Cynthia Ozick, Jewish Writer

In the history of Post-World War II American Literature, the prominence of American-Jewish novelists is an Important phenomenon. Among these writers, Saul Bellow, Bernard Malamud and Philip Roth, inspite of their disavowal of being Jewish writers, are known for their distinctive contribution to the American novel. In this connection the emergence of Cynthia Ozick in the realm of American fiction deserves special mention.

Cynthia Ozick is undoubtedly one of the most outspoken and audacious representatives of the movement of writers “Who self- consciously define themselves as Jews and attempt to express their artistic vision in Jewish terms” (Wisse 41). She is well known as a short story writer, novelist, essayist, poet, critic and translator from the yiddish. She has published three novels, the first entitled Trust (1966) - “an enormous novel, the writing of which had taken many more years than any novel ought to take” (Art and Ardor 265), The Cannibal Galaxy (1983) - the highly acclaimed and The Messiah of Stockholm (1987). Her stories/Novellas have appeared in various prestigious magazines, many collected in her three volumes of short-stories: The Pagan Rabbi and other stories (1971), Bloodshed and Three Novellas (1976), and Levitation: Five Fictions (1982). Her articles and essays are collected in Art and Ardor (1983) and Metaphor & Memory (1989). She has translated from the Yiddish many stories, poems, and essays.

Cynthia Ozick’s views increasingly occupy the established centres of literary opinion. Her fiction has been acclaimed as “an extra-ordinary literary entity” (Stevenson 29), and her stories as “bright; shiny gems which simultaneously delight and provoke” (Cole 55). William Abrahams, the editor of Prize stories 1984, places Ozick–“as one of the Three greatest living American writers of short fiction” (xi). Victor Strandberg of Duke University, admires her “vivacity of imagination and Vigor of style” (310). For Sarah Blacher Cohen, Cynthia Ozick is “sure of her artistic identity” and “regards the entire range of human experience as the fit subject forher fiction” (179).

Besides pleading for a literature that is “centrally Jewish”, and refusing to accept the label of “woman writer”, Ozick has reiterated the importance of Judaism “as a religious as well as an ethnic and social characteristic”, and displayed in her fiction “an overt reverence for her heritage”. In contrast to many of her contemporaries like Trilling, Bellow, Malamud or even Roth, who, though ethnically Jewish, try to avoid raising the question of Jewishness in their fiction and totally ignore any Jewish sounding message, Ozick considers herself and even desires to be known as a Jewish Writer.

Joseph Epsetin aptly remarks:

            Cynthia Ozick is different; She calls herself a Jewish writer because, first she has given up “the religion of Art”, takes seriously the Jewish covenant and its commandments ... Miss Ozick may be the only Prominent writer in America who is prepared to let that adjective (Jewish) appear before that noun (writer) (65).

Cynthia Ozick is one of the handful of American Jewish writers who endeavour “to come to terms with any form of Judaism in a historical, religious, or cultural way, in fact, in any but an ethnic or social sense” (Yudkin 129). She views the world from an intensely religious and distinctly Jewish position. For her to be is primarily to take the Jewish covenant s6riously, and to be a Jewish writer is further to reject “the religion of Art” and choose life. Confronting contemporary “indifferent disaffected dejudaised Jewish novelists” (Art and Ardor 171), she declares:

Being a Jew is something more than being an alienated marginal sensibility with kinky hair: to be a Jew is to be covenated, ... or, at the very minimum, to be aware of the covenant itself ... If to be a Jew is to become covenated, then to write of Jews without taking this into account is to miss the deepest point of all (“Ethnic Joke” 113-114).

Thus, to be Jewish writer is for her to be committed to write “centrally Jewish” (Art and Ardor 69). She defines a Jew as “someone who shuns idols, who least of all would wish to become like Terach, the maker of Idol” (Literature as Idol 188). Covenant and Idolatry are then the key Jewish terms for Ozick.

Ozick’s fiction is pervaded with distinct religious metaphor, frequently drawn from the Torah, the Talmud; and the mystic sources of the Cabala. Her fiction is suffused with Jewish folklore, tradition and mysticism. She emphasizes her conviction that the jews in America will become more aware and proud of their heritage, striving to preserve or strengthen it. Whereas most of the Jewish writers search for the answer to the question “What am I?” Cynthia Ozick seems to be preoccupied with the problem “to be or not to be” a jew.

To date six book length studies of Ozick’s artistry have appeared. These include the contributions of Victor Strandberg, Vera Emunakielsky, Sanford Rinsker, Elaine M. Kauvar, Joseph Lowin and Lawrence Friedman.