Reviews: Golem Song

marc estrin’s golem song commentary by peter quinones

Fri, 16 Feb 2007 21:37:05 -0500

The Bohemian Aesthetic
the art of fiction volume 2, number 4

One of our most prominent living intellectuals, Professor Martha Nussbaum, makes an appearance in Marc Estrin's Golem Song, during a lunchtime conversation with the main character, Alan Krieger, who disgusts her (as he does almost everyone with whom he comes in contact). I mention this because I once had a real life encounter with Nussbaum in the mid 1990s, when I was one of several people the Boston Review invited to write short replies to an article she'd written for them (you can read that here.) I cracked up when I read the passage

"I was arguing that our primary loyalty should be to humanity as a whole, and not to some parochial national identity."

"So, what's wrong with that?"

"Oh, there were all kinds of objections—from silliness like, 'How can you be loyal to the world at large when there is no world state to be loyal to...'"
 because it kinda-sorta describes the reply I wrote for the journal. I guess Nussbaum heard it often. This brought the power of this novel home to me in a direct, contact sport type of way. While recognizing that this won't happen for everyone, I nevertheless feel this book has the potential to hit almost anyone concerned about the modern world with almost equal force.

Marc Estrin
by Sam Kerson

Estrin's third is an extremely learned novel covering a host of important topics that I can't possibly get to in an article of this length. On seemingly every page, the author makes free use of folklore, religion, myth, literature, songs, poems, puns, allusions, and pop culture. He's also hilarious, often wickedly irreverent. Readers must be alert, here. And I'm choosing to limit my remarks, after a brief observation of the book's postmodern character—mainly to the issue of Kreiger's racism and hatred of African Americans—then condensedly touch on the disintegration of Krieger's relationships with his girlfriends and family. There's a third large issue—Jewishness, the state and condition of Jews in history and in the contemporary world scene, as well as the fate of Israel as a state in the modern Middle East—which I'll mention only in passing, but it's no less important for that.
As noted, this tale has a thoroughly postmodern identity, as the occurrence of a well-known living person engaged in dialogue with a fictional character illustrates; but there's more to it than that. Estrin employs the device of "Paper Trails"—documents and letters which provide information about Krieger and commentary on events transpiring within the world of the fiction. He also uses chapter headings that tease by giving only a little information regarding what the chapter's about. (For example, Krieger's home life is discussed in "Krieger Domesticus"). Finally, there are, on the face of it, endless references—some direct, some allusory—to classic works of literature from the 'canon', if I may use that word (i.e. the novel begins with a nod to Joyce: "Stately? No. Ahh, but plump? Decidely.").
So, who is Alan Krieger? He's an obese, chain smoking, foul-mouthed, racist nurse in the ER of a large and busy New York hospital. He lives with his mother and his pet snake, Shlong, in a Bronx apartment, darts back and forth between between two girlfriends, and despises his brother, Walter, and Walter's family (who live in Vermont), mainly due to disagreements over the Middle East situation and the state of Israeli politics. It's hard to say exactly when it happens, but, at some point, Krieger's mind tips sideways and he begins to fancy himself a latter-day messiah for the Jews. He also becomes fascinated with the Biblical concept of the Golem; hence, the novel's title.
The word 'golem' is used in the Bible to refer to an embryonic or incomplete substance: Psalm 139:16 uses the word 'gal'mi', meaning 'my unshaped form' (in Hebrew, words are derived by adding vowels to triconsonantal roots; here, g-l-m). The Mishnah uses the term for an uncultivated person ("Ten characteristics are in a learned person, and ten in an uncultivated one" [Pirkei Avoth 5:7]). Similarly, golems are often used, today, in metaphor—either as brainless lunks or as entities serving man under controlled conditions but hostile to him in others. Similarly, it is a Yiddish slang insult for someone who is clumsy or slow.

-Wikipedia
Some aspects of Estrin's work are extremely confrontational and may make a lot of readers uncomfortable. Krieger slowly develops into a Kahane-like figure—a warrior Jew who advocates violence as a means of achieving socio-political goals and satisfactions. In an interesting review of the book, for Pop Matters, Jason B. Jones points out that some readers, not knowing much about Estrin, may tend to assume that Krieger's just a thinly disguised version of the author, himself, when, in fact, it seems that exactly the opposite is true. (Jones' review is also highly perceptive in talking about binary concepts that exist in the novel—something I'm not at all sure I would have picked up on).
Estrin applies a strategy of references to get all of his fundamental points across to us, but, in particular, to point out just how isolated and lonely his main character is. The vastness of Krieger's learning is an indication; we wonder if this guy ever does anything other than read books. His temperament and erudite lifestyle function as a wedge between himself and less scholarly folk (which includes almost everybody); but, even more, it exists to show us how quickly an educated and knowledgeable person can become a monster. Simply as a fun exercise, readers might want to glance at the following list of unexplained allusions Krieger makes, in the course of the story, and determine how much they know about each item—without performing a Google search.
Toshiro Mifune
the Bishop of Hippo
Count Chocula
the Big Ham
Something to Be Desired
H.P. Lovecraft

When pellets such as these are slipped into dialogue and interior monologue, reading becomes both challenging and enjoyable. It's an ordinary device brought into play extraodinarily well.
The question of what it means to be a Jew in modernity has, of course, been investigated, at length, in American fiction by three great twentieth century writers—Bellow, Malamud, and Roth; twentieth century Jewish theology and philosophy had plenty of heavyweights, such as Buber and Fackenheim. Estrin, I think, has clearly learned from all three of the novelists—not only thematically, but stylistically. The author understands (and acknowledges) some literary heritage, and I feel that these small accedences are more subtle, more masked, than the numerous outright references he makes to other writers and musicians.
The opening chapter of Golem Song nods to these predecessors in three slyly differing ways. In the staff room of the hospital, Krieger finds a brownie—half eaten, left for dead—and he debates the best way to eat the remains of it without being seen. This is strongly evocative of one of the opening scenes of Bellow's Herzog, wherein Moses Herzog leaves remains of his toast for the mice in his kitchen. In quick order, Krieger accidentally knocks a coffee cup off the table and it flies through the air, landing perfectly, bottom down, on the carpet, the coffee quivering inside, not a drop spilled. This, again, recalls the otherworldly magic that the characters in Malamud stories (i.e. The Magic Barrel or The First Seven Years) experience; and, lastly, the outrageous humor of which Estrin makes use, in every chapter, channels Roth—especially in earlier novels such as Portnoy's Complaint and The Great American Novel. (The latter begins with a small nod to Moby Dick in the exact manner that Golem Song nods to Joyce.)
In Krieger's twisted mind, the principal enemies of the Jews are African-Americans—specifically, the Nation of Islam. There's all manner of lunacy in New York on the subject of Jews vs. Blacks and, in the '90s (the novel's set in 1999), we had the Crown Heights Riots, Professor Leonard Jefferies, and the aforementioned Kahane and his followers. From the get-go, Estrin sets up the later scenes of confrontation and dementia. Much of significance ensues between Krieger and African-Americans. In the first chapter, Krieger encounters, in the hospital chapel, a Mr. Brown, who thinks he's Jesus. In the second chapter, he has nasty racialist and sexual thoughts about a black woman in the subway; then, the door to the subway car opens and "in swaggered two youths of color, equipped with acoustic accoutrements", who proceed to smoke—even though there are signs everywhere announcing that this isn't allowed. Later, Krieger produces a rap lyric for one of his girlfriends, Ursula (a psychiatrist and shiksa):
How you spell girl, girl with a G?
Well, you know I spell girl, girl, with a B!
'Cause I know what the *@!$ you fo
Ain't no mischance you called a ho
Hey, a brother like me, he need only one thing
And that thing a target for mah .44 ding-a-ling!
Ain't my vernacular simply spectacular?
I'm a killa, a Godzilla, that's the ganze megillah
 Krieger really starts to fall apart when it's revealed that Ursula has a black lover who's converted to Judaism. Shortly after that, Krieger's attacked in the parking lot of St. Vincent's and, as might be expected, assumes it was at the hands of a black assailant, although he has no proof of this. He's passed over for a promotion which goes, instead, to a black female colleague. When a black patient named Eddie, who's been stabbed and has assaulted a policeman, is brought into the ER, Kreiger, in a "joking" manner, threatens to emasculate the man. Perhaps what pushes his bigotry totally over the edge are some of the speeches he hears at a Nation of Islam rally, held at the Statue of Liberty:
...is none other than the black man. The black man is the first and the last, the maker and the owner of the universe. Allah is proving to us that the white race is not—and never will be—the Chosen People of God. They are the Chosen People of their father Yacub, the devil.

And:
Jewish victimization is part of a great hoax that explains how Jews have come to influence Western civilization out of all proportion to their small numbers. Jews are not victims: they are victimizers. They were the main people responsible for the genocide of the Native Americans. They were one of the main slaveholders of our people before—and after—the Civil War.

So, Estrin presents us with all of the usual justifications an imbalanced person will wield in order to palliate his/her racism, culminating in a Rambo-like reaction to the anti-Semitism of the Nation of Islam.
A couple of Krieger's rants:
Violence is as Jewish as potato latkes, Calvin. This world ain't "Fiddler on the Roof". That was bad enough. But after the Shoah show, non-violence doesn't cut it anymore. For Never-Again-ists, we need force and power, and not just brain power.

I have in mind blacks chanting, "More lampshades!" at a cannibal demo in Crown Heights. I have in mind my little Jewish nephew singing gangsta rap. Makes marrying a non-Jew seem like yeshiva.
 However, the imagined tormentors of the Jewish people are not the only ones with whom Krieger has serious issues. He ruins a seder at the home of his girlfriend, Debbie Goldenbaum, shocking the guests with his contemptuous ridicule of their traditions and beliefs. He fights with his brother over their conflicting views of Israel (Walter is a pacifist who's appalled by the behavior of the Israeli military—as he puts it, the policy of "a thousand eyes for an eye"—and who takes Krieger's "JDL swagger and machismo" deeply to task). The other girlfriend—the German Ursula—elects to dump Krieger for her long-lost African-American Jewish friend, Calvin, whom she happens to bump into at a restaurant where she and Krieger are having dinner (another miracle coincidence!). Even his mother can't stand him anymore and goes to live with her other son and his family in Vermont. (We learn of this from one of the Paper Trails with the subtitle of "First Epistle of Ma to the Floridians".)
Readers wishing to explore further should consult the Jones review mentioned earlier, as well as one by Gordon Hauptfleisch. There's also a long interview with the author that provides quite a bit of exposition into Estrin's planning for the book.
Golem Song is fascinating and disturbing, and it may be the only hysterically funny novel about the possibility of a race war that you'll ever read.
Published in The Bohemian Aesthetic

Golem Song Unreviewed? Scott Esposito

Fri, 8 Dec 2006 21:43:04 -0500

Over on the Unbridled Books blog, publisher Fred Ramsey wonders why the new book by a much-lauded author has been widely unreviewed.
The first is that Estrin’s profile may not yet be high enough to warrant a newspaper review when his new book is hard to describe or categorize or compare to any but his earlier work. The reviewers’ prior acknowledgment of Estrin’s intractable brilliance notwithstanding. The second possibility is that Estrin’s publisher is a small press. The issue there is not personal to us. And I don’t take it that way. It’s just that, even though our books are widely available through all the traditional bookselling channels, book-page editors may assume that their readers won’t be able to find a book with our imprint because it’s not that of an Island publisher.
I could well be wrong about both possibilities. Maybe reviewers just couldn’t take this one, either couldn’t stomach it or were unwilling to take on the challenge it poses to the reader. Maybe editors were trying to do us a favor by delivering us from their reviewers’ condemnation. I would certainly appreciate that sort of thing for one of our debut novelists, would even be downright grateful. But I should think the reception of Estrin’s first two novels would preclude such considerations. I mean, a fellow with a couple of lauded, if not well-known, books is pretty much fair game, isn’t he?
Well, I'm going to take up for this book. I read Golem Song back in December (it took me all of 3 days). I had heard Marc Estrin's name bandied about, and I wanted to see what he was all about. I found this book to be sharp, erudite, complex, and deliciously comic. It was good enough to make me go back to Estrin's backlist, and I'm now reading his first novel (which I am also enjoying). ** He has become an emerging author that I am keeping my eye on.
I don't know why this book has not received as much review coverage as Estrin's two previous books, but I will recommend it without reservation. It is the story of Alan Kreiger, a New Yorker who slowly (but comically) descends into his own private paranoid world and ends up on the brink of violence. This sounds heavy, but it isn't. In my opinion, Estrin stays true to his rather unpleasant subject-matter while maintaining a fundamentally comic feel.
Along the way, Estrin weaves in numerous myths (from Greek to Jewish to modern American), explores Jewish identity, gets into the sticky debate over Israel, and even manages to look into the great Tolstoy-Dostoevsky divide. He integrates a ton of texts into this book and (I believe) challenges the reader to go back to them, read the whole thing, and think through the matters raised for herself. All this in just over 300 pages that rush by as though they were really about 150.
I don't think this book is without its faults, but I did enjoy it a lot, and I think it wraps a great deal of substance into what is a fundamentally well-crafted, entertaining narrative. After finishing it, I went back through, looking at all my notes, and I began to see more and more depth in this book. This, in my opinion, is the mark of a good book. I don't know why it's been passed over for review coverage, but hopefully this humble blog can give it a little well-deserved attention.
_________ ** Even though I normally feel like this kind of thing is unnecessary, because either you trust a blogger or you don't, I am beating the drum for Estrin rather heavily today, so, disclosure: After finding out how much I liked Golem Song, Ramey--who I think is Estrin's #1 cheerleader--enthusiastically emailed to offer me a copy of Insect Dreams. Obviously, this had no bearing on my opinion of Estrin or either of his books, much in the same way that the sky being blue has no impact on my take on Philip Roth, but some people seem to believe otherwise, so, there, I just said it. This blog is about promoting literature, and that end isn't served by getting behind crappy books.

Portrait of the Artist as a Morbidly Obese, No-Longer-Young Man Who Still Lives with His Mother

Tue, 21 Nov 2006 13:51:48 -0500

Pop Matters, November 19, 2006
Golem Song
by Marc Estrin
Unbridled Books
October 2006, 320 pages, $15.95
by Jason B. Jones

Portrait of the Artist as a Morbidly Obese, No-Longer-Young Man Who Still Lives with His Mother
Golem Song wears its Joycean ambitions on its sleeve, beginning with an homage to Ulysses: “Stately? No. Ahh, but plump? Decidedly.” Like Stephen Dedalus before him, Alan Krieger aims “to forge in the smithy of [his] soul the uncreated conscience” of his Chosen People. And if Joyce distanced himself coolly from Dedalus’s romantic ideals, Marc Estrin is fascinated by a more urgent problem: how easily ethnicity, and even the identification with an ethnic history, can tip into intolerance and violence. Alan Krieger, self-styled arbiter of Jewish identity, is a charming monster—omnivorous reader with apparently perfect recall, consumer of White Castle burgers and Reddi-Wip, racist, paranoiac, and, at least in desire, a mass-murderer. Oh, and he’s frequently hilarious.
The novel recounts the collapse of Alan Krieger who, at the beginning of the novel, is reminding a psychotic patient to pray, “OH LORD, MAY I REMEMBER ALWAYS THAT MAN AND GOD ARE NOT ONE”. By the end, he will have anointed himself deliverer of the Jews, a latter-day messiah come to defend his people from the irrevocably rising tide of black culture and black bodies. When we meet him, he is juggling two women, Deborah, a Jewish social worker, and Ursula, a German (!) psychiatrist. When we finally part ways with Alan, both women have left him, both for the same reason. Alan tries to teach Ursula the ways of Jewishness, borrowing heavily from Arthur Naiman’s Every Goy’s Guide to Common Jewish Expressions. Ursula realizes pretty quickly that, for Alan, the distinction between goyish and Jewish amounts to “hav[ing] all the good people for [him]self”. She observes, “This is all your verdammte Chosen People bit come home to roost. It’s what gets you in trouble all the time”. Deborah stays with him longer, until he tries to re-stage a kind of reverse Kristallnacht by transforming himself into a golem.
Estrin gives Krieger’s racism all the usual motivations: frustrated desire; fear; economic displacement (he’s passed over for promotion at work by a black woman, and ultimately fired after mock-threatening to castrate an immobilized black patient); paranoia; a Charles Bronson-style response to the Nation of Islam’s casual anti-Semitism. What keeps this from dissolving into cliché is Estrin’s vital sense of how easily smart people can delude themselves into thinking they are beyond bigotry. Krieger is so effortlessly smart, self-deprecating, and ironic at the novel’s beginning that it can be difficult to trace when, exactly, the irony stops, or when his self-deprecation turns into a thinly disguised self-aggrandizement.
The novel centers on a key binary, which Alan imagines in three related forms: that between ethics and reason, on the one hand, and passionate, unreasoning godliness on the other. Krieger’s favorite shorthand for this binary is the distinction between Tolstoy and Dostoevsky, though it also emerges as Talmud versus Kabbalah and, in more elaborated form, as the difference between pacifist and violent Judaism. Sometimes all three forms seem to coalesce:
Your father is an Enlightenment dupe. How can anyone prefer [Tolstoy’s] lawful, rational universe to Dostoevsky’s anarchic, mystical, hallucinatory one? We’re ruled by Zohar, not Talmud! Your father thinks the peasants are noble? No, the peasants are sick, violent, and corrupt to the soul ... And the fucking irony is that Tolstoy, may his name be erased from the Book of Life, set himself up as a god. He challenged God—while Dostoevsky groveled in front of Him. God, that is. Makes me want to puke.
If the peasants are “sick, violent, and corrupt to the soul,” then it is a very quick step to desiring their extermination. Alan invokes Judaism’s ancient heroes, especially Joshua, as a model for “a new testament—and I’m not talking about Paul’s epileptic ravings and Jesus’s mishegas—I’m talking the norm of a new kind of Jew, no more bent-over rabbis but patriotic, bronzed warriors, kicking ass and transvaluating values. Its time for the Viconian age of the post-schlimiel!”. This is, in effect, a genocidal eschatology, and Krieger is quick to apply its maxims. His very definition of a “new kind of Jew” demands that he find appropriate objects of slaughter. The allegorical relations of Krieger’s outlandish claims to, say, American or Middle Eastern politics are pretty evident. But this novel’s appeal is not simply allegorical—don’t miss the wildly comical confrontation between the real-life philosopher Martha Nussbaum and Krieger over the question of disinterested rage as an ethical stance.
Readers will perhaps be tempted to identify Krieger with Estrin. In the novel’s original form, this apparently would’ve been easily done: Estrin has told Robert Birnbaum in an interview that many of the novel’s revisions were expressly directed at signaling authorial distance from his creation. More sophisticated readers will grant that Estrin and Krieger and pretty different, but infer that perhaps Krieger is a kind of projection of Estrin’s id. Estrin winks at this reading in the novel: Krieger’s hated brother, Walter, is a violist who lives in Vermont and who is a staunch critic of Israeli policy—who believes, in fact, that “the State of Israel, morally bankrupt and mortally endangered by its victories, has triumphed over Judaism” an opinion that reduces Alan to “actually foaming at the mouth.” The joke here is that Estrin is a cellist, who lives in Vermont, and who is an activist, in part with Vermonters for a Just Peace in Palestine/Israel. Estrin has created a protagonist who would presumably hate him.
But it would be a mistake to reduce this novel to a kind of metafictional game, no matter how intellectually or psychologically rewarding. Estrin claims in an author essay on his website that the novel was inspired by a real phone call:
Back in late ‘96, I think, I received a phone call from someone in NYC, asking me to buy him a high-powered rifle with a telescopic sight, as these were easily obtainable in Vermont. “Why?” I asked. “So that I can kill black people in the park from my window.”
This phone call, Estrin claims, was the event that goaded him into fiction, as he tried to imagine the possibility of a race war in the United States. Although Golem Song is his third published novel, it was once his first completed manuscript. And while “impending race war” no longer seems to top anyone’s political agenda, this hardly makes Golem Song irrelevant: Its dramatization of just how easily confidence that one has been chosen by God can drive one into ethically dubious aggression should be familiar to anyone paying attention to American proponents of the Iraq War. The problem of false messiahs is, in a post-9/11 world, not especially a Jewish problem; rather, the temptation to messianism has become a difficult geopolitical question.
From PopMatters

Book Review: Golem Song, by Marc Estrin

Tue, 21 Nov 2006 13:49:42 -0500

GL Hauptfleisch
Blogcritics Magazine

“…One Saturday night, when he was a differently-abled teenager, Oedipus and his buddies were tooling around in the limo, and they decided to take in an oracle. So up to Delphi and guess what?”  You can most assuredly guess that you will never hear a more hilarious account of Oedipus Rex than you will encounter in Marc Estrin’s trenchantly voltaic third novel, Golem Song. But it may also be the most disconcerting, too, as the main character — with unthinking Freudian relish in the embellishment — tells the story to his mother. On Mother’s Day. With a Snoopy card.   But Alan Krieger is not your standard-issue 35-year old emergency-room nurse with a brilliant, non-stop mind and mighty mouth. For one thing, he still lives with oedipal ma in a sixth-floor New York apartment that, “floor-to-ceilinged” with scholarly tomes, ominously reminds him — and us — of the Texas Book Depository. Often endearing but just as often infuriating, tossing off bonmots and potshots cavalierly quickly, Alan is more than one of those people you either love or hate effortlessly and uncritically. Once more, with intensity: You love to hate him or hate to love him; friends and family seem to enjoy pursuing that extra effort it takes to submit to the voodoo-that-you-do, or to push in more pins.
But with Estrin’s character-driven comic touch, you will come for the foibles but stay for the foils in this 1999-set novel. Alan’s self-sabotaging and manic antics may undermine him but it is the hell of other people — adherents and adversaries alike — that helps define him, especially and increasingly in the degree with which they accede to his strong stance on Jewish theology and its legacy.
“I’m sick to death of Jewish patheticness,” he rails. “Exemplary victims, weak, passive, cowardly, timid and downtrodden, limp Jewish rags soaked in repulsive silent suffering…” It’s a mindset Alan uses in his lifelong standoff with his pacifist brother over the issue of Israel, and an outlook that buttresses his stance against converts to Judaism he encounters, including a black acquaintance: “What, you haven’t suffered enough?”   Despite Alan’s neurotic edges and perceived extremism, though, he's affable with his ER co-workers of the rank and file stripe, and patient to a point with the patients. He fancies he has the pick of two girlfriends, one an out-of-his-league psychiatrist and the other of the levelheaded soulmate variety, understanding and comforting. Though she may have her limits, too.  Further complications testing Alan's people-person skills crop up during a night when a senseless city-wide gang war turns the ER into a “stitch-em-up factory,” and a garrulous Farrakhan-inflamed Anti-Semite GOMER (“Get Out of My Emergency Room” regular) pokes and prods Alan to the point where contention is construed as racism - but only on Alan's part. Ultimately and however arguably justified, Alan’s better judgments and attempts at poetic but un-PC justice — the denigration of affirmative action in confrontaion with his African-American supervisor doesn‘t help — leads to the loss of his job.   A latent fanaticism fanned also signals the advent of a new and unstable phase, tinged with tension and dark humor, that comes as Alan deludes himself into believing he’s been “chosen” to deliver America from Anti-Semitism. Indeed, as one character says, he’s become enslaved “to your own rhetoric, to the flight of your ideas.”   If Alan has become a Frankenstein of sorts, it’s all the more a Faustian connection rooted in the folktale of the Golem, the animated being of clay that defended the Jews in 16th Century Prague. It’s a theme that pops-up repeatedly in Estrin’s ever-arresting novel; Alan remembers reading as a child about this “cross between the Jolly Green Giant and the Pillsbury Doughboy.” His mother used to call him a golem, too (perhaps just a twisted term of oedipal endearment, though).   But now, as Alan prepares for a retaliatory plan of cultural attack, it is more befitting to remember that in Hebrew, the word golem equates to “shapeless matter.” “Something,” Alan is told, “that has potential but is not yet formed, not yet there.”
Nothing ratchets up the riveting anticipation and the anything-can-happen possibilities more than putting them under the command — or utter lack of control — of a man who is himself still an unfinished works-in-progress.

Gordon Hauptfleisch is Blogcritics Assistant Books Editor and a free-lance writer who has managed record stores and bookstores while barely managing to retain a thread of decorum and dignity. When not lollygagging his way to an early grave, he writes book reviews for the San Diego Union-Tribune. He will have you know that beneath his gruff exterior lies an enormous lack of character.

Blogcritics Magazine

O, Superman

Tue, 21 Nov 2006 13:47:47 -0500

Seven Days, November 1, 2006
Margot Harrison
 How do people become fanatics, capable of killing strangers on the strength of a belief? How do words and ideas give birth to murder? With the death toll from suicide bombings mounting daily in the Middle East, we can’t afford not to ask these questions. But the third novel from Burlington’s Marc Estrin reminds us that ideological violence is no stranger to our own shores. Set on the eve of the new millennium, Golem Song confronts an older source of friction and fear in American urban culture: the tension between African-Americans and Jews.   The novel’s protagonist, Alan Krieger, R.N., is an unlikely warrior of any faith. He’s a pudgy, thirtysomething, two-pack-a-day smoker with a mind stuffed full of classic literature and a formidable talent for oratory and wordplay. Alan resides in the Bronx with his mom and pet snake, works in a busy emergency room, and divides his free time between his two brainy girlfriends: a Jewish social worker and a German shiksa psychiatrist. That’s not enough for this man of appetites, who still scans personal ads and aspires to the romantic conquest of real-life philosopher Martha Nussbaum.   That’s the comic side of Alan Krieger: Like Shakespeare’s Falstaff, he’s all about excess. But his anger is larger than life, too. In the first chapter, we get a sense of the power Alan can wield with words alone. When a strapping psychiatric patient goes berserk in the ER, insisting he’s the son of God, Alan subdues him by telling the story of Shabbatai Z’vi, a 17th-century would-be messiah whose delusions brought him to grief.   It’s not always easy for Alan to absorb his own wisdom — that man and God aren’t one. He’s angered by the things he experiences every day: the teenagers who blast rap music on the subway, the gang members who come to the ER boasting of brutal killings, the anti-Semitic orators of the Nation of Islam. Soon he’s taking revenge in small ways — like telling an unruly black patient the doctors are going to castrate him — that get him in trouble with his superiors. Alan’s friends are shocked by his racist comments, but he insists, “I’m not racist; I’m a realist.”   Though he calls himself a Buddhist, Alan’s sense of himself is shaped by Judaism — and, perhaps even more deeply, by the long history of anti-Semitic violence in Western culture. He’s convinced that the only way to make it stop, whether in the Bronx or on the West Bank, is for Jews to give tit for tat. “I’m sick and tired of Jewish patheticness,” he proclaims. “Exemplary victims, weak, passive, cowardly, timid and downtrodden. . . . [we need] the norm of a new kind of Jew, no more bent-over rabbis but patriotic, bronzed warriors, kicking ass and transvaluating values.”   On the anniversary of Kristallnacht — the massive 1938 Nazi pogrom — Alan’s obsessions come together. Like 16th-century Rabbi Loew, who created a giant golem from clay to protect the Jews of Prague, he will fight back. And, like the golem after the rabbi forgot to deactivate it on the Sabbath, Alan won’t make distinctions between the innocent and the guilty.   This topic could lend itself easily to sensationalism. But Estrin, who won national acclaim for his first novel, Insect Dreams, is no sensationalist: He’s a philosopher and a writer steeped in the modernist — and postmodernist — traditions. Like Alan’s mind, the novel teems with allusions to classic music and literature, from the Old Testament to Captain Marvel comics. For readers, this sets the comprehension bar pretty high. To understand the novel, it helps to know that the fragments passing through Alan’s mind in the first chapter are from Hamlet, or that “kicking ass and transvaluating values” is a reference to Nietzsche’s concept of the superman.   Formally, too, the novel is challenging — at least until you get used to the fact that its narrator is and isn’t Alan Krieger. Though Golem Song appears to be written from an omniscient third-person perspective, Estrin slips in and out of Alan’s interior monologue, giving the novel a James Joycean feel. Many chapters are composed almost entirely of dialogue, with few he-said she-said tags to remind the reader who’s speaking.   Luckily, Estrin writes vigorous, colloquial dialogue, the kind that’s even better when you read it aloud. The chapter in which Alan tells his mother the Oedipus story — on Mother’s Day, of course — is a small comic masterpiece. In another beautifully crafted passage, Alan witnesses an Independence Day rally by the Nation of Islam and a competing White Power demonstration. Here humor gives way to chilling irony: For all their disagreements, both groups blame their problems on the Jews.   In scenes like this, it’s hard not to see the source of Alan’s rage. Estrin likes to approach difficult issues without reducing their complexity. Perhaps that’s why he’s partial to the dialogue, a form pioneered by Socrates for the discussion of questions with no easy answers.   In this refusal to simplify the difficult, Golem Song is reminiscent of a classic American novel of race conflict: Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man. (Both authors acknowledge the influence of Dostoevsky’s Notes from the Underground, with its socially marginal, devil’s-advocate protagonist.) Like Ellison’s nameless African- American narrator, Alan Krieger has revelatory interracial encounters with random people he meets on the streets of New York. Both characters feel the weight of a long history of ethnic oppression; both are inexorably pushed toward violence.   Golem Song and Invisible Man diverge radically at their dénouements. By the end of his story, Ellison’s narrator knows that the American “melting pot” is more like a seething stew. But he also has an epiphany: Diversity, in all its “concrete, ornery, vile and sublimely wonderful” messiness, is what America is about. Ellison writes that those who preach ethnic or ideological cleansing, whatever their race or creed, are “making the old eagle rock dangerously.”   For all his brilliance, Alan Krieger is ultimately one of those people. It’s hard not to wish that Estrin had given his character a moment of insight like Ellison’s — or given us a character with a countervailing perspective who was prominent enough in the narrative to stand up to Alan. It’s frustrating, sometimes almost unbearable, to be stuck inside the mind of a man who’s talking himself into madness.   But to deny the realities to which he’s reacting would be worse. “Do the country-club Jews understand this?” Alan asks about his racism, pointing out that wealth will buy a lot of tolerance — and complacency. Real pluralism means working out conflicts that sometimes seem intractable. Estrin uses Alan’s downfall to illuminate this truth: When everyone claims to be the “chosen people,” no one has a right to exist.    From Golem Song:  Alan Krieger had nothing wrong with his liver, nor was he likely to, since he didn’t drink or do injectables. Unattractive? Beauty must be in the eye of the beholder, for Alan had acquired not one but two lady friends — though overweight is not exactly chic.   As Alan has just trod down the steps and through the turnstile, one’s attention turns, then, to “underground.” Podpolia, in Russian, refers not to subways but to the crawl space under the floor of a house, and Dostoevsky has evoked in this little masterpiece an irate, claustrophobic consciousness in strained polemical battle with some imagined enemy, the condition, he thought, of modern man.   Unlike Dostoevsky’s antihero, Alan Krieger, RN, was neither narrow-minded nor without character. Nevertheless, there was something podpolye-ish in his heart as he stood waiting to be transported.   Ecstatic discharge from the nether regions of the downtown express as it disappeared into darkness. Old Sparky, Alan thought, the festival of lights come round for Passover. The uptown platform — his — was filling up with huddled masses yearning to go home and watch TV.   What a card, old God. Execute all those lil Egyptian firstborns? For I will go through the land of Egypt in that night, I and not an intermediary — the Big Ham. He could have had Jews avenge themselves. But no. No Jewish Fists allowed. Why? Afraid of His People punching themselves in the face? Punching Him in the Face? He kept everyone in the dark that night, without responsibility or blame for all those little corpses.

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