Cynthia Ozick

Jewish-American literature: heavy on the Jewish

Reprinted with permission from Jewish American Literature: A Norton Anthology, published by W.W. Norton & Company.

 

"If we blow into the narrow end of the shofar [ram's horn], we will be heard far. But if we choose to be Mankind rather than Jewish and blow into the wider part, we will not be heard at all; for us America will have been in vain." In Israel in 1970, Cynthia Ozick issued this call to "build Diaspora a permanent body of Jewish literature." To re-consecrate the English language of Jewish American writers, she imagined something akin to Yiddish, which "became the instrument of our peoplehood on the European continent, and…a spectacular body of literature at last sprang out of it."

 

Although Ozick did not go on holding to so strict a prescription, her writings and public statements have mainly evinced Jewish history and concerns or Judaic religion and culture. What's more, the narrow end of the shofar, the ram's horn that recalls Isaac's near‑sacrifice, has served her in stories touching on the Holocaust, such as "The Shawl" and (indirectly) "Envy; or, Yiddish in America."

 

Cynthia Ozick was born on April 17, 1928, and grew up in Pelham Bay, then a semirural area of the Bronx. There, her parents, Russian immigrants, tended a struggling pharmacy through the depression. Ozick "experienced a great deal of antiSemitism in my neighborhood and school--being called a Christ‑killer and all of that." She was also turned away, as a girl, from Hebrew school, but her grandmother insisted that she be let in. After graduating from New York University, she wrote a master's thesis at Ohio State on Henry James' late novels.

 

"Besotted with the religion of literature," Ozick spent seven years trying to write a Jamesian "Work of Art," then seven more years on her first novel. Trust (1966) was greeted as "almost Tolstoyan…and her prose at intervals attains a Jamesian sonority."

Cynthia Ozick. Photo credit: Julius Ozick

 

It was Ozick's stories that first made her mark. "The Pagan Rabbi," published originally in 1966, starts from a saying in [the rabbinic text] Ethics of the Fathers that sets the love of nature below sacred study. In this tale, a brilliant young New York rabbi struggles between Moses and Pan, couples ecstatically with a wood nymph, loses his soul, and ends by hanging himself in a tree. Recalling Isaac Bashevis Singer, this fantasy appeared in Ozick's collection The Pagan Rabbi (1971) next to a realistic story that actually involves Singer.

 

"Envy; or, Yiddish in America" (1969) presents an immigrant Yiddish poet named Edelshtein (based on poets such as Jacob Glatstein) who desperately seeks a translator to "lift me out of the ghetto" so that "the prayer‑load that spilled upward from the mass graves should somehow survive." Meanwhile, Ostrover, a satiric version of Singer, is amply translated and published. "Ostrover's the world. A pantheist, a pagan, a goy," cries Edelshtein. "For humanity he speaks?…And to speak for Jews isn't to speak for humanity?"

 

Clearly, the endlessly vexed question of what it means to be Jewish preoccupies Ozick, especially in America and after the Holocaust. For her as a writer of fiction, this question has taken particular form in the opposition between Hellenism and Hebraism or aesthetics and morality. She cites the second commandment, "Thou shalt have no other gods before me," which prohibits making any likeness of things in heaven or earth. Even though her own work consistently pushes us and her char­acters toward moral distinctions, fiction writing has seemed to Ozick an idolatry, yet a necessary idolatry.

 

One can sense the force of this dilemma in her virtuosic metaphor making. "A darkness inside a cloud," Edelshtein calls the Yiddish language. Sometimes Ozick's metaphors become rather rich; but often they achieve a magical efficacy, as in "The Shawl"'s imagery of sound, light, and animality. And her title essay in Metaphor and Memory (1989) finds the revelatory Judaic--as well as literary--idea in a verse from Leviticus (19:34): "The stranger that sojourneth with you shall be unto you as the home‑born among you, and you shall love him as yourself; because you were strangers in the land of Egypt." Here is "history as metaphor, memory raised to parable," Ozick says. "Without the metaphor of memory and history, we cannot imagine the life of the Other."

 

Ozick published several collections of essays and reviews that range tellingly over Western literature and questions of writing. Reviewing a book by Bruno Schulz, a Polish Jew gunned down by the SS in 1942, she aligns him with Kafka, Babel, Singer, Jerzy Kosinski, and mentions Schulz's final manuscript, a novel called The Messiah that was lost after his death. Then years later, Ozick wrote The Messiah of Stockholm (1987), imagining that Schulz's manuscript has resurfaced: an obsessive Swedish critic, believing himself Schultz's son announces, "The Messiah's turned up! Here!" This slender redemptive thread in Ozick's phantasmagoric tale goes some way toward relieving her sense of literature as idolatry.

 

Along with the charged imagination and prose style that move her theological impulse, Ozick has a comic side. It emerges in The Puttermesser Papers (1997), wherein a female Jewish mayor of New York creates a girl golem [artificially created being] to cleanse, not Prague, like Rabbi Loew's 16th-century golem, but "New York!" And Ozick has a feminist persuasion too: "Feminism is simply another way of saying humanism."