The Puttermesser Papers by Cynthia Ozick

First published: 1997

Type of plot: Magical Realism

Time of work: The late 1980’s

Locale: New York City

Principal Characters:

• Ruth Puttermesser, a lawyer and Jewish intellectual, later mayor of New York City
• Morris Rappoport, Ruth’s married, middle-aged lover when she is in her thirties
• Xanthippe, the golem Ruth creates from the dirt in her potted plants and endows with life; she is named after the philosopher Socrates’s shrewish wife
• Rupert Rabeeno, Ruth’s lover when she is no longer employed and is in her fifties; Rupert is a painter and copyist of the paintings of the Old Masters
• Emil Hauchvogel, the boyfriend from her youth whom Ruth marries in the novel’s fantasy of her life after death

The Novel

The Puttermesser Papers is divided into five parts, which are further subdivided into several short chapters that trace the life history, including the life after death, of the novel’s feminist, Jewish, intellectual lawyer-heroine, Ruth Puttermesser. An amalgam of comedy and social satire, the book also includes supernatural fantasy derived from Jewish folklore, literary parody that inverts the conventions of historical sagas of great men who run for high public office, and a serious psychobiography of three famous nineteenth century figures. As a result, The Puttermesser Papers divides its energies among various genres of literature and social critique ambitiously and sometimes, to the reader, perplexingly.

The first part, “Puttermesser: Her Work History, Her Ancestry, Her Afterlife,” presents a brilliant but frustrated thirty-four-year-old lawyer who has quit a prominent Wall Street law firm, where both her gender and her ethnicity were barriers to advancement, to work for the Department of Receipts and Disbursements in New York. While working for the city, she also visits her Uncle Zindel for Hebrew lessons in which the reader learns that the name Puttermesser means “butterknife.” In this scene, Cynthia Ozick refuses to allow the reader to take her character seriously when the narrative voice erupts with “Stop. Stop, stop! Puttermesser’s biographer, stop! Disengage, please. Though it is true that biographies are invented, not recorded, here you invent too much. A symbol is allowed, but not a whole scene: do not accommodate too obsequiously to Puttermesser’s romance.” Telling readers that Puttermesser is not “an artifact” but “an essence,” Ozick ends the chapter with the direct challenge “Hey! Puttermesser’s biographer! What will you do with her now?”

The second Puttermesser Paper answers this question. Ozick turns to Jewish folklore for her answer, and Ruth Puttermesser creates a golem. In folklore, a golem is an artifically created human being supernaturally endowed with life, and Ruth’s is made from the earth in her apartment’s houseplants. Fantasy and allegory merge in this part of the novel, as the golem, Xanthippe, sets out to cleanse New York of filth and municipal problems and to elevate Ruth to the office of mayor. Part perfect daughter and part monster, the golem quickly grows into a sexually insatiable giantess who sleeps with every man in Ruth’s administration until the mayor is forced to uncreate her.

The next section, “Puttermesser Paired,” follows Ruth in her fifties as she falls in love with Rupert Rabeeno, a young painter and copyist of great European art. Here, life again imitates art as Ruth introduces Rupert to the works of the nineteenth century woman writer George Eliot and Eliot’s romance with George Henry Lewes. Rupert develops an unusual thesis about Eliot, Lewes, and Johnny Cross, Eliot’s younger husband after Lewes’s death. In a bizarre twist of fate, Rupert ends up acting out his thesis in his Platonic romance with Ruth, and he abandons her.

The fourth section, “Puttermesser and the Muscovite Cousin,” examines how political and artistic idealism associated with the term “Russian Jew” became debased into vulgar materialism during the period of glasnost as communism began to dismantle itself in the late 1980’s. Ruth’s cousin Lidia emerges as a caricature of the Jewish intellectual in her crass commercialism.

The last section, “Puttermesser in Paradise,” recounts Ruth’s ugly death at the hands of a burglar who breaks into her apartment, murders the retired woman in her sixties, and then proceeds to rape her. In heaven, Ruth’s youthful dreams come true as she marries a childhood sweetheart, Emil Hauchvogel, and gives birth to the son she lacked on earth. Yet for human experience to have meaning it must be linked to duration, or time, and heaven is, by definition, the realm of timelessness; thus, Ruth’s bliss is condemned to fade. “The secret meaning of Paradise is that it too is hell,” she learns. The book concludes with a plaintive poem that both laments and ridicules the dilemma of the childless intellectual whose hopes for life, literature, and love have been bitterly ignored by reality: “Better never to have loved than loved at all./ Better never to have risen than had a fall./ Oh bitter, bitter, bitter/ butter knife.”

The Characters

The characters of The Puttermesser Papers are less novelistic creations who grow and change in the course of the novel than they are static and one-dimensional figures in Ozick’s fantastic allegory. With the exception of Ruth Puttermesser, whom readers come to pity more than admire, most of the characters function as figures serving Ozick’s purpose of social satire. An alter ego for Ozick herself, Ruth made her first appearance in 1962 as a character in story published in The New Yorker magazine that later became the first chapter of The Puttermesser Papers. About once a decade afterward, Ozick revisited Ruth to add another chapter to a character who came to life at age thirty-four, then entered successive decades as Ozick herself entered them. The first two chapters of Ruth’s saga appeared in Levitation (1982).

The second chapter, “Puttermesser and Xanthippe,” confirms Ozick’s reputation for outrageous inventiveness when Ruth creates and animates the golem. A fantastic Frankenstein-like creation, Xanthippe, named after Socrates’s wife, aids Ruth in her revenge upon the political machine that fired her and helps her in her “Plan for the Resuscitation, Reformation, Reinvigoration and Redemption of the City of New York.” Then, as Frankenstein raged against his creator, the golem utterly destroys Ruth’s achievements as mayor. This plot also resonates with echoes of the Book of Genesis, in which God creates man out of earth; the name “Adam” means “clay” or “earth.” While Ruth imitates God the creator, she also imitates Ozick the writer, who is made a writer by the characters she creates, as Ruth is made mayor by the golem she creates.

The third chapter, “Puttermesser Paired,” returns to the question of art, imitation, and their relationship to life when Ruth falls in love with the painter Rupert Rabeeno. She first meets him at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, where he is painting an imitation or “reenactment” of The Death of Socrates. Here Ozick engages in subtle symbolism in her second allusion to the philosophic tradition and to its central Socratic tenet, “The unexamined life is not worth living.” By the end of the novel and of Ruth’s life, the irony of such a belief will be clear to the reader.

The fourth chapter, “Puttermesser and the Muscovite Cousin,” is, in contrast to earlier chapters, the least richly imagined and fantastically described. It returns to Ozick’s central preoccupation as a writer with questions of Jewish identity and its relation to community.

The fantastic returns in the last chapter, “Puttermesser in Paradise,” where Ozick indulges her satirical antiutopian impulse and manages to negate much of what the reader has learned about Ruth in a paradise that quickly becomes hell.

Critical Context

Ozick’s publications, beginning with the novel Trust (1966), range among collected poems, short stories, essays, novels, and plays. They include The Pagan Rabbi and Other Stories (1971), Art and Ardor: Essays (1983), The Messiah of Stockholm (1987), Metaphor and Memory: Essays (1989), Epodes: First Poems (1982), The Shawl (1989), Portrait of the Artist as a Bad Character and Other Essays on Writing (1994), and Fame and Folly (1996). Ozick has received numerous awards, among them a Guggenheim Fellowship and a Mildred and Harold Straus Living Award from the American Academy and National Institute of Arts and Letters.

Ozick rejects the term “woman writer” as a significant category to describe her achievement, but she embraces “Jewish writer” as a category of civilization, culture, and intellect, a heritage she affirms that always informs her fiction. Many critics found her first novel, Trust (1966), unreadable because it was heavily influenced by the example of Henry James. Once she abandoned Jamesian influence, however, Ozick’s fiction became preoccupied with questions of Jewish identity, particularly the meaning of the Holocaust. In her short story “The Shawl,” she creates a powerful and moving account of life and death in a concentration camp. The Cannibal Galaxy (1983) concerns the spiritual struggles of a survivor of the Holocaust who becomes a headmaster of a school in the American Midwest. The Messiah of Stockholm (1989) raises questions of identity and authenticity important to a writer as morally serious as Ozick. It also reflects Ozick’s interest in the ways in which art can interfere with life, as it does in the third chapter, “Puttermesser Paired,” of the The Puttermesser Papers. For many of her characters, assimilation of Jewish identity to that of the dominant culture is impossible, since it entails the disappearance of what is distinctively Jewish in the characters’ makeup.

Bibliography

Cohen, Sarah Blacher. Cynthia Ozick’s Comic Art. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1994. States that Ozick writes comedy of character that exposes the flawed nature of her protagonists. Places her in the context of other Jewish writers and the tradition of rabbinical wisdom.

Finkelstein, Norman. The Ritual of New Creation: Jewish Tradition and Contemporary Literature. Albany: State University of New York Press, 1992. Only one chapter discusses Ozick, but she is placed in elite company with Harold Bloom, George Steiner, and Walter Benjamin as one of the twentieth century’s leading Jewish intellectuals.

Friedman, Laurence S. Understanding Cynthia Ozick. Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1991. A good general introduction to her fiction. Useful on the tensions between assimilation and separateness as they relate to issues in Jewish identity. Good on the role of fantasy and the golem in Jewish tradition.

Kauvar, Elaine M. Cynthia Ozick’s Fiction: Tradition and Invention. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1993. Good discussion of the role of Socrates, fantasy, and the Doppelgänger in Ruth Puttermesser’s adventures. An impressive study of Ozick’s achievement, especially in her short fiction.

Victor Strandberg, Greek Mind/Jewish Soul: The Conflicted Art of Cynthia Ozick. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1994. Excellent on Ozick’s biography and its connection with her art.