54
I'AIUISAN REVIEW
scholar who becomes a passionate pantheist, who struggles for union with
nature and coupl es wi th the dryad of the tree on which he finally hangs
himself? But does Ozick see herself in hine Or in the story's skeptic narra–
tor who abandons his religious vocation, goes into his uncle's fur business,
and marries an American Protestant "puritan" fI-om whom he is soon
divorced-while Rabbi Kornfeld marries a holocaust survivor' Or in this
wife of the transcendental apostate who hides her beautiful hair in the ortho–
dox married woman's wig and bears seven d:lllghtcrs? Or is Chick herself
present in none of these but rather in the ironic, Lltionalist mind that molds
the narrative' "The Shawl," published with its sequel "Rosa" in
1989,
con–
fronts the question of Jewish identity through that most inexpressible of
subjects, the holocaust experience--the historic trauma which haunts all
writing about Jewry in our time. Like l3ellow- '\vhose whole fiction is a
wrestling with the Angel of Theodicy," as she has said- Chick seeks to
comprehend the "Creator who admitted Auschwitz into His creation"–
and this darkest of puzzles remains unilluminated. Despair concerning
ul til11ate meaning- despi te a superficial lightheartedness- seems represented
in the five stories joined together in
Ti,e Plitterl/leSSer Pallers.
They do not compose a novel although the sep;1rate stories give por–
tions (not always logically conllected) of one
I~uth
Puttermesser's history
from youth to death and the afterlife. The book is uneasily taken as a
whole. Ozick once cri ticized Roth's
The
Co
II
II/erlill'
because its characters
seemed to her "so wilily infiltrated by postlllodern inconstancy that they
keep revising their speeches and their fates: you call' t trust them to stay
dead." But
The Pllflcrl/ICSSer Pllpers
is as postmodern and skeptical as any–
thing Roth has written. One of its best nlOlllents is a scene between young
Ruth and her great-uncle Zindel who has been giving her Hebrew lessons
and acts as an ancestral reference until the narrator breaks off to say he died
before she was born: "Stop, stop' Putterlllesser's biographer, stop! ...Though
it is true that biographies are invented, not recorded, you invent too
much!" The authorial voice engages the formulas of conventional story–
telling and Illocks thelll, as when she pauses to say,
Now if this wcrc ,m optimistic portr,lit. c:\,lctly herc is wherc
Puttermcsser's cmotion,1i lifc would bcgin to grind itself nlto evi–
dence. Her biography would procccd ronuntically. thc rich young
Commissioner of thc Departmcnt of l{.ccci pts and Disbursements
would fall in love with her. She would convcrt him
to
intclligence
and the cause of Soviet Jewry. He would abandoll bOHing and the
pursuit ofblucbloods. Putterlllesser would cnd her work history and
move on to a bower in a fine suburb. This is not to bc.
