He visits Yehudah Schaalman, a shady expert in the dark art of kabbalah, and asks him to construct a golem, a creature made of clay, that can serve as his wife before he leaves for America. The novel starts off in Singer territory, a shtetl in Poland where Otto Rotfeld, “an arrogant, feckless sort of man, with no good sense to speak of,” decides that the only way he will get a wife is to make one. And this impressive first novel manages to combine the narrative magic of “The Arabian Nights” with the kind of emotional depth, philosophical seriousness and good, old-fashioned storytelling found in the stories of Isaac Bashevis Singer. Wecker gives these now nearly universal feelings a particular flavor. Drawing on her own Jewish upbringing and her husband’s Arab-American culture, Ms. The senses of permanent loss and dislocation that at times overwhelm the Golem and the Jinni are an inevitable part of the immigrant experience. Despite a handful of unusual powers, these two mythic creatures are still strangers in a strange land, caught between the folk traditions from which they spring and the modern world. The title characters of Helene Wecker’s inventive novel, “The Golem and the Jinni,” are only slightly more bewildered than the thousands of other immigrants who end up in the teeming tenements of New York in 1899.
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