Utz Read Online Free PDF

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    â€˜Kept them,’ I said. ‘The sheikh, if I remember right, liked to sit his favourite dwarf on his forearm and his favourite falcon on the dwarfs forearm.’
    â€˜Nothing else?’
    â€˜How can one know?’
    â€˜You are right,’ said Utz. ‘These are things one cannot know.’
    â€˜Or would want to.’
    â€˜And what would cost a dwarf? These days?’
    â€˜Who can say? Collecting dwarfs has always been expensive.’
    â€˜That’s a nice story,’ he smiled at me. ‘Thank you. I also like dwarfs. But not in the way you think.’

I t was now early evening and we were sitting on a slatted seat in the Old Jewish Cemetery. Pigeons were burbling on the roof of the Klausen Synagogue. The sunbeams, falling through sycamores, lit up spirals of midges and landed on the mossy tombstones, which, heaped one upon the other, resembled seaweed-covered rocks at low-tide.
    To our right, a party of American Hasids – pale, short-sighted youths in yarmulkes — were laying pebbles on the tomb of the Great Rabbi Loew. They posed for a photograph, with their backs to its scrolling headstone.
    Utz told me how the original ghetto – that warren of secret passages and forgotten rooms so vividly described by Meyrink – had been replaced by apartment buildings after the slum clearances of the 1890s. The synagogues, the cemetery and the Old Town Hall were almost the only monuments to survive. These, he said, far from being destroyed by the Nazis, were spared to form a proposed Museum of Jewry, where Aryan tourists of the future would inspect the relics of a people as lost as the Aztecs or Hottentots.
    He changed the subject.
    â€˜You have heard tell the story of the Golem?’
    â€˜I have,’ I said. ‘The Golem was an artificial man . . . a mechanical man . . . a prototype of the robot. He was a creation of the Rabbi Loew.’
    â€˜My friend,’ he smiled, ‘you know, I think, many things. But you have many things to know.’

T he Rabbi Loew had been the undisputed leader of Prague Jewry in the reign of the Emperor Rudolf: never again would the Jews of Middle Europe enjoy such esteem and privilege. He entertained princes and ambassadors, and was entertained by his sovereign in the Hradschin. Many of his writings – among them the homily ‘On the Hardening of Pharaoh’s Heart’ – were absorbed into the teachings of Hasidism. Like any other Cabbalist he believed that every event – past, present and future – was already written down in the Torah.
    After his death, the Rabbi was inevitably credited with supernatural powers. There are tales – none dating from his lifetime – of how, with an abracadabra, he moved a castle from the Bohemian countryside to the Prague ghetto. Or told the Emperor to his face that his real father was a Jew. Or trounced the mad Jesuit, Father Thaddeus, and proved the Jews were innocent of blood guilt. Or fashioned Yossel the Golem from the glutinous mud of the River Vltava.
    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’ meant ‘unformed’ or ‘uncreated’ in Hebrew. Father Adam himself had been ‘golem’ – an inert mass of clay so vast as to cover the ends of the Earth: that is, until Yahweh shrank him to human scale and breathed into his mouth the power of speech.
    â€˜So you see,’ said Utz, ‘not only was Adam the first human person. He was also the first ceramic sculpture.’
    â€˜Are you suggesting your porcelains are alive?’
    â€˜I am and I am not,’ he said. ‘They are alive and they are dead. But if they were alive, they would also have to die. Is it not?’
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    â€˜If you say so.’
    â€˜Good. So I say it.’
    â€˜Good,’ I