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2 Golem: The Seeker and the Sought An oylom iz nit keyn goylem. The world is not made of fools. —Hanan J. Ayalti, Yiddish Proverbs When Ruth Puttermesser in “Puttermesser and Xanthippe”1 fashions a golem in the middle of the night, she is giving tangible form, one is even inclined to say giving birth, to a number of her longings. Though she is the only Cynthia Ozick character to fashion a literal golem, like many of Ozick’s protagonists, Puttermesser’s golem is a foil for her narcissistic and redemptive needs and impulses. Golem making has been interpreted as a celebration of the divine. It draws its power from mimesis: a flawed but significant imitation of the ultimate creation of the world, the human-like being. Conversely, golem making has also been read as a form of idol worship, whereby a literal body, whether hand-made or co-opted in the form of an existing other, becomes the expression of a personal agenda and bid for power. Either way, constructing a golem makes the all too human creator acutely aware of her own limitations. Utilizing this (often misguided) power almost always results in destruction and mayhem, both to self and others. As a result, consciousness of this internal split, of the duality of being both creator and creature, divine and narcissistic , becomes a vehicle for Ozick to foment sympathy for her characters who are lost and often not found in a fractured and osmotic world. Similar to other areas of creativity in her work, Ozick’s protagonists who make golems cite both Jewish and Western sources for their inspiration . Their intentions are not to take sides in the war of civilizations but to create figures that can perform as defenders and redeemers. Their idiosyncratic individual needs compel them to bridge the gaps between the personal and the civic, the Judaic and the Western, the permissible and the unacceptable. These characters live in a liminal state, and suffer there. 37 38 Belonging Too Well Engaging in the extreme act of golem conjuring highlights the intensity of their plight. They require and desire unification both within themselves and with the world at large. The result, though, can be confusion between self and other, between reality and fantasy, and, like Pygmalion, each one of these protagonists “marvels, and loves the body he has fashioned.” When Ovid comments on Pygmalion’s amorous connection to Galatea, he writes that the “best art . . . is that which conceals art.”2 So it is with Puttermesser when she conjures Xanthippe and calls her daughter, and Lars Ademening when he pursues Bruno Schulz and calls him father. The golem fulfills the role of double for these two (among a number of other Ozick) characters, and becomes their attempt to express and unify disjointed and often repressed aspects of themselves. Goldsmith claims that the creation of the golem is for the maker a conquering of his or her darker aspects. “They must be overcome, tamed, in the individual’s quest for immortality, to attain that perfect state which is the redemption of the soul, that discovery of the ideal self made real.”3 More often than not, personal and communal restorations become a palimpsest of impulses that literally piggyback on one another. Puttermesser wants to save herself from loneliness as much as she wants to save New York City from itself. Searching for Bruno Schulz’s lost manuscript, The Messiah, Lars Ademening makes the Polish author into a golem-redeemer who embodies the young Swede’s longing for personal and cosmic salvation. The same impulse can be located in “Virility,” “The DockWitch ,” “The Doctor’s Wife,”4 and in Ozick’s most recent novel, Heir to the Glimmering World. In these narratives when actual golem making does not take place, then other significant transformations and metamorphoses do. Golem/doubles prevail as well in “Bloodshed,” in The Cannibal Galaxy, and in “An Education.”5 Sometimes in these fictions, there is a ‘realistic’ or representational handling of the double: one character substitutes for aspects of another and “an allegorical interpretation of the double as part of the ineradicable past gets its psychological meaning.”6 Sometimes the reader is clearly in the realm of the fantastic where “the limit between matter and mind is not unknown . . . as it is in mythical thought, for instance; it remains present, in order to furnish the pretext for incessant transgressions.”7 More simply stated, when used, “the fantastic represents an experience of limits.”8 And few...

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