"Utz" by Bruce Chatwin

Kaspar Utz had a part-Jewish and part-baronial ancestry, growing up on an estate in Czechoslovakia between the First and Second World Wars. By flexibility and cunning, he survived the Nazis and now lives in Prague under the communists in a small flat with his maidservant and a fortune in collectable porcelain.

This elegant novel, written with all the precision of a porcelain objet d'art, explores the contradictions and the futility inherent in communism and in collecting, and the compromises we all make in our lives.

Selected quotes:

Page numbers refer to the 1989 Picador paperback edition

• "I thought for a moment that lunch was going to end in a slanging match - until I realised that this was another of their well-rehearsed duets." (p 36)
• "All golem legends derived from an Ancient Jewish belief that any righteous man could create the World by repeating, in an order prescribed by the Cabbala, the letters of the secret name of God. 'Golem' means 'unformed' or 'uncreated' in Hebrew. Father Adam himself had been 'golem' - an inert mass of clay ... until Yahweh ... breathed into his mouth the power of speech." (p 42)
• "It depressed him, on crossing the Czech frontier, to see the lines of barbed wire and sentry-boxes. But he noted, with a certain relief, that there were no more advertising billboards." (p 88)
• "There is a microphone in this wall. One in that wall. Another in the ceiling, and I know not where else. They listen. listen. listen to everything. But this everything is too much for them. so they hear nothing!" (p 96)
• "Things are the changeless mirror in which we watch ourselves disintegrate." (p 113)

April 2022; 154 pages

This novel was short-listed for the Booker Prize in 1988

This review was written by the author of Motherdarling  and The Kids of God

"The Prague Golem": Vitalis 2004

I bought the book of Jewish fairy stories in Prague; it is an English translation. It is a little like the Brothers Grimm meet Orthodox Judaism. There are stories of men who discover Gold and Rabbis who cheat death. In particular the stories focus on one Rabbi, Rabbi Loew, who creates the Golem, a man fashioned from  clay and brought to life. The purpose of the Golem is to protect the Jewish community but he never seems to be used for this and shortly afterwards the Rabbi, by saying the original prayers backwards, returns the Golem to clay.

The trouble with these sort of religious stories is that morality is repeatedly confused. In Rabbi Loew the Benefactor of the Jews in Prague the good Rabbi persuades Emperor Rudolph  that "the whole community should never in future be held responsible for the guilt of the individual." This is clearly right and proper and a bedrock of decent law. In the story after next, Beleles Street, the very same Rabbi discovers that the cause of the plague which has been killing the children of the community is that two couples are wife-swapping. It is apparently OK for God, or Death, to make the whole community suffer for the sins of a few but it is not OK if the Emperor does it.

Double standards. Superstitious nonsense.

December 2011; 63 pages