Title: The Golem of Brooklyn
Author: Adam Mansbach
Genre: Speculative Fiction
Year of Publication: 2023
Why I Bought/Borrowed It: Another book I bought based on the cover. It had me at Golem and Brooklyn.
Two Sentence Summary: Part The Lost Shetl, part Frankenstein, part Rent-vibe, part The Iron Giant and part A Short History of the Golem (I made that one up), The Golem of Brooklyn is a madcap contemporary roadtrip in search of self, vengeance (maybe), and a broader understanding of the Golem’s place in Jewish history. Insightful and delightful with a cast of characters with whom you feel an instant connection.
What was Judaism if not an exacting, totalized system of laws handed down by the divine, then kitted out with redundancies and fail-safes by the scholars to eliminate any chance of an infraction–building a wall around the Torah, it was called, the process by which don’t cook a goat in its mother’s milk ballooned into never mix dairy with meat, buy two sets of dishes, wash them in different dishwashers — and then, finally, poked full of loopholes so the devout might obediently circumvent those laws?
The Golem of Brookly by Adam Mansbach