davidfcooper

“The Golem and the Jinni is recommended to adults who enjoy a good story and have a childlike sense of make-believe.”

The folklore underlying the book is both Eastern European Jewish and Levantine Arab in origin. Jewish folk tales are fun reads, but in most of them you won't learn much about Judaism. The same is true of this novel. In interviews Ms. Wecker has admitted that her knowledge of Judaism is by and large limited to what she learned as a child in Hebrew school.

The first of the two title characters is created by a corrupt kabbalist. Here Ms. Wecker is taking poetic license. Traditional Judaism has its share of magic and superstition, but the magic is supposed to be white magic. In theory a corrupt kabbalist would be an ineffective one, since the efficacy of the magic depends on the purity of the practitioner's intent as well as on his or her strict ritual observance, but from a Jungian perspective we all have a shadow side to our psyches, and anyway, this is a book whose premise demands multiple suspensions of disbelief.

As in most love stories boy meets girl, they get to know each other noting similarities and differences, they break up, and a dramatic crisis reminds them of their feelings for each other and brings them back together. To find out how that basic scenario plays out in detail for the novel's supernatural title characters you'll have to read the book.

In addition to the title characters the book has a strong cast of supporting characters including the title characters' human mentors, protectors, and co-workers, and people in Eastern Europe and the Levant who figure in the backstories prior to the title characters' immigration to late 19th Century New York.

Ms. Wecker wrote The Golem and the Jinni as an attempt to combine the folklores of her Jewish ancestors and of her Arab-American husband's ancestors and to imagine a time and place where Jews and Arabs lived in peace as neighbors. But the historical reality in turn of the previous century New York was that the Jewish immigrants of the Lower East Side and the Arab immigrants of the Lower West Side rarely crossed paths. It is also worth noting that turn of the previous century Levantine Jewish immigrants chose to live among their European co-religionists on the Lower East Side rather than among their former neighbors from the old country in Little Syria.

In my New York Journal of Books review I recommend The Golem and the Jinni "to adults who enjoy a good story and have a childlike sense of make-believe." This novel would make a terrific HBO original series combining the supernatural elements of True Blood and Game of Thrones with the historical authenticity of Boardwalk Empire, Deadwood, John Adams,and Rome.