The Redemption Comedy, Part 1
The Golem Dreams
I’ve certainly talked around it for long enough, so I suppose I should get to the heart of the matter.
Der Goylem is great. Truly wonderful. And very, very weird.1 Which makes it even more wonderful. I, personally, love it: There are invisible spirits,2 a very angry rabbi, Jesus and one large man (originally) made of mud. It’s a piece of Yiddish literature which has left an absolutely indelible mark on wider culture in general. It’s unquestionably a landmark, both in terms of drama and in terms of his career.
What’s not to like?
I’m a terrible one for answering rhetorical questions quite seriously, so I’ll answer this one, too: What isn’t to like — at least for me — is how much Golem now overpowers absolutely everything else Leivick ever wrote.
Part of the play’s dominance is likely explained by the fact that it existed, very early on, in multiple languages. Leivick’s Golem has always been a rather cosmopolitan sort of creature. It was translated and retranslated. In fact, its first production was in Hebrew, by Habima (still located in Russia then), and not in Yiddish.
Golem has a bit of a stranglehold on academia, too. Again, the presence of the play in so many languages, including English, makes working with the text so much easier. But language aside, it’s not hard to see why the Golem has always been a metaphor of one sort or another. Leivick himself sometimes battled back against the Golem being too completely, too easily, identified as standing for the Russian Revolution. But he’s just as easily applied to machine learning, war, board-gaming, coffee machines…a magic mud-man for all seasons.
Most of these miss, or don’t engage with, the component of messianic longing in Leivick’s Golem — Zachary Sholem Berger has called Leivick ‘passionate, longwinded, bloodsoaked messianist’ — who, you might even say, is an aspect of himself, one of Leivick’s many literary doubles, the embodiment of his own messianic longing as well as his Jewish rage, just as within the play, he’s an embodiment of the Maharal of Prague’s rage.3
Shmuel Charney further compares the Maharal and Shylock in their rage toward an oppressive, sometimes murderous, world. Leivick himself expands on the notions of Jewish anger, desire for revenge, and the figure of Shylock in relation to himself in essay where he meets the Jewish Blood-Redeemer — whom he mistakes for his own imagined double at first. I’m of the opinion that Leivick is both the Golem and the Maharal.4
One of the many things that the Golem’s long shadow obscures, though, is his own sequel.
The Redemption Comedy followed roughly a decade after the first play, in 1932. Once again, it’s one of the works from the Sanatorium period, where Leivick was undergoing frequent, extended stays away from home while being treated for tuberculosis, including in Colorado. Leivick writes about completing the drama in his sanatorium room in Denver and, well, I’m just going to give you the whole essay, because it’s good basic summary of the play and Leivick’s feelings towards it — particularly in respect to both the Golem and the Moshiach as symbols, looking back at it from 1956:
Complicity in Tragedy
Amongst several accounts, which I wrote while I was in Denver at the Spivak Sanatorium in 1932, I found this diary entry:
——— ‘Today I finished writing the second part of Golem — The Redemption Comedy, or The Golem Dreams. I should be satisfied, as one usually is satisfied when one finishes a work on which they have laboured a long while. I am indeed satisfied by the fact of having finished a work, but with the conclusion of the drama itself, I am not satisfied. Even more — a great sorrow envelops me that I have concluded the drama so tragically; why the longed for redeemer, Hanina — the Moshiach Ben David, of which Yosele, the one-time Golem, has dreamed — must go so far as to kill the Moshiach Ben Yosef with his own hands in order for the true redemption to be able to come. He kills him. The people celebrate. The people dance the dance of redemption. But the true redeemer himself, Hanina, cannot bear the sentence he had to carry out: To spill blood. He is not there at the celebration of the definitive redemption, he descends, of his own free will, to the prison dungeon and consents that the executioner should go with him and, there in the dungeon, give him his due. ———
‘Did Hanina have to be brought to this? In particular, did I, the writer, have to bring the entire proceedings to this, that even he, the purest, most unsullied redeemer, must, in order for the redemption to come, commit an act of murder, even if it is the last murder? — The question halts before me: If the redemption must not come other than by bloodshed — what is preferable: That the redemption should come and the redeemer stain his hands with blood, or that the redeemer remain pure, his hands spill no blood, and the redemption never come on the this account? — In my heart, I felt that it was better to gamble the entire redemption, so long as the redeemer’s hands remained clean, pure. But the redeemer himself, it seemed to me, would not agree with this. He would say: The redemption must come. It is preferable to me, and I, for the blood which I have shed, must voluntarily accept the punishment which is due a spiller of blood. I therefore go willingly down into the prison dungeon in order that the executioner may give me my due, and I will be his last victim. After me, his axe, too, will be purified. It will cease to be an axe. And so it ends: He descends to the dungeon and — the curtain falls.
‘I lay on my sanatorium bed, looking at the manuscript on the little table across the way, and a despair embraced me. I heard as a voice in me suddenly said: If you had to bring your best hero to the obligation to die, what right do you have to remain alive? It’s time for a poet or a dramatist, if he should have no other finish for his heroes but for death, to die together with his dying characters. Time for the separation between the artist and his creation to be removed already. Time for them to be one.
‘Whole days the thought lay heavily upon my heart. I, in the span of those days, could not touch the manuscript…
‘I pled, I myself don’t know to whom: Come and liberate me from the whole human tragedy, redeem me from being within it, from writing it, from seeing it in its bloody apparitions, and, particularly, from still needing to make the pretence that in the world, and in the history of humanity, and in the art of humanity, there is nevertheless a ‘good,’ an ‘optimistic’ order.
‘A consolation arose in me: See, Hanina, Moshiach Ben David, is below, in the dungeon, and the curtain falls — you don’t know what happens there, in the last dungeon. Perhaps the executioner himself refuses to carry out Hanina’s desire and Hanina lives on? ———‘
This is the entry. I read it now and smile sadly to myself over my own naivety, when before my eyes stand today’s ‘redeemers,’ not of legend and not of fiction, but ‘redeemers’ of the present reality — grey, dull, middling, not on theatre stages, but in squares, in the Stalinist climate. They stand before my eyes, as in the span of decades they have made idols of one another, licked one another’s boots, and began to eat one another, kill one another, smearing one another in blood and whipping one another and — are not ashamed of their blood-smeared hands. On the contrary — they laugh, they revel, they hold parades. It doesn’t occur to them to feel guilty and plead to be dragged into a dungeon and given their due.
And in their footsteps, the under-redeemers follow, a rabble, and transform the human tragedy into a dictatorial circus — into a nonsensical, not only bloody, farce.
— Excerpted from H. Leivick, Esayen and Redes, 1963.
From the NYPL
To Be Continued…
It is not the source of the Paul Wegener silent film(s). It’s not even the source of most of the stage productions mounted roughly around the time of its composition, including at least one musical version. It is vaguely the source of an operatic version from the early sixties, but only vaguely and isn’t the sole source.
Leivick’s Golem also has invisibility as one of his powers, along with magical travel and an imperviousness to fire, as well as a very large axe. The axe is frequently characterised as the weapon of the pogromist (it certainly is in Leivick) and the Golem is created to answer every blow given in kind…
There is often an anger or a rage simmering below the surface in Leivick’s drama, usually against society as it exists and the degradation it visits upon mankind in general and Jews in particular. In essay, his anger seems to often emerge as sarcasm or irony — sometimes wryly funny, but clearly born of unhappiness.
I’ll come back to this.