Eight Crazy Frights: Eight Great Jewish Horror Stories

                                                                                         

                                                            Chanukah Sameach!

I am not myself Jewish, so it would be presumptuous of me to set this out as some sort of canon, or to cheekily rate each story by "how Jewish is it?" As for criteria: In the introduction to The Jewish Book of Horror,  Rabbi John Carrier suggests that Jewish horror is simply horror written by a Jew. 

I don't quite agree: For example, Harlan Ellison's Jewish heritage informs many of his stories (including one that did make the list), I wouldn't think of, say, "Flop Sweat" or "Shattered Like a Glass Goblin" to be Jewish horror stories  any more than F. Paul Wilson's Catholic background (which, again, informs many of his stories) makes  "Cuts" or "Soft" specifically Catholic horror stories. 

So, the idea was to find horror stories written by Jews that themselves seem to speak to some element of the Jewish experience. And, of course, they had to be good stories in their own right. 

1. The Golem by Yudl Rosenberg

Synopsis: Facing persecution and the anti-Semitic blood libel, Rabbi Liva builds Joseph the Golem to help the Jews of Prague.

Thoughts: The Golem was obviously going to be on here; along with the Dybbuk, it's one of the first things that jumps to mind when thinking of the Jewish supernatural tradition. Usually, there's an element of the Frankenstein story in the Golem myth--do not call up what you can't put down, he who lives by the sword shall perish by the sword, etc.

This version. . .doesn't really have that. Rabbi Liva decommissions Joseph the Golem at the end of the story only because they've defeated the blood libel and Joseph's services are no longer required. And, while that makes this version of the story less horrific and more straight fantasy, I kinda like it. Sometimes, things do go right. And besides--there are enough downer endings on this list that we may as well begin with something a bit more pleasant.

Where to Find It: To get this out of the way--this is a bibliographic nightmare, since many of these stories are from folklore or from religious texts, and that's not an easy citation. To keep it simple, I'm sticking with one of the books I used for research: Great Tales of Jewish Fantasy and the Occult (ed. Joachim Neugroschel). It's an entertaining read, and easy to dip in and out of.

2. On Seas of Blood and Salt by Richard Dansky

Synopsis: Reb Palache, pirate captain, battles a ship of the living dead on the high seas.

Thoughts: "Rabbi Pirate Fights Zombies" is a premise that seems too good to be true. It sounds like a Newgrounds video from the days when the Internet was full of that 'epic random' crap. In lesser hands, it would be, but Richard Dansky is not "lesser hands." We open with Reb Palache having a religious discourse with an angel (whether or not said angel is metaphorical, I'm not entirely sure), which sets the mood well. I admit that I'm not sure what being a pirate captain has to do with tikkun olam, but there are other Reb Palache stories so maybe one of them explains this.

This story brings the goods as an action-horror piece, and just when you think it's done, BAM!, there's a second wind and things get more interesting and gruesome.

I enjoyed Reb Palache's chest of mystical Jewish artifacts--it reminded me of the occult powders and preparations that William Hope Hodgson's Carnacki employed alongside his scientific methods, or of the holy relics that various Catholic heroes bust out in John Bellairs novels.

Where to Find It: The Jewish Book of Horror, and Dansky's collection A Meeting in the Devil House (which includes some other Reb Palache stories). And...it's a podcast! 

3. A Prayer for No One's Enemy by Harlan Ellison

Synopsis: After an anti-Semitic protest turns into a riot, two high school boys find themselves brokering a meeting between an elderly Jewish woman and a young neo-Nazi.

Thoughts: The tricky thing about Ellison is that although his Jewish heritage does come through in his writing, it's hard to pin something down as simply "A Jewish horror story." "Boulevard of Broken Dreams" has an all-too timely moral horror element of it, like a Rod Serling script, but it's not exactly horrific in genre terms, and while I think there's a provocative element to it, it kinda coasts on the initial shock value. "Mom" came very close to making the list--it's a delightful ghost story and a love letter to Jewish-American mothers--but even though there's a ghost, it's played for laughs and fond "awwws," not horror.

This isn't really horror either--except it is. The ending is as upsetting and devastating as any "proper" horror story on this list, and it's worse because, well, this sort of thing hasn't gone away. Even worse is the way in which hatred twists around on itself, poisoning the souls of those who wield it and those who are wounded by it alike.

Where to Find It: The Essential Ellison (where it's quite correctly filed in the "Worlds of Terror" section), and in Love Ain't Nothing But Sex Misspelled (which you can either find as a stand-alone or together with The Beast that Shouted Love at the Heart of the World in White Wolf's Edgeworks 4 omnibus.

4. Dancing Men by Glen Hirshberg

Synopsis: Seth is the grandson of a Holocaust survivor and has strained relationships with both his father and grandfather. A childhood visit to the latter in the New Mexico desert exposes him to a Navajo ritual--and a distinctly Old World horror that it conjures.

Thoughts: This is a difficult one to discuss without getting into spoiler territory, so I won't. What I will say is that while "trauma and/or survivor's guilt are the monsters" are well-trod paths in contemporary horror fiction (sometimes, too well-trod), "The Dancing Men" goes to the next level. The difference (besides the quality of Hirshberg's writing) is in maintaining the "guilt/trauma as monster/ghost" framework, but then reintegrating it back into the characters--body and soul. It is a moving and provocative and disturbing story, worthy of a close and careful read. This is as good as it gets.

Where to Find It: Ellen Datlow's a huge fan of this story--it's shown up in no fewer than four of her anthologies: The Dark (where it first appeared), Year's Best Fantasy & Horror 17, Darkness: Two Decades of Modern Horror, and Edited By. If you want more Hirshberg than just this, it's in his The Two Sams: Ghost Stories.

5. The Dybbuk by Ber Horovitz

Synopsis: An woman's impure thoughts causes her son to be born with the soul of a sinful gentile. Time for an exorcism!

Thoughts: The other slam dunk inclusion on this list. In truth, this isn't a particularly horrific story--nothing really bad happens, and everyone lives happily ever after (yay!). This is, however, a fun story--a good religious parable with entertaining cultural flavor.

Where to Find It: Again, I went with Great Tales of Jewish Fantasy and the Occult, but there are versions of this story all over the place.

6. The Enemy by Isaac Bashevis Singer

Synopsis: A Yiddish newspaperman tells the story of a mysterious, unbelievably rude, and possibly supernatural waiter on an ocean liner.

Thoughts: Part of the point of Kirby McCauley's all-important anthology Dark Forces was to showcase the "serious," "literary" side of horror. To that end, he seeded it with contributions both from well-respected sf writers (Joe Haldeman, Gene Wolfe) and with a pair of literary heavy-hitters as respectable as you can get: Isaac Bashevis Singer and Joyce Carol Oates.

Singer's story is great: It's literate, funny, and scary. Parts of it remind me of Campbell in how it locates horror in everyday experiences of rudeness and humiliation, and then goes further. I also appreciate that Singer invokes concerns from Jewish history but doesn't make the story a mere metaphor for Nazi-era persecution: Our protagonist is sailing to NYC from Argentina shortly after WWII, so when he encounters rudeness--and mocking servings of pork chops--from the waiter, he and we suspect a former Nazi carrying the bad old traditions. But then, the waiter acts solicitous and polite with another openly Jewish family, so it isn't that simple. It's a savvy move--Singer taps into the threats and fears that underly the whole story, but doesn't let things be that simple.

The ending is great, too: On the surface, it ends with a shrug and the punchline to a Jewish shaggy-dog story, but the fact that the enemy has popped up again in New York leaves us with a lingering sense of fear.

Where to Find It: Dark Forces, which you should already have. If not, get a copy--or go all-in on Singer! You can find it in two single author collections--his mid-80s collection The Image and Other Stories, or Volume 3 of the Library of America's Isaac Bashevis Singer: Collected Stories series.

7. Crossing Into Poland by Isaac Babel

Synopsis: It's the Russo-Polish war of the 1920s, and the Red Army has just taken Novograd-Volynsk. Liutov, part of the rear guard, wades into the aftermath.

Thoughts: My brother turned me onto Isaac Babel and I love him (Babel. Well, also, my brother). It is a stretch to call Babel's works "horror"--they don't traffic in the supernatural. However, I think of Babel as carrying on in the tradition of someone like Guy de Maupassant (referenced by Babel in his story of the same name)--there's a conte cruel quality to much of both men's work.

I would happily (or unhappily--it's a grim story) list "Crossing Into Poland" along with Ambrose Bierce's "Chickamauga" and Charles Birkin's "The Happy Dancers" as examples of non-supernatural stories about violence and war that primarily aim at evoking emotions of fear, horror, and disgust. Maybe add the recently deceased John Varley's "The Manhattan Telephone Book (Abridged)" in there, too.

In many ways, this story actually does contain elements of a traditional horror story. The big reveal in the story is that the narrator has spent the night in the same bed as a dead man--a classic horror shocker. What adds an element of non-traditional horror is that Liutov himself is Jewish, and yet he is participating with blank indifference (not that he has much of a choice, but maybe that's even worse) with the casual oppression of his compatriots.

Where to Find It: This is part of the "Red Cavalry" story-cycle that's collected in the book of the same name. There are any number of translations of this and Babel's other stories--and all are very much worth your time.

8. How to Build a Sukkah at the End of the World by Lindsay King-Miller

Synopsis: Some helpful reminders on how to keep the Sukkot tradition going in a world where everything else (including, most recently, your mother) has fallen apart.

Thoughts: I mentioned the premise of this grim little story into my college friends group chat (which is overwhelmingly Jewish), and re-ignited a pilpul that had raged this last Sukkot about whether any citrus fruit can substitute for an etrog. They had other questions as well, such as "Wouldn't you be living in a tent the whole time during the apocalypse anyway?"

Anyway, I love this story. It's vague where it needs to be, and specific where it needs to be, and although there's a level of dark humor, it does nothing to, *ahem*, leaven the piece.

Where to Find It: The Jewish Book of Horror.