![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() So does Ahmad, another slave bottled up-literally-and shipped across the water to a New York slum called Little Syria, where a lucky Lebanese tinsmith named Boutros Arbeely rubs a magic flask in just the right way and-shazam!-the jinni (genie) appears. She lands in Manhattan with less destructive force than Godzilla hit Tokyo, but even so, she cuts a strange figure. The rabbi, Shaalman, warns that the ensuing golem-in Wecker’s tale, The Golem-is meant to be a slave and “not for the pleasures of a bed,” but he creates her anyway. One aspirant, “a Prussian Jew from Konin, a bustling town to the south of Danzig,” is an unpleasant sort, a bit of a bully, arrogant, unattractive, but with enough loose gelt in his pocket to commission a rabbi-without-a-portfolio to build him an idol with feet of clay-and everything else of clay, too. In her debut novel, Wecker begins with a juicy premise: At the dawn of the 20th century, the shtetls of Europe and half of “Greater Syria” are emptying out, their residents bound for New York or Chicago or Detroit. Can’t we all just get along? Perhaps yes, if we’re supernatural beings from one side or another of the Jewish-Arab divide. ![]()
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