Puttermesser und ihr Golem [Gebundene Ausgabe]

The Puttermesser Papers

I have heard about,read about,and read several of her articles and reviews in Commentary and N Y Review of Books.So finally reading one of Cynthia Ozick's novels,or is it a collection of novellas is familiar,but new. Oh yes though her fictionalized characters are stereotyped and surreal, there is now parody,satire,stilletto words that mirror a neo-con perspective that hurts.Now her fiction entertains,bewilders all from a new kind of Swiftian universe.and Charles Lamb "roast pig" solution

Ms Puttermesser is a polymath filled with Greek philosophers,ancient talmudic rabbis with arcane magic that enables her to resurrect the golem from Bronx grand concourse dirt. Only this time she is named after Socrate's wife who aids and abets Puttermesser ascent from the bowels of NY city bureaucracy to mayor of NY. This is after a stint in the backroom of a Wasp law firm doing the backroom "Jewish" legal research. Her adventures with her golem cover the universe of science and parodies of NY life. Puttermeister has to put her to death,embarking then on lust and love in Manhattan where she ultimately conquers and loses. Finally with her Russian cousin as her cynical counterpart she takes after the upper west side liberalism with a slashing attack on the Tikkun crowd and Michael Lerner. Ruth ends up in paradise with the Plato entourage and Henry James. Within the earthbound story is the reenactment of the Lewes- George Eliot romance in a beady repetition of romance and death in Venice a la many stories and movies on the Grand Canal. So what! Well it entertains,but there is a real unsettling darkness here also that pains and depresses one to the marrow. Even a Freudian interpretation,so now out of fashion,does not hit the dreads Ozick portrays in the murky sub texts of her contrarian embedded prose.The word picaresque could be applied here as a canonical theme of this book,but it would be too easy an application. Ozick has other motives in mind.Her characters exhibit fatuous ideological posturing defending and attacking cultural continuity.

The Putermesser Papers. A Novel by Cynthia Ozick.New York,Vintage International,1998.

-- Harold J.Fine

Cynthia Ozick has written a brilliant book about the construction, collapse, and trepidation accompanying the laying of the foundations, of castles in the air. In each chapter, Ruth Puttermesser, a lonely woman with an internal life so rich that her external one seems to exist only to provide grist for its mill, becomes the prisoner of her own imagination. Not a new technique--Puttermesser is only one link of a chain punctuated by such luminaries of the internal life as Baron Munchausen and Walter Mitty. What gives Puttermesser her pathos, Ozick her brilliance and the book itself its almost biblical cadence is the way each Puttermesserian adventure begins marked by the heroine's own reluctance, crescendoes like a runaway locomotive, and ends not with a bang but a whimper. We watch each castle in the air demolished brick by brick. Puttermesser's disappointment at each misadventure, real, imagined or somewhere in between, is savvy but genuinely hurt--as though one part of her knew, snarkily, that she would fail all along, and the other part, stunned and wounded, actually feels the pain of the failure. In addition to her unmatched powers as dream mason, Ozick is a fount of arcane knowledge (from Kaballah to George Eliot's sex life), a sharp social observer (the chapter wherein she skewers what Lucy Dawidowicz called "soft-minded liberalism" is a joy to read) and a flawless stylist, whose every paragraph reflects the ethos of Puttermesser herself--spare, sparse, uncompromisingly tough-minded, yet cognizant of, and awed by, beauty. To read The Puttermesser Papers is to be swept away by a rich and ultimately realistic fantasy life and to be haunted, a long time hence, by the beauty of Ozick's prose, the questions with which Puttermesser wrestles, and Puttermesser herself, as winning a heroine, in her own way, as any in 20th-century literature.

I don't want to get into a full review; the Papers are deep and rich, and I myself am an overladen government bureaucrat, sneaking a few minutes at Amazon. But the last review struck me, for the quality of its misapprehension. Ruth Puttermesser may be many things, but I don't think that we're told by Ozick that one of those things is sad. Her life is confined; small (few acquaintances); frequently trammeled by misfortune; but it's so focussed and beautifully realized and imagined that I think to say that it's sad is way off the mark. To have the imagination and the passionate rationality to shape a golem, to love a copyist, to offer a counterpoise to the ardent Russian cousin...I think Ozick has described a character that describes something wonderful in many people I know.