2
The Golem Cult of 1921 New York
Between Redemption and Expulsion
Paul Wegener’s third film, Der Golem, wie er in die Welt kam (The Golem, How He Came into the World), quickly crossed the Atlantic and premiered in New York in the summer of 1921. It played for sixteen weeks at the Criterion Theater near Times Square, a record run for any film that year. Reviewers in the Yiddish- and English-language press concurred that nothing like it had been seen on their side of the Atlantic; they were enamored with both Wegener’s acting in the role of the golem and Hans Poelzig’s settings.1 Hugo Riesenfeld, the Criterion’s musical director, made the film more appealing for American audiences by arranging a new prologue (in the form of a brief theatrical production) and musical score that drew on Jewish music old and new.2 In keeping with the Criterion’s policy of “continuous-performance-no-reserved-seats,” the film’s live prologue and music were performed several times daily to packed houses despite the stifling summer heat.3 This enthusiastic American response was indicative of the new, post–World War I reception of German cinema. At the same time, the prologue—which staged the medieval expulsion of Jews from Nuremberg, Germany, in 1499—ensured that the film would be viewed with an eye (and ear) to the precarious situation of Jewish communities in Europe past and present.4 The prologue also reenacted the Passover ceremony in Nuremberg in order to evoke the longue (and mythic) durée of Jewish bondage and salvation. In such a context, the golem emerged not only as a protector but also as a redeemer, a Messiah-like figure who could stave off the expulsion of persecuted Jews.
This new emphasis in the treatment of the golem materials needs to be understood in the context of recent Jewish history in Europe. Anti-Semitic sentiment increased in Germany after World War I, as army generals and right-wing journalists placed part of the blame for the German defeat and ensuing civil strife on the Jews. The Russian civil wars that commenced after the Bolshevik revolution in November 1917 also prompted a wave of brutal anti-Jewish pogroms, and Jewish populations in Russia and Poland became displaced as a result of wars, revolution, and economic hardship. The majority of Jews who emigrated from Europe during this period headed to the U.S. In the year 1921 alone, 103,700 eastern European Jews arrived on American shores, joining over two million Jews who had relocated there starting in the late nineteenth century.5 By the time Wegener’s film screened in New York, 1.6 million Jews were living in the city.
The inflow of Jewish immigrants was not welcomed with open arms in the U.S. but, instead, led to a reactionary nativist movement; in May 1921, the U.S. Congress passed the Emergency Quota Act, restricting the overall immigration to 3 percent of the total number of foreign-born residents in the U.S. from a particular country (according to the 1910 census). In 1924, these quotas were reduced to 2 percent, and Jewish immigration from eastern Europe slowed to a trickle.6 Yet in comparison to other immigrants, of the 2.5 million Jews who had already immigrated between 1880 and 1924, very few returned to their countries of origin. Jewish newcomers congregated in the big cities of the East Coast, particularly in New York, where they constituted close to 30 percent of the population and became embedded in the social and cultural life of the city.7
The Jewish community in the U.S. continued to be deeply affected by and concerned with the situation of the Jews in Europe; despite the distance from the actual battlefields and the sites of anti-Semitic violence, there was a sense of kinship with the European communities and a growing anxiety in the face of American nativism. In 1922, the writer Reuven Brainin, who had arrived in the U.S. in 1910, declared a global “golem epidemic” and compared European society to a soulless golem capable of inflicting torture and death on hundreds of thousands of Jews. The U.S. was not blameless either, in his view, for in Washington sat “cultured people” who sought to pass laws that would prevent Jews orphaned by the pogroms from entering the country.8 With reference to these pogroms, one viewer of the Criterion’s prologue to The Golem claimed that when he was watching the Jews leaving Nuremberg on the stage, he saw before him contemporary Ukrainian refugees and Romanian Jews walking across Europe to escape persecution, as well as “the three orphan children whose parents were killed in an Eastern Galician pogrom and for whom that very day [he] had endeavored to find a home.” For this viewer, the golem of Wegener’s movie could become a metaphor for the defense and shelter that the Jews desperately needed. He wished that “someone would fashion another Golem and place upon him the words that would make him act.”9 In the process of transposition from Germany to the U.S., the cinematic golem narrative thus developed beyond Wegener’s postwar concerns and his implicit vision of Germany’s potential re-creation. It could also speak to American anxieties about immigration quotas and the survival of Jewish communities. The cinematic golem effectively bridged the great gap between Europe and the U.S., reinforcing the connection between Jews on both sides of the Atlantic and enabling a cultural exchange concerning the different aftermaths of the war.
The golem’s reception in the U.S. also reveals an American awareness of the larger context in which the golem emerged around World War I. The Yiddish press accounted for the film’s success as part of a worldwide phenomenon: “In recent times a kind of golem-cult has started to develop,” pronounced Ts. H. Rubinstein in the pages of the Yiddish newspaper Der tog (The day) in December 1921. Reviewing the recent operetta at Max Gabel’s Yiddish theater, he mentions the multiple German versions of the “original” old Jewish legend.10 What the “golem-cult” reveals is the capacity of this story of creation not only to cross national, ethnic, and linguistic borders but also to call into question stark divisions between “low” and “high” culture. “The entire world stands now under the sign of the golem,” Baruch Rivkin declared likewise in 1921, alluding to versions of the golem narrative that had recently appeared in Russia, Germany, and Austria, as well as to the screening of Wegener’s film in the U.S. In his discussion of H. Leivick’s lengthy dramatic poema Der goylem, Rivkin further explained that the tragedy of the monster figure lies not in its potential humanity and earthly desires but in the messianic calling that awakens within it. The “deep meaning” of the golem as a “surrogate” Messiah—one that offers a “material rather than spiritual redemption”—has finally emerged, for Rivkin, in the early 1920s and become a world-changing “power.”11
The global excitement over the golem was indicative of this story’s ability to constantly accrue new meanings, but it was also a tale of rapid adaptation into new media and forms of entertainment. Nowhere was that adaptation more obvious than in America. The year 1921 witnessed the screening of Wegener’s film and the proliferation of Yiddish texts, stage productions, and newspaper columns, all retelling the golem narrative.12 The golem “comes with gigantic steps,” Brainin contended, appearing “in the theater, in the ‘moving pictures,’ in the press,” and even in “political and societal life.”13 If the lengthy screening of Wegener’s film was the most notable and popular manifestation of the post–World War I American golem mania, it was not the beginning of it. Rather, Leivick’s modernist poema (a long dramatic poem), composed between 1917 and 1920 and published in New York in 1921, predated the screening of The Golem and accentuated the tragic aspects of the golem narrative.14 The very same New York critics and audiences read Leivick’s work, viewed Wegener’s film, and attended the golem operettas.15 They were all engaged in intensive “goleming,” as Yitsḥok Even described it, when he wrote in 1922 about Gabel’s production and the general golem craze, coining the term goylemn zikh (to golem). He even described a recent visit to the Old-New Synagogue in Prague with the goal of climbing up to its attic to find out what the golem’s face looked like, that prototype for all the “goleming . . . in recent times.”16
In Leivick’s dystopian poema, Rabbi Loew banishes the true Messiah in favor of the clay monster that perpetuates the cycle of unending violence, ultimately turning against its own community and murdering Jews. Following on the heels of Leivick’s work (and Wegener’s film), two different theater producers adapted the story for the Yiddish American stage. Though these shows varied widely in substance, both avoided the foreboding atmosphere and nihilist violence of Leivick’s work. Most notably, Max Gabel’s 1921 Der goylem (The golem) translated this story of creation into an extremely popular operetta.17 Informed by the film’s prologue at the Criterion as well as by Wegener’s cinematic aesthetic, this production staged scenes of Jewish exile and expulsion but did not paint diasporic life in macabre colors. Instead, Gabel’s American operetta took a more lighthearted approach to the issue of Jewish persecution in Europe, ending on a note of integration and reconciliation.
The American penchant for theatrical and musical zest notwithstanding, the 1921 goleming that took place in New York epitomized the ongoing and often anxiety-ridden engagement of immigrant Jews with their new environment, as they attempted to find their own footing in America while remaining involved in the affairs of their home countries. These texts, films, and plays conveyed the tension between the human subjugation to greater forces and the search for an ethical mode of intervention in history, through the assertion of Jewish agency. The golem narrative, making its mainstream debut in the U.S. in the aftermath of the postwar pogroms in eastern Europe, also channeled Jewish frustrations regarding the American treatment of refugees, offering the fantasy of a redeemer who would “make Jews free.”18 Yet, as we shall see, this messianic impulse would always confront historical constraints and human foibles, leading, as in Leivick’s drama, to catastrophic results.
Messianic Violence in H. Leivick’s Poema Der goylem
In 1922, the Yiddish writer and journalist Israel Joshua Singer (1893–1944) reviewed H. Leivick’s Der goylem for the Warsaw Folkstsatung (People’s newspaper). Singer commented on the unique perspective afforded by this timely work: “Is it a coincidence that such a work was produced in none other than America, and precisely during the bloody years between 1915 and 1920? No. Only from a remove, only in the one relatively quiet place, which became less involved than others in the global blood-bath, only there could one see and feel the tragedy of the world—the conflict between creator and mass, between spirit and golem.” Rather than accuse Leivick of being too distanced from the events in Europe, Singer considers the remove an advantage. He proceeds to compare World War I to a “gigantic global golem . . . that has risen on clay feet and set out on its path, knocking down everything that stands in the way.” Just as the soldiers on the battlefield cannot see anything beyond what stands immediately before them, so, Singer contends, “every one of us has become a small bit of clay in the large golem.” Therefore, perhaps only someone observing the events from a certain distance, like Leivick, might attempt to represent the larger picture, to “see and feel the tragedy.” Singer’s golem metaphor describes how the events of the war crushed and subsumed the individual and restricted a collective vision.19
As a relatively recent immigrant to the U.S., Leivick was deeply involved in the events that unfolded in Europe during the war and in its aftermath. Years later, in preparation for a 1935 speech, Leivick wrote, “The World War of 1914 gave a death blow to humanism. The animal has arisen. Cynicism has arrived. Bareness.”20 Leivick adds to Singer’s imagery the reduction of the human to the animal, so that the sanctity of life is no longer preserved. In mentioning the “national and civil wars” raging at the time of the golem’s creation in seventeenth-century Prague, Der goylem implicitly alludes to World War I and the Russian civil war. At the same time, focusing on the figure of the stranger or other, the golem, the dramatic poema can be read as indirectly concerning the situation of Jews as often unwelcome foreigners on American shores. Leivick’s work thus balanced transnational and local concerns, appealing to readers of Yiddish literature both in eastern Europe and in the U.S.
Leivick (né Leyvik Halpern) in his youth had become a member of the Bund—the general union of Jewish workers in Lithuania, Poland, and Russia, founded in 1897—and after a period of imprisonment in Minsk for his opposition to the czarist regime, he was sentenced to forced labor in Siberia. In 1913, Leivick escaped from Siberia and immigrated to the U.S., where he began publishing poetry in the journals of the Yiddish impressionist poets known as Di yunge (The young). Benjamin and Barbara Harshav comment that Leivick’s poetry was marked by “sublimated suffering, messianic fervor, a mystical tone, and naïve humanism, combined with a Neo-Romantic musicality of harmonious verse lines that were imbued with Russian Symbolism.”21 Leivick started his first poetic drama, Di keyten fun moshiekh (The chains of the Messiah), in 1908 while in prison; he then revised and published it in 1939. In this work, the angel Azriel rebels against the idea that the Messiah must passively wait until the end of times in his gilded shackles. Calling for an unshackled Messiah who can redeem humanity, Azriel describes how on earth “bodies / roll in filth, in worms / in prisons, in subjugation, in exile / in chains, in blood, on the brink of death.”22 Leivick contends here with the human desire to intervene in the course of history rather than remain mere bystanders to unfolding events. On the one hand, having himself suffered, as a Bundist, “in filth, in worms / in prisons,” the poet criticizes the notion of messianic postponement. On the other hand, the open-endedness of the drama makes Azriel’s fall from the divine realm appear futile and hubristic.
The problem of reconciling Jewish action and even aggression with the notion of messianic postponement returns in Leivick’s Der goylem, composed in New York in the late 1910s. This dramatic poema also centers on a leader, the Maharal of Prague, who, like Azriel, will not wait for redemption but urges it on. In a key scene, the Messiah, who has apparently arrived too soon, reflects on the difference between the golem and himself, describing the golem as a redeemer who uses “his fist” and “his axe.” The Maharal chases away the unnecessary Messiah, contending that instead he has created “a second man to do [his] bidding / the only one permitted to be dark, / permitted to shed blood, spill blood for blood.”23 The opening image of the first printed version of the drama is, aptly, that of the axe-bearing golem, drawn in bold strokes by the artist Jennings (Yehuda) Tofel (figure 2.1). At the end of the drama, after the golem has killed Jews, the Maharal laments that by creating a “superhuman” golem, he has turned his back to the patient old ways of his people, who have always quietly waited for redemption, “spilling” the blood he “desired to save.” To add to the golem’s revolt against its maker and society, Leivick’s rabbi rebels against the Jewish norms of passivity and nonviolence, “wanting what the foe lays claim to” and in so doing bringing disaster on his community.24 Leivick’s violent golem paved the way, as we will see, for future American and Israeli golems who do not act in mere self-defense but are brutally vengeful.
In writing Der goylem, Leivick drew on Yudl Rosenberg’s 1909 Yiddish Seyfer nifloes Maharal (The Golem or The Miraculous Deeds of Rabbi Leyb) but departed from the tradition of Jewish praise literature.He followed I. L. Peretz’s earlier symbolist dramas, Di goldene keyt (The Golden Chain, 1907) and Bay nakht afn alten mark (At Night in the Old Marketplace, 1907), also standing in dialogue with contemporary modernist apocalyptic writings by Peretz Markish and Moyshe-Leyb Halpern, composed in response to the war and brutal pogroms in eastern Europe.25 Published by the modernist New York Yiddish press Amerika, Der goylem is written in blank verse and divided into eight scenes bearing symbolic titles such as “Clay,” “Walls,” and “Revelations.”26 Leivick used the same high register of poetic Yiddish throughout Der goylem, not differentiating between characters through variations in dialect, register, or style. Much of the action of the play takes place offstage (as when the golem kisses the rabbi’s daughter and, later, when it murders Jews), and the scenes themselves include lengthy monologues, revealing the rabbi’s thoughts and aspirations and the golem’s desires and hallucinations.
Leivick portrays an indeterminate golem figure, eschewing any clear-cut allegory. The ambiguous symbols and multiple meanings of his poema allowed for a range of literary and political interpretations: most notably, Leivick’s Russian contemporaries read it as pro-Bolshevik.27 In 1925, at an evening in Leivick’s honor in Moscow, the communist critics, led by Moyshe Litvakov, interpreted the golem figure as representative only of the revolutionary proletariat, omitting the “tragic-Jewish” dimension of the story. In this reading of the piece, Yossele the golem is a symbol of the “rebellious folk person,” and Russian Jews called for a complete identification with the golem and its use of physical strength, rather than with the Maharal.28 From Leivick’s viewpoint, the golem’s “childish tears” and its “yearning for light and love” were meant to manifest a messianic affinity.29 As he contended in 1953, Der goylem exposes the darker side of Jewish participation in twentieth-century wars and revolutions. Avraham Novershtern and Sara Simchi Cohen have also suggested that Leivick depicts an intense psychic and physical bond between monster and creator and that the two cannot be fully distinguished and pitted against each other, as in the Russian reading of the poema.30
In writing about the destruction and devastation that, according to the Maharal figure, must take place en route to redemption, Leivick took up the notion that “Jewish Messianism is in its origins and by its nature . . . a theory of catastrophe.” In Gershom Scholem’s explanation, catastrophe and utopia are but “two sides of the Messianic event”; they go hand in hand rather than follow each other in a more logical progression. In the apocalyptic strand of messianism, the transition from the present to the messianic future involves a “revolutionary, cataclysmic element,” and it constitutes a break in historical time.31 Living in the throes of “blood libels, blood and fire and—destruction,” the Jewish community led by the Maharal seeks out such a revolution, inviting a violent response on behalf of their savior.32 The Maharal believes that “[God] has sent / this helpless servant, all helpless himself / to help us. Darkness itself, he is to bring / us brightness.”33 The Maharal’s creation of a redeemer constitutes an assumption of Jewish power and an entrance onto the stage of history, but in the drama, this action leads only to absurdity and nihilism since, as David Biale explains, “metahistorical longings” cannot be realized in “the concrete realm of history,” just as “the real world can never fully reflect mystical reality.”34 As the drama progresses, it becomes evident that although the golem has achieved the original mission—to prevent the blood-libel scheme of the priest Tadeush—it will not bring “brightness.” The desperate hope that “the sword brings comfort and relief” is disproven when the golem’s axe lands on Jewish heads.35
Rather than uphold the necessity of violence on the way to successful political change, Leivick’s apocalyptic text culminates in chaos and terror. Having prevented the blood libel, the golem still emerges a broken entity that cannot find its place in society, whether Jewish or human. With its first utterances as a phantom, when it warns the rabbi not to create it, the golem expresses the wish not to exchange its “darkness” and “stillness” for “the bustling of streets and human beings.” The golem retains, even after its animation, something of the shadowy phantom. In this sense, it is a product of the era and its manner of “trampling” the human and disregarding the sacredness of life. The Maharal molds the golem and charges it with the mission of “a nation’s messenger, a man of might,” disregarding the golem’s desires and the ruinous effect of this mission on the golem and its surroundings.36
Though Leivick borrows plot elements, settings, and characters from Rosenberg’s Seyfer nifloes Maharal, he departs from this text in his ambivalent portrayal of the erring and cruel rabbi and his indeterminate golem. In Rosenberg’s chapbook, the golem is a mute entity that uses violence in a justifiable rather than an excessive manner. When first molding and animating the golem, Rosenberg’s Maharal and his helpers inform the anthropoid that its name is Joseph, dressing it in Jewish clothes. The mute golem becomes a servant in the rabbi’s courtroom and is given the nicknames “Yossele the golem” and “Yossele the mute.” In the section “What Rabbi Leyb Used the Golem For,” Rosenberg describes how the golem is disguised as a “gentile porter” that roams the ghetto streets at night between Purim and Passover, catching Christian offenders who are plotting against the Jews and delivering them to the authorities.37 The golem uses violence to enforce the law that the Christian authorities will not impose. As a Jewish-like monster that can “pass” as a goy and perform physical feats usually associated with lower-class men, Rosenberg’s golem exhibits both Jewish and non-Jewish attributes.
Leivick’s golem is a different monster altogether: endowed with the powers of speech and human-like self-awareness, its behavior and appearance are less predictable and classifiable. For instance, the name that the Maharal gives his creation, Yossel (as distinct from Yossele), a diminutive form of Joseph, connotes at one and the same time the warring Messiah son of Joseph and the Yiddish term for the sacrificed Jesus.38 The stage directions provide us with the first image of the golem: “Huge eyes. . . . Thick lips, deeply indented corners. A frozen empty smile on the lips, empty yet twisted, virtually on the brink of weeping. Black, curly hair on his head, beard, and mustache. His eyes open wider and wider as he gapes at everything.”39 The description of the golem’s face as an exaggerated mask underscores its volatile nature, shifting inexplicably between extremes. In the 1925 translation and adaptation of Der goylem at the Habima Theater in Moscow, under the direction of Boris Illich Vershilov, Aharon Meskin enacted the eponymous monster as such an erratic creature: at moments bursting out in childish laughter and at other times raging uncontrollably.40
While the golem’s “thick lips” and dark hair might be construed as stereotypically Jewish, Leivick depicts its body as gigantic and powerful, so that the rabbi’s wife immediately remarks, “he doesn’t look at all like a Jew.” She further observes, “Such hands / such shoulders this person of yours has / it frightens me.”41 At the end of the second act, the rabbi also casts doubt on the golem’s mission as he contemplates its monstrous physique: “Is that the man I dreamed into existence? / My champion? My envoy? . . . He? Such arms! / Such legs, such shoulders! . . . So much body, flesh! [azoy fil guf] / How could there be so much dumb sorrow?”42 The golem’s overwhelming body (“groysen guf,” the rabbi says) is surprisingly incompatible here with the heroic mission envisioned for it. The rabbi bemoans the fact that in order to protect his community, he must create a being that poses a threat to the very same community and that cannot be integrated into Jewish society or human society at large. For the poet Aaron Glantz-Leyeles, Leivick’s golem embodies “brutal physical power,” expressive of a Jewish “drive for revenge against our enemies.”43
The rabbi’s reaction to the golem as a piece of flesh conveys his general ambivalence toward exhibitions of excessive masculinity, even when needed for Jewish self-defense.44 At the same time, when the rabbi encounters the true Messiah, he rejects him on the basis of his physical inadequacy:
And can his fingers coil in iron fists
And crush and bash and smash and shatter skulls?
And can he even stand the stench of blood
And spill it? . . .
. . . And can his hands,
His delicate hands, scratch in the filth of pits,
Looking for limbs, looking for bones and ashes?45
The emphasis on the Messiah’s “delicate hands” and his inability to exact revenge underscores the contrast with the golem, whose massive arms and hands can surely do so.
Dressed as a lower-class porter, Rosenberg’s protective golem embodies the ba‘al guf, the strapping or muscular young man who was then emerging as a type in Jewish literature, for example, in Hebrew and Yiddish works by Ḥayim Naḥman Bialik, Sholem Asch, and Isaac Meir Weissenberg. These “little-noticed Jews, the butchers and porters and teamsters with their physical prowess and passions,” to quote Irving Howe and Eliezer Greenberg, were imagined as a class that could “take matters into their own hands,” protecting themselves from gentile attacks.46 Sharon Gillerman writes that such images of strong Jewish men arose in Yiddish literature out of “the experience of political disenfranchisement and physical vulnerability, combined with rising violence and a desire among Jews to exercise some form of self-defense.”47 The indeterminacy of the golem encouraged its literary adaptation as a new type of strong man that can perform a reverse ethnic drag, appropriating external non-Jewish ideals. Rosenberg’s golem as porter is such a positively recast ba‘al guf. The “goyish” costume of this figure reminds the reader, however, that this type marks the border with the Christian world. By describing the Maharal and his wife’s negative reaction to the golem’s body as not “at all” Jewish, Leivick highlights the ambivalence of the Jewish creator who has brought a ba‘al guf into existence.
If in Hillel Rogoff’s Forverts (Forward) review of Der goylem, “the Jews in exile are abandoned and vulnerable because they are sheep among wolves, . . . too physically weak and too spiritually exalted,” then the golem embodies the notion of (male) Jewish transformation into a gentile-like man.48 This figure’s alienation and ultimate breakdown in Leivick’s work, as well as its lack of self-determination, bring to the fore, however, the risks entailed in such a transformation. Unlike Rosenberg’s mute and compliant Joseph, Leivick’s golem is out of control from the very first moment of animation. An overgrown newborn, the clay monster must adjust too quickly to the world and has difficulty visually decoding its surroundings and understanding how to maneuver its body. The clay monster’s sense of physical confinement and insecurity in the rabbi’s home develops into paranoid and violent hallucinations that accentuate its rebelliousness. Its violence is directed both at the rabbi—as creator—and at itself: “I want my hand to hit / Your head, and yet I cannot move. . . . / I want to twist my head off from my shoulders.”49 These described, though not executed, physical gestures are prompted by an apocalyptic vision of the sunrise as a fire that comes through the windows and sets the walls ablaze. The golem seeks to escape the home and its persecuting wall and run toward the fire.50 In subsequent hallucinations, the golem sees itself as an unwanted thing, beaten and trampled by a Jewish mob that attempts to bury it alive. Similarly, it internalizes the creator’s revulsion at the sight of its body, declaring, “I am repelled, disgusted by my flesh, / Revolted by my glassy, bulging eyes.”51
At the climax of the play, the rabbi sends the golem on its most important mission: to retrieve the vials of blood planted by the priest Tadeush in the cave underneath the five-walled tower (or palace in the Yiddish version). Leivick depicts this ruined gothic site, borrowed from Rosenberg’s text, as blackened, covered in cobwebs, its doors missing and windowpanes broken.52 It provides a shelter, nonetheless, for the sick beggars of Prague and for the golem, when banished from the Maharal’s home after kissing the rabbi’s daughter in public. When venturing into this eerie underground space, the golem not only encounters supernatural beings—“cave spirits” and walking corpses that have risen from their graves—but also “a man with a cross,” that is, Jesus, and “a young beggar,” the Messiah.53 The three potential redeemers appear equally ineffectual in their complementary missions, and the chorus of corpses pronounces the final nihilist verdict on the possibility of redemption:
Look, all three are sitting there,
Never stirring, never speaking
You must know just who they are,
Sing the story of their anguish
There is nothing more to sing
There the cross lies, not to carry.
There the chain lies, not to clatter.
There the axe lies, not to strike with.
So we sing the song of nothing.54
In Yiddish, the song of nothing is filled with clattering, alternating rhymes in contrast to the blank verse that characterizes the majority of lines in Der goylem. This sing-song poetry heightens the macabre mood and emphasizes the emptiness of the verse itself (“there is nothing more to sing”). The symbolic objects of redemption also lose their functionality, and the three saviors appear immobile, so that those awaiting them have been fooled and punished for their hopefulness. The chorus’s song and dance of “nothing” then devolves into a “song of madness,” “anger,” and “nonsense.”55 When the corpses return to their graves, the hallucinatory scene with the three saviors vanishes, and the golem appears sitting alone, guarding the two flasks of blood. At first, the golem is completely unresponsive and does not even recognize its creator and master. “His entire face,” Leivick writes in the stage directions, “appears as though insane. He doesn’t move a limb.”56 The golem’s appearance renders the power of hallucination visible. In the dramatic medium, moreover, these visions are not merely reported but dramatized, enacted by different characters, thus blurring the borders between dreams and waking reality, hallucinations and “history.” In this sense, the drama as a whole becomes suffused with the golem’s demonic messianism.57
When encountering the Messiah in the cave scene, the golem declares that “rottenness” exudes from him, since the beggar’s feet are wounded and covered in rags.58 Rather than represent a new era, a break from the past, the Messiah’s body is decaying and lethargic, in contrast to the golem’s more vital, “newborn” body. The two characters stage different types of living death: the Messiah is suspended in eternal waiting; the golem lives an accelerated existence that ends abruptly and catastrophically. While the golem wants to be with the young and old beggars, the Maharal chases the two away, telling the golem that “their time has not arrived. Now is your time.”59 The Messiah also admits, in a later scene, that the time is not right for him. The world should not be expected to “halt all killing,” he says ironically, just because the Messiah has decided to arrive. Paradoxically, because the world is in dire need of redemption, it is incapable of receiving the Messiah and must resort to the golem as “redeemer / with his fist and with his axe.”60
The final act, titled “The Last Mission,” concerns the disastrous outcome of the golem’s descent into the underworld of the cave and the rabbi’s inability to understand his mistake until it is too late. The act takes place on a Friday evening in the anteroom of the old synagogue, where the golem appears completely altered: broken, neglected, and unkempt, wearing only one shoe, and unable to emerge from paralyzing visions.61 The “savage” golem who “cannot pray” is positioned here, according to the Yiddish literary critic Bal-Makhshoves, “outside of the Jewish people . . . cut-off from tradition, . . . half-naked.”62 When the Maharal finally arrives, he tells the golem to start “to live as everybody lives, / Just as Jews live—.” The Maharal is unwilling to assume responsibility for his creation, for the golem’s suffering and its actions, and suggests instead that the “miserable” golem “try going to the synagogue with all / The worshipers and try to understand.”63 Fully aware that the golem’s restlessness is its “fate,” the rabbi nonetheless fantasizes that the golem could manage to fade into the background, to live among Jews, like Rosenberg’s mute golem, and pretend to be more like them. When the rabbi departs to perform the Sabbath services, the golem is further dehumanized as it crawls on the floor, moans, and pulls at its hair and clothes. After reviving itself with a sip of water and some bread, the golem picks up the axe and breaks out through the window.64
In the story of the Prague golem, the Maharal forgets to take the ineffable name out of the golem’s mouth on Sabbath eve, and the golem then becomes enraged and starts to destroy the ghetto. In Leivick’s modernist retelling, the rabbi does not use a magical formula or evoke the ineffable name of God; his desertion and neglect, rather than his forgetfulness, are at fault. Whereas in the Prague tale, the rabbi withdraws the magical formula just in time and restores the peace, reciting the Sabbath Psalm once more in the synagogue, in Der goylem, Leivick superimposes the Sabbath ritual on the golem’s deterioration and resulting violence—a disturbing dissonance of sacred ritual and destruction.65 According to the stage directions, as the golem moans, the Sabbath prayers are audible through the wall, and when the golem rushes into the street with the axe, “every word of the cantor is now clearly heard” as he begins to recite the Sabbath Psalm. The holy recitation becomes the macabre soundtrack for the golem’s sacrilegious rampage. When screams and cries are heard outside, the community ceases to pray and runs in fearful chaos into the street. After arresting the golem with its bloody axe, the Maharal must then shield it from the angry and terrified Jewish crowd.66
Since the golem’s violence is described secondhand, because it takes place “offstage” in this verse drama, the reader has access only to the reactions of the crowd and the rabbi, who all insist that the golem has shed “Jewish blood.” The emphasis on the Jewishness of the blood, especially following the blood-libel attempt, suggests that Christian persecution has been internalized. Instead of the priest, the Jewish leader—the Maharal—takes upon himself the responsibility for the violence, claiming that he has “sinned against all Jews.”67 The rabbi then determines the golem’s “final mission,” ending its life simply by ordering it to “breathe out [its] final breath.”68 Without any ritual and in solitude, the golem is put to rest, but with this unresolved ending, the reader does not experience the satisfaction of a catastrophe averted. Instead, the resumption of the Sabbath prayers provides an ironic closure to the golem’s existence outside the boundaries of Jewish and human life.
If for Polish and Russian critics Leivick’s drama addressed the events taking place in Europe, despite its publication in the U.S.—namely, the horrors of war (Singer) or else the triumphs of communism (Litvakov)—Der goylem could also be interpreted against the backdrop of the local immigrant population and the concerns of that community. By connecting the golem’s disruptive words and deeds to its status as an undesirable outcast, Leivick urged his readers to rethink what constitutes a Jew, and a Jewish man at that, in this new environment. He raised the question of the status and communal identity of those immigrant Jews who have already taken off one shoe, as it were, and “cannot pray.” Just as Der goylem underscores the potential alienation of the “newly made” Jewish American male from the Jewish community and its leaders, it also reveals the golem’s general inability to find its place and be recognized in human society at large. In this respect, the poema could have also spoken to the experiences of Jewish immigrants vis-à-vis the general American population. As outsiders who needed to negotiate the constraints of the social world into which they arrived, Jewish immigrants from eastern Europe resembled the golem in its initial inaptitude and ongoing sense of not belonging. The intense pressure as a result of the golem’s attempted “assimilation” into human and Jewish communities and its self-alienation can be read in the American context: rather than evoke a sense of security in the new “goldene medine,” Leivick’s poema expressed anxieties concerning both the internal resilience of Jewish communities postimmigration and the ability of Jews to cope with the pressures of change and integration.
The Spectacle of Expulsion: Paul Wegener’s Film at the Criterion Theater
While Leivick’s poema and Max Gabel’s operetta, discussed shortly, could be read and appreciated only by the Yiddish-speaking immigrant population, Wegener’s The Golem, which premiered on June 19, 1921, at the nine-hundred-seat Criterion Theater near Times Square, enjoyed broader success. On October 9, the New York Times reported that “the golem is going and going” and that when the film closed the following week, it would have had a record run of “sixteen weeks and four days in the same theater.”69 The promotional ads for the film, published in both English- and Yiddish-language newspapers, feature the golem standing behind stone tablets engraved with the Ten Commandments. “Thou shalt not make unto thee any graven image” appears in large print (figure 2.2).70 The golem both holds the tablets, Moses-like, and also peers down at them, as if trying to decipher the letters. Made of clay by a human who imitates God through the act of creation, the golem is a “graven image” of sorts, used to rescue the Jewish community and thus supplant the need for divine intervention. Paradoxically, the prohibition against creating graven images appears in an ad for a movie that invites Jewish and non-Jewish audiences to view the ambiguous golem as a threatening idol and a redeeming Moses. Wegener had also, symbolically, taken over the theme of the golem and presented it in a new guise.
Having been exposed to Robert Wiene’s The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari and to the aesthetics of Max Reinhardt’s theater, American critics located The Golem’s unconventional mise-en-scène and its unrealistic treatment of the Jewish milieu within the context of German theatrical and cinematic expressionism.71 Jewish and non-Jewish reviewers extolled the artistic merits of the film, including Wegener’s acting as the golem, the architectural set design, and the cinematography. The Jewish critics did note Wegener’s “mistakes” and exaggerations when it came to representing Jewish prayer and conduct, also complaining that Wegener did not follow Jewish renditions of the golem narrative, such as Rosenberg’s.72 The extrafilmic devices, theatrical and musical, all enhanced, by contrast, the “old Jewish atmosphere” of The Golem.73
Figure 2.2. Advertisement for Paul Wegener’s The Golem at the Criterion Theater. (New York Tribune, June 1921)
Wegener’s film, as we have seen, ignited the “golem-cult” in 1921 New York, and its attraction can be attributed both to the cinematic spectacle itself and to the new American packaging that augmented the Jewish dimension of the story. In addition to the theatrical “prologue,” the Criterion’s presentation included several other pieces before and after the film: a short film depicting the “old Jewish community in Prague where the golem legend was born,” a masked dance, and a short Buster Keaton comedy.74 Miriam Hansen has explained that silent-era exhibition practices, including live musical accompaniment and theatrical pieces, gave the audience a sense of collective presence. These extrafilmic components enhanced the lived space and time of the movie theater rather than subordinating it to the events taking place on the screen. They “allowed for locally and culturally specific acts of reception, opening up a margin of participation and unpredictability.” The space of the cinema functioned, moreover, as an “alternative public sphere” for social groups like immigrants and women, “providing an intersubjective horizon through—and against—which they could negotiate the specific displacements and discrepancies of their experience.”75 In other words, rather than serve as a vehicle of assimilation, cinematic exhibition often promoted ethnically specific collective experiences that reaffirmed the group’s sense of identity. Screened in the mainstream Broadway movie theater to viewers of different genders and ethnic backgrounds, Riesenfeld’s Golem program still managed to forge a sense of Jewish communality through Yiddish and Hebrew songs and theatrical performance. The German film thus mediated the Jewish refugee experience for American viewers.
The prologue in particular left a deep impression on the viewers, as one member of the audience, I. L. Bril, recalled:
The stage is darkened and in that darkness come an old man and a lad. They sit down and the old man tells the lad the story of the expulsion of the Jews from Nuremberg, Germany. And as he speaks the curtain parts and we behold a Seder evening scene. The family is sitting round the table; they sing that part of the Hallel which begins “Min Hametzar Korosi Yoh Ononi Bamerchavyoh” (out of my straitness I called upon the Lord: the Lord answered me with enlargement). And suddenly there is a knock on the door which upon being opened admits a messenger from the ruler who tells the Jews that their expulsion has been decreed and that they must leave within a month. The messenger departs and the curtain descends whilst the Jews are still chanting the Psalm. The next scene shows the streets of the city Nuremberg; the Jews with the wanderer’s staff in their hands and the packs upon their backs are leaving. Again they sing and this time it is “Eli, Eli”—O Lord, O Lord, why hast thou forsaken us? Then came the picture of “The Golem” telling its story of how the Jews in Prague were saved. “The Golem” is a legend, and the screen version makes it all so real, so vivid.76
The theatrical prologue replicates the contents of the images that Wegener’s Rabbi Loew projects on the wall of the court for the entertainment of the gentile courtiers, featuring wandering Jews with their staffs and packs. It also reenacts the arrival of the edict of expulsion in the film itself, delivered by the courtier, the messenger of ill tidings who subsequently becomes the lover of the rabbi’s daughter. The prologue draws a connection between the cinematic spectacle of stereotypical Jewish wandering and suffering and the specific historical event of the 1499 expulsion from Nuremberg. The framing figures of the old man and the lad who introduce the scene stage the intergenerational transmission of (cautionary) Jewish history and myth, as occurs in the yearly recitation of the Passover Haggadah.
The interrupted Passover celebration in Nuremberg further reminds spectators that the Israelite plight in Egypt and the wandering in the desert can recur in modern times. It echoes Rosenberg’s and Leivick’s evocation of a Passover blood libel and their use of the golem to stave off Christian attacks. Instead of the prophet Elijah, who is supposed to visit the Passover celebration and drink wine from his cup, a messenger arrives with the expulsion decree. The golem film functions within this context as a response to the Jewish cry “why hast thou forsaken us?” since it features a rabbi capable of saving his community with the help of an artificial strongman. The display of hopeless exile in the prologue to the Criterion screening offset the success of Rabbi Loew with his golem in the film itself. The fantasy of the golem as protector became more “vivid” and captivating in this manner. It resounded in relationship to the external American prologue and not just in the context of the internal threat within the film. By contrast, when the film screened in Germany, reviews underscored its fantastical and dreamy, even “primeval” qualities, distancing it from the present day, in line with Wegener’s own stated preference for the fantastic.77
While the original German symphonic score for the film by Hans Landsberger created a modernist program of “logically linked sound patterns,” Hugo Riesenfeld’s new score forged a musical mosaic that ranged from “religious chants of the thirteenth century to modern Jewish compositions.”78 Like the American score, intended to heighten the Jewishness of the film, the theatrical prologue inserted Wegener’s production into a specifically Jewish context, including a program of “Jewish music.” The music that accompanied the prologue accentuated the historical context and the narrative of Jewish duress by combining two renditions of psalms: the traditional Passover Hallel (Psalm 118) and the modern song “Eyli, eyli” (“Eli, Eli”; “My God, My God”), based on Psalm 22. Both “Min ha-metsar” and “Eli, Eli” are appeals to God for help, and in the case of the former verse, God responds with abundance. Another review mentions that the actors of the prologue left the stage while singing a wordless exile song (goles lid), “so heartfelt and Jewish that it brings tears to one’s eyes.”79 The Russian-born Jewish composer and music ethnographer Lazare Saminsky, who had recently immigrated to the U.S. and became, in 1924, the musical director of Temple Emanu-El in New York, was responsible for parts of the orchestration and for “Min ha-metsar.” Saminsky lent this scene its musical authenticity, having researched and collected Jewish liturgy during his ethnographic expeditions in the Pale of Settlement (together with S. An-Sky). One newspaper reported that he managed to represent musically how an “old person would tell of the suffering of the people of Israel.”80
To augment Saminsky’s music in the prologue, Riesenfeld drew on a proven “hit,” recycling Jacob Sandler’s “Eli, Eli,” which had already been used for the prologue of the film Humoresque in 1920, featuring the Jewish basso profundo Emanuel List.81 Sandler wrote “Eli, Eli” in 1896 for an American operetta, The Jewish King of Poland for a Night, performed at the Windsor Theater, and the song became an instant sensation, rising quickly from a “stage tune” to the status of a Jewish “religious folk hymn.” According to Irene Heskes, “Eli, Eli” is a “quintessential Jewish lament” that incorporates and popularizes elements of “traditional liturgical chant.”82 Spectators of Wegener’s film recalled, through this musical choice, the recent Humoresque, which itself ran for twelve consecutive weeks on Broadway, primarily at the Criterion, during the previous summer. List was engaged to sing again for The Golem, adding to his already extensive appearances with “Eli, Eli.” He was accompanied by a large choir and soloists (over twenty artists in total), providing the song with a “new interpretation” that had “never been sung anywhere before.”83 Some Jewish critics complained, however, that the Criterion could have omitted “Eli, Eli,” since that song had already been performed ad nauseam.84
Reporting on The Golem’s prologue, the New York Times critic wrote that “then, as now, the introductory measures by the Windsor Theater orchestra were the signal for a great demonstration on the part of the audience.”85 The participation of the audience created a sense of specific “collective presence,” but it was, nonetheless, semiscripted and predictable. “The epitome of difference, of melodic sounds as yet unintegrated into American music,” in Heskes’s words, “Eli, Eli” elicited a strong emotional response on the part of moviegoers, who sensed that they were about to view a cinematic performance of Jewishness.86 Like the American films Humoresque or His People (1925), The Golem too rendered Jewishness itself “a kind of commodity” for general American consumption and not only for Jewish audiences.87 When the film premiered, the New York Tribune described it as “a photograph of Jewish hopes and Jewish despair in the darkest period of the existence of that race.”88 The use of mournful, foreign-sounding music in the prologue and throughout the score enhanced the otherness of the film and evoked the atmosphere of darkness and despair that could occasion an artificial creation such as the golem. Through this music, the film’s exhibitors at the Criterion emphasized the Jewish dimension of the golem narrative, encouraging viewers to draw connections to their present times and to the situation of Jewish communities in Europe and the U.S. With the help of the framing additions, the golem of Prague became a spectacle of Jewish survival and continuity against all odds.
In this new American framework, Wegener’s images of the Jewish population and its ghetto no longer spoke to a defeated German nation and its hope for rebirth and recovery. Rather, they implicitly evoked the conditions of Jewish mass immigration and resettlement amid rising nativism that “questioned the racial admissibility of Jews” and their ability to assimilate into the American nation.89 In the early twentieth century, established Jewish immigrants tended to move to uptown Manhattan or to Brooklyn and the Bronx, whereas newcomers would congregate on the Lower East Side, then referred to as the “ghetto.” In contrast to the imagined ghetto in the film, the ghetto Jews of New York might have feared anti-Semitic attitudes and restrictions but not expulsions. The quotas placed on immigration, however, imperiled their relatives and friends who remained in Europe and had already suffered the devastating effects of World War I. Reports about the unstable conditions in eastern Europe and, subsequently, about the massacres of Jewish populations appeared on a daily basis in the Yiddish press. The new film lent the clichéd tropes of exile, rehearsed on the stage and within the film itself, new meaning in this context of Jewish-American relations. The golem, like the goldene medina itself, was a potential savoir of Jewish refugees, but it could also turn against them.
The review of the film premiere in the New York Tribune taps into these fears concerning the situation of Jews in Europe when it describes medieval Jews as “chattel,” unable “to leave the ghetto without permission” or pursue any occupation aside from “money-lending” and “selling old clothes.” Because the Jews were incapable of open revolt, they dreamt up the all-powerful golem that “saved the Jewish people from destruction.”90 The film reminded Jewish viewers of the fear of dispossession that they had suffered and that many of the Jews in their former countries continued to endure. With the vision of an enclosed and idiosyncratic Jewish ghetto, Wegener’s The Golem thus provided a double fantasy for American viewers: it portrayed a Jewish community striving to retain its ethnic and religious particularity in the face of external pressures and envisioned the creation of an artificial hero tasked with saving the Jews from expulsion and preventing their endless wandering.
Although Wegener’s film evokes apprehensions about the future of Jewish communities and suggests that a territorial (possibly Zionist) solution is necessary, it nonetheless ends on a more reassuring note than Leivick’s poema does. The film stages the golem’s violent rampage, but the monster conveniently murders the daughter’s Christian lover rather than any of the Jews. The golem ends its existence outside the ghetto, in the hands of a child that, by treating the golem as a plaything rather than a tool or a weapon, restores the equilibrium of the Jewish community. The “final mission” of Leivick’s golem, by contrast, is its death: it draws its “final breath” not as a recognized hero but as a feared murderer, leaving readers to contend with the golem’s unforgivable violence and the Maharal’s “sin.” Leivick’s text and Wegener’s film complemented each other in the New York of 1921, raising similar concerns about Jewish exile, immigration, and integration. But they offered distinct visions of the golem as hero (Wegener) and antihero (Leivick) and of the potential unity or discord within a Jewish community striving to defend itself and uphold its boundaries. The American theatrical and musical additions to the film also enhanced its contemporary relevance. Thus, Bril asks at the end of his aforementioned review, “The Seder, the messenger announcing the forthcoming expulsion, the exodus, . . . ‘Eli, Eli,’ ‘The Golem.’ Do they belong to the past alone?” Yearning for the “mystic words that would make Jews free,” he asserts that the golem story of the grandparents has become equally relevant for the grandchildren who have just arrived, as refugees, in Ellis Island.91
A Jewish Goylem for the American Oylem
The success of Wegener’s film at the Criterion encouraged Jewish theater producers to attempt their own versions of the golem narrative. Ads that appeared in daily Yiddish papers in 1922 show that producers relied on the public’s familiarity with Wegener’s film, since they replicated the golem costume and the film’s Orientalist aesthetic. Two Yiddish operettas were staged in close succession and drew the crowds: Der goylem (The golem)—an adaptation of the Jewish Hungarian playwright Albert Kovessy’s drama (translated into Yiddish by Mark Schweid) at Max Gabel’s Theater in Harlem—and Joseph Tanzman’s Der prager goylem (The Prague golem) at the Lyric Theater in Brooklyn.92 Tanzman’s operetta, like Gabel’s, included a range of music: prayer hymns; romantic duets; and happy, comical songs; as well as Tanzman’s performance of “Der oylem iz a goylem” (The public is an idiot).93 The concurrent and competitive staging of these productions in early 1922 attests to the general enthusiasm for the golem at this particular moment (figure 2.3).94 In the 1921–1922 theater season, critics singled out Gabel’s The Golem and S. An-sky’s acclaimed The Dybbuk, playing at Maurice Schwartz’s Yiddish Art Theater, as the most “original” works of the season.95 Since then, both Gabel’s and Tanzman’s operettas have been forgotten, but the surviving, handwritten Yiddish text of Gabel’s production enables us to analyze, for the first time, the translation of the golem narrative to the popular Yiddish stage.
The “musical legend” concerning the golem premiered on December 16, 1921, with a sixty-person choir and thirty musical numbers. In adapting the golem narrative to the Yiddish theater stage, Gabel followed in Riesenfeld’s footsteps in the Criterion’s prologue and score, emphasizing the threat of expulsion and homelessness and using music to enhance the pathos of this tale of creation. The music, composed and arranged by Louis Friedsell, consisted of prayer-like songs such as “Merciful God,” folk tunes such as “The Redemption,” romantic duets, and even Gypsy-inspired numbers. Friedsell, like Riesenfeld before him, had “collected old Jewish theatrical motifs” and combined them to create this operetta.96 Interweaving these musical numbers into a “riveting” dramatic plot, the operetta belonged, according to Rogoff, to a “higher class of operettas” (reminiscent of Avrom Goldfadn’s 1881 operetta Shulamis). Whereas for Rogoff the singing did not appear arbitrary but flowed from the mood in each particular scene, Variety claimed that the musical and “amateurishly executed dance” numbers were “dragged in by sheer force,” “without rhyme or reason.”97
The script, dated to December 1921, sets the prologue at night, “under the city of Prague.” It depicts a group of “homeless Jews” who appear “ragged, tired, cold, and hungry, singing a prayer until they exit [the stage].”98 This scene is reminiscent of the Nuremberg expulsion portrayed in the Criterion’s prologue to Wegener’s film, in which Jews also appear as iconic exiles singing dirges, “the wanderer’s staff in their hands and the packs upon their backs.”99 In both film and operetta, the prayer emphasizes the forsakenness of the Jews, which only the creation of a golem can possibly resolve. As Rabbi Loew consults his magical books and prepares the figure of clay for animation in the first act, he hears the sad singing of the wanderers. He ceases his work on the golem in the secret room and opens the window to converse with them. He invites his “sisters and brothers” into the ghetto and its synagogues, instructing them to continue praying and not to lose confidence in the Creator. In contrast to the film, the edict of expulsion is delivered only at the beginning of the operetta’s third and final act, long after the Maharal has created and animated the golem. This “preemptive” creation therefore appears as a response to the general Jewish condition of homelessness and vulnerability, to help the “Jewish people who have been suffering for thousands of years already—and if not to completely free them, then at least to make their troubles lighter.”100
Figure 2.3. Side-by-side advertisements for Max Gabel’s Der goylem and Joseph Tanzman’s Der prager goylem. (Forverts, February 1922)
Photos of Max Gabel dressed as the golem reveal that he not only drew on the Criterion’s theatrical prologue but also borrowed Wegener’s costume from the popular film (figure 2.4). Gabel’s attire included the cinematic golem’s sculpted head mask, large boots, thick belt, and rope tied around his arms. He even used the animating device, the star-shaped capsule, invented by the Wegener crew for the first (1914) film and subsequently used in the 1917 and 1920 films as well.101 As in the latter film, the Yiddish Rabbi Loew discovers the animating word (emes, “truth”) when it is projected on the walls of his house (with fire spurting out of the letters); he then traces the word onto a piece of parchment. In the Yiddish operetta, the parchment is placed, however, not in a five-pointed metal capsule but in a hexagram, a Star of David, enhancing the golem’s Jewishness.102 Finally, as Wegener did with his wife, Lydia Salmonova, who enacted the role of the rabbi’s daughter, Gabel engaged his wife and partner onstage, the popular melodrama actress Jenny Goldstein, for the role of Miriam, Rabbi Loew’s “modest” daughter. In multiple ads and photos, Goldstein too appeared with long, braided hair and an Oriental costume and jewelry, reminiscent of Salmonova’s attire in the film.103 The golem’s desire for Miriam awakens and intensifies throughout the operetta, as it does in the film, and the couple’s extratheatrical relationship enhanced the erotic dimension of this love interest.
Gabel’s golem is also named Joseph, as in Rosenberg’s text, but its ability to converse intelligently is reminiscent of Leivick’s drama. The golem draws on its memory and ability to learn and reveals inconsistencies in the Maharal’s logic as the drama progresses; its human-like intellect enables it to perform certain actions of its own free will. The rabbi even claims that the golem has become too “wise” when the clay creature refuses to obey him because one of his commands goes against the rabbi’s initial instruction “to defend the weak and suffering.”104 Where Gabel’s production departs most dramatically from Wegener’s film and Leivick’s drama is in its emphasis on rationality and overall avoidance of mystical and supernatural forces. Unlike Leivick’s mad and irrational golem, moreover, the golem in the operetta arrives at rational conclusions and is able, by the end of the drama, to determine that it must end its own life for the good of others.
In order to re-create a Jewish world in which a golem is brought into existence, Gabel made use of comic minor characters. A servant couple who engage in romantic banter serve as a foil for the melodramatic story of Miriam’s love for the poor Yeshiva student Nakhman, even while her father has promised her hand in marriage to the rich Shimon. This couple, the housemaid Esther and the servant-student David, function as internal spectators to the unfolding drama, posing questions that the audience might be wondering about. For instance, when Esther asks David about the “secret” that “the rabbi mentioned to the poor wanderers,” David explains that at night the rabbi enters the locked room to knead. “What does he knead, dough for farfel noodles?” she replies, and David teases her, explaining that the rabbi is kneading a large, tall, dead “thing” of clay. Esther, in disbelief, says she will ask the wanderers for more information, and their sorrowful song ends the scene.105 Such exchanges punctuate the work, poking fun at the seriousness of the dramatic action and inviting the audience both to identify with and to feel more knowledgeable than the uncomprehending Esther.
David and Esther’s conversations also provide essential background information for the main romantic drama: David reveals Miriam’s tragic love for Nakhman, while Esther describes how Miriam cannot sleep at night, agonized as she is by her father’s decision.106 In the 1920 film, the drama of Jewish-Christian political strife is intensified through the illicit love affair between the Christian knight Florian and the rabbi’s daughter, culminating in the knight’s death. In the 1914 film, Wegener and the screenplay writer, Henrik Galeen, also introduced a forbidden romantic relationship between the Christian baron and the Jewish antiques dealer’s daughter. In both films, the romantic plot involves the transgression of class and ethnoreligious boundaries, expressing Christian German anxieties concerning intermarriage. In the 1922 Yiddish operetta, however, the romantic drama revolves around class differences alone, since both men are Jewish.
As in An-sky’s 1919 The Dybbuk—a tale of unrequited love between a girl from a wealthy family and a poor Yeshiva student in which the deceased lover, Khonen, returns as a spirit to possess his beloved, Leah—The Golem operetta portrays the struggle of a young Jewish woman to marry her lover in defiance of her father’s financial arrangements. An-sky’s play ends, however, with the tragic death of Leah in the failed attempt to exorcise the dybbuk, the spirit of Khonen. By contrast, in the first act of The Golem, the audience is reassured that the rabbi is not blinded by Shimon’s gold but rather wishes to use it to help the multitudes of miserable Jews. With this money, he hopes to bribe the Jews’ “haters” and prevent them from engaging in persecutions. Nakhman protests that the rabbi is willing to sacrifice his daughter’s happiness for the sake of his people. After Nakhman helps free the rabbi from imprisonment because of a false charge of alchemy, he earns back the father’s good faith and consent in marriage. The Golem operetta as a whole invites the audience to identify with Miriam and Nakhman and to witness the Maharal’s process of recognition and repentance, after he has been falsely accused by the “charlatan” Shimon. The Maharal confesses, “I have calculated poorly—the suffering of his people has made me forget the right that my child has over the love that her young heart feels.”107 Despite the operetta’s setting in the past, it conveys a modern sensibility: the daughter’s romantic “right” is recognized, and the individual triumphs while the collective ultimately benefits from this resolution.
In the intergenerational struggle, the golem is aligned with the younger generation, and particularly with those who fight for a just cause. The rabbi had initially defined the golem’s charge as “to protect the poor, weak, and suffering”; the golem uses this proclaimed “mission” to defy his creator. When the rabbi attempts to marry his daughter to Shimon, the golem stands by “the poor and weak,” in this case Miriam and Nakhman.108 After the defiant Miriam is banished from her home, the golem continues to defend her and, dramatically, saves her from death by fire. While the golem initially threatens that it will “have” the rabbi’s daughter before agreeing to turn back into clay, Miriam’s acceptance of the golem as a “good person” with a soul in its heart leads the monster to relinquish its desire and put an end to its own life.109 Though the golem also threatens its creator with the destruction of Prague, it never actually becomes violent. Leivick’s murderous golem thus stands in sharp contrast to Gabel’s morally acceptable Jewish anthropoid who ultimately protects the Jewish people and a Jewish woman in particular.
Gabel’s clay giant is one of the more human and likeable golem figures to be molded in this period. Both Wegener and Leivick created erratic and violent monsters that evoke horror, whereas the golem of the operetta is not a menacing being and raises its fists only to protect the rabbi. Gabel’s Prague rabbi breathed into his golem a soul and superhuman force and also endowed it with “a soft, feeling heart,” Rogoff wrote in Forverts. “And this same heart that was only supposed to bring happiness to the Jews, that was only supposed to feel sympathy for the poor and suffering—this heart also began to feel and to long after love.”110 When animating the golem, the rabbi tells it of its “mission” to protect the Jews, which shall be “engraved upon his heart.” The golem asks whether it has such an organ, and the rabbi tells it to place a hand on its breast and feel how it beats. The golem’s “heart” is the “ineffable name of God,” the animating parchment within the capsule that endows it with the “spell of life.” Rather than merely a mechanical or magical device, the capsule is analogous here to an internal human organ, but the golem is instructed not to develop “independent desires or demands.” Like Miriam, it must sacrifice its “heart,” its individual identity, for the sake of the Jews.111
The operetta’s golem was thus “more human than the average human” with its “superhuman heart” and “superhuman feelings,” according to Der tog. Kovessy himself and Gabel in his adaptation went “too far” with the humanization of the golem, when they endowed it with more than mere “physical heroism.”112 S. Robinzon of the Yidishes tageblat (Jewish daily news) conflated the golem’s humanity with its Jewishness in Gabel’s production. For Robinzon, this golem is “a Jew,” since “he cannot bear the injustices of the world”—apparently a distinctly Jewish trait. The golem ultimately becomes even more “humanely Jewish” (menshlikh-yidish) when it sacrifices itself, benefiting Miriam and her betrothed, as well as the Jewish community at large since the Emperor has promised to revoke the expulsion edict pursuant to the golem’s deanimation. When Wegener’s golem allows the child to remove the animating capsule, it too appears to determine when its own existence must end, but in this case, it is not for the sake of the Jewish community. Robinzon pits Gabel’s “Jewish golem” over and against Wegener’s golem, declaring that the German film is “goyish through and through.”113 In Gabel’s production, unlike Wegener’s final scene, the golem becomes a member of the Jewish community precisely through its manner of dying, which affirms the values of male self-sacrifice and female modesty and purity. Unlike the indeterminate monster of flesh in Leivick’s work, rejected by its Jewish creator and community, Gabel’s golem is integrated into the Jewish environment and is treated with dignity.
For the critic of Der tog, Wegener’s film constitutes an utter fantasy, set in a legendary past, whereas the Yiddish production, with its Jewish music, provides a more realistic Jewish environment (svive), despite the anachronistic electrical lamps.114 If Kovessy had already humanized the golem, Gabel and Schweid, in their translation-adaptation, further “Yiddishize” this figure—to comic ends. As the golem attains more knowledge, it quickly begins to question what it has learned. When the rabbi defines God as the “almighty” that has “created us and rules over us,” the golem wants to know if God created it. Hearing instead that the rabbi was its creator, the golem says, “You? Who are you to meddle [mishn zikh] with God’s deeds?” When the rabbi decrees that his command must be held sacred by the golem just as he holds God’s command as sacred, the golem scoffs, “Must? . . . Fie! [feh], I don’t believe in the word ‘must.’”115 Using exclamations like “feh,” Gabel’s golem sounds at ease in the Yiddish tongue, defying its creator in his own language almost from the moment it opens its eyes. Interweaving a self-affirming plot spoken in colloquial Yiddish with musical numbers, Gabel’s operetta appropriated the golem narrative for Yiddish popular culture and took away its more foreboding aspects and its transgressive bite. Just as the golem became more human and Jewish on the Yiddish stage, so too was its power used in a productive and ethical, rather than destructive, manner, benefiting the Jewish community.
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The golem’s immense success in the New York of 1921 suggests that the clay monster had important cultural “work” to perform on American shores. The golem narrative bridged post–World War I European and American cultures, creating a sense of transnational golemhood: Leivick’s poema spoke to the devastating effects of World War I and Russian civil strife, while Wegener’s film became relevant, in its American packaging, to the Jewish refugee and immigrant problem. These golem texts and productions emphasized the theme of persecution in exile in order to scrutinize the role of Jewish leaders and their vision of how Jews should act when they possess a powerful golem. But whereas Leivick’s text, with its abject golem, can be read as implicitly concerned with Jewish integration into American society, Gabel’s operetta revolves around internal class issues, portraying the emancipation of the young Jewish woman and the rabbi’s diminished authority as he admits to an error of judgment.
The goleming that took place in 1921 New York had a high entertainment value, even when it alluded to the serious subject matter of Jewish persecution and exile. The American golem was an object of general fascination on the part of both Jewish and non-Jewish audiences, and it garnered attention from a wide range of daily newspapers. The intense uptake of this post–World War I story of artificial creation has had a long-lasting effect, even when the New York “golem-cult” subsided in the 1930s: Leivick’s drama continues to be performed on the American stage well into the twenty-first century, and Wegener’s film exerted its visual impact on scores of subsequent productions. In this manner, the image of the golem as a violent redeemer with an axe was imprinted in the American cultural memory and came to symbolize the brutal twentieth century and the consequences of its wars and revolutions for Jewish populations in Europe. As we shall see in the next chapters, in the post–World War II era, the golem emerged once again, in different continents and for different purposes. American artists created their own powerful and vengeful golem in the medium of comics, portraying figures that could rewrite history and teach the Nazis a lesson. Israeli writers of the post-1948 period drew instead on the figure of the golem as a suffering victim, akin to a war-injured soldier. The violence of the golem could also be redirected: projected onto past and present enemies of the Jews and their newfound state.