"The Golem and the Jinni," by Helene Wecker The creatures" folkloric natures are both powerful and vulnerable. The jinni, like all his kind, is made of fire; his natural enemies are water and iron, but most of all the wizard who enchanted him a thousand years ago. A Jewish magus made the golem docile, yet also strong enough to withstand almost anything except a secret incantation, which the kindly rabbi who finds her in the streets resolves to thwart. Both creatures have the potential to live forever. For both, the greatest challenge will be discovering their own distinct qualities and deciding how to use them. Early on, the still-confused golem tells her rabbi that she is beginning to understand the need for politeness. If everyone did as he or she pleased, she says, "it would be easier, at first. But then you might hurt each other to gain your wishes, and grow afraid of each other, and still go on wanting. That inescapable id-driven longing, and the simultaneous fight to conquer it in the name of civilization, make this novel embody both fire and earth, substance and spirit. History, magic and religion braid together in old New York's tenements while the lives of the widowed golem and the freed jinni unfold. Both are sleepless; both quickly find lodging and employment and receive names from the humans who accept their true natures - the golem is known as Chava, or "life"; the jinni is Ahmad. These relatively small moments open up into a languorous meditation-by-example on the nature of humanity, desire, conscience and free will. In the background is a crowded mosaic of other stories about the characters who surround Chava and Ahmad: Chava's gentle old rabbi, as well as an ice cream maker, a magus who left rabbinical studies for the dark arts, a long-dead Bedouin girl and a socialite enchanted by the jinni's heated seduction. The scheme neatly lends itself to allegory, contrasting several Old Worlds with the immigrant experience and its new class divisions. Most of the apparent digressions and lingering contemplations are eventually drawn into the entwined elements of the plot, but a reader can't be blamed for wishing the two main players would cross paths a bit sooner. We're a third of the way in before we encounter what filmmakers would call a "meet cute," and it's enchantingly described. In the still of the night, the golem is wandering, lost and lonely after her rabbi's death, when "a strange light appeared, seeming to float in midair. . . . She saw that it was not a light, but a face; and the face belonged to a man. . . . The rest of the world had fallen away. She had to know who he was. What he was. They recognize each other as, in fact, Other. "You're made of earth," he says. "And you're made of fire," she replies. These opposing characters are fundamentally alike, at least in their foreboding, and their interactions are described in some of the loveliest language in the book. But these two are not meant to be together, at least not in the way we might expect. Nighttime loneliness leads to tentative companionship, yet the arrogant jinni still tarries with human women, while the golem frets over both his nature and her own - whether she will "pass" as human or do harm as something else. It's easy to sympathize with the golem. Conceived as a Stepford Wife or, more appropriately, an Angel in the Hovel, she is untethered without a master. The thoughts and desires of the strangers all around her flood her mind, activating both emotion and action. She harbors a full range of feelings, from embarrassment to anger, and, like other yearning women, she finds herself limited by circumstance. But human women may stand together; the golem is different. She has special powers, and soon she becomes terrified when an act of violence reveals her ability to take away life. "You must learn how to act according to what people say and do," the rabbi once cautioned her, "not what they wish or fear" - that is, impulse must be tempered by reason. Susann Cokal's next historical novel, "The Kingdom of Little Wounds," will be published in October. She teaches at Virginia Commonwealth University and is a frequent contributor to the Book Review.