Gershom’s Golem

An honest-to-god Jewish horror story, by guest contributor Elie Lichtschein

Yesterday, I posted an interview about the conspicuous lack of Jewish horror stories.

Today, I have a treat for you: a Jewish horror story. And it’s a good one, too.

The story is by Elie Lichtschein, who was gracious enough to let me republish it here. Elie describes himself as “an Ashkenazi American horror writer.” He's the creator of The Creeping Hour, a 2019 kids horror podcast for GBH Boston and his short fiction has been published by Knopf (IT'S A WHOLE SPIEL, 2019) and Supernatural Tales (Autumn 2021).

This is a long story. You may want to print it out.

If you like it, subscribe to Elie’s original fiction site, Dark Quarters.

Part 1

After Gershom was born, his parents waited the commanded eight days before holding the circumcision in the large shul on the edge of town. At his bris milah, Gershom ben Yaakov was slight, what you’d call the runt if he had been born in a litter, but it was only him, no litter, so in a strange way, straight out of the birth canal, Gershom Hirsch was a runt unto himself. His grandfather, the learned Rabbi Dot, was the mohel, of course, and after muttering a litany of mystical prayers (and a few slip-streaming variations on God’s multi-numbered names), the elder man stroked his whiskers, turned his tallis like a cape, said the proper blessing, and touched knife to squirming skin, turning baby into Jew, Gershom’s mutilation into the faith complete.

For seven months, Gershom was a charming, if unremarkable baby: bobbing along, eating, pooping, crying, existing. But the day after he entered his eighth month, he showed a slight fever that wouldn’t break, and after two days of care without relent, Yonky and Malka Hirsch brought their baby to the emergency room of Kettle-Slaw Hospital Main. The attending initially diagnosed an ear infection, but an older doctor caught on to something, gestured to his colleagues, and took the infant into a room for further tests. During this agonizing period, Gershom’s parents wrung their clothes and each other, holding tight but not speaking. Seated in a well-lit far corner of the waiting room was Gershom’s grandfather, the confusingly calm Rabbi Dot. The spiritual master turned a page of Talmud like he was alone in shul, not among teeming crowds in the Rosen Pediatric ICU on the busy fourth floor of KSH Main. Time clicked along, slow and then slower. A new doctor appeared, introduced himself to Gershom’s parents as the head of pediatrics. His face sagged as he spoke, likely a facial tic, but Yonky Hirsch read it as a suppression of something. Something slight but there, hiding under the folds. Always ready to emerge. That dreaded pointed thing. Coming, if it could be believed, for a miniscule heart. Gershom had no ear infection, the doctor said. No, it was worse. Phrases detached, phrases like “encumbered unicuspid aortic valve” and “immediate intervention” and “numerous delays posed in acquisition.” These meaningless (meaningful) words flew around and then past him, but all Yonky heard was the under-pulsing of the doctor’s cheeks and jaw.

One thing was clear: there was a valve Gershom needed and he needed it desperately. Yonky and Malka called everyone they knew, numbly walking the hospital halls, trying to find someone who might know someone who might know someone who might be their baby’s yeshua (not that one). Meanwhile, across the room (and through several unseen universes), Gershom’s Grandfather looked up from his Talmud, Sanhedrin, where he’d been engrossed in the b side of its 65th page. In silence, he surveyed his surroundings. A pause like the breath before creation, and the great holy man closed his book and rose to his feet. Unnoticed among the scramble, the whiskered Rabbi Dot drifted out the door and into the windy night. When he returned, an hour later, it was to little fanfare from his family, who were still hunting for their donor, with more urgent airs of desperation. In his right hand, the old man held a small cooler, the exact red Kool-Sav he used decades earlier to pack sandwiches for Malka, back when she was Malkie and it was just the two of them in the big “orchard-style” house around the corner from Kettle-Slaw’s main shul. The family patriarch handed the cooler to his daughter, said a few words in an undertone, directions only Malka heard, and returned to his seat. He picked up his Talmud, opened it, and returned to his studies, calm as a jay in a tree. Malka wasted no time in delivering the cooler to the pediatric head. The doctor peeked in, nodded, asked where she got it. “My father found a donor,” Malka Hirsch said, words that were true, even when they weren’t.

The infant Gershom recovered nicely from his surgery and went on to become a slight boy with a cautious excitement for life and no memory of the illness that threatened it. He might have stayed completely blind to his surgery were it not for the scar under his clavicle, to the left of his heart. It was shaped like a yud, the tenth letter of the Hebrew alphabet, and occasionally beat hard, usually when Gershom was really sleepy or frightened. As he climbed his early years, Gershom’s preoccupations were similar to those of many three and four-year-old’s: he loved jigsaw puzzles, especially a series of Jewish ones called Dino-Yids featuring a T Rex in a Tallis, a Stegosaurus in a Shaytl, a Pterodactyl in Phylacteries, and so on. He assembled these with his friends, the ones who were real, like his best friend, Jerry, and Dougie from up the street, and the ones who were imaginary, like Sevvy, his special friend, a large smiling man no one else could see.

Once, when he was six, Gershom stood in the medium pool at summer camp. An older kid tugged on a counselor’s shorts and pointed at him. “Why does he have uh axe on him?” The kid wasn’t Jewish, so Gershom didn’t fault him much for not knowing it wasn’t an axe, it was a yud, but it did make him reconsider his scar. It was an axe, even though it wasn’t. “A yud is an axe,” Sevvy said, suddenly there in the pool beside him, felt by no one else. “A yid is an axe, too.” It was a comfort. Gershom hugged Sevvy, whole again, and jumped into the deep end of the pool, splashing and laughing.

A month before he finished sixth grade, Gershom entered his season of terrible dreams. Nearly nightly, he woke up shivering at his brain’s most miserable conjurings, landscapes all lit up in flames these god-dead colors, the colors of screams doing their synesthete dance. Screams all over, in the lining of the dream, and poison leaves falling from above. Drenched in sweat, heart beating egregiously (or was it his yud?), Gershom laid in bed, early hours of the night, a frightful time enough on its own, too scared to fall asleep again because it might return him to that place. The dreams continued after school ended and there were three weeks of straight hell, either sleepless and atrocious or sleepful and atrocious in a different way. Malka brought him to a rabbi for counseling and then a psychiatrist for medicine, but the pills didn’t make the dreams go away, just made it so that Gershom slept through them, was in essence trapped inside the horror. He ditched the meds the second time this happened. It was a real low point in his life, and it all came to a head one night in mid-June, a dry night after a bunch of rainy days, when Gershom, in the middle of the same nightmare, saw a new detail. A figure emerging from the flames. It grew larger and nearer and just as it got close enough for Gershom to recognize, he woke up. He was as sweat-drenched as ever and his heart beat so loud it tickled his ears. It was 2:30 in the morning, but something pulled at him, something outside of him, outside his bed, outside his house. He saw, in moonlight, the forest across the street. A patch of dirt seemed highlighted. Nothing objectively remarkable about it, but Gershom understood. He crossed the street, but still felt observable from the bedroom window, like part of him was still there. He rolled and formed dirt until he had three circles on top of each other, a snowman made from mud, and then tried desperately to evoke the gigantic figure in his dream. He lengthened the limbs and roughly humanized the slab until there he was, in mud on the ground before him. Sevvy, exactly as Gershom remembered him, though he’d never seen him in real life. Gershom hugged his muddy friend once and scurried inside. He woke up the next morning and immediately ran to his window to check on his mud statue, but it was gone. Which meant he had dreamt the whole thing (questions were diverted from the dirt under his nails). Regardless, immediately after that strange midnight activity, the dreams stopped. This brought no complaints from Gershom, who blissfully leapt through the rest of his summer, which was now wonderful because he could sleep without dreaming. Soon enough, he even forgot the color of the screams.

The year before his bar mitzvah, Gershom’s main interests were sports, reading, and Torah with Zaydee. Sports were his primary focus during the school year, basketball and soccer the big ones, and at camp he played a ton of basketball, but also softball, newcomb, and tennis. Reading was an extension of being Jewish. It made innate sense to him that a nation so eager to identify as “people of the Book” (not al-kitāb, more like Haggadahs open at the Seder for hours) would have some of the best written stories. Spoken ones, too. Wasn’t that the main chiddish of Jewish storytelling? Interweaving the written with the spoken, the oral with the penned? (when it wasn’t quilled?) In preparation for being called to the Torah, Gershom’s grandfather, the by-then stooped but no-less enigmatic Rabbi Dot, started teaching Gershom his portion. These lessons, lasting an hour, took place on Sunday mornings at a corner table in the study hall of the large shul on the edge of town. The elder Jew taught his einekel the surface truths of God’s face, sliced into fifty-four sections, each a trove of numbered secrets and letter-specific combinations that removed veils and revealed essences. Gershom picked up quickly on chanting the Torah, and the lessons soon shifted to reviewing the portion before Zaydee took out one of the many ancient volumes of his enormous Talmud, which he opened as lovingly as a baby’s blanket. Gershom was a captive to these wonderful strange stories; stories of shapeshifting demons wearing the faces of Jewish kings (Gittin 68a), flying serpents swallowing superfrogs and chasing fish with mudskippers up their nostrils (Bava Batra 73a), the teetering panic of the reed-swayn shaydim that swarm humans like dirt piles around a pit (Brachot 6a), holy men creating calfs from nothing and then eating their meat (Sanhedrin 65b), and the angels that hover near God’s curtain, listening to the uninterrupted issuance of dark divine speech (Chagigah 16a). There were so many stories, all stemming from Hebrew words in old books that his grandfather pointed at with a crooked finger, so many stories that by the time Gershom was standing on his bar mitzvah bima, saying “Amen” and leaning into the vast terrifying silence for a second, two, three, before reciting the very beginning of Leviticus, his head was under-swirled with interchangeable demons and kings and wonderful oceans full of strange monstrous things living strange monstrous lives. His Judaism, he realized, as his bar mitzvah day passed over like a holiday, was what grew from the soil of legal written words for living, when dashed against the most fantastic tales, spoken for thinking.

Zaydee’s stories made the yud beat in Gershom’s side. Maybe it was the heart beneath his side, it was always hard to tell the difference. Didn’t matter. His grandfather’s tales did to his brain what sports did to his muscles and reading to his way of thinking. But as the summer of Gershom’s seventeenth year of life neared, a new beating took over, one that might have had moments from his yud (and maybe the yud-shaped organ that was always straining) but was mainly, undeniably, his heart.

It was a good summer, and it was a bad summer, corresponding to different facets of life, the individual and the collective. On the individual level, things were good, good as could be and maybe even better. Gershom met the girl at Shloimy’s 11th grade graduation party. Her name was Mia but he couldn’t hear her when they first met. The music was so loud. “RINA?” he kept trying different names, hoping to slot the right one. “GINA? SHIRA? SIA?” She play-acted frustration and grabbed his arm. Pulling a marker from nowhere, she wrote M I A in big letters on his forearm. Later that night, Gershom tenderly traced a finger across the letters on his arm as his mind traced fingers across the memory of her face. He loved how she wrote her name. She curled the M like cursive and wrote the A lowercase, like a baseball hat. He thought of those three letters long after the mark on his arm faded, and only stopped once he saw her again, which he did with Shloimy at the small synagogue on the south side of town where kids their age went on Saturday mornings to wring out time because shomer negiah there was not a thing. Mia and Gershom started hooking up in the second week of June and by the third in July, their love was the main thing in Gershom’s life, a total summation of joy and breathfulness. Almost every twilight that early summer, Gershom waited until first firefly, the unspoken sign to text Mia to come over (his parents turned in super early). She arrived in the nearing dark, luciernagas sounding off silently around them, and he opened the gate. They talked, ate, whispered, kissed, but most often just lay in the other’s embrace on the hammock deep into the warm dark, those nights, soft and elastic (and only lightly bug-bombed), taffy on a back porch.

On an individual level, things in Gershom’s life that summer were good. On an individual level. On a collective level, the level of American Jewry, more specifically the post-Modern Orthodox Jewish community of Kettle-Slaw, New Jersey, things were not so good.

Part 2

It was that bad time of history, every seventy-five years or so seems to bring one. When the highest echelons of civilized society don their red gloves and shine a spotlight onto that which they normally beam to the corners: their hatred for the Jew. The loathing with a thousand faces. A fever as long as the sun, and equally cosmic. Kettle-Slaw, with its twenty-minute commute to New York City (no traffic), sprung up in the 1970s as a suburb of Englewood, and saw an influx of Orthodox Jews in the late 1980s. Thirty-six years later, it was 88% Jewish, according to a 2020 town census. For a while, it was golden living, no disturbances, coasting in the company of the Unseen Lord of the Hebrews, a true American Yiddishe paradise.

Paradise departs swift like a tagged swastika. The swastikas would come, but before them came the stuffies. Early one Sunday morning in late spring, a few weeks out from Gershom and Mia’s meeting, the beadle of the medium sized shul on the southwest side of Kettle-Slaw arrived to unlock the doors, turn on the power, and get the prayer room ready for the first minyan of the day. He fumbled with his keys as he approached the main entrance and spotted a paper shopping bag on the stone ledge under the mezuzah. He picked it up. Inside were three toys. He unlocked the shul, put the bag on a table near the arched landing, and promptly forgot about it, attending to a small leak in the ceiling of the men’s room. Two hours later, after the morning prayer crowd thinned out and the only ones left were a father and son studying mishnayot over stale cookies and fresh coffee, the beadle passed the entrance table and sighted the bag. He examined it more closely. The toys were the same, three stuffed birds holding a saxophone to their beak, like they were in the middle of a solo. The beadle reached inside, took one out. It was a goose. They were all geese. He set them on the table, side by side by side. A trio of saxophone-playing geese, each identical to the next, a band of triplets specializing in the one instrument, which didn’t strike him as a particularly strong arrangement. He put the toys back in the bag and set it on the desk of the shul president.

The beadle didn’t think of it until the next morning, when he arrived to find three bags on the same stone stoop. All containing the same stuffed animals. A goose playing the sax. Three per bag. He wondered if the shul was running a toy drive he hadn’t heard about and filed away in strange dimness the fact that all the toys delivered were the same. They looked expensive, well-crafted and possibly hand-stitched. He examined one closer, saw the tag on the side. SHMIGGABLE STUFFIES! COLLECT ALL 200! And under that, a minuscule drawing of a beak and a saxophone and the words JAZZ THE GOOSE (#14). He carried the bags inside, and texted the president where to put the toys for the drive. Curious, lightly unsettled by something foggy, elusive like a trapped memory, he pulled out his phone and looked up Shmiggable Stuffies. A toy company that produced variations on the ten or so geese on the table. All were animals named for things animals can’t do: SWEEP THE LION (#106) held a broom, DRIVE THE JACKAL (#68) pawed a steering wheel, SURF THE SHARK (#55) wore shades, hula shorts, and carried a wakeboard in her fins, MAGIC THE SQUIRREL (#19) brandished a wand, and of course, number 14, JAZZ THE GOOSE, pressed his beak to a saxophone reed. The beadle put his phone in his pocket and went about his day.

The next morning, three boxes of the stuffed animals awaited him. Not only that, a message, graffitied crudely into the pavement beside the landing.

J A Z  T H E  G O S E !

Sketched next to it was a terribly blank face. The beadle wasn’t sure if the misspelling was purposeful, but he knew on sight it was something big. Something bad. The writing carried a malevolence that, together with the lights-off smiley and the president’s previous day assertion of no toy drive in the shul (or anywhere in Kettle-Slaw, so far as he knew), made the beadle’s skin feel raked. Plus, and this didn’t need stating, graffiti was not good. The beadle didn’t touch the boxes or the bags. He hastened into the shul and clicked in the floor lock. He had a vague notion to check the security cameras; one pointed at the main entrance. But first things first. The shul president picked up on the first ring. At the mention of “defaced property,” he knew in his heart (in his bedroom across town) that his latest fears were coming to be realized (L8ER H8ER). The president listened, blood sinking. Meanwhile the beadle, near manic on the other end, entered the shul office, intending to gather all the stuffies and assemble the evidence. He glanced at the monitor, gasped. Outside, a draped figure bent over the boxes. There was a distinctive mark on the man’s hoodie. Looked like a death’s head, definitely a skull. A hiss of color from his hand, and the beadle understood.

Bringing the president with him, the beadle hurried outside, in time to see the man take off. Saw the new graffiti, same as the old graffiti, but with more elucidation:

J A Z  T H E   G E W S S S S

A pit opened in his belly, something terrible he’d never known. The poet Michelson soared past him, a line about the failed Austrian artist counting coins as his landlady nodded, impatient. Only the Jews believe in my future success. For a long moment in the warm morning, a frightened human being stood on a spot of de-hallowed ground. Eventually, he un-paused and punched three numbers into his phone. The police arrived, the beadle gave a statement, the stuffed animals were taken into custody, and the footage was reviewed. The perpetrator, who had bravely covered his face to commit a hateful act of intimidation, eluded capture.

There was a war overseas, that was likely the catalyst of this latest pounding of the hate-horn, but even before the bewildering violence, there’d been something in the air, something that scared Yonky Hirsch the few times he let himself fully sense it, something his father-in-law, the waking dream-slept Rabbi Dot, might have termed to his students “the luft of the end,” but would likely have named “God’s face, hidden from Himself,” to himself. Yonky knew the feeling, through his parents, his ancestors, and his lived experience, thirty-one isolated occasions in forty-three years of life. That longest, meanest of hatreds, and the minds and hearts of human beings were not short for fuses. Men with darts in their eyes were after him, and had been, way before the latest misery in the Middle East.

Two days after the KSPD filed a report on the shul vandalism, similar graffiti appeared outside of the Jewish day school on the border Kettle-Slaw shared with New Milford, only this time the spelling was not hidden. It was accompanied by five swastikas (though no stuffies), and just like that fear was throned. Schools and shuls throughout Kettle-Slaw took over the preoccupation. Security guards were hired, motion-sensor cameras installed, and a bill was introduced in the local legislature to secure funding for an additional police presence during hours when shuls were operational. There was only two weeks left in the school year, but attention was turned there, and also to the busy slate of youth summer programming. The NLC called, put out messages and updates. It didn’t help; when the enemy of the Jew moves in, it’s near impossible to keep the line closed.

The additional presence didn’t yield any suspects, just caused the swastikas to migrate from the southeastern side of town to the public park in the west, out of range of cameras and guards but still Kettle-Slaw. And with their return came acts much worse: a brick was thrown through the front windshield of Dr. Tannenbaum’s Tesla. This was purposeful – Dr. Tannenbaum loved the automobile but thought its sunken hood ornament looked too much like a cross and so had a welder work it until the T turned, unmistakably, into a Star of David. Stop signs all down Schott-Nayz Road were tagged with small stickers on their top reading “No ↓ until the last 1” and, spelled in a large messy hand at the bottom, “GAST.” Posters of bloody hands doing the Spock salute papered the brick wall behind the library. Tombstones in the Living Light cemetery were knocked over (in an especially grody case, human feces smeared on one of them) and, almost surreal in its in-on-the-plot-ness, the chupchiks and double kuf in the cemetery’s Kehillat Kodesh signs were Hebraically grammaticized to read “kike.” Most personal to Gershom, Devra Pallaci from three houses down was accosted in the parking lot of the Stop & Shop by a hooded assailant who called her “Jew Seed” and shouted “I’m here to plant a bagel tree! Put you six feet under boot,” before turning over her grocery cart and fleeing behind the building. All these and more were reported. Footage was reviewed, inquiries made, patrols bolstered, but not a single perpetrator was apprehended. It seemed, after the resurgence of malevolence, that the enemy, with his many faces and more bodies, stayed fugitive. The community watched in horror and learned (not that they needed the lesson) that not all evil is antisemitism, but all antisemitism is evil.

The attacks were so pervasive that sad strange summer they even occupied Mia and Gershom’s tiny paradise of a hammock. One night in the first week of July, as the two fledgling lovebirds hung out on their nest of roped string, suspended above the fragrant lawn, Gershom noted a palpable dimness to their whispers. They called it early that night because Mia’s dads didn’t want her out past 8:30. Made tentative plans for the following evening, earlier so she could get home before it got pitch, but come firefly o’clock and Mia broke them, texting she was going to stay this one in, something was happening at Kettle-Slaw Hospital Main (her dad worked in security), and a “Puce Alert” was in effect.

Gershom read and re-read her message and put down the phone. He hadn’t heard anything about the hospital, where his uncle worked, and the message spooked him, but larger than that was his punctured anticipation. The turn-down hurt as much as the flip had lifted. He sank into his hammock, sad because of girl-stuff, not Nazi-stuff, which meant his priorities were probably fucked. A chapbook of love poetry (Carver, Where Water Comes Together with Other Water) lay ignored on his belly, useless now, making an inverted V. Staring into space at the crack of woods, Gershom’s attention caught on something bristling by the ever-pines. In the near-dusk, the golem materialized into itself, so imposing, so sudden, it was like a statue had spontaneously generated on the edge of his lawn. Gershom’s first thought was terror, that Mia’s dads were right, there was danger in the night, stuffed animal-wielding monsters whose cutesy façade hid an interior of brain-rot, consumption, destruction. But then the thing shifted and started walking in such an odd, stilted manner there was no mistaking it.

“Sevvy?” Gershom whispered. The yud in his side tingled, a phantom limb feeling, an itch that seemed of him and yet not. He scratched his ear and said, louder, “Sevvy??”

Sevvy, that great silent friend, kept moving. Gentle, like the wind, nodding his head up and down, he stepped past the trees and to the edge of the hammock. Gershom felt something emanate off him, an atmospheric charge, the whoosh of an extinguished candle. Something that does not belong and yet is. Is absolutely. Like him. Absolutely Gershom, absolutely Sevvy.

Gershom hadn’t spoken to his friend in years, five at least, and never before had he seen him like this. It was a shock. Back when they played, he never conceived of Sevvy as anything, certainly not a golem. Sevvy was Sevvy. Like how Dad was Dad, no further explanation needed. Gershom now saw Sevvy was indeed Sevvy, and that was a golem. A golem with a slightly round body, like he’d originally been fashioned from three balls of mud, one placed on top of… Gershom gasped, remembering the dreams when he was ten, leaving his house in the middle of the night to enter the shallow forest. How Sevvy was gone the next morning. It was a wonderful moment of realization, beaded with love, which then turned into consideration and acceptance. The being understood. Sevvy bent, slowly, like a great wooden ladder sliding down, rung by rung, until his hardened face was set next to Gershom’s. So close that his three letters of truth, one of the self and two of death, were discernable. Slowly, the golem pressed his forehead to Gershom’s. And Gershom saw what he carried. He saw and he joyed, over and over. And just like that, Gershom made a decision. He understood why it was, even if he didn’t understand why it was for him. But understanding has claws, and those claws scratched familiar openings. And so, as a certain memory warmed him like a blanket, Gershom let the golem inside him. Willingly, lovingly, self-evisceratingly.

Gershom woke up the next morning like a bug on a bed. He stayed in the memory of Mia bailing on him last second and then the dream about Sevvy. In it, Sevvy was a golem, just like in those nightmares half a lifetime ago. Gershom went about his morning routine, teeth-brushing, waste-discharging, body-scrubbing, clothing-choosing, and was on his way to his favorite, food-eating, when he picked up a vibe in the house. Something was wrong. His mom was in the kitchen, hysterical, brandishing a paper at his father, slumped at the table. “What would be enough, Yonk? If it came into our yard next time?” Yonky Hirsch started to answer, but he saw Gershom and stopped. “What is it?” Gershom needed to know. “What happened?” His mother didn’t answer. She threw a paper on the table. The morning’s Kettle-Slaw Clarion. The headline was visible. BODY FOUND OUTSIDE HOSPITAL IN LATEST SUSPECTED ANTISEMITIC ATTACK. Shocked, and feeling a surreal tingle along his yud, so insistent it was almost anaphylactic, Gershom unfolded the paper. A body had been discovered at the end of Wilbur Ave, the service road leading to Kettle-Slaw Hospital Main. At first glance it looked like the dead man was Jewish, since he was found wrapped in a garment that looked like a tallis. Pinkish letters spelled, in graffiti beside the corpse:

F O R M  L I N E  T O  S U P P O R T  Z I O N A Z I S

and half of an M. Initial reports cited foul play, but forensics indicated that the perpetrator had suffered a fatal overdose mid-act. It was odder than that; when EMTs removed the body, they discovered, under the spread of bloodstained garment, words written in a pasty sludge blaring

N O T S E E E E E E O N I Z M

Investigators were perplexed by this, but deemed it another message of Jew-hatred, although they offered no explanation why the two messages were written in different materials.

The appearance of a body, the first fatality in the latest bout of Jew-hating attacks, set off alarms of panic throughout Kettle-Slaw. It didn’t matter that the dead man was identified as Cristofer Browers, a decidedly non-Jewish agitator from Rochelle Park with a history of intimidation and arrests stemming from trespassing and disorderly conduct. The reality of a cadaver outside of a hospital changed things, even with the death ruled an accident. Security was bolstered, if that degree of tightening was even possible. Flames were fanned on both sides of the burn, and just as security measures tightened across Kettle-Slaw, so did the resolve of protestors, upset over the dead body but mostly the continued death campaign unraveling in lands oceans away. In mid-May, the campus of Kettle-Slaw University became a main site for protests. Positioned at the north tip of town, at the cross-streams of Route 4 (which you took east to New York City) and Route 17 (which you took south to go deeper into Jersey), KSU was home to surprisingly few Jewish students, who opted instead for options across the Hudson or down the turnpike. Protestors took up the north lawn of campus, declared it a “LIBER8ED ZØN3.” Tents were pitched under unfurled banners (STOP FUNDING GENOCIDE! and END ALL VIOLENCE!), placards were posted all over (KEEP PIGS OFF CAMPUS! OINK FREE ZONE) and chants were heard the clock around. “BLOOD AND SOIL! RIVER! SEA! THE LAND IS THEIRS! NOT YOURS! NOT ME!” was pretty scary, according to Gershom’s parents’ translation, “LA SHI! NICHEVO! NOTHING! NADA! WON’T STOP TIL THERE’S INTIFADA!“ was very scary, according to the surface reading, and “NO ONE’S FREE! TIL IT’S 3 OF 3!” was down-spine horrifying, when Gershom decoded it online. The campus activity attracted a glut of non-student provocateurs, including one necked in a cardboard cangue with “NATAN FOR GAZA” painted on it who appeared on the edge of the encampments beside a man in a turquoise kaftan who claimed he was “Tzvi, Returned,” here with his prophet, his prayer, and his doom-laden message of supernatural intervention. Strangers and slogans put down, the protests on campus were mostly peaceful. Disquieting, but decidedly non-violent, nothing like the turns across town.

On Friday, police were summoned back to the west side of Kettle-Slaw, although the shomrim got there first. Someone had scribbled, in letters more faded than the graffiti outside the hospital, words meant to evoke both the recent murder of the white nationalist Browers and centuries of justification for Jew-baiting and bloodbathing.

was found sketched in hate outside Rabbi Tegendorf’s shteeble. Rabbi Tegendorf, the sweetest littlest man who had never once in his life wished harm on a soul and universally bestowed good will and brachot to all. Rabbi Tegendorf, who definitely did not kill Jesus Christ or Cristofer Browers. With Shabbat bearing down, five or so hours to go, residents of Windsor Ave gathered to help clean the graffiti so that it was all removed by nightfall, the holiest of the various Jewish times, Shabbat. There was footage of this attack, but no leads, so it was unclear at first who carried it out. But the next morning, the first of that summer’s true decline, Gershom awoke with a heavy beat in his heart (or was it his yud?) and knew somehow, knew without knowing how, that justice had been meted.

He wasn’t wrong, or maybe he was, because justice, like many words, is context dependent. The CSS security team patrolled KS’s shuls early that morning and found, like a wrapped-up present, a corpse outside zeisel Rabbi Tegendorf’s 19th century-cosplaying shul. The victim’s head was crushed under the weight of a log so heavy it took four shomrim a concentrated effort to lift it (while looking away) and move the body onto a stretcher (the cops yelled at them when they showed up). Just like with the first death, a message was scribbled in thick paste under the body. Another call and response to the misspelled message of C H R I S T T K I L E R. This one read, simply:

C L Y D E  K I L L L E R

There was a smudging of mud before the C. It looked almost like a *. The dead man was identified as Clyde Sawchuck, originally from Orono, Maine, but living in Jersey City for the last year or so. His online presence was front and back-loaded with gigabytes of hate news, death videos, gargoyle worship, and game back-ups.

Chaos rent the already fear-rent community. Two dead bodies, both avowed white supremacists according to their social media footprints, readily googleable. Articles were published all over about the bloodthirsty mechanics of “the movement” to take down the enemies of the Jews. It was obvious that the Jews were behind it, a form of meta-conspiracy; clearly the protection of Jewish property and their general vengeance stemmed from a Jewish source. More cabal-like-laced hysteria to add to the already simmering soup. The police were clueless, had less than no leads, an oddity that went overreported in the local media. There was no security footage of the first death, but the second was caught on a security camera outside of the shul, affixed there just a week earlier to deal with the rising tide of violence. The footage showed the perpetrator approaching the entrance the night after his first attack. He walks over to his erased message. Kicks the ground. The absence of police presence is ominous, the audacity of the man to return to the scene the next night bone-chilling. At one point, the man looks up. He freezes. You can practically see the erect lines of hair on his neck, the only skin of him visible. Another moment and he starts tagging. Looks like he starts rewriting what was erased. In the distance, something. A swirl of sand, far down the street. It nears and a second item materializes. The slow roll of a lifted log, weapon of the man’s soon destruction. An odd couple, trunk and sand, strolling down the street, platonically almost. The sand reaches the man, covers him. A bizarre twang on the screen, which is mute, rising and obscuring. The log breaches the swirl. A few moments, and the peal of sand lifts, indifferent and abrupt in its leaving. Sawchuck’s dead body is revealed beneath it, head crushed horribly, note in mud sketched under his flak jacket. The footage was gory and the death was ruled a freak accident. Gory, but more than that, odd. The strange slow roll of a murder-minded log. Moving with purpose, but whose? And by what means? Unclear.

After this second death, Gershom scoured every article and every relevant post he could find. He read and scrolled and thought. It was Sevvy. Of course it was Sevvy. What was sand if not a relative of mud, fathered by dust and mothered by rain? And the deaths of these particular men! It was the role of the golem, was it not, to do exactly this. Protect the Jew. Protect the Jew at all costs, even (and maybe especially) when the cost is death. Gershom’s suspicions were up since the first fatality, because reading about Browers sent his yud (heart?) beating in bursts. Plus, there’d been a bad dream or two. Nothing like during the wretched heyday of ten years old, thank the sweet Lord. But enough to remind Gershom what he’d blissfully forgotten. Times stayed tense, a hovering feeling that things were bad, had been bad, and would stay bad, with the dark promise that any moment it could all explode into something way worse.

And then a third body turned up. This time there was no doubt it was a homicide. Scarily enough, the body was found on the KSU campus, though a mile from the encampments on the north lawn. The LIBER8ED ZØN3 was still there, twenty tents still pitched, occupied by two dozen protestors, significantly less robust than during the school year. Nonetheless, the prolonged focus of protest activity on the north lawn drew attention, leaving south campus, especially the part abutting the northeast ridge of the Kettle-Slaw nature preserve, open for pogroming. What happened this time, according to a broadcaster the morning the body was discovered, was that a “would-be hate perpetrator” snuck onto KSU in the middle of the night to dump red food coloring into the penny fountain outside the Samuel H. Lister Library, and was assaulted mid-attack. Indeed, the water in the fountain was Pharaohically red.

B L O O O O D  L I B E L

was scrawled on the concrete next to it in a neat hand. The letters were red, the body by the fountain blue. The dead woman still had two bags of red dye in her cargo pants. Her mouth spewed mud. The entire lower half of her face was caked in dried dirt. A quick autopsy revealed three pounds of arsenic-rich bulldust was clumped in her belly, as well as a crunch of leaves, twigs, and a score of ants, many still alive. Whoever killed this woman, it was clear – and clarity was terrifying – did so by pouring mud down her throat until she choked. The messaging beside the dead body invoked a response as vociferous as the actual homicide, for the simple reason that the two words “blood libel” vocalized the community’s most consciously muted fears.

The Jewish community of Kettle-Slaw tripled down on safety. There was a night, two nights after the discovery of “the mud woman, yimach shimah,” as some of the more conservative Jewish tabloids had dubbed Aryana Tate-Marjerie, 54, of the Bronx, for the community to gather and discuss recent town-wide developments. Billed as “An Urgent Talk Re: the State of K-S Jewry,” it was held at the biggest shul in Kettle-Slaw, the gigantic temple smack in the middle of town, right where Monterey Avenue meets Shimon Drive. Over 900 people packed into the tight room. The recent outing of Tate-Marjerie as the head organizer of a 10K+large Telegram channel called Dark Front gave the meeting an extra-shot of urgency. Dark Front “call[ed] on all standard-bearers of non-yt fronterry to action,” and the Kettle-Slaw Jewish community, not their intent, responded in kind. The shul’s aisles were packed with people standing around. Latecomers were re-directed to the temple’s oversized banquet hall, where a video screen carried the scene in the sanctuary. Security was outrageous, two uniformed police at every entrance, five at the main entrance, a metal detector, a sniper on the roof (insane!), and patrol cars circling the premises. Inside the temple, a bevy of rabbis, shul presidents, lay leaders, and community machers sat on chairs at the oversized platform in the front of the room (the bima was removed to make more space). One by one, Jewish leaders took turns speaking, discussing everything from security updates to reports from overseas, to Talmudic discourses on the catchment and subsequent destruction of Amalek, to ways to stay calm in a sea of hatred, to verses of the Torah meant to be recited in times of needed strength. Some were more millenarian-minded. A local restaurant owner swore the prophecies of the “shayd navi” were coming true. A raven-haired woman asked everyone to try their best to levitate with her. A short man with a red beard suggested purchasing real estate on contested soil. Yet another pleaded with them to do teshuva, as if this was somehow all their own fault. A single message was overstated. Something bad was happening to the Jews, and it needed to stop. Maybe it started as a protest against war, maybe it was a continuation of an eternal animosity. Maybe it was one of a thousand things, but it was clear that a broad net had been cast and the fishing was good.

The morning after “An Urgent Talk Re: the State of K-S Jewry,” a scathing article appeared in the KSU undergraduate paper, The Campus Commentator, which apparently published in the summer. Written by a student named Yishai Keubler, the piece excoriated the gathering, spending three paragraphs on one of the speakers, the man who petitioned the audience to buy land in the West Bank. Further, Keubler condemned “atrocities committed in our name, under the banner of our identity and unity as Jews.” He held nothing back, deriding the so-called “Jewish avenger” around town, demonizing the so-called “Zionist entity” across the sea, and downplaying the general atmosphere of Jewish intolerance that seemed to sweep the community and country in broad waves. In his article, Keubler placed the blame squarely on his Jewish peers for “tolerating sustained campaigns of violence in our name.”

Keubler’s article was published on July 27. On July 29, his body was found propped up in the bed of his single-suite dorm room on the KSU campus, where he had been taking summer classes and editing The Campus Commentator during off-season. Long thorny sticks were shoved down his ears until they popped the soft electrically-charged mechanism in his skull. An awful death, no words for the horror. Letters were written on Keubler’s wall, above his bed, mucked onto a poster of The Clewed Leeches. They spelled, in a by-now familiar sticky block font:

B L O O O O D  L I A B L E

A distinction was being drawn, it seemed. Gershom watched the unravel, horrified. Realizations, as the air alit him, that the grenade was rolling from inside the house, at least in the determination of his tether, the perpetrator of these acts. Why was this happening? Gershom had no answer. He had no comfort, either, but prickling warnings, like mud, began to take form.

Part 3

When Gershom’s grandfather, the devout Rabbi Dot, died, there was an interesting note in his will. It hadn’t to do with money, the Elder Mystic leaned too heavily on the many teachings of his esotericized forebears to have much use for material matters. Not for lack of ability: the old man, as a young man, had taken off a few months from yeshiva, in his sixth year, to exteriorize enough of a living to successfully win over the father of the woman he would marry, and who would eventually become Gershom’s grandmother in absentia, her childbirth demise leaving its biggest scars on her husband. In four months, the young man turned $1000 into a sum a thousand times that by means unclear to those not residing in his brain. The amount was banked for years to come, buying clothing, food, books, and the ten hundred things involved in raising a child. At the holy man’s death, which occurred near the end of his 89th year of life, which was also Gershom’s fifteenth year, $26,567.84 was left from the original cool mill. The money was given to Gershom’s mother, as was the late rabbi’s house and most items inside. There were a few exceptions. His vast collection of Jewish holy books covering every conceivable area of study, numbering close to 50,000, was split in entrustment between the large shul around the corner from his house, his long-term prayer and study spot, and the small community upstate where he spent most of his summers soaking in seforim and sun. A single volume in his will was stipulated for neither destination. Four words in the contract regarded it: “To give to Gershom.” The old man’s second material bequeathal to his grandson was his copy of tractate Sanhedrin, part of the Vilna Shas he’d received as a wedding gift from his father-in-law. The summer of this particular story’s unfurl, that is, the most disturbing summer of Gershom’s life, the volume in question sat on the shelf in his bedroom, although it hadn’t been touched since his mom put it there, after the will was revealed, hadn’t been cracked since the worn fingers of the late Rabbi Dot last traced their way through it.

That volume of gemara was the farthest thing from Gershom’s mind as he paced his bedroom, not fully literally, but definitely in a manner of thinking, that night of discovery in late July. It was Sevvy, which meant it was Gershom, a truly terrifying thought, since Gershom hadn’t done anything, not in the way that yielded those real-life corpses, four of them total, oh God it was awful to think of that one description of the Keubler boy. He had no idea why Yishai was killed. Gershom’s brain didn’t perfectly align with politics; poetry tugged at his heart like historical writers at his father’s, or top-shelf food writing at his mother’s, or mystical practitioners of the most salient silent secrets at his grandfather’s. But he understood ethics, not the ethics of his fathers necessarily, but ethics more broadly, and how could the murder of a twenty-year-old college student who wrote an article expressing an opinion be justified? Who’s trying to justify it? Gershom spoke back to himself. Mud may have motives, but it lacks empathy or understanding.

Gershom stayed up late that night, so late, so sad, the last week in July, listening to the live version of his favorite song over and over, thinking of Sevvy, worrying about Sevvy, badly wanting Sevvy to stop whatever he was doing, and then just badly wanting Sevvy to appear, because to confront his protector (as if “blood liability” was protection, a crushed juicebox feeling) felt like the only way to end these bizarre awful deaths, which started out maybe justified, but not recently. (And not even at the outset, if he thought about it for a second. His was a religion of life and love.) He found a janky website, KettleSlawDeaths.com, that carried a mine of information not in the public reports. Like Cristofer Browers’ full autopsy, which stated that the cause of death was not a drug overdose, as had first been reported (which Gershom got, because the autopsy stated that man did have cocaine, methamphetamine, pink cocaine, and three kinds of poison in his blood at the time of death). The report clarified that Browers had died from “suffocation,” confirming Sevvy’s presence. The golem’s earthen, squelchy hands were all over the other three. The website also contained a trove of Yishai Keubler’s previously unpublished writings, including a few essays, all of which had a strong anti-nationalist bent. There was a photo gallery, too, which compiled dozens of photos of all four victims – Gershom hated this, Keubler aside, this humanizing of neo-Nazis, people posing with family members and pets, hiking and eating cake, people whose private beliefs centered on variations of a dark reality one called “the American alt-reicht,” proof that the stairs of their mind no longer reached the attic, or if they did, the attic was haunted and worth avoiding. Gershom truly hated it, but it was all there to be looked at, read, and considered, and so he did that, later and later into that fateful morning. Around 3:30 am, while sitting at his desk in a daze, two screens open before him, and also a notebook on which he had been writing down things without any real purpose, Gershom felt a thud in his yud. His eyes wandered to the window. He lowered the shade, stared into the forest across the street. A large figure stood there in silence, its hulk outlined against the dim offering from the streetlight above it. Gershom couldn’t make out Sevvy’s face, but then slippers were on his feet, his arm was wrenching into a hoodie sleeve, and he was out the door, crossing the street, and standing there, looking up at Sevvy. Looking up at Sevvy, Gershom felt wonderful, four years old again, all the terrible scary newness of life there, but it all diminished and rolled down into nothing because of Sevvy, Sevvy, who Gershom had never even shaped then, but who was always there for him in form, protecting him. Except in this instance, the him was expanded, or seemed to have been, to include those like him, those made targets, boundaries unclear. Gershom didn’t overthink it. Boy pressed forehead to towering being’s, that tall mud of the Talmud, and what was communicated between them was communicated in silence. Clearly, a message was imparted, because the great creature jerked its head, not unlike a nod, and a torrent of tears (of acceptance? surrender? misery?) splashed from the boy’s eyes, and then the golem was gone, through the trees and the night, far from its recent destruction.

It seemed to work. There were no attacks or counter attacks for three days, during which Gershom’s thoughts went backwards down the cause-and-effect line, shifting from Sevvy (gone off, where he’d hurt no one further) to Zaydee. At that point, Gershom’s grandfather, the source-recalled Rabbi Dot, was six feet under soil in the mystic’s corner of the Kettle-Slaw Kehilas Kedoshim. The fourth evening after his early morning meeting with his golem, Gershom borrowed his father’s car and drove to the Jewish cemetery behind the small shul on the western side of town. As he entered, an old man in a folding chair by the gate looked up. “You got twenty minutes,” he said, gesturing to a sign on the wall next to him. CLOSES AT NIGHTFALL. The Ls at the end looked like flipped 7s. Gershom nodded. That was plenty.

Zaydee had been a private man, but there was no denying his magnetism: for the last fifty years of his life, he’d been sought out by random “shin seekers,” mainly due to a slim volume of kabbalistic love poetry he put out the summer he turned forty. Similarly, his grave was an occasional site for holy trippers, but thankfully none were there when Gershom reached his grandfather’s simple headstone. Across it was a stone bench someone donated specifically for that spot. Grateful, Gershom took a seat on the stone and read the words on the head.

They were all Hebrew. Said his grandfather’s name, simple attribution, didn’t even call him a rabbi. A list of those who loved him, including a daughter, son-in-law, two cousins, and a beloved grandson (shout out him). Under this a bunch of Hebrew acronyms that Gershom made little sense of and a quote from the Talmud. Gershom read the Hebrew letters that spelled out the name of the cited tractate: Sanhedrin. It was a Greek word, was it not? Always his favorite masechet, but that might have been something he stole (or was it inherited?) from his grandfather. Gershom’s grandfather, always so drawn to the holy and hidden (what he called “the separate and the strange,” like all those stories he told and retold so well, over the so-long too-few years) and attached to the undersoil truths of life, the sode, similar to sod and yet so different, level four of four. Oh, the runaway tyranny of thoughts! Which poet wrote that? Gershom pivoted, tried to focus. What was he just thinking? He read the words on the grave. Rereading them, he recalled the single volume of Talmud Zaydee left for him. A hook, and through it, a line. He hurried out of the graveyard just as the elderly man readied to close the gates, got behind the wheel of his dad’s car, queued up his song of the summer, and drove home with purpose.

The volume was still on his bedroom shelf. Gershom turned the over-loved pages. Miniscule writings, his grandfather’s notes, appeared on each one, already rectangled with words, holy text in the center and commentaries in encircling columns. All of it in the holy tongue, except where it was Aramaic, which was holy, too, a variant slash outgrowth of the alphabet God (supposedly) chose to create the world and then speak to man through. Gershom, no God, turned the pages aimlessly, looking for something, not looking for anything. He kept turning, eyes trying to take it all in, but as they did, they too turned on him, grew heavy.

Gershom awoke the next morning on his bed, still dressed, his grandfather’s Sanhedrin open before him. He marked the page, 58a, and set it on his desk. Yawning, he went to the kitchen to brew a cup of Good Morning, America. Back in his room, he returned to his Talmudic flipping. A few pages later he found it on daf 65b. A small chunk near the bottom. A short passage had a line next to it, and there, written in English, the only words in the volume in that non-holy tongue: “Gershom, eight months.”

He hastily read the passage. It told, in Aramaic, a story he remembered from childhood. Two rabbis, Rav Hanina and Rav Oshiya, spent their Fridays delving into the Book of Creation, and by doing so, were able to create life from mud, a baby calf, which they slaughtered and ate in honor of the Sabbath. Gershom read the passage, again and again. His eyes flicked from it to “Gershom, eight months,” and as the scar above his heart beat, something slotted. He traced his fingers across the scar, shaped like a yud, shaped like a yid, shaped like an axe. He knew the details, vaguely, of his illness at eight months; you couldn’t have grown up with the scar and not been mad with curiosity. Baby Gershom needed a heart valve, badly, and no one could find one. Except for his grandfather, who’d shown up with the exact piece Gershom needed.

Realization hits heavy and conversion is a process, takes time to assimilate. It was a good chunk of it later that Gershom looked up. Out the window he heard sirens. Faint, and then louder. And then a lot more. He closed the Talmud and put it on his desk. Uneasy, he opened his phone and checked his news app.

Nothing stood out. But Gershom knew. You can’t keep the golem away. Later in the day, the news broke. The first headline jumped out. KETTLE-SLAW YOUTUBER FOUND MURDERED IN BIZARRE PIG SACRIFICE; PERPETRATOR SOUGHT. Horrified, Gershom read about the death of Miklo Henshin, a local Jewish micro-influencer who’d uploaded, a day earlier, a video called “Freedom to Anyone Anywhere Is a Threat to Jewish Security Somewhere.” It was clearly satire, the article stated, a total deadpan delivery sending up the apparent butchery being carried out in Kettle-Slaw against “the enemy of the Jews.” Henshin’s body was found crushed under the carcass of a half-ton pig. G O Y E N S A U was carved into the pig’s flesh. This first message wasn’t as glaring to the boy reading the news article as the second, the one meant for no one but him. In sticky mud on the floor next to the crushed human were words spelling:

S O R R R Y  G E R S H

I T R I E Y E D D D D T O K E E E E P A     W A Y

Gershom read this, heart pounding, yud pounding, disgusted, horrified. He knew, even though he had so badly wanted not to know, there was no way out but for the one. It was awful, but it was what it was. This, this, whatever this misery was, could not continue. He saw his grandfather, seventeen years earlier, walking into the forest across the street from his home. Reaching down, finding two forms of dust, the one and the many. Two hands forming, guiding, finding, and then the concealed man’s brain speaking truth to his lips, which spoke them to mud, which brought the being into being.

The settling of the dust took longer than if it had been mud. It wasn’t that Gershom didn’t know how to do it, it was simply the weight of the thing. Because the words in his grandfather’s Sanhedrin, when pressed to his skull, told him outright that the golem was only here because of him and, thanks to the late (L8) Rabbi Dot’s mystical machinations, Gershom was only here because of the golem.

He waited until later that night. There were a few things to attend to first. He wrote three letters, a long one that he left on his bedroom desk with “Mom + Dad” on it, next to a medium length one marked “Shloimy.” He put the third, a single long paragraph spilling over with passion and sadness, in an envelope marked “Mia” and stuck this inside a Ziploc bag he then tied to the hammock, the site of their brief love. He ran his fingers down the spines of his favorite books, soaking in the memories of his poems, his stories, his words, the ones that really got inside him, got inside him like a feeling, sure, like a fever, maybe, but mostly and totally, got inside him like a friend. Here, so close to the end, Gershom reflected that, most of all, of everything he’d experienced in seventeen short (too short!) years, he probably liked the friendship part of life most of all. (On this consideration, he slammed shut a dark door marked Mia because behind it he knew lay a whole mess of emotions, love and connection and unity, which he had tasted but not fully experienced.) Violence begets violence begets violence begets violence. In a huge ugly circle, exactly like in Bereishit, right after the story of Cain and Abel, where it drops the lineage of those early people. This hurt. This was painful. But the violence had to stop. Gershom felt a pain in his side. Side? he thought. No no no, that’s my heart.

And with that, with the night shining dark and self-knowing above him, alive, a feeling he already missed, Gershom exited his parents’ house. As he crossed the street, he thought about dirt. All humans become dirt in the end, if they’re lucky, if they’re not ruined first. His grandfather, who somehow survived the furnace, had been dirt now for years. In a way, Gershom was going back to his grandfather. Did this offer comfort? It was hard to tell.

Two sentiments in him, a mite of dust for whom the universe was created, Gershom entered the dark shallow forest across the street. Two steps under tree cover, and he heard the rustle of his friend, his first friend in life and, soon, any moment, his last. The golem’s body was as tall as ever, almost as tall as the nearby pine. Even at that late point, Gershom knew to separate the creature from the appearance it took, knowing dirt was clay, was mud, was malleable. Rain was a great destroyer, and former of its hardened physicality. But rain couldn’t destroy this one. There was too much mud on a planet half-named for it, and, tied to it all, because of a valve in his heart, too much Gershom.

The being walked over, slow. Gershom noticed, on his chest, a small disturbance in the otherwise smooth veneer. Sevvy had a matching scar, in the same place as Gershom, from where Zaydee had cut into the tough skin to find the necessary valve. Humans needed heart valves to live – clay-honed homunculi? Not so much.

Gershom stared at the golem and the golem stared back. Speech wasn’t necessary, but it did separate the human from the other forms of embodiment (Masechet Mudman), and so Gershom, about to undergo his most human transformation, enacted his last essential form of human communication. “You saved me,” Gershom whispered, looking his friend in his unseeing, unmoving eye. “You saved me, Yosev.” The golem didn’t say anything, of course, didn’t move a mud cell. It had been, and would stay, a cruel summer. Gershom saw the א מ ת on his best friend’s forehead and, just like that, the other way was illuminated.

The golem pressed his head to Gershom’s and for a moment the Hirsch boy saw where Yosev was going. He saw and he cried and felt the lifting of a Semitic sadness. Such a beautiful sight, so indescribable to eyes that don’t taste silt. The golem’s fate was sealed, sealed with mud. Gershom waited until he couldn’t stand it and then reached up and smudged out the א, spelling the מ ת of his first friend’s life. The golem shuddered and collapsed and was no more.

Late that night, Gershom ben Yaakov Hirsch rolled a pile of mud later into the Kettle-Slaw Living Light cemetery. He packed it tight at the foot of his grandfather’s grave. Small stones had been placed along the headstone, an old Jewish custom, and among them, someone put a single stuffed goose, saxophone to its lips like it was forever playing the blues.

And just like that, with the final grounding of Gershom’s Golem, the violence stopped. Until, of course, it was time to start up again. Story old as soil, as interesting as dirt: the hateful don’t die, and with them the worst human passions stay lit.

***