prague golem

The Prague Golem: Jewish Stories of the Ghetto is a small collection of stories about the Jewish Ghetto in Prague, edited by Harald Salfellner, and illustrated by Hugo Steiner. *

My oldest brought this back for me after traveling there for five days while we were in Italy. Both of my kids went and they loved it. The architecture, the food, the people, and the parks. They had a great time. I’ve heard that Prague is one of the few larger European cities that escaped significant damage during the wars. Based on their photos it seems legit.

This group of short stories tell the history of the Jewish community in Prague which goes back centuries. The story of the community is told though the history of its people, their sometimes rocky relationship with the sovereign, and tales of a few nearly superheroic figures. These stories especially we fun to read. They read like folk tales of Paul Bunyan or John Henry with a little Greek myth thrown in.

The writing is simple and accessible, like some committee had the idea to put these stories together and they hired someone’s nephew to bang them out. OR, this book was originally written in some other language and translated; Czech or something. Yeah, that sounds better, let me check... well, based on the Vitalis (publisher) website, this book is available in many languages and most indicate that it was translated from German, however the English version doesn't include a translator in the credits. Maybe Harald Salfellner is multi-lingual. sounds like he has more than one tongue. nope, not even going to look it up

The golem itself appears in a couple of the stories, and it apparently pretty well known as a taker of care when it comes to business. Seemed a little creepy to me, and maybe not a very wholesome solution to the rabbi's problems, but there you go.


* you can find this book on Amazon, and a bunch of other places, with the author listed as "U Zelezne Lavky" which is the name of a street in Prague as far as I can tell.