The Golem of Queens

by Susan Lago

 

“Your eyes saw my unformed limbs;
they were all recorded in Your book;
in due time they were formed,
to the very last one of them.”
Psalms. 136.16

And when G-d created Adam from dust, “...an undefined figure was fashioned…”
Talmud. Sanhedrin 38b


The Golem of Queens rides the 7 train. No one in the car looks his way; they are all looking at their phones with their eyes and listening to them through the devices in their ears. They don’t see the Golem just like they don’t see the person wrapped in layers of garbage bags, holding a shivering Chihuahua, and lying across the seats at one end of the car. The Golem reaches up and adjusts the Mets cap that sits atop his headshape, pulling its brim down lower over his eyes.

***
Golem Recipe

Ingredients:
     Mud
     Imminent danger to Jews
     Writing implement
     Secret name of G-d

Directions:
     1. With hands, mold human-sized form out of mud, preferably in the dead of night, preferably on a riverbank.
     2. To activate, write the Hebrew word for truth, emet, on the form’s “forehead.”
     3. When finished, simply erase the aleph to form met, the word for death.
     4. Store dried remnants, or “dust,” in locked, sealed container and store in an attic, preferably in a synagogue.

Note: Pregnant women should avoid proximity to container, dust, and golem storage facilities.

***

Pearl boards the 7 at Grand Central. There’s only one empty seat and it’s next to a large, dark man wearing a Mets cap. She’s been teaching for four hours straight and her feet have headaches in her worn-down flats. She side-eyes Mets Cap and can’t help but notice the dirt and mud that drip onto the subway floor. In fact, he’s surrounded by brown sludge and smells faintly of fish and largely of decay. She registers all of this, but who is she to judge? She’s sure she’s not too fresh-smelling herself after pacing the classroom in an attempt to engage the first-year college students who are trying to disappear into their desks, or at the very least, reach the phones stowed beneath a thigh or inside of a sleeve.

The train stops in the tunnel.

The passengers let out a collective sigh, but don’t look up from their phones. On her right, Mets Cap seems to have twigs, leaves, and bits of plastic poking out of his arms and legs, his broad chest, the fists that rest on his massive thighs. No part of her touches him, but still, she feels his coldness, that the matter of him is cold. At the other end of the stalled car, a man wearing a garbage bag like a poncho is humming and his dog is whimpering and at that moment, the door on the opposite end bangs open and three men roll into the car. No one looks up, but just the same, everyone’s attention locks onto the men strolling through the car, as, almost imperceptibly, one-by-one, they all move out of the way of these men, these laughing, talking men insisting upon attention. Pearl’s fingers tangle themselves in the fine, gold chain around her neck.

“What’s that?” They’re in front of her. She sees all six of their feet in their enormous, puffy sneakers. Their bodies smell sour, of beer and boredom.

“I’m talking to you, lady,” the middle one says. A finger, the color of the underbelly of a fish, points to the small pendant she’s been sliding back and forth along the chain.

“It’s a chai,” she whispers, bending her head to hide behind the waves of wheat-colored hair that have come free of her ponytail.

“A WHAT?” All three of them laugh and she looks up. Their faces are damp and red and they’re all wearing caps on their shorn heads. He leans down so that his nose is a wingbeat away from hers. “Are you a fucking Jew?” he screams into her face.

And that’s when the Golem stands up, reaches over, and throws the man overhand across the traincar.



Reverend Thaddeus presides over The Church of the Benevolent King in central Queens. He prides himself on being a preacher for a new age. Yes, he’s youngish, and so carries himself in a way that makes him look closer to forty than thirty. His sermons tap tap tap on his congregants’ secret fears and call forth their demons that he guides them into dressing up as angels. Just now, he sits in his office, hunched over his computer, putting the finishing touches on the one for the Sunday before Good Friday. He giggles and flicks long pieces of yellow hair out of his eyes with a characteristic toss of the head.

Before the five-sided, clapboard building was taken over by the Church of the Benevolent King, it had been a Presbyterian house of worship and for a short time before that, a hotel. Far back in its history, it had been a shul. In its days as a house of prayer for Jews, a minyan would meet there from sundown on the Sabbath until three stars appeared in the sky a day later, to pray, each black clad man bobbing to his own godbeat. Unbeknown to Reverend Thaddeus, the Congregation, the landlord, or the City Archives, deep beneath the structure lay a complex web of catacombs. Ancient. Older than old.

This is where Leo Davidson goes when Reverend Thaddeus takes the pulpit in his city.

     17h
     Taddy @RevThaddeus
     Haters accusing me of antisemitism! Some of my best friends are Jews

     2h
     My landlord is a Jew but that’s not why he keeps raising my rent

     2hr
     I mean he doesn’t even look Jewish even tho he has a big nose

     2hr
     Lots of people have big noses

     2hr
     Lots of people are money hungry not just the Jew

     2hr
     Although the Jews I know are all rich and send their kids to fancy private schools while hard-working americans struggle to put food on the table and pay their bills

     1hr
     Calm down everybody!!! HAHAHA!!! I didn’t mean to imply that Jews are the 1% even tho my landlord drives a Mercedes

     1hr
     And hasn’t fixed the leaky pipe under the sink even though I CALL AND TEXT HIM EVERY DAY!!! Just cuz he’s a Jew doesn’t mean he’s a slumlord

     1hr
     Of course Jews are americans! HA! Just because they don’t believe in OUR LORD JESUS CHRIST doesn’t mean

     56m
     I love all of God’s children, even those who deny HIS WORD and strive to build their kingdom here on earth

     15m
     Passover is in three days

     13m
     Don’t listen to the rumors about the blood of good CHRISTIAN CHILDREN

     11m
     The ingredients on a box of matzah list only water, flour, and salt

    

     8m
     Rally tomorrow @FlushingMeadowsCoronaPark 12noon bring ur signs!!!
     Golem @golemofqueens
     Replying to @RevThaddeus

    


On an April evening, in the Hebrew month of Nissan, three days before the first night of Passover, Miriam Gottlieb tells her story to the old Jews of Queens. The event, a fundraiser for new seating for the temple’s sanctuary, is being held in the basement of Temple Sinai. She tells them about the one item of clothing that she owned, a striped uniform “Is that the right word?” she asks, raising her narrow shoulders. “Did I own the uniform? Can you ‘own’ something you’re forced to wear?” She looks around the room, at the men with their high-waisted pants, the women with their chunky jewelry. In the front row, a man looks up at her, tears pouring down his face unchecked and she nods; her own tears dried up a lifetime ago. All around her, the people, the Jews who survived, cry silently. A man sitting in the back row rises to his feet and shouts, “The Litvaks were the worst antisemites of all!” He’s shushed by a tiny woman in a lime green pantsuit, who whispershouts at him to sit down and be quiet.

Outside the synagogue, protestors line the sidewalk. They call themselves Thaddeus’s Army. They shout and wave their fists and when one of them picks up a stone from the landscaping surrounding the synagogue’s perennial garden, and then throws it, the small mob falls silent at the sound of tinkling glass as it crashes through the sanctuary’s stained-glass window. Then they are all throwing stones and the colored glass falls like rain onto the grass. In the basement, Miriam Gottleib and the weeping Jews hear nothing.

After Miriam’s talk, the old Jews of Queens file out of the synagogue chattering about the speech, colonoscopies, and Florida. They stop when they see the broken glass. The people with their signs. One of the Army picks up a chunk of cement, throws it, and it hits Miriam on the side of her head where the thin graywhite hair does little to cover her pink scalp. She drops like a stone. That’s when the Golem rounds the corner. He’s moving fast for such a large, human-shaped mass. He picks up the man who threw the first stone and hurls him through the broken window. He breaks a sign over another’s back.

At the sound of sirens, the old Jews scatter, though slowly, and the Golem of Queens melts into the gloaming.



Tink sneezes.

“Here, honey. Blow.” Pearl holds the tissue to her daughter’s nose while the five-year-old snorts and blows like a tiny mad pony.

“I have The Allergies,” Tink says.

“No, honey. I think you have a cold,” Pearl says. She brushes fine pale brown curls off Tink’s face and presses a palm to her forehead. “You feel warm.”

“That’s cuz I’m alive,” Tink says.

Pearl doesn’t answer. She’s still shaken from the ride on the subway. There had been the men, that she remembers. And the strange, cold person sitting beside her. She remembers the fear in the train. The sneakers. Then there’s nothing, only a blank space that ends with her standing on the platform at Flushing Main Street amid crying people and a phalanx of police officers pushing them back away from the car so the EMT workers could make their way through.

“Mama! You’re hugging me too hard.”

Pearl loosens her grip. Sometimes Tink pleads illness as a way to get a day off from school, a day where she and her mama can curl up on the couch and watch Disney movies. It’s just the two of them. Before the divorce was even final, Pearl’s ex had moved in with his girlfriend. He still sees his daughter every few months, although Tink is shy around him these days and the time they spend together probably not satisfying for either one of them. But now it looks as if Tink hasn’t been pulling one of her tricks. Her cheeks are flushed and her nose drips even after Pearl takes the tissue away.

Pearl reaches for her phone to call the school to tell them Tink won’t be in tomorrow, but it buzzes in her hand before she can place the call. The alert says that Temple Sinai Preschool will be closed for the rest of the week. She frowns at the phone.

“Mama,” Tink says.

She turns in time to see her daughter bend over and throw up on the floor.

The phone beeps again and, as she reaches for Tink, it tumbles to the floor. She picks it up and reads the new alert: “TEMPLE SINAI PRESCHOOL WILL BE CLOSED UNTIL FURTHER NOTICE.”

Tink retches and then vomits again.

Leo pulls open the door to the last room at the end of the longest tunnel. He has to pull hard because the door is heavy. The air down here beneath the Church of the Benevolent King is Cask of Amontillado dank, but he’s sweating anyway. Inside the room, he lights the lanterns that hang from the walls.

Here is where he created the Golem, on the table beneath the picture of his great-grandfather, who had migrated to New York from Vilna, bringing with him a frightened bride, the Torah scroll he had received on the day he became a bar mitzvah, and the secret spell for creating a creature who would be a defender of Jews in time of need. Here in the United States, in New York City’s borough of Queens, the Jews have lived in relative peace for generations. Of late, however, the temperature has changed, an evil wind blowing in from the great plains of history, bringing with it a storm of hatred and fear that is now on the verge of erupting as the springtime holidays approach.

The first Golem that Leo created had wreaked havoc in the neighborhood following Leo’s order to bring back a large pie with onions and peppers. He had had to chase him down Queens Boulevard while the Golem raided pizza parlor after pizza parlor, loading his arms with stacks of steaming hot pies. Leo eventually caught up with him by following the trail of melted cheese, finally cornering the Golem in between a bodega and empanada place.

The second Golem was no better. Leo took a handful of the last creature’s dust and mixed it with the mud from the banks of Little Neck Bay. He carved on its forehead the word whispered down the line, father to son, until it came to him on his thirteenth birthday. This Golem had come to life and then immediately ran away to rampage through the fish department at Fairway in an effort to follow Leo’s order to bring them a nice fillet of salmon for the Sabbath meal.

Leo had laid low after that, especially because the public’s attention turned to the acrimonious divorce of one of Hollywood’s most well-loved couples. Amid accusations of nanny seducing and out-of-control shoe collecting, the rumble that Leo had felt swelling up through the informationsphere seemed to abate.

But then Reverend Thaddeus had come to town. No one seems to remember when he first stepped up to the pulpit; one day he was just there. And when his preaching extended out from the five walls of his church and spilled over onto the streets of his city, Leo knew he to try again.

And so he had created the third Golem. He calls him Joseph.

The next day, Pearl takes Tink to the pediatrician. It hadn’t been easy to get an appointment with Dr. Bronstein, not the day before Passover, but she begs the receptionist to squeeze them in. The night had been awful. Why is it that kids always throw up on their pillows, Pearl wonders as she tightens her grip on Tink’s hand to cross the street.

“What’s happening over there, Mommy?” Tink points to a crowd of people. They’re carrying signs and marching in in a circle in front of the Chabad House on the corner.

“I don’t know, sweetie,” she says, and puts her arm around her daughter as they hurry across.

“Dirty.” Tink reads.

She puts her hand over Tink’s eyes and tucks her head against her hip. “Don’t,” Pearl says.

More sign-carriers are moving down the sidewalk; they’re blocking traffic. They’re between them and the door to the building where the pediatrician’s office is. The little girl pulls her head out of her mother’s grip and looks up. “Are Jewish people dirty, Mama? Are we dirty?” She holds an arm out in front of her and frowns.

Then Pearl sees that in addition to the signs, the protesters carry boxes of matzah, which they’re piling up in front of Chabad House. An arm rises up from the center of the pulsing mob and throws what appears to be a ball of fire at the tower of matzah boxes. The crowd twitches and then all the hands are throwing fire. Tink screams. In the blank that is yesterday, Pearl sees the figure in the Mets cap.

She lifts her daughter up onto her hip and runs.

“Are you sure they meant to burn down the Chabad center?” asks Shaina. On this, the second night of Passover, she’s just served her special vegetarian matzah ball soup and all around the table her guests are blowing on their spoons of steaming liquid, hungry after making their way through the long Passover service.

Pearl nods and puts down her spoon without tasting her soup. She’s pale, Shaina sees, and too quiet. She glances over at Tink who is poking her matzah ball tentatively with one small finger.

“Are you feeling better?” Shaina asks her.

“Yes, Grandma,” says Tink. “My mommy says I had twenty-four bugs!”

Now Pearl smiles. “Not quite. I said you had a twenty-four hour bug. A bug is a virus that makes you feel sick.”

The man occupying the fourth seat at the table laughs. Leo Davidson. Shaina sees she did right to invite her colleague from the Jewish Studies Department where they both teach. She had been hoping that he and Pearl would hit it off since both are around the same age and work in academia, although at different colleges, Pearl floating between two in Manhattan, and Leo recently tenured at their university in Queens. Her daughter spends too much time working and taking care of Tink and not enough on having fun, in her opinion.

Leo turns now to Pearl. “You must have been scared,” he says.

She nods. “Yes,” she says.

“That reminds me of something I saw on my phone while waiting on line at the the grocery store,” says Shaina, who is gathering the now empty soup bowls. “It was about a vigilante going around attacking members of Thaddeus’ Army who are desecrating Jewish cemeteries and attacking Jews as they leave synagogue on the Sabbath. They say he’s huge.” She disappears into the apartment’s closet-sized kitchen and returns with several dishes, which she places on the the white tablecloth. “Oh yeah, and that he wears a Mets cap. Weird, right?” She sits and passes the platter of brisket to Leo.

Both Pearl and Leo are silent and the expressions on their faces so similar that Shaina puts the platter down. “What?” she says, looking from one to the other.

“I saw him,” says Tink.

They all turn and look at the little girl.

“When we were running away from the doctor’s office, Mommy. I could see over your shoulder. A mudman come round the corner. He picked up some of the people and threw them. He stomped on their signs. He looked right at me!”

“A what-man?” says Shaina.

“Mud,” says Tink.

“He looked at you?” says Pearl.

“Yeah, but he wasn’t going to hurt us. He wasn’t mad at us, only at the people who made the fire.”

“When was this?” asks Leo. His voice is low. The room smells of apples and roasted meats.

“Yesterday,” says Pearl.

“Why? Is that important?” asks Shaina.

Leo breaks off a corner of the piece of matzah that had been lying on his plate and turns it over and over in his hands. “Tomorrow is the evening of the Sabbath,” he says.

“What happens on the Sabbath?” says Pearl.

Leo shakes his head. “Nothing good. If the stories are true.”

And he tells them the story of the Golem.

Leo takes Pearl’s hand and guides her along the tunnel leading to the secret room beneath the five-sided church. “Not much of a first date,” he says. He smiles at her and she can see a flash of white through the gloom.

“Oh. Are we on date?” She smiles back as he helps her over a puddle. Crazy, this, she thinks: flirting as the world around them is in chaos.

“Maybe a pre-date. I intend to ask you out on an official one as soon as this is over.” They stop in front of a door made of wood planks bound by iron bands. Leo pulls a key out of his pocket. “Would you say yes?”

Play hard to get, she tells herself. “Yes,” she says. Oh well. Hard to get is not really her thing, plus they are in crisis mode here. “Definitely.”

How did she let herself get talked into leaving Tink with Grandma and going on a mission to stop an out of control, Jew-defending, anthropomorphic being? She’s not sure she believes what he’s saying, but he looked so genuinely alarmed at the Seder, that she offered to go with him the next day to help. Also, his eyes are very blue.

The door screams open and they enter the room. Pearl waits by the door as Leo lights the lamps. He brings her over to the table and introduces her to his grandfather’s portrait. And then he’s busy, carefully rifling through pages of dusty books, stopping occasionally to make notes in one of those black and white composition notebooks she remembers from grade school. She shivers in the dank air and wraps her arms around her waist. Without looking up from his task, Leo puts an arm around her and pulls her to him. Now she can see what’s in the book. Letters that look kind of like the Hebrew she remembers from religious school but not quite. In the upper left corner is a drawing of creature that like the one who is filling in the blank space in her memory.

“Leo,” she says. He stops, looks up. “What happens if we don’t stop him by sundown tomorrow?”

He points to a passage on the page in front of them. “This says that if the creature doesn’t get a day of rest, he’ll destroy all the enemies of our people. I thought I was doing the right thing, protecting the Jewish people of our city from what Thaddeus started with his cyberpogrom, but the whole thing is out of control.” He rakes his fingers through his dark hair.

Pearl shudders even though she’s warm now, held against his side. “How will we know where to find him?”

Leo passes her a flyer that he had peeled off the fence surrounding the church on their way in. “The Church of the Benevolent King Good Friday Sermon,” she reads. “Join us to learn how good people can protect their children from those who would do them harm as Easter approaches.” She looks at Leo. “He can’t possibly be referring to that twelfth-century accusation about Jews killing Christian children before Passover?”

“He is.”

Pearl looks down at the paper. “The sermon is tomorrow night at 7:18. What an odd time! So precise.”

“That’s when the sun sets. That’s when Shabbat begins.”

They look at each other.

“That’s where Joseph will go,” Leo says.

“Well, if we stop him,” she says.

He finishes her thought: “Who will protect us?”

“But if we don’t stop him, a lot of innocent people will get hurt.”

He looks at the time on his phone. “We have twenty-two hours,” he says and hands Pearl a pen.

The next day, the nave of the Church of the Benevolent King is so packed that people have to stand along the walls and along the sides and back of the five-sided room. A babble of voices rises up from the pews. Many of the congregants hold the flyer; almost all hold boxes of matazah, Pearl sees. She glances down at her phone: the time is 7:10.

“We’re in time,” Leo says.

“What if the Golem doesn’t show?” she asks.

Leo takes her hand as they make their way through the throng toward the front of the nave where the empty pulpit stands waiting for Reverend Thaddeus. Pearl points at two metal washtubs sitting in front of the lectern, one filled with books of matches, the other with small plastic bottles. “That’s kerosene,” she says.

“Joseph will come,” Leo says.

The noise in the room rises along with the temperature and people fan themselves with their flyers. Pearl glances around the nave. The congregants are dressed as if for a party, the women in brightly colored dresses, the men in pressed white shirts and pants. Children run up and down the aisles, bashing each other with their boxes of matzah.

At exactly 7:18, the reverend emerges from the back of the transept and stands between the pulpit and the lectern, looking out over the heads of Leo and Pearl, who duck down beside the first pew. The noise builds and intensifies. Reverend Thaddeus stands inside of the sound, the dying rays of the sun through the clerestory lighting up his yellow hair until it glows, resplendent in scarlet vestments like he’s cloaked in fire. Pearl gasps. He raises his hands and the room falls silent.

“He’s not here!” says Pearl, the words catching in her throat. Leo squeezes her hand.

Reverend Thaddeus walks to the lectern. He puts one hand in either side and looks out over his now silent congregation. “Good people,” he says and Pearl thinks he sounds like a radio announcer. “You have heard the stories about the Jewish holiday of Passover, which lasts for eight days and eight nights. During this time, the Jew may not eat bread. Instead they eat,” and here he reaches down, and from behind the lecturn, pulls out a box of Manischewitz Whole Wheat matzah. The room gasps.

“They’re not even kosher for Passover!” Pearl whispers.

Leo shakes his head.

The reverend motions for silence and the mumbling stops. He leans forward and the last beams of sun turn his face to marble. “Blood!” he says. The sound of a baby crying echoes round the room’s domed ceiling. “Yes, the story is a rumor, but how many times have rumors proven to be TRUE?” His voice is thunder and the baby wails louder.

The door in the back of the church slams open and all heads turn.

The Golem fills the entranceway. He’s a man, but not a man. He’s of the earth, but has hair and nails and eyes that narrow in focus at the reverend. He takes a step into the room. Another.

“Joseph!” Leo cries from the front of the church.

The creature jerks at his name, but doesn’t stop his forward motion. Pearl stands, and from the paper in her hands, reads the words that Leo copied for her from one of his books, writing out the Hebrew sounds. The Golem advances. The pews empty as people run for the side door of the nave. An old woman with a cane falters and then falls. Behind her, another woman plants one high-heeled shoe on her back and vaults over her.

“Louder!” Leo shouts to Pearl. He takes her hand and pulls her up onto the platform where Reverend Thaddeus crouches, hiding behind the lectern. Pearl chants and the Golem advances, walking with huge feet over the congregants who have stumbled in his path, others, he tosses aside. It’s Reverend Thaddeus he wants. It’s Reverend Thaddeus he’s come for. He reaches the platform and tears the lectern out of the floor and hurls it over his shoulder where it crashes against the pews. Pearl chants as loud as she can, but the Golem doesn’t stop. He reaches for the cowering man.

“Joseph!”

The Golem hesitates. He looks at his creator.

“I can stop this,” he shouts to Thaddeus, but you have to stop what you’ve started. Can you do that?”

“Go to hell, Jew,” says Reverend Thaddeus.

Leo reaches up, touches his creature’s forehead, looking into the muddy eyes, and rubs out one letter from the word he had carved into his forehead. At once, the Golem turns to clay and then falls into a pile of dust at his feet. The church is silent and empty now, in the distance, sirens. Leo and Pearl scoop up the earth and put it in the knapsack that he’d carried with him for this purpose. When he wipes the tears from his eyes, he leaves a smear of mud across his cheeks.

So it’s Pearl who helps the trembling reverend to his feet. The three humans stand in the empty nave next to the broken pulpit. “Leave here,” says Leo. He holds up the knapsack. “Leave and I promise to store this dust in a place where no one will ever find it. No one but me. And my descendents.” And he looks at Pearl, who blushes.

Reverend Thaddeus nods, once.

***

“I’m so glad Leo and I will be able to sublet your place while we look for one of our own,” Pearl says. She and her old friend Jenn are enjoying this fine September day on the outdoor patio of their favorite coffee place on Northern Boulevard. Pearl lets her latte cool while Jenn sips her artisanal cold brew through a straw.

“No problem,” Jenn says. “I was kind of afraid you’d try to Jew me—I mean get me to lower the rent.” She laughs. “Oops! Sorry. I forgot that you’re.”

Jenn says more after that, but Pearl doesn’t catch it; she’s trying to figure out whether she heard what she heard. She gazes at her old friend, still smiling and gesturing over their drinks, and then Pearl motions for the check. She pays for both of them, leaving a generous tip, and then stands.

“Oh, come on. You know I was only kidding. It’s just a saying,” Jenn says.

“I know,” says Pearl.

“Look, I’m really sorry. You’ve always been so sensitive!”

Pearl leans down and kisses her friend’s cheek. “I know,” she says again.

Out on the sidewalk, Pearl reaches into the handbag hanging from her shoulder and brushes her fingers against the plastic bag she’s hidden in an inside pocket, the one that holds a handful of dust.

This work made possible by a grant from PSC-CUNY.