Chapter 1

Yoska cowered in the fetal position inside a wine barrel, surrounded by near total darkness, yet his senses were illuminated. The sweet scents inside his hideout were filled with joyful memories, yet outside was the unfamiliar, frightening sounds of violence - contradictions too complex for a 9-year-old boy to comprehend. For now, all he could do was feel. Understanding? That would take the rest of his life, and only through alternating decades of darkness followed by Cambrian explosions of light.

He was not certain if he was experiencing another visit from the monsters. All the signs were there. He could not move, he could not see, he could barely breathe and inside his barrel, he heard the sounds of demons. Or were they outside this time? The timing seemed all wrong. The monsters usually came to him in his bed, usually about an hour after he fell asleep. During the hazy area between sleep and life, they would come to him and pin him down so he could not move - not even twitch his nose or nudge his finger. And they would hover, whisper in languages he did not understand and press painfully on his back, threatening to break his spine in two.

No, Yoska thought. These dybbuks were different. They were not the ones who came to him as formless shadows. These ones were flesh, and they were growing louder, slurring their words - Hungarian words, not the strange speech from his waking, paralyzed dreams.

Yoska tried to tune out the senses that created fear. So he closed his eyes, covered his ears, and focused on the pleasant.

First, was the scent of old oak mixed with the sweet memory of Pesach. The residual smell of Passover wine soaked into the oak barrel in which he hid - curled but unable to lie in the upright container - helped him recall the laughter of family, the taste of holiday chocolates, the mild intoxication of his grape juice spiked with a touch of sticky, syrupy, sweet alcohol. Last year's Pesach meal was the first seder in which he was allowed to pour a drop of wine into his cup. He wasn't sure how it was done, or what he would experience, but he relished the thought that, if he drank enough of it, he would grow giddy with drunkenness. What would it feel like to lose control of his mind and his body, the way he heard adults long after he was supposed to have been asleep?

Yoska had always thought of drunkenness as synonymous with silliness, or happiness - the way he heard them sing the Chad Gadya - the frantic, chanting fun rhyme about a little goat that is representative of the Jewish people - for the 20th time that Pesach evening, each time the words more slurred, the lyrics more bawdy. It was a jumping, spinning, joyful and Jewish - therefore holy - drunkenness - one that always seemed festive and light and totally innocent and harmless. He would never have thought to tie the two together - drunkenness and violence.

Wine was for holidays, for festivals - for warm Pesach and giddy Purim.
Yet, the drunk voices he heard from the wine cask in which he hid - the vicious laughter of the goyim - that was a different kind of drunk.

So, Yoska tried to will himself into blocking a couple of his senses, to ignore it and thus make what they detected go away. He still thought there was a chance of pulling that off - to manage at least invisibility with the shutting off of his own sense of sight. He managed a slight smile as he allowed the scent of wine to take him back to springtime and Pesach. He stroked the warm crust of his grandmother's freshly baked bread that he clutched in his hand, felt the satisfying crunch in his teeth, then the fluffy, sweet, warm taste of the dough beneath the crust. This barrel would be a womb, if he could call upon only on his senses of smell, taste and touch.

But this was fantasy, he knew - even at the age of 9. He had other senses that could not be ignored. He knew that closing his eyes does not really make the world, or him, just go away. His eyes could see through the cork hole in the barrel, and his ears could hear the confusing, violent sounds around his hideout.

He allowed the older boy in him to take over the younger - the cynical one who knows that he is no longer a baby and his mind should be removed from the realm of fantasy. Yet the older Yoska did not know what to do with the new information his senses gave him. His thoughts were in turmoil, his eyes wet with tears that seemed to be piped in from a reservoir deep inside that he had never before this night had known had existed. It was a reservoir that would remain fed almost constantly for almost the next 30 years: Terror.

But terror is only a word, and not one with which Yoska was familiar. To say the word, to try to define it, to package the emotion into a simple word does not do justice to the emotion - especially when you're a 9-year-old boy hiding in an oak wine barrel, clutching a piece of bread, and praying harder than he had ever prayed before for God to either make it stop, or forever take away his his senses of sound and sight, which were bearing witness to pogrom.

But the sounds continued, despite his prayers, of familiar voices letting out unfamiliar-sounding shrieks, of drunken laughter, broken glass and the sound of others' prayers. Yoska recited the Sh'ma over and over again. It was all he knew to do. "Hear O Israel, the Lord Our God, the Lord is One." "Sh'ma, Yisroel, Adonai elhohaynu, adonoy echud." He said it the magic three times. Then the magic six. He recited and wondered how he got here, remember the last words he said to his grandmother just a few hours earlier … or had it already been a whole night and day. He couldn't remember.

"But, Grandmother, how am I to breathe?" he had asked her, staring puzzled at the stacks of wine casks. Outside the courtyard, he heard the mob approaching, hurling rocks and anti-Jewish epithets. Little Yoska did not understand all the words the harsh voices were saying, but he knew that they were dangerous.

"Through the spigot and cork holes," said Yoska's grandmother, her voice maintaining its gentle timbre, but slightly more hurried and high-pitched - just enough of a difference to let her grandsons know that this was not the time to question, but to obey. At the same time, her voice also maintained an even calmness so as not to panic the boys.

He heard the faint sounds of breaking glass and laughter.

Obeying their grandparents, Yoska and his brother, Andor, climbed into the wine casks and shut the lid tight. He unraveled his cloth filled with bread given to him by his grandmother to sustain him through a period of time that he suspected even his grandmother did not know, took a bite, then peered out the cork holes that served as his spy glass, framing the bizarre, terrifying images he was witnessing. But it wasn't so much what he saw that was terrifying - an angry or frightened face here, shards of glass there, but it was what he heard. The incomprehensible sounds of terror among familiar voices. There, in the barrels, Yoska and his brother, Andor, waited until further instructions from their grandparents.

Jacob and Deborah Grun did what they could to protect their grandchildren. In the basement, they would be found. But these casks would not be destroyed by the mob. Even if they succeeded in slitting the throat of every Jew in Paks, the mob would still need the casks for the coming grape harvest.

Yoska looked out his peep hole and recognized some of his neighbors dart by with plundered Jewish property. The night came, and as the air filled with the sound of drunken hate songs mixed with Jewish pleadings for mercy, the forms of his neighbors and his tormentors turned into shadows. But the darkness and shadows, for a reason he did not know, did not frighten him. Maybe it was because they served as background to the sparks. The darkness revealed the flames emanating from the Jewish homes and stores. He was relieved to see the fire. That means he no longer needs to be ashamed of his tears. If he was pulled out from the barrel by the goyim, and if they mock him for crying while they beat him, he could tell them the tears were from the smoke and not from their blows.

He focused his eyes above the shadows, closed his ears to the cries of pain and taunting laughter, and tried to gaze at nothing but the tips of the flames. He watched them above the roooftops and imagined they were dancing there, dancing in circles as in Simchas Torah. The flames were extensions of the Jewish homes, of the people suffering inside, emanations of the souls inside.

"Emet," he whispered both in his dream and in the barrel. "Emet. Emet. Emet. Emet."

"Truth."

He had been saving the word for an emergency such as this. An ancestor of his, Rabbi Yehudah Loew of Prague, placed the word on a lump of clay, and the clay became a protector.

"Emet. Emet. Emet." He said it the magical three times. Then he said it again six times - the number that is best.

But the Golem did not come.

Chapter 1 (continued)

Yoska curled up inside his wooden cask and drifted off to sleep. He dreamed of laying face up, every muscle paralyzed, his mouth open, gulping the sweet wine pouring from the gashed throat of his grandmother. He opened his eyes, or only dreamed he opened his eyes. He was not certain whether he was still in the dream paralysis or if he was fully awake now. Yoska gazed up through the hole at the vivid, dancing rooftop emanations, then his eyes wandered to what was just above them. Sparks.

Yoska thought of what his mother told him about sparks and the husks that contain them. There are sparks of holiness inside the husks of the quelipah, the evil, the world of exilic suffering. He did not understand at the time. But now, watching the sparks emanate from the dancing flames, which in turn emanated from the suffering below, he got it. The drunken laughter, the charred homes, the broken glass, the blows and cries of pain, were merely shells, a covering over the holy essence inside of them. What he was witnessing was only a the outer cover, like gazing at a wine barrel, unaware of its contents -- a frightened little Jew.

That is how Yoska became unafraid. What was happening was not the whole story. It was only the surface. His mother had taught him to look through the surfaces of things and people, and detect the stories inside of them. So, although still witnessing the rampage of his neighbors against his neighbors, he found it no longer necessary to find reason or comprehension. He was not witnessing anything other than the surface packaging that hid the massacre's true nature. Whether it could be found in the sparks above, he didn't know, since the sparks, themselves, broke apart and floated into increasingly tinier pieces and floated invisibly to the heavens. He was already turning the progrom into memory, breaking them down into their component parts -- he was watching himself watch the shadows, the sounds of laughter and pain, the last breaths of life, then above them the dancing flames and above them the sparks, disappearing invisible dark matter, scattered and further hidden into Ein Sof, the unknowable emination of God from which all other emanations originate.

His eyes moved from the smoke to the sparks, then back to the fire and the homes and streets. This time, he looked at the scene with his new eyes, the ones his mother taught him to use, the ones that see the essence of things -- the parts, the components, the spirits -- beneath the skins of the rapists, vandals and murderers, he could also see sparks that needed raising. Some of them were holy, yet not aware. Many were dark, devilish, hatred embodied, yet all were part of creation. The Jews, the chosen, he understood, had a role in the creation and in the repair of the world -- mitzvot, ith Truth. Emet, Emet, Truth. The Golem is not a monster made of clay. It is a force that gathers, guided by Emet. Truth.

Inside this husk, this barrel, the gathering would begin. He closed his eyes, and saw the hidden sparks, and began counting them, and gathering them. But how can a 9-year-old boy do it alone? He couldn't worry about that. He started counting, and gathering.

Then he saw the glow before they appared. The returning Jewish soldiers, coming home to Paks. Now, this test is at an end. He knew that he will not get credit for the end of the pogrom, but he saw what he created from only one evening of hard labor -- gathering sparks. He built a Golem with Emet, with dust, with clay particles and the Golem brought Jews with guns.