OZICK, Cynthia

PUBLICATION

Collection

A Cynthia Ozick Reader. 1996.

Novels

Trust. 1966.

The Cannibal Galaxy. 1983.

The Messiah of Stockholm. 1987.

The Puttermesser Papers. 1997.

Short Stories

The Pagan Rabbi and Other Stories. 1971.

Bloodshed and Three Novellas. 1976.

Levitation: Five Fictions. 1982.

The Shawl: A Story and a Novella. 1989; "The Shawl" originally published in New Yorker, 1980.

Poetry

Epodes: First Poems. 1992.

Play

Blue Light (produced New York, 1994).

Other

Art and Ardor (essays). 1983.

Metaphor and Memory (essays). 1989.

What Henry James Knew and Other Essays on Writers. 1993.

Fame and Folly: Essays. 1996.

Quarrel & Quandary: Essays. 2000.

Editor, The Best American Essays 1998. 1998.

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Bibliography:

"A Bibliography of Writings by Ozick" by Susan Currier and Daniel J. Cahill, in Texas Studies in Literature and Language, Summer 1983.

Critical Studies:

Cynthia Ozick, edited by Harold Bloom, 1986; The World of Cynthia Ozick, edited by Daniel Waldon, 1987; The Uncompromising Fictions of Ozick by Sanford Pinsker, 1987; Cynthia Ozick by Joseph Lowin, 1988; Understanding Cynthia Ozick, 1991, and "A Postcolonial Jew: Cynthia Ozick's Holocaust Survivor," in SPAN (Australia), 36, October 1993, pp. 436-43, both by Lawrence S. Friedman; Cynthia Ozick's Fiction: Tradition and Invention by Elaine M. Kauvar, 1993; Cynthia Ozick's Comic Art: From Levity to Liturgy by Sarah Blacher Cohen, 1994; Greek Mind/Jewish Soul: The Conflicted Art of Cynthia Ozick by Victor H. Strandberg, 1994; "Do We Not Know the Meaning of Aesthetic Gratification?: Cynthia Ozick's 'The Shawl,' the Akedah, and the Ethics of Holocaust Literary Aesthetics" by Joseph Alkana, in MFS, 43(4), Winter 1997, pp. 963-90; "'And Here (Their) Troubles Began': The Legacy of the Holocaust in the Writing of Cynthia Ozick, Art Spiegelman, and Philip Roth" by Sophia Lehmann, in CLIO, 28(1), Fall 1998, pp. 29-52.

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Cynthia Ozick belongs at the forefront of a group of postwar Jewish American writers (including Hugh Nissenson and Arthur A. Cohen) who have discovered in the religious traditions of Judaism a conceptual underpinning for their art. Her literary project may thus be distinguished from that of writers like Saul Bellow and Philip Roth, who often write about an ethnic Jewish milieu without explicitly engaging with the moral and theological basis of Judaism itself. Employing a range of literary modes—including the novel, the short story, and the personal and critical essay—Ozick's writings frequently move toward the form of the parable. Her recurrent theme is the clash between ethical outlooks, often characterized as a moral or Judaic outlook confronting an aesthetic or Hellenic one. Another abiding theme in her work is the problem of responding to the Holocaust, and the figures that emerge as heroes in her writings are often characterized as witnesses to the destruction of European Jewry.

At the center of Ozick's writing is her conception of Judaism. This conception depends more upon an overall ethical and ideological orientation than upon the specifics of ritual practice. In particular she emphasizes the second commandment, the ban on idol worship. In an essay entitled "Literature as Idol: Harold Bloom" she writes, "The single most useful, and possibly the most usefully succinct, description of a Jew—as defined theologically, can be rendered negatively: a Jew is someone who shuns idols." For Ozick an idol is not merely a plastic form of a god; she extends the category to include any product of the human imagination that comes to be worshiped in and for itself. What makes an idol so dangerous, according to Ozick, is its ability to demand complete submission, eliminating human compassion and obscuring a proper view of history. She maintains that even literature, when conceived of in purely aesthetic terms, has a tendency to become an idol.

Many of Ozick's essays, including the manifesto-like "To-wards a New Yiddish," reach toward a definition of a specifically Jewish literature. The mark of such a literature, in Ozick's view, is that it "passionately wallow[s] in the human reality; it will be touched by the covenant." Jewish literature, she contends, resists becoming an idol by insistently turning toward the world in a gesture of moral judgment. As she writes in the preface to Bloodshed and Three Novellas (1976), "I believe that stories ought to judge and interpret the world." Interestingly Ozick writes in a style that is highly ornate, elegant, and, indeed, literary. Thus it may be said that the style of her writing stands in tension with its ethical commitment. Ozick herself has hinted at this dualism in her work, asserting in an interview that she has "two heads: one that writes the fiction, the other that writes the essays."

Beginning with her very first prose work, a long novel entitled Trust (1966), the Holocaust has figured as a crucial point of reference. Her fiction is populated by characters who strive to retain the memory of the Holocaust amidst forces of forgetfulness. In Trust Enoch's work as a tabulator of death camp victims leads him back to Jewishness. He is contrasted with the anti-Semitic Allegra, who screams "the concentration camps are all over!" In "Envy, or Yiddish in America," the Yiddish poet Edelshtein desperately seeks a translator into English, asserting that "whoever forgets Yiddish courts amnesia of history." Also Ozick often uses the figure of a Holocaust survivor to articulate the moral truth of a story. In "Blood-shed" a Hasidic rabbi who survived Buchenwald impugns the assimilated Bleilip for surrendering to an "unearned" despair. In "The Pagan Rabbi" Sheindel, who was born in a concentration camp, represents a keeper of the faith while her husband, Kornfeld, worships nature, abandons his Jewish faith, and ends up taking his life. About Sheindel Ozick writes that she "had no mother to show, she had no father to show, but she had, extraordinarily, God to show."

Ozick's overall treatment of the Holocaust is informed by the Hellenic/Jewish antimony that underpins her writings. For Ozick the Hellenic outlook leads to an indifference, if not downright hostility, to history and the claims of memory. By contrast the Jewish outlook attends to what Ozick calls "the voice of the Lord of History." Yet much of Ozick's work complicates any simple alignment between memory and Jewish anti-idolatry on the one hand and forgetting and Hellenic aestheticism on the other. In The Messiah of Stockholm (1987) the worshiper of art, Lars, strives to recover the writings of Jewish writer Bruno Schulz, who was killed by the Nazis, and in "Rosa" the eponymous protagonist, a lover of Greek culture, keeps alive the memory of her daughter, who died in a concentration camp. In these works it turns out that the characters with a heightened aesthetic imagination are precisely the ones who avoid the amnesia of the surrounding world. Finally Ozick's work suggests that art and Holocaust memory are not necessarily antithetical even though their proper alignment requires a complicated balancing act.

—Julian Levinson

See the essays on The Messiah of Stockholm, "Rosa," and "The Shawl."