THE GOLEM is the subject of two recent books:

The Sorcerer's Apprentice?
Another look at the mythic servant who repeatedly saved the Jewish people
August 30, 2007 - Robert Leiter, Literary Editor [Jewish Exponent]

The golem -- the massive, hulking servant figure who manages to repeatedly save the Jewish people from doom and destruction in any number of tales written in the 19th and early-20th centuries -- has popped up in book form once again in The Golem and the Wondrous Deeds of the Maharal of Prague, the work of Yudl Rosenberg as edited and translated by the distinguished novelist Curt Leviant. Just about a year ago, W.W. Norton publishers released a compilation of golem tales, titled simply The Golem, that brought together various works in several genres, written by a quartet of writers, Rosenberg among them, all translated by Joachim Neugroschel. The other authors represented were S. Bastomski, Dovid Frishman and H. Leivick, who penned the classic play about the massive creature fashioned from a piece of clay by a wonder-working rabbi.

There is a great deal of overlap between these recent books. Both translators fill in the history behind the term "golem" and identify the nature of the character that bears the name, and the general outline is similar. They part ways, however, in their assessments of Rosenberg.

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Earlier posts on the Golem are here and here.