216
PARTISAN REVIEW
straight out. Her nose has thick, well-haired, uneven nostrils, the right
one noticeably wider than the left. We quickly get the idea: Puttermesser
(whose name, in Yiddish, means "butter knife") is something of an
American misfit. Not to worry, however, for what Puttermesser might
lack in terms of mainstream credentials, she more than makes up for
with her Judaic ones:
In bed she studied Hebrew grammar. The permutations of the
triple-lettered root elated her: how was it possible that a whole lan–
guage, hence a whole literature, a civilization even, should rest on
the pure presence of three letters of the alphabet? The Hebrew
verb, a stunning mechanism: three letters, whichever bted three,
could command all possibility simply by a change in their pronun–
ciation, or the addition of a wing-letter fore and aft. Every con–
ceivable utterance blossomed from this trinity.
Including (we learn in "Puttermesser and Xanthippe") the possibility
of creating a golem who both aids and complicates her life when she–
improbably-becomes New York City'S mayor. for those who rightly
associate Ozick with moral seriousness-and, wrongly, with a certain
pinch-facedness-the Puttermesser stories reveal her penchant for the
comic, even the ana rch istic. Puttermesser is born from Ozick's itch
to
cut loose, to let the imagination take her where it will. Not since the
"Nighttown" section of James Joyce's
Ulysses
has there been such sheer
delight in the unbridled, playful imagination. In Joyce's case, his
schlemielish
protagonist, Leopold Bloom, alternates between fantasies
of power (at one point he becomes Mayor of the New Bloomusalem )
and equally vivid reveries of being exposed, humiliated, utterly pulled
down. In a similar vein, Ozick's story turns the conventional scenario of
the golem-as-defender into a golem as comical as frankenstein's mon–
ster: a character with a will, and sex life, of its own. Puttermesser's new–
found power-as mayor she wants to turn New York City into a
socially progressive paradise-is spoiled by the very creature she created
to make this happen.
Granted, Puttermesser is a long-suffering bureaucrat rather than a
writer, but the same tendencies that so upset Ozick when she thinks
about icons good and bad also apply to her mercurial character. Is there
perhaps a certain amount of self-abnegation here? My hunch is that
Puttermesser bears more than a few correspondences
to
Ozick, espe–
cially when we learn how Puttermesser was once fatally attracted to a
