Customer Reviews

The Golems of Gotham: A Novel

5 star:		(7)
4 star:		(3)
3 star:		(2)
2 star:		(5)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

Having enjoyed immensely Rosenbaum's other works (Second Hand Smoke and Elijah Visible) I had high expectations for Golems of Gotham. I was not disappointed. Once again, the author explores the familiar terrain of love, fear, atrocity, beauty, and art. However this time, he does so with a depth and patience that permeates every page and far surpasses his earlier work. Although the surface plot of the book is compelling and makes for a wonderful read - there is another story (found within that story) equally compelling and even more beautiful. It is found in the narratives and in the simplest of asides - and speaks of the highs (and lows) of parental love and the beauty (and ugliness) of the city of New York (a city which is so prevalent herein - and described with such sweeping prose as to qualify the 10023 zip code itself as a main character).

Once again Thane Rosenbaum offers us an excellent book and a compelling glimpse into the realm of human emotional complexity.

This may be one of the best novels I have ever read. It is amazing to me. I find myself responding on many levels...

a mirror of realities I have never articulated but felt deeply.

Thanks.

This book was almost impossible for me to get through. Not because of the complexity of the narrative, but because I felt like I was in the hands of an inept writer of fiction. (I forced myself to finish it for a book club). The premise of the book is interesting and indeed promising, but the execution falls dismally short of the mark of a good book. Thane Rosenbaum should stick to journalism. Although the author had some interesting things to say about a "holocaust family," they would have been better said in an essay or condensed into a short story (by a different writer). Clearly Rosenbaum has not taken the adage, Show don't tell, to heart--this book is almost entirely said and not shown.

Aside from the preachy way this book is told, there are myriad other reasons that it simply doesn't work as a novel. Perhaps the most pressing one is that Rosenbaum doesn't know any of his characters. This is a book filled to the brim (and beyond) with empty and flat characters! Furthermore I'm sure the holocaust writers he dragged into the cast of his poorly resolved, poorly researched narrative are spinning in their graves. Did the author know anything, for example, about the lives or personalities of Primo Levi or Jerzy Kosinsky? These characters and even the main ones were hard to distinguish, and even harder to believe and give a damn about.

In this book, Rosenbaum has captured some incredible reflection on the concept of suicide. While the book is ostensibly about the Holocaust, wrapped in a fairy tale of kabbalistic spirituality, Rosenbaum's story, is only a vehicle. It is the mode by which he transmits so many thoughts and feelings on why people should go on with life, philosophically, not just biologically.

Starting with several Holocaust survivors who committed suicide, Rosenbaum investigates the reasons why they might have done so. One would think that after Auschwitz, Buchenwald or Bergen-Belson, life would be a virtual cakewalk. Nothing could possibly be as bad as that again.

And as a general class, that is true. Yet, there is a small component of Holocaust survivors, who eventually decide that they can no longer live with the memory of what they saw, and eventually take their own life. And not surprisingly, a high percentage of them are artists, poets and writers, the people who would be most susceptible to feeling the pain of others and themselves.

In crafting his book, Rosenbaum illustrates many reasons to live. And he equally poses many questions about life. But in some respects, he does manage to find reasons to live, which are undeniable, if not difficult to accept sometimes.

As an added bonus, Rosenbaum's descriptions of midtown Manhattan are some of the best present day representations of the area I have ever read in my life. Since he teaches at Fordham Law school, he would be quite familiar with 59th St. & Broadway. The incredible precision of his pictures of Manhattan are truly picturesque and artistic.

Rosenbaum has succeeded in creating a truly wonderful work that handles difficult life subjects with great aplomb. It is recommended to those who think about life and the meaning therein.

It occurred to me while reading this excellent book that there are many families whose current generation need to face and address the family past. While my dad's family was in crisis/turmoil for some time before, there are many parallels between the aftermath of my grandfather's Navy service in the Pacific in WWII (including Guadalcanal & Tarawa) and the type of aftermath this family has. NOTE: they are NOT identical, just somewhat similar in the effects for the next generations, especially when things are not spoken of but hang in the air & take on a life of their own.
The only reason I knocked off a star is for a rather mundanely contrived ending, but it really doesn't effect the essence of the book. A great work!

Life has never treated best-selling mystery writer Oliver Levin well. As a child, he was orphaned when his parents committed suicide in a Miami synagogue. After years of marriage, his wife vanished from their Manhattan brownstone without a trace, leaving him to raise his infant daughter alone. Now, even his livelihood is threatened, as he faces an especially pernicious case of writer's block. Although Oliver has always held his emotions in check, they now threaten to overwhelm him, leading him to consider suicide.

Sensing her father's anguish, his now teenage daughter Ariel looks to the Kabala for answers. Always something of a mystic creature (for instance, she's becomes a klezmer violin virtuoso days after first picking up the instrument), she decides she needs to summon the spirits of her grandparents to help her rescue her father from despair. The ritual she performs (a variation on the one Rabbi Judah Loew used to create the fabled Golem of Prague) goes slightly awry, however. In addition to her grandparents, she accidentally summons a group of six additional ghosts, all spirits of Holocaust survivors who committed suicide, all writers who grappled with the enormity of that event through their art (their number includes Primo Levi, Jerzy Kosinski, Paul Celan, Jean Amery, Piotr Rawicz, and Tadeusz Borowski). Even as they assist Ariel in her quest, the ghosts use their unearthly power to remake Manhattan so that nothing remains to remind them of the Holocaust (e.g. removing tattoos, eliminating crowded train cars and smokestacks, etc.). Doing so, they create chaos.

Using the Holocaust as a dark touchstone, Rosenbaum has crafted a seriocomic reflection on the persistence of memory and the struggle to find meaning in the wake of tragedy, examining the paradox which arises when one seeks to honor the past but at the same time embrace the present and the future, a theme especially resonant in this post 9/11 world. Rosenbaum laments the fact that as successive generations supplant their elders, time tends to mute the horrors of the past, simply because the events are less immediate. Over time, even something as horrendous as the Holocaust begins to fade from everyday consciousness.

A strange hybrid of light-hearted farce and serious reprimand, this work at once celebrates and condemns the human capacity and need to move forward. Charming and oft times laugh out loud funny, The Golems of Gotham is by turn serious and reflective. In the end, Rosenbaum successfully reconciles both impulses, delivering a novel that is as entertaining as it is sobering, one that provides new perspective on familiar themes.

It's not quite fair to describe Rosenbaum's latest book as a novel. It actually reads much more like an essay. This is a message book...Rosenbaum has a rather heavy-handed message that he is bent on delivering. There is a tremendous lack of depth or realness in the characters and the plot is overly contrived and uninvolving. The reason is simply that the characters are only devices Rosenbaum uses to further communicate his message. Indeed, the characters are anything but fully fleshed out (no pun intended)...they as well as everything about this book exists for the sole purpose of preaching. Very uninvolving. The message itself is educational and somewhat interesting, but buyer beware - this is an overlong essay...not a novel.

Funny and sad, touching and scorching, both depressing and uplifting. Anyone with a soul ought to read this book.

This book is about Oliver, son of two Holocaust survivors who made him an orphan by taking their own lives while he was in college. Equally devastating to Oliver was the fact that his wife deserted him and their two year old daughter, Ariel. It is also about Ariel, now a teenager, who has become the emotional caretaker in their family of two out of necessity, because Oliver is too waterlogged with grief and loss that he has kept buried all these years. Ariel, through kabbalism, brings back Holocaust writers as ghosts, along with ghosts of Oliver's parents, to save her father. The Holocaust itself is a character here - actually, the best developed character. The story itself is amusing, if not laugh-out-loud funny, but it is told in loosely connected segments, divided by segments that delve into the realm of philosophy. I would not recommend this story as a great read if all you want is amusement.

The thing that makes this book so fantastic is the intimate and literary way in which Rosenbaum explores grief and loss. Rosenbaum is specifically examining the particular loss experienced by Holocaust survivors and their children, but the grief and loss he actually evokes is more generic. Rosenbaum's work illuminates the bleak emotional state that is the product of experiencing alienation from family and the near inability of the self to face that kind of rejection. Ariel not only saves her father in these pages, she also saves the readers who suffer from alienation for an infinite variety of reasons. The reader first experiences Oliver's pain, and then his transformation vicariously. On closing the book after reading the last page, this reader felt lighter and more hopeful about a lifetime of alienation than she ever would have beliefed possible. Rosenbaum has contributed mightily to the world's literature in ways that he himself, perhaps, didn't even realize, as he pursued his quest to make sure that the world does not forget the ultimate horror of the Holocaust.

I bought this book in the interest of getting a sense of the work of some of the writers that Rosenbaum includes in his cast; I finished GOLEMS hoping that the rambling would led to a satisfying end. Neither of these ideas panned out. Reading Andrine's review, I was so relieved to read that someone agreed that book just didn't do anything interesting with its material.

Also, based on the little research I've done on the topic and the other, better books I've read that include them, Rosenbaum's golems aren't even golems. What's going on with that? A much better book that includes the concept and some satisfying background information on its history is Marge Piercy's Body of Glass (published in the States as He, She, and It).