2010 BRIDGES ASSOCIATION 27

On the day I was born, my given name was

instantly transmitted to French relatives: La
flle de Zike (my mothers underground name
during WWIIs French Resistance) sappelle Si-
mone. Yet moments later, another fate awaited
me. My father arrived at the hospital, a bou-
quet of white roses in hand, took one look at
me, and announced, Mais elle nest pas toute
[But shes not all there]. My fate was cast. He
had re-named me Patoute. Growing up, ev-
ABSTRACT: In this essay, the author traces the personal background of her research on the Jewish golem
legends that began with her PhD dissertation, Te Golem as Metaphor for Jewish Women Writers.
Drawing on diverse writers including Andre Brink, Eunice Lipton, Temple Grandin, Chava Rosenfarb and
Cynthia Ozick, Yehuda explores the repercussions in her own life of the Talmudic statement, A woman
[before marriage or childbirth] is a golem.
W
AS I BORN A GOLEM?
1
Simone Naomi Yehuda
But I take the risk. On this page,
with more generous loam, I start
to dismantle stone by stone, word
by word, the fortress of scars.
Vera Schwarcz, Dreaming the Song of Songs
What is the hardest thing of all? Tat which seems the easiest for your
eyes to see, that which lies before your eyes.
Goethe
28 BRIDGES Volume 15 Number 1
eryonefamily, friends, neighbors, class-
matescalled me Patoute. Some still do.
I was the frstborn daughter of Walter Juda
(a Jewish refugee who, at the age of sixteen,
fed Nazi Germany in 1932) and a French
Catholic mother, Rene Molino (whose own
mother, Blanche Molino, a leader of the Resis-
tance in her native Lyons, harbored Jews).
Tus my parents met, came to the United
States, and had me, their eldest child, followed
by three sons. Allow me to reiterate. From the
moment of my birth onward: my mother, fa-
ther, three brothers, school and neighborhood
friends, teachers, mailmen, milkmen, every
single member of my French family called me
Patoute. Again, in French, Patoute (pas toute)
literally means not all, not whole. Teres
no getting around it. Tats what it means.
Tere are a number of questions that this
raises: (1) What was my father thinking? (2)
What was missing that made me not whole?
(3) Why did he later insist that what he meant
was, But she is so little, (in French, so lit-
tle translates to Si petit), and (4) Why
didnt anyone, including myself, challenge
this inaccurate translation? My father spoke
fuent French, as did my mother, born and
raised in France as she wasas did her entire
French family, of course; as do I, for that
matter, French being my frst language.
Oddly, it was afer I entered a doctoral
program that I began to apprehend the true
meaning of this name and ponder what could
have been missingfrom my fathers point
of viewin his little girl. Why was I not
whole, incomplete? What did I lack? Al-
though its fairly obvious that daughters dont
have penises, apparently this fact somehow
blindsided my father. Certainly, other fathers
have had this experience. For example, the
protagonist in Andr Brinks 1996 novel
Imaginings of Sand reports that:
Had I obliged my father and entered the world
as a boy, I would have beenin honor of an
array of his ancestors [named]Ludwig Max-
imillian Joseph Heinrich Schwarzenau and der
Glon. Seeing me born . . . without the distin-
guishing appendage of the right sex, he re-
treated in disgust and pretended I hadnt
happened. (p. 3)
2
Te time came for me to try and under-
standnot only the reasons why this phe-
nomenon sometimes occursbut, in my
case at any rate, the short and long-term ef-
fects of such a naming and upbringing. As
Eunice Lipton states in her memoir French
Seduction, At frst I entered the dance on my
fathers terms, like a girl stepping into a twirl-
ing jump rope. But there was no exit. I could
only repeat the steps over and over and over
again (p. 12).
3
Like Lipton, I didnt want to
look too closely at my father (p. 130). Like
Lipton too, I had no idea whyseemingly
out of the blueI would periodically become
indignant, hostile, alienated, depressed,
angry, and/or hurt.
In her illuminating Animals in Transla-
tion, Temple Grandin
4
asks why it is that
normal people dont see a lot of things . . .
Why cant they see what the matter is, at least
not without a lot of training and practice?
(p. 24). In her own case, as an autistic indi-
vidual and Doctor of Animal Science, she
discovered that its because they arent visu-
ally oriented the way animals and autistic
people are (p. 24). As evidence, she cites a
famous experiment by psychologist Daniel
Simons, head of the Visual Cognition Lab at
the University of Illinois. A team called Go-
rillas in Our Midst showed a group of peo-
ple a video of a basketball game and asked
them to count how many passes a team made.
Afer a while, A woman wearing a gorilla
suit walked onto the screen, stopped, turned,
SIMONE NAOMI YEHUDA 29
faced the camera, and beat her fst on her
chest. Fify percent of the people who watched
this video didnt see the gorilla (p. 24).
Grandin adds that this can actually be ex-
tremely dangerous, citing as evidence another
scary study that NASA conducted with air-
plane pilots who were put in a fight simula-
tor and asked to conduct a bunch of routine
landings. However, on some of the landing
approaches, the experimenters added the
image of a large commercial airplane parked
on the runway, something they would never
see in real life. . . . One quarter of the pilots
landed right on top of the airplane. Tey never
saw it (p. 25). Her explanation is that normal
peoples perceptual systems are built to see
what theyre accustomed to seeing. If theyre
used to seeing gorillas in the middle of basket-
ball games, they see gorillas. If theyre not,
they dont. Tey have inattentional blindness
(p. 25). Children, perhaps more than adults,
are susceptible to these types of erroneous as-
sumptions about their parents behaviors and
motivations.
Tus it was a shock when I realized as an
adult that I, following in my fathers foot-
steps, may long have been sufering from
something much like Grandins inatten-
tional blindness. As a so-called normal
individual, was it possible that Ilike King
Lear vis vis his daughters and Oedipus vis
vis his fate (who both literally and fgura-
tively couldnt see what was right in front of
their eyes)was seeing only what I (was) ex-
pected to see, what I had been taught to see?
If so, wouldnt it naturally follow that it
would be difcult, if not impossible, to accu-
rately evaluate the conditions of my life
what Grandin terms the setupnot to
mention many, if not all, of my subsequent
decisions, conclusions, suppositions, rela-
tionships, and beliefs? Was it possible that, in
some fundamental, plain-as-the-nose-on-
your-face ways I couldnt see the [real] de-
tails but only the idea of reality that had
been presented to me? Like other so-called
normal people, could I have blurred cer-
tain important details in an inaccurately
pre-established general concept which in
some ways was harmful (p. 30)? And, if so,
how, exactly, was this harmful? If were all
guilty of inattentional blindness, even need
it to survive, why is it necessary to examine
this blindness? As James Baldwin eloquently
summarized about his own anguished rela-
tionship with America, I was compelled to
admit something that I had always hidden
from myself at the price of [my] . . . progress
(quoted in Lipton, p. 152).
It was as a PhD candidate that I found the
statement which would set me of on an en-
tirely new path. In a Talmudic text, Rabbi
Samuel ben Unya extrapolated from Isaiah
54:5, Sanhedrin 22B that, in the name of Rab:
A woman [before marriage or childbirth] is
a golem
5
A golem? What on earth was a
golem? I embarked on many years of research
which revealed, briefy, that golemim [in the
plural], are magically createdi.e., man-
made and not of woman bornin short,
non-human or sub-human beings in human
form (computers, robots, and cyborgs are
considered contemporary variations of the
golem). Traditionally, golems are forged from
earth or clay (much as Adam was, in Gene-
sis), and are brought to life when a tablet
engraved with the Divine Name is placed in
their mouths by their Creator. Other defni-
tions of golems include: amorphous beings;
artifcial men; cocoons; dull, stupid, or hu-
morless people (Yiddish); embryos; imperfect
substances; incomplete human beings; voice-
less and soulless anthropoids or entities; ser-
vants; unformed masses, and the ultimate
ancestors of the human race.
Okay. But what do women have to do
30 BRIDGES Volume 15 Number 1
with golems? How do women stop being
golems afer marriage or childbirth? Te
question is, why do so many of us perpetuate
antiquated beliefs that should have been laid
to rest long ago? And why did one of these
antiquated beliefs escape from my fathers
mouth the moment he laid eyes on me?
My father, raised a Reform Jew, was cer-
tainly far removed from the complete dedica-
tion to Talmud and Torah study of his
grandfather, who, as a devout Orthodox Jew,
lef the business of life to his wife. I will never
forget the contempt with which my father told
me that his grandfather never worked a day in
his life. I can also remember the revulsion I
felt when, as a teenager on a trip to Israel, I was
taken to the Orthodox section of Jerusalem
and witnessed frst-hand how the men dovened
day in and day out as their worn wives, shorn
of hair and in wigs, toiled endlessly and thank-
lessly at the necessary cooking, shopping,
cleaning, and conducting of business afairs.
No doubt, my great, great grandfather also
daily recited the traditional morning prayer,
Blessed be God for not having created me a
woman, a slave, a gentile. Tough my father
was rightfully proud of the liberal Jewish
views and work ethic that led to his highly suc-
cessful career, including the founding of a
third company in his nineties, is it unreason-
able to suggest that he could have absorbed Or-
thodoxys profoundI would even say
perverseprejudices against women, and un-
wittingly passed them on to me through my
nickname? Why make such a fuss about this,
you may well ask. Why, as my parents wished,
couldnt I for Gods sake let this go? Why did
and doI feel cursed, rather than loved, by his
self-professed term of endearment?
Te answer lies partly in the fact that the
actual meaning of the word was continu-
ously denied, which in itself indicated that
something was amiss. As well, this denial be-
came a kind of metaphor for the larger real-
ity of my upbringing. So it was that during
the writing of my dissertation, I began to
wonder what kind of explanation could be
given for my fathers need to diminish his
daughters sense of self-worth.
As a mother now myself, I know for cer-
tain that if I had nicknamed my child Stu-
pid, for example, and said that what I meant
was Sweetheart, no one would be fooled.
Friends, neighbors, family members, teach-
ers, the authorities, someone would eventu-
ally compel me to confront such a hostile,
negative, and destructive act. Afer all, most
of us understand that words mean what they
meanhowever limited those meanings may
be in an ultimate, existential senseand, as
such, should be taken seriously. Assuming
that my father was not, in some way, dedi-
cated to a willful destructiveness toward his
daughter, there had to be some historical or
psychological explanation.
I, for example, like so many other 13-year-
old girls, and unlike my brothers, was not bat
mitzvah. It wasnt until my twin daughters
came of age and became bnot mitzvah that I
realized how signifcant it was for me not to
have been accorded the honor of being viewed
as a responsible, adult Jew. As far as my father
was concerned, this coming-of-age cere-
monyextended to my male siblings as an
inevitable rite of passagewas simply not on
the radar screen. Yet this, I have learned, is
more than a gender issue. As Cynthia Ozick
has asserted, Te point is not that Jewish
women want equality as women with men,
but as Jews with Jews (p. 136).
6
Tere is no
question whatsoever that in countless other
crucial ways I was in no way equal to my
brothers in my fathers eyes. I was not there,
not worthy of inclusion in the time-honored
rituals of his faith, not whole. I simply was not
included in the story. Yet, although never a de-
SIMONE NAOMI YEHUDA 31
voutly religious man, my fathers upbringing,
his forced fight from Germanys Nazism, not
to mention his last name, marked himand
therefore mepermanently and indelibly as a
Jew, a golem Jew. When I learned that the
golema complex and highly evocative phe-
nomenon in Jewish loreis a soulless and
voiceless creatureyou can perhaps under-
stand why I was hooked.
Even Chava Rosenfarb, a Yiddish writer
and survivor of the Holocaust who believes
that Tere have been so many more impor-
tant issues to worry about in Jewish history
than the problem of womens rights, which
have always seemed trivial and irrelevant in
comparison, concludes that:
Excluded from the brotherhood of those who
study Gods word, the woman was reduced to
being a kind of benign resourceful golema
workhorse with a tender, loving heart, a never-
resting womb, and never-resting hands . . . It
was she who assumed the role of the oppressed
Jew vis vis the Jewish male, and was thus bur-
dened with a double load of sufering.
7
Obviously, it is not only the female of the spe-
cies that has occasionally received the raw end
of the deal. On the contrary. Both genders
beneft as well as sufer from the privileges so-
ciety attributes to them; both sufer from neg-
ative and restrictive stereotyping. Tough it is
not my task here to outline the countless ways
in which men are diminished by gender ste-
reotyping, it is important to note that Not to
think about the riddle is to remain the riddle;
[by not] break[ing] with what [you] have been
told, [you may be limiting what you are] able
to do. As such, you then run the risk of con-
tinuing to be viewed as unable, disabled, dis-
barred, or even un sous-dvelopp . . . un
sous-capable, an under-developed, incapable
being.
8
Tis is a condition eloquently de-
scribed by Rachel Korn in the last stanza of
her poem My Body:
My shadow
like a veil
stitched of thinnest mourning
already takes
my measure
and sisters me
with waiting earth,
with moist grass
and in my blood
I hear the worlds weeping
and my unborn song.
9

Golem experiences due to homophobia or
ageism, or to being diferently-abled, over-
weight, unattractive, disfgured, ill, poor,
wealthy, over-educated, uneducated, and so
forth, have a great deal to teach us about how
we all, in one way or another, have viewed
ourselves and/or others as golems, as less
than fully human, and how that has impov-
erished their lives as well as our own.
NOTES
1. Tis essay is an abridged excerpt from Was
I Born a Golem?, the frst chapter of the book Im
writing entitled Te Golem and Me: An Annotated
Memoir (in which I am expanding my doctoral
dissertation Te Golem As Metaphor for Jewish
Women Writers). Te rest of the book entails the
chapters: What, Exactly, Is A Golem? Is Patri-
archy Relevant? Has Anyone Else Ever Felt Like
a Golem? and Can A Golem Become Whole?
In addition to a Glossary of Terms and a Works
Cited and Consulted, various appendices will in-
clude a history with illustrations of some Gods and
Goddesses, Creation Stories, Literary and His-
32 BRIDGES Volume 15 Number 1
torical Heroes and Heroines, Matriarchies and Pa-
triarchies, Golem, and a Lilith Chronology.
2. Brink, Andr. Imaginings of Sand: A Novel.
NY: Harcourt Brace & Company, 1996.
3. Lipton, Eunice. French Seduction: An
Americans Encounter With France, Her Father,
and the Holocaust. NY: Carroll & Graf, 2007.
4. Grandin, Temple. Animals in Translation:
Using the Mysteries of Autism to Decode Animal
Behavior. NY: Scribner, 2004.
5. Sherwin, Byron L. Te Golem Legend: Ori-
gins and Implications. Lanham, MD: University
Press of America, 1985. See also, Singer, Isaac Ba-
shevis. Te Golem is a Myth for Our Time. Te
New York Times (August 12, 1984): 2;1. Singer at-
tributes this attitude to Rabbi Loewe, the hero of
the Prague golem legend. He reports that in his
book Beer Hagolah, Rabbi Loewe wrote that men,
through sexual intercourse, endow women with
spirit and physical form.
6. Ozick, Cynthia. Notes Toward Finding
the Right Question. On Being a Jewish Feminist:
A Reader. Susannah Heschel, ed. NY: Schocken,
1983: 120151.
7. Rosenfarb is quoted in Sokolov, Naomi B.,
Anne Lapidus Lerner, and Anita Norich, eds.
Gender and Text in Modern Hebrew and Yiddish
Literature. NY: Te Jewish Teological Seminary
of America, 1992: 217218).
8. From duPlessis, Rachel Blau. Blue Studios:
Poetry and Its Cultural Work. Tuscaloosa, U of Al-
abama P, 2006 and Csaire, Andr. Une Tempte,
Adaptation de La Tempte de Shakespeare Pour
un Ttre Ngre. Paris: Editions du Seuil, 1969.
9. I found this poem in Whitman, Ruth, ed.
An Anthology of Modern Yiddish Poetry. NY: Oc-
tober House, 1966: 41.
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