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itself is a better predictor of where the clash between the pedagogies of
art and certain brands of religious education ultimately end up. Beulah
survives the best (as well as the worst) of Brill's Dual Curriculum-a
yoking of Jewish instruction and secular learning that does little justice
to either-and even manages to find a measure of success, of apprecia–
tion, if you will, that had eluded her in America. That this happens
through art and in the Paris that had formed the thick-headed Brill is
to
pack irony upon satirical irony.
Invention is what the imagination, at its best, specializes in; and I
would argue that nowhere has Ozick been more inventive, more play–
ful, than in her stories about Ruth Puttermesser. [n a recent Internet chat
session, something Ozick must have regarded with more than her usual
amount of trepidation, she was asked who her favorite, or most
detested, icons might be-this, because of a
New York Times Magazine
special issue, "Heroine Worship: The Age of the Female Icon," in which
Ozick had written about Gertrude Stein. Her answer was instructive,
especially if one keeps Puttermesser in mind:
I'm not going
to
answer that by naming names but by naming
types. Among writers, I most detest those who turn writing into an
instrument rather than an end in itself. For instance, writers whose
chief goal is power of one sort or another. Whether it's power of a
political sort or simply the intoxicating power of fame. The kind of
writer I most admire is someone who dedicates a life to the art of
writing and one day is discovered
to
be quietiy immense.
She went on to cite Chekhov as one example; she might well have men–
tioned her own career as another, for her remarks about writing that ulti–
mately matters go straight to the heart of what aesthetics is, and does.
In this regard, the (comic) case of Ruth Puttermesser is instructive.
The collection's opening story-"Puttermesser: Her Work History, Her
Ancestry, Her Afterlife"-introduces us to Ruth Puttermesser, a thirty–
four-year-old lawyer with a long history of academic overachievement
and a considerably shorter one of successful romantic involvements.
In
addition, we learn that she has a Jewish face and a modicum of Ameri–
can distrust of it. She resembles no poster she has ever seen. She hates
the Breck shampoo girl, so blond and bland and pale-mouthed; she boy–
cots Breck because of the golden-haired posters, all crudely idealized, an
American wet dream, in the subway. Puttermesser's hair comes in
bouncing scallops-layered waves from scalp to tip, like imbricated
roofing tile. It is nearly black and has a way of sometimes sticking
