Books, Arts & Manners: Nice Jewish Golem

The Puttermesser Papers, by Cynthia Ozick (Knopf, 236 pp., $23)

ALTHOUGH multiculturalism is one of the buzzwords of the Nineties, Jewish writers were enjoying its benefits as long ago as the 1950s. For while novelists like Bellow, Malamud, and Roth sought to master the pure mechanics of fiction, it was their Jewishness that seemed so fresh to the postwar world, and it was this freshness, this ethnicity that once guaranteed them a wide audience. They were writing at a time when many Jewish immigrants still spoke in thick accents and strove, with poignant imperfection, to conform to the strange new culture that was struggling to assimilate them. It was the crisis of this collision that furnished the central theme for an entire generation of American Jewish writers.

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James Gardner

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The Puttermesser Papers, by Cynthia Ozick (Knopf, 236 pp., $23)

ALTHOUGH multiculturalism is one of the buzzwords of the Nineties, Jewish writers were enjoying its benefits as long ago as the 1950s. For while novelists like Bellow, Malamud, and Roth sought to master the pure mechanics of fiction, it was their Jewishness that seemed so fresh to the postwar world, and it was this freshness, this ethnicity that once guaranteed them a wide audience. They were writing at a time when many Jewish immigrants still spoke in thick accents and strove, with poignant imperfection, to conform to the strange new culture that was struggling to assimilate them. It was the crisis of this collision that furnished the central theme for an entire generation of American Jewish writers.