Category: Reviews by Jim Lynch

The 1619 Project: A New Origin Story, by Nikole Hannah-Jones

The 1619 Project reframes the American origin story by placing slavery at its foundation and tracing how that legacy continues to shape American institutions and society. Expanding on an earlier issue of The New York Times Magazine, the anthology combines essays, poetry, and brief historical interludes to connect the nation’s past to its present.

Across its opening chapters, the anthology argues that slavery shaped not only America’s racial hierarchy but also its democratic ideals and economic practices. The book opens with an essay that partly focuses on the 1619 arrival of a slave ship in Virginia. This arrival marks the beginning of the system of chattel slavery in America. This system would continue for some 250 years, ending in the Civil War, but whose effects would linger long beyond that.

In “Democracy,” Nikole Hannah-Jones contends that Black Americans, rather than the nation’s founders, have repeatedly compelled the United States to honor its stated principles of equality and liberty. In “Race,” Dorothy Roberts examines how racial categories prevented solidarity between white and Black workers and helped preserve slavery, while in “Sugar,” Khalil Gibran Muhammad links the harsh labor practices of American capitalism to the industrial discipline of chattel slavery.

The remaining chapters extend this analysis to politics, citizenship, self-defense, punishment, inheritance, medicine, and other areas of American life. They examine whether Black Americans’ votes are still treated as legitimate, whether the right to self-defense is applied equally, and how racial disparities persist in law enforcement and punishment. The anthology concludes with an essay advocating reparations as a means of redressing the enduring burdens imposed by centuries of slavery and racial oppression.

The 1619 Project challenges the completeness of the conventional American origin story by showing how slavery and racial oppression have shaped the nation’s current political, economic, and social institutions. Its central contribution is to connect that history to persistent inequities, asking readers to reconsider not only how the United States began but also how its founding contradictions continue to influence the present.

— Jim Lynch

The Golem and the Jinni, by Helene Wecker

The Golem and the Jinni is a debut novel by Helene Wecker. The novel is a mixture of historical fiction and fantasy. The two title characters are magical creatures who unexpectedly find themselves living as immigrants in New York City around 1899. Chava is a golem created from clay by a Jewish mistic kabbalist and Ahmad is a jinni, a creature of fire, who has been trapped in a copper flask for centuries by a wizard.

The story opens in the Polish town of Konin. A local man, Otto Rotfeld, is planning to immigrate to the United States and desires to take a wife with him. Rotfeld seeks out a Jewish mistic kabbalist, Yehudah Schaalman, to make him a wife out of clay. Rotfeld asks for a submissive wife, but also request that she be curious as well. Although Schaalman foresees disaster for Rotfeld, he does as Rotfeld requests and makes him a golem for a wife.

On the voyage to the United States, Rotfeld disobeys Schaalman’s instructions and wakes the golem while still at sea. The golem wakes with no knowledge of the world but is able to sense her master’s desires and seeks to carry them out. Soon thereafter, Rotfeld becomes seriously ill and passes away. The newly awakened golem is left masterless and must use her ability to read other’s desires to hide her true nature from the other passengers while the voyage continues.

Upon arrival in New York, the golem escapes the vessel, bypasses immigration, and makes her way to the Jewish quarter. There, the golem is discovered by Rabbi Avram Meyer, who takes the golem in and names her Chava. The rabbi considers destroying Chava, as he knows how dangerous a golem can be, but decides to help Chava lead as close to normal an existence as is possible.

Meanwhile, a Christian Syrian tinsmith, Boutrous Arbeely, takes on the task of reviving an ancient copper flask. During repairs, Arbeely accidentally frees a jinni from the flask. Like the golem, the jinni is soon trying to fit into society and pass as a human, taking the name Ahmad and working at the tin-smithery with Arbeely.

Much of the story focuses on Chava’s and Ahmad’s struggles with passing as human. Both spend the hours of the nighttime awake and alone. Eventually their paths cross and they recognize each other as magical creatures. They soon forge a fraught friendship and explore the city together at night. They have opposing views on the communities that they live with and what each should be seeking in life. Chava wants to be as human as possible and seeks to fill the needs of those around her while Ahmad resents being trapped in human form and seeks a way to escape his imprisonment. The story climaxes with the arrival of an antagonist with ties to both Chava and Ahmad.

Through the novel, Wecker explores aspects of her relationship with her husband. Wecker is of Jewish heritage and her husband is of Arab heritage, which mirrors the origins of the golem Chava and the jinni Ahmad. Wecker has said that elements of the story were inspired by “similarities between our families, the way that certain themes echo between them.”

Further, the story deals with themes on class divide, the immigrant experience, and feminism. Through the fantasy lens of the golem Chava and the jinni Ahmad we experience the difficulties in assimilation to a new culture and what it means to hide one’s true nature.

— Jim Lynch