Baer's Golem Redux

An interesting and informative book of relevance to our endeavors:

The Golem Redux: From Prague to Post-Holocaust Fiction
Elizabeth R. Baer
Published by: Wayne State University Press
http://www.wsupress.wayne.edu/books/detail/golem-redux

Subjects: Cultural Studies, Folklore, Jewish Studies, Literary Criticism and Theory, Popular Culture

PAPERBACK
Published: April 2012
ISBN: 9780814336267
Pages: 240
Size: 6x9
Illustrations: 12
$27.95

EBOOK
Published: April 2012
ISBN: 9780814336274


First mentioned in the Book of Psalms in the Hebrew Bible, the golem is a character in an astonishing number of post-Holocaust Jewish-American novels and has served as inspiration for such varied figures as Mary Shelley’s monster in her novel Frankenstein, a frightening character in the television series The X-Files, and comic book figures such as Superman and the Hulk. In The Golem Redux: From Prague to Post-Holocaust Fiction, author Elizabeth R. Baer introduces readers to these varied representations of the golem and traces the history of the golem legend across modern pre- and post-Holocaust culture. In five chapters, The Golem Redux examines the different purposes for which the golem has been used in literature and what makes the golem the ultimate text and intertext for modern Jewish writers.
Baer begins by introducing several early manifestations of the golem legend, including texts from the third and fourth centuries and from the medieval period; Prague’s golem legend, which is attributed to the Maharal, Rabbi Judah Loew; the history of the Josefov, the Jewish ghetto in Prague, the site of the golem legend; and versions of the legend by Yudl Rosenberg and Chayim Bloch, which informed and influenced modern intertexts. In the chapters that follow, Baer traces the golem first in pre-Holocaust Austrian and German literature and film and later in post-Holocaust American literature and popular culture, arguing that the golem has been deployed very differently in these two contexts. Where prewar German and Austrian contexts used the golem as a signifier of Jewish otherness to underscore growing anti-Semitic cultural feelings, post-Holocaust American texts use the golem to depict the historical tragedy of the Holocaust and to imagine alternatives to it. In this section, Baer explores traditional retellings by Isaac Bashevis Singer and Elie Wiesel, the considerable legacy of the golem in comics, Michael Chabon’s The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay, and, finally, "Golems to the Rescue" in twentieth- and twenty-first-century works of film and literature, including those by Cynthia Ozick, Thane Rosenbaum, and Daniel Handler.
By placing the Holocaust at the center of her discussion, Baer illustrates how the golem works as a self-conscious intertextual character who affirms the value of imagination and story in Jewish tradition. Students and teachers of Jewish literature and cultural history, film studies, and graphic novels will appreciate Baer’s pioneering and thought-provoking volume.


Elizabeth R. Baer is professor of English and genocide studies at Gustavus Adolphus College in St. Peter, Minnesota. She is co-editor with Hester Baer of The Blessed Abyss: Inmate #6582 in Ravensbrück Concentration Camp for Women (Wayne State University Press, 2000) and co-editor with Myrna Goldenberg of Experience and Expression: Women, the Nazis, and the Holocaust (Wayne State University Press, 2003). She is also editor of Shadows on My Heart: The Civil War Diary of Lucy Buck of Virginia, a finalist for the Lincoln Prize in 1997.

Reading The Golem and the Jinni

After a hiatus of many months, I finally finished Helene Wecker's The Golem and the Jinni: A Novel (2013). The book has an interesting premise in that a female golem and a male jinni find each other in New York City in 1899 and become friends. The two main characters are likable and (especially Chava, the golem) easy to relate to, but the story seems to be going nowhere in the middle of the book until the reader learns (in the end) how everything is intricately connected.

Chava, a masterless golem, is not a very typical representation of her class. She seems very human despite her obviously unnatural size, appearance, and physical strength and speed and reminded me very much of the plight of a modern-day Frankenstein's Creature trying to fit into a world that could easy hate and fear her.

CFP Reanimate Earth: Liminality and Communitas in Literature of the America (Panel) (6/15/14)

Of potential interest:

Reanimate Earth: Liminality and Communitas in Literature of the Americas
Location: Georgia, United States
Call for Papers Date: 2014-11-07
Date Submitted: 2014-03-31
Announcement ID: 212657

Seeking out new growth in devastated spaces and optimism in the face of environmental despair, this panel will take on the task of enchanting readers with physical spaces in the U.S., Canada, and Latin America that have already been toxified or left for dead.   The liminal, a conception traditionally most relevant to anthropology and psychoanalysis, has the capacity to reinvigorate the relationship between culture and its more anomalous literary environments.

The possibilities for this concept are substantial, particularly when we perceive the liminal self as place, because as limen the hybridized monsters and liminal zones depicted in post-WW II literature are catalysts for environmental reanimation and a source for hope. What we propose is the observance, sorting and wise use of unclassified spaces where more than reforestation and revegetation will be needed to bring back ecological viability and biodiversity; sites of interest might include areas either flooded or desertified due to global warming, zones at the edge of leaking nuclear reactors, interstate medians, tornado-ravaged areas, aesthetic greens surrounding campuses, and graveyards.

 Possible topics may include, but are not limited to, the following:

• hybrid spaces and bodies

• interstitial regions and borderlands

• transnational approaches to place

• liminality as a result of globalization

• golems, zombies, and shape-shifters

• liminal communities

• post-post-apocalyptic literature and film

• ecological dead zones

• genetically modified organisms

Send 200-500 word abstracts to Lee Rozelle at rozellehl@montevallo.edu by June 15.

Lee Rozelle
University of Montevallo
Department of English
Station 6420
Montevallo, AL 35115
(205) 665-6424 (office)