By some incalculable force of human attraction, Alan Krieger has two lovers. A man of his girth and compulsion, a man who cannot stop talking and who believes the world to be completely irrational, should not take one companion for granted, much less two. Women who can tolerate his anger, his obsessions, and his antic clowning all at the same time are not easy to come by. But when the thought arises in Alan that he's been chosen" to deliver Jewish America from the threat of Anti-Semitism, then all his connections to reality fall away, including those to his lovers and his family. Recalling the folktale of the Golem, the Frankensteinian giant of clay that saved the Jews in 16th Century Prague, Alan lays out a plan of attack and then sets to making the most outrageous of preparations in the culture wars, in New York City at the turn of the millennium. Like each of the acclaimed Estrin novels that have preceded it, Golem Song is an allusive, manic, and wildly comic approach to some of the most serious and difficult cultural questions of our time.
"The resolution of the story and this tragic golem figure will stay with the reader long after the final page is turned."
Jewish Book World
"Estrin is fascinated by a[n] urgent problem: how easily ethnicity, and even the identification with an ethnic history, can tip into intolerance and violenceIts dramatization of just how easily confidence that one has been chosen by God can drive one into ethically dubious aggression should be familiar to anyone paying attention to American proponents of the Iraq War. The problem of false messiahs
