Maya Barzilai

This essay discusses the interplay of German and Hebrew in S. Y. Agnon’s later fiction, particularly Ad henah (To this Day, 1952). In this work, Agnon, who had lived in Germany between 1912 and 1924, revisits the German home front during World War I. He uses this setting to reflect upon the modern status of Hebrew—the sacred language of creation—in a world ravaged by war, including the more contemporary, 1948 battles. For this meditation on language, creation, and destruction, he draws on the golem tale, which had become a mainstay of German-language literature in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. As his “golem,” Agnon casts a brain-injured German soldier who has forgotten his name, family, and home. Agnon’s rich rewriting of the golem story, a narrative of animation through language, establishes an unholy alliance between Hebrew and German and invites a reconsideration of Gustav Meyrink’s occult bestseller, Der Golem, first published in 1915. Through translations of his stories into German in the 1910s, Agnon found himself hailed as the “authentic” chronicler of East European Jewish life, particularly as contrasted with the “inauthentic” Meyrink. Pushing back against this dichotomy and the past cult surrounding his works in German-Jewish circles, Agnon’s mid-twentieth-century writing reveals the ongoing presence, and even preservation, of German language and culture within modern Hebrew.

Following the 1988 translation of Roland Barthes's Camera Lucida into Hebrew, Ronit Matalon, an Israeli writer of Egyptian extraction, began interpolating Barthes into her writing, in part through unacknowledged quotations. This essay explores how Camera Lucida “traveled,” as a piece of both visual theory and personal reflection, to the Israel of the first Intifada and its aftermath. Drawing on Matalon's use of Barthes, the essay seeks to highlight Camera Lucida's theoretical tensions and to show how these tensions were productive for an experimental mode of critical writing. In her short fiction, Matalon uses the elevated Hebrew of Barthes in translation as a surreal device of linguistic and narrative estrangement from the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and from the predictable script of an Israeli journalist's visit to a mourning family in Gaza. Parodying Barthes's discovery of the famous “Winter Garden” image of his deceased mother, Matalon questions Camera Lucida's relevance and significance for situations of mourning in which inequality prevails and the deceased subject does not function as the Barthesian unique and irreplaceable other. Reading Matalon's novel The One Facing Us (1995), I contend that here, in the fictionalized framework of neocolonial Cameroon, the author addresses the racial implications of Barthes's idea of photographic “contingency,” anticipating American criticism of his work by more than a decade. Matalon treats the light captured in the photograph itself as a means of disrupting photography's contingency and introducing indeterminacy into the black/white order of Africa, as well as the racial orders of Israel and Palestine.

Actor and director Paul Wegener released his 1920 silent film The Golem, How He Came into the World in the aftermath of Germany's defeat in World War I. The film's innovative cinematography, lighting effects, modernist architectural design, and thrilling plot all led contemporaneous viewers and critics to pronounce that Germany had finally succeeded on the film front if not on the battlefield. The Golem, How He Came into the World, Wegener's third golem film, narrates how Rabbi Loew, here an astrologer and sorcerer as well as a spiritual leader, forms and animates an artificial clay anthropoid in order to save the Prague Jewish community from an edict of expulsion. Maya Barzilai situates the 1920 film in the historical and social context of post-World War I Germany, taking into consideration Wegener's violent and traumatic service on the Western front. She closely analyzes the film's expressive sculptural aesthetic, enhanced through poetic cinematography, arguing that Wegener's animation of cinema also served a postwar ethical purpose: revealing the human face of the golem and offering a redemptive escape from the the film's Christian-Jewish conflict through nature on the one hand and Zionism on the other.

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. This volume explores how the malleable golem—often imagined in Jewish texts and contexts—also invited reflections on the rise of Jewish national movements and new bodily ideals in an age of war and revolutions.