Pernath seems to have no memory of his earlier life, and drifts through the ghetto becoming embroiled in plots and patterns over which he has no control. Not all of it makes sense as Meyrink's dreamlike prose weaves around the citry's narrow cobbled streets, with Pernath attracting grotesques as a candle flame does moths. There follow a series of encounters, some confusing, some macabre, some frightening. He tries on a mysterious hat belonging to one Athanasius Pernath and is plunged into Pernath's story, and head. The Golem begins with an unnamed narrator who is unsettled by bizarre dreams and seems disjointed from his existence in the Jewish ghetto of Prague. But as its main character, Athanasius Pernath, a gem-engraver living in the Jewish ghetto, is plunged from one nightmarish scenario to another at the behest of shadowy powers, unknowable bureaucracy and individuals with covert agendas: perhaps his is the story of the Jews of the Prague ghetto and their centuries of subjugation at the hands of others. Meyrink began writing it in 1907, so The Golem cannot really be read as an allegory for the first world war. When the final instalment of The Golem was published in August 1914, war had just broken out. For the duration of its first publication in serial form from December 1913, the political manoeuvring that led to the Great War was rumbling along in the background of European life.
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