Dear Reader,

Like Malka, I am always thinking about stories. Their formation, how we consume, digest, and regurgitate them. How they are sustenance for hope, while also brandished as weapons. My interest in stories—particularly folklore and fairytales—began young. I have vivid childhood memories of gathering around a storyteller at synagogue and listening to Jewish folktales told in vibrant recantation, often accompanied with props or song. At the conclusion of each story, the teller would ask us questions and ask for questions in return, a spirited call and response. There was no decisiveness of story, only edifying dissection and curiosity.

This interest in stories stayed with me into adulthood, shaping the course of my postgraduate studies. I became obsessed with the ebb and flow of literature—its revival, its desecration—as befitting the political motivations of the time. Stories shaping narratives shaping stories, repeated indefinitely. My academic focus on history and conflict allowed me to uncover the darker, more sinister underbelly of stories, and how they become tools of identity politics and nationalism. It’s this malleability of stories that led me to the Middle Ages, and to the rediscovery of the legend of the golem.

The Middle Ages in Europe was a time rife with antisemitic narratives—from the myth of blood libel to accusations that Jews worked with the devil to carry out the Black Death. Yet, emerging in this period was another story, too: The Golem of Prague. Birthed from Jewish mythology, the golem’s story has seen many variations and interpretations dating back to the Babylonian Talmud. But I grew increasingly interested in this sixteenth-century rendition. The Golem of Prague tells of a rabbi—the Maharal of Prague—creating a lifelike creature from clay (or stone) to protect the Jews from antisemitic attacks. Yet as time passes, this creature, a golem, grows increasingly violent (or in some renditions, they worry the golem will grow violent) and the rabbi’s forced to lay him to rest in the attic of the Old–New Synagogue in Prague, ready to be awakened again to protect the Jews if needed.

The listener of the story is forced to think: Man or monster? Good or evil? Is violence necessary for peace? Was the rabbi right to create the golem, or did he step too close to divinity’s domain? The creation of this legend fashioned a new narrative I wanted to explore in my own way.

While the legend of the Golem of Prague served as great inspiration for The Maiden and Her Monster, I have taken many liberties with this tale and its historical context. My hope is that it will exist like many other golemic tales: adhering to the locality of where the story is told. In the case of The Maiden and Her Monster, that is a fictional world, with fictional locations, cultures, and characters. While inspired by the history of Jews in medieval Prague, this novel is not an accurate depiction of the time period nor its people. This is also true of the magic system. Kefesh is not meant to be a direct or adequate representation of any method, discipline, or school of thought within Jewish mysticism. Instead, it is drawn from ideas across many forms of early Jewish mysticism, entangling understandings of the earth, creation, and faith. It is one perspective, and it’s meant to be vague, because I think it’s very Jewish to leave things up for interpretation.

The Maiden and Her Monster was my attempt to preserve a hidden history and explore the danger and resiliency of stories and faith. To tell a story about the Jewish experience that feels both timeless and lost to time. The golem, in the attic of the synagogue, waking once again. Thank you, dear reader, for opening its pages.

Excerpt From

The Maiden and Her Monster

Maddie Martinez