Snow in August (43 page)

And here came Jack Roosevelt Robinson. Number 42. That summer our lives changed. Robinson became the closest thing I had to
a role model (a phrase that did not then exist). If he could take the insults and race-baiting he had to take that first year,
then so could the rest of us when confronted with other forms of stupidity or brutality or evil. If he could defy everything
that was placed against him, so could we. He played with controlled intensity, doing everything to the best of his abilities,
and then adding something else: desire. That fierce desire was a form of fire. Burning inside of Robinson, it warmed all the
rest of us, particularly those of us who were young. It lit up our imaginations. It lit up Brooklyn. It lit up America. So
Robinson is crucial to this novel. There is a very Catholic way of reading it: the rabbi is the Father, the boy is the Son,
and Jackie Robinson is the Holy Ghost.

Still, the novel was a long time coming. It finally came together for me in 1989, during a trip to Prague, a city that had
existed for me only in imagination. I was there as a newspaperman, covering the fall of Communism. Those days and nights were
as glorious a time as I’ve ever spent as a journalist, watching the Czech young, led with moral intelligence by the writer
Vaclav Havel, as they made their final joyous assault on the cement face of the State. They used language against the State.
They used intelligence against the State. They used
laughter and irony as their supreme weapons. In contrast, the old Stalinist hacks of the regime looked gray and sullen when
they arrived at their palaces, like archbishops who had ceased believing in God.

But during this extraordinary week, there was much downtime. I decided to use those free hours to see where Franz Kafka had
lived. There were no guidebooks with this information, because the long-dead Kafka was out of favor with the Communist hackocracy.
Still, in the company of a translator who was an ally of Havel, I set out. It turned out that Kafka had lived in many places
in Prague, but our search inevitably took us to the old medieval Jewish ghetto, and to the Alt-Neu Synagogue.

And there, something strange happened. I stepped into the cemetery that adjoins the synagogue, a small plot where, I was told,
Jews lay buried twelve deep. And I felt a shudder, a pebbling of skin, a sense of immanence, as if I had suddenly connected
with all the lost centuries. The dead were not dead. The past was here, in this holy ground. Their past. My past. I had only
felt that sense of connection once before, on my first journey to Ireland, as a son of the Irish diaspora. I went to walk
upon the hill of Tara, holy place of the pagan past, and trembled: feeling all the mad Celts dancing and singing under the
moon. Here in Prague, Jews and Celts danced together.

In one corner of the cemetery there was a statue of a learned man, larger and more imposing than all others, stern, austere.
I asked my translator who he was. The translator told me that this was Rabbi Loew. And then he told me about the Golem, pointing
to the high stories of the synagogue, where the Golem
was said to rest. I said: “God, I wish I’d had a golem when I was eleven.”

And uttering that wish, I knew I had my novel at last.

Here is that novel, set in a time before television, when our imaginations were stirred by talk at kitchen tables, by books,
by songs, by an occasional movie, and by the radio. It was a time when boys could believe in magic words. They could believe
that Billy Batson would say “Shazam” and become Captain Marvel. They could believe in the extraordinary transformations of
Irish legends and myths, often accomplished with magic words. They could hear Yiddish and believe that it was the lost Irish
language of the Celts. They could believe in the secret language of the Kaballah.

Again, this is a novel, not a tract. But it has a very simple theme: first we imagine, then we live. If it has a message for
the young it is this: imagine your entire lives, not simply your youth. Enjoy that youth, revel in it, but also imagine a
time and a life beyond Saturday night. You never know how a life will turn out, any more than a novelist knows how his novel
will end; you think you know where you are going, and then the road takes a sudden turn. But there must be a large vision
of that journey, a life-enchancing sense of possibility and triumph. Yes, there will be diversions. Yes, there will be defeats.
There might even be tragedies. But if we do not imagine, we do not live. We can imagine splendid careers, great loves, amazing
children. We can imagine worlds we have never seen, those of the distant past, those in the immediate future. We can imagine
Prague in the years of mad Rudolf II, and we can imagine Jackie Robinson before we ever get to see him play.

The Golem is a triumphant symbol of the human imagination. On its simplest level, his tale is a parable about the power of
moral intelligence. The imagination allows us to confront all horror and all evil. In the end, the imagination opens out,
like a great symphony, to encompass all the living and the dead, to say to the forces of evil, as the Jews continue to say,
a half century after the Holocaust: You cannot win. You can kill us. You can insult us. You can marginalize us. But we shall
triumph. And we shall dance.

“A TENDER NOVEL…. When it comes to evoking the sights and sounds of postwar Brooklyn streets Pete Hamill has no peer…. When
you finish that roller-coaster last chapter you’ll wonder if the shade of Isaac Bashevis Singer whispered in his ear.”

—
Frank McCourt, author of
Angela’s Ashes

In the year 1947 Michael Devlin, eleven years old and 100 percent American-Irish, is about to forge a most extraordinary bond.
His new friend is Rabbi Judah Hirsch, a refugee from Prague. Here in Brooklyn, surrounded by tenements and the smell of hot
dogs, Rabbi Hirsch enchants Michael with stories of ancient wisdom as Michael explains to him the equally wondrous world of
baseball. Then the neighborhood intervenes—and only one thing can save them from the hate all around them. A miracle …

“STRONG AND SOULFUL—A WONDERFUL ADDITION TO A COMPELLING BODY OF WORK. Few are as good at evoking New York City’s life and
heart as Pete Hamill.”

—
Oscar Hijuelos, author of
Mambo Kings Play Songs of Love

An Alternate Selection of The Literary Guild®

P ETE H AMILL , novelist and journalist, is the former editor in chief of the New York Daily News and the author of a bestselling memoir, A Drinking Life , as well as seven previous novels and other works.