The golem is depicted in many stories as a child with the body of a giant, a being who is not intelligent and must constantly be asked to do things. When a golem becomes vain, terrible things often happen. In my story, the golem learns how to be a part of the community. The giant almost symbolically represents the Yiddish culture, which, like the golem in the story, originated in the Middle Ages and disappeared in the first part of the 20th century because it became jaded and could not adapt to the rapidly changing American culture.
With this story, I show the struggles and migration of the Jewish people and, more
specifically, how Yiddish culture was born in Germany and later shifted to Eastern Europe. The last part of the story is about the popular migration of Yiddish culture to America and how it began to fade and slowly disappeared there. It is an incredible trajectory that was driven by unrest and pogroms and would ultimately lead to a gradual disappearance of a culture.
I think it is no coincidence that golem stories regained popularity in the late 19th century, after their initial success in the Renaissance. Both periods were enormously difficult for Jews.
During the Renaissance, Jews had to flee the long religious wars in central Europe. At the time, absolute monarchies were struggling with new movements in Christianity that were trying to undermine the power of the Church, and neither side was hugely fond of the
culturally and religiously different Jews.
This caused a flight to Eastern Europe, where faith and rule in the Polish-Lithuanian empire had always been diverse due to its proximity to Orthodox Christian and Muslim states.
Unfortunately, that stability disappeared in the 17th century during the Ukrainian struggle for independence, during which the new states started using the Orthodox faith as a weapon
against the Jewish migrants. Because of the unstable state of the Polish Commonwealth, Jews received little protection and could not migrate due to simultaneous wars in Germany and the Russian empire.
After the Polish partitions in the 18th century, Polish Jews’ freedom of movement was restricted to the “Jewish Pale” area of the Russian empire. This was an area from which they could not freely travel or migrate to any other part of the empire except with a university degree or a very high economic status. That was not the reality for most Jews in the Pale area, who lived in small towns called shtetls.
Jews living in the German areas of the former Polish Commonwealth began to assimilate very extensively in the 18th century, adopting a much more German form of culture. Yiddish was seen as a peasant dialect or slang in Germany, and many German Jews tried to move
away from it. The golem in my series enjoys the peace in his shtetl during this period, but he does not expect the storm that will come and destroy his entire community. In 1782, Austrian Emperor Joseph II gave Jews equal rights in his empire, which then comprised parts of what is now Austria, Germany, Poland, the Czech Republic, Hungary and Belgium. The ghettos
were torn down, and many Jews moved from the shtetls to big cities, where there were far more employment prospects.
In the Russian Empire, the situation worsened with the repression of Polish, Ukrainian and Belarusian peoples and their languages and freedoms. The Russian tsars encouraged anti- Semitism with laws and secret operations such as the publication of the infamous scripture ‘The Protocols of the Elders of Zion’ and the creation of radical nationalist groups like the ‘Black Hundreds’, which culminated in a wave of terrible pogroms around 1900, causing a wave of Jewish migration.
As a result, Jews fled to the United States, which promised freedom and safety to migrants and was very appealing to migrants in the 19th century. Giant steamships like those of the famous Red Star Line transported thousands of Jewish migrants, who were often in dire
circumstances but hoped to find a good life in the US. The Jewish migrants did not receive an immediate warm welcome and were often sent back, but that did not stop them from coming back again and again.
In my series, the golem also sails over to the US and discovers the diversity and number of Jewish people. Like that of many Jewish migrants, his small world is shaken by the number of similar people. The image of the golem on Ellis Island is also an experience that many Jews had to endure: the strange new world with all details measured and checked. Eastern European Jews also often felt strange compared to Western Jews, who had much more
acceptable clothes and names and travelled in the upper classes.
Jewish communities in the US experienced rapid growth, including Yiddish newspapers, prints and books. Signs in Yiddish appeared in Brooklyn. Eastern European food such as bagels and stuffed doughnuts became popular in eastern US cities. Despite the flourishing of this American Yiddish world, the Yiddish language lost ground at the expense of English.
Jews did gain new and unexpected positions in the American community.
Tired of the stereotype of Jewish impotence, Jewish boxing clubs and boxers sprang up. It proved an easy way to gain popularity in the new society and presented an imposing image. It was from the world of these early boxers and wrestlers that the superheroes of American pop culture later emerged. Many of them were created by Jewish writers and artists, who fused folklore and American love of sport into the colourful superhero. The golem in my story also seeks fame and fortune in the ring. His strength and size give the clay giant many fans, but it does not make him happy, because like the Jews of the US, he is slowly losing his Yiddish culture. The golem feels his power less and less within him and doubts his destiny in this modern world.
Due to the large number of Jews in the US, Jewish culture became part of the mainstream during the mid-20th century, with Hanukkah greetings on seasonal cards and a wider
acceptance and acknowledgment of Jewish customs. With this process of assimilation, much of the unique Yiddish aspects in the culture also disappeared. The last two fragments and
images represent this loss of culture and exhaustion of power. The golem is far too tired to fight or perform miracles anymore and is taken to the realm of the spirits by the mystical figure of the divine helper. In the final work, we see the two walking from the old buildings of the ghetto towards a contemporary landscape, symbolising the fundamental change and fusion of Yiddish culture into the mainstream.
