Prologue The Latin roots of "monster" are monere , meaning "to warn," and monstrum , an omen, or a supernatural being that indicates the will of a god. "Monster" shares its etymological root with "premonition" and "demonstrate." My first monster story was Frankenstein . Though this first Creature was more James Whale than Mary Shelley. When we were little, my brothers and I would abandon the great outdoors and race inside in time for the Saturday monster movie matinee. Two hours of ecstatic dread. Of delicious nightmares in chiaroscuro black-and-white. Every few weeks, it would be his turn. I waited for his graceless body, his halting gait and cinder-block shoes. I could recognize the operating room where he was born. I knew he was real, because we were the same--everything that made him a monster made me one, too. We had more in common than scars and shoes. Frankenstein is the story of a disabled child and its parent. It is also the story of a Golem. Humans have told stories of magically animated creatures for thousands of years. Ancient religions from Babylonia and Sumer, to Mexico, Africa, and China, all assert that gods formed the first human beings out of clay. Enki and Prometheus are but two creators who formed a being and gave it life. These days, we have Victor Frankenstein and his Creature, but long before them, the Jews had Rabbi Judah Loew ben Bezalel and his Golem. Golem ( goylem in Yiddish) is Hebrew for "shapeless mass" and first appears in Psalm 139 of the Hebrew Bible, in which Adam is referred to as a golmi . Adam is brought to life by the breath--the word--of God, transformed from inert matter into vibrant life: the first Golem. The difference is that Adam becomes fully human, while Golems of legend never do. Iterations of this legend date from as far back as the eleventh century, but the most famous version dates from sixteenth-century Prague. The Golem of Prague tells the story of Rabbi Judah Loew ben Bezalel (an actual historical figure, known as the Maharal) and his creation of a living being made of clay. Golems wend through our stories, from Pygmalion's statue to the Bride of Frankenstein to Mr. Data and Seven of Nine; from the Cylons to C-3PO, R2-D2, and Chucky the doll. And, of course, to Gollum himself. While these are not all Golems, exactly, every creature is made of inanimate material that is shaped and awakened by the will of a master (and nearly every story is of a master--not a mater--a male who attempts to attain the generative power of the female body). Golems are built in order to serve a specific purpose. Adam, it is said, was built for the glory of God. The Golem of Prague was built to save the Jews from a pogrom. Frankenstein's monster was built for the glory of his maker, and for the glory of science itself. These Golems were not created for their own sake. None given purposes of their own, or futures under their control. Golems are permitted to exist only if they conform to the wishes of their masters. When a Golem determines its own purpose--let's call it hubris--it is almost always destroyed. The Golem must stay unconscious of its own existence in order to remain a receptacle of divine will. Yet every tale tells us: it is in the nature of a Golem to wake up. To search for the path from being an It to an I. In Golem stories, the monster is often disabled. Speechless and somnambulistic, a marionette acting on dreams and animal instinct. In Yiddish, one meaning of goylem is "lummox"; to quote the scholar Michael Chemers, from God's perspective, all humans are disabled. The day I was born I was a mass, a body with irregular borders. The shape of my body was pared away according to normal outlines, but this normalcy didn't last very long. My body insisted on aberrance. I was denied the autonomy that is the birthright of normality. Doctors foretold that I would be a "vegetable," a thing without volition or self-awareness. Children like me were saved without purpose, at least not any purpose we could call our own. I am a Golem. My body was built by human hands. And yet-- If I once was monere , I'm turning myself into monstrare : one who unveils. Excerpted from Golem Girl: A Memoir by Riva Lehrer All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.
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Painter Lehrer applies the same unflinching gaze for which her portraits are known to a lifetime with spina bifida in this trenchant debut memoir of disability and queer culture. Born in 1958, Lehrer was among the first to benefit from a surgical breakthrough that enabled doctors to save the lives of newborns with her condition. In the book's first half, Lehrer recounts finding uninhibited joy with other disabled children at Cincinnati's Condon School, as well as some unnecessary and ultimately harmful medical procedures she endured. At 21 and living in Chicago, she discovered an exuberant sexuality--one she believed wasn't possible for her--and grappled with feeling marginalized due to her queerness. The book's second half, however, loses some of the intimacy as Lehrer adopts a more didactic tone to describe a succession of relationships and document the rise of her career as an artist and the way her work explores the intersections of gender, sexuality, and disability (she includes photos and her own illustrations throughout). Lehrer notes that "international debates (such as those in Belgium and the Netherlands) persist over whether to treat infants like me at all," and observes that "disability is the great billboard of human truth.... Add it to any discourse, and we can see what humanity truly values." Readers will be sucked into Lehrer's powerful memoir. (Oct.) |
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In the Jewish tradition, a golem is a clay figure brought mystically to life, as when Rabbi Judah Loew ben Bezalel's golem defended the Jewish population against anti-Semitic attacks in sixteenth-century Prague. As a girl, artist, writer, and disability activist Lehrer, born with spina bifida (an incomplete closing of the spine), imagined herself as following in a long line of golem-like figures, from the Bride of Frankenstein to Gollum of Tolkien fame. Lehrer describes at length her countless surgeries, ongoing struggles with the condition, and the toll it takes on both her physical and emotional life. She also writes about her complicated relationship with her mother, who had her own serious health issues which Lehrer had to contend with when she was still a "half-formed" youth. For Lehrer, the typical rites of passage into adulthood were inevitably fraught with tension and anxiety, including navigating relationships with both men and women. When attending what was then the Randall J. Condon School for Crippled Children in Cincinnati, she felt accepted; but once she left its safe confines, she was considered a freak. It is a topic she returns to often in this sometimes disturbing but often darkly humorous memoir illustrated with Lehrer's artwork, a chronicle of a free spirit who finds solace and purpose in creating art that represents the socially challenged body. |
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An artist born with spina bifida shares her story and her paintings with grace and humor. "What's wrong with her?" As a child, writes Lehrer, when a stranger would callously ask that question, "to my dismay, Mom would provide all they'd need to win the vacation package and the new Cadillac. She laid out the details of spina bifida, its causes and effects, as if deputizing a city-wide cadre in case I had to be rushed to an emergency room. For me, this kind of visibility was like being scraped along the sidewalk." Lehrer, whose paintings of what she calls "socially challenged bod[ies]" hang in the National Portrait Gallery of the Smithsonian and many other museums, narrates her difficult childhood with an eloquence and freedom from self-pity that are every bit as powerful as those of Lucy Grealy in her Autobiography of a Face (1994). Remarkably, Lehrer, now 62, found a way to survive endless surgeries (many of them completely bungled) and irremediable pain to create a successful life--one that readers will relish learning about. Her evolving self-awareness as an artist, a disabled person, and a woman with a complicated sexuality are well-explored, and her prose ranges from light and entertaining to intellectually and emotionally serious--and always memorable. In explaining a period when she took up painting beds, she writes, "Beds are crossroads, where impairment and sexuality intersect, the mattress a palimpsest of ecstasy and hurt." The memoir is illustrated with photographs of family and friends and color images of Lehrer's paintings. In an appendix--a bonus book within the book--she goes back to each of the portraits and shares anecdotes about her process and her interaction with the subject, often including that person's own account. In one of her series, The Risk Pictures, Lehrer leaves the subject alone with the canvas for an hour and instructs them to alter it however they want. An extraordinary memoir suffused with generosity, consistent insight, and striking artwork. Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission. |