Thane Rosenbaum

The Golems of Gotham is about Oliver Levin, a mystery writer suffering from writer's block and his daughter, Ariel, an apparent musical prodigy of the klezmer violin although she has never played a day in her life. In an effort to help her father's block and to rescue him emotionally from his past baggage, Ariel uses Kabbalah magic to create golems. However, things go awry and instead she conjures the spirits of Jewish writers including Primo Levi, Jean Amery, Paul Celan, Piotr Rawicz, Jerzy show more Kosinski, and Tadeusz Borowski and also Oliver's parents, Lothar and Rose. The Golems are united by the fact that they all committed suicide after surviving the Holocaust.

Boy, was this book depressing! It took me forever to get through because of it. Every page I turned, I felt weighed down. When happiness did occur, it felt like a Pyrrhic Victory, it came at such a cost that I wonder was it worth it at the end? Thane Rosenbaum writes beautifully. I wanted to get lost in his prose.

He also expanded the scope because it was not all about the tragic history of the Levins; it discussed the Holocaust seriously even condemning Life is Beautiful as inappropriate. Rosenbaum showed how the Holocaust was the worst inhuman atrocity that can never be forgotten. It seeps into the blood and bones of all who were present. The Golems of Gotham is about humanity's need to forget and desensitizing of tragic events; of putting the past behind and trudging forward.

The only problem is that by ignoring the past, the present numbs causing the future to stifle. Rosenbaum argues the past, no matter how awful, has to be embraced but not all at once and not universally because that would be too much. I liked The Golems of Gotham but I felt it got a little too preachy at the end. This book cannot be dark and fantastical for 97% of it and try to throw genuine therapeutic happiness as its last 3%. Continue to ride that dark wave; drag me kicking and screaming into the shadows with no regrets! show less

The Golems of Gotham is about Oliver Levin, a mystery writer suffering from writer's block and his daughter, Ariel, an apparent musical prodigy of the klezmer violin although she has never played a day in her life. In an effort to help her father's block and to rescue him emotionally from his past baggage, Ariel uses Kabbalah magic to create golems. However, things go awry and instead she conjures the spirits of Jewish writers including Primo Levi, Jean Amery, Paul Celan, Piotr Rawicz, Jerzy show more Kosinski, and Tadeusz Borowski and also Oliver's parents, Lothar and Rose. The Golems are united by the fact that they all committed suicide after surviving the Holocaust.

Boy, was this book depressing! It took me forever to get through because of it. Every page I turned, I felt weighed down. When happiness did occur, it felt like a Pyrrhic Victory, it came at such a cost that I wonder was it worth it at the end? Thane Rosenbaum writes beautifully. I wanted to get lost in his prose.

He also expanded the scope because it was not all about the tragic history of the Levins; it discussed the Holocaust seriously even condemning Life is Beautiful as inappropriate. Rosenbaum showed how the Holocaust was the worst inhuman atrocity that can never be forgotten. It seeps into the blood and bones of all who were present. The Golems of Gotham is about humanity's need to forget and desensitizing of tragic events; of putting the past behind and trudging forward.

The only problem is that by ignoring the past, the present numbs causing the future to stifle. Rosenbaum argues the past, no matter how awful, has to be embraced but not all at once and not universally because that would be too much. I liked The Golems of Gotham but I felt it got a little too preachy at the end. This book cannot be dark and fantastical for 97% of it and try to throw genuine therapeutic happiness as its last 3%. Continue to ride that dark wave; drag me kicking and screaming into the shadows with no regrets! show less

The Golems of Gotham is about Oliver Levin, a mystery writer suffering from writer's block and his daughter, Ariel, an apparent musical prodigy of the klezmer violin although she has never played a day in her life. In an effort to help her father's block and to rescue him emotionally from his past baggage, Ariel uses Kabbalah magic to create golems. However, things go awry and instead she conjures the spirits of Jewish writers including Primo Levi, Jean Amery, Paul Celan, Piotr Rawicz, Jerzy show more Kosinski, and Tadeusz Borowski and also Oliver's parents, Lothar and Rose. The Golems are united by the fact that they all committed suicide after surviving the Holocaust.

Boy, was this book depressing! It took me forever to get through because of it. Every page I turned, I felt weighed down. When happiness did occur, it felt like a Pyrrhic Victory, it came at such a cost that I wonder was it worth it at the end? Thane Rosenbaum writes beautifully. I wanted to get lost in his prose.

He also expanded the scope because it was not all about the tragic history of the Levins; it discussed the Holocaust seriously even condemning Life is Beautiful as inappropriate. Rosenbaum showed how the Holocaust was the worst inhuman atrocity that can never be forgotten. It seeps into the blood and bones of all who were present. The Golems of Gotham is about humanity's need to forget and desensitizing of tragic events; of putting the past behind and trudging forward.

The only problem is that by ignoring the past, the present numbs causing the future to stifle. Rosenbaum argues the past, no matter how awful, has to be embraced but not all at once and not universally because that would be too much. I liked The Golems of Gotham but I felt it got a little too preachy at the end. This book cannot be dark and fantastical for 97% of it and try to throw genuine therapeutic happiness as its last 3%. Continue to ride that dark wave; drag me kicking and screaming into the shadows with no regrets! show less

A story of the impact of the Holocaust on the lives of the next generation - the children of survivors. Duncan Katz is born of Auschwitz survivors who fled to America but continued to live the trauma of their harrowing experience in their daily lives, passing on the burden of their tortured psyches to the next generation. The mother, Mila, is the driving character --- shrewd, tough, ruthless, her main obsession is to exact vengeance for the past by rearing the new "hero" who will destroy show more steorotype of weak, timid Jews. Duncan was never a child in the normal sense -- his mother drove him to excel in everything, imposing a strict military discipline and a rigid schedule with no room for fun, play, or friends. The world is a jungle to be survived, everybody is an enemy. Outwardly, he becomes the "perfect" man, but he is destroyed, hollow inside. He has turned out to be a robot, incapable of feelings other than revenge, hate, a bully, unable to sustain any relationship, including even with his mother. He becomes a federal prosecutor and a top Nazi-hunter. He breaks from his family, starts his own, discovers some secrets, travels to Poland and attempts an interpretation of justice Duncan-style, and so on...

The novel is well-intentioned, it draws us to the battle inside individuals who grew up in such families who have to live with their demons the rest of their lives, and to carry this burden. But the novel reads too much like the script of a commercial movie --- it sensationalizes everything so that it becomes an odd mix of suspense, crime thriller (Mila is a card shark and a gangster, a leader even of the Jewish Mafia), melodrama (Mila with cancer, reunion with a "secret" brother), and other stuff too "fantastical." I regret reading something on such a dreadful and serious subject, written in a way which "cheapens" it. Perhaps this appeals to those who like hollywood hero type movies with a bit of "historical" element thrown into it (this was highly starred in Amazon, but i should have known better). show less