In the early 20th century, another twist was added to the legend of the Golem that would also be applied to future depictions of Frankenstein’s monster. Well-known scholar and forger, Rabbi Yudl Rosenberg, published his Book of Wonders of the Maharal with the Golem in 1909, claiming it was written in the early 17th century. In it, he depicted Rabbi Loew creating the Golem to protect the Jews of Prague from mob violence spurred by rumors they were murdering Christian children and using their blood in religious rituals. At first, the Golem protects the Jews, but eventually it goes on a murderous rampage and must be destroyed by its creator. The Golem becoming the enemy of those it was created to protect is a twist that’s become part of the legend of both the Golem and Frankenstein’s monster, receiving its fullest expression in the 1931 film Frankenstein, when the monster accidentally drowns a little girl.

Russian refugee Leivick Halpern retold this blended story in his 1921 “dramatic poem in eight scenes”, Der Goylem, written in Yiddish. A dense, deeply symbolic story, it was also a hot mess that, if performed as written, would run for four hours. But stageable versions were soon cobbled together and it became a standard of the Yiddish theater repertory. So standard that a version was performed at St. Mark’s Playhouse in New York City’s East Village in the late Sixties where it was seen by a young Jewish woman who worked the box office at the nearby 4th Street Theater. Her name was Bari Wood and she’d been born in Chicago but moved to New York City after graduating from Northwestern.

A big fan of science fiction (although she found Ray Bradbury “a bit literary for me”), she re-covered the seats of the 4th Street Theater (“They had gotten pretty icky”), sold tickets, was given a pair of shoes by Eva Gabor to replace her worn-out ones, got a boyfriend, and eventually landed a job as a librarian at the American Cancer Society on the Upper West Side. Eventually, she became the assistant editor of the Society’s in-house magazine.

After nine years at the American Cancer Society she became co-editor of a throwaway magazine for physicians called Drug Therapy where she found herself remembering Frank M. Robinson, a graduate student she’d known at Northwestern who’d sold his first novel, The Power, back in 1956.

“He was just over the moon about it,” Wood recalls. “And it struck me that people actually get published. Just people. You didn’t have to be Virginia Woolf.”

With that, Wood began writing her first novel, The Killing Gift. Every day after work she came home to her aparment in the Mayfair on West 72nd Street, made dinner, washed the dishes, then sat down and wrote freehand until she hit her goal of three pages per day.