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Cynthia Ozick: Or, Immortality
Dara Horn
Jewish Review of Books, Fall 2016
Why does Cynthia Ozick, at 88 an undisputed giant of American letters, still seem obsessed with fame?
Like nearly everyone else who appreciates Cynthia Ozick’s brand of genius—and I don’t mean “brand” in the 21st-century sense, but rather the brand plucked from the fire, searing one’s lips into prophecy (the distinction between the two neatly encapsulates Ozick’s chief artistic fascinations)—I’m not the type of person who is a fan of anything at all. As something close to Ozick’s ideal reader, I am skeptical of the entire concept of fandom, religiously suspicious of the kind of artistic seduction that would make one uncritical of anything created by someone who isn’t God. But I am nevertheless a fan of Ozick’s, in the truly fanatical sense. I have read every word she’s ever published, taught her fiction and essays at various universities, reviewed her books for numerous publications (occasionally even the same book twice), written her fan letters and then swooned over the succinct handwritten replies in which she graciously gave me a sentence more than the time of day, and even based my own work as a novelist on her concept of American Jewish literature as a liturgical or midrashic enterprise (a stance she has since rejected, though too late for me). As a young reader I was astonished by what she apparently invented: fiction in English that dealt profoundly not with Judaism as an “identity,” but with the actual content of Jewish thought, at a time when almost no one, and certainly no one that talented, was quite bothering to try.
Today I remain utterly seduced by the dazzling architecture of her stories, the distilled clarity of her sentences, and the urgency of her arguments. But my love for her is haunted by one point of strange discomfort: her obsession with fame, which in one form or another suffuses nearly everything she writes. (In this collection she loudly clarifies that she really means “recognition,” since “Fame is fickle”—but we knew that. Fine, then: high-end, enduring fame.) Her early masterpiece, “Envy: Or, Yiddish in America,” is a novella-à-clef about Isaac Bashevis Singer’s cheap glamour overshadowing better-yet-untranslated writers; her novella “Usurpation (Other People’s Stories)” involves, among much else, a fable about a magic crown that grants its wearer eternal literary fame (spoiler: this isn’t a good thing); The Messiah of Stockholm is about the forgotten genius Bruno Schulz and failed writers and charlatans vying to steal his legacy; Heir to the Glimmering World includes a scholar and a scientist both robbed of their greatest discoveries, forced to become wards of a famous-yet-thoughtless millionaire . . . I could go on, but instead I will simply point out what Ozick’s entire oeuvre brilliantly enacts: Despite the underlying assumption of Western civilization that we owe our world to the genius of Great Men (yes, men) whose names still resonate today, the truth is that merit and credit are only rarely linked. This sad truth is genuinely fascinating, because it unearths our most buried questions about the purpose of living as mortals in a world that outlasts us. But it also can become a perverse obsession for creative artists of every stature, because, as conventional wisdom and the degrading experience of reading Amazon reviews suggests, nothing good comes of it. Or does it? … [To read the full article, click the following LINK – Ed.]
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Dictation: A Quartet by Cynthia Ozick
Abraham Socher
Commentary, September 2008
Dictation: A Quartet
by Cynthia Ozick
Houghton Mifflin. 179 pp. $24.00
In a review almost a quarter-century ago of Saul Bellow’s Him With His Foot in His Mouth, a book of five short stories, Cynthia Ozick asked:
Does there come a time when, out of the blue, an author offers to decode himself? Not simply to divert or paraphrase, or lead around a corner, or leave clues, or set out decoys (familiar apparatus, art-as-usual), but . . . spill wine all over the figure in the carpet . . . and disclose the thing itself? To let loose, in fact, the secret? . . . The cumulative art, concentrated, so to speak, in a vial.
Now, at a similarly late stage in her career, Ozick has collected four stories of her own, “a quartet,” as the subtitle of her new book has it, and one is tempted to ask the same question. Has Ozick offered to decode herself?
Perhaps—though it should be noted that it was never clear that Bellow’s one true subject, his “secret,” was, as Ozick claimed, “the Eye of God.” Ozick is, like Bellow, known as a Jewish writer, but unlike Bellow (who once criticized Isaac Bashevis Singer as “too Jewy”), she has not resisted the label or dismissed it as social happenstance. To the contrary, the question of what it means to write as a Jew has always been at the center of Ozick’s work.
Her first published short story, “The Pagan Rabbi” (1966), depicts a rabbinic scholar who tells his children fantastic tales, comes to worship nature, and, in a fit of despair and ecstasy, ends up hanging himself from a tree with his tallit (prayer shawl). The central character of her most successful novel, The Cannibal Galaxy (1983), is a Jewish educator whose great ambition is to lead a school that marries the best of the Jewish and classical traditions; he fails. Ozick’s most recent novel, Heir to the Glimmering World (2004), manages to be at once about a figure very much like Christopher Milne, the unhappy model for his father’s “Winnie the Pooh” stories, and about the medieval Jewish heresy of Karaism, which rejected rabbinic commentary in favor of biblical literalism.
It has, in short, been Ozick who, of all Jewish American writers, has been most concerned with God and His demands. Not the “God-idea,” or ecstatic spiritual experience, but the biblical God of Sinai Who announces Himself as utterly unique and prohibits the worship of anything else or its image “in the form of the heaven above, or on the earth beneath, or in the water under the earth.” … [To read the full article, click the following LINK – Ed.]
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A Life in Writing: Cynthia Ozick
Emma Brockes
The Guardian, Mar. 4, 2011
In Foreign Bodies, Cynthia Ozick’s new novel, there is a character called Marvin who is loud and obnoxious but who excites a certain sympathy on the basis of his type: his wife accuses him of having no self. This is a classic Ozick observation.
“What does it mean?” she says, at her dining-room table in a small town outside New York City. It is a hot day and the room is cool and dim. It means “he’s always looked over his shoulder at other people, beginning when he went to Princeton. He’s always looking for another self, a better self, than his own self-disparaged self.”
The disparaged self is a great theme of Ozick’s, the construction of an identity after immigration, trauma, movement from one class to another. She is also familiar with it in the personal sense. She refers to herself in the interview as “unknown, totally obscure”. There’s a trembling quality to Ozick, a misleading fragility that acts as the surface tension to her great depths. She wrote the new novel partly as a challenge from David Miller, her agent, who noted that she had never written about music before and so as well as Marvin she created Leo, a composer. His passion, which she delineates brilliantly, is, one assumes, that of the writer in musician’s form. “Yes, it’s a snow job,” she says. “Bullshit. It’s just a transposition of one kind of passion to another.”
Ozick is 83. She recalls growing up in the Bronx in an era when – she smiles to acknowledge how impossible this sounds – it was semi-rural. When she describes her upbringing, it is with unabashed writerliness, sentences that unfold and keep unfolding until she emerges, blinking, at the other end.
Her parents were immigrants from Russia – her mother came as a child, her father at 21 to escape the tsarist conscription. They ran a pharmacy together, addressed each other in public as Mr and Mrs O, and brought up their two children in what Ozick now sees as the tail end of the 19th century. “Certainly there were plenty of cars, but the milkman came with horse and truck, in the Bronx, and in the summer the horses turds would be on the sidewalk and the sun was very hot and the streets were made of tar and these straw turds would sink into the tar and they had this fragrance of barn and country and it was not an unpleasant olfactory experience.” She draws breath and laughs.
So serious a novelist is Ozick, in subject matter and theme, it is often overlooked how funny she is and how playful is her writing. (I’m thinking of Ninel, the joyless fanatic in her 2004 novel Heir to the Glimmering World who is always leading “yet another march in favour of the downtrodden” and who renamed herself thus because it is Lenin, spelt backwards). Ozick used, she says, to be horrifically highbrow, a real bore who thought the only way to achieve Literature was to relinquish all other writing pleasures. After graduating with a masters from Ohio State, she spent seven years labouring on a novel she now wishes she’d abandoned sooner. (She thought she was being faithful to the idea of Henry James, her hero; now she thinks she was idiotic.) “I regret it. If I’ve ever regretted anything it was putting all my eggs in one basket, holing up and kneeling at the altar of literature, instead of going out and at least reviewing, running around and trying to write for magazines. That would’ve been the intelligent thing to do but I didn’t and that was because of fanaticism.” … [To read the full article, click the following LINK – Ed.]
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The Modern ‘Hep! Hep! Hep!’
Cynthia Ozick
Observer, Oct. 5, 2004
We thought it was finished. The ovens are long cooled, the anti-vermin gas dissipated into purifying clouds, cleansed air, nightmarish fable. The cries of the naked, decades gone, are mute; the bullets splitting throats and breasts and skulls, the human waterfall of bodies tipping over into the wooded ravine at Babi Yar, are no more than tedious footnotes on aging paper. The deportation ledgers, with their scrupulous lists of names of the doomed, what are they now? Museum artifacts. The heaps of eyeglasses and children’s shoes, the hills of human hair, lie disintegrating in their display cases, while only a little distance away the visitors’ cafeteria bustles and buzzes: sandwiches, Cokes, the waiting tour buses.
We thought it was finished. In the middle of the twentieth century, and surely by the end of it, we thought it was finished, genuinely finished, the bloodlust finally slaked. We thought it was finished, that heads were hanging-the heads of the leaders and schemers on gallows, the heads of the bystanders and onlookers in shame. The Topf company, manufacturer of the ovens, went belatedly out of business, belatedly disgraced and shamed. Out of shame German publishers of Nazi materials concealed and falsified the past. Out of shame Paul de Man, lauded and eminent Yale intellectual, concealed his early Nazi lucubrations. Out of shame Mircea Eliade, lauded and eminent Chicago intellectual, concealed his membership in Romania’s Nazi-linked Iron Guard. Out of shame memorials to the murdered rose up. Out of shame synagogues were rebuilt in the ruins of November 9, 1938, the night of fire and pogrom and the smashing of windows. Out of shame those who were hounded like prey and fled for their lives were invited back to their native villages and towns and cities, to be celebrated as successful escapees from the murderous houndings of their native villages and towns and cities. Shame is salubrious: it acknowledges inhumanity, it admits to complicity, it induces remorse. Naïvely, foolishly, stupidly, hopefully, a-historically, we thought that shame and remorse-world-wide shame, world-wide remorse-would endure. Naïvely, foolishly, stupidly, hopefully, a-historically, we thought that the cannibal hatred, once quenched, would not soon wake again. … [To read the full article, click the following LINK – Ed.]
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FOR FURTHER REFERENCE:
She: Portrait of the Essay as a Warm Body: Cynthia Ozick, Atlantic,September 1998 – An essay is a thing of the imagination.
The Envy of Yiddish: Cynthia Ozick as Translator: Kathryn Hellerstein, Studies in American Jewish Literature, Volume 31, Number 1, 2012 — Early in 1969, a professor of literature, Irving Howe, and a Yiddish poet and critic, Eliezer Greenberg, published an anthology, A Treasury of Yiddish Poetry, gathering new translations of works by almost-forgotten Yiddish poets of Europe and America.
Cynthia Ozick: Saul Austerlitz, My Jewish Learning — The term ‘Jewish writer’ ought to be an oxymoron,” observed Cynthia Ozick in her typically sharp essay “Tradition and (or versus) the Jewish Writer,” from her 2006 essay collection The Din in the Head. Here Ozick is specifically referring to novelists like Norman Mailer, whose best work, she believes, stems from a rejection of the bonds of tradition—be it literary or religious.
Cynthia Ozick Takes Up Arms Against Today’s Literary Scene: Zoe Heller, NYTimes, July 13, 2016 — “If an essay has a ‘motive,’ ” Cynthia Ozick once wrote, “it is linked more to happenstance and opportunity than to the driven will. A genuine essay is not a doctrinaire tract or a propaganda effort or a broadside. . . . It is a stroll through someone’s mazy mind. . . . It co-opts agreement; it courts agreement; it seduces agreement.”
Cynthia Ozick: Jewish Virtual Library — In conversation, one hears a soft, youthful tinkle, clear as a bell. Then there is the unfailing Old World politeness, the refinement of language, and a bright eagerness in the voice to share her thoughts, to hold nothing back. Yet, if the voice is poetry, the words are prophecy. One will hear this in the deep insights, the well-wrought thought, the keen incisiveness, and the sharp wit. These will come later-but they will come.
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