A short life of the author
Cynthia Ozick (born 17 April 1928) is an American novelist, short story writer, essayist, and critic whose intellectually formidable, linguistically exuberant body of work has made her one of the most respected and distinctive voices in American letters. Her central concerns — Jewish identity and memory, the dangers of idolatry (the worship of images and fictions), the moral responsibilities of the writer, and the relationship between imagination and ethics — are pursued with a prose style of extraordinary richness and an intellectual ambition that draws equally on the Talmudic tradition, Henry James, and the polemical essay tradition of European Jewish intellectuals.
Life and Career
Ozick was born in New York City and raised in the Pelham Bay neighbourhood of the Bronx, where her parents ran a pharmacy. She grew up speaking Yiddish at home and English at school, an experience that gave her a permanent sensitivity to the textures and registers of language. She attended New York University (where she was taught by Lionel Trilling’s colleague Sidney Hook) and earned an MA from Ohio State University, where she wrote a thesis on Henry James — the writer who, more than any other, shaped her conception of the novel as a moral instrument.
Her first novel, Trust (1966), was the product of seven years of writing — an enormous, Jamesian novel of ideas that was critically admired but commercially ignored. Its failure taught her that she was a writer of shorter forms: novellas, stories, essays. She later described the seven years spent on Trust as a form of idolatry — the worship of Art with a capital A — and much of her subsequent work is animated by the tension between the seductions of aesthetic ambition and the Jewish prohibition against graven images.
The Pagan Rabbi and Other Stories (1971) — her first story collection — announced the themes and the style that would define her career. The title story, in which a rabbi hangs himself after an erotic encounter with a dryad, is a parable about the incompatibility of Jewish monotheism and the pagan worship of nature. “Envy; or, Yiddish in America” — a thinly veiled portrait of the Yiddish poet Jacob Glatstein’s resentment of Isaac Bashevis Singer’s fame — is one of the great comic stories in American literature.
“The Shawl” (1980) — a three-page story set in a concentration camp, in which a mother watches her infant daughter thrown against an electrified fence — is one of the most devastating short fictions ever written. Its companion piece, “Rosa” (1983) — a novella about the mother decades later, living in a Miami Beach hotel, still carrying the shawl — extends the story into the aftermath of trauma. Together they were published as The Shawl (1989).
The Messiah of Stockholm (1987) — about a Swedish book reviewer who believes he is the son of the Polish Jewish writer Bruno Schulz and who encounters a woman claiming to possess Schulz’s lost manuscript, The Messiah — is a characteristically Ozickian meditation on literary paternity, the fetishisation of lost texts, and the boundary between genuine art and forgery.
The Puttermesser Papers (1997) — the adventures of Ruth Puttermesser, a Jewish intellectual woman in New York who creates a golem, becomes mayor, and eventually achieves a kind of paradise — is Ozick’s most playful novel and her most sustained exploration of Jewish myth in a contemporary setting.
Foreign Bodies (2010) — a deliberate “counter-novel” to James’s The Ambassadors, set among American Jews in 1950s Paris — is her most recent novel, and one of her finest.
Essays
Ozick is one of the great American essayists. Her collections — Art & Ardor (1983), Metaphor & Memory (1989), Quarrel & Quandary (2000), The Din in the Head (2006) — range across literature, Jewish thought, feminism, translation, and cultural criticism with an argumentative force and stylistic brilliance that place her alongside Edmund Wilson and Susan Sontag. Her essay “Toward a New Yiddish” (1970) — calling for an American Jewish literature rooted in the liturgical tradition rather than in secular universalism — was a manifesto that provoked furious debate.
Critical Standing
Ozick is one of the most important Jewish American writers of the postwar era and one of the finest prose stylists in American literature. She has won the PEN/Malamud Award for excellence in the short story, the National Book Critics Circle Award, and numerous other honours. Her work is central to any understanding of American Jewish literary culture.
Key Works
- The Pagan Rabbi and Other Stories (1971)
- The Shawl (1989)
- The Puttermesser Papers (1997)
- Art & Ardor (1983)
- Foreign Bodies (2010)
Collecting Ozick
Trust (1966, New American Library) — her debut — is scarce and brings $100–$300. The Pagan Rabbi and Other Stories (1971, Knopf) brings $50–$150. The Shawl (1989, Knopf) brings $20–$50. Her essay collections are modestly priced but essential. Ozick signs at events; signed copies are available.