PROLOGUE
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 same—everything 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 breath—the word—of 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.
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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 Pygmalion’s 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 master—not a mater—a 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. Frankenstein’s 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 purpose—let’s call it hubris—it 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.
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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 God’s 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 didn’t 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, I’m turning myself into monstrare: one who unveils.
* Many scholars believe that Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley was aware of and influenced by this centuries-old legend, including Paul Root Wolpe of Emory University: medium.com/neodotlife/frankenstein-at-200-the-golem-and-biotechnology-accb33dac3be.
PART ONE
In the beginning
CHAPTER 1
Carole’s Story: It’s 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.
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My mother’s 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 this—not again, she’d 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 wasn’t blood—she 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.
Jerry heard her shriek and ran through the bedroom, slid into the bathroom. She yelled, Honey, I’m in labor, he shouted, Where is the suitcase? What do I pack?—the suitcase that would’ve been packed and ready to go if things had been happening according to schedule. This day was precisely one month before the due date she’d been given in the obstetrician’s office. Jerry drove like he’d never heard of traffic laws. Carole sat doubled over on every towel they owned.
It was all so unfair. She had the kind of sturdy, wide-hipped, large-breasted body celebrated in fertility sculptures since the dawn of time. At twenty-four, she looked able to birth a clan, a tribe, a city-state, while striding through fields with arms loaded with harvest. Instead, there had been three miscarriages in less than two years, followed by eight months of paranoid restraint.
Jerry thought, If this is all there is, just us forever, dayenu. It’s not that he didn’t want children—he did—but he’d almost given up on family life at all. Jerry had married late, at the age of thirty-one, eight years after coming home from the Army. He had been with the 102nd Infantry Division (the Fighting Ozarks)*1 when they landed at Cherbourg, in September 1944. The 102nd fought their way across Belgium until reaching Aachen, which was where Jerry’s foxhole ran out of ammunition. Something possessed him to run across the fields of fire in search of resupply. Miraculously, he made it back unscathed and stayed that way until the next-to-last day of his enlistment. The fleeing German army lobbed mortar shells behind them as they retreated; one blew up and slammed shrapnel into Jerry’s face. The Army traded a Purple Heart and a Bronze Star for the shattered jaw and the teeth left behind on the battlefield.