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The Golems Take New York: The Resurgence Of The Golem In The Work Of Cynthia Ozick And Thane Rosenbaum, Peter Schulman

World Languages and Cultures Faculty Publications

The late twentieth and early twenty first centuries have seen a resurgence of the golem in several major American novels. What factors might lead to such a re-imagining of the golem in American fiction? Cynthia Ozick's The Puttermesser Papers (1997) and Thane Rosenbaum's The Golems of Gotham (2002) re-invent golems no longer anchored in vengeance but in healing, as vehicles for the kabbalistic notion of Tikkun Olam ("repairing the world"). Ozick creates the first female golem to help the lonely protagonist become a reformist mayor; in The Golems of Gotham, the golem is transformed into a team of literary …