The Golem of Brooklyn

Informationen zum Autor Adam Mansbach is the author of the #1 New York Times bestseller Go the F**k to Sleep , as well as the novels Rage Is Back , The End of the Jews (winner of the California Book Award), and Angry Black White Boy , and the memoir-in-verse I Had a Brother Once . With Dave Barry and Alan Zweibel, he co-authored For This We Left Egypt? and the bestselling A Field Guide to the Jewish People . His work has appeared in The New Yorker, The New York Times Book Review, Esquire, The Believer, and The Guardian . Klappentext "In Ashkenazi Jewish folklore, a golem is a humanoid being created out of mud or clay and animated through secret prayers. Its sole purpose is to defend the Jewish people against the immediate threat of violence. It is always a rabbi who makes a golem, and always in a time of crisis. But Len Bronstein is no rabbi--he's a Brooklyn art teacher who steals a large quantity of clay from his school, gets extremely stoned, and manages to bring his creation to life despite knowing little about Judaism and even less about golems. Unable to communicate with his nine-foot-six, four hundred-pound, Yiddish-speaking guest, Len enlists a bodega clerk and ex-Hasid named Miri Apfelbaum to translate. Eventually, The Golem learns English by binging Curb Your Enthusiasm after ingesting a massive amount of LSD and reveals that he is a creature with an ancestral memory; he recalls every previous iteration of himself, making The Golem a repository of Jewish history and trauma. He demands to know what crisis has prompted his re-creation, and whom must he destroy. When Miri shows him a video of white nationalists marching and chanting "Jews will not replace us," the answer becomes clear"-- Leseprobe 1 Four Hundred Pounds of Clay Len Bronstein was not so much in need of a golem as he was in possession of a large quantity of clay, and very stoned. Three hours earlier, after his morning coffee and in lieu of breakfast, he had eaten a hazelnut lace cookie containing twenty milligrams of THC, the last of a batch his friend Waleed had baked and brought to Len's Memorial Day cookout a few weeks earlier. Waleed did this regularlyit was how he expressed love, and also how he gained new customers. The nature of an event was always fundamentally altered by Waleed's arrival. It was awesome. For the last several years, Len had been stealing one five-pound brick of premium sculpting clay each week from the private high school in Brooklyn Heights where he worked as an art teacher. He didn't really know why. Len liked his job, liked his co-workers, got along fine with his studentsboth the merely wealthy and famous actors' kids. Had Len asked, his department head probably would have invited him to take home all the clay he wanted. The school was awash in resources of every sort: the filmmaking lab had professional-grade cameras and editing suites, the fifth grade math teachers had PhDs. If Len had been fortunate enough to attend a school like this, he never would have ended up a high school art teacher. Len was no sculptor; his artistic disciplines were not-painting and not-writing, which made the vast reserve of clay stacked up in the shed in the backyard all the more perplexing. But as Waleed's cookieand with it, Waleed's geniushit him full force, Len walked out of his garden apartment and into his apartment's garden, and the splintering, hard-to-latch door of the shed listed open, affording him a glimpse of the wall of light gray clay, and Len decided that today was the day to begin writing the masterwork of speculative fiction he'd been sketching out in his head, here and there, for the last however-many months. The concept of the novel was that in the very near future, the study of epigeneticsthe notion that trauma can be passed down in the DNA, can ramify across generationstakes a massi...

Autorentext
Adam Mansbach is the author of the #1 New York Times bestseller Go the F*k to Sleep, as well as the novels Rage Is Back, The End of the Jews (winner of the California Book Award), and Angry Black White Boy, and the memoir-in-verse I Had a Brother Once. With Dave Barry and Alan Zweibel, he co-authored For This We Left Egypt? and the bestselling A Field Guide to the Jewish People. His work has appeared in The New Yorker, The New York Times Book Review, Esquire, The Believer, and The Guardian*.

Klappentext

**The dazzlingly imaginative, ferociously funny story of an art teacher, a bodega clerk, and a five-thousand-year-old clay crisis monster, from the author of the #1 New York Times bestseller Go the F*k to Sleep.*

“A devastating romp through history, a bonkers road trip through America, this novel could not be any funnier—or any more important.”—W. Kamau Bell

In Ashkenazi Jewish folklore, a golem is a humanoid being created out of mud or clay and animated through secret prayers. Its sole purpose is to defend the Jewish people against the immediate threat of violence. It is always a rabbi who makes a golem, and always in a time of crisis.

But Len Bronstein is no rabbi—he’s a Brooklyn art teacher who steals a large quantity of clay from his school, gets extremely stoned, and manages to bring his creation to life despite knowing little about Judaism and even less about golems. Unable to communicate with his nine-foot-six, four hundred-pound, Yiddish-speaking guest, Len enlists a bodega clerk and ex-Hasid named Miri Apfelbaum to translate.

Eventually, The Golem learns English by binge-watching Curb Your Enthusiasm after ingesting a massive amount of LSD and reveals that he is a creature with an ancestral memory; he recalls every previous iteration of himself, making The Golem a repository of Jewish history and trauma. He demands to know what crisis has prompted his re-creation and whom must he destroy. When Miri shows him a video of white nationalists marching and chanting “Jews will not replace us,” the answer becomes clear.

The Golem of Brooklyn is an epic romp through Jewish history and the American present that wrestles with the deepest questions of our humanity—the conflicts between faith and skepticism, tribalism and interdependence, and vengeance and healing.

Leseprobe
**1

Four Hundred Pounds of Clay**

Len Bronstein was not so much in need of a golem as he was in possession of a large quantity of clay, and very stoned. Three hours earlier, after his morning coffee and in lieu of breakfast, he had eaten a hazelnut lace cookie containing twenty milligrams of THC, the last of a batch his friend Waleed had baked and brought to Len’s Memorial Day cookout a few weeks earlier. Waleed did this regularly—it was how he expressed love, and also how he gained new customers. The nature of an event was always fundamentally altered by Waleed’s arrival. It was awesome.

For the last several years, Len had been stealing one five-pound brick of premium sculpting clay each week from the private high school in Brooklyn Heights where he worked as an art teacher. He didn’t really know why. Len liked his job, liked his co-workers, got along fine with his students—both the merely wealthy and famous actors’ kids. Had Len asked, his department head probably would have invited him to take home all the clay he wanted. The school was awash in resources of every sort: the filmmaking lab had professional-grade cameras and editing suites, the fifth grade math teachers had PhDs. If Len had been fortunate enough to attend a school like this, he never would have ended up a high school art teacher.

Len was no sculptor; his artistic disciplines were not-painting and not-writing, which made the vast reserve of clay stacked up in the shed in the backyard all the more perplexing. But as Waleed’s cookie—and with it, Waleed’s genius—hit him full force, L…