The Hidden Palace

The second novel in Helene Wecker's series that began with The Golem and the Jinni, the story follows two supernatural beings hiding among immigrants in early 20th-century New York City. Chava Levy is a golem, a woman sculpted from clay and animated by Jewish mystical magic, who can sense the thoughts and desires of everyone around her. Ahmad al-Hadid is a jinni, a creature of living fire from the Syrian Desert, trapped in human form by an iron cuff placed on his wrist by a wizard. In the previous novel, they discovered each other's secrets and defeated the sorcerer Yehudah Schaalman, Chava's creator, who now lies imprisoned in a copper flask buried in the desert. As this novel opens, both are trying to build ordinary lives while concealing their true natures.

Ahmad returns from the Syrian Desert, where he buried the flask, sparking a legend among the jinn about the "iron-bound jinni." In New York, Chava visits the grave of her late husband, Michael Levy, then meets Ahmad at the docks, and they walk through Manhattan. Meanwhile, Sophia Winston, a young woman from a wealthy Fifth Avenue family, secretly prepares to leave the country. A brief affair with Ahmad left her permanently ill from carrying a remnant of jinn-flame inside her body. Under an assumed name, she sets out for the Middle East to search for a cure.

Over the following years, Chava and Ahmad settle into a relationship, walking New York's streets by night and exchanging a promise of fidelity at the Gill, a secluded wooded stream in Central Park. Each winter, Chava's clay body stiffens and the psychic scream of Schaalman grows louder through the bond connecting her to her creator. Ahmad experiences a crisis of identity, realizing he thinks increasingly in English and that his jinn language cannot accommodate his daily human life.

On the Lower East Side, Rabbi Lev Altschul, an Orthodox rabbi raising his young daughter Kreindel Altschul alone, discovers five ancient volumes of forbidden mystical knowledge among a deceased colleague's library. After witnessing a massive protest march against Russian pogroms, he resolves to use the books to create a golem protector. Kreindel, now eight, has taught herself Hebrew by eavesdropping on her father's lessons. She helps sculpt the golem's features, giving it mismatched marble eyes. They name him Yossele.

In the Syrian Desert, a young jinniyeh, a female jinni, discovers she is immune to iron, a terrifying anomaly among her kind. When her secret is exposed, she is banished to Palmyra, an ancient ruined city the jinn believe is haunted by demons. She finds the ruins harmless and makes them her solitary home, sustained by the tale of the iron-bound jinni, a kindred exile she longs to find.

The threads converge when a tenement fire erupts on Forsyth Street. Kreindel, sent to deliver a message to the synagogue, runs back and shouts the command to wake Yossele through the locked apartment door. The golem carries her to safety while her father perishes. Chava, overwhelmed by the girl's terror, rushes into the building and falls through a collapsed floor. Ahmad enters the inferno and carries her out. In the aftermath, Chava's brass locket, which contained the Hebrew command capable of destroying her, is burned beyond repair. She begs Ahmad to rewrite the command; he refuses, then relents after days of estrangement, forging a new steel locket. Kreindel, declared a ward of the state, is sent to the Asylum for Orphaned Hebrews, where she secretly guides Yossele to a hidden basement alcove for nightly reunions.

Chava realizes she must leave the bakery before anyone notices she does not age. She enrolls at Teachers College and earns a degree, reinventing herself as Charlotte Levy. Ahmad and his partner, Boutros Arbeely, purchase a loft building called the Amherst in Little Syria. When Arbeely dies of cancer in January 1912, Ahmad locks himself inside in grief. Chava breaks in to confront him; their argument escalates to the rooftop, where Ahmad declares they were never good for each other. Chava loses control and attacks him, and they fall together off the building. Visibly damaged, she goes to Anna Blumberg, a former colleague and one of her few confidantes, but Anna slams the door in fear. Chava disappears from both their lives.

Charlotte engineers her way into a cooking instructor position at the Asylum, where her innovative curriculum wins adoration. Among her students is Kreindel, whose fierce anger strikes Charlotte with unusual force. Ahmad, sealed inside the Amherst for three years, tears out its interior and constructs an unprecedented creation: eight cantilevered steel platforms spiraling upward around a central column, fitted with blue-green glass. As war engulfs Europe, Sophia's search for a cure brings her to Palmyra, where the jinniyeh enters her dreams. Recognizing Sophia's connection to the iron-bound jinni, the jinniyeh offers a bargain: She will cure Sophia if Sophia takes her to New York. They escape war-torn Syria together and reach the city.

At the Asylum, Charlotte discovers Yossele in the basement, recognizes him as a golem, and realizes Kreindel is his master. She resolves to destroy him but cannot bring herself to do it. Meanwhile, Toby Blumberg, Anna's son and now a teenage Western Union messenger, delivers Sophia's cable to the Amherst and begins investigating connections between Chava, Ahmad, and Sophia. The jinniyeh, calling herself Dima, finds Ahmad and they become lovers; she drugs Sophia with laudanum, trapping her in a dream and breaking her sworn oath. Toby tracks down Charlotte and shares what he has learned. Charlotte gives him a message for Ahmad: She needs his help to destroy Yossele.

Events accelerate. At the Asylum, a prank on Kreindel nearly triggers Yossele's protective rage. Charlotte lures Yossele out of the building and into the Hudson River. At the Hotel Earle, Sophia's mother, Julia Winston, confronts Dima, who transforms into a tiger. Julia fires a pistol; the bullet passes through Dima and lodges in Sophia's abdomen, carrying a scrap of jinn-flame that creates a permanent psychic link between Sophia and the jinniyeh. On a pier, the Golem encounters Dima, who raises a hurricane in an attempt to destroy herself and everything around her.

Multiple characters converge at the Amherst. Anna arrives, then Toby and Kreindel. The Golem brings the injured jinniyeh from the pier, and Ahmad places Dima on the forge to heal. When Dima revives and sees Yossele, she panics; Yossele attacks, chasing her through the platforms, his weight buckling the steel structures. Ahmad realizes the Amherst's fatal flaw: He never designed it to bear the weight of others. The building collapses, and Dima escapes into the night.

At a neighborhood coffee-house, the Golem opens the locket to read the destructive command but finds Ahmad has written: "But you deserve life." She cannot go through with it. Yossele picks up the paper and offers it to Kreindel. He has come to understand that his master no longer needs a golem protector now that she has human friends. Kreindel reads the command, and Yossele dissolves into a mound of earth.

The epilogue follows the characters into May 1915. Sophia convalesces at her family's estate, using her psychic link to the jinniyeh to predict world events. The jinniyeh wanders North Africa, permanently altered, unable to reintegrate with jinn-kind. The Golem purchases a house in Brooklyn using proceeds from the Amherst's sale and Sophia's financial backing, becomes Kreindel's landlady, tends a garden enriched with Yossele's clay, and begins collecting myths and accounts of unexplained phenomena, searching for other beings like herself. Kreindel studies Hebrew and theology, growing closer to Toby. Ahmad decides to leave New York for Chicago to study architecture. Before departing, he and the Golem walk through Pennsylvania Station and exchange the words they never said: "I love you, and I always will." The Golem pockets a timetable for the train to Chicago.