He, She and It Read Online Free PDF

the Base is not the way I told it to my child Riva or to my child Shira or to Shira and Gadi when they would sit on their haunches like little frogs, all bug eyes and appetite. I am recording this story just for you in the nights of my ash-gray insomnia, when my life feels like an attic full of boxes I have put away, things once precious and now dusty and half forgotten but still a set of demands that I put it, all of it, in order and deal with it, as bequests, as trash, as museum to set open to the family or the world. This is a time of beginnings and endings, of large risks and dangers, of sudden death by mental assassination. It is also the time my sight is failing again, and this time it cannot be repaired. The darkness of night apes the darkness I dread, and sleep is the lover I fear perhaps more than I truly desire his soft warm weight on me.
    This is the story, then, of the Golem: not you, my own little Golem I call little although you are taller than me by the same measure as a tall man (like Razi, my second-to-last lover) and stronger than me by a factor too large to bother guessing. You can lift a block of marble over your head. No, little as an affectionate term, the way so many languages attach suffixes of endearment that diminish in size as they enlarge in affect. Avramhas forbidden me to see you, but we can still communicate through the Base, and there I create my bubeh maisehs for you. I am not at all sure to what extent I am guilty of great folly and overweening ambition for my role in your programming, or to what degree I am instead that figure of Strength on the Tarot deck, the woman who tames the lion, who taught you to temper your violence with human connection. A task Avram interrupted.
    I am telling this story for you as I lie alone in my own huge antique bed in the bedroom shaped to me like an old familiar garment, with the scent of narcissus from the courtyard, in this the house of my family with its oasis of green in the desert the world has become. I lie awake sensing the danger gathering around us in this fragile modern ghetto. This is a tale of my family from long ago when the world seemed to be breaking open. They called it rebirth. Renaissance. But nothing ever comes back the same. The world moves in epicycles on the human level, although at the time in which my story is wanting to be told, it was those very projected epicycles of the universe that were being discarded by a few brave astronomers in favor of a system that was simple, clear and utterly alien to the human or rather the man-centered universe held to be immutable and preeminently Christian by most of those living in Europe. But like the Ptolemaic universe, my story has a human center.
    This is the story particularly of one Judah Loew, several men and women around him, and one un-man. But it is also the story of a city, and of a town within a city, a town as special and as isolated and as endangered as our own free town of Jews huddled here beside the rising poisoned sea. Prague is the city, beautiful Prague just taking on its gray and golden, mustard and terra-cotta, strawberry and pistachio stucco warmth, just beginning to be shaped into the city whose Baroque lineaments I walked through in the spring of my twenty-second year—2008—while I was studying philosophy with that brilliant man who was so great a teacher and so awkward a lover, and yet I thought the bargain of my flesh for his company and his conversation a worthy one, and I was right. I wandered those twisted ways and climbed the streets of stairs, dreaming of Kafka, whose stories I carried always with me, and dreaming, too, of Einstein, who had taught at that university while he was creating his theory of relativity. I was a bright, bright student, the best student of my professor and his momentary beloved besides while lilacs bloomed that spring.
    Every day from the university buildings I looked back into what had been the ghetto; every day I crossed it, past