Meeting by chance, the two creatures become unlikely friends whose tenuous attachment challenges their opposing natures, until the night a terrifying incident drives them back into their separate worlds. Surrounding them is a community of immigrants: the coffeehouse owner Maryam Faddoul, a pillar of wisdom and support for her Syrian neighbors the solitary ice cream maker Saleh, a damaged man cursed by tragedy the kind and caring Rabbi Meyer and his beleaguered nephew, Michael, whose Sheltering House receives newly arrived Jewish men the adventurous young socialite Sophia Winston and the enigmatic Joseph Schall, a dangerous man driven by ferocious ambition and esoteric wisdom. Struggling to make their way in this strange new place, the Golem and the Jinni try to fit in with their neighbors while masking their true natures. Trapped in an old copper flask by a Bedouin wizard centuries ago, he is released accidentally by a tinsmith in a Lower Manhattan shop. Ahmad is a jinni, a being of fire, born in the ancient Syrian Desert. When her master dies at sea on the voyage from Poland, she is unmoored and adrift as the ship arrives in New York Harbor. Chava is a golem, a creature made of clay, brought to life by a strange man who dabbles in dark Kabbalistic magic. The Golem yearns for a master because her destiny is to serve the Jinni craves freedom, as he is bound to human form by an iron cuff welded onto his wrist by an ancient wizard’s spell.Helene Wecker's dazzling debut novel tells the story of two supernatural creatures who appear mysteriously in 1899 New York. “Passing as human was a constant strain,” Wecker writes. The “glowing man” and the clay woman share the loneliness of not fitting in.

Most important, Wecker gives her main characters appealing emotional resonance, through their inner thoughts, which are not so inhuman after all, and their conversation. Wecker’s portrait of the shared experience of Jewish and Arab immigrants feels like a walk back in time, exploring the “wondrous and terrifying” city from the harbor view at Castle Gardens to the carriage roads of Central Park, from the Yiddish speaking shops to the coffeehouses of Little Syria in Lower Manhattan. Working with Arbeely, who names him Ahmad, the Jinni becomes a master metalworker, creating fantastical gold and silver birds, striking bejeweled necklaces, and a ceiling of tin that re-creates the Syrian desert, the “portrait of an ancient memory.” Boutrous Arbeely, a Syrian Christian tinsmith hired to do repairs, frees him unexpectedly. The Jinni, a volatile fire creature, has been imprisoned within a copper flask for a millennium under circumstances he can’t recall.

The golem and the jinni a novel