Cynthia Ozick: literary works and critical analysis

American Jewish Writers have come a long way since WWII. There is even a literary movement that comprises all their works that is taught in schools today. In an interview with Katie Bolick, Cynthia Ozick explained why she was rejecting the appellative "woman writers," but did not reject being called "Jewish writer": "Jewish" is a category of civilization, culture, and intellect, and "woman" is a category of anatomy and physiology. it's rough thinking to confuse vast cultural and intellectual movements with the capacity to bear children" (Ozick).

Cynthia Ozick is an American Jewish female writer who has lived as a Child in Bronx, New York during the 1930s and went through every kind of discrimination possible, starting with patriarchal views that made the rabbi at the first school she was brought in to advise her grandmother to keep a girl away from something she did not need and continuing with the anti-Jewish feelings the Christian people in her neighborhood nourished.

The writer was born in 1928 in New York and she lived with her parents in Bronx where they had a pharmacy. Her parents came from Lithuania and their upbringing is shown in some of her works. The Jews living in the northwest of Russia were more severe, more rational and less inclined to mysticism, like those from the Eastern European countries (Jewish Virtual Library).

Her first novel, Trust, narrated in the first person, concentrates on the life of Allegra Vand, a woman characterized by "alertness without talent, intelligence without form, energy without a cause." The story is presented through the narrator's eyes, Allegra Vand's daughter. The events told by her are starting right after WWII. The nameless narrator is revealing while the story unfolds her own passions, struggles as a child and then a young woman who is searching for her place in the world, torn between her keen intelligence, her mother's marriage to someone who did not acknowledged her until later and her own puzzling emotions.

Inevitably, Ozick concentrated much of her literary work on the Jews and their destiny. Johanna Kaplan compares the effect her collection of stories the Pagan Rabbi and Other Stories had on her with those Borges, Kawabata and Garcia Marquez exercised at a time when she was already acquainted to universal literature (Kaplan, 15).

The seven stories in this book are centered on people Jews living with their bodies on American soil, their hearts in the places they left before coming to America and their souls in a mystical world where they hope to find God. They are torn between their two identities, between at least three civilizations, probably like her parents and all those in their community who were born elsewhere and came to the U.S. between in a period of torment for the whole world: between the two world wars. The author expresses here some of her own questions regarding the mystical part of life, the common, the extraordinary and the sacred. Maybe her interest for the mystical came from the first literary pieces she read as a child: fairytales. Her exceptional memory and her intelligence made her remember the world full of wonder she experienced while reading those books.

In spite of all the difficulties she might have encountered as a Jewish girl living in Bronx in the 1930s, Ozick had the chance to pursue her dreams and become a writer without having to fight any resistance from outside. She went to a high school that taught her excellence and prepared her for the competitive world of ideas she will soon enter. She attended the Hunter College High school in Manhattan. Her short story Una Mayer and the novel trust will reveal some of the experiences she had during high school (Jewish Virtual Library).

Ozick wrote about the holocaust although she was never a witness of the atrocities. She explains herself that having lived anywhere in the world, especially as a Jew, during the times when the Holocaust was happening, a writer cannot escape the compulsion to write about it even without having been there:..."for some reason, I keep writing Holocaust fiction. It is something that has happened to me; I can't help it. If I had been there and not here I would be dead, which is something I can never forget. I think back on the four years I was in high school -- I was extraordinarily happy, just coming into the exaltations of literature -- and then I think about what was going on across the water, with very confused feelings" (Ozick). Her story, the shawl, first published in the New Yorker was one of those stories written under the deep influence of what happened during the Holocaust. Ozick expresses her conviction that fiction is not possible outside history. The passed essentially leaves its mark on anything in the present and it touches anything created by humanity, including its literary work (Ozick).

Some critics, like a. Alvarez "accused" her of being obsessed with Jewishness when referring to one of her novels: Puttermesser. Alvarez concludes that judging by her works, redemption can only come from religion and backs up this conclusion by citing the her own words about her language: "Though English is my everything, now and then I feel cramped by it. I have come to it with notions it is too parochial to recognize. A language, like a people, has a history of ideas; but not all ideas; only those known to its experience. Not surprisingly, English is a Christian language. When I write English, I live in Christendom"(Alvarez, 56).

She graduated at the Ohio State University with a graduate degree in English. She got married in 1952 and, under the deep influence of Henry James's writings, during the next decade she will work on a project for a first novel she will abandon eventually and worked on Trust, a novel she will publish in 1966. Leo Baeck's Romantic Religion and Heinrich Gratetz' History of the Jews will definitively influence her into adding "Jewish Themes" in her further literary work. She will write and publish poems and a short story based on these (Jewish Virtual Library).

Although she rejects the label "feminist writer," Cynthia Ozick has feminist influences all over her literature. The reminiscences of her first encounter with the rejection in the Yiddish school where her grandmother has brought her for the first time must be the first layer of feminism upon which there grew all the rest of the influences in this direction. Her essays and her short stories prove that she argued with the tools of feminism: "It is insulting to a poet to compare his titanic and agonized strivings with the socalled 'creativity' of childbearing, where -- consciously -- nothing happens. One does not will the development of the fetus... The process itself is as involuntary and unaware as the beating of one's own heart" (Ozick cited by Pollitt, 64).

Ozick is a writer of literature, poetry, short stories, theatre and essays just as she is a New York intellectual. She is a Jew just as she is a product of the high energies flowing among those who were living in New York, the center of the universe for some. The collection of her writings gathered under the title Art&Ardor are proving her features common to the New York Jewish writers who were brilliantly debating over the world of ideas.

The writer has challenged her role of creating, thus partly becoming a "creator" in the sense of "creator of the universe." It is true that her novel the Canibal Galaxy she wrote as if having understood how the universe was created: "And the earth was astonishingly empty" (Ozick cited by Apple, 137). It is thus a reinforcement of her statement regarding the importance of history when it comes to the creation of a writer and this outs things into the perspective of the origins of the universe. Joseph Brill, one of the main characters of the novel is a survivor of the Holocaust. Apple compares the novel with one of William Blake's poems since it is looking directly to the mystery of creation without any intermediaries and without fear.

In her Jewish inheritance, Ozick could not escape the role idolatry had for her Jewish people. It will appear as a major theme in her literary work, starting with her second novel, the Cannibal Galaxy.