A Golem of One’s Own
Eve Goodman, the narrator of Beth Kander’s I Made It Out of Clay has had a very bad year. The sudden death of her father has shut her down emotionally and sexually. Her younger sister Rosie, a fitness influencer, is ushering in Hanukkah by marrying her partner Ana at a Jewish camp: “Ancient festival of lights meets modern lesbian wedding.” As maid of honor, Eve has to wear an unflattering magenta pantsuit, find a date for the wedding, and come up with a toast that honors the dead relatives that are the loves of her life: her father and her bubbe, a Holocaust survivor.
She’s about to turn forty as layoffs loom at the ad agency where she is a copywriter. And after a rare joyful night out at the Big Gay Christmas Concert and some barhopping with her besties, she has a frightening encounter with a neo-Nazi on the Chicago El. This seems to be the price she pays for being “A single woman, taking the train alone, after midnight, Drunk. Flaunting my Hanukkah shirt, exposing my identity to the whole damn world.”
Given this state of affairs, what’s a girl to do but make a golem out of the clay left behind in the very creepy basement of her apartment building? And for a while, being the mistress of a golem—a mythical being from Jewish folklore, clay animated through magic into something between a robot and a guardian angel—is a blast. Unlike his legendary forebears, his “attractiveness is almost cinematic,” and she enjoys dressing him up in snug jeans as well as a suit for the wedding (where he will serve as her date). When she has to name him (yes, here, unlike in the Bible, Eve is the namer rather than the named), she calls him Paul Mudd. In this way, she honors his clay origins as well as his resemblance to Paul Rudd, her teen crush from the film Clueless.
When Eve is with Paul, she need not fear Nazis; in fact, when she again meets the harasser on the El, he doesn’t register her existence. However, she recognizes him, and her “supernatural bodyguard” beats him to a pulp. His superhuman strength makes the heavy lifting associated with wedding errands effortless. And, as an added and totally unexpected bonus, his hard-wired body makes him an extraordinary lover. Judy Syfer’s 1971 satirical essay “Why I Want a Wife” famously ends with the line “My God, who wouldn’t want a wife?” For a while, Eve and many readers of I Made it Out of Clay might be forgiven for thinking, “My God, who wouldn’t want a golem?”
However, the protection racket associated even with a golem as attractive as Paul Mudd isn’t all it’s cracked up to be. For one thing, his superhuman strength makes him dangerous even as he protects Eve and those she loves. When a stalker appears at the wedding reception and terrorizes Eve’s sister, he not only disarms but almost kills the attacker (he also injures the drunken groomsman who makes a pass at Eve). Just as importantly, the golem’s attentiveness to any and all danger means that those he protects ultimately end up isolated.
When it comes time to deactivate her golem, Eve’s best friend Sasha, a Jewish woman of color who had a golem of her own, is her mentor. And her mother’s emerald ring (that originally belonged to Bubbe) is the implement that allows Eve to wipe out the animating Hebrew letter on the golem’s forehead. Clearly, sisterhood and the whole mishpacha (Yiddish for family) are needed to free Eve from the golem’s protective seductiveness. As Sasha wittily notes, having a golem is “like you got the world’s best vibrator, but after you use it, it starts randomly electrocuting other people.”
Slowly but surely, Eve emerges from Paul’s spell and from her grief-induced cocoon. Reintegrated into her family and her friend circle, she embraces that a life free of risk is no way to live: the “most important thing is to go out there and dare to live anyway, even in a world full of danger.” And risk-taking rewards her with a new human love interest as well as a professional coup.
Part of the satisfaction of I Made It Out of Clay is its unapologetic Jewishness, even at the level of the sentence. Describing the golem, Kander writes, “If there’s one thing this guy isn’t it’s a WASP.” She portrays Eve as a lover of Christmas but also a player of “spot the menorah—a holiday I spy game.” And Eve tells a fellow wedding guest that Paul “works in security.” This fun, campy style allows I Made It Out of Clay to wear lightly its more serious concerns—the deadening weight of grief, expendable employees, social media “likes” substituting for intimacy in everyday life, and an antisemitic zeitgeist that cannot be wished away.
If at moments I Made it Out of Clay lapses into talkiness, that, too, reflects the zeitgeist and doesn’t diminish the substantial reading pleasure of this novel.
Helene Meyers is the author of Movie-Made Jews: An American Tradition.
