoyed. “It’s a memoir, of course,” he said. “The story of my life.”
It was as he was walking me, almost herding me, really, toward the door, that I noticed, lying on the glass shelf of a chrome-plated étagère, what I took to be another example of his late wife’s work. It was a clay doll, about the size of the old G.I. Joes they used to have—big enough to whip Ken’s vinyl ass. This clay figure was lumpy and crooked and almost looked as if it had been made by a kid, and I remember considering whether I ought and then deciding not to ask Mr. Adler if he had any children. You could tell, somehow, that he did not. It was a just a glimpse that I got, that day, of the little clay man. Then I was out the door.
I imagine there may be some of you who remember the name “Joseph Adler.” You may have read his memoir, The Book of Hell, which I still see from time to time in used bookstores, its black jacket tattered or missing. My father-in-law owns a copy, though he has an extensive library of books on Jewish subjects and owns copies of a lot of books that nobody reads anymore.
I have a copy of my own, one which my father bought right after it came out. It’s a well-written, fairly brutal account of the two years the author, a Prague-born Jewish journalist, spent in Theresienstadt. All the usual horrors are present, and although there is an interesting chapter on the secret camp newspaper, Vadem, in the end there is nothing really to distinguish the book from any of the many literary memoirs that have been written about those times. The only passage of interest to us here is a brief paragraph that concerns, very much in passing, the Golem of Prague:
One morning I found myself in possession of five potatoes that were free of rot and not overly endowed with eyes. A man approached me offering to trade for them. In return for my potatoes he said that he would give me the magic tablet, inscribed with secret writing, that had once lain under the tongue of the famous Golem of Prague and was responsible for bringing to life that legendary Jewish automa
ton. He said that it was a lucky charm and would protect me from evil. We settled on two of my potatoes and went our separate ways. Shortly thereafter, I heard the man had been killed. As for the tablet, incised with Hebrew characters which I was days in trying to make out, it was lost in the disorder that followed my liberation.
Interestingly, one also encounters the Golem of Prague in the pages of Strangely Enough!, in a piece entitled “The Phantom of the Synagogue.” In it “C.B. Colby” recounts the basic legend of Rabbi Judah’s golem—the blood libels, the shaping of the clay of the Moldau River, the need to put an end to the Golem’s career, and the persistent rumor that the lifeless form of the Golem still slumbers in the attic of the Alt-Neu Synagogue in Prague’s ancient ghetto. Nothing is said, however, about the placing of any magic tablet inscribed with Hebrew letters under the Golem’s tongue.
Those of you who lived in and around Washington, D.C. during that time may dimly recall the scandal that followed the book’s publication, and a few particulars of the strange case of the writer the Washington Post called “The Liar Who Got Lost in His Lie.” About six months after the book came out, you may remember, a woman came forward to denounce Joseph Adler, or C.B. Colby. This woman had stumbled upon The Book of Hell in her local library and, seeing the author photo, had recognized in the delicate, birdlike features of old Mr. Adler the unmistakable lineaments of a Czech Nazi journalist named Victor Fischer, an admirer and eventual successor of the notorious propagandist Julius Streicher and one of those chiefly responsible for spreading the lie about the ideal conditions to be found in Theresienstadt, where Fischer’s accuser had herself been interned.
The Wiesenthal Center took an interest; the Washington Post investigated. Mr. Adler denied the woman’s claims, hired a lawyer, and promised to fight the charges. Soon afterward, however, he collapsed, and had to be hospitalized. He had suffered a stroke. From his hospital bed, he composed a remarkable statement to the Post. I remember reading it to myself one morning over my bowl of Quisp cereal. In his statement, Mr. Adler acknowledged being Victor Fischer and described the destitution and despair into which he had fallen after the war, roaming penniless and starving through the Czech countryside. He described being set upon by a roving gang of Jews bent on murderous revenge, and told how his life had been spared through the kind intercession of a Jewish girl, herself a survivor, whom he eventually married—the late Mrs. Adler. In 1946 he and his new bride had emigrated to the United States, Fischer carrying the passport of a dead Jew, Joseph Adler, whose identity, on his arrival in New York, he eagerly and persuasively assumed. He resumed his journalistic career, writing for a number of newspapers and magazines, and in time came, or so he claimed, to be Joseph Adler. The whole lifelong charade had been pulled off with the knowing connivance of his wife, whose numerical tattoo had served as the model for the one which she herself pricked into his arm with a sewing needle.
Looking back I find that my recollections of the Book of Hell business are mingled with and effaced by concurrent memories of the Watergate scandal and with overarching outrage at my parents’ divorce. I remember seeing Mr. Adler’s statement in the paper, as I’ve said. I can remember my mother’s shock and sense of betrayal by the man she had fed from her own kitchen. But the thing I remember the clearest is the day they came to take Mr. Adler’s things away.
Once he entered the hospital, Mr. Adler never returned to the modest blue house on our street. One by one the goldfish in the pond fell prey to the neighborhood cats; then a kind of green pudding appeared on the surface of the water. After a few more months there was nothing in the fishpond but a slick black mat of rotten leaves. And then one day a large Mayflower van pulled up. I happened to be passing by on my bicycle and stopped to watch the burly men carrying out the furniture, the giant twist of barbed wire, the endless boxes of books. There were a lot of crazy sculptures, and the moving men cracked jokes about them and how ugly they were and the things that some people called art. Their harshest humor they reserved, however, for an immense clay statue of a man, taller than any of them and weighing so much that it took three movers to carry it out of the house. It was a crude figure, lumpy and misshapen, with blocky feet and stubby fingers and a wide, impassive face. I recognized it at once: it was the tiny doll that I had glimpsed lying on a glass-and-metal étagère. It had grown, just as golems grew in the legends; as the Golem grew in Strangely Enough!, shaped by my great ancestor Rabbi Judah; as a lie grows, ugly and massive as Mr. Adler’s lifelong deception, and as heavy as the burden of the guilt and horror that must have driven him so to inhabit and claim as his own the story of a dead Prague Jew.
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 the
m 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 batting—can you guess?
People of the Book: A Decade of Jewish Science Fiction & Fantasy Page 40