Cover

THE TRIBE

BARI WOOD

With a new introduction by

GRADY HENDRIX

VALANCOURT BOOKS

Introduction by Grady Hendrix

INTRODUCTION

Besides Steven Spielberg, the Golem is Judaism’s most famous contribution to show business. Formed from clay, usually silent, oversized, and superstrong, with the Hebrew word emeth (truth) engraved on its forehead,* it’s been a Pokemon (card #076), the subject of numerous movies (The Golem and the Dancing Girl, 1917; Der Golem, 1920; Le Golem, 1936; The Emperor and the Golem, 1951; It!, 1967), the focus of a 1974 CBS Radio Mystery Theater episode set in Central Europe during World War II, and even the star of the Simpsons “Treehouse of Horror XVII” segment, “You’ve Gotta Know When to Golem”. On the literary side, it featured in Michael Chabon’s The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay, appeared as a superhero in DC Comics’ 1991 Ragman miniseries, and in three of Terry Pratchett’s Discworld novels.

Golems are only mentioned once in the Bible as an “unformed body” (Psalms 139:16), the Talmud refers to Adam as a Golem before life is breathed into him, and there are references to Golem in the Sefer Yetzirah, an ancient book of Jewish mysticism. There’s also a vaguely anti-Semitic sketch of a Golem published by Jacob Grimm (of Brothers Grimm fame) in 1808, and an extremely anti-Semitic gold-digging, penny pinching lady Golem created to be a sexual surrogate in Ludwig Achim von Arnim’s gothic novel, Isabella of Egypt (1812). But the Golem we know and love originated in the early 19th century, about eighteen years after Mary Shelley’s similar-­but-different monster debuted in Frankenstein (1818).

Our Golem is the Golem of Prague, who first appeared in print sometime between 1836 and 1847, a clay humanoid animated by an all-star mystic, Rabbi Loew (d. 1609), who placed a piece of parchment containing a magic formula in its mouth. Created to perform menial tasks, the Golem rested every Sabbath in accordance with Holy Law when the Rabbi removed the parchment from its mouth. But one Sabbath he forgot and the Golem ran amuck until the parchment was removed and the Golem collapsed into a pile of dust.

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.

One of her friends passed it along to an editor at Dell who invited Wood to his office where he proceeded to, as Wood recalls, “ream me up one side and down the other, telling me in every way my book was lousy and I was a fool. I was heartbroken.” Baffled, Wood went home, made some minor cuts, and eventually an acquaintance at the Cancer Society recommended her to Mary Yost’s literary agency. They agreed to represent her and, after going out to five or six publishers, The Killing Gift landed at Putnam where Ned Leavitt bought it for $2500. He rolled up his sleeves and worked the manuscript hard with Wood and when it came out in hardcover in 1975 it surpassed Putnam’s expectations, staying on Newsday’s bestseller list for weeks and selling its paperback rights to Signet for $300,000.

Wood needed a second novel and she’d been discussing the 1975 deaths of the Marcus brothers with her colleague at Drug Therapy, Jack Geasland. The Marcus brothers were twin gynecologists who’d been found dead of drug overdoses in their shared apartment after a history of bizarre behavior at New York Hospital (including one of them tearing the anesthetic mask off a patient’s face during surgery and using it on himself). Wood pitched the novel to Putnam and they paid her and Geasland a $40,000 advance.

Twins (1977) did okay business in hardcover but cleaned up in paperback, spending ten weeks on the bestseller list, and was adapted into Dead Ringers (1988) by David Cronenberg.

“They had to buy it for the idea, that was the only reason,” Wood recalls. “I don’t think Cronenberg had much interest or respect for the book, but I met him and he was the sweetest man you’d ever want to meet.”

For her next novel, Wood remembered the production of The Golem she’d seen at St. Mark’s Playhouse, but her biggest influence turned out to be the New York State tax law. Recent changes in the tax code meant that writers were suddenly considered unincorporated businesses and Wood, who had made a large amount of money in a short period of time, found herself paying state and city income tax, then state and city corporate tax, then Federal income tax on top of that.

“I was so sorry I had to move to Connecticut,” she says. “There were no streetlights, no people, and while I lived there for many years, I can’t say I ever really liked it.”

Even worse, “When I left New York, a lot of the impetus was just gone. You could take a walk at lunch hour in New York and see so much stuff, and in Connecticut you took a walk at lunch and saw squirrels, and leaves, and chipmunks, and who cares? It hurt my writing.”

Wood finished The Tribe after settling in Connecticut, but she’s not a fan of the book.

“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?

After being deactivated by its creator, the Golem of Prague was stored in an attic, waiting to be rediscovered by future generations when needed. The Tribe, too, has been forgotten for decades, slumbering in the dark, waiting for its own rediscovery. Like the Rabbi’s Golem, Bari Wood’s creation now comes lurching forth out of the darkness once more, inspiring wonder, and terror, and awe.

Grady Hendrix

Grady Hendrix is a novelist and screenwriter whose books include Horrorstör, My Best Friend’s Exorcism, and We Sold Our Souls. His history of the paperback horror boom of the Seventies and Eighties, Paperbacks from Hell, won the Stoker Award. You can stalk him at www.gradyhendrix.com.

* The Hebrew letters aleph, mem, tav are engraved on the Golem’s head, which means emet or “truth.” Remove aleph and you’re left with met, which means “death.”

Dedication

I want to thank four people:

Geraldine Hawkins who died in 1977,

Samy Gay of the Brooklyn Police Department,

Ned Leavitt, and Louis Sica.

I couldn’t have written this book without their help.

Epigraph

Black Striga

black on black

who eats black blood

and drinks it

like an ox she bellows

like a bear she growls

like a wolf she crushes.

—Charm against Lilith

(14th Century)

Prologue

Prologue

“Why are you here?” Abrams asked.

“General Pearce ordered me to see you, I’m seeing you,” Bianco said. He peeled tinfoil off the insides of a cigarette pack.

“Major, Major,” Abrams scolded softly, “I meant why are you in Nuremberg?”

“Because I’m in the Army,” Bianco said. He concentrated on rolling the tinfoil into a ball.

“You can be in the Army at Bragg, Jeffersonville, Tacoma . . . why Nuremberg?”

He turned in his chair and looked out of the open window. The breeze that came in was hot and full of stone dust from the rubble that still covered the city. A mansion had stood on the lot next door; wrought-iron gates showed through dust and broken columns.

“You were supposed to go home in January, Lou,” Abrams said. “It’s July. That’s seven months in this hole that you didn’t have to spend.”

Bianco rolled that last of the tinfoil and held up the ball.

“For the war effort,” he said.

“The war’s over,” Abrams said.

“So it is.” Bianco pitched the ball into the waste­basket.

“Then why are you still here?”

“Pearce told you, didn’t he?”

“Pearce says you’re waiting for them to capture Johann Speiser,” Abrams said.

“With his permission,” Bianco said.

“He thought you meant a couple of weeks, not seven months.”

Bianco didn’t say anything.

“What did you do here for seven months?” Abrams asked.

Bianco shrugged. “Memorized Gone with the Wind, screwed whores, went to the movies.”

“And to the trials?”

“At first,” Bianco said.

Abrams leaned across the desk. “How’d you feel?”

It wasn’t a trick question, Bianco realized, Abrams really wanted to know.

“I felt sorry for them,” Bianco said.

“Me too,” Abrams said softly. “They were just shaky men whose clothes didn’t fit . . .” He trailed off, and lit a cigarette. After a moment he said, “You opened Belzec, didn’t you?”

“It’s in the file, Doctor.”

Shouts came through the open window; they heard glass breaking somewhere.

Abrams said, “Speiser was commandant of Belzec, right?” No answer from Bianco. “That’s why you’re waiting for him, isn’t it, Major. For what he did at Belzec.” His voice got very gentle. “Look, Lou,” he said, “if we capture Speiser, we’ll hang him. If no one gets him, he spends the rest of his life rotting in a Brazilian jungle. What can you do to him that’ll be worse than that?”

“I don’t want to do anything to him. I want to ask him a question.”

“You waited seven months to ask a question?”

“I guess I did,” Bianco said.

“What question?”

Bianco didn’t answer. The office was quiet in the heat; the breeze stopped and the stone dust in the air settled, leaving another layer of powder over everything. Bianco lit a cigarette. The smoke didn’t move and he looked at Abrams through it.

“What question?” Abrams asked again.

“You’re a psychiatrist, right?”

Abrams nodded.

“So Pearce can’t order you to tell him what I say.”

“He can, but I don’t have to obey.”

“Will you?” Bianco asked.

“Not if you don’t want me to.”

Bianco sat back. “I don’t.”

Then he said, “Okay, I’ll tell you. I want to tell someone. But it’s not what you think. It’s not because of the lime pits and ovens. As bad as that was, we were used to it by the time we got to Belzec. No, not used . . . I’m still not used to it. But that’s not why I’m here. It’s something else. A feeling I got there . . .”

“I’m supposed to be able to deal with feelings,” Abrams said.

“Sure, sure.” Bianco paused, then said, “I don’t know how to start . . .”

Abrams leaned over and opened a metal cabinet next to his big carved-oak desk and took out a bottle of whisky and two paper cups.

“A little schnapps’ll make talking easier,” he said, and he poured two stiff shots and gave one to Bianco. Bianco sipped. It was good stuff and went down smoothly—the spoils of war, he thought. He took another sip, then drank it down at once and waited for it to settle the shaky feeling he had most of the time. The wind came up again, riffled papers on Abrams’s desk, then died, and everything was quiet.

“We got to Belzec in April,” Bianco said quietly. “April ninth, just as the snow was melting.” He held out the cup, and Abrams refilled it. “The weather was crazy then. It would rain, then the sun would come out, then it would rain again. Little squalls like that all day long. It was warm for April, but there was still a crust of ice on the ground, and our boots broke it and sank in the mud, so we had to go slowly, staggering from barracks to barracks, following the food trucks and medics. There was an English squad with us and their major was an aristocrat of some kind. Named Reynolds. One of those thin-nosed Englishmen who looks like everything smells bad. Only there it did. Awful. And Reynolds had this silver flask with him and he’d take a sip, then hand it to me, and when we finished it, he’d send his sergeant back to the truck to fill it up again. I can see that flask clearer than I can see Reynolds’s face. It was silver, and it had vines and flowers carved on it; and the guy’s initials, and some kind of crest . . .” Bianco stopped, then smiled. The skin around his narrow light brown eyes was dark, and he was too thin, but the smile was attractive and made him look younger. “I’m not here to describe English heirloom silver, am I?” he said.

“No,” Abrams said gently.

“The point is, I looked at the flask so I wouldn’t look at what was all around us. We drank, and checked lists to keep from looking at it. Ah, the lists . . .” Bianco finished his third whisky, and Abrams poured another.

“The Krauts kept lists of everything. Who the prisoners were, where they came from, when they died. Lists of kapos, and the Jews who wouldn’t be kapos. Lists of the supplies that came in and of the stuff that went out. . . . That was some list, that was.” He leaned forward, holding his cup. “Clothes, money, jewels, gold by the ounce, from their teeth, Captain. But you know that. They cut the women’s hair, weighed it, put it on a list, and sent it home to stuff mattresses . . .”

Bianco’s voice had gotten shaky, and he stopped. Abrams was quiet, and after a moment, Bianco went on.

“By noon, we’d checked the dead and dying in Barracks 552, and went on to 554 . . . pretty drunk by then. Staggering in the mud with the wind blowing rain off the pine needles. I remember I had to keep wiping my glasses. We stopped in front of 554, swigged some more, then pushed open the door. It was pretty dark at first, so I couldn’t see who was there and who wasn’t. Then the sun came out, lit the place up, and two little boys ran to us . . . ran . . . and yelled ‘Welcome, Americans!’ in English. I realized then that the place didn’t smell. I mean it did, but only of mud and wet wood. So I thought they were long dead and gone, except for the kids. Then I saw them. Thirty-­five of them standing next to their bunks in a line, like soldiers at inspection. We all stared at each other for a long time. They had hair, and teeth. Oh, they were thin, but not starving. And pale, but winter pale, not the color of starvation.

“Then one little man left the lineup and came up the aisle. He had dark hair, with a beard, and a little cap on his head. Tears ran down his face and he held out his hand to me, and said, ‘My name is Jacob Levy. Thank you for coming,’ in English. I didn’t want to touch him; the prisoners were covered with lice and there’d been typhus in the camp. But I took his hand. I couldn’t help it—something about the man—and I started to say something, I don’t know what; ‘you’re welcome’ maybe. But all at once I started crying. Then Reynolds shook hands with him, and he cried. Christ, what a scene. They all came toward us then, all in tears, but all smiling; and me and Reynolds and the little guy stood at the door like hostesses at a wedding, and shook hands with those ghostly-­looking men as they went out into the open air. They hugged the little guy, and he was the last one to leave. Just before he did, he looked back at the place, and I watched his face. But it was blank, except for the tears. I couldn’t tell what he was thinking. Then he followed the others outside as one of the transport vans pulled in through the mud.

“I know I was drunk. But even so, I knew it was nuts for thirty-­five men, all from one village . . . they were, you know . . . one village . . . to be alive, and well. So I stayed there to look around. I didn’t expect to find anything but I looked anyway. I walked down the aisle between the bunks with the sun going and coming, and at the back wall, behind the bunks, I found this pile of sealed cartons. I ripped one open, and found the answer.”

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