“It never gelled as far as I was concerned,” she says. “It never took off on its own. I knew it was a good story, but the story was better than my rendering of it.”

She’s wrong.

Released in hardcover by NAL in 1981 and in paperback by Signet in November of that same year, with cover art by Don Brautigam, The Tribe bounced around the New York Times paperback bestseller list for a couple of months and did okay, but its legacy isn’t its sales. Its legacy is that it is one of the most important works of Jewish horror ever written.

The Tribe had been preceeded in July 1981 by F. Paul Wilson’s kind-of, sort-of Jewish horror novel, The Keep, and in 1989 there would be the Israelis versus Soviet demons book, Red Devil, by David Saperstein, followed by Henry W. Hocherman’s The Gilgul in 1990. But The Tribe stands alone as a retelling of the legend of the Golem of Prague that asks the unanswerable question: how can Jews live after the Holocaust? Is it possible for them to ever feel safe again?

Only a Jewish horror novel can ask what would happen if the Golem of Prague came back to life today, now that the Holocaust has ended and the enemies of Judaism are more subtle. What happens if the Golem comes back to protect the chosen people, but the chosen people are confused about who the real enemy is? What if they disagree?

It’s also a love letter to the city Wood left behind, a tender, touching, hardcased, hopeful book about New York, about real estate prices, about moving to the suburbs, about survival, about belonging, about being alone in a crowd. Like New York, it teems with characters—from wisecracking cabalists to Jewish gangsters, to a conservative Jewish woman who falls in love with an African-­American man tired of being patronized because of his skin, to a Polish émigré who doesn’t understand how the war could be over but he still doesn’t feel safe. There’s a not-so-heroic rabbi who talks a big game until the crunch comes. A concentration camp survivor who killed traitors with his bare hands and has aged into a white-haired, pink-cheeked grandfather. A doctor’s wife with a taste for vodka and her 17-year-old son who loves babies.

Wood would go on to write plenty of other books, but to me this is her masterpiece. The Golem of Prague was built for noble purposes but it kills and kills to protect its tribe, even after it runs out of enemies. Wood relocates that story to New York, with its teeming tribes living shoulder to shoulder, and takes it one step further, asking: who are the people who will tell the Golem that the war is over? Who will tell the weapon that it’s won?