Should this be a Sunday book? I don't think so. "Jewish" can refer to either a religion or an ethnic identity. In this book it refers to an ethnic identity.
Title: Golemcrafters
Author: Emi Watanabe Cohen
Date: 2024
Publisher: Chronicle
ISBN: 978-1646142699
Length: 264 pages
Quote: "You let them learn Hebrew, become b'nei mitzvot--why not golemcraft?"
Because golemcraft is pure fantasy, that's why. In this fantasy story it works. Yona and Shiloh, whose father is Jewish and whose mother is Japanese American, feel conspicuous even at the Jewish Students Association at their school. Neither is popular. They've been ordered to join clubs. Neither is interested in any of the possibilities. Just as they're looking forward to a quiet "and solitary" spring break, their Jewish grandfather sends them a suitcase full of clay meant to be used to make golems.
According to Jewish folklore, a golem is a robot made from clay animated by the magic of ancestral memories, used to help Jews who were facing religious persecution, only nobody's ever been able to get one to do very much.
According to this novel, which is full of snarky wisecracks but is not really a comedy, the grandfather is able to get golems to do very small things before de-animating them. When he tries teaching the children, Shiloh doesn't get the clay to move. Yona does. Then both children start having dreams, which appear to be "portal fantasies," but turn out to be the memories of the departed ancestors they are putting into the clay. The clay expands; the kitchen becomes crowded with half-seen, half-heard ancestral memories, one of whom insists that they are "Not! Ghosts!" The strongest memories that want to go into Yona's golems are memories of people who were martyred for their religion. It becomes an intensely sad spring break.
The grandfather takes the children to an amusement park with themes inspired by Grimm fairy tales, then points out that although the Grimms' monsters and witches weren't supposed to be human they can be read as having Jewish-like characteristics. Why do witches wear cone-shaped hats? Because cone-shaped hats were a medieval fashion that some people wanted to bring to an end, so they drew pictures where unsympathetic characters wore cone-shaped hats. No witch would have considered a more practical form of headgear while flying on her broom. And in some places in the Grimms' Germany, Jews were required to wear cone-shaped hats. And what about Rumpelstiltskin? Was his long, funny name...Jewish? And so on.
Who knows. Probably those who used fantasy stories to scare children into good behavior did associate their fictional bugaboos with real enemy tribes who might have kidnapped children for ransom. Jews were very far from being the worst offenders on any list of savage European tribes that did it, but they were a different tribe that lived nearby, easy for children to see as funny or scary-looking.
Was your family one of those that "know a funny little man, as quiet as a mouse, who does the mischief that is done in everybody's house"? Did he have a name? Around the turn of the century I remember feeling disgusted to read that, in some parts of the United States, his name was not "Mr. Nobody" or "the Ghost" or "the Possum," but "Yehudi." People didn't know that this is both a personal name and a tribal identity name, "the Jew, the descendant of the tribe of Judah," nor did they know how to spell it, but they knew that that was whom to blame for plates nobody remembered having chipped and mud nobody remembered having tracked in. The heavens hide their face from our intolerable race.
Cohen, through her characters, frets about the possibility of religious persecution reviving through blather about "the globalist Zionist elitists" who orchestrated the COVID panic and marketed the clot-shots. I see more evidence that people are willing to hate Dr. Fauci individually than that they are blaming him for belonging to any larger group. But I can think of a strategy Cohen doesn't let her characters consider trying: Jewish Americans who don't want to be hated could dissociate themselves from "globalist elitist" thinking people have valid reasons to hate. George Soros was Jewish and dreamed of global tyranny. Other Jews could recognize him as a troubled old man who never realized that he'd fallen into a then-popular but misguided way of thinking, and so never climbed out of it. Most US bankers aren't Jewish and most Jewish Americans aren't bankers, but it wouldn't hurt Jewish Americans to recognize that lending money at interest is not the most ethical way of earning a living and the Rothschilds, may God have pity on them, are not the examples anyone wants to follow. Such little things may prevent a wave of hate from forming.
What's not to love about Golemcrafters? Apart from its being probably too heavy for readers the ages of Yona and Shiloh (11 and 13). That's not necessarily a serious fault; many young adult novels are more interesting to adults than they are to the young. Beyond that, though, Cohen paints herself into a corner. She objects to stereotypes of possibly-Jewish "outsiders" as ogres, then upholds the stereotype of Jews as eternal victims that makes everyone else ogres. Obviously Jews have been a victim group, but all Cohen offers in the way of a solution is to perpetuate the same irrational thinking that fosters bigotry and hate.
Snow White, Cohen and her sources forgot to mention, had the pale skin and raven waves that are a rare combination even in central Eurasia, but were seen as the ideal of Indian, or Slavic, or Ashkenazic Jewish beauty. (The physical type may be even more rare in England and Italy but has certainly been idealized there.) When persecuted by an envious stepmother, Snow White ran away and lived with some short people wearing cone-shaped hats. German "dwarfs" were not a stereotype inspired by Jews but an actual genetic mutation found in some German families. Snow White's friends were, however, definitely an "other" group, disadvantaged--miners!--who had a separate, alternative subculture that was prosperous enough to help a refugee from the dominant culture, such as Snow White. Reflection on this might make Cohen's next novel more fun to read.
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