A writer of science fiction named Philip José Farmer once devised the amusing or tedious conceit of tracing the lineage of Lord Greystoke, better known as Tarzan of the Apes. Mr. Farmer postulated that an ancestor of the future lord of the jungle was among the passengers of two coaches that were passing Wold Newton, England, in 1795, just as a radioactive meteor fell from outer space into a meadow on the outskirts of the village. The radiation from the space rock, and the genetic mutation it caused, Mr. Farmer posited, affected all the descendants of those passengers, among them the eventual John Clayton, Lord Greystoke—Tarzan. Mr. Farmer then extended his conceit by claiming that not only Tarzan but all the great heroes and villains of popular nineteenth- and twentieth-century literature—the Scarlet Pimpernel, Sherlock Holmes and Professor Moriarty, Doc Savage, Phileas Fogg, Fu Manchu, Sam Spade, James Bond—were descended from the people riding in that pair of coaches, a superhuman lineage of siblings and cousins descended from that common ancestor and that catastrophic event.
When, as a boy of nine or ten, I encountered Mr. Farmer’s hypothesis in his amusing mock biography of Tarzan, it came as no surprise to me at all. My father had already articulated, in considerable detail, a similar startling theory of our own lineage.
Over the years my father has informed me—generally with no warning and without offering any explanation for the information’s having gone unmentioned until that moment—that we Chabons are connected, distantly perhaps but with a kind of telling intimacy, to the following people: the great tragedienne Rachel, the humorist Art Buchwald, the vicious murderer Lepke Buchalter, Rabbi Eliyahu, known as the Gaon or Genius of Vilna, the aforementioned Rabbi Judah ben Bezalel ben Loew, Harry Houdini, the first-class spy and third-rate baseball player Moe Berg, and, most gloriously of all, Napoleon Bonaparte, through his nephew Napoleon III, who—or so my father claims—fathered an illegitimate child, my ancestor, of the above-mentioned French actress, Rachel.
I won’t bother with the question of whether my father is telling the truth, or believes he is telling the truth, when he says such things. Nor is it germane to my point to ask if I believe him. After all, what he says could be true; if plausibility is good enough for me as a reader, and good enough for you as listeners, it’s good enough for me as a son. The importance to me, now and as a child, of my father’s stories is and was 1) their peculiar, detailed beauty, from the quirkiness of the famous personalities they involved to the complicated ways in which my father attempted to map out our relation to these people, and 2) the sense of incredible connectedness I derived, as a kid, from his stories. Listening to my father describe the deeds, crimes, and achievements of our famous cousins, scattered as they were across continents and eras, gave me an almost vertiginous sense of simultaneity, of our family’s and my own small self’s existing in all times, at all places.
When I was ten years old—shortly after reading Philip José Farmer’s biography of Tarzan, with its genealogy of heroes and criminals almost as fantastic as my own—I produced my first sustained work of fiction. This was a short story, about twelve pages in length, entitled “The Revenge of Captain Nemo.” It recounted a meeting between Verne’s Captain Nemo and Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes (first cousins, according to Farmer). I won’t make any claims as to its merits, but two great things happened to me in the course of writing it. One was that I consciously adopted, for the first time, a literary style: Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s, or rather that of the good Dr. John Watson. I think I had always been sensitive, before this, to variations in writers’ diction and to the mood and tone of a paragraph. I was alert to the difference in vocabulary and idiom one found in British storybooks, could tell when language was trying to sound antiquated, jocular, or hard-boiled. I could hear the difference between words of Latin origin and those that came from Anglo-Saxon. I knew how Doyle’s writing sounded. I could hear the tune of it in my head. Now I just had to sit down and play.
Getting the style down—that was more than half the fun for me. I used words like “postulated” and “retribution.” I wrote “had the odor of” instead of “smelled.” I went on about railway schedules, the harbor at Portsmouth, the fog. I referred to the infamous Moriarty as “the Napoleon of Crime,” thus linking him, in my imagination, to my own family tree. When I finished it, “The Revenge of Captain Nemo” went over pretty well. I had the satisfaction of being praised by my parents and other adults and of having actually completed something that struck me as admirably substantial, even huge. The work of typing it alone had nearly killed me. But more precious to me than praise or completion was the intense pleasure I had derived from attempting to impersonate Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, from putting on his accent, following his verbal trail: It was the pleasure that a liar takes in his lie as it enters the world wearing the accent and raiment of the truth, sounding so right and plausible that—if he is any kind of liar at all—he begins, himself, to believe it. It was the pleasure that a maker of golems takes as the force of his words, the rhythm and accuracy of his alphabetical spells, blow life into the cold clay nostrils, and the great stony hand unclenches and reaches for his own. At some point in the exercise the power of Doyle’s diction resounding in my ear carried me away. I felt intimately connected to him, as though it was not I inhabiting his literary skin but, somehow, the other way around. It was like something out of a ghost story—a child sitting down at a haunted piano and feeling a spectral hand guide his own over the keys.
That was the second important thing that happened to me when I wrote that story. It was as if I had opened a door and stepped into the room in which all my favorite writers were sitting around waiting for me to show up. They were a disparate bunch, from Judy Blume to Edgar Allan Poe, spread over different eras, continents, and genres. Some were close kin to each other—Lord Dunsany, H. P. Lovecraft—while others seemed to have nothing in common beyond their connection to me. And somehow, I sensed, their intersection defined me. They were, in other words, my family. I derived from them, they explained me. And more than anything else I wanted—I knew it now—to be accounted one of them. This was the wish—to be a credit to that far-flung family of literary heroes—that I have sought to embody, to express in the infinitely malleable clay of language, ever since.
It was around this time, as I was making up my mind to be a writer, that I encountered my second golem. By this time we were living in the then-new town of Columbia, a planned community in the Maryland suburbs, between Baltimore and Washington, D.C. In the waning years of my parents’ marriage—it ended, draw your own conclusions, the year that I began to formulate my wish—one of the only reliable sources of pleasure for my father and me was the weekly trip we took, alone, to the Howard County Public Library’s main branch, then located on Frederick Road, outside of the city limits of Columbia itself. One evening as I was rather sullenly spinning the wire rack of paperbacks intended for a group of readers who were then just becoming known, in the librarian trade, as YAs, I came across a book called Strangely Enough!, written by one C. B. Colby and published by Scholastic Book Services. It was one of those mysterious books that you have loved as a child but which as you go out into the world no one else ever seems to have read or even heard of, although the library’s copy was tattered and well worn and had been checked out, to judge from the number of fading purplish dates stamped onto its tan pocket, by dozens of YAs before me. It was made up of a series of about a hundred short pieces, little essays, each about five hundred words long and devoted to exposing or musing over all kinds of inexplicable and supposedly factual incidents and phenomena: poltergeists, haunted paintings, UFO sightings, rains of frogs and stones, witch scares, phantom hitchhikers, encounters with the devil in which he left his cloven footprint clearly visible in a neighborhood rock. I read a few of the entries—enough to persuade me that it was going to turn out to be one of the best books I had ever read—and then carried it with a few other titles to wait for my father at the circulation desk.
“Strangely Enough!” the librarian
intoned, putting a little Twilight Zone wobble into her voice. I nodded. “You know he lives here. C. B. Colby.”
It turned out that C. B. Colby lived not merely in Columbia but right down the street from my family, in the small cubistic house stained dark blue, with the goldfish pond, that you had to pass whenever you went to our street’s communal mailbox. His real name was Joseph Adler, and in time I discovered that in addition to Strangely Enough! he was the author of some 250 other works, fiction and nonfiction, for children and YAs, under a bewildering variety of pseudonyms. All I had known of him before now was that he was a baby chick of a man, with a soft, wavering plume of white hair and a gentle if somewhat stiff manner toward children. A reticent, courtly ghost of him, the first real writer I ever knew, can be glimpsed in the figment of a writer called August Van Zorn, in my novel Wonder Boys. Mrs. Adler had died not long after we moved into the neighborhood, and my mother had made him a roast and carried it down to him. The widower, she told me when she returned from this charitable visit, was a “survivor.” I hadn’t heard the term before, though I had an aunt by marriage who had been interned at Auschwitz as a child, and I knew enough, the next time I saw Mr. Adler, to look for and discover the greenish-black numbers on the inside of his forearm.
I was not a bold child. It took me most of the four-week circulation period to get up the nerve to go to his front door, clutching the library’s copy of his book, which by now I had read at least half a dozen times, terrifying myself, ruining my sleep, making the flat, sunny, avocado-and-goldenrod-colored 1973 world of Columbia, Maryland into a strange and marvelous world that contained treasures and ghosts and mysterious bright objects in the sky. Before approaching his house directly, however, I had spent several days furtively lurking nearby, concealing myself behind a bush or the neighbor’s parked car, studying the bare windows behind which nothing ever seemed to move. I saw a piano. I saw a work of iron sculpture that looked something like a mace and something like a gate and something like a twist of barbed wire. I saw thousand and thousands of books. And once I caught a glimpse of Mr. Adler, drinking orange juice straight from the carton.
“Ah,” he said, when he opened the door to me. “My little shadow.”
It would be nice to tell you a story now about how Mr. Adler, the taciturn, intellectual, widowed author of two hundred popular pseudonymous novels, and Michael Chabon, the awkward, unhappy, budding boy-writer skulking around the margins of his neighborhood, his future, and his parents’ divorce, forged an unlikely friendship while teaching each other valuable lessons about literature and life. But it didn’t work out that way; I guess that’s why stories are so much better than life, or rather why stories make life so much better. Mr. Adler invited me in, dismissed Strangely Enough! with a contemptuous wave of his hand, poured me a glass of orange juice that I felt a little bit nervous about drinking, and told me that my eyeglasses were much too big for my face. The house was filled with all kinds of spiky and unnerving sculptures, some all welded steel, like the one I’d seen from the window, others done in wood, plaster, and glass. They were the work, he explained to me, of his wife. Just before I departed his house for the first and last time, he took me into his office and pointed to the neatly stacked pages of a manuscript sitting beside his great steely battleship of an IBM Selectric. “That is the first book I will ever put my own name upon,” he said. There was a faint trace of an accent; it made me think of my aunt Renee, who had been in the camps too. “What kind of book is it?” I asked him. He looked annoyed. “It’s a memoir, of course,” he said. “The story of my life.”
It was as he was walking me, almost herding me, really, toward the door, that I noticed, lying on the glass shelf of a chrome-plated étagère, what I took to be another example of his late wife’s work. It was a clay doll, about the size of the old G.I. Joes they used to have—big enough to whip Ken’s vinyl ass. This clay figure was lumpy and crooked and almost looked as if it had been made by a kid, and I remember considering whether I ought and then deciding not to ask Mr. Adler if he had any children. You could tell, somehow, that he did not. It was a just a glimpse that I got, that day, of the little clay man. Then I was out the door.
I imagine there may be some of you who remember the name “Joseph Adler.” You may have read his memoir, The Book of Hell, which I still see from time to time in used bookstores, its black jacket tattered or missing. My father-in-law owns a copy, though he has an extensive library of books on Jewish subjects and owns copies of a lot of books that nobody reads anymore. I have a copy of my own, one which my father bought right after it came out. It’s a well-written, fairly brutal account of the two years the author, a Prague-born Jewish journalist, spent in Theresienstadt. All the usual horrors are present, and although there is an interesting chapter on the secret camp newspaper, Vadem, in the end there is nothing really to distinguish the book from any of the many literary memoirs that have been written about those times. The only passage of interest to us here is a brief paragraph that concerns, very much in passing, the Golem of Prague:
One morning I found myself in possession of five potatoes that were free of rot and not overly endowed with eyes. A man approached me offering to trade for them. In return for my potatoes he said that he would give me the magic tablet, inscribed with secret writing, that had once lain under the tongue of the famous Golem of Prague and was responsible for bringing to life that legendary Jewish automaton. He said that it was a lucky charm and would protect me from evil. We settled on two of my potatoes and went our separate ways. Shortly thereafter, I heard the man had been killed. As for the tablet, incised with Hebrew characters which I was days in trying to make out, it was lost in the disorder that followed my liberation.
Interestingly, one also encounters the Golem of Prague in the pages of Strangely Enough!, in a piece entitled “The Phantom of the Synagogue.” In it “C. B. Colby” recounts the basic legend of Rabbi Judah’s golem—the blood libels, the shaping of the clay of the Moldau River, the need to put an end to the Golem’s career, and the persistent rumor that the lifeless form of the Golem still slumbers in the attic of the Alt-Neu Synagogue in Prague’s ancient ghetto. Nothing is said, however, about the placing of any magic tablet inscribed with Hebrew letters under the Golem’s tongue.
Those of you who lived in and around Washington, D.C. during that time may dimly recall the scandal that followed the book’s publication, and a few particulars of the strange case of the writer the Washington Post called “The Liar Who Got Lost in His Lie.” About six months after the book came out, you may remember, a woman came forward to denounce Joseph Adler, or C. B. Colby. This woman had stumbled upon The Book of Hell in her local library and, seeing the author photo, had recognized in the delicate, birdlike features of old Mr. Adler the unmistakable lineaments of a Czech Nazi journalist named Victor Fischer, an admirer and eventual successor of the notorious propagandist Julius Streicher and one of those chiefly responsible for spreading the lie about the ideal conditions to be found in Theresienstadt, where Fischer’s accuser had herself been interned.
The Wiesenthal Center took an interest; the Washington Post investigated. Mr. Adler denied the woman’s claims, hired a lawyer, and promised to fight the charges. Soon afterward, however, he collapsed, and had to be hospitalized. He had suffered a stroke. From his hospital bed, he composed a remarkable statement to the Post. I remember reading it to myself one morning over my bowl of Quisp cereal. In his statement, Mr. Adler acknowledged being Victor Fischer and described the destitution and despair into which he had fallen after the war, roaming penniless and starving through the Czech countryside. He described being set upon by a roving gang of Jews bent on murderous revenge, and told how his life had been spared through the kind intercession of a Jewish girl, herself a survivor, whom he eventually married—the late Mrs. Adler. In 1946 he and his new bride had emigrated to the United States, Fischer carrying the passport of a dead Jew, Joseph Adler, whose identity, on his arrival in New York, he eagerly and persua
sively assumed. He resumed his journalistic career, writing for a number of newspapers and magazines, and in time came, or so he claimed, to be Joseph Adler. The whole lifelong charade had been pulled off with the knowing connivance of his wife, whose numerical tattoo had served as the model for the one which she herself pricked into his arm with a sewing needle.
Looking back I find that my recollections of the Book of Hell business are mingled with and effaced by concurrent memories of the Watergate scandal and with overarching outrage at my parents’ divorce. I remember seeing Mr. Adler’s statement in the paper, as I’ve said. I can remember my mother’s shock and sense of betrayal by the man she had fed from her own kitchen. But the thing I remember the clearest is the day they came to take Mr. Adler’s things away.
Once he entered the hospital, Mr. Adler never returned to the modest blue house on our street. One by one the goldfish in the pond fell prey to the neighborhood cats; then a kind of green pudding appeared on the surface of the water. After a few more months there was nothing in the fishpond but a slick black mat of rotten leaves. And then one day a large Mayflower van pulled up. I happened to be passing by on my bicycle and stopped to watch the burly men carrying out the furniture, the giant twist of barbed wire, the endless boxes of books. There were a lot of crazy sculptures, and the moving men cracked jokes about them and how ugly they were and the things that some people called art. Their harshest humor they reserved, however, for an immense clay statue of a man, taller than any of them and weighing so much that it took three movers to carry it out of the house. It was a crude figure, lumpy and misshapen, with blocky feet and stubby fingers and a wide, impassive face. I recognized it at once: it was the tiny doll that I had glimpsed lying on a glass-and-metal étagère. It had grown, just as golems grew in the legends; as the Golem grew in Strangely Enough!, shaped by my great ancestor Rabbi Judah; as a lie grows, ugly and massive as Mr. Adler’s lifelong deception, and as heavy as the burden of the guilt and horror that must have driven him so to inhabit and claim as his own the story of a dead Prague Jew.,