FLB home News resources for undergraduates graduates faculty staff graduate assistants flb business office flb graduate student services   staff directory FLB directories UIUC home old browsers April 6, 2005 2004-2005/031 Jewish literature discussion series April 12 The fourth meeting of a discussion series on Jewish literature will be held Tuesday, April 12, from 7-8:30 p.m., in the Main Auditorium, Champaign Public Library, 505 S. Randolph St. The discussion of Cynthia Ozick’s “The Puttermesser Papers” is free and open to the public. The dialogue will be led by Michael Shapiro, professor emeritus of English and director of the Program for Jewish Culture and Society. Author and poet Elizabeth Klein is the co-leader. “The Puttermesser Papers” chronicle the life of Ruth Puttermesser (Yiddish for “butter knife”): a friendless, uncommonly learned, unmarried civil servant with a law degree, whose “only irony” is “to postulate an afterlife.” But one morning Puttermesser finds a golem in her bed, and everything changes: she becomes Mayor of New York; forms an “ideal friendship” with a younger man; grows old; is brutally murdered; and ascends to Paradise. Most of the novel’s interlinked stories appeared in “The Atlantic Monthly” during the past 20 years. The five-part discussion series is titled, “Let's Talk About It: Jewish Literature.” The series’ theme is “Demons, Golems, and Dybbuks: Monsters of the Jewish Imagination.” Each story looks at extremes of behavior (in humans and non-humans) and how those extremes help people define what they call normal. The final discussion in the series, on “Angels in America,” by Tony Kushner, will take place May 10, and will be co-led by Brett Kaplan, assistant professor of comparative and world literature at UIUC.