From Ghetto to Paradise: The Poetics of Home in Cynthia Ozick’s The Shawl, The Puttermesser Papers, and Heir to the Glimmering World

[[abstract]]Gaston Bachelard maintains that our childhood home is our “first universe, a real cosmos in every sense of the world” (4). Indeed, the home is one of the most fascinating and most perplexing places. This thesis investigates the poetics of home in the selected works of Cynthia Ozick, who attempts to construct a “Judaic home” through the feministic lens. Ozick’s representation of home—multilingual and evincing Jewish history, religion and culture—makes her texts convey a distinct sense of Jewishness, while the display of domestic objects, the inter relationships, and the use of languages such as Hebrew, Polish, Yiddish, and German, all retell Jewish American collective histories. I contend that Ozick’s literary home, being a Jewish cultural repertory, is a performative space; meanwhile it can be understood as a cache, a hiding place where its inhabitants withdraw into. The thesis consists of five chapters. Following the Introduction that gives the overview of the study, Chapter One, “Home in the Ghetto: The Shawl,” reads Ozick’s The Shawl, a Holocaust narrative that delineates Rosa Lublin’s home as evocative of nostalgia for a lost landscape of home/land and its imaginative recovery through a shawl. Chapter Two, “Jewish Mother and Her Garden: The Puttermesser Papers,” analyzes The Puttermesser Papers, wherein Ruth Puttermesser creates a female golem in the hopes of establishing a paradisic landscape and redeeming the New York City. Chapter Three, “The Promised Land versus Paradise: Heir to the Glimmering World,” through analysis of Ozick’s novel Heir to the Glimmering World, articulates home as a personal paradise, as a Jewish immigrant family, the Mitwissers, sets up a new home in the United States. The Conclusion contains a restatement of my readings. My attempt here is to analyze Ozick’s reconstruction of a Jewish home, where ethnicity is manifested in a spatial domain. Through readings of The Shawl, The Puttermesser Papers, and Heir to the Glimmering World, this thesis, “From Ghetto to Paradise,” sheds a new light on criticism about Ozick and contributes to the local scholarship with a pioneering study on a writer that has been rarely discussed.