Book Description
Exploring the role of the golem in the formation of modern Jewish culture
Author : Cathy S. Gelbin
Publisher : University of Michigan Press
Page : 226 pages
File Size : 44,49 MB
Release : 2011
Category : Literary Criticism
ISBN : 0472117599
Exploring the role of the golem in the formation of modern Jewish culture
Author : David Wisniewski
Publisher : Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
Page : 37 pages
File Size : 30,77 MB
Release : 2007-11-19
Category : Juvenile Fiction
ISBN : 0547531796
Retold from traditional sources and accompanied by David Wisniewski's unique cut-paper illustrations, Golem is a dramatic tale of supernatural forces invoked to save an oppressed people. It also offers a thought-provoking look at the consequences of unleashing power beyond human control. The afterword discusses the legend of the golem and its roots in the history of the Jews. A Caldecott Medal Book.
Author : Yehudah Yudl Rozenberg
Publisher : Yale University Press
Page : 255 pages
File Size : 19,41 MB
Release : 2007-01-01
Category : Literary Criticism
ISBN : 030013472X
This collection of interrelated stories about a sixteenth-century Prague rabbi and the golem he created became an immediate bestseller upon its publication in 1909. So widely popular and influential was Yudl Rosenberg's book, it is no exaggeration to claim that the author transformed the centuries-old understanding of the creature of clay and single-handedly created the myth of the golem as protector of the Jewish people during times of persecution. In addition to translating Rosenberg's classic golem story into English for the first time, Curt Leviant also offers an introduction in which he sets Rosenberg's writing in historical context and discusses the golem legend before and after Rosenberg's contributions. Generous annotations are provided for the curious reader. The book is full of adventures, surprises, romance, suspense, mysticism, Jewish pride, and storytelling at its best. The Chief Rabbi of Prague, known as the Maharal, brings the golem Yossele to life to help the Jews fight false accusations of ritual murder-the infamous blood libel. More human, more capable, and more reliable as a protector than any golem imagined before, Rosenberg's Golem irrevocably changed one of the most widely influential icons of Jewish folklore.
Author : Helene Wecker
Publisher : Harper Collins
Page : 426 pages
File Size : 11,21 MB
Release : 2013-04-23
Category : Fiction
ISBN : 0062110853
“An intoxicating fusion of fantasy and historical fiction. . . . Wecker’s storytelling skills dazzle." —Entertainment Weekly A marvelous and absorbing debut novel about a chance meeting between two supernatural creatures in turn-of-the-century immigrant New York. Chava is a golem, a creature made of clay by a disgraced rabbi knowledgeable in the ways of dark Kabbalistic magic. She serves as the wife to a Polish merchant who dies at sea on the voyage to America. As the ship arrives in New York in 1899, Chava is unmoored and adrift until a rabbi on the Lower East Side recognizes her for the creature she is and takes her in. Ahmad is a jinni, a being of fire born in the ancient Syrian desert and trapped centuries ago in an old copper flask by a Bedouin wizard. Released by a Syrian tinsmith in a Manhattan shop, Ahmad appears in human form but is still not free. An iron band around his wrist binds him to the wizard and to the physical world. Chava and Ahmad meet accidentally and become friends and soul mates despite their opposing natures. But when the golem’s violent nature overtakes her one evening, their bond is challenged. An even more powerful threat will emerge, however, and bring Chava and Ahmad together again, challenging their very existence and forcing them to make a fateful choice. Compulsively readable, The Golem and the Jinni weaves strands of Yiddish and Middle Eastern literature, historical fiction and magical fable, in a wondrously inventive tale that is mesmerizing and unforgettable.
Author : Irène Cohen-Janca
Publisher :
Page : 0 pages
File Size : 19,92 MB
Release : 2017
Category : Golem
ISBN : 9781554518883
This retelling of an ancient Jewish legend will capture a new audience with its powerful illustrations and timeless text.
Author : Ira Robinson
Publisher : Academic Studies PRess
Page : 270 pages
File Size : 37,46 MB
Release : 2021-02-23
Category : Religion
ISBN : 1644695057
This book illuminates important issues faced by Orthodox Judaism in the modern era by relating the life and times of Rabbi Yudel Rosenberg (1859–1935). In presenting Yudel Rosenberg’s rabbinic activities, this book aims to show that Jewish Orthodoxy could serve as an agent of modernity no less than its opponents. Yudel Rosenberg’s considerable literary output will demonstrate that the line between “secular” and “traditional” literature was not always sharp and distinct. Rabbi Rosenberg’s kabbalistic works will shed light on the revival of kabbala study in the twentieth century. Yudel Rosenberg’s career in Canada will serve as a counter-example to the often-expressed idea that Hasidism exercised no significant influence on the development of American Judaism at the turn of the twentieth century.
Author : Wendy C. Nielsen
Publisher : Routledge
Page : 300 pages
File Size : 11,66 MB
Release : 2022-05-30
Category : Literary Criticism
ISBN : 1000582418
This book explains the elimination of maternal characters in American, British, French, and German literature before 1890 by examining motherless creations: Pygmalion’s statue, Frankenstein’s creature, homunculi, automata, androids, golems, and steam men. These beings typify what is now called artificial life, living systems made through manufactured means. Fantasies about creating life ex-utero were built upon misconceptions about how life began, sustaining pseudoscientific beliefs about the birthing body. Physicians, inventors, and authors of literature imagined generating life without women to control the process of reproduction and generate perfect progeny. Thus, some speculative fiction before 1890 belongs to the literary genealogy of transhumanism, the belief that technology will someday transform some humans into superior, immortal beings. Female motherless creations tend to operate as sexual companions. Male ones often emerge as subaltern figures analogous to enslaved beings, illustrating that reproductive rights inform readers’ sense of who counts as human in fictions of artificial life.
Author : Maya Barzilai
Publisher : NYU Press
Page : 323 pages
File Size : 49,69 MB
Release : 2020-04-01
Category : Religion
ISBN : 147984845X
2017 Jordan Schnitzer Book Award in Jewish Literature and Linguistics Honorable Mention, 2016 Baron Book Prize presented by AAJR A monster tour of the Golem narrative across various cultural and historical landscapes In the 1910s and 1920s, a “golem cult” swept across Europe and the U.S., later surfacing in Israel. Why did this story of a powerful clay monster molded and animated by a rabbi to protect his community become so popular and pervasive? The golem has appeared in a remarkable range of popular media: from the Yiddish theater to American comic books, from German silent film to Quentin Tarantino movies. This book showcases how the golem was remolded, throughout the war-torn twentieth century, as a muscular protector, injured combatant, and even murderous avenger. This evolution of the golem narrative is made comprehensible by, and also helps us to better understand, one of the defining aspects of the last one hundred years: mass warfare and its ancillary technologies. In the twentieth century the golem became a figure of war. It represented the chaos of warfare, the automation of war technologies, and the devastation wrought upon soldiers’ bodies and psyches. Golem: Modern Wars and Their Monsters draws on some of the most popular and significant renditions of this story in order to unravel the paradoxical coincidence of wartime destruction and the fantasy of artificial creation. Due to its aggressive and rebellious sides, the golem became a means for reflection about how technological progress has altered human lives, as well as an avenue for experimentation with the media and art forms capable of expressing the monstrosity of war.
Author : Rüdiger Ahrens
Publisher : Walter de Gruyter
Page : 432 pages
File Size : 19,77 MB
Release : 2013-12-12
Category : Literary Criticism
ISBN : 3110297205
Magic realism has become a significant mode of expression in Jewish cultural production. This special focus of Symbolism for the first time explores in a comparative and transnational approach the magic realist engagement of Jewish writers, artists, and filmmakers from the Diaspora and from Israel with issues of identity, oppression and persecution as well as the Holocaust.
Author : Steven Mace
Publisher : Lulu.com
Page : 436 pages
File Size : 37,72 MB
Release : 2015-04-28
Category : Fiction
ISBN : 1326260383
Echoes and Exiles is Steven Mace's third short story collection: featuring high quality stories, many of which have been previously published online in magazines and webzines; 26 short stories in contemporary, SF, fantasy and horror fiction genres; and featuring bonus children's stories, flash fiction and scripts. This collection features disappearances on a remote space colony...a teleportation accident... dark family secrets...the rise and fall of an alien planet...a fantastic invention...strange events at a snowbound mountainside cabin...a teenage runaway with a demonic pursuer...an elderly couple who take in a mysterious and malevolent lodger...a spy glass that can view through time and space...a future dystopia...an innocent caught up in a robbery...a space salvage team find something nasty in deepest space...the dangers of virtual reality...a dying man with a grudge and desire for a revenge....a marriage that isn't what it seems...and a psychopathic drifter...all these stories and more.