The Golems of Gotham

Praise for The Golems of Gotham:

A book at once magical and natural . . . Rosenbaum’s novel is at once chilling and warm, rigorous and fanciful, savagely witty and profoundly reasoned. The Golems of Gotham charms as it frightens and moves us, and shows a novelist moving into the fullness of his imaginative capacity.

—San Francisco Chronicle

Inventive and electrifying epic. . . . [Rosenbaum] adds art to ambition and intellect in this dazzling novel, writing in language so lively it practically bubbles off the page like an ancient potion.

—Boston Globe

Hilarious . . . more touching than tragic, more absurd than abject, . . . very funny and a joy to read . . . Comparisons to Michael Chabon’s brilliant The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay are unavoidable . . . Written in an offhand, approachable prose that’s full of lyrical pyrotechnics . . . With compelling characters, both dead and alive, prose that captures your attention but keeps you rooted in the story, serious issues addressed amid humor and fantasy, The Golems of Gotham is eminently readable, deeply personal and surprisingly satisfying.

—Denver Post

“Stunning.”

—Miami Herald

Appealing . . . The Golems of Gotham is also a complex novel. Rosenbaum has a fluent style that can pivot and change direction on a single word, and the novel is rich in detail and vignette.

—New York Times Book Review

The Golems of Gotham is by turns a fable, ghost story, and history lesson . . . Given the ultimate power of his writing . . . Rosenbaum is reminiscent of Vonnegut at his best, dispensing narrative nuggets at will and providing haunting passages to be studied again and again. The Golems of Gotham is a feast to be taken slowly and carefully, and savored.

—Bookreporter.com

A sprawling, tragic, comic, magical masterpiece . . . Rosenbaum’s brave story-outrageous, cynical and sentimental-clarifies the Jewish challenge for this century.

—Jerusalem Report

Quick-witted and a lot of fun.

—Amazon.com

A vivid sense of how the Holocaust, far from being a discrete and completed event, is an open wound in the Jewish psyche . . . Rosenbaum writes something strong and true.

—Washington Post

Mr. Rosenbaum’s novel is filled with wonderful comic invention . . . but there is a much more serious point hiding behind Mr. Rosenbaum’s high jinks . . . If the novel is filled with the fantastical, it is also just as full of the prophetic, and it is the latter that resonates long after the leaps of a very playful imagination have receded. No review can do justice to the richness packed into the 367 pages of The Golems of Gotham. I found myself rereading whole sections for the shape and ring of their paragraphs as well as the sheer emotional power packed into every catalogue, every observation of the world.

—Forward

The Golems of Gotham is a big, risk-taking work of Jewish imagination . . .The golems, post-Holocaust Peter Pans, bring a kind of Miracle on 34th Street paradisiacal ambience to New York . . . Rosenbaum enchantingly harnesses some of this dream magic to create a haunting and disturbing ghost drama, exploring themes that thoughtful people continually confront.

—Moment Magazine

A miraculous, cautionary new tale about the 20th century’s defining event . . . Astonishing, one of the best novels of the year.

—The Anniston Star

Writing with trouble in mind and sulfur in his pen, [The Golems of Gotham] seems a riotous marriage of bitter wisdom and urgent magic. . . . What you look for is the kind of poetry, the music, a writer can make of his nightmares. . . . Rosenbaum shows that he can reach into the primal, wordless core of an emotion into the lava of disaster and raise the hair on the back of our necks.

—Buffalo News

In the face of unfathomable loss and abandonment Rosenbaum conjures plural golems as a rescue team for a self-absorbed and lost world, and gives us a profound, humorous irreverent book of life made all the more affecting by recent events in —Gotham. What Job might have written if he had a wry sense of humor.

—Chaim Potok

Thane Rosenbaum has broken new ground in The Golems of Gotham. It is, like Jewish experience itself, both heartrending and ecstatic, a work of magic realism that descends into the pit of Holocaust memory while still casting its gaze upward toward a vision of beauty and redemption. The Golems of Gotham represents a significant advance not only in Rosenbaum’s own development as an artist but in the entire genre of post-Holocaust fiction.

Rebecca Goldstein, author of —The Mind-Body Problem and the 36 Arguments for the Existence of God: A Work of Fiction

Thane Rosenbaum gives the idea of ghost writer a whole new meaning. Funny and fearless, he has conjured the departed masters of Holocaust memory, marched them down Broadway, and turned all of Manhattan into the haunted head of a tormented Jewish writer.

—Jonathan Rosen, author of The Talmud and the Internet: A Journey Between Worlds

From the darkest and most complex source, Thane Rosenbaum has fashioned a surprisingly entertaining novel.

—John Turturro