Click 
Just in case anyone was wondering whether my goal to read more Cynthia Ozick was still in tact, the answer is a resounding Yes! Any of the books I’ve read so far (The Shawl, The Cannibal Galaxy, and Foreign Bodies) would be enough to keep up my interest, and I’m happy to say that my hunger was far from sated — rather, it was substantially increased — when I read The Puttermesser Papers (1997).
Honestly, I could spend this entire review and then some simply writing about the first twenty pages of this fantastic book. It is in those pages that we meet Ruth Puttermesser when she is still young.
Puttermesser was thirty-four, a lawyer. She was also something of a feminist, not crazy, but she resented having “Miss” put in front of her name; she thought it pointedly discriminatory; she wanted to be a lawyer among lawyers. Though she was no virgin she lived alone, but idiosyncratically — in the Bronx, on the Grand Concourse, among other people’s decaying old parents.
This first chapter is called “Puttermesser: Her Work History, Her Ancestry, Her Afterlife.” When we meet Puttermesser she is employed in the blueblood Wall Street firm of Midland, Reid & Cockleberry; she was hired “for her brains and ingratiating (read: immigrant-like) industry, was put into a back office to hunt up all-fours cases for the men up front.” It is the middle of the century, so it is surprising that Puttermesser has even this job. Perhaps it is because the firm is doing its part for diversity:
Three Jews a year joined the back precincts of Midland, Reid (four the year Puttermesser came, which meant they thought “woman” more than “Jew” at the sight of her.
Somehow, while touching upon the Jewish lawyers, Ozick also touches on some hilarious aspects of Wall Street culture. Did she once work in a Wall Street law firm? I don’t believe so, though it is hard to imagine anyone coming up with the following quip without having direct experience. Even better that it is subdued and part of a passage meant to show the failed attempts at solidarity between the Jews and the other lawyers:
They bought the same suits from the same tailors, wore precisely the same shirts and shoes, were careful to avoid tie clips and to be barbered a good deal shorter than the wild men of the streets, though a bit longer than the prigs in the banks.
Puttermesser doesn’t last long in this environment. After suffering through an “anthropological meal” where her employers “explored the rites of her tribe,” Puttermesser leaves private practice to work for the City of New York’s Department of Receipts and Disbursements, as Assistant Corporation Counsel — “it had no meaning, it was part of the subspeech on which bureaucracy relies.” We’re only a few pages into the book at this point, though it has been funny and sad already. We have a firm picture of Ruth Puttermesser, the trials in her life, her attitude toward those trials – Ozick has let us know that we’re in the hands of a master. And that this portrait, while comic, will also be sad.
Now if this were an optimistic portrait, exactly here is where Puttermesser’s emotional life would begin to grind itself into evidence. Her biography would proceed romantically, the rich young Commissioner of the Department of Receipts and Disbursements would fall in love with her. She would convert him to intelligence and to the cause of Soviet Jewry. He would abandon boating and the pursuit of bluebloods. Puttermesser would end her work history abruptly and move on to a bower in a fine suburb.
This is not to be. Puttermesser will always be an employee in the Municipal Building. She will always behold the Brooklyn Bridge through its windows; also sunsets of high glory, bringing her religious pangs. She will not marry. Perhaps she will undertake a long-term affair with Vogel, the Deputy in charge of the Treasury; perhaps not.
The difficulty with Puttermesser is that she is loyal to certain environments.
The loneliness and tragedy of Puttermesser’s life is especially apparent in the next passage when Puttermesser has a type of out-of-body experience and we hear of her visits to her great uncle Zindel, “a former shammes in a shul that had been torn down.” (On John Self’s review of this book he quotes a great passage about the disintegration of the shul.) But . . .
Stop. Stop, stop! Puttermesser’s biographer, stop! Disengage, please. Though it is true that biographies are invented, not recorded, here you invent too much.
This long scene did not occur. “Uncle Zindel lies under the earth of Staten Island. Puttermesser has never had a conversation with him; he died four years before her birth.” We learn that “Puttermesser is not to be examined as an artifact but as an essence.” What does this mean exactly? It seems Ozick herself had this question when she closes this first section, “Hey! Puttermesser’s biographer! What will you do with her now?”
This opening section was originally published in 1977, in The New Yorker. Subsequently it was collected in Levitation: Five Fictions, Ozick’s third collection of short stories. Over the years, Ozick answered the question “what will you do with her now?” by publishing four more chapter in Puttermesser’s life — “Puttermesser and Xanthippe,” “Puttermesser Paired,” “Puttermesser and the Muscovite Cousin,” and “Puttermesser in Paradise” – each also published in various literary magazines before coming together in this remarkable collection.
In each, Puttermesser ages approximately one decade. In “Puttermesser and Xanthippe,” Puttermesser is 46, still working at the same place, and having an affair with Morris Rappoport, “a married fund-raiser from Toronto.” Within the bureaucratic system, there is abuse of power — even corruption. And Puttermesser’s tolerance ends one night when Morris leaves her because she’d rather read Plato than have sex. She’s uncertain exactly how it happens and is shocked when she find a female clay figure lying in her bed. Unwittingly, she brings the creature to live; Puttermesser has created Xanthippe, the first female golem. Together they work to make Puttermesser the new mayor of New York City, ushering in a brief period of unprecedented prosperity and peace.
We next meet Puttermesser at “the unsatisfying age of fifty-plus” in “Puttermesser Paired.” She’s been reading George Eliot and George Lewes, fantasizing about her own George Lewes, when in walks a potential mate twenty years her junior. This particular story offers a tremendous essay on the relationship between Eliot and Lewes and Eliot’s subsequent husband John Cross, twenty years Eliot’s junior and potentially a George Lewes wannabe. It’s a remarkable story.
In “Puttermesser and the Muscovite Cousin,” Puttermesser reconnects to her Russian roots when her Soviet cousin asks for some help. Not only is this story interesting for its portrayal of Perestroika, but also it looks at Puttermesser’s guilt when she traces her ancestry back and realizes how different her life has been from her cousin.
Finally — well, nearly finally (more on that in a second) — we find Puttermesser on the night of her violent death when she is nearly 70. She has occasion to ponder her name, which literally means “butterknife.” There’s no greatness there, and there’s evidence that a name can denote greatness:
For instance: the poet Wordsworth giving exact value for each syllable. Or Mann himself — Man, Mankind, seeking the origins of human character in Israelitish prehistory. Or how one Eliot reins in the other Eliot: “the jew squats on the windowsill” — that’s Tom — rebuked by Deronda’s visionary Zion — that’s George. And James the aristocratic Jacobite, pretender to the throne. Joyce’s Molly rejoicing. Bellow fanning the fires; Updike fingering apertures; Oates wildly sowing; Roth wroth. And so on. Puttermesser: no more cutting than a butterknife.
Before we leave her entirely, though, we go with her back to when she was 19 and madly in love with an prideful intellectual college boy.
There is much to experience in these pages, and Ozick throughout is entirely in control and pays out by the sentence. Surely Ruth Puttermesser (“no more cutting than a butterknife”) is one of the great literary creations of all time.
Cynthia Ozick’s new novel Foreign Bodies (2010) is touted as a retelling of Henry James’s classic The Ambassadors. I haven’t read The Ambassadors, so let this review be a favor to anyone who wonders whether reading The Ambassadors is a prerequisite. Answer: no. At least, I enjoyed this book a great deal. Then again, not having read The Ambassadors, I have no idea what layers and issues I missed out on, or how much more I would have enjoyed my reading experience. So, perhaps I’m no help at all.
Review copy courtesy of Houghton Mifflin Harcourt.
The premise upon which the action is built is fairly easy to explain. The book begins with a letter, written in 1952, from Beatrice Nightingale (in New York) to her brother Marvin Nachtigall (in California; incidentally, Bea has changed her last name). From this letter we learn that Marvin sent Bea to Paris to find his wayward son, Julian, who has left his comfortable home in California to live the bohemian lifestyle abroad. Bea quickly tells Marvin that she has left Paris without ever encountering his son. Marvin immediately shoots Bea a disapproving (to put it mildly) letter, reminding her of how inept she has always been. He wants her to go back.
So! A wild goose chase, useless, pointless, it was eating into her vacation time, and all to please Marvin, to serve Marvin, who — after years of disapproval, of repudiation, of what felt almost like hatred — was all at once appealing to the claims of family. This fruitless search, and the murderous heat. Retrograde Europe, where you had to ask bluntly for a toilet whenever you wanted a ladies’ room, and where it seemed that nothing, nothing was air-conditioned — at home in New York, everything was air-conditioned, it was the middle of the twentieth century, for God’s sake!
In the first chapters, Ozick’s descriptions of Paris as a torn up land are amazing. Contrary to what James presented, so I’ve heard, in Ozick’s rendering of 1952 Europe and America, America is the civilized land (at least, on the surface) and Europe is brutal; the streets of Paris are filled with sad souls. To make matters worse for Bea, it is one of the hottest summers on record. She had meant to go from Paris to Rome, but instead she just takes off to go back to New York, where for years (she’s 48) she has been a modestly successful teacher of literature to a bunch of rough boys destined to become mechanics (something her incredibly successful brother can’t help but remind her).
Bea and Marvin have never been close. Their Jewish heritage means different things to each of them. Interestingly, it is Marvin, who does not change his name, who wants to the least to do with it. He has married a Christian named Margaret; if anything, he retained the name Nachtigall to give him an advantage. For decades, Bea and Marvin have barely corresponded. In fact, Bea has never seen Julian, who is in his early 20 when she’s sent to salvage him. Some time in the past, however, Bea did meet Marvin’s oldest daughter, Iris.
Marvin hatches another plan. He will send his daughter to Bea so that Iris can educate her on Julian’s character (Iris and Julian are still close). Once Bea knows more about Julian, she is to return to Paris — nevermind the inconvenience of leaving that terrible job — and, for once, do something worth while in fetching Julian. Iris shows up as planned; however, instead of educating Bea on Julian’s character she asks Bea to lie for her: she will go to Paris and fetch Julian and Bea will simply tell Marvin that Iris has decided to stay in New York a bit longer. Shocking Bea further, a week later, when Iris was to return, a letter arrives: Iris has decided — well, had always intended — to stay in Paris too. If things were at one time bad between Marvin and Bea, they are about to get much worse.
However, just before Iris left for Paris, she hit a key on a grand piano that was taking up most of Bea’s apartment. The piano is a haunting reminder of Bea’s first marriage to Leo, an aspiring composer, which ended in failure and hurt (we meet Leo, and at one time he and Bea are face-to-face again; here are his thoughts: ”Inconceivable that this unsmiling middle-aged woman could ever had been a wife, anyone’s wife. Certainly not his! Her ankles, those shoes. Even her wrist bones. She was dry all over. Were there breasts under that wool jacket?”). Bea could never get rid of that piano, which Leo simply abandoned, but she never had it make a sound. When Iris makes that note rings out, Bea has a flash of desire. When Iris’s letter comes from Paris, rather than tell Marvin what happened, and rather than just let her brothers’ family figure out their own mess, she returns to Paris herself.
Foreign Bodies, though not my favorite Ozick, has many of the strengths for which Ozick should be more widely read. Her sentences are filled with perfect words, and she can make the rhythm do whatever she likes, giving it a mournful tone here and a vibrant — sometimes even frenetic — tone there. Her characters, even though we don’t particularly like any of them (and there are a lot in this book), are alive to us. We may hate Marvin, we may hate Bea, we may hate Julian, Iris, Leo, Margaret, or, two I didn’t bring up here, Lili or the ”Doctor,” but they each have a depth to them that few other writers could muster in their characters — if anything, I wanted more about each character. And through the entire book, under the surface of everything, are threads of themes and all come together — still under the surface. Ozick sums up an important one for us:
She thought: How hard it is to change one’s life.
And again she thought: How terrifyingly simple to change the lives of others.
A few years ago I was stunned when I read Cynthia Ozick’s The Shawl. It was superb. Since then, I’ve tried to get my hands on other things she’s written, but, as it often happens with authors I’m pretty sure I’ll like, I’ve been saving them up as a treat. No more. I went back to her second novel, The Cannibal Galaxy (1983).
Sadly, The Cannibal Galaxy appears to be out of print in the United States (I checked it out of my local library), as is her next novel, The Messiah of Stockholm (which, to my surprise, I found in a local bookstore). Why we let her novels go out of print is beyond me. We can’t, I don’t think, blame the media entirely (though I haven’t seen much about her new book Foreign Bodies; I’ve read it and will review it soon); after all, Ozick is critically acclaimed: The Cannibal Galaxy was praised in both The New York Times Book Review and the daily New York Times long before Jonathan Franzen’s Freedom was. She’s won several awards. She is considered one of America’s greatest living writers. But her books, even those still in print, are hard to find in bookstores. Well, thank goodness for libraries, because I would hate to have missed out on this book.
I have many unread books on my shelves, and I’m anxious to read many of them. But when I read the opening lines in The Cannibal Galaxy I couldn’t resist checking the book out from the library. They’re wonderful as they introduce our elderly protagonist Joseph Brill, a school teacher, and the American Midwestern setting in which he teaches:
The school was on a large lake in the breast-pocket of the continent, pouched and crouched in inwardness. It was as though it had a horror of coasts and margins; of edges and extremes of any sort. The school was of the middle and in the middle. Its three buildings were middling-high, flat-roofed, moderately modern. Behind them, the lake cast out glimmers of things primeval, cryptic, obscure. These waters had a history of turbulence: they had knocked freighters to pieces in tidal storms. Now and then the lake took human life.
Brill is nearing sixty when the story begins, but quickly Ozick takes us to his youth in Paris. As a Jew, he was raised to shun idolatry of any kind, and this produced in him an innate fear of museums and the relics they hold. Of course, they are also an inviting temptation. One in particular is too alluring. “He did keep away, at least for a while; his conscience was strong, and hummed with his mother’s own inflections.” But, after a few tantalizing years (honestly) in which he took the long route past the museum, Brill finally enters. It turns out to be the home of and memorial to Madame de Sévigné, whose writings to her daughter — now considered great works of art, though to some her daughter was hardly deserving – become important to the book’s themes of maternity and idolatry.
Brill’s Parisian childhood does not take up much of the book, but such is Ozick’s skill that it comes off vivid and nuanced. We learn, for example, of Brill’s best friend Claude who, understanding that his love for Brill does not match Brill’s love for him (or, does it — Brill is not sure), turns on Brill and calls him Dreyfus.
When the Nazis occupy France, Brill is protected by some nuns. He is kept in a basement with plenty of books, so he reads constantly from both Jewish and secular texts. Thus the inception of Brill’s great work — to found a school based on a powerful new pedagogy:
It was a thought infinitely remote, mazy and tantalizing — a school run according to the principle of twin nobilities, twin antiquities. The fusion of scholarly Europe and burnished Jerusalem. The grace of Madame de Sévigné’s flowery courtyard mated to the perfect serenity of a purified Sabbath. Corneille and Racine set beside Jonah and Koheleth. The combinations wheeled in his brain. He saw the civilization that invented the telescope side by side with the civilization that invented conscience — astronomers and God-praisers united in a majestic dream of peace.
We know, from the first pages of the book, that late in live, principal Brill feels stuck in a middling school. He blames the parents and the uncultured students who never, it seems, amount to anything. Certainly none is as gifted as he.
He longed for a noble scholarship — the pleasure-pain of poetry and the comely orderliness of number and the logical passion of Gemara, all laced together in an illustrious tapestry; but he had only these children, the cleverest not clever enough, the mothers shallow brass, the fathers no more than plumbers, the teachers vessels of philistinism, rude, crude, uncultivated, unbookish, raw, oh the ignorance, the vulgarity! Middling, middling! Himself the governor of all this. Royal charlatan.
One day, though, Brill feels he is finally about to be graced by the genius he’s sought. Hester Lilt — the brilliant, confident scholar — has moved to town, and her daughter Beulah will be attending Brill’s school. In every way he can, Brill attempts to offer this child what she needs to become as brilliant as her mother; he favors her above the other pupils and even rearranges the teachers’ assignments when he thinks they are failing Beulah. Despite his efforts, Beulah remains quiet and, apparently, rather dim.
As the book moves on, Brill becomes more and more infuriated when Hester doesn’t seem to take an interest in Beulah’s work. The conflict between Brill and Hester is brilliant. Brill believes that Hester is a gifted mother wasted on a dumb daughter, and, to make matters worse, Hester seems unaware — no, Hester almost seems to wilfully ignore and excuse any potential problems.
“. . . You’re listening to the truth. It all comes out of Beulah.”
She cried, “Leave out Beulah!”
“All your metaphysics. All your philosophy. All your convictions. All out of Beulah. You justify her,” he said. “You invent her around her. You make things fit what she is. You surround her. I’m onto you! If Beulah doesn’t open her mouth, then you analyze silence, silence becomes the door to your beautiful solution, that’s how it works! If Beulah can’t multiply, then you dream up the metaphor of a world without numbers. My God — metaphor! Image! Theory! You haven’t got any metaphors or images or theories. All you’ve got is Beulah. Any idea of yours — look into it, look right at it, and what you’ll see is the obverse of Beulah. Wherever there’s a hole in her — a deficiency, a depression, a dent, an absence — you produce a bump. You make up something to suit the hole, to account for it. You compensate for everything. You re-tailor the universe. You haven’t got any ideas. You’ve only got Beulah.”
How hollow his voice was in the instrument! But he kept it up.
His voice sounds hollow, of course, because some time before Hester disconnected her line, leaving Brill to shout into a void.
If it seems I’ve summarized a great deal of the plot, I assure you that I have not — there is plenty of ground still to cover; indeed, much of what remains unsaid is central to the themes in the book and to how the plot presents those themes. Though this is a relatively short book, it is incredibly dense with both plot and idea. The writing is top-notch. Though Ozick has long strings of sentences and lists tied together with semicolons, it was certainly never cumbersome. A bit more difficult to go through are the dense ideas, but there lies a great deal of pleasure.
Here’s to hoping that some day soon this book is back in print. In the meantime, none of us should wait to read it and more of Ozick’s work.
I have apparently been grossly negligent in my reading. Many times people have recommended I read something—anything—by Cynthia Ozick, but I figured I’d get to it . . . later . . . maybe when I had read everything else I already had to read. It’s not that I had anything against Ozick, but there is so so much to read already. But I was in the bookstore and saw that one of her most famous works, The Shawl (1989), was a mere 70 pages. Not such a burden to undertake.
Did I say burden? This was no burden. And the benefit was extremely high, a highlight in an already good year of reading. I began it late one night as a bit of reading before bed, and I finished it the next morning before I did anything else.
The Shawl in book form is actually composed of two short stories (well, it says one short story and one novella) first published in The New Yorker: “The Shawl” (May 26, 1980) and its sequel “Rosa” (March 21, 1983). Both short stories went on to win the O’Henry Award, the prestigious (the only) annual short story award.
“The Shawl” nearly prevented me from sleeping. It took me only about ten minutes to read, but there is a lot of power packed into that short space. Much like the best short-short works of Chekov, here Ozick draws us in emotionally and physically in a short time and then, in just a few sentences, drains us. It was a wonderful experience.
Okay, a little about the events. It’s a Holocaust story involving three females: Rosa, a twenty-something mother; Magda, Rosa’s just-walking fifteen-month-old daughter; and Stella, Rosa’s teenage niece. The three are being herded into a concentration camp.
Rosa did not feel hunger; she felt light, not like someone walking but like someone in a faint, in trance, arrested in a fit, someone who is already a floating angel, alert and seeing everything, but in the air, not there, not touching the road.
Because the child would otherwise be killed, Rosa hides the skinny Magda in a shawl which she carries next to her own depleted body.
Such a good child, she gave up screaming, and sucked now only for the taste of the drying nipple itself. The neat grip of the tiny gums. One mite of a tooth tip sticking up in the bottom gum, how shining, an elfin tombstone of white marble gleaming there. Without complaining, Magda relinquished Rosa’s teats, first the left, then the right; both were cracked, not a sniff of milk. The duct-crevice extinct, a dead volcano, blind eye, chill hole, so Magda took the corner of the shawl and milked it instead. She sucked and sucked, flooding the threads with wetness. The shawl’s good flavor, milk of linen.
The shawl takes on a mystical quality—it is both sustaining and hiding Magda. It’s a powerful story, and definitely stands alone despite its short length and the subsequent sequel. If I possessed the skill to write it (I don’t, of course—few do), I don’t think I possess the courage. Thankfully, Ozick has both. And speaking of courage, it was pretty risky of Ozick to attempt a sequel; it easily could have diluted the power of the initial story. Thankfully, “Rosa,” which also could stand on its own, adds without detracting.
“Rosa” begins around thirty years after “The Shawl.” Rosa has survived (“Consider also the special word they used: survivor. Something new. As long as they didn’t have to say human being.”) This story takes place in Miami, Florida, where Rosa has moved to after destroying her shop in New York City. Stella, the niece, has, to an extent, managed to forget what they went through, and she wants Rosa to do the same. But Rosa cannot do that.
“My niece Stella,” Rosa slowly gave out, “says that in America cats have nine lives, but we—we’re less than cats, so we got three. The life before, the life during, the life after.” She saw that Persky did not follow. She said, “The life after is now. The life before is our real life, at home, where we was born.”
“And during?”
“This was Hitler.”
“Poor Lublin,” Persky said.
“You wasn’t there. From the movies you know it.” She recognized that she had shamed him; she had long ago discovered this power to shame. “After, after, that’s all Stella cares. For me there’s one time only; there’s no after.”
Persky speculated. “You want everything the way it was before.”
“No, no, no,” Rosa said. “It can’t be. I don’t believe in Stella’s cats. Before is a dream. After is a joke. Only during stays. And to call it a life is a lie.”
“But it’s over,” Persky said. “You went through it, now you owe yourself something.”
“This is how Stella talks. Stella—” Rosa halted; then she came on the word. “Stella is self-indulgent. She wants to wipe out memory.”
The shawl itself, of course, surfaces again to become central to the story, but this time in a different, completely unexpected way. Wonderful that these two masterpieces have been complied into one masterpiece, short but tremendous.
It continues to surprise me how many things I’ve read, even over just the last year, that reference directly or indirectly the Holocaust. Even more surprising is how from that horrendous history so many individualized works can be produced without making the event trivial or overdone (though some of the individualized works are just that). Here is yet another example of how this history refuses to be washed away by the characters or by literature.
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