The dybbuk is an iconic villain of Jewish folklore. As we know from S. Ansky’s 1920 play “The Dybbuk,” this malevolent spirit clings to a human host, taking over its body and mind to haunting and tragic effect.
But in Ellen Galford’s 1993 satirical novel “The Dyke and the Dybbuk,” a dybbuk named Kokos meets her match in a 20th century Jewish lesbian named Rainbow Rosenbloom.
Now, ahead of the novel’s June 2 rerelease via Sinister Wisdom, we are pleased to share an excerpt of this vital piece of queer Jewish literature.
The following is an excerpt from “The Dyke and the Dybbuk” by Ellen Galford.
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If planet Earth slips off its axis tomorrow, put the blame on Rainbow Rosenbloom.
If we are smacked by a rogue asteroid, ingested by a black hole, or poisoned by something dripping through our tattered ozone capacity, feel free to lay it at her door.
For the melting of the polar caps, the disappearance of the snow leopard and the souring of the seas, Rainbow must take the rap.
Not fair? Well, life isn’t.
Note the ground rules: there are 613 commandments that must be obeyed by every Jew alive in the world at any time. To breach even one of them disturbs the universe, and sends the whole Creation out of kilter. Step on a crack, and break your mother’s back.
How’s that for a heritage of guilt? Bum raps over child murder, plague-spreading and a political execution in Roman Judaea seem, in comparison, small potatoes.
Just look at Rosenbloom — thirty-odd years old, devotee of forbidden fruits, not a skirt nor a husband to her name.
By neglecting to get married, Rainbow has done worse than cheat her relatives out of a party: she has cocked a snook at the Law, as laid down in Leviticus. The way Rainbow lives and loves (when opportunity arises, it hasn’t, lately) involves unspeakable acts that rank right up there with throwing children into the fire as a sacrifice to Baal.
And, speaking of children, she has flouted that quintessential obligation upon the female Jew to be fruitful and multiply, to replenish the tribe. She has done nothing to replace the legions that have lately fallen through a hole in history.
Rainbow has not put her foot into a synagogue in twenty years; instead you’ll find her at the cinema. As the film critic for Outsider magazine, Europe’s leading journal of lesbian and gay culture, she’s turned her passion for graven images into a vocation.
But what kind of job is that for a Nice Jewish Girl?
Lots of fun, a little glory, but pays bubkes (beans, to you).
Which is why we now find her driving a taxi through the streets of London. Not your typical NJG occupation either, but perhaps it satisfies some inborn nomadic yearning for this daughter of a wandering tribe.
Enough, already, of this gossip. We’re about to hail her cab.
After dropping off a pair of Jesuit priests in Farm Street, Rainbow crawls through gridlocked Mayfair. She’s decided to call it quits after a heavy day. To get the kinks out, she has some vintage Ozark banjo-pickers banging and twanging from her tape deck, she’s beating time on her steering wheel, and alarming nearby drivers with the sight, if not the sound, of her loud ‘Yahoo!’s.
So she almost doesn’t hear the message from Radio Control. When she does, she wishes she hadn’t. It runs: “Ring your aunt. Extremely urgent.”
This is not as simple as it sounds. Which aunt, for a start? She has five. All of whom live life at an operatic pitch. Cliffhangers and crises are their meat and drink. Rainbow runs through an inventory of possibilities: uncles with heart attacks, burglaries, cars crumpled into brick walls, a giant south-coast tidal wave swallowing up the Oceanview-Bellavista Kosher Hotel and all its guests as the Red Sea swallowed Pharaoh’s armies…
This last vision does the trick.
She smacks her forehead. “Oh God, no… Passover! Aunt Becky’s seder!”
At a pay phone, trying to get a word in between outraged gabbles: “Sorry… I thought it was next week — You know I never remember the dates… All right, I said I was sorry, sorry, sorry. Anyway, I couldn’t have rearranged my hours… OK, I’ll be there as fast as I can. No I won’t speed, I promise — you think I want to lose my licence? Yes, I do know the quick way through Walthamstow… What? My black cords and a red shirt. Why? Of course they’re clean!!… No, I will not go home to change. You
wouldn’t like anything I could change into, anyway. I told you, I don’t own a dress… Listen, Aunt Becky, if I stand here talking any longer, I won’t get there till bloody midnight!”
Unimpeachable logic. She wins the argument, but loses the game. In this traffic, she’ll be lucky to make Ilford in an hour.
Never mind. We’re heading for Aunt Becky’s house, too. But it will take us a little longer to get there. Say about 200 years.
For I must bring you first to another time and country. A grey, low-lying land, of mud and marshes, a strip of plain and the beginnings of a forest that goes on forever. The sea is not far away: you can almost hear it behind the dunes. You will certainly catch a whiff of rotting fish.
Between the forest and the plain there is a track of sorts, and today it is full of traffic. Oxen or bony horses drag laden carts, women trudge with bundles on their shoulders, heading towards a wooden steeple and a huddle of roofs on the horizon. Below them, the market square.
The Dyke & The Dybbuk by Ellen Galford. Published by Sinister Wisdom, Inc. copyright © 2026 by Ellen Galford. All rights reserved.
