developed by Kafka, Schulz, Singer and Malamud. Obviously these are very different writers in certain respects, but all of them, I believe, are Aggadists whose parables raise mighty paws against the Halakah. It is here that Ozick swerves from her precursors, for in the main her tales subordinate themselves to established or normative beliefsno vexed Kafkan paradoxes, no Schulzian arabesques, and relatively few of the narrative ambiguities of Singer or Malamud. As Bloom observes, "So decisive a denial of rupture must be honored as the given of her fiction."
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Ozick's genius and originality lie in the ferocity of her denial, in the insistence of the tale's subordination to the Law. Strangely, her stories take on their own lifethat is, imaginatively vie against the Lawin their stubborn devotion to the traditional Aggadic role and their stubborn linearity of plot and character.
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Linearityor to use a stronger term, predictabilityis found throughout Ozick's fiction; and it is a direct result of her concern with the tension between imagination and faith, Aggadah and Halakah. Quick to voice her humanistic protest against "the fated or the static" in fiction, insistent in her belief that the moral of a well-made parable does not appear in the tale but
is
the tale, that "the tale is its own interpretation," Ozick nevertheless produces stories with a powerful sense of the fated, in which the moral appears to have been inserted into and is not embodied by the text.
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Puttermesser and Xantippe,
one of Ozick's most explicitly Aggadic works, is a good example. The outlines of the golem narrative are worked out for Ozick in advance, of course, but arguably, one of the reasons that Ozick is attracted to the legend in the first place is its profoundly (and for a Jewish tale, untypically) fated plot structure.
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Because Ozick has a great love of the normal and regards the ordinary as permeated with a divine meaning to be endlessly blessed by the "observant" Jew, she also places her faith in the virtues of community and civic life. As represented by Ruth Puttermesser, the diligent lawyer and civil servant, this faith is capable of transforming the beloved but fallen city of New York into an earthly paradise. Puttermesser, no mystic but a rabbinic rationalist, creates the golem Xantippe, who in turn produces the miraculous "
PLAN
For The Resuscitation, Reformation, Reinvigoration & Redemption Of The City Of New York" which enables her creator to become the city's most enlightened mayor. These events, presented through some of Ozick's most lively and balanced comic prose, offer a brighter alternative to Edelshein's gloomy vision of Yiddish in America. The
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