Four years in Prague and I’ve never heard the sound of the Vltava River. There are too many noises in a city this size: too many tourists, too much traffic fighting its way across the city’s 17 bridges, too many boats navigating their way in and out of the country’s capital. It takes a dark sort of magic to create a silence like this: a pandemic that keeps everyone off the streets, a stillness in the wind that only comes this time of night. I had not expected to find myself here, alone, on the shore of the Vltava: it is almost impossible to find the sort of stillness that I’ve found here, the trickling of currents I have never heard before tonight.

I should be sleeping. Most people prefer to be out in the daylight, to enjoy the sun and get out in the world. The only time I’ve been able to leave my house lately is after my children are asleep. Running—especially in the dark, especially in a country where I do not speak the language—has taken on a deeper, meditative significance. I often pick a new direction with the intention of getting lost, with most of my exertion focused on finding my way back. Tonight’s meander brought me toward the city’s center, toward the water’s edge.

In the late 1600s, the Rabbi Judah Loew had a vision that pain, suffering, and persecution were coming for the Jews of Prague. The Rabbi, in his old age, wanted to ensure the protection of his people before he was gone. So late one night, he ventured out with his two most trusted pupils. They walked to the banks of the Vltava River, and there they drew the outline of a man into the clay. A ritual was performed: sacred texts read aloud as the pupils walked seven times around the drawing. As they walked, the clay began to heat and harden, turning red and then to white. The Rabbi spoke again as the clay cooled to the touch: the feel of human skin. Rabbi Judah put a shem with the word Emet (meaning life) written upon it under the tongue of the clay man; Judah watched as the creature took its first breath, where it rose from the filthy riverbank, where all eight-feet of the stone rose to stand before the three men, awaiting their command. Here was their protection, their savior: The Golem.

Prague is a city shrouded in mysticism. Perhaps it has to do with the legacy of Rudolf II, both the Holy Roman Emperor and Europe’s largest supporter of alchemy and the occult. Prague is not only one of the oldest cities in this part of the world, but unlike most neighboring cities, it was not damaged during World War II. Hitler loved Prague so much that he intended to live there after the war, purposely leaving soldiers and supplies outside the city’s borders so Allied forces would have no reason to bomb it. Perhaps it has to do with The Precious Legacy: Jewish relics collected by Nazis and sent to Prague to be part of the “Museum to an Extinct Race.” Most of these relics are still here: historical and mythological artifacts collected throughout the city, the amalgamation of them taking on a very visceral, if metaphorical weight. It is the sort of history that can be felt, that makes even walks to the grocery store take on their own sense of history and wonder.

I’ve lived in Prague for nearly five years, far longer than I expected. Prague is a city that’s beauty is overwhelming, but for as long as I’ve been here, my time here has felt temporary, as if I don’t belong to it. I largely blame it on my challenge with the language. My stay was meant to be short enough that it didn’t seem worth the trouble of taking formal classes, in investing my time in learning a language that isn’t spoken anywhere else. But then I was asked to stay another year, and then another. It’s been five years of expecting to leave at any moment, of assuming my challenges would magically disappear. So much time has passed and I can barely manage pleasantries with cashiers. I feel completely lost in the most basic of conversations. I’ve found that it’s usually easier to be silent, or to be simple, or to limit myself to the small expat bubble of companions I’ve encountered in the city. As each year passes, I can’t help but wonder why I’m feeling more isolated, rather than less; how my wife and children are able to speak and understand Czech so well while it completely eludes me.

Most of our monsters come from the wild: they represent the unknown, the forests and the oceans, the violent ends that come to those who leave the safety of civilization. There’s a reason mythological creatures don’t come from cities: full of witnesses and recorded history, there is nowhere these beasts could hide that wasn’t easily disproved. In the wild, it’s easier to assume our fear of monsters is the product of overactive imaginations: the feeling of vulnerability that comes from being alone. Despite this, it is possible to feel alone on a crowded street, to get lost in the labyrinths of winding streets and darkened alleys. Perhaps the fears we have in cities are easier to articulate: monsters aren’t necessary when people can be so cruel and indifferent. It’s easier to focus on the fears that are known, the monsters that are real, the unknown fading in the streetlight’s sodium glow.

The thing about a city like Prague is that it’s impossible to get lost, even when I’m trying to. It is a bowl-shaped city bisected by a river, meaning it is possible from almost anywhere to see the city’s landmarks. I live two blocks away from the city’s tallest structure, a television tower—designed in the waning years of Communist occupation that looks like a 1950’s Soviet vision of the future—that contrasts so sharply with the city’s architecture that it has been labeled the ugliest building in all of Europe. The tower itself is both so ugly and so conspicuous that it is photoshopped out of nearly every postcard featuring the city’s skyline. With a literal glowing beacon shining where I live, I must run miles before I cannot tell which way I’m going, whether I’m running toward or away from home.

Golems are creatures without will, following their master’s every command. Just as God formed Adam out of the dust of the Earth, so too are Golems called into the world by their creators. They do not sleep. They have no voice. What they have is complete obedience to their masters and a seemingly unlimited strength. Awesome in the Biblical sense.

The earliest known account of creating a Golem can be found in Sodei Razayya, dating back to the late 12th or early 13th century. This is at least 300 years after the founding of Prague, though it is likely that these instructions (and Golems) have been around for far longer than the city itself. Every city accumulates its own legends, but Prague is rare in that the evidence for these legends remains tangible: I have watched plays in the same theater where Mozart first performed Don Giovanni; I often run past a 1000-year-old rotunda with a cannonball embedded in it from an early Prussian invasion; I can still visit the synagogue where Rabbi Loew preached. If the evidence of such people and places exists, then what’s to say that the Golem should not be believed as well? Why must we make stories out of everything we can no longer see, despite evidence to the contrary?

There was only one problem with the spell that created the Golem: he needed to rest on the Sabbath. If he didn’t, then the Rabbi would lose control of the Golem, and his strength and fury would be released upon everything—and everyone—around him. Every Friday night, before Rabbi Loew went to the temple for evening prayer, he removed the shem from under the Golem’s tongue, turning the Golem back to stone so it could rest. Every Sunday morning, when the shem was returned and the Golem came back to life, it became more powerful than before.

Creating a Golem is a miraculous thing, but it is also a divine responsibility. A Golem has no soul, and so it takes on the soul of its Creator. The ancient texts say it should only be attempted by the pure of heart, by those whose own sins could not corrupt their Golem’s purpose. Which is to say, any man who is arrogant enough to believe he can create life out of dust is arrogant enough to believe that his way is the correct one. Why stop with persecuting Gentiles when the Jews commit enough sins against themselves? Why shouldn’t the Golem punish those who break God’s law? How to account for the fact that everyone falls into sin, that everyone is worthy of some punishment? How could it be that the rabbis' attempts at protection could only lead to more punishment and persecution?

Some nights, on my runs, I pick a street I’ve never travelled and see where it leads. More often than not, I find something beautiful: the surprise of a centuries old fortification, or the surprise of peacocks wandering through the dry moat surrounding the world’s largest ancient castle. Other times, it leads to discovery and happenstance, like last week, when I found myself standing at Franz Kafka’s grave. The dead occupy many spaces in this city, and the memorials of the famous are adorned by admirers. Near the school where I teach, there is a two-story monument marking the tomb of composer Antonin Dvorak, the grave of Karel Čapek not too far away. I can visit the final resting place of Rudolf II at St. Vitus Cathedral; Rabbi Loew’s tombstone can be found at the Old Jewish cemetery—customs said bodies could not be moved and so the dead are stacked twelve high in places, new dirt covers the old, the grave stones stacked on top of each other. Kafka is from a different time, a different cemetery; he is found in the New Jewish Cemetery that sits adjacent to a shopping center and a fitness club.

More interesting than Kafka’s grave is the wall it faces toward. On the outer wall of the cemetery gate is a memorial to the Jewish artists killed in the Holocaust. A city this old is full of memorials—for those who have died in the Hussite Wars, the 30 Years War, the fight for Czech Independence, for the Jews of World Wars 1 and 2, for the children put on trains to England to avoid the worst of it, for the victims of the oppressive Communist regime that followed Nazi occupation. But only this plaque characterizes the loss in this way: not in terms of who was lost, but in the lost potential for dance and words and music—how much better could we understand this world, how much beauty was erased from an otherwise ugly place if these people had been allowed to live their lives?

The instructions for making a Golem are right there, on the Internet, for anyone to uncover. A Google search for “How to Make a Golem'' brings up thousands of pages about Minecraft. “How to summon a Golem” brings up hits for the game Terraria. It is only after I look through the suggested searches (“How to make a Golem REAL LIFE”) do I find anything approximating real information.

I am digging through a translation of Sefer Yetzirah, the Book of Creation. To create a Golem, one must speak aloud the true name of God: the language spoken in the Garden of Eden, words lost to us now, received by Rabbi Loew in his dreamed prophecy. One must cleanse their bodies and dress in clean white vestments. One must take soil from a place that’s never been dug and water that’s never been contained and must knead them into clay. One must say the sacred words of God while they imagine the body of a man, creating an astral projection of sorts that can be placed into the clay’s created form: a process taking anywhere from seven to thirty-five hours of intense prayer and perfect articulation of God’s true language.

It is here where I have found something of a thesis: that language is not symbolic of something else, but a source of power in itself. That life or death can be brought into the world, if we could only know the right words to say. That a Golem can be created with a word, but can speak no words itself. That I’m feeling so lost in the language of this city should not be lost on anyone.

Within Prague there are hundreds of Stolpersteine, or Stumbling Stones: brass plates protruding a few millimeters above the cobblestones so pedestrians might trip upon them: each one placed in front of the last place a Jew chose to live, marking their date of birth, the date they were taken from their home, and—when known—the date and location of their death. Chosen homes have always been an issue here: a few years after Loew’s death, the Jews were banished from the city. No matter where you are in the city, you will be walking, and you will stumble, and you will see a ghost made out of stone. It is not a memorial to the dead, but a reminder that the dead are everywhere: the entire city a memorial to itself. For the voices silenced through the centuries, every name gets a few words to remember them by. So few words, but how they accumulate over every neighborhood, every wall, every stone, every death cataloged and marked with the utmost precision, with the exception of the Golem.

We do not know why the Rabbi Loew forgot to remove the shem from the Golem’s mouth: some version of events says that he was late to reading Scripture at the temple, other versions suggest that his daughter had fallen ill and he was distracted, others simply say he was slipping in his old age. But if we don’t know the why of this story, we do know the what: after the Rabbi forgot his most important task, the Golem gained control of its body, laying rampage to the Jewish quarter, to the people who stood in his way. Different versions of the legend leave us with different consequences: who was killed, what was burned. But every version includes this detail: that men ran into the temple to find the Rabbi, to interrupt the word of God to tell the Rabbi what his creation had done, and only in this moment does the Rabbi realize that the danger he had seen in the prophecy was the one he had created.

We do not know how Loew stopped the Golem. Different versions of the legend provide different possibilities: the Golem obeyed the Rabbi’s order and destroyed itself; a child befriended the Golem and removed the shem without realizing what it was; a second ceremony was performed with the rabbi and his pupils, this time in reverse. My favorite version is this: where the word Emet meant life, the word met meant death. In my favorite version of the story, the Rabbi managed to remove the shem from the Golem’s mouth, erased the e, and put the shem under the Golem’s tongue as the monster crumbled to dust. I like the power in this metaphor: that our words can hold such magic, that a single letter can be the difference between life and death.

Kafka took an interest in the Golem for reasons that are obvious in his work, but it was more personal than that: he was a Prague Jew whose health was failing, and the sicker he became, the more interested he became in connecting with his Jewish identity. It may have had something to do with his own thoughts on legacy, his fear of what remained of the self after death—the same concerns that motivated Rabbi Loew in the first place. Both Loew and Kafka came to regret the legacies they were leaving behind. The Golem attacked when its creator lost control, and Kafka’s work didn’t gain popularity until he was no longer around, until after he asked for his unpublished works to be destroyed. His words survived, while his body rests across from a memorial to the artists that didn’t. Kafka’s work dealt with holding onto identity among the cruel absurdity of the world, and he wrote it without ever seeing the Nazi tanks rolling through his city, without seeing the Nazis driven out by the Soviets who were, if anything, even more authoritarian; he wrote it without knowing that his home—originally built to house Rudolf II’s guards in the time of the Golem—would be turned into a shitty souvenir store that still bears his name on a small bronze plaque. With so much history circling around us, we must find ways to deal with it: selling postcards, erecting statues, looking in attics for famous monsters. Isn’t it all just trying to connect with some earlier version of ourselves, trying to give meaning to the places we inhabit?

Words are just sounds and shapes that stand for something else, but so much mythology depends on the idea that some of them are more: God brings the world into being by merely saying so, that the right syllables can sustain or destroy. A word placed under the tongue can turn clay into a man, while another can crumble him to nothing. A word like alchemy was magic until it was recorded, commodified, transmuted into chemistry. A word like defenestration can be born in a window in Prague Castle: that I can stand in the spot where the 30 Years War began, ultimately killing a quarter of Central Europe. After Rabbi Loew’s death, more Jews lived in Prague than anywhere else in the world. A word from the new monarch had all of them expelled: the words from the Rabbi’s vision coming true, as they would again and again over the next several centuries.

Here I am: a foreigner living in a city that’s been around longer than the scientific method, before we had so many ways of explaining the world. I’m at the edge of a river that’s been passing through this city since a time when the unknown could reasonably be described as magic. I think of the journey that brought me here: past the theater where R.U.R. was first performed, giving us the word Robot for the first time—a roughly translation of the word “slave.” Past the Old New Synagogue, past the Old New Jewish Cemetery where I can see Rabbi Loew’s grave. Past the statue outside the Synagogue with Franz Kafka riding on the shoulders of a headless Golem. Past the toy store in the city center which boasts a 12-foot statue of the Golem. Past the virtual reality escape room where you must find the hidden shem to stop the Golem’s destruction of the poorly rendered city that surrounds you: a world created through its own programmed language. Past brass plaques placed to commemorate the dead surrounded by cobblestones made out of tombstones stolen by the Communists. Past the square where an astronomical clock has been running for over 600 years. And if I can watch the movement of the sky in this clock—just as Loew did, just as Kafka did—then why can’t I believe that the Golem is possible?

It is dark now. It’s a city with over a million people and I’m the only one here, on the shores of the Vltava. There’s a comfort in this quiet: language doesn’t matter when you’re alone. I come to this water against the instructions I have read: you should never attempt to make a Golem on your own, for the sins of the creator are the ones that will imbibe the Golem with the very thing its creator is weakest against. Fuck it. I pick up a stick and begin drawing the figure of a man.

What I draw is crude but tall, poorly shaped and yet stronger than I could ever be. I do not have the incantations; I have no vestments; no companions to represent fire, water, or air. It is said that the word that brought the Golem to life was the true name of God, spoken aloud. Imagine what it would be to know a word like that, to have a language that could speak that much power to the world. Imagine what it would be to have that word turned against you. Imagine what it would be to stand at this river, to hear the sound of the city’s silence, the river speaking its own sort of language, making its own monster while you passively listen, while you try your best to understand.

For more information about this piece, see this issue's legend.