There are moments in life when we stumble across the thing we most needed in order to feel right in our own skin. It's usually by accident and a gen There are moments in life when we stumble across the thing we most needed in order to feel right in our own skin. It's usually by accident and a gentle reminder of the fact that we are not the first or the last to go through whatever we are going through.
The Golem and the Jinni by Helene Wecker is quite possibly the most fitting and inspiring book I have read in a very long time. It could also be that it felt as though it were a more magically based reflection of what I've felt in the last three years of living far beyond my own natural home environment.
Within the pages of this elaborate, fanciful, and at times tragic book exists the simple revelation that anyone who is a transplant from one place to another will fear excommunication, reproach, and misunderstandings. I feel that constantly. I have never tiptoed around people or things as much as I have managed to tiptoe around the people of Canada. Even the ones I like and enjoy being around, stir this awkwardness within me and bring it to the surface. I am similar to them, I live among them, but I am not and never will be anything truly like them. In little ways, ways that they don't even realize, they show me this. It's as simple as telling someone "You'll have to adapt." with the impression that adaptation happens at the snap of a finger. It's also the impressions they have of ones culture, which to them is so foreign, but so long as they've read an article or two, or as is the case with this book - traditions and stories passed through superstitious cultural fears, which lead them to believe that they somehow know more about our cultures than we ourselves do. It's the presumption that as long as we remain in their environment they must keep one eye on us at all times or dictate our moves as we wade through -their- waters, all the while reminding us that they do this for our own well-being. For what does it matter to lose our identities, our sense of self, so long as the trade off is safety, security, and blending in?
The Golem and the Jinni goes beyond all of this, though. I've always hated when in school, we were told to interpret an authors' intentions when they wrote a certain passage. I will assume that everything I've just mentioned was a reflection of my feelings and my own sense of lostness, placed eagerly on the heavy pages within the wrappings of words. Now I speak of the soul within the book. It's rough and tumble, immigrant mentality, new world, end of the 19th century American dream, stuck to New York like a tack on a map. There is no doubt at all that the streets of Little Syria and the surrounding neighborhoods of New York are all parts of the silent yet deafening city that lives and breathes. It is a character in this story as well and integral as any other. Each encounter of the city is a heartbeat, a finger tap, a restless foot rhythm. That is not an interpretation. That is what has been set deliberately, ink to page. I found it enthralling. The Golems self-doubt, hunger to fix everyones problems partly for herself and partly out of desire to help others, and the trepidation of being discovered were familiar and surprisingly accurate as to what one fears as an immigrant in general. It becomes an obsession, at times, to not miss a step, to remember to blink accordingly, to always accomodate. That is, until that same desire to accommodate becomes an unhinged scream in your head that won't let you sleep and tears at your fragile confidence. The Jinni on the other hand is a rebellious and resentful transplant. Someone unwilling to give in to the new environment and adapt, he flippantly strides into reckless situations and just as flippantly strides out, never considering who would clean the mess he leaves in his wake. These two main characters are two sides of the same coin. One is too harsh on herself and the other is not enough. If it weren't for the supporting characters with their own threads in the tapestry, the other two would unravel and the story would have been another potentially beautiful mess of a masterpiece that never got a chance to shine.
Luckily these supporting threads wove their stories so carefully within the lives of the two main ones, that there was no choice but to accept that this tapestry was woven expertly by hands that were always meant to do this. Helene Wecker is not an ordinary storyteller. She didn't write a quick sell. She could have. She could have made the story of ketchup seem fascinating. Her words alone, jumbled on a piece of scrap paper, would have been a fun and quirky read. But there'd be no point to that. She probably doesn't even know that what she has done goes beyond words. Helenes novel is not just a story, but a lifeline. In it's magic we can detach ourselves from our own failings, heartaches, homesicknesses, and worries. On the other hand, in its realistic roots we can identify and share these same worries and failings with her characters. They become our confidants as much as we are theirs.
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