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. An even more powerful threat will emerge, however, and bring Chava and Ahmad together again, challenging their very existence and forcing them to make a fateful choice.Ĭompulsively readable, The Golem and the Jinni weaves strands of Yiddish and Middle Eastern literature, historical fiction and magical fable, in a wondrously inventive tale that is mesmerizing and unforgettable.Can’t we all just get along? Perhaps yes, if we’re supernatural beings from one side or another of the Jewish-Arab divide.
But when the golem’s violent nature overtakes her one evening, their bond is challenged. An iron band around his wrist binds him to the wizard and to the physical world.Ĭhava and Ahmad meet accidentally and become friends and soul mates despite their opposing natures. Released by a Syrian tinsmith in a Manhattan shop, Ahmad appears in human form but is still not free. As the ship arrives in New York in 1899, Chava is unmoored and adrift until a rabbi on the Lower East Side recognizes her for the creature she is and takes her in.Īhmad is a jinni, a being of fire born in the ancient Syrian desert and trapped centuries ago in an old copper flask by a Bedouin wizard. She serves as the wife to a Polish merchant who dies at sea on the voyage to America. Wecker’s storytelling skills dazzle." - Entertainment WeeklyĪ marvelous and absorbing debut novel about a chance meeting between two supernatural creatures in turn-of-the-century immigrant New York.Ĭhava is a golem, a creature made of clay by a disgraced rabbi knowledgeable in the ways of dark Kabbalistic magic. “An intoxicating fusion of fantasy and historical fiction.
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