👩‍🏫 Guest Lecture for Intro to Disability Studies

Doctor and Rabbi: She goes on, though, to explore the idea further, that there were “expectations for the Golem that were very specific . . . it had to behave a certain way, and when it stopped behaving that way, it was destroyed. Plus, you know, the doctor and the rabbi both share this kind of mystical superpower sense. And that's certainly how I was raised to regard doctors. (JWA) Traditionally, Rabbis were often able to create life out of clay called golems. There are many golem stories, but one of the most famous is the story of Rabbi Judah Loew who created a golem as a means of countering anti-Semitism. Over the course of the story the golem turns on Rabbi Loew, causing violent chaos in the process so Rabbi Loew must destroy the golem and return it to dust. The common tale of the golem is that it begins as an aid and concludes as an obstacle. We see this mindset informing Lehrer’s method of handling her disability all throughout Part One. At one point she even explicitly compares her doctor to Rabbi Loew (138).

Death: She reflects a lot on the golem as an image, an ally, a monster. She even thinks, in a footnote, about the doll in the film Heidi. In the film, a girl drops a doll and it breaks, symbolizing the death of the golem girl and a moving toward health (41). In a sense, the Golem both represents who she is, who she believes she must move past, and who she must become.

Shapeless Mass: Golem means “shapeless mass,” and in recent years that has slowly come to mean a mass that is changeable. In Milk Fed, for instance, Melissa Broder claims that being a shapeless mass is a bit of a superpower. Here, Lehrer tells us that “I change and change again, with no end in sight. I’ve never had a final form. I’ve been protean since the day I was born” (94). Other books, like Milk Fed, hinge on the image of the shapeless mass as a method of thinking about oneself as forever incomplete, which is where Lehrer is getting this version of the word. The Puttermesser Papers uses the golem as a metaphor for one’s need to parent, and results in a doppelganger. In the second chapter of the novel, “Puttermesser and Xanthippe,” Puttermesser creates a golem out of the dirt from her plants. She uses her knowledge of the Hebrew language to breathe life into the lump of dirt upon her bed. Once she does this, she immediately turns to books to see if this is even possible and discovers what Lehrer does—that Rabbis have this power in Jewish folklore. She initially has her golem daughter, who she is calling Leah as she “always imagined a daughter named Leah” (42) doing laundry, cooking, and cleaning, until the golem insists that she move on to better things. So Puttermesser allows her to come up with a plan, and her plan is for Puttermesser to become mayor of New York City and create a new Eden. What results however is Puttermesser returning her to dust—like all golems.

Other examples you might know are actually related: Supernatural’s “Everybody Hates Hitler” episode has a Golem being used to battle Nazis, both during World War II and the present. This “golem fighting Hitler” story came back again as the impetus for Captain America: Dr. Erskine is meant to be a Rabbi Leow figure, creating Captain America, a golem, to fight Nazis. The golem, in other words, is a shapeless mass of a metaphor itself, constantly shifting, growing, and reemerging, in the pages of massive novels like The Adventures of Kavalier and Clay and smaller stories.

2. Jewish American Identity

Name: It all comes back to the name. Lehrer tells us: “Reevka Brian Yo-ha-ved” is the name she was born with. And as always, she must introduce herself with” English name first, then Hebrew name… Ashkenazi families pull their children’s names from the afterlife; children begin life as phantoms of people they will never meet” (11). It’s almost as if her name is Frankensteined together, made from multiple languages, multiple people, multiple lives.

Survival: Lehrer’s Jewish identity, beyond the use of the golem image, and even past her name, is featured all throughout the memoir. Some early examples are the importance of Dayenu (6), which is a song that features the repeated word meaning “it would have been enough.” Other great moments stand out: Lehrer’s remarks that the Angel of Death is stupid and confused when babies have multiple names (for the living to trick Death into leaving them be) (11). Her survival is something she often thinks about in terms of her Jewish identity, not just in this Angel of Death story—we’re reminded of her Jewishness even when Lehrer isn’t doing it specifically, as everything medical takes place at the Jewish Hospital (38). Lehrer even suggests that Hitler is in some roundabout way the reason she didn’t “end up in an institution”: her existence was a middle finger to him (22). In this way, Lehrer is taking up the role of the golem fighting Hitler—even in the smaller moments, the golem, her Jewishness, is informing every part of her resistance, survival, and life.

Terms: Lehrer also talks about some experiences she had that stood out as very Jewish to me on reread. One was her recollection of Hanukkah (51) and the very interesting moment of superiority she feels when thinking about others celebrating Christmas and only getting one day of gifts. When bad things happen, Riva’s mom is only able to come up with one word: Goyim (65). This comes from when the substitute yells at them to explain why they are all “crippled up.” Goyim of course meaning “non-Jew”—her mom is interestingly not attributing the teacher’s malice to her being able-bodied, but non-Jewish. Lehrer also talks about “making aliyah,” which is a Zionist ideology that Jews should move back to Israel. In 1950, Israel passed The Law of Return giving all diasporan Jews and their families the ability to live there (131). This is especially relevant right now thinking about the tensions between Israel and Palestine, which have an extensive history but are heightened at the moment.

Chapter 24: Face/Off: Let’s read chapter 24 in full together, 140-142. [read chapter] I love this chapter especially, because it both poses her identities—Jewish and disabled—as competing but then complementary. She wants surgery, here, for the first time; she gets it, and in a cruel twist of fate, her body doesn’t mold to the standards that she had hoped for. The body and the mind, in a sense, needed to merge for Lehrer to feel comfortable in herself. Instead, the two identities end in a heated battle, though Lehrer seems to learn the lesson anyway. I’m curious, before moving on, if anyone has any thoughts about the way Lehrer’s identities are “merging” or “battling” here.

3. Jewish Culture and Lehrer’s Other Words

Jewish Culture: Ask: How much does your heritage, your family history, your traditions, shape the way you handle the difficulties of life?

Outside of Lehrer’s disability, she noted the intersection between her queer identity and her Jewish identity. Telling her brother, for example, was a challenge because of his Orthodoxy (217). While I didn’t really focus on this aspect of her identity, I did want to bring it up before hearing final thoughts from Lehrer herself.

JWA: I'm curious about the ways in which you feel like your Jewishness has intersected with the other parts of your identity.

RL: As I say in the book, I never was sent to cheder [a school for Jewish children that teaches Hebrew and religious knowledge]. I never was bat mitzvahed. Because again, Judaism is about making more Jews, especially post-Holocaust Jews. They're supposed to make as many Jews as they can. And it was assumed I never would. It was just assumed, you know, I would never be partnered, so where would I be having kids?

And so it was—I guess tacitly in front of me, probably explicitly between the adults—that there was no reason to give me a Jewish education. What was I going to do with it? For me, that meant watching all my friends in the neighborhood and my brothers and my cousins…All the kids were in cheder, and you know, they'd come back and make jokes about it and complain about it. And then, one by one, I'd go to this bat mitzvah, that bar mitzvah and I wouldn't know what the hell was going on. I couldn't read Hebrew. I'm standing there with everybody in my family while they're reading from the siddur. And, you know, it felt terrible.

Habonim [a Zionist youth movement] is where I had my Jewish identity, and I thought I was going to make Aliyah. I did start to try and teach myself Hebrew. I got into Bezalel [a prestigious art school in Jerusalem] and my parents forbade me to go. So, you know, I just have continually felt like my religion doesn't really have a use for me.

JWA: How has that evolved in your adult life?

RL: I've belonged to various synagogues and study groups. I feel very culturally Jewish. I mean, like my sense of humor, a lot of the people I read, the actors I love. Our culture has fed me tremendously and I am intensely fond of and connected to it. And I do think I’m a Jewish writer.

So what do we think? How much does Jewishness impact Lehrer? She says in some ways not many, but we can see that’s all over the pages of this memoir.

So I ask you, how much would you say your heritage, religious beliefs, family history, community, culture impact the way you live? I think we know it’s a lot, but it’s hard to put into words just how until we look back like this. So, does anyone want to take a stab—is there a clear balance, or is it messier? Can you tease out one identity’s impact, can you distinguish their roots?