Riva Lehrer - Golem Girl: A Memoir

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Golem Girl is a work of nonfiction. Some names and identifying details have been changed.

Copyright 2020 by Riva Lehrer

All rights reserved.

Published in the United States by One World, an imprint of Random House, a division of Penguin Random House LLC, New York.

ONE WORLD and colophon are registered trademarks of Penguin Random House LLC.

LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA

Names: Lehrer, Riva, author.

Title: Golem girl : a memoir / Riva Lehrer.

Description: First edition. | New York : One World, [2020]

Identifiers: LCCN 2020012800 (print) | LCCN 2020012801 (ebook) | ISBN 9781984820303 (hardcover) | ISBN 9781984820310 (ebook)

Subjects: LCSH: Lehrer, Riva, 1958Health. | Spina bifidaPatientsUnited StatesBiography. | Artists with disabilitiesUnited StatesBiography.

Classification: LCC RJ496.S74 L44 2020 (print) | LCC RJ496.S74 (ebook) | DDC 617.4/82092 [B]dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020012800

LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020012801

Cover design: Greg Mollica

Cover art: Riva Lehrer

oneworldlit.com

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Blue Veronika

1999

The Latin roots of monster are monere, meaning to warn, and monstrum, an omen, or a supernatural being that indicates the will of a god. Monster shares its etymological root with premonition and demonstrate.

My first monster story was Frankenstein.

Though this first Creature was more James Whale than Mary Shelley. When we were little, my brothers and I would abandon the great outdoors and race inside in time for the Saturday monster movie matinee. Two hours of ecstatic dread. Of delicious nightmares in chiaroscuro black-and-white.

Every few weeks, it would be his turn. I waited for his graceless body, his halting gait and cinder-block shoes. I could recognize the operating room where he was born. I knew he was real, because we were the sameeverything that made him a monster made me one, too. We had more in common than scars and shoes. Frankenstein is the story of a disabled child and its parent. It is also the story of a Golem.

Humans have told stories of magically animated creatures for thousands of years. Ancient religions from Babylonia and Sumer, to Mexico, Africa, and China, all assert that gods formed the first human beings out of clay. Enki and Prometheus are but two creators who formed a being and gave it life. These days, we have Victor Frankenstein and his Creature, but long before them, the Jews had Rabbi Judah Loew ben Bezalel and his Golem.

Golem (goylem in Yiddish) is Hebrew for shapeless mass and first appears in Psalm 139 of the Hebrew Bible, in which Adam is referred to as a golmi. Adam is brought to life by the breaththe wordof God, transformed from inert matter into vibrant life: the first Golem. The difference is that Adam becomes fully human, while Golems of legend never do.

Iterations of this legend date from as far back as the eleventh century, but the most famous version dates from sixteenth-century Prague. The Golem of Prague tells the story of Rabbi Judah Loew ben Bezalel (an actual historical figure, known as the Maharal) and his creation of a living being made of clay. Golems wend through our stories, from Pygmalions statue to the Bride of Frankenstein to Mr. Data and Seven of Nine; from the Cylons to C-3PO, R2-D2, and Chucky the doll. And, of course, to Gollum himself.

While these are not all Golems, exactly, every creature is made of inanimate material that is shaped and awakened by the will of a master (and nearly every story is of a masternot a matera male who attempts to attain the generative power of the female body).

Golems are built in order to serve a specific purpose. Adam, it is said, was built for the glory of God. The Golem of Prague was built to save the Jews from a pogrom. Frankensteins monster was built for the glory of his maker, and for the glory of science itself. These Golems were not created for their own sake. None given purposes of their own, or futures under their control. Golems are permitted to exist only if they conform to the wishes of their masters. When a Golem determines its own purposelets call it hubrisit is almost always destroyed. The Golem must stay unconscious of its own existence in order to remain a receptacle of divine will.

Yet every tale tells us: it is in the nature of a Golem to wake up. To search for the path from being an It to an I.

In Golem stories, the monster is often disabled. Speechless and somnambulistic, a marionette acting on dreams and animal instinct. In Yiddish, one meaning of goylem is lummox; to quote the scholar Michael Chemers, from Gods perspective, all humans are disabled.

The day I was born I was a mass, a body with irregular borders. The shape of my body was pared away according to normal outlines, but this normalcy didnt last very long. My body insisted on aberrance. I was denied the autonomy that is the birthright of normality. Doctors foretold that I would be a vegetable, a thing without volition or self-awareness. Children like me were saved without purpose, at least not any purpose we could call our own.

I am a Golem. My body was built by human hands.

And yet

If I once was monere, Im turning myself into monstrare: one who unveils.

.

In the beginning

Caroles Story: Its Alive!

She told me my story when she was proud of me. (Look how you turned out!) She told me my story when I annoyed her so much that she folded her arms across her breasts and tilted her eyebrows at me like notched arrows. (Have you forgotten what I went through for you?) She told my story when we had company. (Look how she turned out!) She told my story to every new doctor and nurse who crossed our path.

My mothers stories run through my head like a piece of silver nitrate film.

April 1958

Carole froze, hands in the air, caught in the act of tugging her blouse over her head. Not thisnot again, shed been so careful. Months on bed rest, moving through the apartment like an overfull balloon, afraid to so much as bump the furniture in case it pricked her skin and spilled her contents out onto the floor.

They were spilling now. Hot liquid spiraled down her legs.

She shuffled into the bathroom and waited for the expected release of mangled tissue. For another baby-that-could-have-been to slide out of her on a torrent of red. She looked down at the floor and, oh God, it wasnt bloodshe was standing in a puddle of viscous pink water. Invisible hands twisted her like wet laundry. What a strange thing it is when pain means hope.