Odessa
By Gabrielle Sher (Little, Brown and Company)

According to Jewish legend, the golem is a living entity made out of clay created by learned holy men. A servant or protector of vulnerable Jewish communities, it is a dark redeemer whose unpredictable and dangerous behavior can lead to deep regret and guilt by its summoners. 

The golem is the main character in Gabrielle Sher’s gothic novel Odessa. Drawing on a masterful understanding of the horror genre, both classical and contemporary, and rendered with vivid, cinematic detail, Sher’s debut novel is a brilliant addition to the tradition of mythic storytelling.    

The book is set during the Russian Revolution of 1905, a year when Jews in the titular city experience a wave of devastating pogroms. Mordechai and his superstitious and fragile wife, Frieda, and their children, headstrong teenager Yetta and little Ephraim, live in fear of the Cossack troops acting as agents of the czarist government—performing military strikes, breaking up Jewish resistance groups and initiating pogroms.

Sher presents her story through Frieda, Mordechai and Yetta’s perspectives. Through their eyes, we see how their Jewish identity makes them a target, even as periods of normalcy and their supportive Jewish community provide a sense of security.

These moments are fleeting. The world of Odessa is marked by antisemitism and the indiscriminate killing of Jewish men, women and children. Mordechai, angered by his helplessness in the face of attacks, joins a resistance group. The consequences of his decision are devastating: His daughter is brutally murdered protecting her family during a pogrom.

It is at this point that Odessa switches from family tragedy to gothic horror, recalling the classic 1930s horror films. Mordechai takes Yetta’s lifeless body to a rabbi and begs him to bring her back. The rabbi warns that such an act could have grave consequences. But Mordechai is consumed by a single desire: to have his tempestuous daughter back and his family whole.

“He thought of his daughter,” Sher writes, “his human daughter, who had resisted everything expected of her in life—who had snuck out at night, argued with him, sung at synagogue when she wasn’t allowed, danced with unleashed joy on Purim, told the most unsavory stories she could find in the Torah, loved her family fiercely, so fiercely she had died for them. His hands shook.”

Mordechai and the rabbi, a scholar of Jewish mysticism, create a clay golem infused with Yetta’s spirit. At first, the transformation stays hidden even from Frieda and from Benyamin, Yetta’s hapless boyfriend. Then another monster is unleashed, a spirit of vengeance who wreaks havoc while taunting the golem into joining the acts of destruction. The golem must make a choice between family, love and loyalty, between her own desires and anger
at her fate.

The beauty of Odessa is the way it brings together the tropes of family drama, gothic horror, dark fantasy, Jewish fable and historical fiction, creating something new. Sher’s carefully crafted narrative weaves a powerful story about familial love in times of turmoil and the choices people make to protect those they love.

Like the greatest horror books and films, Odessa ultimately asks that unsettling question: Who are the monsters, really?

Douglas C. MacLeod Jr., is professor of composition and communication at SUNY Cobleskill and has published book reviews in multiple venues, including the Feathered Quill, Rain Taxi, The Arts Fuse and On the Seawall.