Book Alert: The Alchemist's Door
Lisa Goldstein has written many books, ranging from the metropolitan urban fantasy Dark Cities Underground to the 1983 American Book Award winner about Eastern European Jews in the 1940s, The Red Magician. All of them are beautiful, sad, and stirring - in mixed and unexpected proportions.
The Alchemist's Door is another such. It chronicles a short slice of history in which the infamous Elizabethan sorcerer Dr John Dee visits Prague and makes the acquaintance of Rabbi Judah Loew, maker of the Golem. They work together to ensure that the 36 anonymous 'righteous people' who uphold the integrity of the world are not destroyed, and they close the portal which lies between our world and the world of the dark beyond.
The prose is intensely simple, detailed, evocative of the human condition. The plot is focussed, claustrophobic, and erudite. The tale thus told reminds me of many others I've read - I feel echoes of Tim Powers' The Drawing of the Dark and Roger Zelazny's A Night in the Lonesome October in particular. But of all things, this novel builds on Goldstein's others to have a certain potent and specific effect. I have come to realise what the truth of the matter might be. The Jewish people have no soul. Or at least, not as we commonly think of such things.
In its place is something which is greater than that - it is a burden of humanity, and where courage allows, for humanity. It is a desire for truth at all costs, ruthless, demanding, and so terrifying that many would rather avoid it. The Jews are a golem - without the Name, without truth, they are dead. But with the Name, and with the truth, they are rational and dangerous, provocative, ever questioning and finding. And perhaps, without their strange, wise, cynical, sad and wonderful brand of humanity, the integrity of the world might indeed fall away.
The Alchemist's Door is another such. It chronicles a short slice of history in which the infamous Elizabethan sorcerer Dr John Dee visits Prague and makes the acquaintance of Rabbi Judah Loew, maker of the Golem. They work together to ensure that the 36 anonymous 'righteous people' who uphold the integrity of the world are not destroyed, and they close the portal which lies between our world and the world of the dark beyond.
The prose is intensely simple, detailed, evocative of the human condition. The plot is focussed, claustrophobic, and erudite. The tale thus told reminds me of many others I've read - I feel echoes of Tim Powers' The Drawing of the Dark and Roger Zelazny's A Night in the Lonesome October in particular. But of all things, this novel builds on Goldstein's others to have a certain potent and specific effect. I have come to realise what the truth of the matter might be. The Jewish people have no soul. Or at least, not as we commonly think of such things.
In its place is something which is greater than that - it is a burden of humanity, and where courage allows, for humanity. It is a desire for truth at all costs, ruthless, demanding, and so terrifying that many would rather avoid it. The Jews are a golem - without the Name, without truth, they are dead. But with the Name, and with the truth, they are rational and dangerous, provocative, ever questioning and finding. And perhaps, without their strange, wise, cynical, sad and wonderful brand of humanity, the integrity of the world might indeed fall away.
etched with acid at 9:00:00 am
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