Book Reviews
Appealing.... The Golems of Gotham is also a complex novel. Rosenbaum has a fluent style that can pivot and change direction on a single word, and the novel is rich in detail and vignette.
New York Times Book Review
A vivid sense of how the Holocaust, far from being a discrete and completed event, is an open wound in the Jewish psyche.... Rosenbaum writes something strong and true.
Washington Post
A book at once magical and natural.... Rosenbaum’s novel is at once chilling and warm, rigorous and fanciful, savagely witty and profoundly reasoned. The Golems of Gotham charms as it frightens and moves us, and shows a novelist moving into the fullness of his imaginative capacity.
San Francisco Chronicle
Hilarious...more touching than tragic, more absurd than abject, ... very funny and a joy to read.... Comparisons to Michael Chabon’s brilliant The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay are unavoidable.... Written in an offhand, approachable prose that’s full of lyrical pyrotechnics.... With compelling characters, both dead and alive, prose that captures your attention but keeps you rooted in the story, serious issues addressed amid humor and fantasy, The Golems of Gotham is eminently readable, deeply personal and surprisingly satisfying
Denver Post
Mr. Rosenbaum’s novel is filled with wonderful comic invention ...but there is a much more serious point hiding behind Mr. Rosenbaum’s high jinks.... If the novel is filled with the fantastical, it is also just as full of the prophetic, and it is the latter that resonates long after the leaps of a very playful imagination have receded. No review can do justice to the richness packed into the 367 pages of The Golems of Gotham. I found myself rereading whole sections for the shape and ring of their paragraphs as well as the sheer emotional power packed into every catalogue, every observation of the world.
Florida Sun-Sentinel
A half-dozen ghosts of famous literary figures return to New York to help unblock a Jewish writer in Rosenbaum's intriguing but undisciplined second novel (after Second Hand Smoke), which begins with the suicide of a pair of elderly Holocaust survivors, Lothar and Rose Levin. Their deaths prove devastating to their son, Oliver, a successful author who was already struggling with a serious case of writer's block when his wife, Samantha, left him. Oliver's 14-year-old daughter, Ariel, responds to her father's struggles by conjuring up an illustrious group of literary golems who committed suicide in the wake of the Holocaust a group that includes the likes of Primo Levi and Jerzy Kosinski, as well as Oliver's deceased parents. They quickly provide Oliver with the inspiration to write a serious Holocaust novel as they commit various acts of mayhem around the city, and their rehabilitation project coincides with the rise of Ariel, a prodigal klezmer violinist whose talent lands her a gig at a major New York venue. Rosenbaum's far-fetched modern fairy tale is entertaining, despite some sappy moments, but his focus wanders frequently, particularly when he goes off on tangents about the golems as they work their strange magic. Moreover, he never comes close to capturing the essence of the writers, and by the end of the book they are little more than literary clowns. The author's passion for his subject permeates these pages, but it will be tough for this book to earn an audience beyond readers who share Rosenbaum's devotion to keeping the lessons of the Holocaust alive.
Publishers Weekly
When mystery writer Oliver Levin suffers writer's block, his 14-year-old daughter, Ariel, uses the kabbalah and forms a golem to summon help from her grandparents, Holocaust survivors who committed suicide when their only son was in college.... With this very accessible novel full of appealing characters, Rosenbaum...should help ensure that we never forget. —Michele Leber
Booklist
Rosenbaum's latest (Second Hand Smoke, 1999, etc.) promises an engagement with the relations between art, suffering, and memory, but delivers Mel Brooks without the rim shots in the tale of a blocked Jewish mystery writer whose daughter resurrects ghosts to release his creativity.
Kirkus Reviews