Golem Song
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- $14.99
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- $14.99
Publisher Description
By some incalculable force of human attraction, Alan Krieger has two lovers.
A man of his girth and compulsion, a man who cannot stop talking and who believes the world to be completely irrational, should not take one companion for granted, much less two. Women who can tolerate his anger, his obsessions, and his antic clowning all at the same time are not easy to come by.
But when the thought arises in Alan that he’s been “chosen” to deliver Jewish America from the threat of Anti-Semitism, then all his connections to reality fall away, including those to his lovers and his family. Recalling the folktale of the Golem—the Frankensteinian giant of clay that saved the Jews in 16th Century Prague—Alan lays out a plan of attack and then sets to making the most outrageous of preparations in the culture wars, in New York City at the turn of the millennium.
Like each of the acclaimed Estrin novels that have preceded it, Golem Song is an allusive, manic, and wildly comic approach to some of the most serious and difficult cultural questions of our time.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Alan Krieger, a Jewish ER nurse and self-styled "golem of the Grand Concourse," is the antihero of Estrin's third novel, impressive for Alan's verbal pyrotechnics but finally overwhelmed by his motivating pathology. Alan's repulsiveness begins with his grotesquely obese, unhygienic and flatulent body (which is unaccountably appealing to women), but his many minor sins and shortcomings are dwarfed by his outrageous racism. Alan's musings grow increasingly ugly as his interactions with black people in the hospital, on the subway, in the Bronx where he lives, and in Harlem where "they" live both feed and reflect his poisonous obsession. While Estrin foregrounds various prejudices on all sides, it is suffocating to accompany Alan in his accelerating madness, as he sheds the outer skins that make his life at all tenable his family; his girlfriends, a German psychiatrist and a Jewish social worker; his job and hurtles into his fate over the six-month course of the novel. Like Alan, the book's 1999 veers unsteadily between millennial homeboys, Taxi Driver, Bernard Goetz and post-Holocaust Jewish anger, and Alan's ugliness can't hold it all together.
