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by Lisa Lee
Jane went on to law school. Kevin came close to becoming a professional tennis player.
But where they started is nowhere near where they have ended up: Jane has stopped going to her law school classes, and Kevin, now a policeman, has become increasingly distant. Their parents, each on their own path toward the elusive American Dream (their mother hell-bent on having the perfect house and the perfect family, their father obsessed with working his way up from one successful business to the next), don't want to see the family unraveling. When Kevin goes missing, no one recognizes his absence as the warning sign it is until it erupts, forcing them all to come to terms with their past and present selves in a country that isn't all it promised it would be.
Both deeply serious and wickedly funny, American Han is a profound story about striving and assimilation, difficult love, and family fidelity. A searing portrait that challenges assumptions about the immigrant experience, Lisa Lee's debut introduces a powerful new voice on the literary landscape.
The Korean word "han" is generally defined as a feeling that encapsulates sorrow, resentment, grief, and loss of identity. Han is born from years of systemic suffering—occupation, war, displacement—and seeps into the daily lives of Koreans and Korean Americans alike.
Han is never defined within the text of Lisa Lee's debut novel, but it informs every aspect of the narrative, which expertly distills this weighty, complicated concept into the story of one young woman. Raised in Napa in the 1980s by Korean American immigrant parents, Jane Kim and her brother Kevin grew up trying to make their parents proud through academic and athletic performance. Jane went on to law school in San Francisco, and Kevin attempted a professional tennis career. But now Jane has started skipping classes, and hasn't heard from her brother—who quit tennis to join the police force and has seemed increasingly miserable over the years—for months. Jane's parents have separated, and when her mom arrives on Jane's doorstep in her final year of law school, Jane is surprised by her indifferent demeanor. Her mom seems to be in denial about the fact that her family is unraveling at the seams—each of them embarking on new endeavors but none willing to confront the dysfunction at the heart of their family that has led each of them inexorably to unhappiness. Jane herself struggles perhaps most of all, trying to reconcile her parents' expectations for her with the life she actually wants.
American Han is structured into three sections: The Tycoon, The Truck Driver, and The All-American Boy, which respectively examine Jane's relationship with her mom, her dad, and her brother. We first meet Jane's mom, and we see that she is at once overbearing and emotionally neglectful. She always raised Jane to understand that she was inferior to her older brother, who is set to inherit everything, and who is expected to look after the parents in their old age. "[H]er daughter's success or failure would neither benefit nor hurt her, since a Korean woman's daughter belonged to the family she married into," Jane acknowledges. Still, Mrs. Kim has unrealistically high expectations for Jane, first insisting that she become a lawyer and then berating her for not having any income as a law student, then in the same breath insisting that she should be married with children by now.
Jane's father, in contrast, always chasing the American dream through a series of business endeavors and now embarking on a cross-country journey as a truck driver, has become a more distant presence in Jane's life, but his pursuit of Americanness, literalized into his journey to see the country, has pervaded the way Jane sees the world and her own identity. Though he raised his children to be bilingual, he refused to let Jane and Kevin speak Korean to each other in public as children, until they eventually lost fluency. "Sometimes I think that if we'd held on to our language, we would have known each other better," Jane reflects on her relationship with Kevin.
And that relationship is perhaps the novel's most compelling dynamic. Close in age, Jane and Kevin had a close relationship growing up, but where their parents' high aspirations could have further developed their bond, Jane finds that it's had the opposite effect. It's clear that Kevin resents Jane, and considers her upbringing to have been much easier than his own—as the girl, Jane was taken less seriously, which Kevin is only capable of seeing in a negative light for himself. "Kevin was right that I was given more stuff, but he was forgetting that he was set to inherit everything. He was wrong about everything else—nobody was getting what they wanted. But Kevin was so certain, so adept at making others believe in his victimhood and my role as victimizer, that sometimes even I believed him," Jane muses. When Jane sees on the news one day that Kevin has committed a horrifying act, it feels at once shocking and inevitable. It feels disconnected from the brother she once knew, but possible for the stranger who has taken his place.
Told in a vignette style, American Han is ponderous and slow moving, occasionally to its detriment, but what it lacks in plot it makes up for in sharp observation. It's an ambitious response to the Korean American immigrant experience, narrated with heartbreaking sincerity by its central character. Lisa Lee asks, what is lost when you sacrifice everything to assimilate to a new culture where you are never fully accepted? The answer can be seen in each of the family members; in Jane's mother's obsession with transposing traditional Korean family dynamics onto an unsupportive American landscape, in her father's relentless pursuit of an unattainable ideal, in her brother's burnout, in Jane's own loss of identity. American Han is a complex, layered portrayal of a single family, but also a window into a cultural experience that will resonate with many readers.
Book reviewed by Rachel Hullett
Korean immigration to the US occurred in three waves: first from 1903-1949, second from 1950-1964, and third from 1965 on. The first wave was mostly comprised of laborers who were brought in from Korea to Hawaii to work on pineapple and sugar plantations. The second wave began after Korea's liberation from Japanese rule in 1945 and accelerated during and after the Korean War (1950–1953). The division of the peninsula into US-occupied South Korea and Soviet‑occupied North Korea set the stage for the conflict, and the war's devastation and displacement led to many Koreans—particularly "war brides," adoptees, and students—migrating to the United States.
It's the third wave of immigration that concerns Lisa Lee in her debut novel American Han, which focuses on the diaspora struggles of the daughter of Korean immigrant parents, who would have arrived in the US around the time of the Immigration Act of 1965. The Act abolished discrimination based on national origin, enabling an easier naturalization process, and resulted in an influx of immigrants from Asian countries, particularly Korea. As a result, the Korean population in the US grew from 11,000 in 1960 to 290,000 in 1980. A 2022 census report showed that that number has since grown to over two million.
Uprooting oneself and one's family from their homeland is always going to be a complex and painful experience, which is a sentiment echoed by many Korean American scholars and individuals. Korean Americans (and many other Asian Americans) are faced with the additional burden of contending with the "model minority myth"—a narrative that gained traction in the 1960s arguing that Asian Americans, with their traditionally high academic performance and strong work ethic, embodied values that all immigrants to the US should share. In a survey conducted by the Pew Research Center, the majority of Asian American respondents reported that the model minority myth contributed to a heightened sense of social pressure and burnout, though some respondents reported that the stereotype has worked in their favor, allowing them to advance socially and professionally. The model minority myth is frequently used as a means of pitting different racially marginalized groups against one another; it is commonly used as evidence that racism doesn't exist, and often to perpetuate negative stereotypes about Black people.
A Seattle-based study showed that among an Asian American mental health survey, Korean Americans reported the highest rates of depression, and a California-based study showed that suicide rates among Korean Americans are significantly higher than those in other Asian American communities, but mental health services in Korean American communities are underutilized. Former president of the Korean American Psychological Association Justin Choi remarks that "The suicide rate among Korean immigrants has been closely following the statistics in Korea for a long time. There is a unique cultural and psychological connection maintained even across the Pacific."
Some would refer to this unique cultural phenomenon as han, which can be explained as a feeling of sorrow, resentment, and anger, born from a collective history of suffering and displacement, or, as the LA Times describes, "the ineffable sadness of being Korean." But han is not solely a negative emotion—it can also represent a feeling of hope and resilience. Though the word itself is older, the concept of han largely gained traction in the twentieth century, in response to Japan's occupation of Korea and the subsequent invasion of the US and the Soviet Union.
Not all Koreans and Korean Americans share the same view of han. In an essay titled "The Problem with Han," Minsoo Kang argues that the concept is dated, and that it positions South Koreans as "perennially condemned as the passive victims of history," downplaying their achievements. But some Korean Americans in particular find solace in the concept. In a poem that is likewise titled "American Han," E.J. Koh writes, "Han is not just trauma, vague in western circles for colonization and war, historical defeat and inhumanity. Han, not as an illness, but a way of thinking about our lives. Han specific to Korea but not limited to Korea. Han as exile by native Koreans. Han as crossing the Pacific. The word brings me closer to the truth of living as a perpetual outsider and against the definition of han as nationhood."
This concept is further explored in Lisa Lee's American Han, which uses the lens of han to explore the dysfunction of a single Korean American family.
Koreatown in New York City in 2013, photo by Ingfbruno, courtesy of Wikipedia CC BY-SA 3.0
by Carissa Véliz
Today's computer scientists play the same role as the oracles of the ancient world and the astrologers of the Middle Ages. Modern predictions not only advise on war, crop output, and marriages, but algorithms and statisticians also now determine whether we can get a loan, a job, an apartment, or an organ transplant. And when we cede ground to these predictions, we lose control of our own lives.
In this powerful, refreshing new look at the many ways prediction shapes our everyday lives, University of Oxford professor Carissa Véliz explains how putting too much stock in others' predictions makes us vulnerable to charlatans, con artists, dubious technology, and self-deception. Examining a wide range of subjects both personal and societal, including medicine, climate, technology, society, and others, Véliz uncovers a number of insights: predictions about humans tend to be self-fulfilling; more data doesn't guarantee better outcomes; AI is more likely to increase risk than decrease it; and a free and robust society requires not more prediction, but better preparation.
Véliz argues in this incisive and bracingly original book that the main promise of prediction is not knowledge of the future, but rather power over others. Prophecy is an invitation to defy those orders and live life on our own terms.
It's difficult to overstate how much of our daily life is shaped by prediction. From the mundane (checking the weather before getting dressed; deciding which route to take to work to avoid traffic) to the massive (credit scores; election polling) much of modern existence is built on claims about the future. But how often do we pause and consider the ethics behind those predictions? Not often enough, philosopher Carissa Véliz successfully argues in her new book, Prophecy.
Knowledge is power, and from antiquity to the present, simply claiming to have knowledge of the future has been its own form of influence. The Oracle at Delphi and Sam Altman alike position themselves in the halls of power, informing policymaking and making grand promises that tend to manifest the future they foresee. When King Louis XI's court astrologer predicts that he will die three days before the King himself, Louis decides against executing him. When Altman asserts that widespread adoption of artificial intelligence is inevitable—and when every sector of society caves to FOMO and begins adopting it—OpenAI's stock rises.
Véliz's goal is not to provide a solution to one's AI anxieties, whether you're more worried about mass unemployment or the implosion of Google's search function. Rather, she aims to spark public debate on the ethics of prediction itself. As she puts it: "What exactly are predictions, what are their effects, who has the authority to make them, and when is it appropriate to use them?" These questions have been missing from current discussions on artificial intelligence, possibly because the term "AI" has become so vague and overextended, used for everything from machine learning models to Studio Ghibli filters, obfuscating the fact that it is simply a glorified predictor that uses massive amounts of data to predict likely responses.
Predictions express an idea about the future. That expression can become a self-fulfilling prophecy, like how pre-election polling can convince discouraged candidates to drop out early or reshape fundraising and donor decisions. Some predictions have fairly clear-cut, evidence-backed visions of the future, like weather forecasts. Other predictions, while their predictors may claim that same level of scientific rigor, use algorithms that simply launder the human biases behind them—for example, the documented way that AI disproportionately approves mortgage loans for white families over families of color. Your data is not and should not be your destiny, Véliz argues.
Véliz brings the same depth of analysis to Prophecy that she showcased in Privacy Is Power, her treatise on creating a culture of privacy over disclosure in the modern world. Several arguments carry over from that work—for example, how AI companies' incentive to scrape all the data they can from users presents a clear threat to privacy rights—but Prophecy's scope is wider; it is simultaneously a book about technology, business, politics, history, philosophy, and personal development. In the hands of a less skilled teacher, it might become a "Book of Everything," and thereby nothing, but Véliz is an engaging professor, who knows how to introduce multiple sides of a complicated debate without losing her audience.
Take the early chapters on historical prediction, which explore multiple cases of the social and political power of oracles. I've been overexposed to Foreign Affairs' weekly citations of Thucydides and tend to roll my eyes when a writer starts drawing threads from the U.S. to Ancient Greece, but Véliz provides enough substantive analysis to justify all this context, and it's an enjoyable exercise to infer one's own parallels to our modern world. For example, she uses Alexander the Paphlagonian's scheme to make a snake appear as a divine oracle as an example of the risk of scamming; we can also connect the scheme, in which he provides a voice to the snake from afar, to modern companies outsourcing the driving of autonomous vehicles to human operators, or the revelation of Builder.AI's $1.5 billion valuation being driven by staff pretending to be sophisticated bots. In Véliz's telling, the role of medieval fortunetellers is increasingly played by tech executives.
Prophecy could be interpreted by critics as a book against technology and measurement, but to read Véliz's case as a Luddite reaction to AI would be disingenuous. She takes issue more with the growing over-quantification of the human experience. Her ethical and aesthetic arguments are convincing: Yes, it should be shocking to us that companies want to automate creativity, that creating art is being framed as a kind of chore. Yes, there are some contexts that prediction should play no part in. Theoretically, predictive algorithms could analyze vast amounts of data to determine an individual's likelihood of committing a crime. But it would be antithetical to the values of justice systems around the world—fairness, impartiality—to judge people by their probability, even if there were a potential benefit to society's safety. A low-stakes example: "You might be sure that your colleague will leave his dirty coffee cup behind, but it would be inappropriate to send him an angry email about it until he does. So why are we denying people loans, jobs, apartments, bail, and other opportunities on the basis of merely predictive evidence?"
Near the conclusion, Véliz describes hosting discussions with students at Oxford, pushing them to analyze and reflect more deeply, asking probing questions on the "why" behind their deepest-held beliefs. Those discussions are heavy; the pages are dense with citations. With such a good guide, though, this burden is manageable, and lifting it makes you strong. Prophecy feels like one of those office hours: in a few hundred pages of research, Véliz managed to guide me through one of the most complicated, mis- and disinformation-laden topics of our time with a gentle hand and an invitation to think more critically about my assumptions. She may not give readers the perfect way forward in Prophecy, but she gives us the space and several considerations with which to figure out our next steps. Whichever future you choose, just make sure you're the one choosing it—not an algorithm, not an oracle, but your own mind.
Book reviewed by Margaret Belford
Perhaps no current event better embodies Prophecy's concerns about prediction, Big Tech, and ethics than the rise of prediction markets. Platforms like Polymarket and Kalshi have raked in billions of dollars with the idea of placing bets on the future, from the outcome of football matches to the front lines of war. What are they, and how might the ethical lens of Prophecy apply?
Prediction markets are, broadly, online spaces for people to put money on the outcome of future events. That includes everything from sports matches to natural disasters to Russian troop movements in Ukraine. They leapt into the mainstream in 2024 when Polymarket correctly predicted, via the aggregation of its users' bets, the results of the U.S. presidential election much better than polls and pundits did.
The root of modern prediction markets is often traced to three University of Iowa economists, who created the Iowa Electronic Markets in 1988 as a solution to inaccurate elections polling. Their exchange recruited students and faculty to place bets on the upcoming Dukakis-Bush presidential election, utilizing student computer labs, in an age before personal laptops. The market was shockingly accurate, and continues to operate today for research and teaching purposes. These kinds of markets were confined to universities in the U.S., however—the only place legal to trade on election results at that time—and their overseas equivalents never scaled.
Ironically, commentators did not predict the success of prediction markets in the U.S. For years, gamblers were mostly uninterested in making bets on niche political topics, and few investors wanted to contribute to a market without a profit advantage over traditional markets, meaning that there was a lack of liquidity. Also, their legality was questionable—in 2022, Polymarket was forced to shut down in the U.S. for operating as an unlicensed betting site, setting up its headquarters with a P.O. box in Panama, and only recently had their federal investigation dropped by the predication market-friendly Trump administration. In Prophecy, Véliz points out how public trust in statistics and probabilistic thinking have risen at the same time that faith in institutions and bureaucracy has declined. That same trend may at least explain the recent explosion in prediction markets: today, more than two billion dollars are traded weekly on Kalshi, and Polymarket is valued at $15 billion.
Prediction markets should, in theory, combine the wisdom of the crowd with the price mechanism of markets to give policymakers and the public an outline of the future, as the Iowa Electronic Markets did. But they also give incredible incentive to engage in insider trading—like the U.S. soldier charged with using classified information to make over $400,000 on Nicolas Maduro's arrest—or to place highly visible bets to influence the outcome of events they predict. In 2025, the CEO of Coinbase raised eyebrows at the end of an earnings call by listing off five buzzwords, each with bets on Kalshi and Polymarket predicting whether they would be said at that meeting.
Market advocates tend to adopt a "Let's make a market on everything" mentality. The more data, the more exercise of market forces, and the more accurate the prediction. But cases like these call to mind Véliz's declaration of quantification, paraphrasing Max Weber, as an "iron cage of rationality"—just because we can bet on everything, should we?
A person sits at a laptop as the screen shows a currency trading market
Image courtesy of NIKON CORPORATION, NIKON D780.
by Ann Patchett
When Daphne Fuller and her husband Jonathan visit the Metropolitan Museum of Art, they notice an older, white-haired gentleman following them. The man turns out to be Eddie Triplett, her former stepfather, who had been married to her mother for a little more than year when Daphne was nine. Now fifty-three, Daphne hasn't seen Eddie for many years, not since the fateful event that changed the direction of both their lives. Meeting again, time falls away; while their relationship was brief, it had a profound impact on them both, and now that they are reunited, they have no intention of ever being separated again.
Whistler is a story about two adults looking back over the choices they made, and the choices that were made for them. It's a story about bravery, memory, the often small yet consequential moments that define our lives, and the endless stream of loss that in time comes for us all. Beautiful in its simplicity, it is ultimately about how love endures, and how the feeling of being known by one other person, even for a short period of time, can change everything.
Whistler, Ann Patchett's tenth novel (after 2023's Tom Lake) begins with a chance encounter. Fifty-three-year-old Daphne Fuller and her husband, Jonathan, are enjoying a quiet Saturday at New York's Metropolitan Museum of Art when Jonathan tells her they're being followed. He doubles back and confronts the supposed stalker, only to find that the man is actually Daphne's former stepfather Eddie Triplett, whom she hasn't seen in nearly 45 years. As the pair reconnect over the ensuing months, Daphne gradually remembers a terrible ordeal they endured together, an event that precipitated her parents' divorce and the abrupt removal of Eddie from her life when she was nine. An older Daphne narrates the novel, reminiscing about her time with Eddie (both as a child and as an adult) and gradually revealing why he left. Along the way, she finally accepts that she wasn't responsible for his abandonment, even after carrying that belief for decades.
Patchett's last few novels have revolved around parent-child relationships as seen through the eyes of the now-adult child. Whistler continues that theme, exploring the complex bonds between family members and how those ties influence who a person ultimately becomes. Patchett excels at portraying these connections, crafting authentic characters and situations that draw readers into her world.
Although at times the narrator recollects her childhood, many of her thoughts dwell on aging; one particularly important scene talks about impermanence and nonattachment (see Beyond the Book). She also addresses memory—the importance of recalling the past, the potential inaccuracy of memory, and how one remembers those who are no longer a part of one's life. Finally, Patchett addresses the power of storytelling. Specifically, Eddie's tale about a horse named Whistler aids Daphne during the episode at the heart of the novel, but more generally the narrative underscores the importance of our own stories—those we tell others (and ourselves) about who we are.
As always, Patchett's prose sparkles; her writing is deceptively simple yet beautifully descriptive. On encountering Eddie in the museum, Daphne recalls:
"All of this transpired quietly; no one turned to watch life's drama unpacked in the gallery, but still I made a sound. I put my hand to my mouth to stop it, but it had already gotten away from me. It was his voice, Eddie Triplett's voice, coming out of this old man's mouth…And with that I bowed my head and covered my face. I hadn't known there was something in me to break, but there it was and break it did. I stepped into an open crack in time and fell backwards."
The novel is largely character-driven, but the mystery of what exactly happened in Daphne's past drives the plot forward and keeps pages turning; details about the incident are revealed only gradually over the course of the story. That, combined with the author's brilliant writing and interesting characters, allows the plot to move along at quite the clip.
A new novel by Ann Patchett is always a cause for celebration, and Whistler doesn't disappoint. It may, in fact, be the author's best novel to date. Fans will be thrilled, and those readers unfamiliar with her work will be hooked. It's highly recommended for most audiences, but especially for those who appreciate literary fiction. It would also be a great book club selection; its themes will provide many avenues for a great discussion.
Book reviewed by Kim Kovacs
In Ann Patchett's novel Whistler, a pivotal scene occurs between the primary character, Daphne Fuller, and her former stepfather, Eddie. In it, they discuss Eddie's beliefs about the afterlife, which he says he formed in part by reading The Tibetan Book of the Dead.
The Tibetan Book of the Dead is the English title for a Buddhist text knows as Bardo Thodol (also bar do thos grol), generally translated as The Great Liberation by Hearing in the Intermediate States. In Tibetan Buddhism, the Bardo Thodol is read aloud to a dying or dead individual to help guide them through the intermediary state between life and death—the bardo—to either rebirth or enlightenment. (See the Beyond the Book for George Saunders's novel Lincoln in the Bardo for a more complete discussion of the bardo.)
Tradition has it that the Bardo Thodol was composed by Padmasambhava, an eighth-century tantric Buddhist Vajra master (an esteemed spiritual teacher), known more commonly as Guru Rinpoche. The work was transcribed by Padmasambhava's consort and student, Yeshe Tsogyal, who then buried it in the Gampo Hills in Central Tibet. It was said that the guru had all his writings hidden—under rocks, in lakes, in trees, etc.—to be found by Buddhist masters known as tertöns ("treasure revealers") when the information they contained was most needed. According to legend, the Bardo Thodol was rediscovered in the fourteenth century by the then fifteen-year-old Tibetan Karma Lingpa (c. 1326–c. 1386), though scholars suggest the work was actually authored by several individuals over many years, and that the current version dates from the fourteenth or fifteenth century.
The book came to the attention of Western scholars in the early twentieth century. A British officer, Major W.L. Campbell, returned from Asia in 1919 with a copy of the Bardo Thodol, which he shared with anthropologist Walter Evans-Wentz. Evans-Wentz, in turn, produced an English-language translation with the help of Lama Kazi Dawa Samdup, a teacher at a local school. Published as The Tibetan Book of the Dead in 1927, this version is the one most widely known in English-speaking countries and upon which most other translations are based. The title's similarity to E.A. Wallis Budge's translation of the Egyptian Book of the Dead, 1867, was deliberate; Evans-Wentz wanted his work to call to mind the earlier text.
Before long, Westerners began to adopt the book beyond its intended use as part of funerary rites. Carl Jung wrote an essay for the 1935 German edition (published in English in 1957) that contained a commentary on the work, seeing echoes between his own theories on consciousness and the views expressed in Bardo Thodol. And in 1964, Timothy Leary, Ralph Metner, and Richard Alpert published The Psychedelic Experience, a manual meant to guide people through LSD trips that was based loosely on the Bardo Thodol.
Translations of the text are in wide publication today, and Buddhism and Buddhist concepts are becoming more widely adopted in the United States as many seek an alternative to Judeo-Christian traditions. According to the Pew Research Center, the number of Buddhists in the U.S. grew by 22% in the decade between 2010 and 2020. Modern readers of the Bardo Thodol, such as Whistler's Eddie, use its tenets as a tool for personal growth; its teachings about nonattachment and impermanence hit home for many. As Eddie puts it, "Once we're comfortable with death, we'll do a better job with our lives."
You can read the full text of the Bardo Thodol (English translation) here.
by Gabrielle Sher
Yetta is a bright, quick teenage girl with a wild, searching spirit. Stifled by her mother's anxiety, her father's rules, and the path that's been laid out for her, she craves freedom, the edges of which she doesn't know. But her family has reason to be cautious and restrictive. Fear has wrapped itself around their shtetl. Jews are mysteriously disappearing, and there are whispers of an impending attack. When violence comes to their door, Yetta is killed.
Her father, in his grief, fumbles through his nascent knowledge of ancient texts and old magic to bring her back. By some miracle, Yetta is returned—but although she looks the same, she is not the girl she once was. Yetta senses there is a secret her family is keeping from her. The answer resides, in part, in the creature lurking in the woods beyond the shtetl―something that may be of her father's making, and a being that has plans of its own.
Blending history with magical realism, Gabrielle Sher's debut novel Odessa takes place in the early 20th century Russian Empire during the pogroms, a series of government authorized attacks on Jewish communities throughout the empire. We follow Yetta, a bright, spirited girl on the cusp of adulthood, happily engaged to be married, as she is brutally murdered when Cossacks run riot through her village. Stricken by grief and rage, her father Mordechai calls upon his studies of ancient Jewish texts and enacts a ritual to bring his daughter back. Though Yetta is seemingly revived, her body and soul are changed in irreparable ways—a painful truth that she and her family must reckon with, all while the threat of further violence closes in.
It quickly becomes clear after Yetta's resurrection that, in a desperate act to save his daughter, Mordechai has tapped into the lore of the golem, a being from Jewish legend that is said to be forged from clay and given life by its creator (see Beyond the Book). Remarkably strong and resilient, the golem acts as a protector of the Jewish people, carrying out its master's orders without question.
In the context of the father-daughter relationship of Odessa, this controlling dynamic between master and golem becomes more morally complex. In life, Yetta had a rebellious streak, sneaking out of the home to visit her betrothed against her father's wishes. Now, reborn as a golem in a body crafted by Mordechai, her free will is suppressed and she is compelled to follow his commands. Knowing this, Mordechai sends Yetta out to defend their community from further Cossack attacks, emotionally manipulating her into doing so willingly, in order to mask the reality that she has no agency. "God saw you, and gave you strength," he tells Yetta. "More strength than a man. A miracle, a real miracle. And if God has given it to you, it would be spitting in His face not to use it."
Though Mordechai bends the truth and forces his daughter into dangerous situations, he is not quite a villain in Odessa—he does these things because he genuinely believes they are the right things to do in order to protect his family and set his people free from persecution. Through her complex characters, Sher explores how, especially in times of conflict and war, good people can do bad things in the pursuit of freedom or self-defense—be it Mordechai's manipulation, Yetta's violent revenge against the Cossacks, or her mother, Frieda, keeping secrets from her family.
Frieda is Mordechai's opposite: While he sees his daughter's new form as a weapon and boldly pursues justice through brute force, she is decidedly more gentle, anxious, and ruminative. As a woman, she is confined entirely to the home, expected to carry out her husband's commands; indeed, in many ways, her life mirrors that of a golem, lacking in autonomy, which she laments: "She wished she did not freeze when she was afraid, watching herself from a numb distance as she obeyed her husband. She wished she could shout to herself in those moments to wake up, push back, be strong." As the narrative progresses, Frieda begins to protect her family and pursue her freedom in a quieter, more peaceful way than her husband's tactics, as she seeks to find a means of escape without the need for further bloodshed. This subtle contrasting of Mordechai and Frieda's approaches introduces the idea that there is more than one way to be strong, and that cycles of violence can indeed be broken.
While her parents are positioned to contrast each other, Yetta fights to reconcile two seemingly contradictory aspects of herself: the broken mortal girl mourning the life she could have had, and the powerful supernatural entity bound by duty to her people. This struggle manifests thematically, but also physically. It becomes clear that Mordechai's ritual separated Yetta's body and soul not only spiritually, but in a much more literal sense. As such, Yetta must fight to reunite the fractured pieces of her being. But if Yetta the golem is to seek revenge on behalf of Yetta the human, she risks becoming precisely the kind of monster she always feared.
If there is one weak link in this complex family dynamic, it is Yetta's younger brother. Compared to the others, he feels underdeveloped, serving merely as a device to showcase Yetta's caring nature. Still, this does little to hamper the novel's overall impact. Odessa is a bold, gripping exploration of a dark era in human history. Through Yetta's tragic story, her struggle to reconcile life before and after death, and her parent's contrasting responses to her trauma, Sher looks at what it takes to survive against impossible odds, and what it truly means to be alive.
Book reviewed by Callum McLaughlin
In her debut novel, Odessa, author Gabrielle Sher reimagines the legend of the golem to explore historical persecution of Jews, as well as notions of power and control. In traditional Jewish folklore, a golem is a being formed of earth or clay, given life by its creator using ritualistic incantations and scripture.
The word "golem" comes from ancient Hebrew and usually translates as "unfinished," "shapeless," or "embryo," reflecting both its creation from an inanimate substance and its status as not quite human, despite its humanoid appearance. There are many variations of the golem story throughout Jewish history, but most versions depict the creature as a protector of the Jews, following its creator's orders and using its superhuman strength to defend vulnerable communities from attack.
It is thought by some that wise Rabbis could call upon language set out in the Sefer Yetzirah, or Book of Creation, a work of Jewish mysticism, to bring a golem to life. The most widely known version of the golem story takes place in Prague in the 16th century. The city was under the rule of the Roman Empire, with Jewish communities facing persecution. Seeking to protect his people, Rabbi Judah Loew gathered clay from the Vltava River and formed it into the shape of a man. He then carved three Hebrew letters into the creature's forehead: aleph, mem, and tav. Some versions have him inscribe the letters on a small tablet that he placed in the creature's mouth instead, but in either instance, it is these letters—which together form the Hebrew word emet, meaning truth—that bring the golem to life to stop the attacks.
The golem's role is more nuanced than mere protector, however. In many versions of the tale, the creature becomes increasingly strong and unruly, making it unreliable and difficult to keep under control. In some examples, it begins to develop human emotions, lashing out violently when it faces rejection. In most cases, it either fails to carry out orders, or interprets them so literally that it leads to disaster, ultimately forcing its creator to destroy it. In this way, many see the golem story primarily as a cautionary tale, warning people against the dangers of playing God, or misusing their power over others.
If a golem's creator erased the first letter of the inscription on its head, it was left with the Hebrew word met, meaning death. This would return it to a lifeless mound of clay. One legend has it that after Rabbi Loew turned that famous golem back into clay, he hid its remains in the attic of the Altneuschul synagogue in Prague, ready to be reanimated should the Jewish people ever require its protection once more.
Rabbi Loew creating the golem
Image courtesy of the Czech Digital Library
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