Word: golem
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...deaf world with his cries. Although he has been called the voice of the 6 million killed in the "Final Solution," few of his more than 20 books directly confront the events of Auschwitz. Often they discuss the testamental prophets (Five Biblical Portraits, Messengers of God), ancient legend (The Golem) or contemporary Eastern Europe (One Generation After). His study of the Soviet Union (The Jews of Silence) was a new jeremiad, going beyond the crimes of the past. "People who didn't read the book thought it referred to the religious Russians no longer able to study Hebrew...
Before his controlling joke ("prefaces that lead nowhere") wears thin, Lem concludes his fictional anthology with a series of pseudo-documents that seem to have a middle and end as well as a beginning. GOLEM XIV is the last in a line of increasingly super computers developed to monitor the U.S. interests in peace or war. Unfortunately, it has grown indifferent to this task, and so has HONEST ANNIE, its superior and supposedly foolproof successor. Says one of the commentators on this debacle: "In a word, it had cost the United States $276 billion to construct a set of luminal...
...junkie's world is not a series of adrenaline highs and remorseful lows; it is one endless anguish. The victims are zombies, gray-faced, living dead. Director Ulrich Edel hews to a semidocumentary style, but his message is out of the classic German monster movies: There is a golem inside us all, and its name is apathy...
...roots in Talmudic law; her images of evil spring from Jewish folklore and mysticism. These influences get their longest airing in a novella with the intimidating title Puttermesser and Xanthippe. The former is a lawyer in New York's department of receipts and disbursements; the latter a female golem, an artificial being that Puttermesser fashioned from potting soil. With Xanthippe's aid, the civil ser vant becomes mayor and turns the city into a Utopia. Unfortunately, it is the nature of golems to turn against their creators. Xanthippe plays a succubus, sleeps with every man in the administration...
...himself considered rather demonic, gave lectures on the creation of a homunculus and even offered a recipe of ingredients, including human blood and putrefied semen. In 16th century Prague, too, the devout Rabbi Judah Loew was reported to have created out of clay a giant robot known as a golem. This figure, which came to life when a tablet with a divine name, shem, was placed in its mouth, was supposed to protect the Jews from persecution, but some accounts claim that its masters tried to use it for unworthy purposes, and others report that it turned upon its creators...