Faye and her brother Shiloh are half-Japanese and half-Jewish. At their school in Boston, other kids bully them. Over their spring break, their estranged grandfather visits, determines that it’s time to teach them how to build golems, and invites them back to his apartment in New York for training.
While there, Faye and Shiloh start having shared dreams where they are living the lives of other people with the same Hebrew names as them. Faye has the makings of a powerful golemcrafter, but she’s afraid of her power.
Emi Watanabe Cohen has meticulously researched the history of the Jewish diaspora and incorporated the history of Japanese people and Japanese Americans along with that history. Cohen provides an extensive bibliography.
This book is hard to read because it so clearly reflects the struggles Jewish people have faced and continue to face and explicitly connects the antisemitism of the past with the antisemitism of the present. Cohen presents this challenging story beautifully.
Structurally, the story wasn’t quite what I expected. I expected something with a sort of classic fantasy structure, but instead there is a lot of time spent in the dreams and a conclusion that felt to me like it should really be the beginning of the next part of the story rather than the end of the whole thing.
Readers looking for an exploration of Jewish history and why it’s important for Jewish people to hold onto who they are will find that here, from the perspective of modern kids.
I myself am three generations out from the Jewish people in my family who assimilated and intermarried so successfully that nobody was really around to pass on Jewish culture directly in our family. I’ve had to seek it out through other sources. As assimilated as my family has been, I still felt a deep connection to the story of these two kids and their ancestors.
Recommended for kids with interest in Jewish heritage and the commonalities between Jewish people and other oppressed peoples throughout history.
Book: Golemcrafters
Author: Emi Watanabe Cohen
Publisher: Levine Querido
Publication Date: November 12, 2024
Pages: 264
Age Range: Middle Grade
Source of Book: ARC via NetGalley, Public library