Imaginary Worlds - The Golem and The Jinni

Episode Date: January 14, 2015

"The Golem and The Jinni" by Helene Wecker is one of my favorite novels in recent years. It's about two mythological characters meeting in late 19th century New York -- one from Arab culture and the other from Jewish folklore. The inspiration for the book came from real life. She's Jewish and her husband is Arab-American.Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

This episode is brought to you by Secret. Secret deodorant gives you 72 hours of clinically proven odor protection, free of aluminum, parabens, dyes, talc, and baking soda. It's made with pH-balancing minerals and crafted with skin-conditioning oils. So whether you're going for a run or just running late, do what life throws your way and smell like you didn't. Find Secret at your nearest Walmart or Shoppers Drug Mart today. Make your nights unforgettable with American Express.

Unmissable show coming up? Good news. We've got access to pre-sale tickets so you don't miss it. Meeting with friends before the show? We can book your reservation. And when you get to the main event, skip to the good bit using the card member entrance. Let's go seize the night. That's the powerful backing of American Express. Visit amex.ca slash yamex. Benefits vary by card. Other conditions apply.

You're listening to Imaginary Worlds, a show about fantasy genres. I'm Eric Malinsky. I love to explore cities. Like when I got to my 10-year anniversary in New York, I realized that I had been to all the neighborhoods and local landmarks that I wanted to visit or was told that I should see. It was wintertime, so I knew I wasn't going to get out much. Then I thought, well, maybe there's another way I could explore New York. I could go back in time. There are so many books that vividly recreate the past, maybe there's another way I could explore New York. I could go back in time. There are so many books that vividly recreate the past,

like Winter's Tale, Breakfast at Tiffany's, Gangs of New York, Age of Innocence. After a while, I could see the ghostly layers of the old New York on top of the current one. Like when I walk through Madison Square Park, I can imagine the old Madison Square Garden there on the side with the gold statue of the goddess Diana on top. Or what if I'm walking on the Bowery, I look up and I can just imagine the elevated train that would have taken me up to Central Park. Then I discovered a novel called The Golem and the Ginny, which beautifully recreates New York City of 1899.

It also spoke to me on a really personal level. The author is Haleen Wecker. She's actually from Chicago, and she now lives in the San Francisco Bay Area. She only spent a few years in Manhattan in grad school. Thank God for the internet. Thank God for every train enthusiast who went and, you know, made a bad copy of a train schedule that someone found in their grandmother's attic or something, because there is no way I would have been able to do this from California, you know, 20 years ago. But recreating the past was not the point of the book. The story is about the relationship between two mythological characters.

One is a genie, which is the correct Arabic term for a genie. The other is a golem, which is a creature made of clay, whose sole purpose is to avenge the Jews. But in this case, the golem is just trying to understand the world and not hurt anyone if she can help it. Yes, the golem is a she in this story, which I've never seen before. The genie is male. Their relationship is not romantic, exactly. for. The genie is male. Their relationship is not romantic exactly. It's more like an intimate friendship where they constantly challenge each other to try to make sense of the human race. So Haylene and I have pretty similar backgrounds. We both came from Jewish families that aren't very religious but had a strong sense of cultural identity. But her husband's background is Syrian.

The golem and the genie are based on them. We both sort of had the same childhood, but we both felt just a few degrees off from, you know, general American culture, except that I was in, like, the Jewish direction, he was in the Arab American direction. So when you first met, are these the kinds of things you bonded over? What are the kinds of things that were very interesting discoveries for each other, for both of you about each other's backgrounds? Oh, the things we bonded over first were like Star Wars and science fiction.

And I was 18 and he was 20 when we met. College? In college, yeah. And we met at Science Fiction Interest and uh we met at science fiction interest house on a night that they were showing oh my goodness i can't it was like an episode of star trek deep space nine an episode of doctor who we watched all sorts of stuff that weekend there was um the he-man masters of the universe live action movie um and star wars we were both like making wise ass remarks at the at the screen which is why we sort of noticed each other and then after that when we started to get to know each other

it really was about learning how to communicate about our similarities and differences. I was 18. He was my first real serious boyfriend. I sort of avoided the issue to begin with because I just didn't know how to talk about it. And I knew that this was going to be sort of a stumbling block for my family, for, you know, maybe for his family. And this was like a college romance, you know, so let's just, you know, put that over there and just keep watching Star Wars. But then we got more serious and then we had to start talking about it. And it was like, okay, we both want exactly the same thing for everyone there, but we have such different perspectives on it that we end up having arguments just because our language is different, because the semantics is different. And we,

you know, I grew up identifying with Israel and he grew up identifying with the Arab countries, not out of any, you know, political arguments or anything. It's just like, this is the thing that makes me different. And over there is all the people who are like me. Yeah. It's almost a sense of like, this is our team. Yeah. Yeah, totally. Exactly. So she started writing about the relationship as a class assignment. The stories were set in the present. There's nothing supernatural about them. I mean, why would there be? But they felt kind of flat.

These stories were just not working, and I was getting feedback in my workshop that was basically saying these stories are not working very well. And so I was talking about it with a friend after workshop. I was just basically complaining, saying, what am I supposed to do? This is my thesis, and I want to be better than this. complaining, saying, what am I supposed to do? This is my thesis, and I want to be better than this. And she said, she gave me this very startling sort of commandment. She said, Helene, you read nothing but science fiction and fantasy in your free time. That's the stuff that you're always talking about in class. Why aren't you doing that? That's where your heart is. Your reading is out of step with your writing. And she said, the next thing I see from you in workshop, I want it. It should be

like one of your family stories, but you need to figure out a way to make it fantastical too. So did your first thought go to folklore or you're like, where am I going to fit the aliens into this? I really just first thought went to folklore. So no, so like literally that afternoon, I came up with the idea for the book. Although at that point, first it was going to be a short story and then it was going to be a novella or then it was going to be maybe a children's book. And then I started to realize that, no, this is like a really big, long book. And actually, my cohorts in the workshop told me, you know, you've got a novel on your hands. And at first, I really did not want to believe them because I was not emotionally prepared to write a novel. And then I slowly realized that they were, okay, you guys

are right. Okay. So what am I going to do now? Well, I guess I'm going to go sit in the library for a year and research. I was wondering if you grew up, what your thoughts were on the myth of the golem? Because I remember very vividly being in my uncle's house once and being in junior high and he had an illustrated book about the golem and just thinking it was the coolest thing ever and just being like, why didn't they tell us about this in Sunday school? Like I would have been so much more interested if I knew we had this mythological monster. Yes. Yes. I was wondering what your experience was with that. Oh my gosh. Yeah. No, same thing that, um, it never was anything really they taught us in Sunday school. It wasn't anything I got from my, um, my grandparents. My, um, my dad's parents were, um, Polish Jews, Holocaust survivors, and they never really talked about any of that stuff, stories from, you know, the old country or whatever.

I got the feeling that was sort of like in the past and that was just, you know, they weren't going to talk about anything from that. My mom's parents were the sort of cosmopolitan German Jews. And that was like that was country bumpkin stuff. Right. Yeah. Well, it's interesting, though, because I was surprised, you know, how and a lot of people have commented to you about how human she is as a golem i mean she's not a killing machine um i assume obviously starting out you weren't going to make her into a mindless killing machine but i mean how did you um how did you get to where she got and how did you how did you try to figure out that balance? It was really hard. One thing that sort of had to happen was

I had to figure out what her powers were, where her limits were. I had to make her sentient and sort of self-aware and human enough that she could be a protagonist, but not so human that she became sort you know, sort of uninteresting from that fantasy perspective. And one major tweak that happened to her character happened, oh gosh, it was like three or four years into writing the book where she developed the ability to sort of sense the fears and desires of people around her, that empathic quality that she has. And that came after my beta readers basically told me,

Helene, she's boring. We don't like her very much. She's sort of this, I had erred too far on the robot side. That instead of going, I don't understand why that guy and that girl are acting funny at each other when the reader knows, well, it's they have a crush on each other. Like, of course, figure it out, figure it out. Now she knows they have a crush on each other. What I don't understand is why. Hayleen's golem is named Chava. Her master dies in the boat ride to America, so she feels totally lost when she gets here. She ends up working at a bakery in the Lower East Side.

Anna would have been pleased to know that the golem wasn't nearly so certain of herself as she appeared. Passing as human was a constant strain. After only a few weeks, she looked back on that first day, when she'd worked six hours without stopping, and wondered how she could have been so careless, so naive. It was all too easy for her to be caught up in the rhythm of the bakery, the thumps of fists on dough, and the ringing of the bell over the door. Too easy to match it and let it run away with her.

She learned to make a deliberate mistake once in a while, and spaced the pastries a bit more haphazardly. And then there were the customers, who kept their own rhythms and added their own complications. Each morning at 6.30, a small crowd would already be waiting for the bakery to open. Their thoughts pulled at the golem as she worked, longings for the beds they had just vacated and the warm arms of sleeping lovers, dread of the day before them, the bosses, orders and the back-breaking labor, and running below it all, the simple anticipation of a nice warm bun or a bagel

and maybe a sugar cookie for later. Where the golem is grounded and serious, the genie is restless and curious. His name is Ahmad. He has no memory of how he got stuck in that tin lamp or who put the gold bars on his wrist that trap him in a human form. Ahmad thinks that Hava, the golem, is too afraid of her own strength. But she thinks that he's reckless with his powers. At a certain point, the characters took on a life of their own. They were not based on Haleen and her husband anymore. But I was curious what he thought about all this. He was enthusiastic. He was like, oh, okay, that sounds interesting. And then I gave him a few pages and he read it he's like oh i like this so

he was he was very uh supportive through the whole seven year process of writing the book seven years seven years i might do i not know how long it takes to write a novel or is that no that's a little on the long side there people have taken longer but people have taken a lot shorter time too yeah so yeah wow what what what made it uh takes a long have taken a lot shorter time too. Yeah. So, yeah. Wow. What made it take so long for you? A lot of it was the research. Just I knew nothing. I knew nothing. I had to start from scratch about all the various mythologies that I was sort of borrowing from.

And I really wanted to be respectful and not just make things up out of whole cloth. And so that meant doing a lot of research especially the jinnies i imagine oh yeah because the golem is really just one story yeah yes exactly and the thing about that is i had an easier time sort of making up my own goal and it was like well i'm jewish it's you know i own it it's it i can do whatever i want you know i can say well i'm jewish you know so i can do whatever I want. You know, I can say, well, I'm Jewish, you know, so I can do that. But for the Middle Eastern and Muslim folklore, it was like, oh goodness, I do not want to offend.

I do not want to whitewash whatever I find, you know, and just sort of take stuff out of context. Did your husband know about the djinns as much as you knew about the golem? Probably more, just because I think djinn are more in American culture than golems are. You mean as the genies? The genies, yeah, exactly. In their sort of westernized genie form, whether it's the Disney Aladdin movie or I Dream of Genie or really bad jokes that usually start with a guy picking up a lamp

and rubbing it on the beach. Many a New Yorker cartoon. Yes, exactly. It is. It's a trope. It's there in the culture. I think in that very boulderized Western form. But you found the threads, though.

I mean, did you purposely try to sort of anchor a lot of maybe Western readers? Did you purposely try to find the tropes that would remind us of the genie as we knew it to some extent? Or were they already like very much prominent there? Some of them were prominent. The problem that I ran into that eventually turned into, you know, not a problem was there are so many different gin stories from all the different cultures in the Middle East. And I had this thing when I started out of, I have to write a genie the right way. Well, there was no right way. And that was, I kept like, I was like tearing my hair because I'm like, in this story, it

says like, they're like this. In that story, it says they're like that. How do I know? And in the end, of course, it was, well, you get to pick, you get to pick you get to pick and choose you're the writer you get to you know you get to even make something up maybe um one thing i thought about too reading reading i mean i never did know anything about the mythology except reading through your book but i wondered whether this was a way that some people in the past to try to explain mental illness oh yeah certainly um that is something that I didn't get to

in the book, because the Syrians I was talking about were mostly, almost exclusively Arab Christians, is that in Islam, jinn are a fact. Jinn are in the Quran, and the Quran is the word of God, therefore jinn exist. And so jinn belief is prevalent and sort of just establishes a fact of life that there are these creatures that exist sort of alongside us that we usually can't see. And every once in a while, there's an interaction and some are good, some are bad, some are Muslim. And there are a lot of cases of jinn possession that every once in a while pop up on the news. And in the West, it's sort of like, haha, look at these funny people. Really? Still now? Mm-hmm.

Wow. Did you get interesting, once the book finally came out, did you get interesting feedback from Arabic or Muslim readers? from um arabic or muslim readers yeah i i i feel like unfortunately there's so many either negative or mostly ignorant depictions of um arab americans and and sort of arab and muslim mythology out there that the fact that i you know tried is is is like, well, thank you. We're glad you tried. Thank you. Oh, that's nice. So I've gotten a number of emails basically saying you had sympathetic Arab American characters. Thank you for that. It's like, oh man. I feel like that's, you know. It's a little bar.

It's a little bar. Exactly. Like, That should be basic. That's fundamental. One of the most sympathetic characters is an ice cream salesman named Sala, who lives in the long-gone neighborhood of Little Syria, which used to be in Lower Manhattan. He's the only human who can see that Ahmad is a genie. And that's because Sala is tormented. He used to be a respected doctor, and now he can't make eye contact with other

people because when he looks at their faces, he sees hideous skulls. A long pause while the glowing man regarded him. In this scene, they meet up at a diner. Then he leaned forward, peering deep into Saleh's eyes as though searching for something. Saleh froze, feeling giddy as the glowing face filled his vision. He could feel his pupils dilating against the light. The man nodded, leaned back. I can see it, he said. Barely, but it's there. Ten years ago, you were still in Syria, weren't you? Yes, in Homs. What can you see?

The thing that possessed you. Saleh froze. That's absurd. A girl had a fever. I treated her, and I caught it. The fever caused the epilepsy. The glowing man snorted. You caught more than a fever. Bedouins such as yourself may believe in these superstitions, but it's simply not possible. The glowing man laughed as though he had a secret hidden in his pocket and was waiting for the right moment to bring it out. All right, then, Salah said. You say that something possessed me. An imp, I suppose. Or a genie.

Yes, perhaps one of the lower Ifrits. imp, I suppose. Or a genie. Yes, perhaps one of the lower Ifrits. Oh, I see. And what evidence do you have? There's a spark deep in your mind. I can see it. A spark? The smallest ember left behind. The mark of something passing. 1899. How come New York in 1899? Good question. I picked it almost out of thin air. I thought, well, let's just pick 1899. I like that sense of, you know, about to enter the 20th century. There's that tension of, you know, just sort of leaning over the edge of the old century and peering into the new. And then once I'd learned enough, I had, you know, well, that's the time and energy I've got invested. I don't want to make it 1903 now, because I'll lose all this stuff from 1899.

So we're just gonna have to go with it. Yeah. The idea that there was this, I mean, for if you're, you know, an American Jew, the Lower East Side is this fabled place of which we came. It's the Fertile Crescent Valley of which we spread across the nation. And the idea that there was this little Syria that was so close by and then just got totally wiped out. It's like, oh, you were there too. And there's a number of Syrian Americans and Arab Americans that are trying to bring more visibility to that. You know, okay, look, we've always been here. You know, when the city came in and built up the land and bought up the land to make one of the on-ramps and tunnels, everyone sort of picked up and moved and then they built up the World Trade Center like, you know, next door and almost on top of it.

And one of the main churches that had been the stalwarts of the little Syrian neighborhood, they found the cornerstone in the rubble of the World Trade Center. Wow. Yeah. And I love also just the fact that they're immigrants and seeing the world fresh. I mean, that's a great double thing, too, is that they're immigrants seeing the world fresh. And then they're literally brand new people. Yep. Literally brand new people who are seeing the world fresh. I mean, that's a great double thing, too, is that they're immigrants seeing the world fresh. And then they're literally brand new people, literally brand new people who are seeing the world fresh, too. I think that was a nice, that worked for me very nicely, too.

Thank you. It's sort of like the ultimate immigrants. It's not just where do you eat in New York, but how do you eat? They're immigrants to the human race. Yes. Yeah. Yeah. So then, of course, there's the other, the big kind of meta idea that you've got an Arab and a Jew in New York City meeting each other. How much did you think about that on top of, you know, that's kind of, you know, in the 21st century, that's obviously sort of the big kind of resonance there. Right. It sort of came and went, my idea of are these two an allegory for a larger world issue or are they just themselves? In the end, I think it fell somewhere in the middle.

I did not want the two of them to be burdened by a history that they knew nothing about. A history that was the future. a history that was the future. A history that was the future, exactly. At the same time, you kind of can't get away from it as a writer and as a modern reader. More than any sort of allegory, what I think I wanted to do was present this parallel history of Arabs and Jews in America,

which is something that doesn't get talked about a lot and is sort of a shame. What do you mean doesn't get talked about? That reading these memoirs, you know, during my research of, you know, people coming to America from Lebanon or people coming to America from, you know, what's now Poland,

so many of the stories are, it's like just swap out America from, you know, what's now Poland. So many of the stories are, it's like, just swap out the names, you know, swap out the names of the people and the places they come from. And it's the same story. It's wanting to get ahead, wanting to come to America and then feeling like, well, where am I from now? And having, you know, a sense of displacement and dislocation from the people back home and trying to figure out what to keep, what modern ideas to keep, how much to assimilate, how much to retain the traditions. And that's something that Jews and Arabs so much have in common.

in common. And that is, you know, not to counter or say, well, it's silly that we have these arguments. It's, you know, it's not to render modern history meaningless. It's to add a dimension to say, you know, look, we have to remember that the other is usually us. look, we have to remember that the other is usually us. One person's mythological creature is another person's scary monster. It's funny, on one hand, this fictional relationship between an Arab character and a Jewish character gives me hope, but the common ground they share is that neither one is human. And I'm not sure what that says about our chances in the real world. That's it for this week's show.

Thanks for listening. And big thanks to Haylene Wecker, who let me stop by her house right before the holidays. All right, one more question. Do you own a Kindle? I do own a Kindle. This is the largest bookshelf I think I've ever seen. And there's more. No, we can't seem to stop buying books. I think I've ever seen. And there's more.

No, we can't seem to stop buying books. I do own a Kindle. I really prefer reading physical books. Yeah, I mean, these are all pretty weathered. And you have a lot of fantasy books here too. Yeah, a lot of them are either my husband's. For a long time, for I think the first 10 years we were living together, I kept our books separate.

I wanted to be able to look at bookshelves and see me as opposed to him because it was sort of like having my external brain and it was like, okay, here's my area on the wall. And then we moved to this house and I said, forget it.

We're just, just mix them all up. It's, it's okay. You know, I've been staring at them for years. It all feels like me at this point. You can like Imaginary Worlds on Facebook or leave a comment in iTunes or Stitcher. I'm now on Stitcher. I tweet at emolinski. The show's website is imaginaryworldspodcast.org. Panoply.