On June 28, 1948, at the first swearing in of soldiers to the Israeli Defense Army in Tel Aviv, the minister of foreign affairs, Moshe Sharet (Shartok), who was to become Israel’s second prime minster in 1954, alluded to the attacking Arab forces as a creation of the British. He declared that Britain spread fear of this giant “axe-swinging” enemy: “At first, the [Arab] golem withstood the test of our young Israeli men. . . . They ultimately managed, without any experience in fighting, to beat the enemy and undermine the false legend about the Arab forces.”1 Ten days earlier, in a speech delivered at the council meeting of the Workers’ Party of the Land of Israel, Sharet similarly contended that the large army of the Arab League was a “golem created by someone and aimed at us by that someone”—that is, by the British. This conglomerate army, he said, was reminiscent of a golem in its size but also in the “bloated” reputation of its strength.2 The golem metaphor allowed Sharet to rally the Israeli army—a small but ideologically committed force, vital to the new country’s survival—by suggesting that the supposedly powerful Arab armies all around them could be overcome since, like a golem, they were already more dead than alive.
With the founding of the Israeli nation came the birth of an entirely new golem, not a savior and redeemer, however ambivalent, but rather an evil enemy of the Jews. Sharet’s allusion was characteristic of his time period: the Hebrew-language press of the 1940s commonly compared the League of Arab Nations to a golem. And specifically, his evocation of the dreadful, axe-swinging giant also suggests the public’s familiarity with H. Leivick’s rendering of the golem story. Indeed, the soldiers’ swearing-in ceremony took place on the square in front of the Habima Theater in Tel Aviv, home to the Russian-born troupe that first staged Leivick’s 1921 Der goylem in Hebrew translation. Inspired by Yudl Rosenberg’s portrayal of the golem as a ba’al guf (strong or tough man), as we have seen in chapter 2, Leivick’s violent redeemer is ultimately an indeterminate figure, created to counter anti-Semitism but, through mistreatment, reduced to a murderous animal. The golem monster of Sharet’s speech, and of the Israeli press in the 1940s, no longer represented the new, strapping man or the revival of a combative Jewish spirit but rather the supposed power of the attacking Arab nations, which had to be dispelled and destroyed. With this metaphor, Israeli society also distanced itself from diasporic Jewish culture and its cultural legacy. The golem as a transformed Jew represented the changes that European Jewish society underwent in the early twentieth century; the Israeli nation now sought, by contrast, to project the negative attributes of the golem onto its enemies instead.
But, as we will see, in the coming years, another version of the golem story also emerged in Israel. This other side of the “golem condition”—the monster as evocative of war-related disability, powerlessness, and even death—emerged in Israeli literature written in the aftermath of the 1948 battles. In this literature, the golem became an emblem of destruction more generally, no longer representing one combatting side or the other. S. Y. Agnon’s Ad hena (To This Day), published in 1952, set the tone in this regard, portraying the golem as a living-dead soldier. For Agnon, the modern golem is not a magical or mystical entity animated through the ineffable name of God as in the Prague story. Instead, it is a product of warfare, extracted from the mangled bodies of the dead and functioning as a scientific curiosity. Ad hena mobilizes the golem story to reflect critically on the ways in which human beings are molded into modern soldiers. In so doing, Agnon, implicitly following in Wegener’s footsteps, showed the ongoing relevance of the golem story for artworks concerning the destructive and dehumanizing effects of war. Writing this text when Israeli nationhood was being conjured into existence, Agnon creates a foreboding image of the alternate “golem,” the injured soldier. This unmovable, machine-like veteran is not a potential war hero but a survivor that has shed his human demeanor.
Precisely because the majority of the Israeli literary and journalistic output around 1948 expressed “a heroic national line, full of faith in the righteousness of the battle for independence,” Agnon preferred to avoid any direct criticism of current events and set his work instead during the watershed war of 1914–1918.3 As neither an almighty soldier nor a powerful weapon, Agnon’s German “golem” still invited self-reflection on the part of Israeli citizens who had just emerged from their War of Independence. Yoram Kaniuk, an Israeli author who fought and was wounded in the 1948 war, took up Agnon’s implicit challenge in his 1966 novel Ḥimo melekh yerushalayim (Himmo, King of Jerusalem). Set in the besieged Jerusalem of 1948, this text revolves around the figure of a severely wounded soldier, also nicknamed “golem.” In both Agnon’s and Kaniuk’s fiction, “golem” is the term for the inexplicably tenacious human being who clings to life despite his proximity to death. These living-dead men pose a horrific challenge to their caretakers and loved ones, raising questions about the celebration of nationalist sentiment and the willingness to sacrifice the lives of young men for the Israeli cause. Dani Horowitz’s 1982 drama Yossele golem also casts the artificial monster as a soldier, in this case a declared “war hero” who violently defeats the foes of the Jews but cannot usher in peace or messianic redemption.4 What we have, then, in Israel, is a bifurcated golem, created at times of national upheaval and self-reflection but for nearly opposite ends. Unlike Sharet’s and others’ use of the golem to depict the self-destructive military power of enemy nations and to convey the genuine might of the small Israeli army, these Hebrew writers drew on the golem story to expose the vulnerability of societies, including their own, that rely on violent measures to achieve political goals. They show how these societies are ultimately reshaped in the image of their golems, becoming blind to human suffering and trampling the various minority groups and “others” within their midst.
In April 1948, while fierce battles raged in Israel, the national Habima Theater troupe arrived in the United States to showcase four of its established and representative pieces, including its adaptation of Leivick’s Der goylem, first staged in Moscow in 1925. Back in Israel, the journalist Uri Keisari rebuked the “national theater” for deserting its country in a time of struggle and need.5 In the U. S., Yiddish critics did not view Habima’s productions as a throwback to eastern European culture of twenty years prior but interpreted Der goylem as an urgent call, prescient in its time, for the use of Jewish physical force. A review in the Yiddish press echoed the famous slogan of Zionist defense movements in Palestine, “with blood and fire Yehuda will rise,” arguing that already in the 1920s, Leivick understood—and took a fresh approach to—the problems that continued to be pressing a quarter of a century later.6 When adapting the drama for the Hebrew-language stage in Russia, the Habima troupe renamed the golem, originally called Yossel (a diminutive for Joseph), as Yehuda, suggesting “the revival of the ancient Jewish fighting spirit” that could sustain “the hope of a national resurrection.”7 Since Yehuda or Judah was also the given name of Rabbi Loew of Prague, this renaming emphasized the golem’s status as the rabbi’s double. Hence, arriving in New York just as “the new Jewish State came into being,” Habima not only celebrated this occasion but also, through its golem production, presented an allegory of the birth of a state through violence and bloodshed.8
The golem of the 1948 production appeared to Yiddish reviewers as he “should”: a strapping man, a “ba‘al guf” in their words, yet with the brain of a child.9 The Habima actor Aharon Meskin embodied the golem as both a “menacing” and “comic” figure, not only inspiring dread but also adding a “dimension of humor.”10 In this sense, Yair Lipshitz argues, Meskin’s golem is a soulless and mechanical “new Jew” that also displays a “clownish-comic” aspect, enhancing the threatening and foreign side of this bodily ideal through distancing humor.11 Moreover, Leivick’s drama, even in Habima’s shortened and altered adaptation, paints a tragic and terrifying picture of the Jewish resort to violence.12 The murder of innocent Jews at its end reveals that the golem’s unleashed force can and will turn against its creators. Half a century later, in 2002, as the Second Intifada raged in Israel, the production of Leivick’s play in New York at the Manhattan Ensemble Theater raised the question of whether or not “the mighty Jewish state has become a golem for the 21st century, promising protection but leading to peril.”13
Such comparisons of the golem both to the new type of “muscle Jew” in twentieth-century Zionist discourse and to the Jewish state and nation at large emerged from the long-standing portrayal of the golem as a defender of the Jewish community, epitomized by Rosenberg’s 1909 Seyfer nifloes Maharal (The Golem or The Miraculous Deeds of Rabbi Leyb). The assumptions underlying these comparisons were that the golem, as an extension of its creator, the Jewish rabbi, was a product of Jewish society and would serve this society in times of great need. But, in contrast to the Yiddish-language use of the golem, in the Hebrew-language press coverage in the decades before and during the battle for independence, the term golem no longer suggested the ambivalent creation of a new Jew or else a worldwide misuse of modern technology but came to denote the enemies of the Jews and their weapons. Around World War II and Israel’s War of Independence, the Hebrew press uniquely used the golem metaphor with reference to Germans and Arabs, and this artificial creation now functioned as an unambiguous symbol of monstrous evil. Journalists representing a wide political spectrum evoked the destructive and rebellious aspects of the golem story to project the downfall of the Nazi regime or the loss of British control over the Arab League.
Already in 1938, the religious-nationalist paper Ha-tsofe published a piece regarding the expulsion of sixty Jews by sea from Vienna, calling the Nazi commander of the ship a “living golem,” one of the “seventy million [German] golems who loyally obey every command of the ‘Führer.’”14 In this piece, the monstrous golem is a metaphor for those brainwashed (or brainless) citizens and soldiers who unthinkingly follow the commands of their superiors, however cruel and racist they might be.
During World War II, Israeli newspapers likewise evoked the golem to describe the war technologies of the Nazi regime, including their tanks, airplanes, and missiles.15 Writing for the revisionist daily paper Ha-mashkif, Marian Zyd described the nightly attacks of Nazi V1 flying bombs on London in 1944 as “the satanic buzz of flying golems.” In contrast to the German airplanes operated by human pilots during the Blitz, these bombs were guided by autopilot and powered by a pulse jet engine that produced a buzzing noise. According to Zyd, British Jews called the V1 bomb “the golem”: “It looks like a golem, flies like a golem, and spreads terror like a golem, and the Jews then recall the old tale about the golem that ultimately destroyed its creator.”16 Though Zyd gives a nod to the Jews as a people familiar with the “old tale about the golem,” here the term loses its association with the Jewish community and simply refers to the robotic weapons of the Nazis.
Such evocations of the golem story stand in stark contrast to the golem’s appearance in European film and literature of the same period. For example, Julien Duvivier’s 1936 French-Czech coproduction Le Golem portrays a Jewish Prague community struggling under the rule of a fascist Emperor. In this film, shot after the Nuremberg Race Laws went into effect in 1935, the golem is a creation of the Jewish community and represents the “right” of the enslaved minority to revolt and seek justice. In Tel Aviv, the local press described Le Golem, which had a two-week run in July 1948 (after originally screening in 1937), as a film featuring a revolutionary monster that breaks free of its own chains and redeems the Jewish ghetto.17 A “symbol of revolt,” rather than blind obedience, this cinematic golem reminds us that the Hebrew press’s depiction of the golem as the enemy was a distinctive variation that needs to be accounted for.
Relying on the catch-all idea of the golem as a destructive creation that can easily turn against its creator, the Israeli press further compared this figure to the Arab enemy and its Arab League, founded in late 1944. The notion that the Arab League was a “synthetic” or artificial creation of the British was repeated so often that the Workers’ Party paper, ‘Al ha-mishmar (On guard), pronounced that it was common knowledge in the press that the national Arab movement was but a “golem created by the forces of imperialism.”18 Ha-mashkif spelled out the analogy: “The British government brought to life a golem for its own needs—the Arab League. And this ‘league’ certainly carried out its creator’s will many times. But it appears that when the ‘shem ha-meforash’ [the ineffable name] will be removed, Great Britain will no longer be able to control this golem.” As an example, the reporter relates the League’s unwillingness to adhere to the British decision to allow further Jewish immigration to Palestine according to the limits placed by current quotas.19
For Hillel Danzig in the daily paper Davar, the Arab golem was but a reincarnation of the previous Nazi monster. While the “midwife” of the new and barbaric golem was “British imperialism” (supported by U.S. foreign policy), its true political-ideological “spiritual father” was Nazi Germany, he wrote. A supposed “barrier” or defense against the Soviet incursion in the Middle East, the new and more artificial golem embodied in the Arab nations was bound to turn against the Western powers and betray them politically.20 In late July 1948, after the second truce of the 1948 battles was declared (they resumed in October 1948), Davar deemed the Arab League a “weak union” of seven Arab nations, close to disintegration. This “golem” was founded on one principle: “The nonsolution of the question of the Land of Israel.” A resolution of this question would therefore cause the golem to collapse. The day of this collapse was very near, the Davar journalist contended, since the Arab League was bound to fail in the war against the Israeli forces.21
The golem metaphor was thus commonly associated with the Arab enemies of 1948, not only the Arab League but also other Arab leaders such as the king of Jordan, Abdullah I bin al-Hussein, and King Idris I of Lybia.22 During the first swearing in of soldiers to the Israeli Defense Army in June 1948, Foreign Minister Moshe Sharet called, as we saw earlier, for the unification of the various prestatehood Jewish fighting forces into one strong army that could defeat the golem-like Arab military forces. He compared the battle of the Israelis against the Arabs to the story of David and Goliath, contending that the Israelis had struck back against the giant golem with its “swaying axe,” in so doing heroically dispelling the myth of the enemy’s strength.23 The evocation of the golem story at this historically significant military and national event suggests the public’s familiarity with, and the rhetorical effectiveness of, the new Arab face of the golem.
Imagined as a malicious giant that can be toppled, the golem in this use also enhanced the contrast with a particular image of the Israeli military—as supposedly independent of foreign influence and capable of withstanding attack. Israeli soldiers derived their power from an inner sense of conviction in the Jewish right to fight for the land of Palestine. This disassociation of the nascent Israeli army from the golem story marked the desire for a break from the Jewish diasporic past and its abiding mythologies. The golem was, supposedly, a product of Jewish weakness in the diaspora, a much-needed strongman in an age of Jewish dependence on other nations. In Zionist hands, the golem shed its earlier ambiguity and came to embody the menacing external enemy that would ultimately destroy itself or be defeated. Rather than superimposing the Star of David on the golem, as in Paul Wegener’s 1920 film, or using it for the golem’s capsule, as in Max Gabel’s 1921 operetta, the Israeli state’s leaders and journalists severed this implicit connection between the golem and Jewish nationalism. But the Israeli literature published in the aftermath of the 1948 war had a different story to tell about the significance of the golem for the nascent state.
During this fraught historical moment, and as the golem flourished in the Israeli press as a stand-in for the enemy, S. Y. Agnon was writing his war narrative Ad hena. The prolific Hebrew author, who received the Nobel Prize for literature in 1966, also envisioned an atypical golem: a Christian German wounded soldier. Even as the horrors of World War II became known, and after Agnon’s own nation went to war, he specifically set his work in a different time and place, during World War I—a war in which Jews and Christians fought side by side. That deflection away from his own immediate circumstances, as we will see, enabled him to portray the “golem condition” at large and to reflect the more recent wars in an indirect manner.
Well versed in the ancient Talmudic and mystical medieval connotations of the golem as well as in modern narratives about the golem of Prague, Agnon exhibits in Ad hena his interest in the golem’s earlier popularity and the widespread circulation of this narrative during World War I.24 One of the texts responsible for the general fascination with artificial creation during this war was Der Golem, the best-selling novel by the Austrian author Gustav Meyrink, published in 1915.25 Drawing on Meyrink’s work, Agnon revisited in Ad hena the German golem fad that intensified in this period. His contemporary golem is a brain-injured veteran who cannot follow orders, converse, or reveal his identity. We see him through the eyes of the book’s narrator, a Jewish man who disassociates himself from this living-dead soldier and from the German war effort more generally. Nevertheless, the Jewish narrator comes to resemble the German golem as the narrative progresses. As the lives of these two men intersect in crucial ways, Agnon depicts one of the consequences of nationalist fervor and the rapid development of modern war technologies: the fundamental destruction of the human body and self, made in the image of God. While the golem story lends itself to a fantastical vision of the physical capacities and heroic nature of modern soldiers, it also, as Meyrink, Wegener, and Leivick insisted, represents human—and particularly male—fallibility and mortality.
Agnon’s Ad hena is a formally experimental and highly digressive work. The strangeness of the text is most clear in its apparent asymmetry: the first seven chapters depict less than a week in the narrator’s life, and the last eight chapters rush through several months, and then several years, at an ever-accelerating pace. The golem plot ends abruptly in the middle of the work, and no other obvious unifying device takes its place.26 Ad hena’s first-person narrator, a Galician Jew stranded in Germany, does not join the war effort, although unlike Agnon, who spent the war years immersed in the study of Jewish history and religion, he finds it impossible to resume his research on the “history of clothing.” At the book’s opening, on the eve of his planned journey from Berlin to Grimma, the narrator cuts off the margins of his manuscript and discards unnecessary sections in order to lessen its literal (and presumably metaphorical) weight. Here and elsewhere, Agnon seems skeptical about the possibility of literary and scholarly writing amid war and mass death; his doubt about creation goes hand in hand with his constant subversion of the notions of authorship and originality.27
Taking my cue from the narrator’s relationship to his own unfinished manuscript, I consider Ad hena a self-consciously aborted novel—hence, I would argue, its deliberate asymmetry. This work embodies the notion of an aborted existence, like that of the golem and his modern counterpart, the wounded soldier. Ad hena is longer than any of Agnon’s novellas, though shorter than his fully developed novels, Oreaḥ nata lalun (A Guest for the Night) and Tmol shilshom (Only Yesterday). Published in 1939, Oreaḥ nata lalun portrays the aftermath of World War I, primarily within a Jewish community in eastern Europe. Appearing over a decade later, Ad hena takes place during World War I in Germany and centers on the daily contact between Jews and Christians on the home front. Its deliberate structural and thematic disarray implicitly questions the possibility of writing a developed and unified novel about the modern experience of war. Although finished by Agnon himself, in contradistinction to the posthumously published Shira or Be-ḥanuto shel mar Lublin (In Mr. Lublin’s store), Ad hena leaves us wondering not only about the structure of the work itself but also about what has been left out of the text.
Ad hena revolves around the narrator’s travels from one German city or town to another and describes the hardship of both travel itself and the search for a decent place to reside. While Agnon plays in this fictional narrative with many autobiographical resonances, his narrator’s inability to gain footing in war-ravaged Germany is reminiscent not only of Agnon’s own sojourn in Germany during World War I but also of his experiences after the bombardment of his home in the Israeli battles for independence, as he and his family became temporary dwellers in their country.28 Agnon first resided in a boardinghouse in Reḥaviah, a neighborhood in west Jerusalem, not far from his wife and children, who had relocated earlier.29 He lived in the room of the owner’s drafted son, who was off fighting in the 1948 war—just as his narrator stays in the room of the injured “golem” when living in Berlin at the outset of World War I. In Tiberias, where Agnon sought respite for five months during the 1948–1949 winter, his hosts, the Me’iri family, had lost a son in the battles for independence. It was in Tiberias, according to Agnon’s biographer Dan Laor, that Agnon composed parts of Ad hena, which initially bore the title Bi-yemot ha-milḥama (In the days of the war).30
Agnon’s new take on the golem story thus needs to be interpreted through the dual lens of his experiences in World War I Germany—where he resided between 1912 and 1924—and in 1948 Israel. In both cases, the author avoided serving on the front lines or otherwise contributing to the war effort, but he was personally affected by the wars he witnessed.31 If World War II also casts its shadow on Ad hena, which critically depicts early twentieth-century German society, this war is present in a far more indirect manner than the explicit setting of World War I and the implicit resonances of the 1948 period, which Agnon lived through on the home front.32 As we have seen, some of the narrator’s misadventures align with Agnon’s own travails in the years 1948–1949, when he resided in the homes of friends and in boardinghouses. Yet in contrast to other Israeli writers of the period, such as S. Yizhar and Avot Yeshurun, Agnon never overtly dealt with the events of 1948 in his writings. Sidra DeKoven Ezrahi aptly notes that for Agnon, “the inflection point of ‘secular history,’ easily incorporated into Jewish time, is August 1914.” “What then of 1948?” she asks. Not only in Ad hena but also in Agnon’s other works of the period, he elides the changed borders of Jerusalem after 1948 and the radically altered conditions of Jewish life in Israel.33 Still, his writing about the high price that Jews and non-Jews paid during World War I should be seen, I suggest, as attuned to his surroundings, resulting in an unspoken tension between past and present.
If during the fighting Agnon could not remain secure in his home or avoid being affected by the war and the toll it took on human life, his narrator on the German home front similarly worries about his potential enlistment and injury, as he encounters grieving families. On revisiting one friend, the sharp-witted Jewish bibliographer Dr. Mittel, whose son has recently died on the front lines, the narrator finds Mittel submerged in a particularly dark mood, as he reflects on German society:
Freedom of thought has fathered tolerance; tolerance has given birth to democracy; and democracy does not tolerate tolerance. . . . The world has forgotten what truth means, and falsehood has taken its place. You may have considered our generation’s physiognomy. No one looks cynical anymore. Every face is exposed like the teeth of the Kintopp [movie] actresses. The face of the generation is one of innocence—and precisely that is its cynicism: a countenance of innocence and honesty coupled with evil and sinful deeds.34
Mittel alludes here to a Mishnaic figure of speech, “The face of this generation is as the face of a dog,” which denotes the potential corruption of a generation, particularly its leaders, the so-called face of the public.35 In tractate Sota 9:15, this phrase refers to the subversion of proper power structures, foreseeing a time in the future when “they that shun sin shall be deemed contemptible, and truth shall nowhere be found. Children shall shame the elder, and the elders shall rise up before the children.” Therefore, instead of trusting one’s own family members, the rabbis assert that “we can stay ourselves . . . on our Father in heaven.”36 In Agnon’s text, societal corruption is also expressed in the fact that Mittel mourns his son rather than the other way around. From the narrator’s viewpoint, the Jewish sacrifice for the German war effort appears more and more absurd, especially since these acculturated Jews can rely neither on their father on earth (the German kaiser) nor on the father in heaven.
Significantly, the nascent medium of film serves as a metaphorical means for understanding the troubled era. Agnon himself described frequent visits in these same years to a Berlin movie theater, or Kintopp (slang for Kinematograph), especially on cold winter days when the Jewish library closed its doors between two and four.37 In Mittel’s description of the absence of “truth” in German society, Agnon creates a surprising pairing: the Mishnah and cinema. He portrays the evocative power of film’s close-up techniques, which brought the faces of actors closer to audiences, revealing details that would not have been visible to previous generations. For the film critic Béla Balázs, writing in the 1920s, the visual expressivity of cinema and its close-ups expose the soul of surface-level phenomena, thereby animating both faces and landscapes on the screen. Wegener likewise had his face, as a golem, filmed in great close-up, exposing the humanity behind the supposedly inhuman monster made of dead matter. Mittel, by contrast, considers the exposure of the face through the moving image as a reversal of physiognomy’s central tenet—the notion that outer appearance reveals inner nature. Instead, he suggests that if the war has altered the very nature of the human face and its potential interpretation, then cinema exacerbates rather than resolves this condition.38 What it “reveals” is the decline of society, which hides behind the deceiving, “innocent” mask of democracy.39 For the grief-stricken Mittel, the apparent exposure of his generation covers up the truth rather than expressing it; like the actresses’ teeth, this generation’s supposed innocence can and does bite.40
Agnon’s narrator not only learns about the “face of the generation” from Mittel but also trains his own gaze on German society, both its soldiers and its civilians. The external appearance of the World War I veteran has been radically altered through the use of prosthetic limbs and plastic surgery. During the narrator’s first train travel outside Berlin, he must fight his way onto the train: “The car was packed with passengers: war provisioners, Ersatz products dealers, military nurses, officers’ mistresses, and amputees back from the front with their crutches, empty sleeves, rubber limbs, glass eyes, noses fashioned from buttocks by plastic surgeons, and terrified and terrifying faces that had lost their human features in the war.”41 Starting with people who have benefited economically from the war—the provisioners and Ersatz dealers—the list progresses to those whose own body parts must be replaced. The loss of human facial features is terrifying, but even more distressing for the narrator is the apathetic face of the brain-injured soldier whom he encounters at Brigitta’s convalescence home. Described as “a kind of golem man without a brain,” the German soldier epitomizes the terror of war, the way it has altered the face of a particular generation and that of humanity more generally.42
Casting the golem as a non-Jewish soldier, Agnon plays with his readers’ expectations about the nature of the golem and distances this term from its commonplace association with Jewish rabbis and kabbalists. The man, nicknamed “golem” by his German caretakers, is rescued from the battlefield during World War I, “cast amid heaps of crushed corpses,” after his entire battalion is killed.43 A living-dead man, he can no longer be identified with the nationalist forces that sent him to the battle front, but the narrator also does not approve of his new name:
His face was opaque and his eyes did not reveal a flicker of life. I’m surprised that Brigitta called him a golem. In my own opinion he didn’t merit the name golem because the golem created by the Maharal was more beautiful, more human. Picture a long pair of arms, a long pair of legs, a face like dried clay, witless eyes that have no life in them, and two slumped shoulders capped by a motionless head. I would be very surprised if this golem could understand anything, let alone do what he was told.44
Ironically, the artificially created Prague golem seems more “human” and beautifully formed than the injured veteran does, with his lifeless eyes and motionless limbs. Though his heart continues to beat, he is “incapable of thought” and unable, or unwilling, to speak. While Agnon’s Jewish narrator might wish to distinguish the rabbi-created golem from this modern and secular phenomenon of war injury, he is proven otherwise in the course of the narrative.
The brain-damaged veteran at the center of Agnon’s text is first treated at the convalescence home outside Leipzig. His memory loss and inability to speak forces the narrator and others to focus on his exterior in their search for clues that might account for his condition. But this exterior turns out to be both opaque and misleading, precluding any possibility of physiognomic interpretation. The “golem man” also functions as the double of a Russian prisoner of war who works at a farm outside the convalescence home, a man who cannot return to his own home and with whom no one will converse, aside from ordering him to perform tasks and scolding him. The Jewish narrator, exiled from both Galicia and Palestine, is linked to these two soldiers; he identifies with the Russian prisoner as a “lost son,” and over the course of the narrative, he comes to resemble the German “golem.”
Using this notion of a “brainless” man, Agnon situates the figure of the wounded soldier within the medical and historical context of World War I, just as he spins around him a web of scriptural, folkloric, and psychological associations. First, he is attuned to the novelty of brain injuries during World War I as well as to the difficulty of their diagnosis and treatment. Michael Hagner, a historian of medicine, writes that brain injury in this war constituted a “new physiognomic phenomenon.” These young men “often had apathetic and chronically helpless faces” and not infrequently suffered from “a complete breakdown of their verbal, mimetic, and gesticular repertoire.”45 Agnon’s “golem man” similarly has an apathetic, lifeless expression and neither responds to requests nor communicates his own needs. The narrator comes to presume that the wounded man has lost his ability to hear and discern.46
The notion that war reduces men to mere golems or else to vacant and senseless goylems—Yiddish for “brainless idiots”—corresponds, moreover, to the national use of male bodies as raw material (ḥomer gelem) to be deployed for warlike purposes.47 As Hagner contends, moreover, the brain-damaged soldiers of World War I were impervious to the course of rapid therapy and reintegration into society and the labor force that was practiced in other types of physical injury.48 These soldiers easily become dehumanized “golems” in a very narrow sense of the term: brainless, lifeless men who can no longer contribute to society. Pushing against the ideal of the injured but economically productive veteran, Agnon paints a disturbing, foreboding image of human devastation. He shows how all those who have dealings with these returning soldiers are also severely affected by their condition, even when they deny the irreparability of war injury. After the “golem” returns to his family in Berlin and regains his name—Hans—he appears unaltered: when the narrator next encounters him on the street with Hans’s sister, Hildegard, the former golem still does not converse or respond to her addresses. Evidently, the “new suit” that Hildegard intends to have made for her brother will not turn him into a “new person,” as she hopes.49
Agnon offsets the historical meaning of the character’s brain injury with the more mythic dimension conjured by the golem. Gershom Scholem has traced “the idea of the golem” back to the Talmudic association with the first human, adam, in his unformed state, before being invested with a living soul.50 In Agnon’s own posthumously published compilation of Jewish sources concerning language and writing, Sefer sofer ve-sipur (Book, author, and story), he quotes Rashi’s commentary on tractate Sanhedrin 65b, recounting Rabbi Rabba’s creation of a human. Rashi writes that Rabba’s act of creation was performed in accordance with the ancient mystical treatise Sefer yetsira (The Book of Creation), “which taught him to combine the letters of a [holy] name.” Still, the creation could not respond, since it “was not endowed with speech,” and this characteristic marks it as magically created by others and not actually a human being.51
Agnon’s modern golem-soldier resembles these Talmudic golem prototypes with whom communication is not possible. This golem, however, is a man-made product of war, an outcome of secular technological development rather than a mythical creature created through the magical manipulation of Hebrew letters. Made of “flesh, sinew, and bones,” instead of earth or clay, the brain-injured protagonist of Ad hena cannot remember his “name” or “place.” Agnon thus portrays him as doubly God-forsaken, for both words in Hebrew are synonymous with God (ha-shem and ha-makom).52 The name “golem” does not refer back to the creator in this case but instead becomes a placeholder for the absent God. The “golem man” here also signifies a state of personal and societal “brainlessness,” creative impotence, and loss of faith in the power of language and letters. The fascination of Ad hena’s narrator with the injured and apathetic soldier tells of his need to find respite for his tormented state of creative and spiritual paralysis.53 In other words, the condition of brainlessness has its own allure and stands in sharp contrast to the narrator’s repetitive patterns of thought and movement. Compared to both the narrator and the German veteran, the supposedly more “human” golem of Prague represents physical prowess, on the part of the animated monster, and creative potency, on the part of the creator, Rabbi Loew.
Hence, while the lengthy war entailed the formation of obedient soldiers, Agnon sees in World War I also the onset of an era of golem production. “The face of the generation” in this text is not only that of the movie actress and of the soldier who underwent reconstructive surgery but also that of the apathetic veteran who has suffered an untreatable brain injury, resulting in a condition of living-death. While injured young soldiers sought to reintegrate into civilian society, Agnon stresses that reintegration itself can become a mere illusion, a mask of recovery that only produces further golem-like subjects. In contrast to Wegener’s ultimate redemption of the golem, and of the new Christian society with him, for Agnon, World War I is the historical event that not only revealed the damaging nature of war technologies but also called into question the basic premises of the Enlightenment and European humanism.
The narrator of Ad hena reflects from his vantage point on the home front on the effects of the war both in popular visual culture and in the publishing industry. In contrast to the narrator’s incomplete manuscript, Agnon indirectly alludes to Gustav Meyrink’s extremely successful Der Golem (1915), a much-discussed wartime best-seller.54 Published by the Kurt Wolff press, located in the German publishing epicenter of Leipzig, Meyrink’s novel reached massive sales numbers for its time period: nearly two hundred thousand copies in the first decade of its publication, and most of these during the war years. The Wolff publishing house even printed a pocket edition intended for distribution to soldiers on the front lines. Accompanied by Hugo Steiner-Prag’s haunting illustrations, Der Golem is a fantastic thriller set in late nineteenth-century Prague, just prior to the demolition of the Jewish ghetto. While Meyrink drew on elements of the golem of Prague story, he freely altered them to suit his central plot. Meyrink’s ghostly golem returns to haunt the Jewish ghetto every thirty-three years (evoking Christ’s age at death), and his returns are always associated with the outbreak of murderous violence.
In Scholem’s assessment, Meyrink was influenced by esoteric mystical practices and theosophy, such that “deep-rooted mystical convictions and literarily exploited charlatanry were almost inextricably amalgamated” in his writings.55 Max Brod, in turn, contrasted Agnon and Meyrink in 1918, claiming that Agnon truly understands “the secrets of Jewish mysticism” and therefore far surpasses an “outsider” like the Austrian Meyrink.56 These critiques of Der Golem by prominent Jewish writers and intellectuals reverberate in a significant passage of Ad hena, which explains how the brain-injured soldier earned his nickname:
This was a name people knew all across Germany in those days, because a German author had written a book about the golem, and the publisher advertised it widely in the hope of earning back the money he had wasted on the author. He assembled a group of cripples, each shorter than the other, arranged them according to height, and gave them signs to hold that spelled out “golem” in large letters and had them parade through the streets of Leipzig during the annual fair, when the city was crowded with visitors. In this way the name golem became widely known and everyone talked about the golem who was made of clay and by the power of the sacred name of God under his tongue did everything he was ordered to do. “Today,” Brigitta said, “I’m sending the professors in Berlin a golem who is not made of clay and does not use the name of God, but his brain is certainly a golem brain. Incapable of thought, he does not even remember his own name.”57
The narrator never mentions the name of the “German author,” emphasizing instead the role of the (likewise unnamed) publisher as advertiser.58 Leaving the exact identity of the author unknown, albeit easy to guess, serves a double, conflicting purpose: it renders the author’s name “ineffable,” unpronounceable, akin to God’s name, at the same time as it undermines the power of his authorship. In hinting at the legacy of Der Golem, Agnon cynically underscores the role of the modern publisher as creator of the book, registering both his authorial and religious anxieties concerning human mediation in the creation process. As Franz Werfel wrote in a 1916 letter to Wolff, “Nowadays one hears and reads everywhere only Kurt Wolff. Your advertising, especially the ads in the paper, was the most intensive campaign one could imagine: The publisher has created The Golem more than its author.”59
For Agnon, modern texts about the golem are not necessarily a pleasing product of human creativity but instead may result from a distorted and even destructive attempt to mangle literary creation for a quick profit. Agnon thus constructs a network of grotesque links between the publishing industry and the market of flesh—that is, the war, which produces both invalids and “brainless” golems. The publicity stunt of the German word Golem turns the sign-bearing “crippled” men at the Leipzig fair into an attraction of sorts. Similarly, the golem-soldier’s caretakers are fascinated by his strange injury, which becomes a kind of medical “spectacle.” In the German context, the term golem thus provides a way of labeling war injury and even endowing it with visual appeal and a mythical aura. Thus, if Meyrink’s Der Golem is a thriller that promotes an ominous atmosphere of suspense, Ad hena conveys the monotony and suspended temporality of wartime life through the narrative’s structural circularity and repetitions.
The grotesque marketing campaign for the nameless “book about the golem” also corresponds to Meyrink’s own depiction of the Jewish Prague ghetto as a site of human distortion. For him, the Prague ghetto is “the site of mental disease, decadence, and sexual corruption,” to quote Cathy Gelbin.60 His narrator, a non-Jewish man who lives in the ghetto, trains his markedly physiognomic gaze on the buildings of the ghetto and its inhabitants. The grotesque quality of such descriptions serves metonymically to characterize this Jewish environment, which is on the verge of destruction, as uncanny, sinister, and even repulsive. Meyrink’s narrator, for example, often evokes attributes from the animal world of spiders, rabbits, horses, and birds to depict Jewish characters. He also looks at the faces and gestures of the Jewish ghetto inhabitants to try to decipher their familial relationships, and what he can “read from their facial features” are the different “types” and “breeds” to which each person belongs.61 The golem itself is portrayed as belonging to a “Mongolian type,” with its “yellow complexion” and slanted eyes. For Gelbin, because these negative images of Jews are presented from the perspective of the unreliable narrator, they cannot be taken at face value as anti-Semitic reiteration but must be seen as projections that offer “deliberate reflections of the non-Jewish discourse on the Jews.”62
Agnon’s text shows how new types of war injuries, alongside the development of new entertainment technologies, have altered the face of a generation and indeed the very notion of physiognomy. Ad hena offers a reversal of the physiognomic gaze that makes clear-cut connections between the inner and outer aspects of a person and that has so often been directed at Jews. Living outside of an enclosed Jewish community, the narrator of Ad hena trains his gaze on the war-injured men returning from the battlefield and the German women who have both taken their place in the workplace and family and await their return and need for care. For Agnon, writing from the perspective of his secularized Jewish narrator, there is no need to imagine, as Meyrink does, some mysterious and dangerous “soul” lurking behind the urban facade, epitomized by the figure of a haunting golem, for it is the surface of the body and its inhuman proximity to death that Agnon’s narrator finds most disturbing. The narrator’s interest in researching the history of clothing stems from his desire to see the injured or feminine body covered in culturally appropriate attire rather than revealed in its threatening naked vulnerability. Agnon’s narrator thus objectifies the German majority rather than the ethnic minority through a type of physiognomic gaze that nonetheless precludes any clear revelation of human essences.
Agnon’s relationship to the phenomenon of Meyrink’s best-seller is far more complex and ambivalent than the pejorative statements of the unreliable first-person narrator would reveal.63 Devoid of Der Golem’s more salacious plot elements, such as murder and adultery, Ad hena nevertheless contains copious echoes, minute but unmistakable, of the earlier work. Like Meyrink’s amnesiac protagonist who bears the false name “Athanasius Pernath,” the injured soldier in Ad hena suffers from a complete loss of memory and is temporarily given the name “golem.” In both texts, moreover, narrator and golem function as doubles of each other, but for Agnon, “golemhood” is a virtually contagious condition, so that other minor characters also exhibit attributes of the legendary golem (for instance, the face of the injured soldier Yosef Bach looks like “burnt earth”). Another shared plot detail exemplifies the way in which Agnon takes up, alters, and exaggerates aspects of the earlier text. When visiting a Berlin café, Agnon’s narrator notices a single spoon suspended from the ceiling, secured by an iron chain. He is told that the owner had attached it in this way since customers often failed to return the spoon after stirring their coffee.64 In the pub of Meyrink’s Jewish ghetto, spoons similarly hang from chains, but the explanation for this is that once a day, local criminals and prostitutes are given free soup, courtesy of a famous lawyer.65 The irony of providing free soup to criminals while securing their spoons becomes, in Agnon’s text, a doubly ironic distrust that renders all customers in Berlin potential thieves.
Such details, alongside the many intertextual links between the two works, suggest that Agnon’s Ad hena stands in a close dialogue with Meyrink’s far more popular novel. It is almost as if Ad hena were chained to Der Golem, against the will of the narrator, and constantly references its German source—a text that is itself a compilation of mystical sources. This form of preservation deflates Agnon’s own prose, calling into question its origins and originality. While Agnon’s narrator explicitly dismisses the “book about the golem” as a waste of the publisher’s money, the author implies that even in present-day Israel, one must return to and contend with Meyrink’s novel, a key German publishing phenomenon of the war years and an influential text in the modern literary history of golem adaptations. Similarly, the golem’s blank memory and expressionless face could represent the face of the 1948 generation as well: exuberant nationalism has erased the Jewish past from the face of the young nation.
Focused though the novel is on the physical (and thus also visual) dimension of war injury, Ad hena, as well as other Israeli rewritings of the golem story, contends with the role of Hebrew letters in the act of creation. In the marketing scene described earlier, Agnon turns the name golem into a series of (German) letters, and, similarly, Ad hena constantly reminds us of the basic building blocks of Hebrew words, the alphabet. More generally, Agnon considered Hebrew the holy tongue of creation and critiques attempts to modernize the language.66 Early Jewish mystical treatises such as Sefer yetsira present Hebrew and its alphabet as having miraculous powers, capable even of forming human beings, initially by God through the combination of letters and then, through imitation, by Abraham.
Traditionally, a golem-aspiring rabbi animates his lump of clay via the alphabet—whether through the word for truth, emet, or the ineffable or hidden name of God (shem ha-meforash).67 In thirteenth-century mystical treatises by R. Eleazar of Worms and R. Abraham Abulafia, a golem is brought to life through the recitation of combinations of letters (221 in total), following Sefer yetsira’s assignment of a letter to each bodily limb.68 In Agnon’s evocation of the golem, he reminds us of Hebrew’s history as a language of creation, raising what to him is the parallel question of Hebrew’s ongoing role within the fabric of the secular world and specifically in the context of Zionist nation-building. Although the very publication of Ad hena in the newfound State of Israel can be understood as Agnon’s reaffirmation of Hebrew after World Wars I and II, the author cautions us to heed Hebrew’s creative and scriptural legacy as enacted through golem-making.
Ad hena allows Agnon to explore these issues at a remove, showing how both German-language literature and German society embraced the golem story during World War I. For him, the modern golem is no longer a means of knowing God or imitating and celebrating divine creation but a way of undoing the world as created by God through language and bringing the holy tongue to the brink of destruction.69 Agnon’s rendition of the golem story also concerns the status of different languages; he reveals the grotesque results of attempting creation through warfare and animation with the help of German names rather than Hebrew ones. In Agnon’s text, animation and rebellion are thus conflated when the injured soldier, nicknamed “golem,” comes to life at the sound of a German street address.
Traveling back to Berlin with a group of soldiers from the convalescence home who require special medical attention, Agnon’s narrator is suddenly “overcome by a great sadness that made his limbs feel immobile.” Since he can barely move his hands and pick up his luggage, himself resembling the golem-soldier, the nurse in charge offers assistance, telling one of the soldiers to carry the narrator’s belongings to his Berlin “home.” The immobilized narrator proceeds to take out a piece of paper—reminiscent of the parchment on which the animating formula is inscribed in different versions of the golem story—and writes down “the name of the boardinghouse and the name of the street and the house number.” The soldier appointed to carry the narrator’s belongings then reads the address out loud. At this moment, “the same witless man whom everyone used to consider as lacking willpower suddenly jumps up and takes the belongings from the soldier’s hands, stuttering, ‘me, me, me.’”70
The secret formula that animates the war-injured “golem” is, ironically, a German place name and house number. Brought to life through these proper names rather than through God’s ineffable name, the soldier enacts the “failure to attain the linguistic level of the sacred” Hebrew language, even while the author upholds “the model of the world-creating language of Torah before him.”71 Moreover, the animating German names have a particular significance. From the opening sentence of Ad hena, the reader discovers that prior to the narrator’s train journey, he resided at Frau Trotzmüller’s boardinghouse in the Fasanenstrasse of Berlin.72 Trotzmüller relates having dreamt that her son, missing in action, will come home because of the narrator, and this is exactly what takes place when the “golem man,” the missing son, hears the street address and recognizes the name of the boardinghouse, his home.
Translated into Hebrew as reḥov ha-pasyonim (the street of the pheasants), the name of the street where the house is located evokes the pasyon, or passion, of Christ. It further brings to mind the massive and costly synagogue on the Fasanenstrasse, constructed by the Reform Jewish community of West Berlin. When the narrator subsequently approaches the boardinghouse, he takes note of the tall “temple of the enlightened with its gilded tiles made by the Kaiser Wilhelm Royal Tile Works.” Agnon alludes here to the historical Kaiser Wilhelm II, who contributed tiles for one of the synagogue’s halls from his factory in Kadinen, Poland, and sent his representative to the inauguration of the synagogue in 1912. The name of the street thus conjures up the name of the House of God, which has been secularized by the presence in proxy of another king, the German kaiser.73 The term “temple of the enlightened” ironically suggests that while the Reform Jewish community has put its faith in the German nation, an act symbolized by the new “patriotic synagogue,” its members cannot be accepted as “enlightened” and fully integrated citizens of German society.
Just as the street name is itself a juncture of Christian and Jewish terms, so the Jewish narrator appears to travel along his own Via Dolorosa, unwittingly helping to return the golem-soldier to his family, owners of the same boardinghouse on the Fasanenstrasse. The narrator’s room in Frau Trotzmüller’s house is then given over to the veteran, and he finds himself without a bed for the night: “I remained alone in the hallway, straightening myself and shrinking myself. Shrinking and straightening. Finally I stood like a golem whose actions are controlled by others. But here there was no one to tell me do this or do that.”74 On the train, the narrator felt like an immobile golem but unwittingly served as a Maharalic creator, since his actions animated the “golem”; this reversal of fortunes renders him a truly homeless golem. The so-called savior of the lost son becomes a neglected man, standing like a defunct golem whom no one even orders around.
The animation of the “witless” soldier is achieved through a particular combination of names, numbers, and letters that have resonances in both Hebrew and German. The term that Agnon uses for “boardinghouse” in Hebrew, pensyon, is itself a permutation of pasyon (passion), reminding us that the creative power of the Hebrew letters resides in their multiple permutations and combination.75 Yet the seemingly positive event of the veteran’s revival also leads to a negative outcome for the narrator, who finds himself without a bed and a home and is therefore simply another sacrificed Jew.
A similar interlinguistic game takes place with regard to the given name of the “golem man”: Hans Trotzmüller. As Hillel Weis has noted, the name Hans, without vocalization, could be read in Hebrew as ha-nes, the miracle.76 The narrator uses the term “miracle” in the same scene when, on his arrival at the boardinghouse, he finds the doors wide open despite the late hour. Soon enough he realizes that the cause for this strange occurrence is a small miracle of sorts: the family is celebrating the return of Hans. What constitutes a mock “miracle” for one man is another man’s disaster, and the narrator’s inadvertent assumption of the role of a Maharal through his writing of the address at that opportune moment renders him vulnerable to the revolt of the war-made golem and to that of language itself. The transformation from golem to Hans marks a transition from a Hebrew term (golem), adapted into German language and literature, to a German proper name, albeit one that echoes the Hebrew “miracle.”77 In other words, the presence of a German name, Hans, within the Hebrew alphabet (ha-nes) temporalizes the holy tongue in which the Torah was given.
The “miracle” of Hans’s return to his home and identity can also be read as comparable to the supposedly miraculous event of Hebrew’s own return to its “native” land and its use as a national spoken language, a secularized tongue. In both cases, however, the resurrection is incomplete and its outcomes are uncertain: Hans does not become a cured “new” man, even after he resumes his previous life, and the status of modern Hebrew—and its relationship to the scriptural past of the language—remains a subject of much contestation. Todd Hasak-Lowy has compared the mad dog in Agnon’s lengthy novel Tmol shilshom (Only Yesterday) with the golem story, claiming that the writing in Hebrew on the dog’s body represents the magical potential of the holy tongue and the risks involved in its Zionist secularization as an everyday language.78 The act of golem creation is likewise presented in Ad hena as a secularizing force necessitating the dangerous reform of Jewish tradition. The golem of World War I, however, is an interlingual and intercultural formation in which languages and identities contaminate each other, and the resulting creation—whether human or textual—rebels and overpowers its creator. The question remains open in Ad hena whether the return to Palestine/Israel could offer an alternative to this dismal linguistic and spiritual state of affairs.
Agnon thus uses the golem story to connect the devastations of past and present warfare with the issue of Hebrew textual and cultural modernization. When accused of a “lack of modernity,” Agnon once claimed, “I am not completely free of any trace of modernity myself, and even when I do not want to modernize [lehitmadren], modernity revolts [mitmaredet] and lords over me [roda bi].”79 Here, Agnon plays with the Hebrew root for modernity (mem-daled-resh), which, when the final two letters are reversed, spells the Hebrew word for rebellion (mem-resh-daled). With this alteration of the Hebrew signifier for modernity into one for revolt, a golem of modernity emerges that can rebel against its authorial creator. Ad hena is just such a rebellious text, a modern work the structure and progress of which seems to exceed its author’s command. Indeed, the confusing narrative itself mimics the golem’s growth and abrupt ending. The rushed and open denouement of this work further suggests that the condition of golemhood brought about by modern warfare precludes any true recovery or final return, so that Agnon’s own text similarly cannot attain the “end point” of Zion or Israel. Even when the narrator returns to Palestine and builds a home there, Agnon depicts him walking through the empty rooms of a library in which he hopes to house a collection of Jewish books from Germany. The arrival of this library from Germany could potentially bridge past and present—the events of World War I and the Zionist endeavor—but the empty rooms and the postponement of any concrete resolution make the ending inconclusive and ironic.
The issue of creation through the Hebrew language also stands at the forefront of the Israeli playwright Dani Horowitz’s drama Yossele golem. First performed in New York, in 1982, at La Mama E.T.C., the drama depicts the creation of a golem-savior using the twenty-two letters of the Hebrew alphabet. More specifically, Horowitz has the characters divide the animating word emet (truth) into its three letters (aleph–mem–tav), calling out words that begin with each letter. In this manner, the religious Jewish community intends to create a “hero,” an entity with miraculous “power” that can fight their anti-Semitic opponents. The golem, Yossele, declares with his first utterance, “I hear whatever I’m told to hear. They tell me to wait, and I truly wait. Since the early morning, they tell me to hear axes, and I hear the sound of axes.”80 In his battle against the priest Tadeush, who, as in Rosenberg’s Nifla’ot Maharal, plans a blood libel around Passover time, Yossele strikes “blows like an axe”—“like a miracle,” utters one character, and another answers, “and not like a miracle.” It remains unclear whether the animation and “power” of this modern hero-golem is miraculous or not. His actions, furthermore, are not executed to protect the Jews so much as to exact revenge “for all the debts,” a phrase that is repeated throughout this brutal scene.81
After the golem has performed his violence, the Jews yearn only for “one word,” the word “redemption” (yeshu‘a). Some of the characters believe that “whoever fought and won is also a Messiah,” contending that this “miracle” of redemption was determined with the creation of the world. Formed and animated in order to exact revenge, the golem does not bring about any real change, however, and the characters seek in vain for mystical signs that would confirm his role as Messiah. At the end of the play, instead of ushering in the End of Days, the clay monster begins to collapse both physically and linguistically: “Everything falls. Hair. Eyes. Hands. Everything to the ground. I don’t walk. I don’t. I don’t will come. I don’t bring from the sky. I don’t know. They don’t tell me. If I hear an axe—I can do an axe. Rocks I can. I can’t bring ships from the sky.”82 Connected to the earthly elements, the golem cannot offer a wish-fulfilling, heavenly redemption, only axes and rocks. His language is likewise broken, ungrammatical.
In Rina Yerushalmi’s stage adaptation of Horowitz’s play, depicted in a New York Times review, the golem is “born in sand,” and sand covers the entire stage, creating a desert landscape not unlike the landscape of Israel. The golem appears to this reviewer like “a soldier in Israeli uniform,” though an image from the production reveals that the national affiliation of the golem’s uniform remains ambiguous.83 This poetic drama leaves open the specific historical and national context, underscoring more generally the incompatibility of the Jewish notions of redemption and the use of (military) force, especially vengeful violence. Premiering in the summer of 1982, around the outbreak of the first Lebanon war, Horowitz’s Yossele golem reveals that the golem story continued to serve Israeli writers concerned with the violence of war and the manipulation of Hebrew letters for destructive purposes.
The Jewish men in Horowitz’s drama describe a golem with “enormous shoulders,” a “forehead that breaks iron walls” and a “resolute skull . . . [and] resolute hand.”84 Horowitz’s anthropoid resembles both H. Leivick’s monstrous golem with his exaggerated physique and Agnon’s Hans, described as a “ba‘al guf,” denoting a tough, muscular man, as discussed in chapter 2.85 In Jewish literature, the physically well-endowed ba‘al guf was used to designate characters that exist at the outskirts, or borders, of traditional Jewish society.86 For David Roskies, the ba‘al guf was an “earlier, rudimentary” incarnation of the “new Jew” as a revolutionary and fighter, rather than intellectual. Although this figure acted “alone, on impulse” and was not yet “responsive to history,” Sharon Gillerman underscores that this literary type was contemporaneous with the Zionist new Jewish man, even when “not produced exclusively by Zionists.”87
On the physical level, the eastern European literary ba‘al guf thus bore many affinities to the Zionist male bodily ideal of the “muscle Jew” or “new Jew,” as articulated by Max Nordau already in 1898 and, most famously, in 1903.88 Hence, it is not surprising that these two types have also been conflated and that the ba‘al guf, especially in Hebrew literature, came to denote the Zionist man. According to Michael Gluzman, “the new man of Zionism was first and foremost a ba‘al guf,” an impressively tall and masculine figure who embodied an anti-Jewish aesthetic.89 When interpreting early twentieth-century Yiddish and German works, critics have likewise identified the golem as a new Jew. Rosenberg’s Nifla’ot Maharal features the golem, in Gelbin’s words, as a “muscle Jew dressed in Christian peasant clothes”;90 Wegener’s cinematic golem also displays the physical attributes of the muscle Jew, differentiating him from the typical effeminate Jewish male and, in Nicholas Baer’s reading, linking him to the new Jew as a biblical hero, a Samson.91
In Agnon’s Ad hena, the golem Hans is a mock ba’al guf, a non-Jewish man who is reduced, rather than elevated, to mere physical existence. Unable to follow orders, he does not live by his passions, nor does he contribute to the nation; the “golem man” is an unproductive “new creation” despite his robust physique. In this way, Agnon parodies the Jewish literary construction of the ba’al guf, creating a passive figure that acts on his own volition only when hearing the name of his street and parental home. The Zionist-leaning narrator is described, furthermore, as a weak man “unsuitable for army work,” rather than as a strong and bold new Jew. The narrator is well aware that if the war does not come to an end, even men like himself will be turned into soldiers: rather than a ba‘al guf, which literally means the owner of a body, he will become a “ba’al milḥama,” a soldier or, literally, the possessor of a war, whose fate would be “either death or injury.”92
Agnon’s writing on war injury and destruction precisely in the triumphant post-1948 period casts a shadow on the violent execution of the Zionist dream and on the ideal of heroic, antidiasporic masculinity. The implications of his modern golem story were not lost on the next generation of writers in Israel, who were also trying to contend with the events of 1948. One such writer was Yoram Kaniuk. Born and raised in Tel Aviv, he had fought in the 1948 war, suffering wounds in the battles for Jerusalem. Kaniuk’s well-received 1966 work Ḥimo melekh yerushalayim (Himmo, King of Jerusalem) bears strong affinities to Agnon’s Ad hena. Like Agnon, Kaniuk returned to the events of a previous war from a distant vantage point (over three decades in Agnon’s case and eighteen years in Kaniuk’s), fictionalizing and stylizing his autobiographical experiences.93 Ḥimo melekh yerushalayim exhibits a certain generic indeterminacy, similarly to Ad hena, the text being neither long enough to constitute a novel nor short enough to be a novella. As Kaniuk himself describes it, furthermore, his work contains elements of the “gothic novel” (recalling Meyrink’s Der Golem), but it is a “distinctly Israeli book.”94
Kaniuk situates his entire narrative in one location: a makeshift hospital set up in the “Monastery of St. Hieronymus” in Jerusalem. This fictional site is a composite one, as Kaniuk disclosed, constructed of two different monasteries that he knew well: the one in which he was treated during the war and another (unnamed) one in which he resided after the war.95 Kaniuk received medical treatment in 1948 at an Italian monastery, where he was laid up next to a severely wounded man who “grunted for ten days”; “he was something terrible,” Kaniuk wrote in 1974, comparing the man to his fictional Ḥimo, “and he had a wonderful mouth.”96 Amos Guttman’s cinematic adaptation of Kaniuk’s work, first screened in 1987, is set in the Jerusalem Byzantine Monastery of the Cross, which was deserted during the 1948 battles and served as a base for the Gadna (the Jewish youth corps). Guttman visually asserted the centrality of this site, as it symbolizes the history and continuity of life in “Eretz Israel” and sets the stage for the clash between the Jewish newcomers to Israel and the land they seek to conquer and inhabit.97
Despite the autobiographical inspiration for this work, Kaniuk uses a third-person narrative voice, focalized through the character of the nurse Ḥamutal Horowitz. He allows us both to identify with the nurse and to retain a certain distance from her, rendering her actions somewhat mysterious. Similarly to the nurse Brigitta’s fascination with the brain-injured “golem” in Ad hena, Kaniuk’s protagonist, Ḥamutal, is obsessed with Ḥimo Farrah, a soldier whose stomach is lacerated, who has lost his eyesight, and who has suffered several amputated limbs. With the figure of Ḥimo, Kaniuk shows how the war not only has turned strapping youths into living-dead monsters but also has created a twilight zone in which the borders between man and woman, Jew and Christian, and Ashkenazi immigrant and Sephardic native are constantly blurred. On Ḥamutal’s arrival at the battlefield hospital, she herself is an outsider from another “planet”—the city of Tel Aviv. Kaniuk’s representation of her alienation in the makeshift Jerusalem hospital/monastery challenges the Zionist ideal of the secular and worldly woman from the new metropolis. In contrast to both the male Sephardic soldiers and the Christian nun who has mastered Hebrew and Arabic, Ḥamutal is a relative newcomer in Palestine.
The most striking similarity between Ad hena and Ḥimo melekh yerushalayim is the use of the moniker “golem” with reference to the severely wounded soldier under care. In both cases, the man’s caretakers and fellow wounded soldiers adopt this nickname, which then becomes the common address for the horrific specter lying before them. The two golems, moreover, are men who have lost their ability to converse or relate to their surroundings. Ḥimo’s only utterance is an incessant repetition of the stuttering words “re bi,” which everyone around him interprets as his desire to die, a plea for his brother to shoot him (short for tira bi). In the context of the golem story, however, the phrase “re bi” also evokes the figure of the rabbi (rebbe, in Yiddish), both the golem’s creator and its destroyer.
If the continued survival of the soldier-golems proves equally incomprehensible, they are, nonetheless, different types of golems: Agnon’s Hans seems to lack a “brain” and cannot remember anything, including his name, while his body has remained intact. Kaniuk’s Ḥimo is a mutilated man, a lump of flesh covered in bandages, whose limbs are “exposed and crushed [me‘ukhim].”98 Before the nurse Ḥamutal catches her first glimpse of the man, she reads the note at his bedside, providing his name, age, and medication orders. This note, reminiscent of the inscribed parchment that animates the golem, makes her feel responsible for keeping Ḥimo Farrah alive. “He has a name, and it is her duty to help him. Somebody had written that down on the slip of paper, somebody had given her instructions and taken off.”99 In contrast to the initially nameless Hans, Ḥimo’s name restores some of his humanity and obligates his caretakers to assist him through an anonymous, divine-like, order. That order animates the nurse, resulting in a reversal of the golem and rabbi positions, just as in Agnon’s work.
Unlike the inexpressive figure of Hans in Ad hena, the character of Ḥimo retains a remnant of his past glory; he was nicknamed “king of Jerusalem” because of his handsomeness and appeal to women.100 Though the body of the nineteen-year-old is appallingly mutilated, his mouth possesses “the deepest and most noble beauty, perfection on the brink of horror, . . . like a solitary flower on a vast wall.”101 Indeed, his mouth is the site of the text’s sublime encounter. It is both life giving and deadly, as when Ḥimo utters his wish to die, reminding us of the mouth of the golem of Prague, in which the rabbi places and removes the animating parchment. Another wounded soldier who knew Ḥimo from his prewar days even declares that he was once called “The Holy Mouth,” though now he is more like a corpse.102
With a ravaged body and sublime mouth, the golem-soldier is unlike any of the other wounded men at the hospital. Kaniuk describes the soldier Franji, who lost an eye and injured a leg in the war, as a tall and muscular “ba’al guf,” “his thick-set body rippling with muscles.” Franji, a young man of Sephardic extraction, appears liable to erupt violently at any moment, turning “red, and stormy, and wild.” While Franji is “no longer the man he had been,” his injured body, like that of the other hospitalized soldiers, is “merely wounded” or “simply put out of action,” contrasting him both to the “legendary” living-dead Ḥimo and to deceased war heroes such as Ḥamutal’s late fiancé.103 Repulsed by the manly Franji, Ḥamutal is drawn to the helpless Ḥimo. Hence, Kaniuk’s depiction of Franji as a ba’al guf whose masculinity has been compromised does not affirm this bodily ideal but rather calls into question the Ashkenazi military leadership’s use of Sephardic men as mere cannon fodder.
As Ḥamutal comes to understand, the choice to call Ḥimo “golem” does not necessarily indicate a meanness of spirit within the other soldiers or a desire to humiliate the wounded man but rather their compulsion to differentiate themselves, to avoid any possible form of identification with him. The “golem” is no longer human, no longer a suffering soldier, for he has crossed the threshold into the realm of the dead; his body cannot even be diagnosed as a “living body” according to the rules of science. His incomprehensible subsistence belittles the other soldiers’ own troubles and renders them closer to those who are still fighting in the battlefields, reducing their status as the noble wounded.104 While the hospitalized soldiers strive to distinguish themselves from Ḥimo, Ḥamutal completely aligns herself with this “golem,” devoting herself to his needs alone. As the other soldiers yearn for the “miracle” of his death and disappearance, Ḥamutal takes it upon herself—until the dramatic ending—to forestall this death. She, in turn, becomes more golem-like in Kaniuk’s descriptions: her endurance and emotional staunchness mark her as made of “stone” rather than “flesh-and-blood,” as being devoid of “humanity.”105
As Ḥamutal’s relationship to Ḥimo grows stronger, she is repeatedly said to be “in love,” and the soldiers await a “blood wedding between Ḥamutal and her golem.” At the close of the book, this notion is realized: Ḥamutal decides to kill Ḥimo with an overdose of serum, putting an end to his suffering as well as to hers. The “fatal attraction” of the nurse to the golem—understated in Agnon’s Ad hena and explicit in Kaniuk’s work—reverses the early twentieth-century motif of the golem’s own pursuit of the rabbi’s daughter in an attempt to assert its human side (as in Wegener’s films, Leivick’s poema, and Gabel’s operetta). If the war turns young men into defunct golems, Ḥamutal strives to animate the dead clay, not unlike a male rabbi or Maharal. To do so, her initial instinct is to follow the Christian path of redeeming the death of the body or flesh through the promise of another, spiritual life. Toward the end of the narrative, however, she denounces her status as a kind of Madonna-Messiah, attempting to become a flesh-and-blood lover to Ḥimo. “Let me become a human being again,” she utters, asking the “golem” to respond to her sexually.106 Feeling rejected as a “bride” when Ḥimo does not respond, Ḥamutal reassumes her masculine role in the hospital, as Edya Mendelson-Ma’oz argues, penetrating Ḥimo with the “lethal injection.”107
Yosefa Loshitzky has likewise maintained that Ḥimo, as the descendant of a long line of kabbalists from the old Yishuv in Jerusalem, is Zionism’s “other.” By killing him at the end of the narrative, Ḥamutal destroys this otherness, the Sephardic lineage, and proclaims the victory of the newfound European Jewish modernity, embodied in the city of Tel Aviv, to which she returns after Ḥimo’s death. At the same time, she takes on the role of the kabbalist herself, becoming a golem creator who can also put an end to this creation’s existence. Moreover, Ḥimo’s suffering is explicitly compared to that of Jesus, another “king of Jerusalem,” and his death therefore signals the current conquest of Judaism over Christianity (and Islam) in the battle over the Land of Israel.108 In this sense too Ḥimo is a victim of Israeli militarism.
Precisely when Ḥamutal is about to kill Ḥimo, “the familiar symphony of battle” resumes with bursts of machine-gun and small-arms fire. The nurse with her deadly injection is imagined, against this background noise, as a soldier who fulfills the ultimate mission of killing, by “her own courage,” the enemy: the Jewish man who has crossed over to the Christian side and even, potentially, to the Muslim side that threatens renewed Zionist Jewish life in Israel/Palestine.109 Rather than cast the golem as the external Arab enemy, Kaniuk portrays an internal, Jewish golem that nonetheless signifies the monstrous ability to cross religious lines and suggests the blurring of the categories of friend and foe. Through Ḥamutal’s lethal deed, her own name and story are erased; even decades later, she believes that her name has been excised with “a sharp slaughterer’s knife” by those who witnessed her deed, so that they could erase its memory as well.110 Ultimately, in Kaniuk’s work, it is the nurse, rather than the golem, who rebels against basic human conventions, even when her revolt is co-opted by the state and its belligerent affairs.
With the grotesque figure of Ḥimo, Kaniuk ironically reconfigures the trope of the living-dead (ha-met ha-ḥay), often used in the works of the prestatehood (Eretz-Israeli) generation to glorify fallen soldiers and justify their sacrifice. Kaniuk’s living-dead is not a fallen hero waxing poetic from beyond the grave but a grotesquely real survivor whose body refuses to succumb. Ḥimo’s sacrifice is not justified in national and symbolic terms; he is an antihero who despises his continued existence. His desire to be shot to death evokes Nathan Alterman’s poem “Magash ha-kesef” (“The Silver Platter”), published in December 1947, describing a young man and woman who “quietly . . . approach / Then stand motionless, / And there is no sign whether they yet live or have been shot.”111 But whereas Alterman’s heroic youth embody “the silver platter” on which the “Jewish state is served” to its people, Kaniuk uses the appellation “golem” to designate the state of unheroic living-death. Similarly, the other wounded soldiers whose mundane injuries have not earned them heroic “legends” are compared to Ḥamutal’s former lover who died in the Galilee. He is “the silver platter.”112 When a different soldier is brought to the hospital in critical condition, on the verge of death, he is referred to, instead, as “another golem.”113 Rather than seeing this soldier as a new and all-powerful creation that can carry out arduous tasks, a kind of supersoldier, Kaniuk portrays him as a golem who has remained alive against all odds, against all reason, and whose subsistence between life and death challenges the moral fiber of his society.
In a personal essay titled “The Stories That Became My Life Story,” Kaniuk relates, “It took me years to understand that ever since 1948, after the battle in Nebi Samuel, I lived in a state that was not understood at the time to be shell shock [helem krav]. The things I underwent there were too horrific.” He further presents his writing as a kind of “occupational therapy for the awful wound that [he] experienced during the war.” This fictional “interpretation of catastrophes” transforms these sorrowful events into “stories,” “jokes,” and even “flowers,” in his words.114 Through this creative process, Kaniuk molded his horrific experiences into a highly controlled and structured work of art. As the literary critic of Ha’aretz wrote upon the book’s publication, Kaniuk’s language “should have been drunk and wild, but instead it is static and orderly. The dialogue is mechanical and artificial, and the characters are devoid of any kernel of darkness.”115 Kaniuk explained in an interview that he worked hard to produce precisely this effect, striving to render “this immense horror [eyma nora’a] as if it took place in a glass cup . . . within a very restrained frame.” For the awfulness of the experience to be revealed in full force, he contended, the language must be restrained, rather than a “wild, modernist” Hebrew.116 Kaniuk uses the dissonance between linguistic form and content both to contain the “horror” and to expose it through the “glass cup” of literature. Writing from the perspective of a citizen on the home front, Agnon, by contrast, allows his stylized text to run amok, to overtake its creator, as it were, and to revolt in the modernist sense.
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Both dead and alive, human and inhuman, the golem figure for Agnon and Kaniuk represents war injury as an indecipherable phenomenon, a new physiognomy that, since World War I, has changed the face of generations to come. Its very existence is an ironic modern “miracle,” calling into question the basic assumptions of twentieth-century medicine and science, but without leading to any greater faith in divine intervention or in the sacred powers of the animating Hebrew language. The patriotic journalism of the 1948 period, whether socialist or right wing, projected the idea of the golem onto the enemy forces, disowning this supposedly diasporic Jewish fantasy and using the golem to suggest the self-destructive and dependent nature of the Arab nations. The Hebrew literature written during, or about, the 1948 war also revisited the golem story but relied on its mystical and literary connotations in order to convey the grotesque nature of war and its incomprehensible and dehumanizing consequences for both battling sides. These literary golems are hybrid products of Hebrew-German and Jewish-Arab interaction. Agnon’s German golem is, moreover, a creation of blind nationalism on the part of both Jewish and non-Jewish German citizens. The enemy becomes internalized, in this literature, and the golem represents the inability to distinguish fully between self and other, ally and enemy. “War brings death to all equally. That is the monstrosity of war,” write Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri.117
The Israeli authors Agnon, Kaniuk, and Horowitz all use the golem story to depict the individual and collective price of war and excessive brutality. They do not relegate golemhood to the enemy alone but rather retain this term for the sake of Israeli society’s own self-accounting. The golem bequeathed to Israeli literature is the temporary name for a defunct and deformed man, one who cannot be transformed into a Zionist war hero, a muscular Jewish defender. In Kaniuk’s text, the body of the soldier-golem is utterly ravaged—he can no longer be considered a ba‘al guf—further radicalizing Agnon’s earlier depiction of a strapping man who has lost his memory and agency. In Horowitz’s drama, the golem successfully deploys his enormous body to accomplish his violent mission, but he loses all power and deanimates when expected to bring about a false redemption. The term golem becomes synonymous in these texts with destruction and de-creation rather than with animation and nation-building. So these Israeli works evoke the vulnerability of the Zionist project and reveal the madness and instability that lurk beneath it. The darker side of the militarily “mighty Jewish state,” which can and has been compared to a golem that can potentially run amok, is the injured soldier who—for the length of the narrative at least—refuses to join the dead. The golem thus stands as a troubling remnant of the human losses and moral failures that resulted from the 1948 war.