After false claims circulated in Atlanta in 1906 that Black men were assaulting white women, deadly riots broke out in which at least twenty-five Black men were killed and hundreds more injured by marauding white people. Mob violence also erupted in 1915 when Leo Frank, a Jewish factory manager convicted of murdering a young employee, had his death sentence commuted, only to be seized and lynched by anti-Semitic Atlantans.
The Frank case is at the heart of Maggie Nye’s new novel, The Curators, although the community’s virulent anti-Black sentiment is also present here, occasionally bubbling to the surface. Following the arrest and conviction of Frank, five young Jewish girls who call themselves the Felicitous Five become obsessed with him, convinced of his innocence. They collect newspaper clippings and other artifacts related to the case, creating an ad hoc museum, of which they are the curators.
Much of the novel is told from the Five’s collective point of view, balancing their group identity with the unique characteristics of the girls: “Our parents never talked about Leo, not to us anyway, but we knew what had happened. We followed the story with utter devotion as it broke. We felt the five of us had been charged with the collection of all the little pieces scattered across days and columns.” Together, they intend to discover the truth.
But how? From the collective emerges one of the girls, Ana Wulff. She is the youngest of the five, just thirteen at the beginning of the novel, the same age as the murdered factory worker. Ana, of all the girls, is transfixed by stories she has heard from her family’s hired man, Isaac. Black and a widower, Isaac enjoys telling Ana about the dark arts, perhaps to make his job of cleaning up after her easier. “On matters of voodoo magic, Isaac was the foremost authority. Particularly elaborate were his stories about Miss Zelie, the Haitian voodoo woman who absolutely despised an untidy home. . . And he ought to know a thing about it, he told her, on account of the number of times he’d visited Miss Zelie’s stall in Darktown.” Miss Zelie, he claims, was the source of his cures for Ana’s various childhood illnesses.
Fearlessly, Ana seeks out Miss Zelie, hoping to return with a gris-gris, or talisman, that will protect Leo until the authorities can discover the truth. Instead of the gris-gris, however, Ana receives from a different woman, whom she takes to be a witch, a ten-cent tin of Nabisco wafers. Magic wafers, the witch assures her. Despite Ana’s efforts, after the governor commutes Leo’s death sentence, an angry mob—from which a reborn Ku Klux Klan will emerge—murders him. Leo can’t be saved, but perhaps there is a way to cleanse his reputation and safeguard Atlanta’s Jewish community.
Ana and the other girls have learned the story of the golem—two different versions of the story, one sacred, one dangerous—and they resolve to create a golem who will protect their families and also help them find justice for Leo. Their first step is to pool their knowledge, with Ana recording input from each of the girls: “Golems are like men but made from dust. And far stronger than any ordinary man. They’re made from clay, actually. They’re made of mud, everybody knows that. Golems protected the Jews in the Prague story when the pogrom came, like the mob, to drive them out of their villages.”
The project is easier said than done. First, the girls try to draw the golem, but they realize that, anatomically, there’s something missing between his legs, something these young teens have never seen. After some surreptitious research, spying on the males in their families, they’re ready. Holding a series of slumber parties at the Wulff home, the girls dig dirt from the garden to fashion the creature in three dimensions, eventually adding the male appendage: “Not really so different from a necktie, one of us said. We giggled and one of us poked it with her big toe. But it was very certainly different from a necktie. It was an intrusion on the form we were familiar with.”
Once completed, how, then, to animate the golem? Will the magic wafers supplied by the witch do the trick? And what will happen when the creature comes to life?
As Ana becomes more engulfed in the enterprise and her relationship with the mysterious golem, the language of the novel grows elusive. “I am—” says the golem. “Of course you are. You’re incredible,” Ana answers. “—Leo Frank,” he adds. “So you are . . . and you are more,” Ana says. “I am Wulff’s,” the golem says. The fractured dialogue suggests that Ana has lost her bearings, so attached to her creation that reality has slipped away from her.
In a story about the dark side of human behavior, it is difficult to find the light. The girls, while occasionally vicious with each other, are well-intentioned. But they are also too sheltered to fully understand what is at stake for their community and for the other victims of discrimination. It is not surprising that they don’t comprehend the strength of the forces in society that have conspired against Leo Frank and that pose a danger to themselves and Isaac.
It is the devolution into a more fanciful account of the relationship between Ana and the golem that transforms the novel from a purely historical account of the Frank case to a lyrical exploration of both myth and the mob mentality that endangers us all.
The Curators
By Maggie Nye
Northwestern University Press
Published June 15, 2024
Southern Review of Books 