Prague Pictures: Portraits of a City (28 page)

However, Ripellino is speaking only of the
written
legend. Yossel the Golem is as old as the Prague Ghetto. There had been Jews in the city from at least the tenth century; indeed, Ghetto lore had it that the Jews had come to Prague after the destruction of the Temple of Jerusalem. Following the Third Lateran Council of 1179, a papal ordinance directed that a wall should be built to separate the Ghetto from the southern, Christian, parts of the city. Despite persecution and anathema, the Ghetto flourished, stretching from the north side of the Old Town Square up to the banks of the Vltava. In 1781 the Emperor Joseph II abolished the law under which Jews were confined to the Ghetto. The imperial aim was not to liberate the Jews, however, but to assimilate them fully into Christian society as a means of destroying their culture and their languages - Hebrew and Yiddish were banned, and the Jews were forced to Germanise their names. By the beginning of the nineteenth century only ten per cent of the population of the Ghetto was Jewish, and in 1850 the area was turned into a municipal district and renamed Josefov. However, as the
Blue Guide
pointedly observes, the reforming Emperor 'would not, perhaps, have entirely appreciated the honour, for the district was by now a festering slum . . .' In the 1890s, despite protests from architects and artists, most of the hovels and warrens of alleyways had been cleared to make way for the somewhat soulless, Haussmannian avenues of the present-day Josefov, although some of the finest buildings were spared, including the OldNew Synagogue and Meisl's splendid Town Hall. Surprisingly, perhaps, the Nazis too, after the invasion of Czechoslovakia, decided to preserve the surviving monuments, with the intention of turning them into a Museum of Jewry which would be an ironic commemoration of a race soon, they thought, to be extinct. During the Nazi occupation nearly 80,000 Jews were murdered, and today only a tiny community of Orthodox Jews remains in the area. More Jews would have died if not for the underground efforts of brave and decent people such as my friend
who in the 1990s was honouredby Israel for his wartime work on behalf of Prague's Jewish population.
⁵⁵

Yossel the Golem, this kosher version of Frankenstein's monster, had both a benign and a bad side. Having thwarted Friar Thaddeus, he took to patrolling the streets and back lanes of the Ghetto, keeping guard over the houses of the poor so that no malignant
goy
could come creeping in to hide the bodies of Christian children in Jewish homes. One night he surprised the butcher
carrying the corpse of a baby hidden in the belly of a slaughtered pig into the house of Mordechai Meisl, to whom he was indebted, with the intention of denouncing the banker as a ritual murderer. There came, however, that Friday evening when Yossel went on the rampage. Rabbi Loew had forgotten to give him his Sabbath eve instructions for next day, and in his boredom Yossel ran amok, stamping everything in his path to pieces, until the Rabbi was called upon to quell his monster. Eventually, like a pet that refuses to be house-trained, the Golem had to go. One night at the beginning of 1593 - the designation of a particular year is a nice touch on the part of the legend-maker - Rabbi Loew instructed Yossel to sleep not in his own bed in the Rabbi's house but to spend the night in the attic of the Old-New Synagogue. Two hours after midnight, Rabbi Loew, with his henchmen Isaac and Yakob, climbed to the loft where the Golem lay sleeping. First the Rabbi removed the
shem
from under the creature's tongue, then the three men performed the same ceremony by which they had brought the Golem to life, but this time in reverse, and by morning all that was left of poor Yossel was a pile of clay.

The Rabbi himself met a more poetic end, when he bent to savour the perfume of a rose his granddaughter had presented to him, only to discover that Death himself was hiding among the petals. A better way to go, certainly, than the ignominious end that befell, literally, his Polish colleague, the famous miracle-working Rabbi Elijah of Chelm, called Israel Ba'al Shem Tov, who had his own Golem. When the latter's time was up, Rabbi Elijah chose to destroy him by erasing the first letter of the word
emet
graven on the creature's brow, leaving the word
met,
that is, death. However, the Rabbi made the mistake of ordering the Golem to erase the letter himself; when he did so, he turned back at once into a load of clay which promptly collapsed on Rabbi Elijah, crushing him.

In the Josefov today there is little of the atmosphere of the Ghetto left, apart from an oppressive sense of absence, of emptiness, despite the poet Nezval's assertion that Rabbi Loew's
shem
is still here, 'under the tongue of all things, even of the pavement, though made of the same stone with which all Prague is paved.'
⁵⁶
Only in the imagination does the old world live on. Ripellino, lover of twilight and crowded streets, prowls the place in his fancy. 'I feel I lived in that Ghetto long ago; I see myself as a Chagallesque Jew at Succoth with an
etrog,
a yellow cedar branch, in my hand or at Chanukkah, lighting an eight-armed menorah with a
shammes
candle, or as one of the
shammosim
in the many synagogues, or wandering through the foul,
gespenstisch
darkness of the narrow streets.'

insists on driving me to Bratislava, where I shall attend my academic conference. He arranges for us to motor down in the morning, and after lunch he will drive back to Prague; this is a round trip of six hundred kilometres. I insist it will be excessive kindness, but Jindra laughs and says her father is not being kind, only seizing the opportunity to take a good, long drive. The summer day is soft and still; by noon the sun will scorch the roof of
beloved green, or blue, car. At a crossroads we stop and
points across the fields to his family's farm, confiscated from his father in 1948 and given back to the family after 1989;
shakes his head, bemused that he should have lived to see such wonders.
⁵⁷
At the border with Slovakia there is a passport control booth. I ask
what he thinks of the separation of Czechoslovakia into two states, and he shrugs; the Czech Republic is the richer half, but the Slovaks wanted their autonomy, and they got it. Later, in Bratislava, I shall be given a different account, in which the wily Czech Prime Minister, Vaclav Klaus - whom
in tones of high, icy irony, refers to always as
'Mister
Klaus' - tricked the Slovaks into a bad deal because he wanted to be shot of them and their economic problems. As we drive through the Slovak countryside, there are farmers and their families in the fields making hay; not since my earliest childhood have I seen a hand-made haystack. The scene might have been painted by Millais, or one of the less cloying Socialist Realists.