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The rest is Commentary...

Every month, Commentary explores a key Jewish thinker or writer, with a brief biography, an introduction to their major works, and suggestions for further reading. Enjoy! 

Author of the Month for September 

Cynthia Ozick was born in New York City on April 17, 1928, to Russian Jewish immigrants, William and Celia Regelson Ozick. Her childhood was spent in the Pelham Bay section of the Bronx, where her parents worked long hours to maintain a pharmacy during the Depression. She recalls these years as an idyllic time of reading and dreaming of writing; she also remembers being made to feel “hopelessly stupid” at school and being subjected to overt anti-Semitism. After graduating from Hunter High School, Ozick went on to complete a B.A. at New York University and an M.A. in English Literature at Ohio State University, where she wrote a thesis on the late novels of Henry James. James became a kind of obsession for her, both inspiring and inhibiting her burgeoning writing career. For nearly seven years she struggled to write a long, “philosophical” novel entitled Mercy, Pity, Peace, and Love, which she finally abandoned after writing 300,000 words. During this time, Ozick moved back to New York, married Bernard Hallote, and began working as an advertising copywriter. She also wrote short stories and labored for six more years on what became her first novel, Trust, published soon after the birth of her daughter Rachel in 1965. At this time, she also began the intensive study of Jewish philosophy, history, and literature that eventually transformed her writing.

For Cynthia Ozick, literature is seductive: stories “arouse”; they “enchant”; they “transfigure.” Ozick describes herself in “early young-womanhood” as “a worshipper of literature,” drawn to the world of the imagination “with all the rigor and force and stunned ardor of religious belief.” Yet the pleasure of attraction is tempered by danger. Adoration of art can become a form of idolatry—a kind of “aesthetic paganism” that for her is incompatible with Judaism because it betrays the biblical commandment against graven images. Art can also “tear away from humanity,” and Ozick worries that the beauty of language can distract from art’s moral function of judging and interpreting the world. These tensions—between art and idolatry, between aestheticism and moral seriousness, between the attraction of surfaces and the weight of history—lie at the heart of Ozick’s fiction and essays. Indeed, Ozick is often considered a writer of oppositions, many of which are reflected in her efforts to translate what she calls a “Jewish sensibility” into the English language. “I suppose you might say that I am myself an oxymoron,” she explains, “but in the life of story-writing, there are no boundaries.”

She is a prolific and profound essayist, novelist and feminist, and has received numerous awards, including a Guggenheim fellowship. In characteristically contradictory terms, Ozick has described herself—as a first-generation American Jew—to be “perfectly at home and yet perfectly insecure, perfectly acculturated and yet perfectly marginal.” However, unlike many Jewish American writers who were the children of immigrants, Ozick does not write about the sociological experiences of assimilation and subsequent generational conflict. Rather, her sense of being simultaneously inside and outside the dominant culture is manifested in a real faith in “the thesis of American pluralism,” a pluralism that accommodates particularist and diverse impulses. Perhaps somewhat paradoxically, one of Ozick’s greatest contributions to American literature is her unwavering effort to remain “centrally Jewish” in her concerns by perpetuating the stories and histories of Jewish texts and traditions.

Essential Reading 

 One expects a formidable critic like Ozick to be erudite and incisive, but the surprise of her haunting, fantastical 11th book is how funny it is. The novel's interlinked stories, most of which appeared over the past 20 years in The Atlantic and The New Yorker, 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. Ozick's distinctive, poetic style, meanwhile, elevates a novel of ideas to a work of art.

The Messiah of Stockholm "A truly intriguing mystery...Ozick brings off effects comparable to those of Isaac Bashevis Singer, who can persuade the reader to believe the incredible" --  D. J. Enright, The New York Review of Books   £13.95

Lars Andeming, perhaps overly intellectual and certainly eccentric, is the Monday book reviewer for a Stockholm daily. He is also the self-proclaimed son of Bruno Schulz, a Polish writer who was executed by the Nazis before his last novel, The Messiah, could be published. When a manuscript of The Messiah mysteriously appears in Stockholm, in the possession of Schulz's "daughter," Lars's circumscribed world of paper, apartment, and favorite bookstore turns upside down, catapulting him into a whirlwind of dream, magic, and illusion. Ozick's linguistic agility and inventive imagination, while uniquely her own, remind one of Isaac B. Singer at his inventive best.

The Shawl "A book that etches itself indelibly in the reader's mind,"  Publishers Weekly. £7.00

"The Shawl" is a brief story first published in the New Yorker in 1981; "Rosa," its longer companion piece, appeared in that magazine three years later. In both Ozick gives us a meditation, in figurative language at times dense and shimmering, at times richly colloquial, of the consequences of the Holocaust. Accompanied by her niece and hiding her tiny daughter, Magda, Rosa stumbles toward a concentration camp, where Magda is to die, flung against an electrified fence. Years later, in America, we meet "Rosa Lublin, a madwoman and a scavenger, who gave up her store--smashed it up herself--and moved to Miami." She still writes to her dead daughter, whose shawl she covets. When Rosa meets brash, voluble Simon Persky at the laundromat, she resists his arguments that "you can't live in the past" with some persuasive arguments of her own. Indeed, the reader is uncertain to the end whether Rosa will bend--and whether she ought to. A subtle yet morally uncompromising tale that many will regard as a small gem.

The Cannibal Galaxy "Dense with ideas and philosophic speculation, The Cannibal Galaxy is also an organic and beautifully told story of one teacher's attempts to discover his place in history and the meaning of his vocation."  - The New York Times £13.95

This novel of Ozick's deals with the constant struggle of achieving perfection. The main character, Joseph, is a Jewish-Frenchman living in the middle of America. He had faced many hardships during the first decades of his life. When he finally is able to overcome them and enjoy the blessings of his emancipation, he cannot let go of his own sense of failure. The relationships he has in the latter part of his life are not fufilling because he focuses on the lack in these people, not thier ability. Joseph fails to value people as individuals. As a result, he is destined to be ordinary and unhappy instead of trying to be extraordinary. At the end of the novel he is given a chance to change his outlook on life.

Metaphor and Memory "As an essayist, Cynthia Ozick is a very good storyteller. Her arguments are plots....They twist and turn, digress, slow down and speed up, surprise with sudden illuminations.... She likes to spin and sparkle.... Insight, feeling, and the writer's art come together." -- The New York Times Book Review £12.95

In 30 impassioned essays, reviews and orations, Ozick  interprets fiction as a moral battleground. She reads Primo Levi's restrained, lucid testament to Nazi atrocities as a sifting of the criminal imagination and J. M. Coetzee's novelistic portrayal of South Africa as evidence of the hoaxes and self-deceptions of stupidity. She admires Henry James, who is "more and more our contemporary," as well as Chekhov, Cyril Connolly, Italo Calvino, William Gaddis and Saul Bellow. The biblical Book of Ruth, Sholem Aleichem, S. Y. Agnon and Chaim Bialik serve as springboards for her soaring meditations on Jewish identity and culture. 

Previous Authors of the Month
Abraham Joshua Heschel

Isaac Bashevis Singer

Also Recommended:
Chaim Grade
Saul Bellow
Chaim Potok