Pete Hamill: Snow in August

Again, this is a novel, not a tract. But it has a very simple theme: first we imagine, then we live. If it has a message for the young it is this: imagine your entire lives, not simply your youth. Enjoy that youth, revel in it, but also imagine a time and a life beyond Saturday night. You never know how a life will turn out, any more than a novelist knows how his novel will end; you think you know where you are going, and then the road takes a sudden turn. But there must be a large vision of that journey, a life-enchancing sense of possibility and triumph. Yes, there will be diversions. Yes, there will be defeats. There might even be tragedies. But if we do not imagine, we do not live. We can imagine splendid careers, great loves, amazing children. We can imagine worlds we have never seen, those of the distant past, those in the immediate future. We can imagine Prague in the years of mad Rudolf II, and we can imagine Jackie Robinson before we ever get to see him play.

The Golem is a triumphant symbol of the human imagination. On its simplest level, his tale is a parable about the power of moral intelligence. The imagination allows us to confront all horror and all evil. In the end, the imagination opens out, like a great symphony, to encompass all the living and the dead, to say to the forces of evil, as the Jews continue to say, a half century after the Holocaust: You cannot win. You can kill us. You can insult us. You can marginalize us. But we shall triumph. And we shall dance.

PETE HAMILL, novelist and journalist, is the former editor in chief of the New York Daily News and the author of a bestselling memoir, A Drinking Life , as well as seven previous novels and other works.