writes that “no religious knowledge of God… can be gained except through the contemplation of God to creation.” The mystics and Spanish kabbalists, who believed that the key to this knowledge was in certain letter combinations, concentrated on the Hebrew alphabet and on the unknown letters that make up the name of God. In the myth of the Golem, in which a rabbi created a man, letter combinations also play a role.

The idea that man, made in the image of his maker, can turn around and create an image of himself using certain combinations of letters has great resonance for a writer. That the golem was necessarily imperfect because man-made--he could not speak--is a challenge for anyone who uses letters, words, sentences, paragraphs, and so on, to create credible characters and a world in which they live. It was Tolstoy, not God (though as a novelist he was arguably Godly), who defined the novel as a necessarily flawed book of a certain number of pages.

In my life, imperfection in everything man-made was an early lesson. The dolls I grew up with had the tips of their noses sliced off to indicate that they were mere idols who couldn’t speak or think. Photographs allowed into my parents home also had to be made imperfect. The right-hand corner of the only print we have of the grandmother I’ve never met is cut off. In most spheres of religion and magic representative images of gods and goddesses are essential. In the strict monotheism of Judaism there is only one perfect being, whose name and image are unknowable.

The paradigm of imperfection is deep-seated in Jewish literature and emerges readily in the excerpts gathered in this collection. The contrast between the imperfect heroines written by Jewish writers and the idealistic ones of non-Jewish authors is also instructive. And that Phillip Roth’s Brenda Patimkin has to get her nose bobbed to make her “more perfect” seems ironically pertinent.

NOT THE IMAGE OF AN IDEAL: Jewish Heroines in Literature
Excerpted from the introduction to my anthology Een Sterke Vrouw, wie zal haar vinden? (Amsterdam: Meulenhoff, 2000).