Mark Jay Mirsky

East Side Golems

 

I wake up feeling like cinders and ashes. Slowly whatever sparks were not extinguished in the night flicker back into that slight warmth with which I stumble to the first tasks of morning.

Still I am reluctant to go to my breakfast place, a struggling Polish restaurant on Avenue A, due to close in the next year or two. It was a fixture of the neighborhood when I first arrived forty years before, surrounded by tenements filled with refugees from Post War Poland and Ukraine. These new immigrants took advantage of a fleeing Jewish and Italian population; low rents (unbelievable today), cheap foodstuffs; the ninety-five-cent special of the mid-60’s, meat loaf with peas and carrots, mashed potatoes, coleslaw, a slice of bread, rice pudding for dessert, choice of tea or coffee. Haunts, which went on and on with cheap but rising prices, are now snuffed out by high rents and different tastes. I walk a neighborhood where, weekly, a familiar grocery or hardware disappears, a ghost in my head. The two Italian bakeries have closed—tall breads in their windows whose sculptured shapes advertised the flair for dream in grain, gone, and groceries whose cheeses, olives, drew one into the back alleys of Palermo. The heavy black breads of Poland, pumpernickels, ryes, and the sausage shop, will follow suit.

The empty tables in the morning at my breakfast beacon, The Cracow Maiden, prophesize it too will go under the waves of new building on the Lower East Side. Rabbi Loew of Prague’s Golem made of wet clay occurs to me as I sit here, a character in a story.

My persona will be Ezra Mitzraim; thirty-five or so. At an unsteady table in the sinking restaurant Mitzraim will muse like myself, flesh is clay. He hopes to work in the impressionable body of a recent waitress at the Maiden, Wanda. This Polish girl with high cheekbones, points of pink, the buds of early roses in her cheeks, a swaying backside that makes me dizzy, unexpectedly looks into Ezra’s eyes. There are other customers she smiles at; the squat old men of the Mafia who grumble toothlessly over next-to-last cups of coffee; the gnarled survivors of Warsaw burning in World War Two; withered grandmothers drawn over the ocean by children slipping under a rusting Iron Curtain, ladies now bundled in shabby old coats.

There will be few rivals for Ezra’s courtship in The Polish Maiden but Wanda’s stay will be as evanescent as her presence. She has risen from an Eastern Europe akin to this vanishing East Side. Ezra knows he must work quickly if he is to hold her here. Cheap rents are a thing of the past. There is no place for Wanda to stay. No free university. She sleeps, Ezra will learn, on a girlfriend’s couch, her visa non-existent. The spaces and cubbyholes of New York City in the 1960’s, 70’s, 80’s, are gone. Even the outline of the 19th century Manhattan, sun burnished red brick, the cornices, scrolls of antiquity in greening copper or painted steel stamped out against the clouds have toppled to boxes that promise modern amenities but chase the 19th century from the sky.

The question, Ezra thinks is not how Loew, that ingenious sage of 17th century Prague’s narrow haunted streets, inscribed life in the mass of a shapeless clay lump to create a “Being.” Rather—how did earth and water, combined in bowls according to rites of Kabbalah passed in vellums from German rabbis of the 12th century, twist their consonants into sticky living threads to drip a stream of cloudy vowels into the beleaguered arms and thighs of a rabbi enclosed almost entirely in texts? What sent Rabbi Loew’s angry jealous love out from his study in the form of a raging giant?

Wanda bending down to the table beside Ezra’s, has inadvertently revealed two perfect halves of a behind outlined in black cotton jeans and inscribed herself in Mitzraim’s flesh. The loose knit of her white woolen sweater, cables of yarn running through it, hikes far up on her back, while the belt draws away from her waist so that the long line of her back is almost naked as it dips down into her vanilla buttocks to display the beginning of secret passages. Her soul squirms in beside his.

He keeps thinking of her after breakfast, risen from his lonely single table by the window to make his way uptown to a high school where he is obligated to teach some classes for thirty years or more until a pension allows him to retire.

 

*

 

It began with a few words of banter Ezra initiated.

No, not true. It began with her bending. She closes her hand around his heart in that motion as she pours coffee for the other table. Moments before, he first notices this tall waitress, her slender, waving form coming to take his order and her smile. Not the ordinary smile of a waitress, guarded, impatient, even touchingly polite as the younger girls, even the occasional boy, can be to customers at The Cracow Maiden. Most servers there are no more than eighteen and nineteen years old; recruited he supposes, since they rotate every few months, from a service or employment agency in Poland. The morning sun floods his table. Wanda’s smile is hopeful, expectant, like a teacher fresh to the profession, waiting for her brightest student’s answers.

Why waste its breathless inquiry, “What do you want?” with the well-worn, “Rye toast, poached eggs, French fries, juice, coffee”?

He chokes out, as her eyebrows rise—her smile, improbably broadening further—“The breakfast special”?

It is her front, not backside now, that introduces the first personal moment. The cable knit of her sweater when she turns back to his table to ask if he wishes her to refill his coffee containing in full view her breasts confined in a brassiere but so obscured, cupped he cannot tell whether high or low, full, flat, or medium circumference. To excuse a stare verging on the shameless, he asks, “What is that?” pointing to the medallion around her neck, a white cameo on a blue background, its oval secured by a chain of fragile gold links, “The Virgin Mary.” Wanda’s reply thrusts her body from him; yet welcomes him to come closer, her breasts protected by the Virgin’s severe smile that insists on the miracle of chastity and separates his faith from hers. The Virgins in the paintings of the Renaissance, whose mysterious beauty tickled the brush, do not exist in Wanda’s world. As she returns again to service eight family members seated at the long table directly across from Ezra’s, the shortest in the Maiden—one chair facing the window, the other occupied by his book bag—she dips and exposes to him an expanse of white, just above the beginning of the cleft in her behind. This remains, days later, fixed in imagination.

A doctor has forbidden Ezra eggs more than twice a week. He observes it as a knight’s vow of abstinence, even less willing to violate it after his revelation. As soon as the cycle permitted, on the Wednesday succeeding the Friday he had first seen Wanda, he returns to The Cracow Maiden. Wanda is not there. He has to wait past this Wednesday to arrive again at the morning, his dietary Kabbalah, allots for a “breakfast special.”

His disappointment moves in Wednesday’s eggs. The cook sends out hard-boiled, rubbery spheres. The French Fries smell of rancid oil, cut thick, mealy, not the delicate fingers of potato that usually crowd his plate; swashes of ketchup do not redeem these stubs. His coffee is thin. The new waitress’s petite nose, glossy skin, blonde ringlets would ordinarily receive a sympathetic glance. She has an hourglass shape. A little ridge of flesh above the belt, a love handle, escapes the narrow waist of that vessel She does not smile. Wanda’s stomach had been absolutely flat over her belt as she loomed and leaned back above his table. The bones of her waist did not display an extra ounce of flesh. The body was angular but tense, muscular, ready to take flight. He had dreamed of taking Wanda west from Avenue A’s two narrow lanes, gliding to the wide one-way rush of First Avenue to soar on skateboards past the United Nations through the city’s side rib.

Ezra came in, hopeless, on Friday but there was Wanda, beaming when she saw him, the medallion gone. He drew out of his book bag a volume, which he hoped would prove auspicious.

The cover announced in bold letters its content and arriving with his eggs, Wanda bent toward it, as if mesmerized. “What is The Messianic Idea…?” She stumbled a moment over “Messianic,” a pause he found charming even as he searched her sweater. The cloth of her cotton jersey was solid now and revealed nothing although it pulled away even higher than the cable sweater, exposing more of her flat stomach while the pants, pegged by a belt, were further down on her hips.

There was no one at the table beside him and so what had imprinted was not on display.

“Idea” she deciphered the next word but seemed reluctant to pronounce the preposition “in” or the noun, “Judaism,” that followed it.

“Insofar as it concerns you?” he asked.

“Me?” she responded, smiling, as if he had paid her a compliment.

“It is the idea that a woman may be the Messiah.”

“What does that have to do with me?” he thought she asked.

Her voice, however, was indistinct. Someone called from the far end of the restaurant for her to take an order. His table did not exist as she darted off in that direction.

 

*

 

He left The Cracow Maiden that morning without Wanda again approaching where he sat by the restaurant’s street windows. The next week on the days he had assigned himself, she was not there. The idea of her though, begun to work in him, softening the expression of boredom in the blonde girl who poured his coffee, slimming the fat one bringing him eggs. The promise of the wonderful infused the taste of juice, coffee, eggs—running in the yolks.

 

*

 

Isn’t it the idea, after all, which creates what is real? The story that a giant Jew made of clay had run amok through a city of superstitious gentiles was hard to credit but not the hope that it would happen.

Even stranger, Mitzraim thought, as the blonde who could barely manage not to scowl refilled his cup (but did she feel his greedy eyes on her as she came and went?) was the hope that it had happened. A hundred years after the death of Rabbi Judah Loew ben Bezalel the legend of the dumb creature created through mystical utterance, walked out of the synagogue attic, a shadow of that venerable rabbi.

 

*

 

Is it imagination that animates clay? The tale of a man, woman coming to life again, or assuming life, is only a paradigm of human wonder at the idea of dreams being drawn into words; constructed as pictures or ideas so that others in turn can make them part of their memory. Rabbi Judah Loew ben Bezalel had been absorbed into the marching clay. Judah’s complex vocabulary of man’s nature as spirit and dumb earth, dust refined so that its lowest elements (which the rabbi had mocked), collected in a fantasy that smashed about.

It had to wait in the grave for years, in an earth strewn with bones, humping and heaving through the seasons, leaking corpuscles through a buckling coffin. Centuries later, the sense of absence in Prague of a distinguished rabbi in old age, his speech full of hints that he is in touch with other worlds summons this Clay Man, a presence that pervades the synagogue, sifts sticky earth into the socks of its congregation.

What will Wanda make of any of this? She is working on a doctorate in sociology. Ezra’s only hope is that he can lure her into a ghost Manhattan that is even more eerie than the Prague of the Golem. Isn’t the image of the Virgin a token that she believes a dream can take flesh?

 

*

 

I see Mitzraim look up, surprised at my interference as author. It is difficult for him to object. He is aware that he too is a Golem, an idea, yet like Rabbi Loew’s man of clay, he wants to be, to walk the streets with a will of his own.

“You will give it?”

Who else?

“Listen, you misunderstand the workings of your own mind. You are helpless without me. I am at least thirty years younger. You have no chance with this Wanda. Without me there is no story, just a few pathetic words, and a glimpse of a girl’s belly. You have no existence in the pages of your notebook without me. You are the Golem, sitting there, waiting for me to take your place.”

Despite the truth of what Mitzraim says, I cannot remain entirely dumb. “You can’t take my place without some reference to what did or did not happen.”

“Why not?”

“If you don’t reflect something of what caught my interest, it’s impossible for me to identify with your character.”

“Fair enough.”

“She had offered me her smile, inadvertently showed me her backside, spoke a secret,” I add.

“A secret?”

“I withheld it, not knowing what to make of what she told me at the time.”

Mitzraim lapses into silence. I resume my third person.

The cameo was missing the second time I saw Wanda. I inquired as to its absence.

She smiled, clasped her hands over her breasts and said, “I have it here.”

Did she add, “In my heart”?

Or did I simply understand it, and ask myself again, who is this young woman?

I withheld another detail, or, to be precise, I introduced Time into the process as those who fashioned the Golem of Rabbi Judah did. I had to make you (the reader, for you are present here) aware of Wanda’s fascination with the Virgin as mother. Before I spoke of it in terms of Wanda’s flesh, I had to introduce my attachment to the messianic. Wanda’s introduction to this might not have happened as I told it. It occurs to me only now that I became aware of her own attachment to books in a previous session, or breakfast, after I had initiated a conversation about her medallion but before I mentioned the messianic. Flat on my table at the restaurant lay a biography of a German poet, Rilke, whose sensual lower lip hung under his wispy moustache like (modesty makes it difficult for me to pass the word between my teeth) …

It drew Wanda’s fixed gaze as if she was a bee scenting the cup of nectar, golden dust of the stamen, the buzzing at the honeycomb. She fluttered over it.

As she stared, caught in Rainer Maria Rilke’s crossed eyed stare from the glossy cover, the Venus flytrap of his lip, I longed to burst into his syllables:

 

Fangen die Engel

wirklich nur Ihriges auf, ihnen Ehnströmtes?

 

Do the angels seize

really nothing but what is theirs, what has streamed from them?

 

“I have heard of this,” I parse her whispered reply, “poet.”

To which I answer:

 

or sometimes as if by mistake is a bit

of our being with it? Are we

in their features mixed…?

 

*

 

No. I did not recite, but hearing the poet’s name, Wanda’s white face burst into a bush of roses with pleasure. “I have heard of him,” she whispered.

“What have you heard?” I did not ask that. Mitzraim could not have asked it either, knowing that the question would be resented. It was better to go home with Wanda’s form in his head, sit her on the edge of his narrow bed, hoping she would lean back against his pillows, and ply her with lines of the poet whose cross eyed gaze and protruding lip had drawn an admission that she knew Rainer Maria Rilke.

Could one live a life through the words of another? Were words as sympathetic as flesh? Silence was magic, but it was usually the vibrations of a phrase, a line, which seemed to set out in the woman opposite a breathless anticipation, in which one could exchange intimacy, before moving one’s arms to draw her close, or tumbling together found her lips. There was no need to ask, “Do you like? Do you love me?” when both have felt the thrill of extravagant flight, rhythms in verse that reached for a love eluding the poet, which each partner, speaking, could fly with to the other in the flesh. Recalling the long splendid torso of a young woman Mitzraim had recited these verses to years before, a shadow of Wanda laughing in his dreams, did lean back and allow him to put one arm around her waist, and another on top of her shoulder, the length of her body a tense spring about to release her sweetness into his.

What satisfaction did the rabbis who created the clay man receive from their creatures? A Rabbi Elijah summoned our Golem to fight in the alleyways of Poland’s Chelm, but once the creature pummeled the town bullies, it left Chelm to haunt the surrounding villages. The Clay Man tread south; reached the Carpathian Mountains then west to the the Czechs and Slovaks? Could the Golem meekly accept the duties of a library assistant after Rabbi Loew re-animated it in the bowls of his study and the robot administered a few beatings to Prague’s anti-Semitic thugs? Lopsided clay confined to shuffle between shelves creaking with books, scrolls, scraps from the depositories of abandoned synagogues in German-speaking cities, faraway study houses of Sephardim? Yet this collection threatening to collapse cupboards, bookcases stacked up to the ceiling were the crib of the Golem, a creature of ephemera. Can an artificial presence be counted in the tally of ten men necessary to constitute a congregation, read the Law, and recite prayers for the dead? The rabbis’ debate this in the 12th and 13th century, while the dummy waits outside their studies? Seeded with elements of ecstatic knowledge unanimated, he remains but a sacred doll, speechless. The touch of his clammy, cold hand, moist with gelatinous earth, must have made his creator, who spoke so eloquently of clay, uneasy.

Whereas the girl under me was conceived of as air and fire. From Wanda’s brief appreciation of Rilke, “I have heard of him,” I had drawn her image. She memorized reams of poetry and recited it to me, echoing the very verses I had just spoken so that the sensation of drawing her naked body against mine was indeed air and fire.

“Give her back to me,” Mitzraim complained.

It was in fact Mitzraim who had taken the conversation a step further, after asking me to “absent” myself a while “from felicity” and avoid the Maiden of Cracow. I agreed. Why not spare myself the sight of Wanda, her sweetness? An abyss of time yawned between us. Could her smile and mischievous waving shoot graft to my weathered and scarred stump? . . .

“You watched her? When? You agreed…” Mizraim shouts at me.

In my first free moment after a hectic weekend, looking at a week of early morning appointments, I, as the author, did visit the Maiden earlier than anticipated, since it was apparent that I could not later. And when a squat lump of a girl, who hardly looked out of the first eight grades of school, took my order in a half-empty restaurant, checking the minute hand, challenging my rights to the breakfast special, it looked as if the breach of contract with my shadow would have no effect. Just as I sat down, waiting for the order to arrive, having won the unappetizing waitress’s consent, Wanda popped into view.

“I object,” the ghost of my character protested. I had some doubts now too. Mitzraim is better fitted than I to carry on this story.

Far better, I told Mitzraim, that you bring her back to your place.

He was prepared but did not because of a conversation at the cash register, which I had revealed to him.

Wanda had asked what I believed in.

“Why?” Mitzraim pressed; stunned that Wanda would ask.

“Oh, it’s too complicated.” My character stared sullenly at me. “In trying to reveal myself but conceal what might frighten an intelligent young woman from a provincial city, rooted in a conservative Church, I had avoided all specifics of my own religion. She would have read ‘Judaism,’ in the title of The Messianic Idea. I remarked that all writers were superstitious since they believed, if in nothing else, the principle of order. Fiction, the short story, and novel, were dependent on it.

“How did I blunder into this conversation? I have forgotten, but not Wanda clutching her breasts through the woolen cable of her sweater, whether in mockery or actual apprehension, staring at me full in the eyes. In elaborating on my belief, I had whispered so that she could pretend not to have heard it, ‘I am a mystic.’

“‘I am afraid of you,’ she answered, her smile still in place.

“With this I fled the cash register, leaving the story to you, Mitzraim.”

Mitzraim came in the next day, assured that I, the author, would not. Rather than being prepared, however, he was at a loss after my intrusion. Who would Wanda see as she came towards his table? Could he dislodge her from her role as a waitress?

Why had she pressed so hard the question of belief? Was she prepared to question her own? He wanted to introduce the idea they entertained of each other into their conversation, also to bring the poet who had caught her eye back into the words that passed between them.

 

*

 

Wanda will not stay long at The Cracow Maiden. Like all the young women, boys, most between seventeen and twenty-two, this is a halfway station before they disappear with a dubious immigration status into an American city or return to Europe. Manhattan holds out no hope. Possibly in Brooklyn’s further reach, Brownsville, they might find a shadowy room, or the Bronx’s gang plagued Grand Concourse. Though younger by several generations than his creator, Mitzraim knows his possibilities with Wanda are limited. Only if she too lives in words does he have a chance for intimacy. He has to work his way under her sweater in a few fleeting sentences and displace the religious image there with the verse of the poet.

What was the point? He was a creature at best of cardboard, stray sentiments. He had to be left in a restaurant whose prospects were hopeless. What Wanda understood and what he wanted her to understand stretched into the white spaces of the margin. What had happened to the rabbis who conversed with golems? Did the clay weigh down their thoughts? Rabbi Loew of Prague is obsessed with the element of earth in man. Is that why the Golem attaches itself to his name? Any day now Wanda could be gone and with her my character’s chance to work and be worked upon. I had begun to notice details of imperfection in her teeth. The winter was playing havoc with her complexion’s porcelain white. Weary, her promenade down the aisle has lost its spring. The rabbi’s creation in the dry air of the library stiffens, no longer pays attention. Wanda may recall Mitzraim in a dreary moment, long after, her slim form thickened and hobbled by time; see him sitting at the far end of a kitchen in Poland, smiling as he returns her own. Can he touch her in some secret place she allows his fingers to go? Do we fashion the image of each other?

Ah Mitzraim! I leave him with one possibility, an existence in that forlorn kitchen, thirty years hence. I punish him with his own boast of superiority. What does he have to bring to the table for Wanda but a few scenes of seduction in his own head, some lines of Rilke, an abbreviated entry on Golems in The Encylopedia Judaica’s abridged edition. I denied him even a cursory look at Gershom Scholem’s magisterial Major Trends in Jewish Mysticism, which might have raised his stature in the waitress’s eyes.

I, on the other hand, stand poised, if she believes in me, to follow her through every country in Europe, to draw out of the ragbag of tricks, any number of books, places, roles, I have played. I leave him disconsolate at the front window of the Maiden to eye the drug addicts at the next table; the failing old men of the fading East Side Mafia, talking of hospital benefits; marginal characters, scraps like himself who wander in for breakfast. I am at the cash register emptying my pockets, then elbowing beside him in his seat.

“Do you want more coffee?” she asks, bending over.

“Only from you,” Mitzraim says. It is his fourth cup, the third poured by her as her smiles progress down the aisle to other customers.

What a pathetic line, I think.

“What do you want?” he rages at me. “You don’t put anything better in my mouth.”

Shortly after, he is erased.

 

 

Bio:

Mark Jay Mirsky has previously published four novels, Thou Worm Jacob, Proceedings of the Rabble, Blue Hill Avenue, and The Red Adam, and a collection of short stories called The Secret Table, and several books of criticism: My Search for the Messiah; Dante, Eros, and Kabbalah; The Absent Shakespeare; and his latest, The Drama in Shakespeare’s Sonnets: A Satire to Decay. He is the coeditor of Rabbinic Fantasies (Yale University Press) The Jews of Pinsk Volumes 1 & 2 (Stanford University Press), and the editor of Robert Musil’s Diaries in English (Basic Books). He founded the journal Fiction in 1972 with Donald Barthelme, Jane DeLynn, and Max and Marianne Frisch and has been its editor-in-chief up to the present. A Professor of English at The City College of New York, he has served as its chairperson and director of Jewish Studies. His latest novel about Boston lost in the 1960’s is called Franklin Park Puddingstone, and is available in print as well as e-book form. His articles appear on the Fiction website, www.fictioninc.com and his blog www.markmirsky.com

 

from Shadowgraph Magazine Two, Summer 2014