"Greek Mind/Jewish Soul, I predict, will quickly be recognized as the best

work done on Ozick, by far, and one of the best books we have on a contem-
porary modern writer."—Frank Lentricchia, Series Editor

Since the 1970s, Cynthia Ozick's stories, novels, and essays have gradually
earned high critical acclaim. Victor Strandberg's Greek Mind /Jewish Soul is a
comprehensive study of this exceptionally gifted author, correlating her creative art
and her intellectual development. Strandberg devotes considerable attention to
Ozick's struggle to maintain her Jewish religion and culture within a society saturated
with Christian and secular values. By examining the influence of Western
philosophical and literary traditions on Ozick and her particular social cir-
cumstances, Strandberg is able to ask larger questions about the merit of Ozick's
work and its place within American literature.

Strandberg begins by chronicling the cultural dilemmas of Ozick's early life.

The daughter of struggling immigrant parents, Ozick sometimes endured
anti-Semitic ostracism from classmates in the New York public schools. But even
as she deeply immersed herself in her Judaic heritage, avidly learning Hebrew
and studying Jewish history, she found the gentile heritage irresistible, beginning
with fairy tales in childhood and graduating to George Eliot, Edith Wharton,
and Henry James. Her studies in Latin likewise awakened a love for classical
literature that impinged powerfully upon her books, particularly Trust and The
Pagan Rabbi.

By drawing on a range of sources, including his own ten-year correspondence

with Ozick, Strandberg illuminates Ozick's thinking on volatile issues that trou-
bled her during her formative years, including feminism, the Holocaust, and
Jewish cultural survival. Strandberg then offers a close reading of her books and
poems in chapters on Trust, The Pagan Rabbi, Bloodshed, and Levitation and
presents an astute analysis of her later novels, The Cannibal Galaxy, The Messiah
of Stockholm, and The Shawl. After reviewing all the critical material written to
date on Ozick, Strandberg concludes by rendering his own assessment of Ozick's
literary achievement. He considers how "Jewish" her work is, how "American" it
is, and finally, how major her seat is at the table of the canonized.
VICTOR STRANDBERG is professor of English at Duke University. His books
include The Poetic Vision of Robert Penn Warren and A Faulkner Overview: Six
Perspectives. He has also written many articles about contemporary American
writers.
The Wisconsin Project on American Writers
Frank Lentricchia, General Editor

The University of Wisconsin Press

114 N. Murray Street, Madison, Wisconsin 53715
ISBN 0-299-U264-7

WISEdition Original Paperback

The Wisconsin Project on American Writers

'

Frank Lentricchia, General Editor

Author's Note: (January, 2012) I thank the

University of Wisconsin Press for its
permission to put this book online.
Greek Mind/Jewish Soul
The Conflicted Art of Cynthia Ozick

by Victor Strandberg

The University of Wisconsin Press

The University of Wisconsin Press
114 North Murray Street
Madison, Wisconsin 53715

3 Henrietta Street
London WC2E 8LU, England

Copyright © 1994
The Board of Regents of the University of Wisconsin System
All rights reserved

5 4 3 2 1

Printed in the United States of America

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Strandberg, Victor H.
Greek mind/Jewish soul : the conflicted art of Cynthia Ozick /
Victor Strandberg.
228 p. cm.—(The Wisconsin project on American writers)
Includes bibliographical references (p. 195) and index.
ISBN 0-299-14260-4 (cl.) ISBN 0-299-14264-7 (pb.)
1. Ozick, Cynthia—Criticism and interpretation. 2. Judaism in literature.
3. Jews in literature. I. Title.
PS3565.Z5Z87 1994
813'.54—dc20 94-589
To Arne, Bill, and John
for auld lang syne.
"These grains of life will stay forever."
—Cynthia Ozick
Contents

Preface ix
Author's Note xi
Chapter 1. The Matrix of Art 3
Beginnings 3
Feminism 12
Judaism 18
Jewish History 27
The Holocaust 38
Modern Israel 42
L'Chaim! and the Art of Fiction 44

Chapter 2. Readings 57

Early Pieces 57
Trust: A Kunstlerroman 62
Three Story Books: From Pan to Moses 81
The Cannibal Galaxy: Curriculum Duel 111
The Messiah of Stockholm: Gift of the Magi 124
The Shawl: Tale of Two Cities 139

Chapter 3. Judgment 152

The Critical Reckoning 152

Judeo-Christian 171
Amerikaner-Geboren 177
Major/Minor 186
Postscript: An Appreciation 188

Notes 195
Index 209

Author's Note (January, 2012): For easier readability, I have converted the
text into a Microsoft Word format
.
 Preface

About ten years ago, I received a surprise invitation from William

Scheick to write a long essay on Cynthia Ozick for a Special Issue of his
journal, Texas Studies in Literature and Language, which was to be devoted to
three neglected women writers (Ozick, Shirley Hazzard, and Anne Redmon).
Not knowing Ozick's work, I looked at her only available books (The Pagan
Rabbi and Bloodshed), judged them to be first-rate, and accepted the invitation.
The resulting essay, which was published in the Summer 1983 issue of TSLL,
has been assimilated into this book-length study with such changes as I
thought appropriate.

Some greatly favorable responses to that original essay,

described by several scholars as seminal and indispensable, encouraged me
to undertake this longer study, which was occasioned by Ms. Ozick's
extensive burst of creativity since 1983. In addition to the three novels and
two volumes of essays she has published since then, her oeuvre includes
more novellas, stories, interviews, letters, reviews, and essays, along with
some personal correspondence between us in which she most graciously
agreed to answer such questions as I might care to put into writing.
Throughout this book, Ms. Ozick's willingness to conduct a long-term,
written "interview" through this exchange of letters has made an important
contribution, for which I am most grateful.

Because serious scholarship has focused on Ozick for barely a

decade— most of it in the last half decade—two primordial tasks of criticism
remain in progress: to define the author's intellectual moorings, and—with
them in view—to render an interpretive reading of her books. In its effort to
perform those tasks, this book divides into three major sections. Chapter 1 is an
account of the intellectual ambience of the writer as revealed in essays,
interviews, letters, and a variety of incidental writings. Chapter 2 is an
interpretive reading of the fiction (and some poetry) that attempts to analyze its
interplay of themes, characters, and narrative devices. Chapter 3, entitled
"Judgment," begins with an overall review of Ozick scholarship and ends with
my personal evaluation of her achievement. The purpose of the whole
enterprise can be simply stated: I shall consider the book a success if it
substantially facilitates my reader's grasp of the artist's writings.

Other books about Cynthia Ozick have been, will be, and should be
written, giving differing interpretations and approaches to her work. Some
 Preface

of those books have focused or will focus more meaningfully on the

specifically Jewish character of her work than I, a Gentile, can aspire to do.
Others will espouse the kind of postmodern theory in which I have taken
little interest, subjecting her work to the psycholinguistic processes of
deconstruction, for example, or putting primary emphasis on social
abstractions that I have treated as secondary—class, race, gender,
homophobia, late capitalism, imperialism (involving the Palestinian
question), Marxism, the new historicism, and similar issues. Whatever
approach other critics may choose, I hope we shall all hold in common a
respect for clear, largely jargon-free language so as to make both our own
work and Ms. Ozick's more intelligible to the sophisticated readers from
all backgrounds whom, in my judgment, we should aim to serve. This book,
in any case, was written out of that intention.

My strong thanks go to Frank Lentricchia, whose professional

encouragement was indispensable to the making of this book. And I am
deeply grateful to Susan Tarcov for her superb editorial work on the
manuscript.
 Author's Note

For simplicity's sake, I shall refer to Cynthia Ozick's books within my main
text in the following fashion:

(TR) Trust. New York: New American Library, 1966.

(PR) The Pagan Rabbi and Other Stories. New York: Knopf, 1971.
(BL) Bloodshed and Three Novellas. New York: Knopf, 1976.
(LE) Levitation: Five Fictions. New York: Knopf, 1982.
(AA) Art & Ardor. New York: Knopf, 1983.
(CG) The Cannibal Galaxy. New York: Knopf, 1983.
(MS) The Messiah of Stockholm. New York: Knopf, 1987.
(MM) Metaphor & Memory. New York: Knopf, 1989.
(SH) The Shawl ("The Shawl" and "Rosa"). New York: Knopf, 1990.

For additional economy of style, I have identified Ms. Ozick's letters to

me in my main text in this manner: (Ltr 4/15/87).

I also refer in my main text to three frequently cited interviews by citing

the name of the interviewer in this manner:

(Kauvar 385) refers to page 385 of an interview conducted by Elaine M.

Kauvar in Contemporary Literature 26, no. 4 (Winter 1985).

(Scheick) refers to an interview conducted by William J. Scheick and

Catherine Rainwater in Texas Studies in Literature and Language 25, no. 2
(Summer 1983).

(Teicholz) refers to an interview conducted by Tim Teicholz in "The Art

of Fiction" Series (XCV) of the Paris Review 29 (Spring 1987).

XI
 1
The Matrix of Art

Despite her frequent invocation of D. H. Lawrence's warning, "Trust

the tale, not the teller," Cynthia Ozick's own practice of criticism has made
generous use of biography to analyze writings by two Eliots, T. S. and
George, along with favorite writers such as Virginia Woolf, Edith Wharton,
and Henry James. Her primary reason for disavowing the New Criticism
was "its pretense that the poem was a finished, sealed unit, as if nothing
outside the text could ever have mattered in the making of the poem" (AA
179); and what was most untenable about that pretense was precisely its
disregard for the author: "The history, psychology, even the opinions, of a
writer were declared irrelevant to the work and its word" (AA 163). To the
extent that Ozick has portrayed her life and thought in interviews, essays,
and letters, any attempt to understand her art should likewise begin with the
figure behind the typewriter. 1 In this opening chapter, we shall trace out
some personal, cultural, and aesthetic concerns that pervade the life and art
of Cynthia Ozick. In general, it will best enhance our understanding to
unwind these threads in chronological sequence.

Beginnings

Irresistible evidence attests the importance of the early years. '*! am

what I was," says the eighty-year-old Wallace Fowlie in his book of
reminiscences entitled Memory. "For better or worse, we are what we
learned as children," is Joan Didion's way of putting it. Concerning her
earliest impressions, Cynthia Ozick declared that "these grains of life will
stay forever." In "Spells, Wishes, Goldfish, Old School Hurts," a New York
Times essay, she described some of those grains in vivid detail, allowing her
readers to see in hindsight the materials of art coming into formation. 2
4 The Matrix of Art

In this short piece about her childhood Ozick illuminates a showcase of

future artistic motifs. Here the career-long tension in her work between
Jewish and Gentile cultures—between Pan and Moses, Hellenism and He-
braism, Magic and the Law—traces back to her earliest memories. The
dominant Jewish heritage was linked in her memory with her father's "beauti-
ful Hebrew paragraphs, his Talmudist's rationalism," his study "in Yiddish
[of] all of Sholem Aleichem and Peretz," and the letters she wrote in child-
hood Yiddish to a grandmother in Moscow who knew no English. She
simultaneously developed an avid taste for Gentile literature, however,
beginning with "the secret bliss of the Violet Fairy Book." The "shivery
unearthly feelings that a child gets from myths, Norse tales, fairy books," as
she later recalled them, suggest a warning that Reynolds Price raised about
such reading. "I think when scholars are trying to find out what influences
writers, they invariably go wrong because they leave out childhood read-
ing," he says, which "is obviously the most influential of all in forming the
fantasy life and impressing the unconscious."3 Although Ozick moved on to
the standard classics—Cervantes, Swift, Dickens, Twain, Charlotte Bronte,
Louisa May Alcott, and Lewis Carroll—she proved Price correct by her
lifelong interest in pagan gods, dryads, golems, and other versions of magic
and fantasy.

A subtler but deeply ingrained motif of Ozick's early years was the immi-
nence of poverty. At the time she was too young to care that "the lion-eyed
landlady has raised, threefold, in the middle of that Depression that I have
never heard of, the Park View Pharmacy's devouring rent," but she was old
enough to take in a permanent image of what it all meant to her parents:

My mother, not yet 40, wears bandages on her ankles, covering oozing
varicose veins: back and forth she strides, dashes, runs, climbing cellar stairs
or ladders; she toils behind drug counters and fountain counters. Like my
father, she is on her feet until one in the morning, the Park View's closing
hour. (AA 301)

A scene like this, reinforcing Ozick's recognition in childhood of "the

heavy power of a quarter," bears an ancestral relationship to a number of
motifs in the artist's fictions. From her earliest work, Trust, we may cite the
corruptive power of Allegra's wealth, for example, as contrasted with the
healthy vigor of the moneyless Purses and the final apotheosis of the penni-
less Tilbeck. The same spirit recurs, undiminished, in her late work, such as
The Shawl, which vibrates with authorial contempt for the class conscious-
ness it portrays among European and American Jews. According to Arthur
Hertzberg's The Jews in America, this mode of class identity characterizes
The Matrix of Art 5

the larger Jewish community. "American Jewish history is also the story of
. . . the Jewish poor of Europe," he writes, pointing out that in the year of
maximum immigration (1906, the year Ozick's mother came to America),
the two hundred thousand Jews who passed into the United States included
only fifty who declared themselves professionals.4 Ozick thus experienced a
shock of recognition in her belated reading of Dreiser's Sister Carrie, whose
"cramped flats and teeming streets," she wrote in 1986, "are the fabric of
our grandparents' world; we know it with the kind of intimacy we cannot
bring to Hawthorne's Puritans or James's high-caste international visitors."5

One other implication of this scene in the Park View Pharmacy should be
noted before we leave it: Cynthia Ozick never uses her parents as models in
her fiction. Her father figures in Trust—William, Enoch, and Tilbeck—bear
no resemblance to the long-suffering druggist in the Times sketch, nor do
father figures like Joseph Brill in The Cannibal Galaxy and the two fathers
in "The Pagan Rabbi." The discrepancy is even more striking with Ozick's
mother figures: neglectful or exploitative mothers like Allegra Vand in Trust,
Hester Lilt in The Messiah of Stockholm, and Ruth Puttermesser (vis-a-vis
her golem-child) contrast rather than compare with Ozick's own mother,
whom she describes as "a great encourager on all fronts" from earliest
childhood (Ltr 6/6/90). Nowhere in her writing does Ozick's filial attitude
differ from that of her Yiddish/Hebrew dedication in Levitation: "Mama,
Shiphra [her name], O my maminke [beautiful, precious mother]". The
Hebrew verses in this dedication, from Psalms originally addressed to God,
are a final index of filial feeling: Translation: "You uplifted my soul with
strength" (Psalm 138.3). ". . . Every night I drench my bed, with my tears I
soak my couch" (Psalm 6.7). 6

Although no trace of Hemingway's filial spite may be found in Ozick's

pages, something like Hemingway's primal wound does find expression,
not relating to losses in love and war such as Ernest suffered but rather
relating to the "Old School Hurts" of her essay's title. The depth of the
wound can be gauged from her foreword to Art & Ardor, which defines this
essay as having a topic of such compelling force as to make it unique among
all her essays:

I never meant to write essays. Only once have I ever written a piece of
nonfiction on purpose and for its own sake, self-propelled. The desire came on
me spontaneously, long ago, just after reading George Orwell's "Such, Such
Were the Joys . . .," a memoir of Orwell's melancholy childhood in an
English boarding school. . . . Though my own childhood was as far from an
English boarding school as can be imagined, the essay's theme was Orwell's:
school injustice and school humiliation. (AA ix-x)
6 The Matrix of Art

The essay that she published, "We Ignoble Savages" (in the Evergreen
Review of November-December 1959), is a long, bitter memoir of "the
lusterless octet of those years between 1933 and 1941," or age five to thir-
teen. To the essay's catalogues of harms inflicted by the teaching staff Ozick
later added deeds perpetrated by fellow students. Primary among these
hurts is the ostracism imposed upon the Jewish child by the majority cul-
ture. Although New York is, in Ozick's own words, "a city of Jews" (BL 49),
she was the only Jewish child among her classmates in Public School 71—a
status that could not help but affect any small child profoundly:

My classmates were Irish, Scottish, German, Swedish, (some) Italian, and

pretty evenly divided between Catholics and Protestants (no, I guess the Cath-
olics had the edge). I was the only Jewish kid. . . . There were two Catholic
churches; I was terrified of them both, and was obliged to pass one or the
other on the way to school; so, with shaking knees, I used to race past on the
opposite side of the street. . . . (Ltr 6/6/90)

Her first encounter with the Protestant heritage proved more frustrating
than scary, foreshadowing a sometimes embittered lifelong struggle to val-
orize her own heritage against the annihilating ignorance of the majority
culture:

I met my first WASP when a new girl named Jane Jones [a pseudonym] moved
in—she was from a mysterious place called "the midwest." It was second
grade, and I recall in full detail our opening get-acquainted conversation. Jane
Jones, starting off with the standard question: "Cynthia, what are you?" (This
always meant what is your religion.) Me: "I'm Jewish." "Yes, but are you Protes-
tant or Catholic?" Me: "I'm Jewish." Jane Jones, getting exasperated . . .:
"Well, I know that, you said it already. But are you Protestant or Catholic?"
Me: "I'm Jewish." Jane Jones (now really exasperated): "O.K., O.K., you're
Jewish. BUT ARE YOU PROTESTANT OR CATHOLIC? YOU HAVE TO BE ONE OR THE
OTHER!" (Ltr 6/6/90)

In time, the comic innocence of this scene was to give way to something
permanently harmful, an ongoing slander against the child's Jewish identity:
"in P.S. 71 I am publicly shamed in Assembly because I am caught not
singing Christmas carols; in P.S. 711 am repeatedly accused of deicide" (AA
302). When, during her teens, these injuries were amplified unimaginably by
news of the Holocaust, there was compelling reason, both personally and
historically, why Ozick's work would later disclose a pervasive hatred of
Western/Christian civilization (though the hatred cannot extirpate contrary
feelings):
The Matrix of Art 7

My dispraise of Diaspora . . . is centered on a revulsion against the

values-very plainly I mean the beliefs—of the surrounding culture itself: a
revulsion against the Greek and Pagan modes, whether in the Christian or
post-Christian vessels, or whether in their vessels of Kulturgeschichte. It is a
revulsion against— I want to state it even more plainly—against what is called,
strangely, Western Civilization. (AA 157)

Jew-baiting was not the only "old school hurt" for the future artist.
Considering Ozick's voracious appetite for books in her childhood, only
extraordinary obtuseness on the part of the school's teaching staff can
explain their failure to recognize their brightest pupil. "I had no encourage-
ment of any kind in elementary school," she recollects—"where, in fact, I
believed I was stupid and wholly incapable, despite the fact that I excelled at
reading, grammar, and spelling; these were simply not valued by most of my
teachers" (Ltr 6/6/90). The memory was painful enough to bear repetition in
another interview. "I'm still hurt by P.S. 71," Ozick said in 1989; "I had
teachers who hurt me, who made me believe I was stupid and inferior"
(Teicholz 182-83).

But though "the effect of childhood hurt continues to the grave," Ozick
says, it has this useful side effect: "A writer is buffeted into being by school
hurts—Orwell, Forster, Mann" (AA 304). Later, repeatedly, Ozick would
say that retaliation for these early slights would be a serious motive for her
fiction. In answering the query "What book made you decide to become a
writer?" she answered that her stimulus was not a book; instead, "it was the
hope of revenge against the book-hating, Jew-hating P.S. 71."7 To an inter-
viewer's opinion that "The Cannibal Galaxy had an edge of bitterness to it"
(in its satire on American schooling), she explained:

I've discussed "revenge" with other writers, and discovered I'm not alone in
facing the Medusalike truth that one reason writers write . .. is out of revenge.
Life hurts; certain ideas and experiences hurt; one wants to . . . replay the old
bad scenes and get the Treppenworte said—the words one didn't have the
strength or the ripeness to say when those words were necessary for one's
dignity or survival. (Teicholz 183)

Although there were enough Old School Hurts to explain Ozick's strong
penchant for irony and satire, some failures in her early life lay beyond the
reach of irony's exorcism. As with so many other writers—one thinks of a
particular favorite of hers, Emily Dickinson—Ozick's artistic inclinations
produced a sense of alienation within more intimate circles than the school-
yard: "I am incognito. No one knows who I truly am. The teachers in P.S. 71
don't know. Rabbi Meskin, my cheder teacher, doesn't know. . . . My
8 The Matrix of Art

brother doesn't care. My father doesn't notice" (AA 302). Among children
this sensibility may be commonplace enough to be almost universal. But
inasmuch as a similar lack of validation would extend for about twenty
years into her writing career, it is not surprising that Ozick's fiction features
a series of mute, burnt-out, or otherwise thwarted potential artists, includ-
ing the nameless (identity-less) narrator of Trust, Edelshtein in "Envy; or,
Yiddish in America," and Lars Andemening in The Messiah of Stockholm.
"I've never fully recovered," Ozick said of those school years. "You never
really recover from early futility and worthlessness" (Kauvar 385).

Our final entry in the list of Old School Hurts relates to gender. As
precociously as the second grade, Ozick had assimilated Freud's embittering
insight about anatomy affecting destiny: "[Betty Taylor] was extremely
pretty and it was clear in the first hour [that we met] that she would become
hugely 'popular'" (Ltr 6/6/90). Predictably, this principle was to register
most crucially during the teenage period. During her first day of college, at
age seventeen, the atmosphere of sexual competition impinged with the
effect of a new kind of ostracism: "The engaged girls—how many of them
there seemed to be!—flash their rings. . . . There is no feminism and no
feminists: I am, I think, the only one. . . . When the Commons overflows,
the engaged girls cross the street to show their rings at the Chock Full
[restaurant]" (MM 116-17). As with the Jew-hating, book-hating P.S. 71,
this motif of Hymen triumphant was to engender a mood of defiance, most
notably in the withering contempt toward marriage displayed by a series of
Ozick personae such as the narrator of Trust, Una in "An Education," and
the protagonist in "The Doctor's Wife."

Ozick's first day at college produced other notable images of the artist in
transition. Carrying over from her past is the familiar skirmish with
poverty: arriving at New York University with her lunch in a paper bag, she
has only ten cents in her purse, for subway fare home. So she cannot
purchase the magazine that has just aroused her neophyte's hunger—"Partisan
Review: the table of the gods" (MM 114). The deprivation, however, has
fixed Ozick's eye on something better than a magazine—"these bohemian
streets . . . the honeypot of poets." Here in Washington Square the artist's
eye captured a scene of urban lowlife vitality that was to recur in the garb
of fiction on Tilbeck's island in Trust, in Puttermesser's New York City, and
in Persky's Miami (in The Shawl). The cadence, the imagery, and the rush of
energy in the passage join with its proletarian sympathy to give us a sense of
the artist finding her calling:

the benches of Washington Square are pimpled with this hell-tossed crew,
these Mad Margarets and Cokey Joes, these volcanic coughers, shakers, groan-
The Matrix of Art 9

ers, tremblers, droolers, blasphemers, these public urinators with vomitous

breath and rusted teeth stumps, dead-eyed and self-abandoned, dragging their
makeshift junkyard shoes, their buttonless layers of raggedy ratfur. The pret-
zel man with his toilet paper rolls [stripped and used as spindles for pretzels]
conjures and spews them all—he is a loftier brother to these citizens of the
lower pox, he is guardian of the garden of the jettisoned. They rattle along all
the seams of Washington Square. They are the pickled city, the true and
universal City-below-Cities, the wolfish vinegar-Babylon that dogs the spittled
skirts of bohemia. The toilet paper rolls are the temple columns of this sacred
grove. (MM 115-16)

That closing phrase—"temple columns of this sacred grove"—is a reminder

of something that went very well in high school. From 1942 to 1946, Hunter
College High School had grounded Ozick well in the classics, an education
that would undergird her lifelong flirtation (in fiction only) with the pagan
gods of antiquity. "In high school," she writes, "it was Latin class, the
Aeneid in particular, that instigated the profoundest literary feelings—O
infelix Dido!" (Ltr 6/6/90). Thus she could write, about her first day of
college, that "until now, the fire of my vitals has been for the imperious
tragedians of the Aeneid. . . . My adolescent phantoms are rowing in the
ablative absolute with pius Aeneas" (MM 116, 119). At the university she
continued to study Latin writers, including Pliny, Horace, Catullus, and
Plautus, along with Edward Gibbon the classicist historian. Together with
her concurrent grounding in Hebrew, this study of Latin literature led di-
rectly to Matthew Arnold's discourse on Hebraism and Hellenism. During
her student years, she says, "at least for me, the world was dividing itself
into an Arnoldian vision of Hellenism and Hebraism. When I read and read
in Hebrew sources, I would dream the difference from the Greek; and vice
versa" (Ltr 1/14/82).

In contrast with P.S. 71, Ozick's college years brought high distinction, as
her omnivorous greed for books led to Phi Beta Kappa honors and an English
honors thesis on Blake, Coleridge, Wordsworth, and Shelley. "I was saturated
in the Romantic poets," she recalls, which made her "a zealous monist then,
captivated by the fusion of soul and nature" (Ltr 6/6/90). Two eventual
products of this episode were Ozick's startlingly original novella "The Pagan
Rabbi," and her massive, unpublished first novel with title taken from Blake,
Mercy, Pity, Peace, and Love. "I really believed in Mercy, Pity, Peace, and
Love," she recalls, a penchant which made her "slow to 'get' social clues—
especially about this thing called 'class'" (Ltr 7/13/90). We may infer that her
belated awareness of class discrimination marks off that abortive first novel
from her next work, the bitingly class-conscious Trust. (It is worth noting that
the two titles taken together form a continuum—Mercy, Pity, Peace, and
10 The Matrix of Art

Love; and Trust—but the latter term proves so untenable, in the novel Trust,
as to subvert Blake's quartet of noble abstractions.)

In her personal life, Ozick's college years stamped one scar on her soul
that would erupt into print nearly a half century later. In the 30 March 1992
New Yorker, Ozick finally addressed her troubled relationship with a class-
mate who had died two decades before the essay was published and whose
hairlessness found its way into her title, "Alfred Chester's Wig." Deliber-
ately prodded by their English teacher, the two freshmen sharpened their
weekly five-hundred-word character sketches like dueling weapons: "Chester
and I were roped-off roosters, or a pair of dogs set against each other—pit
bulls. . . . All this was Mr. Emerson's scheme" (82). But in the end their
classroom rivalry both confirmed her calling as a writer and strengthened
her friendship with Chester, as they toured bookstores and attended parties
together.

What broke their friendship, after the vital intimacy of their college years,
was a mutual administering of pain. Early on, he wounded her by having a
brilliant career while she labored through a decade of oblivion, giving her all
to a three-hundred-thousand-word novel that she in the end discarded. By
chance, he turned out to be the expert reader who evaluated her first pub-
lished story for a little magazine, a task he completed by sending her a
contemptuous, patronizing letter of acceptance. She in turn inflicted a friend-
ship-terminating wound during a transatlantic exchange of letters on "the
nature of love" by insisting that his homosexuality was artificially induced,
not his natural orientation. Implicitly, the artifice in the case was his physi-
cal freakishness—a totally hairless body, "short and ovoid" and topped by a
wig, that made him feel (she infers) "abnormal, monstrous, freakish . . . too
horrifically ugly" (91). Thus inhibited from moving the female friendships of
his youth toward Eros, she deduces, he found outlets elsewhere.8 Chester's
response—"a savage bellow," she calls it—was written in capital letters:
"YOU KNOW NOTHING ABOUT LOVE!" (91-92). She was at work, at the time,
on her Eros-driven first novel, Trust.

Ironically, it was Chester himself who gave Cynthia Ozick her first kiss,
from which she "shrank back, and told him I could not think of him like
that—he was my brother" (85). But if Eros lay dormant at this juncture,
Apollo did not. She absorbed the image of Sacred Beauty, important for
Trust, from Chester's entourage. His close friend Diana, for example—"one
of the beauties, among the loveliest of all"—implied the pagan resonance of
Sacred Beauty not only in her name but in her very physiognomy: "In after
years, I happened on a replica of her face on the salvaged wall of an ancient
Roman villa" (86). Chester himself, despite the stigma of his hairless condi-
tion and homosexuality, contributed pagan-wise to the making of Tilbeck
The Matrix of Art 11

with his "breezy erotic spirit" reminiscent of "the goat-god Pan at play"
(90). And at a party in Chester's honor, it seemed that Astarte herself
reposed (her actual name is given out as Tatyana), emitting a "mustard
glow" that would recur during the night of Tilbeck's apotheosis:

In the middle of that carpet, a young woman lay in a mustard glow. . . . Her
mustard-colored hair flowed out over the floor. Her mustard-colored New
Look skirt was flung into folds around her. She was sprawled there like an
indolent cat. . . . She had tigers' eyes, greenly chiaroscuro. . . . [It] was the
majesty of pure sexuality. It was animal beauty. . . . Tatyana stretched her
catlike flanks and laughed her mermaid's laughter. She was woman, cat, fish—
silvery, slithery, mustard-colored. She spread her hair and whirled it. . . . With
the holy power of their femaleness, her eyes traversed our faces. (87, 88)

Besides furnishing material for later manipulation into art, Ozick's rela-
tionship with Alfred Chester built confidence in other respects. "He was my
conduit and guide," she says. "Without him, I would have been buried alive
in Washington Square, consumed by timidity" (86). But behind her timidity
was an avid thirst for general education, a subject of disdain for him, which
in the end built a foundation for her art that would outlast his brilliant,
mercurial talent. "I felt in myself stirrings of history, of idea," she writes; "I
was infatuated with German and Latin, I exulted over the Reformation. I
suppose that this enthusiasm meant I was more serious than Chester" (84).

In part because of her greater seriousness, by the time she published her
first novel their careers displayed a sharply contrary profile, hers ascending
steadily from oblivion toward a distinctive place among our most eminent
Jewish-American writers, while his lapsed from high success into hapless
ruination. Shortly before he was expelled from the MacDowell Writers'
Colony because of obnoxious behavior, Chester wrote to friends saying, "I
hate myself too. I can't stand it anymore not having any stable I. . . I don't
know who I am" (94). A few years before his premature death at forty-two,
Alfred Chester brought his search for identity to a Jewish conclusion, mov-
ing to Jerusalem where he composed his last significant work, "Letter from
a Wandering Jew." From it, Ozick cites lines that speak as much for her and
her lifework as for her old college mate: "does a Jew ever stop being a Jew?
Especially one like me whose parents had fled the Russian pogroms for the
subtler barbarisms of New York?" (96). Even if we disregard Ozick's per-
sonal involvement with this man, it is easy to see the grounds of her lifelong
fascination. Had he not been a real person, he could have figured into any
number of Ozick's stories as her quintessential fictional character. But of
equal importance is Ozick's self-portrait as an artist in "Alfred Chester's
Wig," a palimpsest that traces back to her ur-self in freshman English.
12 The Matrix of Art

During these formative years, Ozick's most important discovery in fiction

came about through blind serendipity: "I came, by chance, upon 'The Beast
in the Jungle' at seventeen, knowing nothing about James; and that did it.
That story was included in a science fiction anthology my brother brought
home from the public library" (Ltr 6/6/90). Eventually this chance encounter
would lead to a master's thesis, "Parable in the Later Novels of Henry
James," and thereafter to a fictional oeuvre bearing strong traces through-
out of the Jamesian imprint. The other writers that she favored she describes
as "Everyone's List":

When I think of the writers who have been most important to me,. . . the most
prominently cherished have been James, Forster, Chekhov; and then Tolstoy,
Conrad, George Eliot, Mann, Melville's "Bartleby the Scrivener." . . . Most
readers have the same list, and I can't think of anything that distinguishes
mine, except a kind of obsessiveness, a craze for reading the same thing over
and over again. (I used to read Forster's The Longest Journey every year.) (Ltr
1/14/82)

Although, decades later, George Eliot would be assimilated into the

Puttermesser stories, her singularity as the only female on the above list
suggests a feebleness of feminist consciousness in this phase of Ozick's
beginnings. It was a phase that would soon end.

Feminism

Cynthia Ozick's birthdate, 17 April 1928, fell in the decade when American
women first exercised their voting franchise, and a dozen years before the
economic necessities of World War II gave a new thrust to the movement for
women's equality. In 1946, she gave the graduating address at her all-girls'
school—"Hunter High (finishing school cum Latin prep)"—and then com-
pleted her undergraduate studies at Washington Square College (the liberal
arts segment of NYU) without much sense of sexist bias affecting her aca-
demic life. Ironically, it was during graduate study at Columbia University,
in 1951, that she first ran afoul of the problem. During her seminar with
Lionel Trilling, "the Great Man presided awesomely" over a class that was
all-male except for Ozick and one other female, an older woman "who
talked like a motorcycle, fast and urgent. Everything she said was almost
brilliant, only not actually on point, and frenetic with hostility."9 Given the
Crazy Lady's increasing aggressiveness, it was understandable that Trilling
tried to overcome her by shutting his eyes or by "cutting her dead and
lecturing right across the sound of her strong, strange voice." It came as a
The Matrix of Art 13

shock, however, when Ozick—at that time "bone-skinny, small, sallow and
myopic, and so scared I could trigger diarrhea at one glance from the Great
Man"—received her term paper back containing a rebuke to the Crazy
Lady: "because we were a connected blur of Woman, the Famous Critic,
master of ultimate distinctions, couldn't tell us apart. The Crazy Lady and I!
. . . He couldn't tell us apart!" (CL 674-75).

Going out from academe into the real world merely confirmed Ozick's
experience of sex bias. A brief fling at writing advertising copy produced the
revelation that a male colleague with the same experience and work load as
hers was earning half again as much money (AA 299). As she moved into
her career as a writer, sexist put-downs—some of them authored by female
literati—seemed ubiquitous in her profession. "For many years," she writes,
"I had noticed that no book of poetry by a woman was ever reviewed
without reference to the poet's sex. . . . In the two decades of my scrutiny,
there were no exceptions whatever" (CL 676). The situation proved a stim-
ulus to one of her most blatantly sarcastic works of fiction. "Determined to
ridicule this convention," she says, "I wrote a tract, a piece of purely tenden-
tious mockery, in the form of a short story. I called it 'Virility'" (CL 676). To
the author's amazement, "in every review the salvo went unnoticed. Not
one reviewer recognized that the story was a sly tract. Not one reviewer saw
the smirk or the point" (CL 677). There was no avoiding the
subtlety-be-damned lesson: "Moral: In saying what is obvious, never
choose cunning. Yelling works better."

Artistically, the most momentous result of Ozick's experience of sexism

was a crucial deformation of her first and most ambitious novel, Trust.
Although the novel, nearly seven years in gestation, was huge enough to
have "contained everything—the whole world," Ozick confesses that "there
was one element I had consciously left out. . . [because] I was considerably
afraid of it. It was the question of the narrator's 'sensibility.'" The author's
wry explanation of this deficiency warrants full-scale citation:

Everything I was reading in reviews of other people's books made me fearful: I

would have to be very, very cautious, I would have to drain my narrator of
emotive value of any kind. I was afraid to be pegged as having written a
"women's" novel, and nothing was more certain to lead to that than a
point-of-view seemingly lodged in a woman; no one takes a woman's novel
seriously. I was in terror, above all, of sentiment and feeling, those telltale
taints. I kept the fury and the passion for other, safer characters.
So what I left out of my narrator entirely, sweepingly, with exquisite con-
sciousness of what I was leaving out, was any shred of "sensibility." I stripped
her of everything, even a name. . . . My machine-narrator was there for
efficiency only, for flexibility, for craftiness, for subtlety, but never, never, as a
14 The Matrix of Art

"woman." I wiped the "woman" out of her. And I did it out of fear, out of
vicarious vindictive critical imagination. (CL 682-83)

The reviews of Trust bore out Ozick's forebodings exactly. The New York
Times Book Review, using a picture of a naked woman, spoke of the narra-
tor's longing for "some easy feminine role," allowing a "coming to terms
with the recalcitrant sexual elements in her life." Time magazine called
Ozick "a housewife" (CL 682-83).

Three decades after its composition, Ozick's own pronouncements on

Trust have been so contradictory as to raise a question after the title—which
Ozick do we trust? With at least half her being Ozick can sometimes regard
the book with passionate warmth and nostalgia: "I do know in my deepest
sinew that I will never again write so well, that I will never again have that
kind of high ambition or monastic patience or metaphysical nerve and
fortitude. That belongs, I suppose, to the ambition, strength, and above all
arrogance of youth" (Ltr 1/14/82). But this statement, made in 1982, seems
qualified to the point of nullification by other statements made before and
after. At length, in July 1991, she assigned to Trust the status of an
unresolv-able paradox:

Sigh. About Trust. I suppose I hold both points of view at once.

. . . And at the same time what I told you remains true: the energy and
meticulous language-love that went into that book drew on sources that were
never again so abundant. In certain ways it is simply an immensely long poem.
In terms of a young writer looking for recognition, it was a "towering mis-
take." It was obsessive—I was possessed by a passion almost absolutist, the
passion for literature. . . . So yes: I do care more for Trust than for anything
else; and it probably was a "towering mistake."
No wonder the word "ambivalence" had to be invented! (Ltr 7/20/91)

Bad as they were, the novelistic problems posed by being Jewish and
female proved secondary to the deepest personal problem posed by Trust,
the dilemma of Ozick's artistic identity. In her essay "The Lesson of the
Master" (1982) and in several interviews, she has referred to the period of
Trust as a colossal, irremediable waste of youth and talent, which should
surely have gone into apprentice work instead of a fifteen-year obsession
with writing a Great Jamesian Novel. "What happened was this," she says:

in early young-womanhood I believed, with all the rigor and force and stunned
ardor of religious belief, in the old Henry James, in his scepter and his author-
ity. I believed that what be knew at sixty I was to encompass at twenty-two ...
to be, all at once, with no progression or evolution, the author of the equiva-
lent of The Ambassadors or The Wings of the Dove. . . . For me, the Lesson of
The Matrix of Art 15

the Master was a horror, a Jamesian tale of a life of mishap and mistake and
misconceiving. . . . To be any sort of competent writer one must keep one's
distance from the supreme artists. (AA 295-97)

Although she eventually recovered her admiration for Henry James, never
again would Ozick assume the WASP persona of Trust, nor indeed any
major persona outside her Jewish-American heritage. In effect, Ozick's con-
cept of the artist changed during the seven years that she spent writing
Trust, and the change subsequently settled into permanence. "After Trust I
became a Jewish writer," she says; "T began with an American novel,' I put
it to myself, 'and I ended up with a Jewish one.'"10 Nor, after Trust, would
Ozick ever again permit fear of rejection to undercut her status as a woman
writer. Moving freely among her male and female personae, Ozick has
followed her imagination wherever it led, true to her conviction that the
Muse has no gender.

Eventually a convergence between Ozick's two primary modes of victim-

ization proved irresistible, as she drew the analogy between Jews losing their
memory of injustice and women losing theirs: "A Jew reading of the aes-
thetic glories of European civilization without taking notice of his victimiza-
tion during, say, the era of the building of the great cathedrals, is
self-forgetful in the most dangerous way" (CL 677). Although she rejects
as "foul, putrid, tainted, stinking" any analogy between the Holocaust and
women's predicament, she warns against degrading woman's humanity in
the same tones that she has applied elsewhere to the denial of Jewish hu-
manity: "What happens is that the general culture, along with the object of
its debasement, is also debased. If you laugh at women, you play Beethoven
in vain" (CL 678).

Although Ozick likens—up to a point—the two modes of victimization,

there are obvious incompatibilities in her status as both a feminist and an
Orthodox Jew.11 Like other religious traditions which have tried to keep
their heritage pure over millennia—one thinks of the Roman Catholic Church
and of Islam—Orthodox Judaism has maintained some undeniable prac-
tices of male supremacy. The size of the minyan—the assembly of Jews who
can conduct synagogue worship—must include ten bar mitzvahed males;
women don't count. During Orthodox worship, men only occupy the sanc-
tuary, while women stay apart in a sort of gallery for spectators.12 Some
Orthodox congregations still maintain a ritual bath in which women are
expected to ablute the inherent uncleanness of menstruation. The Orthodox
tradition has included a prayer of thanksgiving for men only, in which they
thank the Creator for not making them women.

Given its genesis in the millennium before Christ, it is not surprising that
16 The Matrix of Art

Holy Writ — the Torah — likewise includes a disheartening measure of mi-

sogyny. Alongside the majesty of his call to righteousness, the Prophet Isaiah
ascribes to his God a disproportionate rage at the young women of his time:

Moreover the Lord saith, "Because the daughters of Zion are haughty and
walk with stretched forth necks, and wanton eyes, walking and mincing as
they go, and making a tinkling with their feet: therefore the Lord will smite
with a scab the crown of the head of the daughters of Zion." (Isaiah 3.16-17)

Should the daughters of Zion get pregnant out of wedlock, it never occurs to
Isaiah's God to smite with a scab the young men who made them pregnant.
Instead, the ignominy and punishment are reserved only to the female:

And in that day seven women shall take hold of one man, saying, "We shall eat
our own bread, and wear our own apparel: only let us be called by thy name,
to take away our reproach." . . . And the Lord shall have purged away the filth
of the daughters of Zion . . . by the spirit of judgment, and by the spirit of
burning. (Isaiah 4.1-4)

In 1984 at a convention entitled "Tradition and Transformation: Women

in Jewish Culture," Ozick challenged the male supremacy in her cultural
heritage. Linda Zatlin, a member of the audience, asserts that Ozick's ad-
dress, "on the Depth of Loss and the Absence of Grief: The Missing Minds,"
compellingly "argued the urgent need for the formal inclusion of Jewish
women into Orthodox Judaism — precisely because of the Holocaust."13 But
unhappily, not even the Holocaust is safely beyond the range of
gender-based controversy. Miriam Cooke, an expert on war and gender,
puts her grievance in the form of a rhetorical question: "Does it matter that
Claude Lanzmann represses women survivors' testimony throughout his
9-hour film on the Holocaust [Shoah]?"14 Perhaps Ozick's best answer to
sexism occurs in her fiction after all, not so much in sardonic broadsides
like "Virility" as in her more subtle portrayals of female vindication.
Barbara Gitenstein, for example, notes how mother-daughter partnerships
prevail over the befuddled male protagonists of The Cannibal Galaxy and
The Messiah of Stockholm, to which we perhaps could add Rosa and her
daughter (though she is just a figment of memory) standing off Persky
in The Shawl. 15

For Ozick herself there was the striking example of her own emancipated
mother, a flamboyant ceramic artist who "wore red hats and called herself a
gypsy. In her girlhood she marched with the suffragettes and for Margaret
Sanger and called herself a Red." 16 Although not an activist in the same
way, Ozick in her turn has used her power of the pen to wreak devastation
The Matrix of Art 17

upon the adversaries of women's equality, those of both the Old Right and
the New Left. Taking on the Old Right in "The Hole/Birth Catalogue" (first
published in 1972), she makes hash of Freud's notorious "anatomy is des-
tiny" formulation—

If anatomy were destiny, the wheel could not have been invented; we would
have been limited by legs.. .. Anatomy is only a form of technology—nature's
engineering. . . . A person—and "person" is above all an idea—escapes
anat-omy.(AA 252)

Norman Mailer and Robert Graves supplant Freud as purveyors of the

Ovarian/Testicular Theory of Literature in Ozick's most substantial femi-
nist essay, "Previsions of the Demise of the Dancing Dog" (first published in
1971). Whereas Graves relegated Woman to the role of Muse—inspirer of
art rather than creator—in The White Goddess and Man Does, Woman Is,
Ozick insists that the human mind is "androgynous, epicene, asexual," and
that "the muse—pace Robert Graves—has no settled sex or form, and can
appear in the shape of a tree (Howards End) or a city (the Paris of The
Ambassadors) or even—think of Proust—a cookie" (AA 264, 272). She is
particularly contemptuous of the notion that women's creativity is sub -
sumed within childbearing:

Literature cannot be equated with physiology, and woman through her repro-
ductive system alone is no more a creative artist than was Joyce by virtue of his
kidneys. . . . A poem emerges from a mind, and mind is, so far as our present
knowledge takes us, an unknowable abstraction. (AA 271)

By a perverse irony of the times, O/ick found it necessary to battle against

the Ovarian Theory of Literature not only on the Old Right flank, manned
by Freud and Graves and Mailer, but equally on the New Left rampart
defended by radical feminists. In "Literature and the Politics of Sex: A
Dissent" (first published in 1977), she disputes the "woman writer" desig-
nation advocated by Ellen Moers and Molly Haskell and predicated on the
inherent "difference" between male and female states of intellect and feel-
ing. "In art," Ozick insists, "feminism is [that is, should be] that which
opposes segregation. .. . I am, as a writer, whatever I wish to become. I can
think myself into a male, or a female, or a stone, or a raindrop, or a block of
wood, or a Tibetan, or the spine of a cactus" (AA 285). The radical feminist
position gives her the opportunity to state an antiseparatist general creed:

There is a human component to literature that does not separate writers by

sex, but that—on the contrary—engenders sympathies from sex to sex, from
18 The Matrix of Art

condition to condition. . . . Literature universalizes. Without disparaging par-

ticularity or identity, it universalizes; it does not divide. (AA 285)

Ozick's most compelling argument against the feminists' Ovarian Theory

is her procession of vividly realized male protagonists. Presumably, if her
feminist adversaries are correct, Ozick should go back and debase these
characters or erase them from her fiction—though one wonders how mean-
ingful her stories would be without Isaac Kornfeld in "The Pagan Rabbi,"
for example, or Lushinski and Morris in "A Mercenary," or Joseph Brill in
The Cannibal Galaxy. In the total framework of her career, feminism has
been a consistent presence but not a central fact of Ozick's artistic vision.
Early on, from the Crazy Lady period through the creation of Trust's re-
pressed narrator, her feminism was a contingency imposed by the immedi-
ate presence of a sexist literary establishment. Since then, she has main-
tained her course between Old Right and New Left without yielding her art
to "the language of politics."

Judaism

The true center of Ozick's art, as it unfolded, turned out to be not biological/
political but cultural: not female but Jewish identity. In sharp contrast with
her rejection of "gender difference"—the idea that women necessarily think
and feel differently from men—Ozick insists with bone-deep conviction on
the importance of Jewish "difference." In "Toward a New Yiddish" (first
published in 1970), she writes: "My reading has become more and more
urgent, though in narrower and narrower channels.. . . I read mainly to find
out. . . . what it is to think as a Jew" (AA 157). To Philip Roth's disclaimer
"I am not a Jewish writer; I am a writer who is a Jew," she warns ominously
that "Roth's words do not represent a credo; they speak for a doom" (AA
158). That doom, she explains, is written in the historical record of assimi-
lated Jews who, after their moment of fame, have inevitably declined into
oblivion: "there never yet lived a Jewish Dickens. There have been no Jewish
literary giants in Diaspora.... There are no major works of Jewish imagina-
tive genius written in any Gentile language, sprung out of any Gentile
culture" (AA 167-68).

Ozick's analysis of this cultural dilemma does not, as some might expect,
point to Gentile oppression as the reason for Jewish literary failure. Her
reasoning instead points entirely inward, toward Jewish neglect of a world-
wide cultural imperative:
The Matrix of Art 19

Why have our various Diasporas spilled out no Jewish Dante, or Shakespeare,
or Tolstoy, or Yeats? Why have we not had equal powers of hugeness of
vision? These visions, these powers, were not hugely conceived. Dante made
literature out of an urban vernacular, Shakespeare spoke to a small island
people, Tolstoy brooded on upper-class Russians, Yeats was the kindling for a
Dublin-confined renascence. They did not intend to address the principle of
Mankind; each was, if you will allow the infamous word, tribal. Literature
does not spring from the urge to Esperanto but from the tribe. (AA 168) 17

Rejecting "a literature that is of-the-nations, relying on what we have in

common with all men" (AA 168), Ozick goes on to explain why Philip Roth
courts eventual "doom" and Norman Mailer figures to end up as "a small
Gentile footnote, about the size of H. L. Mencken" (AA 170). "Esau gains
the short run," Ozick concedes, "but the long run belongs to Jacob"—and
that long run, already four thousand years in the running, depends on the
ongoing force of biblical revelation:

The fact is that nothing thought or written in Diaspora has ever been able to
last unless it has been centrally Jewish. . . . By "centrally Jewish," I mean, for
literature, whatever touches on the liturgical. . . . Liturgy has a choral voice, a
communal voice: the echo of the voice of the Lord of History. (AA 168-69)

It is clear that a proper understanding of Cynthia Ozick's art requires a

grasp of its bedrock religious sensibility.

In her review of Bech: A Book, Cynthia Ozick rebukes John Updike for
creating a "Jewish" protagonist who lacks the very essence of Jewish iden-
tity: "It is as if he [Updike] cannot imagine what a sacral Jew might be" (AA
122). Her correction of this deficiency—which is doubly grievous in a writer
noted for the power and tenacity of his religious consciousness—comprises
a rebuke not only to Updike but to Bech's real-life models, the "disaffected
de-Judaized Jewish novelists of his generation" (AA 117):

Being a Jew is something more than being an alienated marginal sensibility

with kinky hair. Simply: to be a Jew is to be covenanted; or, if not committed
so far, to be at least aware of the possibility of becoming covenanted; or, at the
very minimum, to be aware of the Covenant itself. . . . If to be a Jew is to
become covenanted, then to write of Jews without taking this into account is
to miss the deepest point of all. (AA 122-23)

Because of its vital importance, it is worth taking a moment to rehearse

the terms of the Covenant between God and Abraham, which makes its first
appearance in Genesis 12:18
20 The Matrix of Art

Now the Lord had said unto Abram, Get thee out of thy country, and from thy
kindred, and from thy father's house, unto a land that I will shew thee:
And I will make of thee a great nation, and I will bless thee, and make thy
name great; and thou shalt be a blessing:
And I will bless them that bless thee, and curse him that curseth thee: and in
thee shall all families of the earth be blessed.
So Abram departed, as the Lord had spoken unto him. . . .

In his next message to Abraham, God associates the Covenant with His gift
of the Promised Land to the descendants of the founder: "For all the land
which thou seest, to thee will I give it, and to thy seed for ever" (Genesis
13.15). For their part, the seed of Abraham are to keep the Covenant by
worshiping only the one true God and obeying His commandments faithfully.

In Jewish thought, the contest for legitimacy between the two sons of
Abraham, Isaac and Ishmael, has come to represent the rift between Juda-
ism and Islam; and the struggle between Isaac's two sons, Jacob and Esau,
prefigures the friction between Jews and Christians.19 Within the House of
Israel itself, the Diaspora later imposed a further separation, between
Ash-kenazic and Sephardic Jews—terms that refer to homelands in Eastern
Europe (literally, "beyond the Rhine") and Spain, respectively. For Ozick,
this latter distinction—a recent cause of great friction in Israel—has minimal
importance. Although herself a Yiddish-speaking Ashkenazic Jew, born of
parents who migrated from the Minsk area of Russia, Ozick has displayed
the same affinity for the Sephardic heritage as she has shown for her indige-
nous area of the Diaspora.

Because the division between Christian and Jew is the oldest and most
important of these dichotomies, covering half of Judaic history, we shall
begin our definition of Judaism with Ozick's own sense of difference. Al-
though a Judeo-Christian continuity must be credited—she says, "All the
varieties of Christianity and Islam are inconceivable without the God of the
Jews" (AA 182)—it is the contrast that matters, a contrast that Cynthia
Ozick remarked after reading (in her twenties) Rabbi Leo Baeck's essay
"Romantic Religion." From this essay, which she says "in some way broke
open the conceptual egg of my life" (Ltr 1/14/82), we may infer not only the
difference between Christian and Jew but also that rootlike thrust of art into
real life which is the essence of Ozick's literary credo. As opposed to the
Jewish "Classical" religious sensibility, Romantic Religion as Baeck defines
it makes an ideal of flight from the world:

it seeks its goals in the now mythical, now mystical visions of the imagination.
Its world is the realm ... which lies beyond all reality.... The desire to yield to
illusion . . . here characterizes the entire relation to the world. . . . Romantic
The Matrix of Art 21

religion is completely opposed to the whole sphere of existence with which the
social conscience is concerned. Every romanticism depreciates the life devoted
to work and culture. . . . Romanticism therefore lacks any strong ethical
impulse, any will to conquer life ethically.20

Together with commitment to the Covenant, Baeck's "will to conquer life

ethically" is the chief characteristic of Ozick's own definition of Judaism.
Calling Jewish history "a series of intellectual movements," she insists that
"even given the diversity and sometimes mutual antagonism of all these
ideational currents, they never depart very far from the original Abrahamic
insight: what we nowadays call ethical monotheism" (Ltr 4/22/90). What one
needs to know about Judaism, she contends, "can be very briefly stated. So,
while standing on one foot, maybe I can try to sum up as follows":

Judaism is not equal to the Bible alone; the Bible plus the rabbinic tradi-
tion—i.e. the sea of commentary—make up Judaism.... Jewish ethical mono-
theism is conceived of as a direct channel (beginning with the principle of the
Covenant) between humankind and the Creator, without necessitating a medi-
ator. . . . Another way of stating this is that Idea (or meaning) is imposed on
Nature, as in the invention of the Sabbath, or as in the designation of an
inherited bit of land (Israel) as the fount of conscience. I might add that in
rabbinic Judaism (which is Judaism) there aren't any miracles or bizarre con-
trary-to-nature beliefs, that inquiry is encouraged, that rationalism rules, that
textual study is primary, an absolute sine qua non. (Interestingly, the high
point of Jewish rationalist philosophy was during the so-called Dark Ages.)
And that's all there is ___ (Ltr 8/11/90)

To explain the conflict within the great religions—including Judaism—

regarding rationalism versus mysticism, Ozick refers, much as William
James did in The Varieties of Religious Experience, to the mystery of tem-
perament. Her reasoning incidentally makes a strong case for the conflicted
art of Cynthia Ozick:

I am persuaded that all this means . . . an inherent split in the human psyche:
those temperaments that thrive on mysticism (immanence, incarnation) and
those that thrive on rationalism. Dionysus versus Apollo. The hasidim versus
the mitnagdim. The split occurs in Judaism, Christianity, Islam. . . . And
sometimes both sides are present in the same mind! As in Spinoza, who uses
geometrical formulations to espouse pantheistic doctrines. (Ltr 7/20/91)

So far as her conscious intention can resolve the question, Ozick sides
absolutely with Orthodox rationalism. Thus, when asked to judge Faulk-
ner's comment that "no writing will be too successful without some concep-
22 The Matrix of Art

tion of God,"21 Ozick replies that the "'Concept of God' strikes me as an

idolatrous phrase. . . . We can't presume to give a face or a name or a shape
to the Creator, or set any limits of our own, or presume to define or imagine
qualities or attributes. That utterly rules out God in the representation of a
human figure, of course." This view undergirds one of the sharpest distinc-
tions between Judaism and Christianity, with its "gnostic inclusion of de-
clared attributes and actual figural representation in the idea of God-Man."
In this respect, she says, "Judaism famously has no theology at all. It is not a
'faith' in the Christian sense. Above all, it doesn't have 'a concept of God.'"22
Among the biblical verses that she cites in support of this argument are
Isaiah 40.18 ("To whom then will ye liken God?") and 40.25 ("To whom
then will ye liken Me, that I should be equal?"); Deuteronomy 10.12-13 and
its echo in Micah 6.8; and—as "the greatest summary statement of all"—
Deuteronomy 29.29 (in the King James Bible; 29:28 in the Jewish Penta-
teuch): "The secret things belong unto the Lord our God; but the things that
are revealed belong to us and to our children for ever, that we may do all the
words of this law." Her explication follows:

What this verse tells us is that what God is (the whole kit and kaboodle of
mysticism) is not our human business. Our business is to go about trying to
make an ethical civilization. That's why we say "ethical monotheism," not just
"monotheism." An idolatrous "concept" of God can't produce civilized con-
duct, and never has, beginning with Canaan, whose women were "socialized,"
as we say nowadays, into throwing their babies into the fire to please the idol
and thereby "serve" society. It's in the name of theologies, in the name of such
"concepts," that people eat one another alive. (Ltr 8/11/90)

With this mention of human sacrifice in ancient Canaan, we arrive at the

central precept of the Judaic ethos, as Ozick sees it—namely, that taboo
against idolatry which has distinguished this religion from all others since
the time of Abraham. In her essay on Harold Bloom (originally titled "Juda-
ism and Harold Bloom"), Ozick clarified her thoughts as follows:

The single most useful, and possibly the most usefully succinct, description of
a Jew—as defined "theologically"—can best be rendered negatively: a Jew is
someone who shuns idols, who least of all would wish to become like Terach
[the father of Abraham], the maker of idols. (AA 188)

Among the characteristics of idolatry that Ozick specifies (AA 189-90),

the one that is "most universally repugnant" is its power to overcome hu-
man pity:
The Matrix of Art 23

From this uniquely Jewish observation flows the Second Commandment. The
Commandment against idols is above all a Commandment against victimiza-
tion, and in behalf of pity. . . . Every idol is a shadow of Moloch, demanding
human flesh to feed upon. The deeper the devotion to the idol, the more
pitiless in tossing it its meal will be the devotee. Moloch springs up wherever
the Second Commandment is silenced. . . . Every idol suppresses human pity;
that is what it is made for. (AA 190)

Although, in Ozick's fiction, the Holocaust embodies Moloch most

hor-rifically for this age, founded on the pity-suppressing idolatry of
Hitlerism, subtler forms of idol making also claim her extended attention.23
To the question "What is an idol?" she answers, in "The Riddle of the
Ordinary," that it is "anything that is allowed to come between ourselves
and God. Anything that is instead of God" (AA 207). "This is the point on
which Jews are so famously stiff-necked," she goes on to say; for Jews there
is "nothing but the Creator, no substitute and no mediator. The Creator is
not contained in his own Creation; the Creator is incarnate in nothing, and is
free of any image or imagining" (AA 207). For an artist, more susceptible
than most people to being in love with the world's beauty, on fire with its
significance, the materials of art pose a constant deadly temptation vis-a-vis
the forbidding imperatives of the Second Commandment:

there is always the easy, the sweet, the beckoning, the lenient, the interesting
lure of the Instead of: the wood of the tree instead of God, the
rapture-bringing horizon instead of God, the work of art instead of God, the
passion for history instead of God, philosophy and the history of philosophy
instead of God, the state instead of God, the order of the universe instead of
God, the prophet instead of God. There is no Instead Of. There is only the
Creator. God is alone. (AA 208)

From this insight stems "the deepest danger our human brains are subject
to," Ozick says, a danger that she formulates into a question (italics hers):
"how can we keep ourselves from sliding off from awe at God's Creation to
worship of God's Creation?" (AA 206). For the artist, it appears, there is no
way to cope with the danger. According to her essay on Harold Bloom, her
chosen craft is implicated in blasphemy by definition: "Literature, one
should have the courage to reflect, is an idol" (AA 196). It is an idol not only
because it creates an alternative world to the Creator's, in competition with
the Creator, but also because the imagination that invents such a world
cannot do so without trafficking in evil. Ozick explains this point in "Inno-
vation and Redemption: What Literature Means":
24 The Matrix of Art

Imagination is more than make-believe, more than the power to invent. It is

also the power to penetrate evil, to take on evil, to become evil, and in that
guise it is the most frightening human faculty. Whoever writes a story that
includes villainy enters into and becomes the villain. Imagination owns above
all the facility of becoming: the writer can enter the leg of a mosquito, a sex
not her own, . . . a mind larger or smaller. . . . The imagination, like Moloch,
can take you nowhere except back to its own maw. (AA 247)

So sharp was the conflict between her religion and her craft that Ozick
began her essay on Harold Bloom with the idea that the phrase "Jewish
writer" is "an 'oxymoron'—a pointed contradiction, in which one arm of
the phrase clashes so profoundly with the other as to annihilate it" (AA
178). Among her own writings, Bloodshed (1976)—which I consider her
single most crucial book—is the paramount embodiment of this premise. Its
concluding story, "Usurpation (Other People's Stories)," had been so badly
understood by earlier readers as to occasion Bloodshed's preface, which
may well comprise Ozick's most cogent literary credo. Here she writes:
"There is One God, and the Muses are not Jewish but Greek. . . . Does the
Commandment against idols warn even ink?" (BL 10). Her answer appears
to be Yes, leading to a renunciation of her own powers: "'Usurpation' is a
story written against story-writing; against the Muse-goddesses; against
Apollo . . . the point being that the story-making faculty itself can be a
corridor to the corruptions and abominations of idol-worship" (BL 11).

But yet, in the end, the "artist" half of the "Jewish artist" oxymoron gets
the last word, leaving the author bewildered by a set of unanswered questions:

Why do we become what we most desire to contend with? Why do I, who

dread the cannibal touch of story-telling, lust after stories more and more and
more?
Why do demons choose to sink their hooves into black, black, ink?
As if ink were blood. (BL 12)

Although he was the most dreadful issue of the pagan imagination, the
cannibal-god Moloch was not the only enemy of the Sinaitic revelation.
Perhaps the most subversive enemy of all was the goddess of Sex, variously
named Astarte in Canaan, Aphrodite in Greece, and Venus in Rome. For
Cynthia Ozick this primeval root of Hellenism, that which produced the
pagan gods, has posed so magnetic an attraction as to nearly tear her loose
from her Jewish moorings, as she attests in books like Trust and The Pagan
Rabbi. Beginning in her college years, when she read Matthew Arnold on
Hellenism and Hebraism, studied "E. M. Forster's Greeky heroes," and
"went mad with Gibbon-joy" (Ltr 1/14/82), she gradually came to regard
The Matrix of Art 25

"the issue of Hellenism-versus-Hebraism as the central quarrel of the West"

(AA 181).

It is a quarrel that has been keenly appreciated by other contemporary

writers, including John Updike in The Centaur and Faulkner in his
faun-haunted early works like The Marble Faun and Soldiers' Pay. But the
issue has held exceptional interest for Ozick as a Jewish writer. Her essay
on Harold Bloom, while demonstrating the centrality of Bloom's Judaism to
his literary criticism, also highlights Bloom's argument, via Vico, on the
incompatibility of being both a Jew and a writer:

paganism—i.e. anti-Judaism—is the ultimate ground for the making of poetry....

Bloom writes: "Vico understood the link between poetry and pagan
theology. . . . Vico says that 'the true God' founded the Jewish religion 'on the
prohibition of the divination on which all the Gentile nations arose.'" (AA
181)

To be an artist, then, is to serve pagan gods—"the spontaneous gods of

nature" is her term in a remark about E. M. Forster (AA 15)—and to
translate those gods into their new births. "Reinvigorating the ideal of the
idol in a new vessel, as Astarte begets Venus," is how Ozick describes this
process (AA 194); so we can picture "Venus opening her eyes in a dawning
Rome to learn that she is Astarte reborn. Astarte will always be reinvented"
(AA 197). Such inventions, in turn, displace the true Creator with counter-
feit realities: "Terach [the idol-maker] in his busy shop has put himself in
competition with the Creator. . . . [He] refuses to accept Creation as given,
and has set up counter-realities in the form of instant though illusory grati-
fications" (AA 191-92).

It is significant that Ozick selects Venus/Astarte as her example of a pagan

god who will always be reinvented. As the climactic scene in Trust unforget-
tably attests, sexuality is the issue that most crucially illustrates the
Hellenism-versus-Hebraism conflict in Ozick's writing. In her vividly lyrical,
liberating dramatization of the sexual Life Force, Ozick directly flouts the
deeply rooted taboo that Rabbi Leo Baeck—a great favorite of
hers—defines in This People Israel. Jewish sexual discipline, Baeck says, is
the very thing that most tellingly distinguishes God's People from the
"unclean" Canaanites: "Purity, in this people [Israel], primarily means that
of the sexual life. . . . The battle which this people's soul, in its covenant
with God, waged against the people of Canaan and the peoples nearby was
above all a battle for this purity. It continued for centuries. . . ," 24 To judge
from Cynthia Ozick's fiction, Baeck's time frame ought rather to have been
millennia rather than centuries in this instance.
26 The Matrix of Art

Fortunately for Ozick, she proved able to flout the demands of the Second
Commandment sufficiently to keep herself functioning as a writer. "To
observe it is improbable, perhaps impossible," she says of the divine edict;
"perhaps it has never been, and never will be, wholly observed" (AA 198). In
this essay—renamed "Literature as Idol: Harold Bloom"—her way of
resolving the contradiction is to downgrade the status of literature to the
level of "shamanistic toys," while reasserting the central truth of her
religious heritage: "The recovery of Covenant can be attained only in the
living-out of the living Covenant; never among the shamanistic toys of
literature" (AA 199). With the toys cleared away, the Judaic ethos regains
its original primacy, as described here in words Ozick quotes movingly
from Harold Bloom: "There is no recovery of the covenant, of the Law,
without confronting again, in all deep tribulation, the God of the Fathers,
Who is beyond image as He is beyond personality, and Who can be met
only by somehow walking His Way" (AA 198).

Somewhat too late to affect the bulk of her fiction, Ozick in the mid-1980s
changed her mind about the spiritual hazards of storytelling. In her Paris
Review interview, she answered the question "Is writing idolatry?" by re-
tracting her definition of Imagination as "image-making, . . . a sovereignty
set up in competition with the sovereignty of . . . the Creator of the Uni-
verse" (Teicholz 167). Thanks to "a conversation with a good thinker" (who
preferred not to be identified), she developed the perspective that "I'm in the
storytelling business, but I no longer feel I'm making idols." To the contrary,
the imperatives of ethical monotheism require "the largest, deepest, widest
imaginative faculty of all," so that "you simply cannot be a Jew if you
repudiate the imagination" (Teicholz 168). Acknowledging that "this is a
major shift for me," she revises her theology accordingly:

I now see that the idol-making capacity of imagination is its lower form, and
that one cannot be a monotheist without putting the imagination under the
greatest pressure of all. To imagine the unimaginable is the highest use of the
imagination. I no longer think of imagination as a thing to be dreaded. . . .
Only a very strong imagination can rise to the idea of a non-corporeal God.
The lower imagination, the weaker, falls to the proliferation of images.
(Teicholz 167)

Welcome as it was, this reconciliation of the Jewish writer with the de-
mands of the Creator did not put an end to Ozick's religious quandary.
Appallingly implicit in the question whether a Jew has maintained fidelity to
the Covenant is the question whether God has maintained His. One of the
oldest themes in world literature—it animates the plays of Aeschylus and
Euripides and the Hindu Bhagavad-Gita equally with the Book of Job—
The Matrix of Art 27

theodicy is also perennially new, as seen in Ozick's tribute to Saul Bellow:

"his whole fiction is a wrestling with the Angel of Theodicy."25 Because of
the Holocaust, a wrestling with that angel stretches across her whole fiction
too, preoccupying characters from Enoch Vand in Trust to Rosa in The
Shawl. In her preface to Bloodshed she joins her own voice to those of her
characters who question the justice of Yahweh. "I am certain there is a
demon in this tale ["Bloodshed"]," she writes; "who he is I do not know; I
hope he is not the Creator of the Universe, who admitted Auschwitz into
His creation" (BL 7).

Perhaps it was by way of exorcising this indulgence in theodicy that Ozick

later described the preface to Bloodshed as a work of fiction comparable to
her stories, with its literary credo being voiced by an imaginary character
(Scheick 258). If so, the exorcism is ineffectual, because the ground of
theodicy in this instance is not ancient myth, as with Aeschylus and Job, but
contemporary history; and the voice that contradicts the Creator's is in no
wise imaginary. Instead, it is a historically certified fact that on 30 January
1939, Adolf Hitler made this solemn vow to the Nazi parliament:

Today I will once again be a prophet: If the international Jewish financiers in

and outside of Europe should again succeed in plunging the nations into a
world war, the result will not be the Bolshevization of the globe and thus
victory for Jewry, but the annihilation of the Jewish race in Europe. 26

Clearly, the chief problem of belief for postwar Judaism lies in the premise
that whereas God apparently did not keep his promise to the Jews, Hitler
most certainly did keep his. It may be to God's credit that His Chosen
People have somehow avoided total annihilation through four millennia,
but whether that fact outweighs the appalling record of Jewish suffering is
the great recurring question of the Judaic heritage, particularly since the
millions of martyred dead strewn across those millennia have not yet suf-
ficed to lodge His Chosen People in secure possession of their Promised
Land. If the center of Jewish identity has been the Covenant, its circum-
ference has been the four-thousand-year record of murderous hostility per-
petuated by Gentile neighbors. A proper understanding of Cynthia Ozick's
art requires an overview of that historic record.

Jewish History

"I suppose my guilty secret as a writer is that I've long preferred to read
histories," Cynthia Ozick has stated. "I have [read] and will read any and
28 The Matrix of Art

every history of the Jews" (Ltr 1/14/82). So far as intellectual history goes,
few cultures in the world can measure up to the exalted procession of Jewish
theologians, philosophers, artists, and scientists who have enriched world
civilization with their brilliant and learned contributions. As George
Bernard Shaw observed without too much exaggeration, in Western
thought it has always been "the Jews who, from Moses to Marx and
Lassalle, have inspired all the revolutions."27 Even Karl Marx, an apostate
figure rarely cited in Ozick's writings, accomplished his revolutionary work
in the Jewish tradition of bookishness, basing his thought on years of
original research performed in the British Museum library. And Freud, for
all his hostility to religion, admitted that being Jewish was a crucial
condition for his achievement, in the sense that being part of a scorned
minority proved salutary in his development of an independent,
unconventional intellect. During childhood, Ozick's intellect was doubly
sharpened in this respect, as "almost always the only Jew" in public school,
and "almost always the only girl" allowed into an aged rabbi's Hebrew
class (Kauvar 385).

In her nonfiction, Ozick pays ample homage to Jewish history in essays

that range in time from early and medieval thinkers like Rabbi Akiva and
Ibn Gabirol to contemporaries like Freud and Harold Bloom. In her fic-
tional art, however, Jewish history occurs most compellingly in descriptions
of Gentile persecution, primarily during the Holocaust and secondarily dur-
ing the High Middle Ages—that period of Christian hegemony in Europe
that spawned the Crusades and the Inquisition. In Ozick's personal life it is
clear that her moment of trauma regarding Jewish history occurred about
midway through college. An aesthete up to that point—"I have lived in the
throat of poetry"—she recalls experiencing "another year or so of this
oblivion, until at last I am hammer-struck with the shock of Europe's skull,
the bled planet of death camp and war" (AA 116). 28 A period of about
fifteen years had to elapse before the subject would receive its definitive
historical analysis, beginning with Raul Hilberg's The Destruction of the
European Jews in 1961. From that point on, with Enoch Vand's emergence
as the moral center of Trust, the Holocaust became a pervading presence in
all of Ozick's books, including her reviews and critical essays.

Fed by burgeoning studies in the subject, Ozick's hunger for Jewish his-
tory has produced a point of view that sharply distinguishes her from emi-
nent WASP contemporaries, including several who became the subject of
her literary criticism. John Updike, the least offensive of these, offends
because, in Bech: A Book, he fashioned his Jewish persona from random
scraps of authorial prejudice that were synthesized in ignorance. Updike's
attempt at "putting Bech together out of Mailer, Bellow, Singer, Malamud,
Fuchs, Salinger, [and] the two Roths" (AA 115) cannot work, she argues,
The Matrix of Art 29

the telltale sign of inauthenticity being Bech's indifference to—or ignorance

of—Jewish history, particularly with respect to its record of ubiquitous and
unrelenting persecution:

Emancipated Jewish writers like Bech (I know one myself) have gone through
Russia without once suspecting the landscape of old pogroms, without once
smelling another Jew. . . . [But Bech's] phrase "peasant Jews" among the Slavs
is an imbecilic contradiction—peasants work the land, Jews were kept from
working it. . . . If there had been "peasant Jews" there might have been no
Zionism, no State of Israel. . . ah Bech! . . . despite your Jewish nose and hair,
you are—as Jew—an imbecile to the core. (AA 117)

Updike's peasant Jews may be a pardonable imbecility, the figment of an

imagination that strayed too far from its WASP Pennsylvanian point of
origin. William Styron's imbecility, Ozick's subject in "A Liberal's Ausch-
witz," is not pardonable, because it engenders a refusal to acknowledge the
central meaning of Auschwitz, that towering presence in modern Jewish
history which figures so largely throughout Ozick's fiction:

The two and a half million Jews murdered at Auschwitz were murdered,
Mr. Styron recalls for us, in the company of a million Christian Slavs. This is
an important reminder. . . . [But] the enterprise at Auschwitz was organized,
clearly and absolutely, to wipe out the Jews of Europe. The Jews were not an
instance of Nazi slaughter; they were the purpose and whole reason for it. 29

Notwithstanding his Jewish wife and half-Jewish children, Styron thus re-
peats Shakespeare's vile error of allowing the Jews eyes and ears but not
cultural integrity:

if the Jew is ground into the metaphorical dust of "humanity," or of "victim,"

. . . if he is viewed only as an archetype of the eternal oppressed, if he is not
seen as covenanted to an on-going principle, if he is not seen as the transmitter
of a blazingly distinctive culture, . . . or if he is symbolically turned into
"mankind"—but here I stop, having stumbled on Shylock's plea again. 30

By lacking the sense of history that makes Jewish culture "blazingly dis-
tinctive," William Styron illustrates the central thesis of another book re-
viewed by Cynthia Ozick, Mark Harris' The Goy. Here a Gentile's attempt
to reverse the usual pattern of acculturation occasions Ozick's culminating
statement concerning the bond between identity and history:

How then shall Westrum become like a Jew? What is the Jewish "secret"? . . .
What makes a Jew is the conscious implication in millennia. To be a Jew is to
be every moment in history, to keep history for breath and daily bread. 31
30 The Matrix of Art

Jewish history in turn makes the goy's case hopeless: how can goy become
Jew, she asks, when history has made "fear of the goy" a primary feature
of Jewish identity? From this point of view the honored phrase
"Judeo-Christian tradition" takes on meanings that are not accessible to a
man like William Styron, as she reminds him in "A Liberal's Auschwitz":

Christianity does not stand responsible all alone in the world; nevertheless it
stands responsible. The Inquisition was the known fruit of concrete Christian
power. That thirteenth-century Pope (his name was Innocent) who ordered
Jews to wear the yellow badge was not innocent of its Nazi reissue seven
hundred years later.32

For Ozick and many other American Jews, there are ominous implica-
tions in this failure of comprehension on the part of men as sophisticated as
Updike and Styron. If Updike's Bech cannot hear Jewish blood crying out
from the Russian soil he treads on, and if, worse yet, William Styron cannot
grasp the true meaning of Auschwitz during his visit there, how can one
hope that the Gentile world at large will absorb the lessons of Jewish his-
tory? And if the majority Christian culture fails to absorb those lessons—
fails to acknowledge a millennium of complicity in persecution—can we be
sure the old familiar syndrome will not recur here in America?

Unwarranted as it may seem to a Gentile reader, Cynthia Ozick actually

does express serious anxiety about American toleration in "Toward a New
Yiddish" (first published in 1970). Her sense of marginality as the only Jew
in her neighborhood—among houses owned by Italians, Lithuanians, Ger-
mans, and Scotch-Irish, with blacks a few blocks away—leads to thoughts
of America being their final home in a way that cannot apply to her. For
Diaspora Jews, she says, the soil underfoot is "something sweet and deep,
but borrowed, transient," reminiscent of other friendly nations that did, of a
sudden, turn savage. It is an insight that carries particular urgency for a
Jewish artist: "Read, read, read, and read quickly; write, write, write, and
write urgently—before the coming of the American pogrom! How much
time is there left? The rest of my life? One generation? Two?" (AA158,159).
Ozick is not unusual, she says, in harboring such ideas:

No Jew I know is shocked at this pessimism, though many disagree with it.
They will tell me I exhibit the craven ghetto mentality of the shtetl: "America is
different." I go to the public library and I find a book by three clergymen . . . a
minister, a priest, and a rabbi, and the rabbi's chapter is called "America Is
Different." The rabbi is the author of a study of the French Enlightenment. . .
showing how even Voltaire was not different. The rabbi's chapter is full of fear
masking as hope. (AA 159)
The Matrix of Art 31

As late as 1991, when multicultural pluralism might have seemed irrevers-

ibly victorious in academe, Ozick described Euro-American literary studies
as a scene of "endemic anti-Semitism" where, "if you are an English major,
you simply take it as your premise that you are majoring in Christianity and
as part and parcel of that. . . in the teaching of contempt."33 Although she
claims that she personally can take literary anti-Semitism in stride—"my
feeling is, so what? I'm enough of an aesthete to care about literature for the
sentence, the poetry"—she clearly harbors deep bitterness toward the domi-
nance in the classroom of "a tradition that has received deicide and
super-sessionism and the teaching of contempt with its mother's milk."

From the foregoing discourse on Judaism, it is clear that the Judeo-Christian

tradition translates into very different meanings for Jews and Christians—
even if we set aside the fact of endless, worldwide persecution. Strictly on
the theological level, Christian readers will be unable to make sense of
Ozick's cultural ambience unless they comprehend two paramount issues
from the Jewish perspective: first, the Jewish rejection of Christ as the
Messiah; and second, the Jewish conception of Christianity as a pagan
religion. In a talk at Duke University, Rabbi Shemaryahu Talmon—an ex-
pert on the Dead Sea Scrolls—discussed the first of these topics, which is
doubtless the central theological quarrel between Christians and Jews. Jew-
ish rejection of Jesus as the Messiah, Talmon said, is not a matter of willful
stubbornness or perversity. Instead, according to understandings going back
to Hebrew antiquity, Jesus failed to fulfill several essential conditions of
Messiah-hood, including status as a married man and a patriarch. Most
important, the claim that Jesus is the Son of God represents an unthinkable
blasphemy for traditional Judaism, which could never imagine the degrada-
tion of the Creator of the Universe into merely one of the world's creatures,
to say nothing of His incarnation within some pieces of bread and a cup of
wine. God is rather a superhuman Spiritual Being who does not incarnate
Himself in anything and does not beget Sons or Daughters.

The other issue, Jewish perception of Christianity as a pagan religion, is

implicit for Ozick in the idea of a Trinity—three faces of God replacing
monotheism—and in the idea of mediation, not only through the role of the
Savior but also through that of saints, totems, and even food (bread and
wine). In this respect the Christian Church appears to violate the Second
Commandment wholesale with its crucifixes, altar paintings, and other
representations of the Unnameable One. In one of many similar passages,
Ozick regards with dismay the influx of "Spirit"—that is, of the pagan/
Christian imagination—into the world around us: "Spirit—or Imagination,
which means Image-making, which is to say Idolatry—puts gods into bi-
zarre and surprising places: into stones, plain or hewn; into rivers and trees;
32 The Matrix of Art

into human babies born under significant stars; . . . into dry bread and wet
wine" (AA 234). As with Moloch worship of old, this form of Idolatry has
inevitably led to bloodshed—"wars fought [between] . . . those who argued
over whether a piece of baked dough turned, when certain words were
addressed to it, literally into God" (AA 234). Insisting that "only what is
called Spirit—i.e., Idolatry—produces this kind of butchery," she traces the
thread in short order to the human sacrifice of recent times:

Sometimes it [Idolatry] puts God into the form of a man; sometimes . . . it

suggests that a whole people personifies evil. . . . In either case it traffics,
ultimately, in corpses. . . . [So that] the remaining Jews of Europe—millions—
were locked into freight cars, stacked standing together there like cordwood,
some dying as they stood, the rest awash in a muck of excrement, urine,
menstrual blood, and the blood of violence. (AA 235)

From this perspective, not even the finest fruit of Christian morality, the
Sermon on the Mount, may be presumed free of perversion. Speaking of
Sabbatai Sevi, the seventeenth-century fanatic whom many Jews (including
Sevi himself) took to be the Messiah, Ozick says his career "hints that every
messiah contains in himself, hence is responsible for, all the fruits of his
being; so that, for instance, one may wonder whether the seeds of the
Inquisition lie even in the Sermon on the Mount" (AA 144). And even if, she
says, her "fear of an American abattoir . . . may stem from the paranoia of
alienation [rather than] . . . a Realpolitik grasp of scary historical parallels"
(AA 170), the majority culture threatens American Judaism with extinction
through assimilation. "Diaspora-flattery is our pustule, culture-envy our
infection," she writes; "in America Exile has become a flatterer; our
flesh-pots are spiritual" (AA 171, 172).

To one such instance of culture envy—a New York Times article in which
a Jewish mother (Anne Roiphe) describes her family's celebration of Christ-
mas—Ozick sent a reply that would curiously foreshadow her novel The
Cannibal Galaxy: "When we speak of assimilation among amoebas, we
mean that the larger substance swallows the smaller; the majority digests the
minority."34 This metaphor does not, for Ozick, imply a revulsion against
Christianity; quite the contrary, she asserts, "I am glad to be an
assimilation-ist. . . . Not to have a grasp of Christianity . . . not to know my
neighbor's way, is in some fashion not to know myself." What she finds
objectionable is the majority culture's unwillingness to reciprocate:

I want to be known! I want my neighbors to assimilate my perceptions as I have

assimilated theirs; I want them to know the real Hanukkah of history.. .. I want
them to know the real Passover, the real Rosh ha-Shanah and Yom
The Matrix of Art 33

Kippur, as I know Allhallows Eve and Whitsuntide and Easter and St.
Francis . . . and Martin Luther and George Fox. (Both the founder of German
Protestantism and the founder of the Society of Friends were profoundly
unfriendly toward Jews and Judaism. Luther called Talmud "dung.") 35

Ozick found her answer to the quandary of American Jewish identity in a

historical episode of two thousand years ago: "America shall, for a while,
become Yavneh" (AA 173). Yavneh was the town where, after the Second
Destruction of the Temple, the Romans permitted a small band of Jewish
scholars to found a religious community. "It was out of Yavneh," Ozick
writes, "that the definition of Jewish life as a community in exile was
derived: learning as a substitute for homeland; learning as the instrument of
redemption and restoration" (AA 173n). By accepting English as the "New
Yiddish," Ozick was able to conceive a middle path between total alienation
of Jews from American culture (which Old Yiddish would have maintained)
and total assimilation, such as Anne Roiphe's Christmas celebration implied:

When Jews poured Jewish ideas into the vessel of German they invented
Yiddish. As we more and more pour not merely the Jewish sensibility, but the
Jewish vision, into the vessel of English, we achieve the profoundest invention
of all: a language for our need, our possibility, our overwhelming idea. If out
of this new language we can produce a Yavneh for our regeneration within an
alien culture, we will have made something worthwhile out of the American
Diaspora, however long or short its duration. . . . By bursting forth with a
literature attentive to the implications of Covenant and Commandment—to
the human reality—we can, even in America, try to be a holy people, and let
the holiness shine for others in a Jewish language which is nevertheless gener-
ally accessible. (AA 176-77)

Unfortunately, about a half decade later Ozick concluded, in her preface

to Bloodshed (1976), that "English is a Christian language" in which "there
is no way to hear the oceanic amplitudes of the Jewish Idea in any ... word
or phrase" (BL 9, 10). And according to current sociological analysis, her
hope has proven equally vain with respect to Jewish resistance to assimila-
tion. In its religion column for 22 July 1991, Newsweek magazine cited
studies showing that of all marriages involving Jews, the percentage that
were interfaith rose from 9 to 52 between the years 1964 and 1985. More-
over, three-quarters of the children of these marriages have not been raised
as Jews. Much in the vein of Ozick's prophecy, Newsweek cites an
Orthodox rabbi who calls assimilation through marriage a "death knell" of
American Judaism: "There never has been a community of Jews that has
abandoned ritual and survived."36

And yet, America has proved something like a Promised Land in provid-
34 The Matrix of Art

ing unparalleled safety, freedom, and prosperity to millions of Jews (includ-

ing 325,000 Israeli immigrants living in 1992 in New York City alone).37
Ozick admits as much in ascribing the 1960s rupture between American
blacks and Jews to "this difference—America [being] felt simultaneously as
Jewish Eden and black inferno" (AA 95). Thinking presumably of her own
immigrant parents, she compares "the Jews' pleasure in an America sweet
and open to them" with the "miseries in the Russian Pale" a fraction of a
century earlier (AA 95). For all her anxiety about future supersession of
Jewish culture in America, "Jewish history" in the sense of Gentile oppres-
sion has almost always, in Ozick's work, had a European ambience.

The point is important enough to merit substantiation. Of the four sec-

tions of Trust—her most self-consciously "American" novel—two are set in
"Europe" and "Brighton" (England). The Pagan Rabbi is filled with
European-born characters—the Pagan Rabbi's wife (a death camp survivor);
Edelshtein and his whole circle of Yiddish speakers in "Envy"; the German
who fought for the Kaiser in "The Suitcase"; Edmund Gate and his aunt
(both English-bred) in "Virility." Bloodshed's most memorable characters
are likewise not American nationals: Lushinski (a Pole) and Morris (an
African) in "A Mercenary"; the rebbe (a Buchenwald survivor) in
"Bloodshed"; two Israeli writers in "Usurpation." The protagonist of The
Cannibal Galaxy is French-born, and his adversary, Hester Lilt, issued from
the whole of Europe. The entire script of The Messiah of Stockholm is set in
Sweden, with a nod to Poland (Bruno Schulz's home). And all the main
characters of The Shawl— Rosa, her niece, and Persky—are Warsaw natives.
The main character in Levitation (Puttermesser) is Ozick's most
authentically American character, a contemporary New Yorker; but the
book also visits Vienna to scan Freud's room, and its title story portrays a
man, Feingold, who is obsessed with the Jew killings in Europe from the
Middle Ages through the Holocaust.

There is more than a little of Cynthia Ozick in Feingold's obsession. So

extensive and detailed is his account that we cannot escape this meaning of
her postulate that "To be a Jew is to be every moment in history, to keep
history for breath and daily bread."38 Despite her definition of Jewish his-
tory as primarily intellectual history—that is, about what Jews have done—
her stories define history most vividly as what has been done to Jews:

Feingold wanted to talk about . . . certain historical atrocities, abominations:

to wit, the crime of the French nobleman Draconet, a proud Crusader, who in
the spring of the year 1247 arrested all the Jews of the province of Vienne,
castrated the men, and tore off the breasts of the women. . . . It interested
Feingold that Magna Carta and the Jewish badge of shame were issued in the
same year. . . . There he was telling about the blood -libel. Little Hugh of
The Matrix of Art 35

Lincoln. How in London, in 1279, Jews were torn to pieces by horses. . . .

Feingold was crazed by these tales, he drank them like a vampire. (LE 11-13}

It follows, then, that the true focus of Ozick's "Jewish history" is Europe;
neither of her two homeland countries, America and Israel, catches her
fictive imagination with that kind of intensity. It is true that other American
writers have favored foreign settings—Hemingway set his major novels in
Paris, Italy, Spain, and Cuba, for example—but the Europe of Hemingway
or James was both culturally consanguine with America and deserving of
the author's affection. Cynthia Ozick's Europe, in the light of Jewish his-
tory, is diametrically different from these precursors, figuring into her work
and thought as one titanic ash-speckled graveyard—a map formed (in Trust)
from vomit and urine.

Because of its crucial importance throughout all of Ozick's work, this

concept of history merits a closer examination. Drawing substantially on
Heinrich Graetz's monumental, six-volume History of the Jews, from the
Earliest Times to the Present (1870), the time frame of Jewish history in
Ozick's work goes back to the Great Diaspora (Dispersal) ordained by the
Emperor Vespasian and his son, the Roman general Titus, after they crushed
the Revolt of the Zealots in 66-73. Jews began to appear in Europe at large
during the century after the Romans destroyed Jerusalem (70 A.D.) and
depopulated Judea, taking many Jews to Rome as slaves. By the year 300
European Jews numbered about three million and lived everywhere in the
Roman Empire except Britain, enjoying freedom of religion and exemption
from military service.39 After the Christianizing of the empire under
Constantine, however, Gentile-Jewish relations gradually became less
agreeable. The Nicaean Council of 692 decreed intermarriage punishable by
death and forbade building new synagogues. In 721 Byzantine King Leo III
ordered forcible baptisms for all Jews. In 887 Jews in Sicily were the first
Jews of Europe forced to wear a "badge of shame"—an invention
emulated all across Europe in later centuries. With the onset of the
Crusades in the eleventh century, slaughter assumed the force of systematic
policy. Despite efforts by local bishops to protect their Jews, soldiers in the
German Crusade of 1096 massacred the Jews of Worms, Mainz, Metz,
Trier, Cologne, and Prague, completing their work in the Holy City by
killing the Jews of Jerusalem in 1099.

Throughout the High Middle Ages, the persecution intensified. In 1266

the Council of Breslau decreed that Jews must live in ghettos "separated
from the Christian dwelling-place by a hedge, wall, or ditch." In 1222 an
Oxford student who converted to Judaism was burned alive. Elsewhere in
England, in 1255, eighteen Jews were executed for the ritual murder of a
36 The Matrix of Art

child, the incident that formed the basis of Chaucer's "Prioress's Tale." In
1290 the Jews of England, having grown to five thousand strong since
arriving with William the Conqueror, were expelled to France, not to return
until invited into Oliver Cromwell's Commonwealth in the 1650s. 40 When
the Black Death ravaged Europe from 1348 to 1350, the massacres and
expulsions multiplied as Jews were blamed for the disease, despite the Pope's
earnest admonitions to the contrary, noting in his bulls that the Jews them-
selves were dying like all the other victims. Even so, for having caused the
plague, the Jews of Strasbourg were herded into a wooden cage and burned
alive. By 1500 Jews had been expelled from large areas of France, Germany,
Austria, Hungary, and Spain.

The latter expulsion, in 1492, produced a community of great interest to

Ozick, the Iberian "Marranos" ("Pigs," in contemptuous Spanish vernacu-
lar), who pretended to be converted so as to escape both expulsion and the
Inquisition's flames but ended up being massacred anyway. A more whole-
some effect was the escape of some Marranos to Holland and the Americas,
where they prospered. The first Jews to arrive in the New World came with
Columbus; five of his crew members in 1492 were known to be Jews. When
the Inquisition moved into the Spanish and Portuguese settlements of His-
panic America, the Jews in those areas sought a friendlier environment in
Protestant America, arriving in New Amsterdam (New York) by 1654—
barely a generation after the Mayflower.

The one significant counterpoint to the bloody violence in Europe was the
Jewish sanctuary provided during the Middle Ages in a territory that over-
lapped Poland, Lithuania, and Russia, eventually stretching from the Black
Sea to the Baltic. Here Jews were allowed to own land in 1203, were granted
autonomy in 1356, and were given protective charters by Poland's Casimir the
Great in the fourteenth century. When new rulers arose of less friendly mien,
the Jews in this area were either trapped or forced to migrate to places like
Germany and America. A Cossack uprising of 1648, for example, resulted in
more than 100,000 Jews being murdered. Though Peter the Great halted the
pogroms in 1708 and allowed Jews to live in St. Petersburg, the partition of
Poland in 1795 added 1,200,000 Jews to the Russian domain, creating a
"Jewish problem" in the eyes of the czar which was "solved" by confining all
Jews within the territory that was now endowed with the title "The Pale of
Settlement." Among those so constrained were Cynthia Ozick's ancestors,
living in the region of Minsk, in the very heart of the Pale geographically.

Only with the eighteenth-century Enlightenment did European Jews begin

gaining emancipation, which was accelerated by Napoleon's decree freeing
the ghettos. But this progress was counterbalanced again by a change for the
worse in Eastern Europe, typified by the decree of Czar Nicholas I in 1827
The Matrix of Art 37

stipulating a twenty-five-year military service for Jews—a law that

continued until 1874. Extreme poverty also afflicted the four million Jews in
the Pale, one fifth of whom in 1900 were living on poor relief provided by
other Jews. These conditions, culminating in the great pogrom (the Russian
word for "violent mass attack") that followed the assassination of the czar
in 1881, drove more than two million Jews out of Russia, many of them to
the United States. Among that flood tide of refugees from Russian
oppression were the artist's future parents, William Ozick and Celia (Shifra)
Regelson. The aftereffects of the pogrom were evident to Ozick as a child in
her correspondence with her grandmother in Moscow, written in Yiddish:
"Nikolay, Nikolay, oifdayn kop ikh shpay was my grandmother's lullaby to
me— Czar Nicholas, I spit on your head" (AA 160). Her parents, however,
chose to withhold the gruesome details of family history until the child had
become a woman.

Not until I was grown up was I told about my great-uncle Mottel and his son
Raphael. In a pogrom in a Russian village, the Cossacks . . . tied them to the
tails of horses, upside down. The Cossacks galloped back and forth over the
cobblestones until the heads were dashed to pieces. When at last my mother
confessed this story, she whispered it. 41

In the Russian town of his boyhood, Ozick's father was spared the fate of
great-uncle Mottel and his son Raphael, but only by a harrowingly close
margin. The setting was at Easter, "when these things often used to hap-
pen," and the plot involved a "good priest/bad priest" dichotomy:

The bad priest organized a mob with truncheons. The Jews ran to the syna-
gogue and locked themselves in. The truncheons were turned into torches, and
the mob . . . [was] about to set fire to the synagogue. My father, then a boy of
four or five, always remembered the panic inside, families pressed together.
But then the good priest came along and persuaded the murderers to go home.

Hatred of Western/Christian civilization—"that pod of muck,"

Edelshtein calls it in "Envy" (PR 42)—would seem a natural outgrowth of
such a heritage, even without a Holocaust. But a more positive aftereffect
of the pogrom was something the child could see about her as a daily
presence: the creation of New York as a City of Jews—the metropolis that
since 1900 has had the largest Jewish population of any city in the world.
Jewish population in America as a whole soared from 100,000 in 1855 to
5,720,000 in 1968. By the time Ozick launched her career, around 1960,
New York contained over two million Jews who at that time were
sustaining one thousand synagogues and three daily newspapers in
Yiddish. The vast majority
38 The Matrix of Art

of these were of Russian origin, like herself—brought here with the

immigration wave of two million Russian Jews who arrived between 1880
and 1914. Before and after this period, most American Jews came from
Germany and Poland (150,000 by 1870), Romania (125,000 by 1914), and
Germany again during the Hitler era (240,000 from 1933 to 1945).

The Holocaust

The Hitler era was of course the culmination of "Jewish history" in the
perverse sense of the phrase. No disaster since the time of Abraham could be
placed beside it: not the enslavement in Egypt (1800-1500 B.C.), though it
"remains the great black hole of the Bible" in one scholar's phrasing; 42 nor
the destruction of the First Temple and slavery in Babylon a thousand years
later (586 B .C.); nor the massacres imposed in their turn by Rome, Islam,
and Christendom during the two millennia after that. Among its effects,
Ozick says, was a sense of guilt felt by Jews toward "those who were
surrogates for us"—a guilt that "is inexpiable" and so deep that "we must
question the legitimacy of our very lives."43 But though its presence pro-
foundly affects all her work, Ozick was unable to address the Holocaust
frontally until The Shawl, first published piecemeal in the New Yorker ("The
Shawl," 1981, and "Rosa," 1984). Even then, she withheld the manuscript
from the printer for several years, immobilized by doubt over the moral
propriety of "making art out of the Holocaust." 44

There is a special irony about Germany's being the center of the Holo-
caust. The 5 percent of Europe's Jews who lived there up to the Hitler years,
comprising less than 1 percent of Germany's population, were the most
privileged Jews on the continent—prosperous, fully emancipated, and largely
assimilated into German society. Conversely, the Jewish contribution to
German culture and science was greater than that in any other European
country. Kaiser Wilhelm, though a fervent Christian, included many Jewish
friends and advisers in his entourage; his chancellor, Bismarck, was
philo-Semitic enough to recommend counteracting Prussian
stiff-mindedness by "crossing the German stallion with the Jewish mare."
Through his father's lineage, Hitler himself may have been one-quarter
Jewish, to judge from the fact that his grandmother, as a teenaged
maidservant, received the standard paternity payments from her wealthy
Jewish employer after giving birth to Hitler's father.45 Although the
paternity of Hitler's father has never been established for certain, Hitler
took the evidence seriously enough to assign, in the Nuremburg Laws, full
Aryan status to persons of one-quarter Jewish blood—a maneuver by which
both he and Jesus Christ would pass muster,
The Matrix of Art 39

if we assume the Catholic doctrine that God is the father of both Jesus and
his mother, Mary. (Ironically, the Israeli Law of Return assigns full Jewish
identity on the same quarter-blooded basis.)46

For Cynthia Ozick, the assimilationist character of pre-Hitler Germany is

precisely the index by which to measure the evil of Holocaust betrayal. For
her and many other Jews, Germany's pre-Hitler philo-Semitism implies a
warning about what could happen in other friendly host countries, not
excepting America; and it is an ultimate reason why every Jew on earth,
down to the most assimilated apostate, should support with all his heart the
Israeli land of refuge. When asked whether Germany's Jews can be equated
with America's Indians as victims of genocidal slaughter, as is sometimes
asserted, Ozick pointed to the German-Jewish assimilation as comprising
the crucial moral difference:

The American settlers were out to conquer the land; they were motivated
primarily by conquest, not by killing for its own sake. And they saw the
Indians as . . . different from the settlers in . . . manner, dress, language,
custom, and everything else under the sun. Whereas the German Jews were, as
the famous sneer has it, "more German than the Germans" ... in their mastery
of German Hochkultur. When the settlers killed Indians, they [were] annihi-
lating utterly alien beings—no more justifiable than any other atrocity, but the
usual story. The Germans, curiously, did not adhere to the usual story; they
were entirely original. When the Germans murdered the German Jews, liter-
ally their next-door neighbors, they annihilated an utterly familiar group, part
of and parcel of their own culture. And how profoundly a part of their own
culture! Heine, as you know, was so completely implicated in German educa-
tion that, though the Nazis burned his books, they couldn't root out "die
Lorelei"—so Nazi schoolchildren went on singing it, though now it was called
a "German folksong." 47

It is plausibly arguable that there would not have been a Holocaust if

England had accepted a peace treaty in 1940, the precondition necessary for
the Nazis to carry out their plan to deport all of Europe's Jews to Mad -
agascar. Adolf Eichmann, who helped plan this project, described it as a
colony where "Jews could live among their own folk and be glad to get a
piece of land beneath their feet."48 Hitler's war aims, centered mostly on
regaining the lands lost by Germanic Europe in World War I, did not evoke
a definite prospect of genocide until he had reason to believe that his vow of
January 1939 to the Nazi parliament had been disregarded. The most likely
moment for that to have happened was in November 1940, when Molotov
and Stalin rejected the Fuhrer's proposals for redrawing the map of Eurasia
so as to offer Japan a free hand in the Far East, Stalin in South Asia,
40 The Matrix of Art

Mussolini in Africa, and Hitler in Europe. With Stalin claiming an interest

in the same territories that Hitler had plans for, it was obvious to Hitler that
Jewish Bolshevik Russia had now joined Jewish capitalist America in a
conspiracy to thwart German war aims, and the result for "international
Jewry" would now be what Hitler had predicted.

Six months later his Einsatzgruppen killing squads, following close upon
the heels of the Wehrmacht's sweep into Russia, began implementing his
prophecy with immediate slaughter of one and a half million Jews by
machine-gun fire. The public-image problems implicit in this carnage,
committed in the open landscape of occupied territory, led in early 1942 to
the Wannsee Conference in Berlin, where the Nazi overlords designed the
scheme of bringing Jews to secret killing centers instead of sending killer
squads out to where the Jews were. So began the four-part sequence of the
Holocaust: the exhaustive process of identifying every Jew in the Greater
Reich, followed by their concentration in ghettos, transportation in
boxcars, and gassing in death camps.49

Next to Germany, the country most deeply implicated in the Holocaust

was Poland, the setting for Ozick's most harrowing treatments of the sub-
ject, notably in "A Mercenary" and The Shawl. With the largest Jewish
population in Europe—about 3,000,000 people in 1939—Poland became
the vastest killing field of the war. Site of the most notorious of all death
camps, Auschwitz, this tragic land gave residence to Moloch resurrectus, his
power magnified a millionfold by modern transportation and assembly line
efficiencies devoted to the mass production of death. Next to the Warsaw
ghetto, with 450,000 Jews crowded sometimes ten to a room, the ancient
Jewish settlement in Lublin was the major locus of Jewish confinement.
Ozick chose to commemorate the martyrdom of its 200,000 Holocaust
victims by naming her protagonist in The Shawl Rosa Lublin.

Exacerbating still further the Polish-Jewish relationship was the continu-

ing persecution of Jews after the war, doubtless a strong reason for Ozick's
ongoing hatred of "Europe" in the 1950s and 1960s. Most surviving Jews
fled Poland after a series of pogroms culminated in the killing of 42 Jews in
the streets of Kielce in July 1946, a massacre provoked by rumors of ritual
murder of Christian children by Jews. The Communist government added
new thrust to the postwar ]udenrein movement by its official actions against
Poland's few remaining Jews following the 1967 Arab-Israeli war. A half
century after the German invasion, the 3,000,000 Jews of Poland have
dwindled to about 10,000. That has been reason enough for Cynthia Ozick
"to think of the whole continent of Europe as one vast Jewish graveyard"
(Ltr 6/6/91). The phrase "whole continent," moreover, carries no hint of
hyperbole. Eastward of Poland and Germany, Stalin planned as early as
The Matrix of Art 41

1928 to deport 300,000 Russian Jews to an enclave on the Chinese border;

in 1952-53, his plan to send all the Jews under his rule to Siberia was cut
short only by his death. In a 1971 essay-interview with a victim of Stalin's
policies, Ozick depicted the horrors of Soviet anti-Semitism as nearing
Hitlerite dimensions.50

Westward, in France and the Low Countries, local opportunists and Jew
haters abetted the Holocaust as elsewhere. Many puppet regimes, however,
appeared to follow the principle that Cynthia Ozick has elucidated concern-
ing America's Indians: the killing of other countries' Jews proved more
acceptable than turning on one's immediate Jewish neighbors. The Horthy
regime in Hungary protected its 900,000 Jews from its German ally until
Adolf Eichmann arrived to take charge in March 1944, after which the local
Arrow Cross Nazis went on a savage killing spree. The Romanian army and
police murdered scores of thousands of foreign Jews on its soil, but flouted
demands from Berlin so as to shelter most of its native Jews from deporta-
tion. The Bulgarian government, another nominal ally of Hitler's, finessed
his edicts so shrewdly as to give up not a single native Jew to the Holocaust,
though they sent the Greek Jews under their control to Auschwitz.

The Europe-wide "Jewish graveyard" does display one major counter-

example, in Ozick's work, to Holocaust misery—the Scandinavian countries.
Travel to Sweden in "The Suitcase" figures as the honorable alternative to
traveling to Germany ("The Swedes . . . saved so many Jews,". PR 126);
Nicholas Gustav Tilbeck, the charismatic demigod of Trust, is a Swede; and
the country contributes an attractively civilized setting to The Messiah of
Stockholm. And she acknowledges the uniquely heroic status earned by
another Scandinavian country, Denmark, which she contrasts with both
other European societies and the Allied leadership (read: Churchill and
Roosevelt), who knew of the Holocaust and did nothing whatever about it
(AA 236). In the words of Holocaust historian Raul Hilberg, the Danes
placed "an extraordinary obstacle ... in the path of the German destructive
machine: an unco-operative Danish administration and a local population
unanimous in its resolve to save its Jews."51 In October 1943, as the Gestapo
initiated a roundup for deportation, ordinary Danish citizens organized a
nation-wide rescue operation that succeeded in sending almost all Danish
Jews across the Sound to Sweden. Although subsequent scholarship has
somewhat tarnished the altruism of the affair by exposing its commercial
dimensions, 52 the Danish-Swedish salvation effort remains a rare bright
spot in the terrible Holocaust story.
42 The Matrix of Art

Modern Israel

Though it comprises the most awesome black hole in Jewish history—a true
singularity, in astronomer's jargon—the Holocaust figured largely into the
most spectacular comeback, one may reasonably say, in not only Jewish but
world history. The Restoration of Israel in 1947-48, barely three years after
crematoria chimneys stopped smoking, could not help but evoke schizoid
feelings in the generation of world Jewry who experienced both events as
they unfolded. Although Cynthia Ozick fully shares the exultation of the
Restoration, and has frequently visited "the living breathing vital sovereign
state of Israel" (Ltr 6/6/90), it is curiously absent from her imaginative
writing. Perhaps her strong sense of the sacred and the profane leads her to
put Israel, like the Holocaust, in a realm beyond the idolatrous defilements
of fiction. Yet when Israel does come briefly into her characters' conscious-
ness, the context is likely to be ironic or belittling. In "Envy; or, Yiddish in
America," for example, Edelshtein thinks bitterly of the Restored nation:

Yiddish was not honored in Tel Aviv or Jerusalem. In the Negev it was worth-
less. In the God-given State of Israel they had no use for the language of the
bad little interval between Canaan and now. Yiddish was inhabited by the
past, the new Jews did not want it. (PR 48)

At the end of the same story, Israel comes into view once again in the crazy
slugfest of words between Edelshtein and a Christian evangelist. Here, in
any event, is some grounds for pride for the alienated Yiddish speaker:

"Accept Jesus as your Saviour and you shall have Jerusalem restored." "We
already got it." . . .
"You [people] got a wide streak of yellow, you don't know how to hold a
gun."
"Tell it to the Egyptians." (PR 100)

Though losers on the battlefield, the Egyptians, it turned out, had an

impressive corps of allies. When Egypt and Syria launched the Yom Kippur
War in 1967, Ozick observed in "All the World Wants the Jews Dead," "the
United Nations was silent. The day after and the day after and the day after,
the United Nations was silent." 53 Only after Israel had turned the war
meant to annihilate them into a stunning victory did the U.N. speak, to save
the aggressors. For Ozick that lesson infallibly confirmed two precepts:
first, that "Jewish" and "Israeli" are "one and the same thing, and no one, in
or out of Israel, ought to pretend differently anymore" (105); and second,
that the shame of "Jewish history," no longer a Western phenomenon, had
The Matrix of Art 43

gone global as the non-Western world leaned heavily against the idea of
Jewish survival. Even China, historically remote from Middle Eastern
affairs, inveighed against the "Zionist imperialism" of the country under
attack, not merely with an eye toward Arab oil or influence but—in a
surprising turn—with the weight of historic precedent:

China, until Mao the most traditional of societies, has this tradition too. In the
ninth century, in Canton, . . . there was a massacre of Jews. Tens of thousands
were killed. Mao, who arms terrorists, is no innovator. (209)

Besides consolidating Jewish-Israeli identity and globalizing the

Jewish-Israeli struggle for survival, the Yom Kippur War had one other
profound effect on Ozick's self-consciousness. Henceforth, her identity as
an artist would forever lack any trace of the art-for-art's-sake sensibility.
The catalyst for this stance was a telephone call from a friend who, as the
war was hanging in the balance, wanted to recite a new poem. Though alive
with the urgency of the war, she "shut off the [television] set and listened
to the poem," which was "lyrical; infused, as we say, with sensibility." But,
she says, "then and there I vomited up literature. I was turned against every
posture grounded in aesthetics. Art is indifferent to slaughter" (207). From
that time forward—the year after Trust was published—Ozick's creed of
art-for-life's-sake was to be her standard for virtually every page of writing.

To judge from Israel's precarious wars for survival, it might seem that
"Jewish history" is defined less by Hebraic culture than by the hostility of
enormous powers and populations bent on ending Jewish history.
Ultimately, however, that inference is false. Probably the deepest meaning
of Israel—and of Jewish history—in Ozick's imaginative writing comes in
her advice to John Updike about converting his pseudo-Jewish Bech into the
real thing. To present this advice, she invents a future book for the series,
making it a trilogy that she entitles Bech, Bound:

Whither is Bech bound? . . . And what, above all, is binding Bech? The
memory of Moriah, Isaac's binding. The thongs of the phylacteries. The yoke
of the Torah. The rapture of Return. . . . By now Bech has read his Bible. He
has been taking Hebrew lessons; he is learning Rashi, the eleventh-century
commentator. . . . Starting with the six-volume Graetz, . . . Bech has mooned
his way in and out of a dozen histories. He is working now on the prayer
book, the essays of Achad Ha-Am, the simpler verses of Bialik. . . . He is
reading Gershom Scholem.
Bech stands on a street in Jerusalem. The holy hills encircle him—they are
lush with light, they seize his irradiated gaze. For the first time, he is Thinking
Big. (AA 128)
44 The Matrix of Art

Here for once is Jewish history as it should be, a cosmic-scale feast of the
intellect being hungrily ingested in the Promised Land of the Covenant, with
no shadow of a Holocaust or Arab war or Christian supersession to impose
its menace. This centering of Jewish history on the intellect, displacing
history's actual multi-millennial span of violence, provides an appropriate
transition to our final topic in our Matrix of Art discussion. We turn to the
latter half of the "Jewish artist" oxymoron.

L'Chaim! and the Art of Fiction

From the Gentile majority of American writers, twentieth-century literature

has brought to birth an indecent plenitude of anti-Jewish caricatures. To cite
some of the more celebrated, we have Fitzgerald's Meyer Wolfsheim, the
gangster who wears human molars as cufflinks in The Great Gatsby; T. S.
Eliot's brothel owners, Rachel nee Rabinovitch in "Sweeney among the
Nightingales" and Bleistein in "Burbank with a Baedeker," along with the
slumlord "jew" who "squats" in the window in "Gerontion"; Faulker's "jew
owners of sweatshops" in his original version of the appendix to The Sound
and the Fury (Faulkner's editor—himself Jewish—excised the offensive
adjective; we should also credit Faulkner with mocking anti-Semitism in
Jason's part of this novel); and Hemingway's Robert Cohn, so smitten with
WASP-hunger while watching Lady Brett as to evoke an exceptionally
profane analogy: "He looked a great deal as his compatriot must have
looked when he saw the promised land." 54

In a moment, we shall return to this last impasse between Gentile and

Jew—between Jake Barnes and Robert Cohn—for closer inspection. In order
to do that, I must first propose a theory of culture that figures importantly in
this discourse on the Art of Fiction. The theory is that virtually every cultural
group formulates its distinctive ethos in a word that summarizes for the group
its most crucial, bone-deep (though often unstated) values. Perhaps the most
commonly known of these words in American civilization is the word that
epitomizes Afro-American culture, Soul. Ultimately indefinable, like all such
words, to have soul means having an intense and subtle emotional responsive-
ness, such as one may experience in the varieties of Afro-American music—
gospel songs, jazz, and blues. In The Bluest Eye Toni Morrison memorably
renders the efficacy of soul music as a signifier too deep for words:

The pieces of Cholly's life could become coherent only in the head of a
musician. Only those who talk their talk through the gold of curved metal, or
in the touch of black-and-white rectangles and taut skins and strings echoing
The Matrix of Art 45

from wooden corridors, could give true form to his life. . . . Only a musician
would sense, know, without even knowing that he knew, that Cholly was
free. . . . Free to feel whatever he felt—fear, guilt, shame, love, grief, pity. Free
to be tender or violent, to whistle or weep. 55

By contrast with her treatment of Cholly, Morrison employs a voice

dripping with sarcasm to excoriate the "brown girls" whose insufficient
blackness implies their betrayal of soul values. By pursuing white
middle-class virtues such as hard work and education, along with "thrift,
patience, high morals, and good manners," the brown girls at last rid
themselves of the "Funk" (Morrison's cognate for "soul") that is their true
heritage. They "get rid of . . . the dreadful funkiness of passion, the
funkiness of nature, the funkiness of the wide range of human emotions.
Wherever it erupts, this Funk, they wipe it away; where it crusts, they
dissolve it; wherever it drips, flowers, or clings, they find it and fight it
until it dies."

For convenience we shall use the generic term "soul-word" to designate

this bone-deep verbal nugget in various subcultures. For several decades I
have been gathering a necklace of these words from my readings and travels.
In order to confirm the depth and range of soul-word psychology, I shall
define some of these as follows:

The Japanese soul-word is yamato-damashi, which translates literally as

"Japanese soul" but means in practice (politely put): "Have manhood! Don't
come back till the job is done." The United States learned what that meant
when the Japanese kamikaze pilots inflicted appalling losses on American
forces near the end of the war. Fully three decades later, a few Japanese
soldiers were still carrying on the war in remote jungles of the Pacific,
refusing to come back till the job was done. The return of the last such
soldier in the mid-1970s occasioned a mammoth parade in Tokyo for this
living embodiment of the national soul-word.

The Armenian soul-word is genutzat, which translates as "I give you

everything I have." For a people who have been persecuted almost as badly
and as long as the Jews, genutzat implies an ethic of survival: these people
could not have made it without the kind of total mutual support implied in
"I give you everything I have."

The Serbo-Croatian soul-word is dom, which translates as pertaining to

Home, Homeland, defense of the Home. Tragically, the word has come to
imply bloody violence in recent times as the fractured ethnic groups in the
country fall to quarreling over control over home soil; but it also helped
foster the fighting spirit that, in Tito's partisans, gave Hitler's legions all
they could handle, and later proved more than even Stalin at the height of
his power cared to tangle with.
46 The Matrix of Art

Something similar proved true of Finland, whose soul-word, sissu,

translates as the ability to endure pain and hardship with absolutely stoic
forbearance. The Finnish custom of taking steam baths followed by
immersion in snow or ice water is a minor example of sissu; a major
example was Finland's stunning success in battling hugely superior Russian
armies during the war. After the war, Stalin at the height of his
superpower status prudently refrained from taking over this enemy
territory.

A few other soul-words we may touch on briefly. The Chinese soul-word,

ren, means "to endure"—a formulation that needs no explanation regarding
that long-suffering population. The—or at least a—traditional soul-word
for Hispanic culture is "machismo," an index to both male honor and, all
too often, oppression of women in Latin countries. (Not until 1991 did the
Supreme Court of Brazil rule illegal the murder of an adulterous wife by her
husband to defend his honor—and the court has since rescinded that ruling
under political pressure.)56 And, returning to the American scene, the two
soul-words that concern us most are those of the WASP and Jewish
subcultures: "Class" and "L'Chaim!" respectively.

With this mention of WASP and Jew, we are ready to summon back the
two cultural ambassadors that we left in limbo a moment ago, Jake Barnes
and Robert Cohn. Recent scholarship has discovered two interesting facts
about Hemingway's original manuscript: that in it Lady Brett was the
primary focus of the opening pages; and that, angrily overreacting to
Fitzgerald's advice, Hemingway did not merely condense the opening
thirty pages but swept them away altogether. This abrupt maneuver, by
thrusting Robert Cohn to the book's forefront, gave Cohn and his
Jewishness a special importance.

What were Hemingway's hidden motives for showcasing Cohn as

prominently as he does? The first motive is one that Ozick confessed to in her
own work: revenge. But Hemingway's revenge was far pettier and more
spiteful than Ozick's retaliation against book-hating, Jew-hating P.S. 71.
He was settling a score with a sexual rival, the real-life model for Robert
Cohn, Harold Loeb (though Loeb had rescued Hemingway's first book, In
Our Time, from oblivion). Loeb's transgression consisted of his success in
bedding the real-life model for Lady Brett, Lady Duff Twysden, who had
rejected Hemingway because, she told him, he was a married man. 57
The other motive, using Cohn to exemplify failure to comprehend (never
mind enact) the famous Hemingway Code, reveals a fascinating inability to
reverse the premises of that code: that is, Hemingway could not compre-
hend, never mind enact, the Jewish ethos that Cohn expresses with admi-
rable clarity. The scene of mutual incomprehension occurs early on, in
chapter 2:
The Matrix of Art 47

"Listen, Jake," he leaned forward on the bar. "Don't you ever get the feeling
that all your life is going by and you're not taking advantage of it? Do you
realize you've lived nearly half the time you have to live already?"
"Yes, every once in a while."
"Do you know that in about thirty-five years more we'll be dead?"
"What the hell, Robert," I said. "What the hell." (11)

The ethos that Hemingway half-consciously upholds in this scene is the

paramount WASP imperative to show some Class, which is to say, to
maintain one's dignity among one's fellows and—of virtually equal
importance— to allow others to have their dignity likewise. The latter
purpose is Jake's reason for his repeated though futile efforts to correct
Cohn's behavior by alerting him to the Code that he keeps violating. This
WASP Code of Having Class, or Dignity, goes a long way toward
explaining Hemingway's celebrated emotional taciturnity of style: to have
Class is to obey an imperative that imposes self-repressing reticence on its
practitioners. The code that allows Jake to cry only in private (never, like
Cohn, in public) also invokes, in the above scene, a threefold tacit prohibition
in the name of WASP class/ dignity/reticence: (1) Don't talk too much; (2)
If you do talk, don't talk about yourself; and (3) If you do talk about
yourself, for God's sake don't talk about your griefs and anxieties.
Obviously Jake has shared Cohn's morbid mood "every once in a while,"
but his "What the hell" is an appropriate putdown, from the WASP
standpoint, of Cohn's lack of dignified reticence.58

It never seems to occur to Hemingway, however, that Cohn, not being a

WASP, may abide by a non-WASP ethos. In fact, Cohn exemplifies perfectly,
in this scene, the Jewish ethos, made familiar to us all (though not to
Hemingway's generation) by the immense popularity of Fiddler on the Roof.
In acting upon "the feeling that all your life is going by and you're not
taking advantage of it," Cohn embodies the Jewish "L'Chaim!" principle.
Spelled Yiddish-wise as "l'khayim" in Ozick's essay "Sholem Aleichem's
Revolution" (MM 197), it means, as Topol taught the world, "To Life!"—
but it means, so to speak, more than that: it means, To Life As It Actually Is,
not as it is cleansed and idealized by such popular forms of wishful thinking
as, for example, Romantic Religion.

Another way of putting it is to say that "To Life!" equals "To Reality!"
which in turn equals "To Truth!" The Jewish soul-word implies above all
else a reality-confronting, truth-seeking ethos, an ethos that has proved a
majestic asset in transforming this tiny sliver of the world's population into
a force to reckon with in every realm of actual reality: the arts, sciences,
politics, business and finance, education, and institutions of justice. It is the
48 The Matrix of Art

bedrock reason for George Bernard Shaw's perception that the world's
revolutionaries are always Jews: the hunger for Life/Reality/Truth implied
in L'Chaim! helps explain both this people's extraordinary bookishness and
their revolutionary adaptability to new ideas.

The correlation between Ozick's thought and the L'Chaim! principle is

evident everywhere. "To Life!" prevails over death, the cemetery, and even
the Holocaust in her answer to the question why she will not set foot in
Germany, not even to visit "sacred sites" like the thousand-year-old Jewish
graveyard in Worms:

In Jewish tradition, a cemetery isn't regarded as a "sacred site" (indeed, a

cohen—someone in the priestly line descended from Temple times—is forbid-
den to enter a cemetery), and in any case I have to confess that I think of the
whole continent of Europe as one vast Jewish graveyard. And why go look at
cemeteries when I can visit, as I have many times,. . . the living breathing vital
sovereign state of Israel? (Ltr 6/6/90)

Among Ozick's essays, her most graphic depiction of the struggle between
L'Chaim! and Moloch is "The Hole/Birth Catalogue," first published in
1972. In this work, which was occasioned by Freud's notorious formulation
that "anatomy is destiny," she accords to Freud the title of "philosopher"
but then goes on to observe that "all the truth any philosopher can really tell
us about human life is that each new birth supplies another corpse." In this
light, "to say anatomy-is-destiny is to reverse the life instinct," in the sense
that "if the woman is seen only as child-bearer, she is seen only as a disgorger
of corpses" (AA 255). By correlating "anatomy is destiny" with the death
instinct in this way, Ozick finds the secret reason for Freud's attack on
religion in The Future of an Illusion—and particularly for Freud's rejection
of his own religious heritage:

In the light of Freud's assertion of the death instinct, it is absolutely no

wonder that he distorted, misunderstood, and hated religion. . . . He despised
Judaism because it had in the earliest moment of history rejected the Egyptian
preoccupation with a literal anatomy of death and instead hallowed, for its
own sake, the time between birth and dying. Judaism has no dying god, no
embalming of dead bodies, above all no slightest version of death instinct—
"Choose life." (AA 256)

For Ozick, L'Chaim! is not merely a secular formulation, then—not just a

piece of practical advice like that of Strether in Henry James's The Ambas-
sadors: "Live all you can! It's a mistake not to." It is rather an ethos that
expresses the long Judaic heritage, having risen coeval with the birth of
Israel itself out of the centuries of brutal Egyptian oppression. This rever -
The Matrix of Art 49
.
ence toward the past—toward those real ancestral lives that have created
the Judaic heritage—causes Ozick to repudiate a central feature of literary
modernism: its obsession with (in Harold Bloom's phrase) "'undoing' the
precursor's strength" (AA 194). "Nearly every congeries of Jewish thought
is utterly set against the idea of displacing the precursor," Ozick says,
insisting on the "carrying over of the original strength, the primal
monotheistic insight, the force of which drowns out competing power
systems." Quoting the Passover Haggadah to illustrate this cultural
continuity—"We ourselves went out from Egypt, and not only our
ancestors"—Ozick measures literary modernism against her Judaic
heritage and chooses the latter:

In Jewish thought there are no latecomers.

Consequently the whole notion of "modernism" is, under the illumination
of Torah, at best a triviality and for the most part an irrelevance. Modernism
has little to do with real chronology, except insofar as it is a means to dyna-
mite the continuum. Modernism denotes discontinuity. . . . Modernism and
belatedness induce worry about being condemned to repeat, and therefore
anxiously look to break the bond with the old and make over. . . . The
mainstream Jewish sense does not regard a hope to recapture the strength,
unmediated, of Abraham and Moses as a condemnation. Quite the opposite.
In the Jewish view, it is only through such recapture and emulation of the
precursor's stance, unrevised, that life can be nourished. . . . (AA 194, 195)

If modernism courts irrelevance and triviality through valorizing discon-

tinuity, postmodernism falls radically short of Ozick's Judaic standard of
historicity. In "Toward a New Yiddish," first published in 1970, and "Liter-
ature as Idol: Harold Bloom" (1979), she performs a surprisingly early
roundup of what would later become the usual suspects: Robbe-Grillet (thx.
"father" of the new movement), Susan Sontag (its "mother"), Richard
Kostelanetz and Richard Gilman (its "foster uncles . . . two de-Judaized
American critics"), William Gass, Paul de Man, Stanley Fish, J. Hillis Miller,
Angus Fletcher, Jacques Derrida, and Roland Barthes. 59

In assessing the shortcomings of postmodernism, she chooses Kostelanetz

and Gass to exemplify the postmodern divorce of literature from actual life.
Kostelanetz's statement "So we learn to confront a new work with expecta-
tions wholly different from those honed on traditional literature" reminds
Ozick of Henry Ford's dismissive gesture "Or, history is bunk" (AA 243).
Equally anti-Judaic, for her, is Gass's assertion that "Life is not the subject
of Fiction"—that fictional characters should not "passionately wallow in
the human reality which the work of art refers to" but rather "shine like
essence, and purely Be" (AA 165). This view of literature has not only
"aestheticized, poeticized, and thereby paganized" the contemporary novel,
50 The Matrix of Art

Ozick says; it has reduced novelistic horizons to the scope of a linguistic

playschool with only two games to play—"parody of the old forms,
Tol-stoyan mockeries such as Nabokov's," or else "a new 'form' called
language, involving not only parody, but game, play, and rite. The novel is
now said to be 'about itself,' a ceremony of language" (AA 164).

For Ozick, this "pagan aestheticism" will not serve. "The religion of Art
isolates the Jew," she declares; "it is above all the Jewish sense-of-things to
'passionately wallow in the human reality'" so as to relate "conduct and
covenant" to literature (AA 165). For this reason, to a Jew in America "the
Problem of Diaspora in its most crucial essence is the problem of aesthetics."
Predicting that the religion of Art will "dominate imaginative literature
entirely" in America "for a very long time," she says the Jewish-American
writer who wants to stay Jewish will have to "stay out of American litera-
ture. . . . [He] will have to acknowledge exile" (AA 165).

Fortunately, there is a place of exile in Ozick's literary world that is

immediately accessible, thoroughly Judaized, and inhabited by the most
glorious figures in the history of fiction. That place of exile is the
nineteenth-century novel, emphatically Cynthia Ozick's favorite period of
fiction because of its high correlation with the
L'Chaim!—Life/Reality/Truth-seeking— principle. There is, of course, the
minor inconvenience that "the nineteenth-century novel has been
pronounced dead" by modern/postmodern consensus, and therefore, "since
the nineteenth-century novel is essentially the novel, . . . the novel itself is
dead" (164). Ozick's answer to this challenge is to draw an analogy between
the pre-modern/modern dichotomy in fiction and a cultural dichotomy of
far larger proportions, that which separates what Gentiles call the Old and
New Testaments. First, says Ozick, we had the Old Testament novel of
ethical insight:

The novel at its nineteenth-century pinnacle was a Judaized novel: George

Eliot and Dickens and Tolstoy were all touched by the Jewish covenant: they
wrote of conduct and of the consequences of conduct: they were concerned
with a society of will and commandment. At bottom it is not the old novel as
"form" that is being rejected, but the novel as a Jewish force. (AA 164)

Displacing that Jewish force is the novel of New Testament insight, based
not on history and character but on miracle and mystery:

The "new" novel, by contrast, is to be taken like a sacrament. It is to be a

poem without a history—which is to say, an idol. It is not to judge or interpret.
It is to be. . . . The new fiction is to be the literary equivalent of the drug
culture, or of Christianity. It is to be self-sustaining, enclosed, lyrical and
The Matrix of Art 51

magical—like the eucharistic moment, wherein the word makes flesh. (AA
164-65)

Ironically, Ozick's chief exemplar of such a literature is a Jewish rather

than Gentile writer, the flamboyant poet Allen Ginsberg. Noting the
prevalence, circa 1970, of "lifestyle" as the touchstone of the new ethos,
Ozick carries her New Testament analogy a little further regarding
Ginsberg's case: "But revolutionary lifestyle incorporates very literally a
eucharistic, not a Jewish, urge. What Ginsberg . . . called 'psychedelic
consciousness' is what the Christians used to call grace" (AA 161). We
thereby arrive in Ozick's literary criticism at one more battlefield of Jewish
versus Christian values, Yahweh versus pagan gods. At the end of the
following passage, an interesting resemblance may be discerned between
Allen Ginsberg the poet and Tilbeck, the pagan demigod who drowns at
sea at the end of Trust exactly as Ginsberg does here metaphorically:

[Ginsberg] recapitulates the Hellenization of Jewish Christianity. He restates

the justification-by-faith that is at the core of Pauline Protestantism. In de-
throning the separate Oneness of God ... he goes farther than ... Christianity,
even in its Roman plural-saint version. He wades into the great tide of the
Orient, where gods proliferate and nature binds all the gods together and the
self's ideal is to drown in holy selfhood until nature blots out man and every
act is annihilated in the divine blindness of pure enlightenment. . . . Ecstasy
belongs to the dark side of the personality, to the mystical unknowingness of
"psychedelic consciousness." . . . When a man is turned into a piece of god he
is freed from any covenant with God. (AA 162-63)

In contrast to this "pagan" model of fiction, Ozick advances the Judaic

model in "Innovation and Redemption: What Literature Means"—a syn-
thesis of three essays she had published earlier over the span of a decade.
Two "outmoded" precepts characterize the Judaic model that she here
espouses: tradition and didacticism. Openly Judaic about tradition, she
subordinates modernist discontinuity to the biblical injunction concerning
respect for one's (in this case, literary) ancestors: "more useful cultural news
inhabits the Fifth Commandment [Honor Thy Father and Mother] than one
might imagine at first glance" (AA 241). The other precept, truly
nineteenth-century in character, is the idea that "fiction will not be
interesting or lasting unless it is again conceived in the art of the didactic.
(Emphasis, however, on art)" (AA 245). Her idea of didacticism, in turn,
presumes that "literature is the moral life," creating "a certain corona of
moral purpose" or a "nimbus of meaning that envelops story" (AA 245,
246). Those who claim that fiction is "self-referential, that what a story is
about is the language it is
52 The Matrix of Art

made of, have snuffed out the corona," she adds. And without that nimbus
of meaning, that corona of moral purpose, the novel cannot serve the
ancient Judaic purpose of redemption.

In saying that literature cannot last if it does not "touch on the

redemptive," Ozick is quick to define the word as having nothing to do
with "goodness, kindness, decency, all the usual virtues." Redemptive
literature deals rather with "the singular idea that is the opposite to the
Greek idea of fate: the idea that insists on the freedom to change one's life"
(AA 245). Redemption thus comes to resemble a transcription of the
L'Chaim! principle, in that both L'Chaim! and Redemption represent
"everything against the fated or the static: everything that hates death and
harm and elevates the life-giving—if only through terror at its absence" (AA
246). Ozick's quarrel with Freud stems from this insight (as well as from
Freud's misogyny). "The Freudians claim that they're not determinists, but I
can't see anything else," she told Elaine Kauvar apropos the "prediction
from earliness" that ruined Beulah Hilt's chances in school in The
Cannibal Galaxy (Kauvar 389).

But though her purpose in fiction is thus moral and redemptive—in a

word, Judaic—there remains the "Jewish writer" oxymoron to contend
with, pitting the writer's imagination and idolatry against the Jewish ethos.
Calling the battleground within the Jewish writer a "darkling plain," Ozick
portrays this inner struggle as occurring among adversaries as powerful as
any of those within the fiction that is born of this process. There follows a
memorable instance of the conflicted art of Cynthia Ozick:

Literature, to come into being at all, must call on the imagination; . . . but at
the same time, imagination is the very force that struggles to snuff out the
redemptive corona. So a redemptive literature, a literature that interprets and
decodes the world, . . . must wrestle with its own body, with its own flesh and
blood, with its own life. Cell battles cell. The corona flickers, brightens, flares,
clouds, grows faint. The . . . Evil Impulse fills its cheeks with a black wind,
hoping to blow out the redemptive corona; but at the last moment steeples of
light spurt up from the corona, and the world with its meaning is laid open to
our astonished sight. (AA 247-48)

The key word, in that final clause, is "meaning"—a postmodern taboo

that Ozick sweeps aside without compunction or apology (italics hers):
"What literature means is meaning. . . . Literature is for the sake of human-
ity" (AA 246-47). Aware that she is contradicting the Zeitgeist in this
attitude, she offers the career of Solzhenitsyn as proof that "more often than
not the Zeitgeist is a lie." Following—however unwittingly—the Judaic
model of fiction, Solzhenitsyn shows how "the idea of the novel is attached
to life, to the life of deeds, which are susceptible of both judgment and
The Matrix of Art 53

interpretation, and the novel of Deed is itself a deed to be judged and

interpreted" (AA 87). The Russian writer's opposite, in this context, is
Truman Capote, whose Other Voices, Other Rooms exemplifies the
"narcissistic" modern novel. The survival of the novel form, she predicts,
"depends on this distinction between the narcissistic novel and the novel
of Deed" (AA 87). Though admittedly Capote's flair for style and mood
outshines Solzhenitsyn's plodding naturalism, Ozick sides with the
Russian as the greater truth teller: "Life is not style, but what we do: Deed.
And so is literature" (AA 89).

Ozick's insistence that fiction must correlate with external reality—that

"Literature (even in the form of fantasy) cannot survive on illusion" (AA
101)—brings harsh judgment to bear on several of her contemporaries. In
general, the most damaging thing she can say about any fiction is that it
manifests, like Romantic Religion, the flight reflex, choosing to fantasize
rather than cope with reality. Reviewing The Wapshot Chronicle, she
considers John Cheever's praiseworthy talent to be irredeemably defeated
by this moral weakness: "Minor writers record not societies, or even
allegories of societies, but vapid dreams and pageants of desire. . . .
Cheever's suburbs are not really suburbs at all. . . . St. Botolphs . . . is a
fabrication, a sort of Norman Rockwell cover done in the manner of Braque."60
And when Cheever portrays the decay of his Yankee heritage in terms of
ethnic snobbery—his Dr. Cameron is unmasked as ne Bracciani—no
amount of nostalgic rhapsodizing can make amends: "Oh, it is hard to be a
Yankee—if only the Wapshots were, if not Braccianis, then
Wapsteins—how they might then truly suffer. And we might truly feel."

Another telling example of evading reality that Ozick chooses to discuss

is perpetrated by E. M. Forster—otherwise a great favorite of hers—in
Maurice, his only overtly homosexual novel. Forster's irresponsibility lay in
putting a wish at the heart of his work, rather than the will that brings a
character up against life's genuine contingencies: "I was determined [she
quotes Forster as saying] that.. . two men should fall in love and remain in
it for the ever and ever that fiction allows" (AA 64). Ozick's allegiance to
reality condemns this concept: "The essence of a fairy tale is that wishing
does make it so. . . . In real life wishing, divorced from willing, is sterile.
Consequently Maurice is . . . an infantile book, because, while pretending to
be about societal injustice, it is really about make-believe, it is about wish-
ing; so it fails even as a tract" (AA 64).

We may infer, then, that Ozick has chosen a middle ground for her work,
rooting it in the hard contingencies of actual life on one hand (unlike those
fantasists, Forster and Cheever), while imbuing it all with religious meaning
on the other (unlike sociological novelists like Philip Roth or the Updike of
54 The Matrix of Art

Bech). Talking with Elaine Kauvar, she defended the latter perspective as
one that "goes to the root of every civilization":

There's no civilization that hasn't had a religious aspect; until the world was
quite old, there was no way to separate civilization from religion. I would
think we can do that only for the last two hundred years. A person's religion
was his civilization. It was his medicine, his science, his social structure, his
politics. (Kauvar 379)

In this broad sense Ozick sees "Judaism in its ontological and moral aspects"
as a heritage that "all of Western civilization shares," in that "you just can't
have a Christian culture without understanding that it is also a Jewish
culture."

Here Ozick appears to be shifting the balance of her longstanding mental

conflict, subduing her hatred of Western/Christian civilization to the
premise that "to be a Jew in Western civilization is to be part of the
foundation." Her aesthetic creed shifts its ground likewise; though
"completely torn and in an unholy conflict between moral seriousness and
. . . aestheticism," she leans in the end toward Judaic humanism: "what else
is a great novel going to be about if it isn't about humanity in society?" She
appears to lapse from this standard into further conflict when she admits
that "as a writer I absolutely wallow in mystery religion," despite being a
rationalist in "both my personal inheritance and my temperamental being,"
but her ultimate allegiance as an artist is found in propositions
reminiscent of Matthew Arnold and Henry James—that "life is nothing
without art,.. . that experience, no matter how intense, is nothing at all
without the potter's hand!" (Kauvar 380-81, 393, 377).

Ozick's most important early essay on the relation between moral seri-
ousness and art was "The Jamesian Parable: The Sacred Fount" (in the
Bucknell Review of May 1963). Not surprisingly, the essay is as revealing of
Ozick herself as of her mentor. Crediting James's "perception of moral
beauty" with an "influence . . . almost as forceful and definitive nowadays
as Freud's," she relates James's work to "the Talmudic and Chassidic class
of the parable" as well as to Gospel usage (58). In parable, she says, "the
moral is in the tale, directly and immediately; without the moral, the tale is
nothing" (59). Whereas Kafka is "an allegorist," in her view, "James is a
teller of parables; and for him there must be so tight a fusion of object and
meaning that the two resolve into an integer" (59). Thanks to this
"unfissionable method of parable," James was able to rely "on direct insight,
on instantaneous attestation, on primary apperception, . . . wherein the
moral beings are the moral lesson" (68).
The Matrix of Art 55

Two specific corollaries of this technique effect a lasting Ozick-James

correlation. First, their use of parable works most often through negative
example—that is, their main characters (as she says of James) are typically
"negative moral beings—the values they espouse are evil because they are
self-contradictory" (68). And most important, the evil they perpetrate con-
sists primarily of some form of imposture. For Ozick as well as James, this is
so vital a theme as to correlate The Sacred Fount with her total oeuvre as
well as with its author's:

What, then, in the parable, is the meaning of the sacred fount? . . . It is the
natural balance of things, the human personality unmarred and untampered
with. It is (and here again we recognize the full great chord of the Jamesian
theme) self-realization, the completion of the potentialities of the self. He who
desires to change himself, to become what he is not, contradicts himself,
negates the integrity—the entelechy—of his personality. The self, like the
fount, must always remain full; for once it is robbed or distorted or molested,
it cannot replenish itself. . . . The drinker is seeking to become what he is not,
and in this he is immoral. (69)

As against "the inherent urgency in his novels toward a celebration of

life" (a Gentile L'Chaim! principle, we might say), Ozick thus construes
James's parabolic method as showing us "his abhorrence of the 'unreal' in
all those persons who are false to the code implicit in the conditions in
which they find themselves—Madame Merle, for example, Merton
Densher, Charlotte Stant, Ralph Pendrel, et alia" (70). Ozick's
corresponding abhorrence of the unreal is shown in her characterization of
apostate Jews who betray their heritage throughout all her fiction. As with
James, her parables produce a procession of "negative moral beings" who
seek to become what they are not.

This classic standard concerning the purpose of literature is further illu-

minated in two brief commentaries. In a Round Table discussion entitled
"Culture and the Present Moment," Ozick rejected the Susan Sontag school
of high camp with the claim that "artists themselves must stand up against
[Sontag's book] 'Against Interpretation.'... There's not enough judgment—
and by 'judgment' I mean not simply opinion, but bringing to bear on a
work history, character, and other speculation." 61 Her adversary on the
highbrow side is the playfully self-reflexive novel, a pure art object, against
which she holds up the model of Thomas Hardy: "Hardy writes about—
well, life ... life observed and understood, as well as felt. A society . . . is set
before us: in short, knowledge; knowledge of something real, something
there" (AA 238). Hardy's high seriousness in turn imparts a permanent
efficacy to his work: "Though Hardy was writing one hundred years ago,
56 The Matrix of Art

. . . Hardy speaks to me now and I learn from him. He educates my heart,

which is what great novels always do."62 Although we cannot "turn back to
the pre-Joycean 'fundamentalist novel,'" she goes on to say, that fact cannot
excuse contemporary writers for having "led away from mastery . . . and
from seriousness"—in a word, from Henry James's Art of Fiction and Mat-
thew Arnold's Criticism of Life. With the loss of those qualities, she feels,
the contemporary novel has ruinously vitiated that sort of suspense which
comprises the novel's appeal to the intellect: "Suspense occurs when the
reader is about to learn something, not simply about the relationship of
fictional characters, but about the writer's relationship to a set of ideas, or
to the universe" (AA 241). Or, as she put it in her preface to Bloodshed, "a
story must not merely be, but mean. . . . I believe that stories ought to judge
and interpret the world" (BL 4). Having now looked at this writer's "rela-
tionship to a set of ideas," we may be better prepared to see how her stories
"judge and interpret the world." We turn now from the Matrix of Art to the
art work itself.
 2
Readings

Early Pieces

I used to submit a ms. every year to the Yale Series of Younger Poets, until I passed the age
limit—40—and quit.
(Ltr 6/6/90)

In her mixed judgment of Trust, the huge novel that grandly wasted her
youth, Ozick's.one constant stance over the years has been her claims for its
style. "I wanted to include a large range of language," she wrote in 1982
(emphasis hers): "a kind of lyric breadth and breath" (Ltr 1/14/82). A decade
later she recalled: "the energy and meticulous language-love that went into
that book drew on sources that were never again so abundant. In certain
ways it is simply an immensely long poem" (Ltr 7/20/91). Whether the
sources were "never again so abundant" might be questioned; virtually all
of Ozick's critics agree concerning the sustained mastery of style that perme-
ates every part of Ozick's work. Her remark does serve as a reminder,
however, of the poems she compiled during her earlier life as an artist. Space
limits us here to a few representative specimens, beginning with a cluster
written when she was about thirty. 1

"Cant won't. Wont can't." Those four words, each given a full line,
comprise the entirety of a poem entitled "Morals and Mores." Although the
poem suits its title, its distaste for the nouns "Cant" and "Wont" (i.e., habit
and custom) also defines Ozick's artistic creed of independence. In forms
that range from rhyming quatrains to free verse, she displays her debt to
mentors such as Blake, Dickinson, Whitman, and T. S. Eliot while still
moving toward her eventual place among the most original voices of her
generation. Of special interest are poems that adumbrate the central con-
cerns of her later fictional oeuvre.
58 Readings

The conflict between gender and artistic needs is one of those themes,
implicit in fiction such as Trust and "Virility" and explicit in the essays on
women writers such as Virginia Woolf and Edith Wharton (two childless
artists, as Ozick was until age thirty-seven). In "Five Lives" Ozick ruefully
contrasts her persona's life—"I stayed at home and stuck to bed / and wrote
and wrote and read and read"—with those of four acquaintances who
"stuck to bed" more productively: Helaine, who cunningly snared "husband
cot and cradle"; Vera, who married smart ("chose the brain worth dollars");
and two Carols, who "all have sons" as well as successful husbands. Another
poem, "Terrain," uses landscape imagery and Emily Dickinson's hymnal
stanza to defend this life of apparent deprivation for the sake of artistic
struggle: "Those others call my life plateau / and cry me to their plain / as if
a peak were point too low / to gain."

Perhaps the most interesting of these early poems are those that describe
the psychology of the narrator of Trust, which was then in progress. "The
Intruder" begins with "I am a voyeur of your loves: / outside, a neuter," and
concludes with a series of sexual puns: "What armor [should I] give you
against what arms? // O little sweated god Amor who watches over the
tangled suitor." Another poem, "Fire-foe," portrays the conflict between
Eros and Thanatos in terms of fire and ice, with the narrator turning the
argument of "To His Coy Mistress" backwards: "You [the lover] snatch, I
flee; / you thrive, I fail; / yet ice will trail / through you and me / equally."
Because "The lustful and the tame / come to just the same," the speaker
thinks it "easier by far to go / under the exacting snow / when the blaze is
ashes-low / in the barren bush of No." Another losing battle of Love versus
Death is dramatized in "Vision me old-age grief," whose narrator previsions
herself as old and sexless with "body-sap suckled," enjoying "no immor-
tality / of skin to skin" but rather enduring "shriveled sex and silent rooms."
Even the immortality of having children will yield in the end to "filial
shrieks among our tombs."

In a similar mood, "The Syllable"—a title referring to the pronoun "I"—

evokes the prophet Isaiah's cry "All flesh is grass" in its master image of
personal mortality: "The hale specked tower / of me, fretwork self I made—
/ this blade / arranged / upward—the mower / bent, / and frailed and
changed to freckled hay." With the upper world deleted (the hay has been
"taught / to be burned"), the grassblade-speaker turns to the underworld: "I
have turned, // turned downward to the cruel / root-webbed well, / down to
the nodule-thing of all, / down to the earth's eye." Here in the dead under-
ground the lesson motif concludes as the speaker "learned: / I." A similar
morbidity attends the speaker's birth in the cryptic "Apocalypse," published
in Commentary in September 1959: "In my father's wife I grew like a worm.
Readings 59

Enslimed / I climbed from her grave. All the rest / is a dirty search for a dry
crib." The infant-narrator then proceeds to satirize the idea of Original Sin
by relating it to the narrator's loaded diapers: "On the twelfth day of the
apothegmatical month I am asked what word / 'wipes out the sins of innu-
merable aeons.' I reply 'Your nose.'"

Sometimes the mood lightens, even in poems about death, thanks to

Ozick's recourse to magic and parable that would later turn up in works like
"The Pagan Rabbi" and "Usurpation." Nature-magic dominates "In the
Yard," where the speaker's dead parents spectrally visit her fever-dream,
their life and youth gloriously restored, but in the end the nature god re-
claims them like Tilbeck's greenish sea: "they slyly faded out, becoming all
little leaves / and grass and bush and everything green." A more realistic
version of the pastoral mode is "Boston Air," which achieves its welcome to
spring by sardonically reconceptualizing the grubbiness of the modern city:
"the soot / will wisp like blown-seeds in the town," while the crush of cars
become "Silver / herds" that crowd the thoroughfare. In "Urn-Burial," a
poem that conjoins a lyric style with a narrative design, death assumes
benignity through an extended religious parable. Here God allows men to
live immortally in exchange for letting their possessions die, and they gradu-
ally lose precious or useful objects ranging from jewelry and money to
clothing and plumbing. But in the end God accepts their appeal to reverse
His edict, as the life of eternal stasis without possessions proves unbearable.

Various aspects of Ozick's Jewish sensibility find strong expression in

three poems that suggest Enoch Vand's conversion in Trust. In "Diaspora"
the Holocaust is evoked by so innocent an action as painting the front gate,
an ironwork grill that had undergone previous repair work by an ethnic
salad of Gentile owners—Fantelli, Schlaempfe, Hudson, and "Earliest,
Le-Comte the Huguenot / [who] built the fence around the lot." The idea of
Christmas wreaths hung on the gate by those owners rounds a sudden grim
corner—"Santa sits by the fire, he likes to stoke / and watch the Jew go up in
smoke"—and in no time flat the gate brings us up against the image of
Auschwitz: "This fence has spikes and staves / like a pen." Like Enoch Vand
working his way through Holocaust-despair, the poem nonetheless ends on
a triumphant note: "Zion's seed / can wait and wait / for the holy fall / of
every gate." Pending that messianic apotheosis, the gate does tease out one
positive meaning from its Hitlerian shadows: "My grandfather's rags laugh
to see me propertied." The struggle of American Jews to climb out of
ancestral poverty, here capped by Ozick's status as a homeowner, produced
in Cynthia Ozick a sensitivity to class identity that was to echo powerfully
across her writing career.

Predictably, several poems of the early 1960s portrayed the frustrations,

60 Readings

sacrifices, and surprises of the artist's life—another recurrent theme of

Ozick's fiction. "Visitation," in the fall 1962 Prairie Schooner, recalls Haw-
thorne's "The Artist of the Beautiful" in its depiction of the artwork as a
beautiful fragile cobweb that is "shattered / by the crass gross army-footed
blunt blind tap / of boots." But like Owen Warland, Ozick's spider-artist
will shrug off this callousness of a philistine public: "My decimated web,
like a city of war, / will summon hidden spittle for rebuilding." "The Artist,
Ha Ha," in the Literary Review of spring 1962, recalls Henry James and
Yeats in its rueful portrait of the artist as an encaved hermit, trading her life
for her work: "So do not linger now to live: / turn your back within the cave. /
At its mouth a stone is hurled. / Turn your back: it was the World." But
another poem, "Stile," in the Virginia Quarterly Review of winter 1962,
defines the artist's reward—an unexpected beauty that can suddenly irradi-
ate the humble artwork: "The filigree of snow / That is my neighbor's fence /
(An ordinary rail, with staves) / Suggests a secret immanence." (Ozick's
other poem on this page appears startlingly prophetic in view of its 1962
date: "While in the Convention they were nominating the Next President of
the United States, /1 thought of death: 7 . . . Death the dark, dark horse.")

The final two poems we shall consider were printed in Voices within the
Ark: The Modern Jewish Poets (Pushcart Press: Yonkers, 1980)—a book
that includes generous samplings of Ozick's favorite Yiddish and Hebrew
poets, including Hayim Bialik (of "Bialik's Hint"), Jacob Glatstein
(Edelshtein in "Envy"), and Shaul Tchernikhovsky (in "Usurpation"). Here
Ozick's "The Wonder-Teacher" confirms her preference for rational rather
than romantic religion, for ordinary life over the extraordinary, as her
eponymous rabbi impresses his pupils not when he levitates, "[waiting] in
air for the unknotting of the Name," but rather when he "slept like any one
of us, as if to scorn / all prodigy. We huddled near the marvel of his lung."2
The other poem, "A Riddle," describes a creature with two disparate
feet—"The right wears a tough boot and is steadfast. / The other is got up in
a Babylonish slipper of purple laces." The answer to the riddle discloses
Ozick's dualistic concept of Judaic biblical commentary, which points a
contrast between "Aggada (legend, tale, and lore) and Halachah (law and
code)."

An engaging instance of this double-footed approach to art—and the

final early work we have space to consider—is "The Sense of Europe," a
story published in the Prairie Schooner of summer 1956, at about the same
time as the genesis of Trust. Early as it is, appearing when the writer was
twenty-eight, it nonetheless displays an absolutely distinctive voice—only
Cynthia Ozick could possibly have written this story—and it presents a
preview that reaches from Trust to Puttermesser. The title, belying its
Jamesian urbanity, refers instead to the "terrible and corrupted heritage"
of the
Readings 61

Nazi era with its "old throbbings of fear and flight" (135,133). Making the
sense of Europe worse is the sense of America as a place of Jewish
alienation, thanks to the assimilationist craving of the narrator's Allegra
Vand-like mother:

My mother despised my face, studying it daily and lamenting over the heavy
curly hair that broke the comb as she combed it, over my dark thick oily
features, brooding like a Persian's or an Arab's. . . . Even the placid plainness
of the other [Christian] girls would have pleased my mother, their blue-eyed
looks full of confidence and pleasant things. . . . I might as well have been an
East European ghetto Jewess or, which was after all the same thing, a New
York East Side Jewess (my mother always said "Jewess," just as our Gentile
neighbors did)—and my father would say ... "well, she's a throwback, I guess
she's a throwback to the scissors-grinder ... my stepgrandfather Lester." (129)

The scissors grinder's rise to affluence in the hardware trade is a familiar

American-Jewish story, though its setting in the Deep South, however his-
torically valid, is not so familiar. What makes this story distinctively Ozick's
is the parable she contrives with the marriage of this deracinated narrator
and a boy-man from "Europe." The husband, a Frenchman studying at
Heidelberg, was himself victimized by German brutality in the 1930s, so
badly that his mother committed suicide over it, but neither that experience
nor the subsequent war and Holocaust have enlarged his moral stature—a
stature symbolized by his dwarflike appearance ("tiny and beautiful like a
perfect little mannikin," 127). On the contrary his ("Europe's") narcissism
indicates arrested development as he opens the story fixated on his face in
the mirror: "scrutinizing his molars [he] looks like a nine-year-old-boy"
(126). Not only boy-like, he has become girl-like in his obsession with
having an immaculate appearance—"he shaves under his arms like a
woman and cares for his skin with fragrant white soap . . . [and] now he will
tweeze his eyebrows with me in the same room" (126).

Of course the marriage fails as he abandons his heavy, homely "Jewess" in

favor of someone like himself, a "chattering bird-like exchange teacher from
France" (137). In this gesture Jacques reminds us—rightly, I would say—of
Paul de Man, writing in 1942 that Europe was culturally better off without
its worthless Jews. But the point of the story is that the Jews were "the Sense
of Europe," and their absence reduces "Europe" to the status of a pretty art
object, diminutive and narcissistic and culturally impotent under the charm-
ing surface:

For in spite of his perfection, in spite of his exquisite and museum-like duplica-
tion of some rare, half-sacred, and beautiful semblance of life, the bridegroom
62 Readings

was impotent. He was impotent and effete, as a wax image is without the
possibility (and without will or desire for the possibility) to make life. (136)

In addition to the golem-like character of the bridegroom (a golem also

cannot create life), his vampirish nature gradually becomes manifest, "Europe"
having subsisted all along on its Jewish bloodstream: "Only then I did not
know he was using me up, draining me like a flask of magic serum to keep
him alive and moving." The Holocaust thus destroyed both Europe and its
Jews, the apparent survival of both being a surface appearance only:

we began to decay together. It was a horrible, weird decay. . . . like two

painted corpses which are not allowed to be dead in which the sign, but not
the meaning, of life is perpetrated by a mechanical device compelling the two
hearts to pump, to continue to pretend hollow aliveness. (136)

With this story, the path was open for Ozick's seven-year apprenticeship
to Trust, the huge novel in which this deadly weight of Jewish history plays
off against a contrary impulse toward L'Chaim! and Sacred Beauty. In the
end, I shall argue, the conflicted mind of the artist tilts toward the latter pole
of her thought in that masterwork of her middle career, but "The Sense of
Europe" is a strong reminder of how close a margin obtains. 3

Trust: A Kunstlerroman

Trust went on and on for so many years [seven] that I was able to achieve, during its
composition, wholesale revisions of self, vast turnabouts of personality and character.
(Ltr 1/14/82)

American literature has featured a number of major novels in which the

search for a father forms the essential plot line. Faulkner's Charles Bon
comes to mind, in Absalom, Absalom!, as does Jack Burden in Robert Penn
Warren's All the King's Men, and for that matter the actual gist of the
Horatio Alger stories (as opposed to their rags-to-riches surface theme).
Perhaps it was Thomas Wolfe who stated the idea of father hunger most
compellingly:

The deepest search in life, it seemed to me, the thing that in one way or
another was central to all living was man's search to find a father, not merely
the father of his flesh, not merely the lost father of his youth, but the image of
a strength and wisdom external to his need and superior to his hunger, to
which the belief and power of his own life could be united. 4
Readings 63

Particularly as related to the concluding part of this statement, there have

been many novels, written by men, about fathers and sons; rather few,
written by women, about fathers and daughters. Trust is just such a book,
whose quite remarkable climax fixes upon the way a young woman's "belief
and power" are united with a long-sought father image.

For its originality and evocative power, that climactic scene of Trust is a
piece of great literature, something to justify the preceding five hundred
pages where Ozick pursued her plan "to write a novel about Everything,
about politics, love, finance, etc. etc." (Ltr 1/14/82). The ground theme that
unifies these disparate motifs, including the father hunger, is the venerable
theme of self-discovery. Through most of her twenty-one years, the book's
narrator does not know her own name. Because "her [mother's] aim was to
re-father me" (58), she has borne the name of her mother's first husband
while living under the roof of the second, only to be informed in the year of
her majority that she is "illegitimate issue" because her mother and her
biological father never married. That natural father is the mystery man
whose identity the narrator must uncover before she can know herself. Until
then, she remains a nameless narrator, like Ellison's Invisible Man.

The four sections of Trust are titled after the place-names most relevant
to her self-knowledge. "Part One: America" describes her present sojourn
with mother in the New York area where, while planning post-graduation
travel in Europe, she receives word that her Prodigal Father has demanded
her presence at Duneacres, the abandoned "marine museum" her maternal
grandfather established. "Part Two: Europe" recalls the girl's first encounter
with her father at age ten, when he visited her mother in Paris to extort
money from her. "Part Three: Brighton" describes the mother's vagabond
youth, with major focus on the seaside resort in England where the narrator
was born. "Part Four: Duneacres," picking up the narrative thread sus-
pended since Part One, describes the last fateful encounter of father and
daughter over a two-day period.

Together, the three father figures in Trust represent Ozick's three cultural
matrices—WASP, Jewish, and pagan Greek. William, her mother's first hus-
band, appears to be a model of WASP order and rectitude (it is he who calls
her "illegitimate issue"). Enoch, the second husband, is a Jew whose keenly
original intellect appeals strongly to the narrator. And Gustave Nicholas
Tilbeck is the illicit lover who fathered the narrator, thereby dissolving her
mother's first marriage. Although he appears by conventional judgment to
be utterly disreputable—an irresponsible hedonist, runaway father, vaga-
bond, ne'er-do-well, sponge, and blackmailer—in the end Tilbeck becomes
the role model his daughter has longed for and the unlikely repository of her
"Trust": a man of spontaneous passion, of faunlike immersion in the moment,
64 Readings

of Greek/pagan heresies, suggesting the "spontaneous gods of nature" that

Ozick has associated with E. M. Forster. 5

The heresy that Tilbeck lives by and which in the end engages his daugh-
ter's allegiance is the subject of an essay written by her stepfather, Enoch
Vand: "It's called Pan versus Moses. It's about Moses making the Children
of Israel destroy all the grotto shrines and greenwood places. . . . It's about
how Moses hates Nature" (557). What produces the turn toward Pan, or
more precisely the return to Pan, is the crisis in culture that Ozick portrays
in exceptional breadth and detail. Like Henry James, she juxtaposes Europe
and America, but with a view of the subject that Henry James was spared
because of his death in 1916. It is true that James was incredulous and
heartbroken to have to witness, after a lifetime of treating the "international
theme," the outbreak of World War I; but his agony must seem positively
enviable compared with Ozick's view of the scene following the Holocaust.
In Trust the two characters who represent the before and after of that
unspeakable fragment of history are the narrator's mother and stepfather,
Allegra and Enoch Vand.6 The year the war ends, Allegra brings her young
daughter to Europe in a Jamesian rage to ingest its superior culture while
Enoch Vand is pursuing his job, as a functionary for the State Department,
of listing the names of death camp victims:

She had brought me to see the spires ... and minarets like overturned goblets,
and . . . she promised from this fountain of the world (she called it life, she
called it Europe) all spectacle, dominion, energy, and honor. And all the while
she never smelled death there. . . . But it was deathcamp gas . . . that plagued
his head and . . . swarmed from his nostrils to touch those unshrouded tatooed
carcasses of his, moving in freight cars over the gassed and blighted continent.
(78)

Even though too young, at age ten, to understand the Holocaust, the narra-
tor leans toward her stepfather's rather than mother's view of Europe. On
approaching the German border, she vomits on a German tank and makes a
map of Europe with her vomit (63), and later she repeats the motif with
another map of Europe traced in the stale urine and blood left on her hotel
mattress (116).

An admirer of Europe, Allegra Vand is a compendium of American errors

and follies representing the bankruptcy of her native culture. In politics, art,
religion, and family life, her immense wealth as heiress to a trust fund has
turned her life into a series of pathetic gestures. In her youth, a binge with a
radical political organization led her to write a bad novel, Marianna
Harlow, that became a best-seller in Stalin's Soviet Union. As an older
person, she has been contriving to get her husband appointed
ambassador to a
Readings 65

country with an aristocratic tradition. In the eyes of her daughter, Allegra's

two sexless/childless marriages are the worst thing of all, proving the failure
of love.

The root of corruption is of course her money, which in Jamesian fashion

has stirred predatory instincts among her acquaintances. As a would-be
artist, Allegra is patroness to a poetry magazine called Bushelbasket and its
poet-parasite editor who boasts: "I am an instance of private enterprise. The
Edward McGoverns of the world are luxuries which only the very rich can
afford" (41). And her two husbands—to say nothing of her blackmailing
ex-lover—are deeply conscious of her financial well-being. Even after the di-
vorce, her first husband, William, is willing to stay on as Allegra's trustee
and lawyer: "They were all bought, after all, as Ed McGovern has not been
afraid to express it . . . even the incorruptible William, who had put her
away as his wife, . . . was bought and paid for" (41). So surrounded, the
narrator, wearing a silver and gold graduation dress specially ordained by
her mother, feels rank with vicarious corruption: "There was the sick breath
of money upon all of us; it rushed out dirtily, as from a beggar's foul mouth ...,
full of waste . . . trivial and tedious" (36).

As that sickness metaphor indicates, the failures of the parents infect the
next generation. Thus the narrator is altogether adrift through most of the
text, her keen intelligence mainly devoted to skepticism, distrust, and revul-
sion concerning every aspect of her cultural nurture. Her sole instance of
passion is an ephemeral flaring up of love toward William's son, but this
seems occasioned by fellow-feeling in that he too abjures his parents and
their bankrupt way of life. His fiancee, Stefanie, is a brainless chatterbox
whose interest in him appears motivated by his prospective moneyed future,
so that in the younger generation the cycle of mercenary marriage looks
likely to repeat itself.

Ultimately, the crisis of culture pervading Trust is a religious one, caused

by the contemporary inability of parents or society to provide beliefs to live
by. Trust is trellised throughout with allusion to religious figures—Christ,
Buddha, Moses, Poseidon, Pan, even Allah—and to religious myth and
imagery. And this is where Tilbeck, for all his disreputable ways, proves the
answer to the "quest for consequence" (519) as the various threads of the
novel lead to his concluding apotheosis. In virtually every respect, Gustave
Nicholas Tilbeck is a contrapuntal opposite to the book's perverted ideolo-
gies. Named after Swedish and Russian royalty, such as Allegra Vand pines
after, he chooses to flaunt his descent from a common Swedish sailor who
"died frozen drunk in the streets of Seattle" (457)—a world-wandering
grandfather as free-spirited as Tilbeck himself. His disdain for social status
is matched by his Thoreau-esque disinterest in having money or its symbols.
66 Readings

The narrator's earliest memory of Tilbeck, when as a girl she eavesdropped

on a conversation in the adjoining hotel room (she never saw his face),
focuses on the ancient bicycle, leaning splashed with mud and rain, that
marked his arrival. (Contrapuntally, that same weekend Allegra wrecked
her limousine during a stint of illegal and dangerous driving.)

Tilbeck's blackmailing of Allegra, it turns out, is a matter of amusement

and curiosity for him, and of contemptuous protest, rather than a serious
extortion scheme: he wants to measure just how much her spurious respect-
ability means in her life. He always throws away the hush money she sends
on prostitutes or other frivolities, and when the opportunity arises for real
extortion—he could ruin the prospective ambassador's appointment by
disclosing his own fathering of the love child—it is clear that for this score
of years the whole process has been a bluff she could have called at any time
without retribution. It is noteworthy that Tilbeck was her faithful
companion during the only period of poverty in Allegra's life, while she was
waiting in England for her child to be born and for her trust fund to begin
yielding its opulence. When, after the child's (our narrator's) birth, he
wandered off toward the Mediterranean, he seemed to be testing whether
she would give up all she had and follow him. Instead, despite her
passionate yearning for him, she took her child and dowry back to the
shelter of married respectability, with her first husband staying on as her
trustee and her second one opening up superior access to "Europe."

Concerning this theme, too—of "Europe"—Tilbeck plays a role of

contrapuntal reversal. Whereas Enoch Vand (though born in Chicago)
comes out of the Europe of unspeakable horror, which Allegra never sees,
Tilbeck as a Swede represents a Europe untainted by the Holocaust; and as
a neo-pagan he embodies the freely expressed life force of the Europe of
classical times, before either Christ or Moses imposed their Puritan denials.
Moreover, while Allegra hearkens toward the Old World of palaces and
pageantry, Tilbeck reverses this motif of Jamesian pilgrimage by flying an
American flag on his bicycle in Paris, a reminder of the energy and
adventurousness of that Europe whose denizens journeyed abroad to create
America. Tilbeck, in sum, is a singular example of Europe at its best, made
all the more attractive by the book's otherwise ruinous expanse of cultural
negations.

In Trust those negations cover the most fundamental issues of any cul-
ture: money (as we have seen), sex, and God. Sex—including marriage and
the family—is the first of these issues to appear overtly. In chapter 1, as the
rites of graduation are concluding, a little girl tells the narrator, "My sister's
getting married tomorrow," thereby evoking that greater rite of passage that
normally is indispensable to any young woman's sense of identity: "There
was a shimmer of mass marriages. . . . Envy . . . ought not be accounted
Readings 67

sinful, for sinning is what we do by intent, and envy . . . desires us against

our will" (3). But in this novel of the Eisenhower-Kennedy years, marriage is
virtually moribund. Most of the husband figures—Purse, Enoch, William,
William's son—are either literally or emotionally cuckolded (by Tilbeck, in
each instance), and even apart from this prevalence of sexual mistrust,
marriage is an institution of social-economic convenience rather than a form
for the containment of passion.

The ultimate negations are those that pertain to religion. For the narrator,
a Gentile, Christianity has become meaningless if not actually harmful,
mainly because it is for her a "Romantic Religion," as Leo Baeck described
it.7 Its otherworldliness turns Christian doctrine into gibberish, as seen in
the narrator's response to the Trinity. "I had once actually confused the
Holy Ghost with a new kind of candy bar," she says (59); the Son for her is
"the bitter and loveless Christ" of "redemption, that suspect covenant" (38);
and the Father actually delivered a piece of excrement rather than a Savior
with regard to perhaps the most celebrated of all New Testament verses
(John 3.16): "God so loved the world that he gave his only begotten dung"
(279). For the narrator this world cannot be so wishfully dealt with: "the
irretrievable can never be returned to us; and there is no alternative but to
go on with the facts exactly as they are" (38).

Enoch Vand, a Jew, theologizes this view of Christianity as a version of

the flight reflex. After correcting Jesus' promise of paradise—"The house of
death hath many mansions" (80)—he states the main Jewish objection to it:

Christ was one of Enoch's great villains . . . not merely for his cruelty in
inventing and enforcing a policy of damnation, but more significantly for his
removal of the Kingdom of Heaven to heaven, where, according to Enoch, it
had no business being allowed to remain . . . and ought instead to be brought
down again as rapidly as possible by the concerted aspiration and fraternal
sweat of the immediate generation. (375)

To complete the negation of Christianity there remains only the travesty

of Christian charity expressed by William's new wife, who speaks of "Chris-
tian mercy" and contempt for non-WASPS (the Irish) in almost the same
breath (360-61). And William himself finally reveals beneath his
Presbyterian facade nothing more than old-time Calvinist confusion
between God and Mammon, "his preoccupation with ownership being a
further example of his Calvinist probity" (59).

In the person of Enoch Vand, the Jewish faith is as bankrupt as Chris-

tianity, but at a much higher level of intellectual integrity. What has ruined
modern Judaism is its recent encounter with "Lady Moloch," with "her
diadem of human teeth and ankle-ring of human hair," who has substituted
68 Readings

for Torah Enoch's Book of the Dead, "the black canvas of that ledger held
on that priestly spot [Enoch's heart] like a tablet of the Law" (102). So
Enoch, and apparently the narrator with him, leans toward atheism: "Kein
Gott ist" (136). Even the Holocaust, to him, is just a prototype of "the
magnificent Criminal plan" for the whole species: "Who can revere a uni-
verse which will take that lovely marvel, man (. . . aeons of fish straining
toward the dry, gill into lung, paw into the violinist's and dentist's hand),
and turn him into a carbon speck?" (373). For a time he had held to the
Jewish belief "that whatever you come upon that seems unredeemed exists
for the sake of permitting you the sacred opportunity to redeem it"; but now
he has learned that "God [is] the God of an unredeemed monstrosity," and
"the world isn't merely unredeemed:—worse worse worse, it's
unredeemable" (397, 398). So Enoch is not so far removed from the
Christian flight reflex after all, as the narrator reminds him: '"You're
waiting for the Messiah then,' was all I ventured. He strangely did not deny
it" (191). Until that inconceivable supernatural intervention, there is for
Enoch only a deepening revulsion against the world's monstrous
uncleanness: "'The trouble is the brooms don't work. Nothing works,' he
said. . . . 'There's no possibility of cleaning up. . . . It's the whole world
that's been dipped in muck. . . . You can't clean murder away'" (191).

For the narrator, the question that Enoch's attitude defines is how, or
whether, one's life can be sustained in a world "not only unredeemed but
unredeemable." It is a question that other Jewish writers have spent a
lifetime raising and answering, most notably Saul Bellow—whose "whole
fiction," Ozick says, "is a wrestling with the Angel of Theodicy."8 For
Ozick, unlike the others, the answer comes from pagan antiquity. For the
modern religious sensibility, she suggests, recovery of the L'Chaim! ("To
Life!") principle must come by a Hellenic rather than Hebraic access, for it
was the old Greeks who most deeply immersed their religious imagination
in the natural world, seeing a divine essence in sun and sea, tree and
mountain, and—above all—in the immense creative force of sexuality.

In Trust, that last element of nature is far and away the most crucial,
evoking celibate Christ and taboo-promulgating Moses—both serving a
God who created life without sex—in radical contrast to the pagan worship
of Venus/Astarte. In treating this theme with a power and seriousness that
are rare—perhaps unique—among Jewish writers, Ozick contributes to a
major tradition in American literature. One thinks of John Updike pitting
the last Christian, George Caldwell, against the horde of neopagan hedo-
nists in The Centaur (they celebrate their total victory in Couples}; of Faulk-
ner running his doomed worshipers of Aphrodite to their defeat by a "Chris-
Readings 69

tian" society in The Wild Palms; of Henry Adams musing over the Virgin's
unaccountable victory over Venus in The Education; of Ralph Waldo
Emerson owning the supreme power of Love ("Men and gods have
not outlearned it") in his poem "Eros." Ultimately, they all hearken back
to actual pagan literature in antiquity, of which a chorus in Sophocles'
Antigone is an excellent example. "Where is the equal of Love?" they
chant—

In the farthest corners of the earth, in the midst of the sea,

He is there; he is here
..........
And the grip of his madness
Spares not god or man. . . .
At the side of the great gods
Aphrodite immortal
Works her will upon all. 9

Tilbeck's role as avatar of a pagan fertility god enables him to lift his
daughter from the mire of Christian/Mosaic "uncleanness" that would
otherwise enclose her identity as "bastard" or "illegitimate issue." Her path
to enlightenment is thus the path from the (Mosaic) "clean" to the (Bacchic)
"dirty"; her gain in wisdom is measured by juxtaposing the girl in the white
dress of chapter 1, fearing to get her shoes muddy, and the same girl ecstatic
amid the filth, rust, and decay of Town Island, where the liberating god
himself is last seen, after his death by water, smeared with his own green
vomit. It is dirt, in the end, that fosters life and nourishes it—as the nine
Purses so engagingly illustrate—leaving the "clean" people like William and
Enoch marooned in their sterile and deathsome sanctity.

The importance of this transformation of the religious sensibility—the

most momentous thing in the book—is borne out by the elaborate web of
allusions and images that threads through the text. Scattered across that
web we find fragments suggesting those that T. S. Eliot shored against his
ruins: Yahweh, Buddha, Norse and Greek deities, and scenes from The
Golden Bough fade in and out like the bass line of a melody. Initially, in her
"clean" period, the narrator correlates sexuality with Evil, as Semitic myth
teaches: "presumably those rivalrous siblings [Cain and Abel] were not yet
born while their parents were innocent; that indeed is the point of the story.
The connection between Evil and the birth of the next generation is inti-
mate" (446). From this standpoint, she regards her father, with shame, as
resembling a primitive sea god, reptilian (with "the patient lids of a lizard"),
crudely sexual (lying "among shells with their open cups waiting"), and
cruelly rapacious for his blackmail:
70 Readings

like a terrible Nile-god Gustave Nicholas Tilbeck invaded, vanished, and reap-
peared. Nothing could assure his eclipse but propitiation . . . and my mother,
as enraged as any pagan by a vindictive devil, had to succumb. . . . Money
came to him at last where he lay, and he blinked his torpid jaundiced lids and
was content. (11-12)

Even so, the god's allure also breaks through from the beginning, investing
her gold-and-silver graduation gown, originally a symbol of her mother's
crass opulence, with her father's nature imagery: "the dress she had bought
for me singed my skin with a blaze of gold and silver, the hot gold of my
father's beach and the burning silver of his sea" (23).

Throughout Trust the sea is a crucial motif. For Allegra, the sea's murk
and slime harbor not a sea god but a sea monster who comes, rapacious and
unclean, to invade her shelter—"that Tilbeck who rose from the murk like a
half-forgotten creature of the strait to claim his tribute (I was educated
enough in myth to know that in every tale of this sort it is a daughter who is
taken to feed the slime)" (186). Allegra's father, however—the superrich
founder of her trust fund—had been a compulsive mariner who bequeathed
his seaside estate to establish a marine museum. He meant this place,
Dune-acres on Town Island, to illuminate the religious-scientific truths that
conjoin myth and biology: "I'll give the place to the sea. Every room to be a
mansion for Neptune—sea-nymphs everywhere. . . . Let it be a History of
the Origin of Life" (296); and again:

People are wrong, you know, when they talk of Mother Earth. It's Father
Neptune who takes us in our last days. . . . Blood is salt water, like the sea,
which never left us though we left it. . . . All of mankind's wrung with
drunkard's thirst for the sea. In my view that's the explanation for religion.
(295)

Apart from so honoring the prime matrix of life and myth, the marine
museum becomes a master metaphor for the crisis of culture that undergirds
this novel. Disdained and ignored by Allegra and Enoch (the modern and
secular), closed up and left to decay by William (a Presbyterian Calvinist),
Duneacres while serving as Tilbeck's habitation gradually gathers its force
of psychic retaliation, foretelling a return of the repressed in the offing:
Tilbeck's Dionysian backlash against the contemporary Apollonian. Beneath
the surface realism of style a current of allegory thus becomes manifest:
"Surely my father, constituting present evidence of a buried time, was a sort
of museum," the narrator muses; "he housed matters which had to be dug
after, collected bit by bit, and reconstructed" (56). This imagery, which
adumbrates precisely the central theme and plot line of the whole narrative,
Readings 71

leads to further allegorical meanings whereby, apropos of the reduction of

Duneacres to "fossil museum" status, Tilbeck reveals that his real motive for
blackmail is not money but recognition:

"I see it does you good," the visitor said softly, "to think of me as a fossil."
"I never think of you at all."
"Never?"
"You're not there. You don't exist," she repeated.
"I'm perfectly willing not to exist . . . for someone else . . . as long as I can
manage to exist for you. . . . Well, put it that one wants a little acknowledge-
ment. . . . Of who one is; of what one is." (condensed from 120-22)

Who and what Tilbeck is—a question as central as who and what Gatsby
or Kurtz or Moby Dick is—gradually comes clear by means of allusions and
imagery from pagan antiquity. For his daughter the earliest hint of her
father's true character lies in the book that drops from his rain -soaked
bicycle during the encounter in Paris. Immediately before this moment—one
page earlier—the scene was set by the young girl's religious speculation: "I
was wondering if there's a God. . . . If there is a God, is it the same God for
everywhere? I mean, the same in America as here? . . . I wish there were a
different one for America" (150). With an American flag flying from his
bicycle—"a sort of glorious and healthful omen of America," his daughter
thinks (165)—this avatar of a different god drops his "ENCHIRIDION: OF
WOODLAND FLOWERS" for his daughter's perusal, in which one flower in
particular rivets her attention: "'Jewelweed; Wild Touch-Me-Not,' said the
caption. . . . 'The name Touch-Me-Not almost certainly derives from the
quick, spasmodic action of its ripe seed-pods which instantly erupt at a
touch and spurt their seeds in every direction'" (151-52). Seed-spurting
flowers are not the only clue to Tilbeck's identity. "Ah, you're clammy. You
don't feel clean," her mother says (164); in lifting Tilbeck's book from the
mud the girl makes her first step in the long trek from the clean to the dirty.
Meanwhile, in the background of this encounter with her father, a quartet
of honeymooners engage in open sexual play (they may have been bride
swapping) with a zest that offends Allegra and the landlady but evokes for
the narrator the old amphorae: "They raced across the dewy grass like
Greek runners" (163).

The conflict between Pan and Moses concerning sex reaches maximum
intensity in the scene where William's painful euphemisms for the narrator's
illegitimacy ("the circumstances of my birth—how indecently priggish and
Dickensian that sounds," 274) place Tilbeck's role invitingly in focus, "as
though, while standing solemnly in court, about to be sentenced, I had
caught sight of the god Pan at the window, clutching a bunch of wild
72 Readings

flowers . . . and laughing a long and careless jingle of a laugh, like bicycle
bells" (274). In this context the fall of Pan measures well the failure of the
Western religious imagination. Worshiped in antiquity as the god of sponta-
neous life—of wine, sex, the dance—Pan was appropriated by the Christian
fathers and so transformed that his faun shape became identified with the
Christians' devil. Tilbeck's role is to reverse that epoch-making error. To
Allegra, of course, Tilbeck retains the conventional devil's penumbra, leaving
"an unmistakable cloven hoof eloquently delineated in slime" (153), and his
nickname—Nick—reminds us of one of the devil's common appellations.
But Tilbeck says the name Nicholas represents his "part Greek" ancestry,
which combines with the Norse to open multiple possibilities: "'Nick?' he said.
'Why not Thor? Why not Loki? Why not Apollo? . . . Well, in my time they
didn't call babies Zeus—' 'Or Pan' [I offered]" (474).

As the narrative advances toward its climax, a Dionysian procession of

pagan figures appears to be gathering, leaving all manner of verbal traces:
"the goat-hooves of Venus and Pan" (334); "religious processions for Diony-
sus and Demeter" (343); "the divine . . . Bacchus" (519); "Poseidon . . .
Cupid" (536); "Circe and her pale herd" (450); "Thor at the clavier" (511);
"a god of the Nile" (511); "He [Tilbeck] has an island right off Greece"
(435); "He [Tilbeck] looked like a faun" (473). Tilbeck's domain at
Dune-acres, when finally approached, appears suitable for such an
inhabitant. Ritualistically commanded to appear alone with no guide or
escort, the narrator travels a "road as buried now as Caesar's" (424), then is
rowed to the island by a Charon-like youth with "eye-glasses twinkling light
like semaphores" (426)—though we come to see that this is a reversal of the
classical passage: the world she has left behind, that of Enoch's Moloch and
William's Mammon, is the realm of the dead, while the island before her
harbors, like an Eleusinian mystery, nature's deeply immanent Life Force.

Bespeaking this Life Force, and radiant with its kabbalistic power, is the
tree that guards the way to Tilbeck's island. Gathering vast affinities in its
branches—to the Golden Fleece, the Burning Bush, the Tree of Life and Tree
of Knowledge, the Buddha's bo tree of Enlightenment, the druid's sacred
oak—it signals the beginning of the narrator's apprehension of Sacred
Beauty, a term that her mother had defined during her initiation (with
Tilbeck at Brighton) twenty-one years ago: "If you want to know what I
mean by Sacred I mean anything that's alive, and Beauty is anything that
makes you want to be alive and alive forever, with a sort of shining feeling"
(337). (Allegra's short-lived phase as "an ancient Greek" also centered upon
a "holy looking" tree outside their cottage window: "Most trees are atheists,
but not this one," 337). Which is to say, Sacred Beauty is what makes Enoch
Vand's "unredeemable world" not only redeemable but redeemed. First
Readings 73

described as bushlike, with a "comb of yellow leaf stained through by

sunlight. .., the whole blown head of it coruscating like a transparent great
net of caught fishes"—an image linking the tree to Tilbeck's sea realm—the
tree soon becomes animate with religious meaning:

Lens upon lens burned in the leaves with a luminosity just short of glass and
nearer to vapor; the veins were isinglass ducts swarming with light. . . . A
radiance lifted itself from the shoulders of the tree and hung itself, by some
unknown manner of passage, close against my face, so that, to see, I had to
stare through a tissue of incandescence. . . . The tree was an eye. It observed
me. The tree was a mind. It thought me. . . . It burned for me, it leaped all
whiteness and all light into being, and for me. . . . I was its god, my gaze had
forced its fires, the sanctity of my wonder had quickened its awe. . . . I
appeared like a god or goddess . . . as once the Buddha sat and stared, and,
seeing, showed himself divine; I was nymph, naiad, sprite, goddess; I had gifts,
powers. . . . (424-25)

Although the vision collapses—"Then it was snuffed. The light went out
of it. The sun slid down and away" (425)—her passage to Tilbeck's island
brings fresh epiphanies through the agency of some surprising companions.
Her boatman, "a sort of Norse centaur, the top half human, the lower half
presumably the parts of a boat" (426-27), is one of seven siblings in the
Purse family, whom Tilbeck has invited to stay at Duneacres a few days
while they wait for their plane flight to Pakistan. There, Purse senior will dig
for "humanoid bones" on a Ford Foundation grant; in the interim Tilbeck's
"fossil museum" should satisfy both his professional interest and a serious
need to save money.

The nine Purses contribute three elements to the novel's climax: they
emanate a Dickens-cum-Marx Brothers comic flair; they function as
ancillaries to the initiation rites on Town Island; and they step into the role
of ambassadors from America that Enoch and Allegra fail to fulfill. In a
novel replete with Jamesian echoes—it even quotes verbatim the opening
sentence of The Portrait of a Lady (451)—this portrayal of America's real
representatives becomes in itself an initiation motif for the narrator, who
was born in Europe and has known only Allegra's wealth-insulated
leisure-class America. Like Tilbeck, the Purses constitute a counterpoint to
the book's opening cultural negations.

As a compendium of both the strengths and petty vices of Middle Amer-

ica, the Purse family (from New Rochelle, New York—Ozick's hometown)
exhibits a checklist of representative American traits.. Adventurous (the
whole family is moving to Pakistan), resourceful (they live mainly by their
wits), high-spirited (they are inveterate game players), mildly acquisitive (as
74 Readings

befits their name), and pragmatic (they profess no ideology), the Purses
realize the middle-class ideal of self-improvement through the "diffusion of
competence" that Eric Hoffer thought the most distinctive characteristic of
American culture. The mother, for example, is a superb auto mechanic, and
even the small children are studying Urdu. Unlike Allegra and Enoch, they
will make fine ambassadors.

Amplifying their quintessence of Americanism are the names of the Purse

children, four of which refer to the great transcendentalist writers —Manny,
Sonny, Throw, and Al being Whitman, Emerson, Thoreau, and Bronson
Alcott respectively. The only daughter is Harriet Beecher Stowe Purse, and
the other two boys are named after exceptionally admirable religious leaders—
Dee and Foxy being Mohandas K. Gandhi and George Fox Purse. Of these
names, Emerson's appears most significant, partly because it turns up else -
where in the novel (e.g., 319), but mostly because it clarifies the religious
meaning of this episode. 10 In the end it is the Purse family that certifies what
the narrator had envisioned as a young girl, "a different God for America."

Nominally the Purses are Quakers, or Friends—which is to say, members of

a peaceable sect unstained by Christendom's history of bloody violence and
hypocrisy—but in practice they radiate a pagan mentality, savoring each
moment with passionate vitality. Theirs is the stance Emerson calls for in his
essay "Circles": "In nature every moment is new; the past is always swal -
lowed and forgotten; the coming only is sacred. Nothing is secure but life,
transition, the energizing spirit." 11 And their God is actually the "spontaneous
gods of nature" that Ozick associated with E. M. Forster but which also
evoke the Emerson of "Experience": "Nature, as we know her, is no saint... .
She comes eating and drinking and sinning. . . . We must set up the strong
present tense against all the rumors of wrath, past or to come" (263). Even the
Quaker Inner Light suggests Emersonian rather than orthodox theology:
"Jesus Christ belonged to the true race of prophets," Emerson said in his
notorious "Divinity School Address"; "He saw that God incarnates himself in
man, and evermore goes forth anew to take possession of his World" (105).
Certainly the Purses are doing their best to emulate this mod el.

So the Purses become part of the Dionysian procession that moves into
Tilbeck's magic island, with Mrs. Purse taking the role of Circe, and her
youngest cherub—who is usually nude and hyperactive to an airborne
degree—serving as a Cupid surrogate. Circe's fabled powers of transforma-
tion are in this instance limited to the junk that litters the island (she gets
castaway engines running); her nightly trysts with Tilbeck signify her larger
importance as a sort of love goddess whose previous adventures ma y well
have bred illegitimate issue: "Was he really Purse's son, the splendid savage
child . . .? Or had Circe coupled with a hero while Purse lay bound in the
Readings 75

snores of an aging athlete?" (481). At the same time she evokes other pastoral/
sexual nuances, including "Eve in Paradise on the world's sixth day, sur-
rounded by the forms of nature" (441); Prospero, Miranda, and Caliban
(479); and those two famed Latin poets of love, "Ovum and Virgin" (494).
With the Purses on board, the scene is almost set for the grand rite toward
which the whole narrative has been heading. There remains only one cru-
cially missing actor, or actress, that being a young woman to enact and
celebrate the mystery to which the narrator will become witness-initiate.
That role is filled when the last two visitors arrive at the island, William's
son and his fiancee, Stefanie, who expect to find a private retreat for
pre-nuptial lovemaking.

Its cast now complete, this final epiphany scatters allusions like leaves
from a Golden Bough. To begin, this ground—this sacred grove—was con-
secrated to Love years ago when an Armenian youth killed himself here
rather than give up his beloved; that was why it became a "fossil museum,"
closed to the public and given over to the wild growth of nature. Now the
tomb of Allegra's parents has come to resemble a scene from ancient Attica,
featuring "in the center of a sort of grove an astonishing stone ruin, broken
like a Greek shrine" (452). Here, as the narrator arrives, ritual games are in
progress exempt from conventional rules and standards: Purse and Tilbeck
are playing tennis without court lines or net. Later, the children would
appoint Stefanie their "mistress of games."

Appropriately, the narrator recognizes which of the two men is her father
through his Dionysian quality. Tilbeck's first words on behalf of his visitor
are "Show her the wine cellar" (452), which she correctly regards as a sort
of password: "At once I knew him. Tilbeck was the one who needed
wine" (453). His first question of his daughter is priestly rather than
fatherly— "You religious?" (454). To this crucial question Ozick brings a
wide range of possibilities significantly exclusive of the Judeo-Christian
tradition. The chief reference to Christianity in these pages is a joke:
Tilbeck's "Last Supper"—he calls it that because his presence makes
thirteen at the table (499)—is correctly designated; however, it prefigures
not crucifixion but sexual consummation preceding his death by water.
Further belittling the faith are the twelve chairs for his guests, each chair
topped by the carved head of a reprobate Christian king. Those same
countenances, recurring on the mansion walls, indicate why Tilbeck has
so cheerfully burned most of the furnishings: "The kings matched the
kings on the chairs under the trees. Grotesque noses, awkward rough little
snarls, wicked wicked foreheads leering with the minute grain of the
crafty wood.... 'See?' he said.... 'That whole row up there? . . . Those are
the Six Philips of France. . . . On the other side . . . those are the Five
Philips of Spain. Murderous, hah?'" (455).
 76 Readings

Buddhism, by contrast, appears to great advantage, as Tilbeck evokes

the Buddha's smile (466), the Buddhist "Man without Ego" ideal (468), and
the Buddha's teaching of desirelessness: "Not wanting anything is what
makes me perfectly free.... There's not a thing in the wide world I want. Or
ever wanted" (468). Allegra later confirms through her mockery this facet of
Tilbeck's role: "The Man of No Desires. I know the whole thing. . . . Just
like the Buddha after nirvana. A holy man" (548-49). And the pagan ambi-
ence continues to thicken. When Nick/Zeus/Pan licks his daughter's blood
from a cut finger, emanating "the floweriness of wine in his shoulder," she
becomes half initiate, then yields to the flight reflex: "Strange and new, I
breathed the minotaur. Then ran . . . to the panicked kings, to the table
dense with civilization, ran, ran from the faun" (474). But she already
knows there is no going back to innocence: "Following slowly up out of the
beach, a small laughter came from the beautiful man" (475).

Philosophically, the ideology that undergirds this interlude appears to

derive from the teachings of Gnosticism, that longstanding rival of Chris-
tianity which fostered the Catharist Court of Love in the twelfth century. Like
Denis de Rougemont in Love in the Western World (and like his disciple John
Updike in Couples and Marry Me), Ozick postulates a redeeming knowledge
at the heart of this episode—a knowledge attainable only through sexual
consummation. In this instance, the narrator's undeveloped state—young,
virginal, small-breasted—imposes the need for vicarious learning: she will be
witness to the rite of love, not participant. Yet her knowledge is sure and
transforming, as her affinity with the celebrants grows stronger: "I was initi-
ate. I knew it. I knew the taste of complicity. Nick had put it on my tongue
like a pellet—complicity, amazing first-hand knowledge of the private thing"
(520). There follows the sense, hitherto unimaginable in her "hollow man"
condition, of deep change pending: "knowledge is the only real event in the
world, and something had happened. . . . In me the private thing turned:
knowledge turned, love turned, what my mother knew I knew" (521). Again,
in Gnostic/Catharist fashion, the knowledge in question is ineffably sensual:

Taste; no word. Yet there was no memory of a physical flavor. . . . It is never

sensuality that remains (I know now and glimpsed then), but the idea of
sensuality.... Feeling cannot be stored.... The nerve gives only the now, and
is improvident. (520)

Brought to this level of enlightenment, the narrator is fully prepared at

last for transcendence, as the Purses are not; unspiritual,
conventional-minded sluggards, they snore through the final epiphany. On
the brink of transcendence, the narrator enters the lovers' circle:
Readings 77

The lovers had touched. The lovers had touched at last. Their skins had
touched; the friction had begun; the Purses were expunged: something had
happened. Love. The private worm; the same. What my mother knew I knew.
—I loved my father.
And the union of the lovers was about to be. (526)

The key phrase here is "I loved my father." Her mother's purpose from
the beginning had been "to re-father me" (58) to William or Enoch, and that
purpose had struck away the girl's identity, bringing on her Hamlet-like
mood of world-weariness. Without roots, money, career, respectability, or
even a family circle, Tilbeck seems eminently suitable for de-fathering. What
redeems him as father is his life's proof that all the above desiderata are
obstacles to his daughter's freedom and subversive of her search for
self-knowledge. Initially, the encounter between father and daughter
appears to magnify her identity problem. As though being illegitimate issue
were not enough, her father's youthful appearance engenders still deeper
humiliation:

There was still something unrecounted about the stink of my first cell.
Dejection seized me. Shame heated my legs. Not even William, sordid
puritan, had had the courage of this sordidness. I viewed my father. He might
have been a decade younger than my mother. . . . Then and there I had to
swallow what I was: the merest whim. . . . It surpasses what is decently
normal. A boy of seventeen had made me. (453-54)

The narrator's movement from this depth of shame to unconditional love of

father thus marks a transformation that in the end makes possible her own
self-acceptance. Tilbeck's Catharist practice of free sexuality, performed so
she might know she "had witnessed the very style of my own creation"
(531), wipes away every trace of taboo and stigma.

It is important that what our narrator witnesses is free sexuality, not "free
love." Ozick underscores this distinction in the setting of the scene (the
floor), the dialogue, and the action. Throughout their dalliance the lovers
mock each other verbally—she calling him "Cockroach" and suggesting
that he starch his soft member—and, most important, the narrator notes
that "From the beginning they never kissed" (53). Moreover, the very style
of her creation, she observes, is doglike: at the last moment, "brutally, and
before she can sprawl, he flips her over. And penetrates. A noise of pain
creaks from her . . ." (530). Which is to say, the distinctly human tenderness
of face-to-face sex has been abjured in favor of more primitive, more purely
erotic conjunction: Zeus choosing the form of a swan or bull for his fleshly
encounter. (Zeus—as commander of the thunderbolt—-is also evoked here
by the background storm's thunder and lightning.)
78 Readings

From this nexus of nymph and demigod we may infer three crucial insights,
commonly hidden behind a veil of sentimentality: (1) that sexuality, the Life
Force, emanates with irrepressible power from the uncivilized, prehuman
depths of the human psyche; (2) that in the male lover of any age the sexual
being—the faun—is always a seventeen-year-old boy; and (3) that such
sexual conjunction as is described here is not sordid or "dirty" but expres -
sive of Sacred Beauty. The narrator's perfect agreement with these princi -
ples, and her newfound contentment with her status as "illegitimate issue,"
are shown in her subsequent taunting of William's son, who is determined
to marry Stefanie despite her infidelity, "so as not to embarrass the families"
(533). "'I,' I said, 'am issue of the floor. You,' I said, 'are issue of the nuptial
couch'" (534). Plainly, she flaunts the richer heritage.

There remains the sine qua non of style, in this book a momentous
presence. "[In Trust] I wanted to include a large range of language: a kind of
lyric breadth and breath," the author has stated (Ltr 1/14/82), and in her
preface to Bloodshed she says that Trust "was conceived in a style both
'mandarin' and 'lapidary,' every paragraph a poem" (BL 4). Some inkling of
such a style may be evident in certain passages I have cited, such as the
"enchanted tree" episode, but no critical analysis can do justice to this
feature of her six-hundred-page novel. In this limited space, I shall rest the
case on two excerpts, choosing one for its lyric effect and the other for its
masterly organization. The lyrical excerpt, describing the union of lovers, is
a sunburst of prose poetry reminiscent of D. H. Lawrence for its
quasi-mystical mood and of James Joyce for its fusion of graphic precision
with rhythmic cunning. In the gradual shortening of her phrases we may
detect a resemblance to the quickening, panting rhythm of foreplay:

a bridge of strength grows from the root of her neck to her calves, her buttocks
strain into squares, she seems to hang upward from the cord of her side,... his
touch which has risen with her, turned and fallen with her, clings for its life to
the cliff, . . . her voice runs with a moist sluggishness, the surfaces of her eyes
are leathery as callouses, he has tripped some strand linked to other strands,
some voluptuary wire in her brain tightens, he has caught the drawstring of
her frame, her thighs knot and shift, the wicks of her nipples tighten . . . her
upper lip is hoisted, her nostrils knead themselves. . . . (528)

The other passage I have selected is the opening sentence of the novel,
evocative of Henry James for its craftsmanship in making design subserve
meaning:

After the exercises I stood in the muddy field (it had rained at dawn) and felt
the dark wool of my gown lap up the heat and din of noon, and at that instant,
Readings 79

while the graduates ran with cries toward asterisks of waiting parents and the
sun hung like an animal's tongue from a sickened blue maw, I heard the last
stray call of a bugle—single, lost, unconnected—and in one moment I grew
suddenly old.

While the sentence strikes us at once for its complex trelliswork—the paral-
lelisms branching into subordinate particles—its full artistry becomes clear
only on second reading of the novel, which reveals that we are looking at a
thick cluster of the book's most important motifs and issues. The
"exercises," for example, though a major rite of passage to the other
graduates who "ran with cries toward . . . waiting parents," produce only a
Hamlet-like melancholy in the narrator, whose own "graduation" will
require a rite of passage with her own "waiting parent" some five hundred
pages hence. The rain and "muddy field," in turn, indicate the narrator's
transition from "clean" to "dirty" which that rite of passage will entail.
Whereas here in chapter 1 she "took off my white shoes to save them from
the mud," the epiphany on Town Island is associated with rusted junk, mud,
and (after Tilbeck's drowning) slimy green vomit. The fulcrum of that
shift from Moses to Pan, the book's climactic sexual encounter, is presaged
in the unconsciously sexual phrase, "[I] felt the dark wool of my gown lap
up the heat and din of the sun," while her conscious mind regards the sun
and sky with a sick soul's revulsion ("the sun hung like an animal's tongue
from a sickened blue maw"). The "last stray call of a bugle—single, lost,
unconnected" represents her own alienated condition, from which—together
with its resulting condition of growing "suddenly old"—Tilbeck would
ultimately rescue her, with his Pan-like spirit of perpetual youth and his gift
of intimate connections.

In its cumulative effect, the "mandarin" and "lapidary" style of Trust

points up a final meaning. Cynthia Ozick, who wrote an MA thesis entitled
"Parable in the Later Novels of Henry James," has here framed her own
parable: Trust, which began in the initiation mode of What Maisie Knew,
ends in a parable of the artist. Like Melville's "Bartleby the Scrivener" (a
"most cherished" favorite of Ozick's, Ltr 1/14/82), Trust forms its analogies
around the figure of an artist-rebel; unlike Bartleby, the narrator of Trust
escapes her sick soul condition at last through her transfiguring experience
of Sacred Beauty. This liberation, however, is conditioned by the narrator's
ongoing namelessness, which implies a final inability to resolve the artist's
conflicted identity. In effect, Trust clarifies the issue by eliminating two of
the cultural options portrayed in the narrator's four parent figures. In Ozick's
future fiction, we shall not see Allegra's Europhilic aesthetics reappear as a
serious option, nor will America's dominant Christian culture ever magnify
80 Readings

its allure beyond William's cold and hypocritical paradigm. The remaining
two father figures, however—pagan and Jewish—will continue their battle
for possession of the artist's soul from The Pagan Rabbi and Bloodshed
through The Messiah of Stockholm and The Shawl. As Trust ends, Tilbeck's
victory is genuine but temporary, as Enoch Vand prepares himself for re-
newed combat by total immersion in Orthodox Judaism.

Tilbeck's final metamorphosis, after his death, greatly enhances the para-
ble. "A male Muse he was. Nick" (539), says the narrator, overriding the
objection that "the Muse is a woman." In "Women and Creativity: The
Demise of the Dancing Dog," Ozick defines what a Muse, of either gender,
does. As against the "sentimentalists" who "believe in money, in position, in
a marriage bell"—incidentally a good description of Allegra Vand—the
Muse says "'Partake,' it says, 'live,'" reminding us "that the earth lies under
all." In its deployment of this Kunstlerroman ending, Trust resolves its
deepest theme, that search for self-knowledge or identity which originated
in the book's opening pages. Clearly the male Muse, though biologically
unprogenitive (Stefanie was using contraceptives), has dropped germinous
seeds into his daughter's soul, thereby transforming her bridal hunger of
chapter 1 into an easy jest in the novel's closing paragraph: "What I was and
what I did during that period I will not tell; I went to weddings."

Even Nick's exposure as a "tawdry Muse," with dyed hair and a laurel of
vomit ("tender putrid greenish flowers," 545), only enhances the parable. "It
is no light thing to have intercourse with the Muse," the initiate says of her
newly insatiate thirst for beauty; "The planet's sweetmeats fail after a nibble
at vatic bread" (539). But the tawdry Muse teaches his offspring to spurn
any celestial city; grubby, earthbound Town Island is the soil from which
will spring art's Sacred Beauty. From this standpoint the bridal hunger of
chapter 1 may be seen, in hindsight, as the artist's passion for the world's
body:

I looked out at them with envy in the marrow, because I was deprived of that
seductive bridegroom, . . . of his shining hair and the luster of his promised
mouth. . . . I did not wish to envy them,. . . but greed for the world had bitten
me. I longed to believe, like these black-gowned brides, in pleasure, in splen-
dor, in luck; in genius, in the future, most of all in some impermeable lacquer
[i.e., art] to enamel an endless youth. (3)

That final phrase, "to enamel an endless youth," is what art can promise
in its Keatsian mode: forever wilt thou love and she be fair. But for Tilbeck,
the enamel comes at a high cost. By dyeing his hair, this apostle of Buddhist
desirelessness does disclose one desire after all, to preserve his youth; and
nature answers his need with the only preservative it has, an early death.
Readings 81

The Orphic ambience of his death at sea suggests an immolation to Sacred

Beauty, perhaps a willing surrender to the nature gods he serves. For now, to
Ozick's narrator, Tilbeck's example suffices. But the moral vacancy of those
pagan gods, tracing back to rambunctious Olympic fable, is reflected in
Tilbeck's stunted ethical development: he has achieved "eternal youth" in
the sense of immaturity of character as well as in beauty worship. Tilbeck's
irresponsibility, not his mortality, would provoke the recoil of the Hebrew
conscience in Ozick's later writings: Even so, the Tilbeck phase is a neces-
sary period in the growth of the artist, who will be forever changed by that
taste of the world's beauty.

At the end of Trust, the male Muse imparts one last gift to his neophyte,
that being his own example of the virtue cited in the book's title. "The title
'Trust' was of course ironic, and signified distrust in every cranny," Ozick
has said (Ltr 1/14/82). This distrust notably extends to the novel's fake artist
figures: Edward McMahon, the poet-parasite; Eugenia Karp, the punster;
Allegra Vand, authoress lionized in the Soviet Union. The novel's epigraph,
however, poses the choice between "a mammoth trust fund" and "a minus-
cule fund of trust," and in leaving her mother's domain for her father's, the
narrator has chosen the latter legacy. However minuscule the fund, self-trust
is perhaps more necessary for the artist than for any other calling. "To
believe in your own thought, to believe that what is true for you in your
private heart is true for all men,—that is genius," said Ralph Waldo Emer-
son (a presence in Trust) in "Self-Reliance"; and again, "In self-trust all the
virtues are comprehended," he declared in "The American Scholar" (147,
74). To the narrator of Trust, these precepts bear significant correspon-
dences. To think and feel independently, seeking Sacred Beauty; to follow
new gods, pursuing Gnostic knowledge; to believe in her calling, emulating
the male Muse's "cult in himself. . . . The cult of art . . . the cult of
experience" (325)—these are the salient features, in the end, of Cynthia
Ozick's portrait of the artist as a young woman.

Three Story Books: From Pan to Moses

A fugue of antagonisms. One cannot even be sure of Agnon's definitive passion, whether he
leans finally to the side of lyrical sorcery or of Torah.
"Agnon's Antagonisms"

The Pagan Rabbi and Other Stones (1971)

Obviously a collection of short stories can not be expected to display the
coherence or unified focus that we expect to find in a novel. 12 In her three
82 Readings

collections Cynthia Ozick gathers a rather disparate group of writings,

ranging from brief sketches to novella-length narratives, in which her literary
modes vary from conventional realism to parable and fantasy. To a
surprising degree she imposes a web of coherence upon the stories, nonethe-
less, through her continuous process of "reinvigorating" (a favorite word in
her literary criticism) her central themes and obsessions. By imagining radi-
cally new sets of characters and dramatic situations, and employing fresh
ways of approaching her material—especially in the comic/ironic mode—
she extends and deepens her ground themes rather than merely repeat them
from one book to another.

The themes that predominate in her three story collections are familiar to
readers of Trust, but their interaction now assumes an altogether different
profile. The Pan-versus-Moses theme continues to sustain a basso continuo
presence in the time frame that stretches from "The Pagan Rabbi" (1966)
through the Puttermesser-Xanthippe stories of Levitation (1982), but this
central theme of Trust gradually loses ground to two themes that were
subordinate in the novel: problems of the artist, particularly the Jewish or
female artist; and the exigencies of Jewish identity. This latter theme, rele-
gated to Enoch in Trust, eventually emerges as the transcendent issue of the
story collections, evoking the author's deepest emotional and artistic power.

Illustrating the new balance among her triad of ground themes is a brief
quantification: of the seven stories in The Pagan Rabbi, only two make the
Pan/Moses dichotomy their central theme, while two others touch on the
issue. By comparison, five of the tales focus upon the figure of the artist,
and six of the seven amplify the theme of Jewish identity, leaving only "The
Dock-Witch" to carry forward the Gentile cultural ambience of Trust.

Although the pantheistic element thus seems downgraded from its para-
mount status in Trust, it still rated enough importance to justify making
"The Pagan Rabbi" the title story for the whole volume. In this tale the Pan/
Moses conflict attains a new intensity, in part because the story is a more
concentrated form than the novel, but equally because the adversarial ideol-
ogies are more clearly drawn: not Tilbeck versus the general modern mal-
aise, but Pan versus orthodox Judaism. Moreover, the conflict now occurs
within a single individual, the learned rabbi whose suicide occasions the
story.

As in Trust, a vital symbol in "The Pagan Rabbi" is the tree that functions
as both totem (for Hellenic nature worship) and taboo (for Hebraic forbid-
den knowledge). Sex and death, the two modes of forbidden knowledge
associated with the Semitic myth of the Fall, do in fact pertain to the rabbi's
tree: sex, when he couples with the tree's dryad; and death, when he hangs
himself from its branches. Yet it is Pan who prevails over Moses in this
Readings 83

encounter. Death here becomes (as Walt Whitman called it) a promotion
rather than a punishment in the light of the rabbi's pantheistic insight: "The
molecules dance inside all forms, and within the molecules dance the atoms,
and within the atoms dance still profounder sources of divine vitality. There
is nothing that is Dead" (20). From this Spinozan heresy—Spinoza is cited
by name on page 32—arise two intolerable consequences for traditional
Judaism. First, the Second Commandment is nullified by the immersion of
the Creator in his creation: "Holy life subsists even in the stone, even in the
bones of dead dogs and dead men. Hence in God's fecundating Creation
there is no possibility of Idolatry" (21). And second, as a final outrage against
the Hebraic ethos, the concept of holiness, of being separate from the un-
clean, becomes meaningless. Even more than Town Island in Trust, the
setting of "The Pagan Rabbi" is thus befouled with corruption, so that the
rabbi's ecstatic sexual union occurs in an environment of "wind-lifted farts"
and "civic excrement" created by the city's sewage polluting the nearby
seashore (33, 37). Even so, the vitality of Nature overrides the authority of
Torah. When the Law undertakes direct competition with the senses, claim-
ing to sound "more beautiful than the crickets," to smell "more radiant than
the moss," to taste better than clear water (36), the rabbi on the instant
chooses to join his dryad-lover, hanging himself from the tree with his
prayer shawl.

Because the narrator of "The Dock-Witch" is a Gentile, neither the Jewish

horror of idolatry nor the ideal of holiness stands in opposition to his
pantheistic enticement. (The Gentile is sufficiently Holocaust-haunted, how-
ever, to notice the cleansing of a German ship, which "smelled of some
queer unfamiliar disinfectant, as though it were being desperately scoured
into a state of sanitation," 139). So the protagonist, originally a midwestern
churchgoer (131), yields immediately and guiltlessly to the impulse that
brought him to New York to live within sight of the East River. Here the
pagan goddess of Nature is connected, like Tilbeck in Trust, with the sea
and pagan Norsemen (her final metamorphosis puts her on the prow of a
Viking ship), as well as with the original Canaanite seagoers, the Phoeni-
cians whose tongue she speaks. Between seeing off a shipload of Greeks to
their homeland and another vessel packed with Orthodox Jews to theirs, the
Dock-Witch so affects the narrator's view of nature that even a pair of
penguin-sized rats on the dock appear "sacerdotal" to him, "like a pair of
priests late for divine service" (147). And as with Tilbeck and the Pagan
Rabbi, the speaker's immersion in nature is consummated in a sexual union
of insatiable magnitude—"she made me a galley slave, my oar was a log
flung into the sea of her" (156). The parable ends, like Keats's "La Belle
Dame Sans Merci," with the narrator immersed in the grief of abandonment.
84 Readings

The hunger for the world's beauty that underlies these extraordinary
sexual encounters relates the tales of Pan worship to both the theme of
Jewish identity and that of the portrait of the artist. An engaging example of
all three themes working in concert is "The Butterfly and the Traffic Light,"
a sketch that shows the artist toying creatively with her material. Here the
thematic triad begins to form when a character named Fishbein talks with a
young woman about the "insistent sense of recognition" that can attach to
so mundane a thing as a street in their small city:

Big Road was different by day and by night, weekday and weekend. Daylight,
sunlight, and even rainlight gave everything its shadow, winter and summer,
so that every person and every object had its Doppelganger, persistent and
hopeless. There was a kind of doubleness that clung to the street, as though
one remembered having seen this and this and this before. (213)

To see this doubleness is the beginning of metaphor, so that an unneeded

traffic light over Big Road becomes, for the young woman, "some sort of
religious icon with a red eye and a green eye" (214), and this in turn becomes
a new version of the Hellenism/Hebraism dichotomy. It is Fishbein who
argues in favor of plural gods and Isabel who maintains the Orthodox
Jewish position (215):

"What kind of religion would it be which had only one version of its deity—a
whole row of identical icons in every city?"
She considered rapidly. "An advanced religion. I mean a monotheistic one."
"And what makes you certain that monotheism is 'advanced'? On the con-
trary, little dear! . . . The Greeks and Romans had a god for every personality,
the way the Church has a saint for every mood. Savages, Hindus, and Roman
Catholics understand all that. It's only the Jews and their imitators who insist
on a rigid Unitarian God. . . . A little breadth of vision, you see, a little
imagination, a little flexibility, I mean—there ought to be room for Zeus and
God under one roof. . . . That's why traffic lights won't do for icons! They
haven't been conceived in a pluralistic spirit, they're all exactly alike.

Two other metaphors give this sketch a behind-the-scenes candor, the

impression of the author's mind disclosing the way it works. One is the
butterfly of the title, a metaphor for the death-bound beauty of actual life.
It is a prettier creature but less significant than the caterpillar (art in the
process of creation): "The caterpillar is uglier, but in him we can regard the
better joy of becoming" (217). The other metaphor is that of the immortal
city, like Jerusalem, Baghdad, or Athens—mythologized by millennia beyond
any sense of utility. America, in this sense, has no cities; and that, we may
surmise, is why Town Island is the crucial setting in Trust: it was hopefully
Readings 85

christened Dorp Island a mere three hundred years ago, like Gatsby's Man-
hattan, by Dutch sailors.

Whereas "The Butterfly and the Traffic Light" creates a positive impres-
sion of artistic creativity, two other sketches of the artist render a feminist
protest in one instance and a nightmare vision of failure in the other. The
feminist satire is "Virility," an attack against male supremacy in art that
correlates largely with Ozick's ridicule of the Testicular Theory of Litera-
ture in her essay "Women and Creativity: The Demise of the Dancing Dog."
So manly has the poet Edmund Gate become, after his meteoric rise to
success in "Virility," that his very shape now resembles a "giant lingam"
(244), and his reviewers search for appropriate imagery to describe his
verses: "The Masculine Principle personified," "Robust, lusty, male," "Sem-
inal and hard." When it turns out that an elderly aunt actually wrote the
poems, the praises turn to abuse ("Thin feminine art," "A spinster's
one-dimensional vision," 266), and Edmund Gate does penance for his
impersonation by faking his death at age twenty-six and spending his
remaining half century going in drag.13

"Virility" was written with a classic novella about a failed artist in Ozick's
mind. Like the employer-narrator in "Bartleby the Scrivener," Ozick's
narrator is much put-upon by his lowly proofreader, who usurps, in turn, the
employer's name (Edmund), his home (the attic becomes Gate's study), his
sister (by whom Gate fathers illicit offspring), and finally his personality
(the editor haplessly mimics Gate's alliteration of the "p" sound, like
Bar-tleby's employer mimicking "I would prefer not to"). Just as Bartleby's
role as a burnt-put writer is reflected in his dogged perfectionism at the
mechanics of longhand copying ("he seemed to gorge himself on my
documents . . . [writing] on silently, palely, mechanically"), so Gate's
ambition as a poet is sublimated into unparalleled mechanical skill on the
typewriter, which "was so consistent, so reliable, so intelligible, so without
stutter or modest hesitation—it made me sigh. He was deeply deadly
purposeful" (242). And Bartleby's reputed sojourn in the Dead Letter
Office—the final repository of failed artwork—is matched by the motif of
the dead aunt's letters, which sustain Gate's spurious role as the poet of
Virility for three years after Aunt Tivka's death.

If such artistic fraudulence is contemptible, there is one thing even worse:

having talent without the strength of character to realize it. In "The
Doctor's Wife," Doctor Silver's failure to realize his talent resembles that of
Hemingway's persona in "The Snows of Kilimanjaro":

he thought how imperceptibly, how inexorably, temporary accommodation

becomes permanence, and one by one he counted his omissions, his coward-
86 Readings

ices, each of which had fixed him like an invisible cement. . . . At twenty he
had endured the stunned emotion of one who senses that he has been singled
out for aspiration, for beauty, for awe, for some particularity not yet dis-
closed. . . . At forty he was still without a history. (187-88)

Apart from Hemingway and the later Henry James who feared a wasted
life ("The Beast in the Jungle" is especially relevant here), one other writer—
an Ozick favorite—makes a curiously negative contribution to "The
Doctor's Wife." The success of Anton Chekhov, another
bachelor-doctor-artist like Doctor Silver, stands as a reproach to the latter's
arrested development while at the same time representing something like
Harold Bloom's "Anxiety of Influence" thesis. In fact, the story is a
perfectly Chekhovian paradigm of waste and futility, vividly illustrating the
banality of marriage (a theme carried over from Trust), the illusiveness of
happiness, and the human incapacity to achieve or even formulate a
meaningful purpose in life. The Chekhovian tone is especially strong
concerning this last motif: "his life now was only a temporary
accommodation, he was young, he was preparing for the future, he would
beget progeny, he would discover a useful medical instrument, he would
succor the oppressed,... he would be saved" (182-83).

Although his sympathy informs his practice in saintly proportions, the

Doctor's spiritual ministrations avail nothing, especially regarding the
hostilities he tries to anneal. His patients—poor Negroes and Italians whose
nonpayment leaves him poor also—display unrelenting ethnic hatred in his
waiting room; his sisters radiate contempt toward their husbands, who in
turn loathe each other; and his aged father, a dependent now living in the
Doctor's apartment, seethes with "incessant fury." Nor can he help his
brother-in-law, who presses questions with a manic-depressive's urgency:
"How do you get to be happy?" "Tell me what I'm alive for" (185). The
black mood engendered by his quandary leads to the central conflict of the
tale, between actual life and art, reality and fantasy. Given the circum-
stances, reality faces an unequal battle: "[To himself] he confessed . . . that
the human race—husbands, wives, children—was a sink, a drainpipe, a
sewer, that reconciliation was impossible, that his waiting room would
remain divided, that his brothers-in-law would remain divided, that his
sisters were no more than ovum-bearing animals born to enact the cosmic
will, that he himself was sterile" (189).

The counterpoint—"that all the same it was possible to be happy" (189)—

depends solely on the efficacy of art, defined here in connection with the
photograph of a woman pictured with Chekhov around the year 1890.
"Too late"—the Doctor is now fifty—"he made up his mind to marry, but
Readings 87

fell in love . . . with a picture" (188). By now, in actual life, "this eternally
dimpling girl" has become "a withered old woman . . . or, more likely, dead,
dead, dead!" (189), but in Keatsian fashion he chooses this image of eternal
youth and beauty over the older woman his sister tries to match him with—
"a sunset, it was the last hour before her night" (203). Implicit in this scene
is Ozick's own ambiguity about the issues: though resolutely "Judaic" in her
aim to correlate art with actual life, she has also expressed a deep ongoing
infatuation with photography for its power to preserve the passing moment
from decay. In the end, because Doctor Silver has not lived, he preserves not
a scrap of his life in art, nor does he even manage to define what mode of art
might suit his need. Bewildered by the chaos of it all, he leaves the capturing
of his own time to another brother-in-law, a commercial photographer,
while he takes the woman in the photograph as his imaginary wife in a final
Chekhovian lapse into protective illusion.

The remaining two tales in The Pagan Rabbi also portray artistic failure,
but their central concern is Jewish identity. Both "The Suitcase" and "Envy;
or, Yiddish in America" define the Jewish ethos by contriving a memorable
confrontation between Jew and Gentile. In "The Suitcase," the adversaries
at first seem totally assimilated into the larger American society. The
Gentile, formerly a pilot in the Kaiser's air force, has lived in America so
long that he "no longer thought of himself as German" (103). Apart from
naming his son Gottfried—he later wishes it were John—his only
connection to his native land has been a sister whose eleven-year-old
daughter died in the bombing of Cologne. The Jew is Genevieve, a brilliant
woman who has become mentor and mistress to the German's son, though
both lovers are married to others. She too has become assimilated,
preferring the art world of New York to her dull Jewish husband (a CPA)
and four daughters back in Indianapolis. For her Gentile lover, a painter, she
has even culled through German literature, selecting comments from
Beethoven, Mann, and Goethe for Gottfried's exhibition program. (The
program features a talk by one "Creighton MacDougal" of the Partisan
Review, a pretentious fraud who gives Ms. Ozick occasion for some
wicked satire of the eminent pundit Dwight MacDonald.)

The color yellow, however—innocently visible in a brick house, in

buttercups, in curtains, in a field, in a girl's hair—inevitably portends the Star
of the Holocaust, and thus confrontation. When these two characters
meet—the painter's father and mistress—their layers of assimilation rapidly
peel away, exposing the ethnic granite at the core of each personality. Her
innate Jewish-ness rises to the mention of Carl Gustav Jung as "some famous
Jewish psychiatrist" (107), to which she replies, "He isn't a Jew.. . . That's why
he went on staying alive" (108). His ethnicity thereupon reacts in a surge of
defensiveness:
88 Readings

He knew what she meant him to see: she scorned Germans, she thought him a
Nazi sympathizer even now, an anti-Semite, an Eichmann. She was the sort
who, twenty years after Hitler's war, would not buy a Volkswagen. . . . Who
could be blamed for History? It did not take a philosopher . . . to see that
History was a Force-in-Itself, like Evolution. (109)

Of course he is not a bad fellow. All he wants, as a German, is to forget

History, which is exactly what she, as a Jew, cannot permit. Ostensibly
he gets the best of her by breaking up the miscegenetic dalliance and
sending Genevieve back to her Jewish family. But the final victory is hers. At
the end of the tale, when Genevieve's purse is reported stolen, he com-
pulsively proves himself innocent by opening his suitcase and demanding
that she search it. It is a paradigm of his much larger and unanswerable need
for innocence, brought to exposure by his remark that tomorrow he sails
abroad:

"To Germany?"
"Not Germany. Sweden. I admire Scandinavia. . . ."
"I bet you say Sweden to mislead. I bet you're going to Germany, why
shouldn't you? I don't say there's anything wrong with it, why shouldn't you
go to Germany?"
"Not Germany, Sweden. The Swedes were innocent in the war, they saved
so many Jews. I swear it, not Germany. It was the truckmen who stole your
purse, I swear it." (125, 126)

A similar confrontation of Jew versus Gentile concludes "Envy; or, Yid-

dish in America," where the aging Yiddish poet Edelshtein gathers together
the familiar thematic triad: problems of the artist, Jewish identity, and the
pagan enticement. What defeats the artist in this story is not lack of will or
talent but entrapment within a minority culture that is dying from world-
wide loss of interest within modern Jewry. Edelshtein has found that even
the nation of Israel has no use for "the language of the bad little interval
between Canaan and now" (48), and with Yiddish eradicated from Europe
by the Holocaust, there remains only America as a site where Yiddish might
survive. Here, however, to his dismay, the younger generation of American
Jews actually refers to its elders as "you Jews" while disdaining the Jewish
obsession with history as "a waste" (92). Meanwhile, America interprets
Jewish culture through novelists who were "spawned in America, pogroms
a rumor, . . . history a vacuum. . . . They were reviewed and praised, and
were considered Jews, and knew nothing" (41).

Yet Edelshtein himself exhibits telltale signs of cultural betrayal. Emanat-

ing from the same reflex that makes him envy "natural religion, stones,
Readings 89

stars, body" (86), his dream life hovers about Canaanite temptations, such
as homoerotic desire for Alexei, a friend of his boyhood, and similar lads
spotted in the subway: "The love of a man for a boy. Why not confess it? Is
it against the nature of man to rejoice in beauty?" (80). And his lapse into
wishing "he had been born a Gentile" (68) must mitigate the cultural
betrayal he ascribes to others. Moreover, the Gentile preference for flesh
over spirit—"Our books are holy, to them their bodies are holy," the
Pagan Rabbi had said (12)—gains new appeal when measured against the
decrepitude of the Yiddish speakers. Together, Edelshtein and Baumzweig
comprise a catalogue of decay featuring a dripping nose, a urine-stained fly
"now and then seeping" (9), "Mucus the sheen of the sea" (58), "thighs . . .
full of picked sores" (76), and a recurrent "vomitous belch."

The status of Yiddish in America seems analogous to this decrepit

condition, but in the end it is not Yiddish so much as Jewish history that
Edelshtein struggles to preserve from oblivion. Like the face-off between
Jew and German in "The Suitcase," Edelshtein's confrontation with the
Christian evangelist focuses upon a vein of history that the Gentile prefers
to dismiss. To Edelshtein's list of historic villains—"Pharaoh, Queen
Isabella, Haman, that pogromchick King Louis that they call in history
Saint, Hitler, Stalin"—the evangelist responds with the sort of fancy that Leo
Baeck classified as Romantic Religion: "You're a Jew?... Accept Jesus as
your Saviour and you shall have Jerusalem restored" (99). As in "The
Suitcase," the thrust and parry of dialogue quickly strikes ethnic bedrock,
as Edelshtein places his adversary among his list of historic
villains—"Amalekite! Titus! Nazi!"—when the majority culture bares its
teeth in familiar fashion: "You people are cowards, you never even tried to
defend yourselves. . . . When you were in Europe every nation despised
you. When you moved to take over the Middle East the Arab Nation, spic
faces like your own, your very own blood-kin, began to hate you. . . . You
kike, you Yid" (99-100).

By way of transition to the next book, it should be noted that Edelshtein's

closing outry, "On account of you I have no translator!" obscures a
fundamental precept stated earlier in the story, that Yiddish is
untranslatable. Even without the indifference of young Jews and the
contempt of Gentiles to contend with, Edelshtein's poetry would remain
hopelessly incommunicable to a non-Yiddish readership:

The gait—the prance, the hobble—of Yiddish is not the same as the gait of
English. . . . Mamaloshen doesn't produce Wastelands. No alienation, no
nihilism, no dadaism. With all the suffering, no smashing! NO INCOHERENCE!
. . . The same biblical figure, with exactly the same history, once he puts on a
name from King James, COMES OUT A DIFFERENT PERSON! (81, 82)
90 Readings

In her preface to Bloodshed Cynthia Ozick amplifies this statement with

an exposition of her own problems with the English language—"A
language, like a people, has a history of ideas. . . . English is a Christian
language. When I write English, I live in Christendom. But if my postulates
are not Christian postulates, what then?" (BL 9). The specific story to which
she relates this problem is the next one we shall consider, "Usurpation
(Other People's Stories)" in Bloodshed. Having written this preface, she
says, solely from frustration over a critic's comment that "Usurpation" is
unintelligible, she explains why it may have seemed so:

There is no way to hear the oceanic amplitudes of the Jewish Idea in any
English word or phrase. "Judaism" is a Christian term. . . . English . . . cannot
be expected to naturalize the life-giving grandeur of the Hebrew word—yet
how much more than word it is!—"Torah." . . . So it came to me what the
difficulty was: I had written "Usurpation" in the language of a civilization that
cannot imagine its thesis. (BL 10)

We turn next to the book that is at once the most profoundly Jewish and the
closest to the midpoint—in several meanings—of Ozick's career as an artist.

Bloodshed and Three Novellas (1976)

As these fragments of her preface indicate, Bloodshed is the book in which
Cynthia Ozick most markedly stakes her claim to being a Jewish author—
more profoundly Jewish, I should say, than the more celebrated names like
Saul Bellow and Philip Roth. Because all four of its tales take as their
governing theme the betrayal of Jewish identity, Bloodshed is the most
coherently unified of her collections, Taken together, the four stories
comprise a form resembling that of a classical symphony, with the first and
last movements ("A Mercenary" and "Usurpation") being monumental
expositions of her theme, the second movement ("Bloodshed") having the
mood and pace of a slow movement (like the funeral march in Beethoven's
Eroica), and the third movement—the quasi-farcical "An
Education"—taking the role of a mood-lightening scherzo (Beethoven's
"Joke" movement). The preface, in this scheme, would be the coda, coming
first in the book but invented last.

As in her earlier writing, Jewish identity forms part of a thematic triad

that includes the appeal of paganism and the portrayal of the artist torn by
self-conflict. With its artist persona and its renewal of the Pan-versus-Moses
conflict, "Usurpation (Other People's Stories)" is the entry in Bloodshed
that best illustrates this continuing thematic interplay. Subserving this por-
trait of the artist mired in self-conflict are two issues the author discussed at
Readings 91

length in her essay "Literature as Idol: Harold Bloom." The first issue is
Bloom's "anxiety of influence" thesis, here taking the form of Writer's
Envy; and the other is the conflict between Judaism—specifically the Second
Commandment—and art. This latter question evokes the most forgivable
and yet—to the author—the most worrisome instance of cultural subversion
in the volume. As her preface states it: "the worry is this: whether Jews
ought to be story-tellers!... There is one God, and the Muses are not Jewish
but Greek. . . . Does the Commandment against idols warn even [against]
ink?" (10).

Because this story has caused more confusion than any other in the Ozick
canon, a brief synopsis may be helpful. "Usurpation" is unified throughout
by its narrator, who succumbs to Writer's Envy on hearing a famous writer
(Bernard Malamud) give a reading of his "The Silver Crown." Among the
crowd is a would-be writer who asks her to bring his manuscript ("A Tale of
Youth and Homage") to Malamud for his help. She instead reads it and
usurps it for her own narrative, which further incorporates two disparate
Hebrew writers—Agnon (a pious Jew) and Tchernikhovsky (a pagan
apostate)—into her story. Claiming that incoherence is, "as you know, the
fashion," the narrator slyly plies a technique of postmodern playfulness as
she repeatedly apologizes to the reader about her raggedness of form: "I see
you are about to put these pages down. . . . I beg you to wait. Trust me a
little"; "Here I will interrupt the goat's story to apologize"; "I will have to
mend all this somehow. Be patient. I will manage it"; "oh, how I despise
writers who will stop a story dead for the sake of showing off!" (139, 142,
147, 158). Culminating this violation of the story's frame is a critique by
one of the characters: '"I looked up one of your stories. It stank, lady. The
one called 'Usurpation.' . . . Boring! Long-winded!" (175).

But though the author is accused of plagiarism—"Half of it's swiped, you

ought to get sued"—the narrator's usurpation of other people's stories shortly
becomes a minor issue. In this most openly confessional of Ozick's stories,
the essential usurpation encompasses a much larger prize: the appropriation
of an alien culture, which alone can make storytelling permissible: "Magic—
I admit it—is what I lust after. . . . I am drawn not to the symbol, but to the
absolute magic act. I am drawn to what is forbidden" (134). Because "the
Jews have no magic," she goes on, "I long to be one of the ordinary
peoples . . . oh, why can we not have a magic God like other peoples?"
(135).

The answer to that question comes through another usurpation, borrowed

from the manuscript of the "goat."14 In it, our narrator finds the concept of
the writer as "self-idolator,... so audacious and yet so ingenious that you will
fool God and live" (141). The writer who has done this is Tchernikhovsky, a
Jew who has lapsed into "pantheism and earth-worship ... pursuit of the old
92 Readings

gods of Canaan" (144). Despite this apostasy, which culminates in his "most
famous poem, the one to the god Apollo" (143), he ascends after death into
the Jewish paradise, where our narrator glimpses him wickedly at ease in
Zion, hobnobbing with his pagan gods, savoring his faunlike pleasures, and
ignoring with impunity his Jewish obligations of worship:

Tchernikhovsky eats nude at the table of the nude gods, clean-shaven now, his
limbs radiant, his youth restored, his sex splendidly erect . . .; he eats without
self-restraint from the celestial menu, and when the Sabbath comes . . . as
usual he avoids the congregation of the faithful before the Footstool and the
Throne. (178)

The story's last sentence, however, makes it clear that though he could fool
the Jewish God, neither he nor any other Jew can ever fool the gods of that
alien culture in whose praise he wrote his poetry. They will always know he
is not one of theirs: "Then the taciturn little Canaanite idols call him, in the
language of the spheres, kike" (178).

If "Usurpation" portrays the least blameworthy betrayal of the Jewish

heritage, "An Education" treats the most blameworthy, which may explain
why it emanates the most sardonic tone of these four stories, and is the most
immediately comprehensible. Written about the time Trust was completed,
it extends several of the novel's themes, as is evident in the heroine's (Una's)
initial interest in the classics (she earns two graduate degrees) and her
ultimate disinterest in marriage (she refuses to marry her lover). In the
opening scene, a Latin class, Una is called to explain the genitive case—a
term that becomes a key to the story, both as a description of marriage and
as a foreshadowing of Una's total possession by a singularly irresponsible
married couple.

That married couple, in turn, illustrates the central theme of the story, the
cultural vacuum that ensues when they try to assimilate to the Gentile
majority. Having changed their name from Chaims ("But isn't that Jew-
ish?") to Chimes ("Like what a bell does"), they further de-Judaize them-
selves by eating ham, naming their daughter "Christina," and making a joke
of the Holy Ghost/Holocaust pun (80). The retaliation for this betrayal of
their heritage comes when Clement Chimes, a would-be artist, is unable to
progress beyond the title page of his masterwork, "Social Cancer/A Diagnosis
in Verse/And Anger." Leaving aside his lack of talent, we may read this story
as the obverse of "Envy; or, Yiddish in America." Contrary to Edelshtein,
who fails because his art is rooted in a dying minority culture, Chimes fails
because, having renounced his Jewish birthright, he faces the dilemma of
trying to write literature without any cultural enrootment whatever.
Readings 93

Whereas "An Education" presents an essentially comic view of Jewish

deracination, "A Mercenary" projects a tragic instance of this governing
theme—tragic in the old sense of portraying grievous waste. The tale begins
rather shockingly with an epigraph from Joseph Goebbels—"Today we are
all expressionists—men who want to make the world outside themselves
take the form of their lives within themselves." Whatever else we may make
of this remark, it comprises a perfect definition of idolatry as Ozick portrays
it: a man making the outer world over in his own perverse image. The tale
proper applies Goebbels' remark to three characters representing the
civilizations of three disparate continents. The two main characters have in
some sense exchanged birthrights: Lushinski, a native of Poland, by
becoming the United Nations representative of a small black African
country; Morris, his assistant, by submerging his African past under a
European veneer acquired at Oxford. A third character, Louisa—Lushinski's
mistress in New York—is American, and hence too innocent to either
require or comprehend a multiple identity; but she, like the others, follows
Goebbels' expressionist standard in so far as she prefers her innocent inner
picture of the world to the reality defined by actual history.

Lushinski is the "Mercenary" of the title, an eloquent "Paid Mouthpiece"

for his African dictator both at the U.N. and in television talk shows
featuring "false 'hosts' contriving false conversation" (20). In his latter role
he makes a televised confession of murder, but he never tells anyone who his
victim was—not even Morris or Louisa. Instead he tells his audience of
other violence: how the Germans took Warsaw on his sixth birthday, caus-
ing his wealthy parents to buy him a place with a peasant family, after which
the parents, though Aryan in looks and manners, were identified as Jews
and shot. It is not very entertaining stuff, commercially speaking, and soon
the mercenary in the man rises to meet the mercenary medium; he makes his
tale out to be a jest, a fabrication to entertain his listeners: "All this was
comedy: Marx Brothers, . . . the audience is elated by its own disbelief. . . .
Lushinski is only a story-teller" (29).

In thus making a travesty of his tragic past, Lushinski is not solely inter-
ested in commercial advantage; he mainly wants to exorcise the self he was,
the child who "had survived the peasants who baited and blistered and beat
and hunted him. One of them had hanged him from the rafter of a shed by
the wrists. He was four sticks hanging" (37). Telling Louisa he is "the
century's one free man," he explains: "every survivor is free. . . . The future
can invent nothing worse" (37). Having chosen to use his freedom establish-
ing a new identity, he has largely succeeded. Though "born to a flag-stoned
Warsaw garden," he now feels himself "native to these mammalian per-
fumes" of African flowers, in token of which he long ago immersed his
94 Readings

being in this culture's pagan hedonism ("these round brown mounds of the
girls he pressed down under the trees," 16). To further underscore his
freedom from that Jewish child in his past, he has taken a crypto -German
mistress in America: "They spoke of her as a German countess—her last
name was preceded by a 'von' . . . though her accent had a fake melody
either Irish or Swedish" (21). At the same time he has done all in his power
to offend Jews everywhere: "Always he was cold to Jews. . . . In the
Assembly he turned his back on the ambassador from Israel. . . . All New
York Jews in the gallery" (41).

Yet the Jewish child in the man is not wholly expungeable. For all his
sophistication, words like "peasant" and "Jew" evoke visible fear in Lushinski;
and most important, he reveals that telltale sign of Jewish identity, a passion
for Jewish history. The history in question—Raul Hilberg's monumental
work The Destruction of the European Jews (1961)—opens a breach be-
tween Lushinski and his mistress, who sees no purpose in this masochistic
morbidity:

"Death," she said. "Death, death, death. What do you care? You came out
alive." "I care about the record," he insisted. . . . He crashed down beside her
an enormous volume: it was called The Destruction. She opened it and saw
tables and figures and asterisks; she saw train-schedules. It was all dry, dry....
(38)

Paradoxically, his affinity for Jewish history only strengthens his need for
exorcism, as his Gentile mistress correctly infers: "You hate being part of
the Jews. You hate that. . . . Practically nobody knows you're a Jew. . . . /
never think of it" (40).

In the remainder of the tale Lushinski accelerates his flight from his
Jewish past by becoming "a dervish of travel" as he speaks about Africa on
the television and lecture circuit and by cementing his ties to his African
"homeland." Morris, the real African, meanwhile moves in a direction exactly
opposite to that of Lushinski, gradually shedding his European veneer so as
to recover his tribal birthright: "the dear land itself, the customs, the rites,
the cousins, the sense of family" (33). Pushed in this direction by his revul-
sion against the Tarzan movies—"Was he [Morris] no better than that lout
Tarzan, investing himself with a chatter not his own? How long could the
ingested, the invented, the foreignness endure" (46)—Morris tries to push
Lushinski likewise. From New York, "a city of Jews" (49), he sends a letter
to the seacoast villa in Africa where Lushinski is enjoying his employer's
gratitude. The letter describes a Japanese terrorist, jailed for slaughtering
Jews in an air terminal, who in his priso n cell has converted to Judaism.
Readings 95

Unlike Lushinski, the Japanese convert is not a mercenary. Lushinski reads

the message as an unmasking: "It meant a severing. Morris saw him as an
impersonator. . . . Morris had called him Jew" (51).

Thus a familiar pattern recurs: a Jew who tries mightily to assimilate is in

the end forced back into his native Jewishness. Like Tchernikhovsky in
"Usurpation," whom the Canaanite gods called kike though he had fooled the
God of the Jews, Lushinski will finally be pronounced Jew no matter how far
he may flee into the hinterland. As the tale ends, the blue-and-white colors of
his African surroundings comprise a double reminder of his Jewish identity,
evoking memories of Holocaust Poland and of the Israeli flag at the United
Nations. His very cigarette smoke, with its blue-white haze, now calls him
"Jew" and so thrusts him away from the pleasures of his new country and
toward the land of his birth, and thence to a closing revelation: the name, in
the last two lines, of the man Lushinski had killed and buried in Warsaw:

And in Africa, in a white villa on the blue coast, the Prime Minister's gaudy
pet, on a blue sofa . . . smoking and smoking, under the breath of the scented
trees, under the shadow of the bluish snow, under the blue-black pillars of the
Polish woods, . . . under the rafters, under the stone-white hanging stars of
Poland—Lushinski.
Against the stones and under the snow. (51-52)

Up to this point, the stories in Bloodshed have portrayed the deracination

of Jewish identity in terms of art ("Usurpation"), sociology ("An
Education"), and politics ("A Mercenary"). In her title story,
"Bloodshed"—and doubtless this is why it is the title story—Ozick brings
forward her most momentous mode of deracination, the theological. In this
instance the theology does not involve a conflict between Judaism and some
alien system (e.g., Pan versus Moses); rather, its focus lies wholly within a
Jewish matrix. Cleared thus of goys and pagans, the narrative measures a
New Yorker named Bleilip, a middling sort of Jewish American, against
"the town of the hasidim," an Orthodox village within range of Bleilip's
neighborhood that is inhabited almost entirely by survivors of the death
camps and their close relatives. Ostensibly, he has come hither to visit his
cousin, but in reality he is in flight from a despair so deep that he has been
toying with the idea of suicide—toying, literally, in that he carries in one
pocket a toy gun ("to get used to it. The feel of the thing," 70) and in
another pocket a real pistol. Thus possessed by the Kierkegaardian Sickness
unto Death, Bleilip has undertaken this sojourn among the faithful as a last
feeble grasp for beliefs to live by.

Fundamentally, the issue in "Bloodshed" is the most crucial dichotomy

that fractures the Judaic ethos—the contradiction between sustaining un-
96 Readings

bearable suffering, as predicated by Jewish history, and the L'Chaim! or "To

Life!" principle, which holds that life is always worthful. The cause of
Bleilip's despair is his enclosure within the far side of that contradiction, so
that his religious belief fails in the face of recent Jewish history—the
bloodshed of the story's title. Regarding the Holocaust even the Orthodox
rebbe, a survivor of Buchenwald, apparently shares Bleilip's sick soul
condition. At worship he describes the appalling transference wrought by
that monstrous event upon the ancient idea of the scapegoat:

For animals we in our day substitute men.... we have the red cord around our
throats, we were in villages, they drove us into camps, we were in trains, they
drove us into showers of poison. . . . everyone on earth became a goat or a
bullock, . . . all our prayers are bleats and neighs on the way to a forsaken
altar. . . . Little fathers! How is it possible to live? (65, 66 -67)

Now when it most seems that the rebbe is Bleilip's alter ego, he suddenly
turns on Bleilip: "Who are you?" (67). To Bleilip's answer—"A Jew. Like
yourselves. One of you"—the rebbe retorts: "Presumption! Atheist, devourer!
For us there is the Most High, joy, life. . . . But you! A moment ago I spoke
your own heart for you, ernes [true]? . . . You believe the world is in vain,
ernes?" (67). This exchange leads to the rebbe's final divination: "Empty
your pockets!" Even before the guns come to view, the rebbe—a death camp
survivor speaking to a New York intellectual—says the key sentence:
"Despair must be earned" (69).

Other Jewish writers have threaded forth a similar response to the

Suffer-ing/L'Chaim! dichotomy—Saul Bellow's Herzog is a masterly
example— but Cynthia Ozick remains distinctive for her theological rather
than philosophical orientation. In "Bloodshed" her confrontation of Jewish
opposites concludes in a kind of theological dialectic. Bleilip, the hater of
bloodshed, admits he once used the pistol to kill a pigeon. The rebbe,
defender of the faith, admits that "it is characteristic of believers sometimes
not to believe" (72). What they hold in common, as Jews, at last takes
precedence: first, a belief, if only "now and then," in "the Holy One. ... Even
you [Bleilip] now and then apprehend the Most High?"; and second, the
blood kinship, including the most dreadful meanings of the term, that the
Most High has seen fit to impose upon His people. The rebbe's last words,
"Then you are as bloody as anyone," become Bleilip's final badge of Jewish
identity in this most severely Jewish of the book's four tales. They also make
a convenient bridge from this title story of Bloodshed to the title story of
Levitation, where Jewish history again transforms bloodshed into a
singular mark of this people's identity.
Readings 97

Levitation: Five Fictions (1982)

As its title indicates, Levitation: Five Fictions is a collection that ventures
into fantasy, fable, and allegory. Beneath these novel tactics, however, Ozick's
earlier triad of ground themes continues to inform the new book. Behind
her fresh slate of characters facing new dramatic situations in widely
different settings, the essential issues remain the familiar concerns with
Jewish identity ("Levitation"), the pagan enticement ("Freud's Room," the
Puttermesser-Xanthippe stories), and the struggles of the artist ("Shots").

In her title story, Ozick tries a new tactic: adopting the point of view of a
Christian minister's daughter. Her (Ozick's) task is eased, however, by the
woman's desire to marry "Out of my tradition," which makes her eligible
for marriage to Feingold, a Jew who "had always known he did not want a
Jewish wife" (3). A psalm her father recites from the pulpit leads her to
resolve the problem of a mixed marriage: she will become "an Ancient
Hebrew." After her conversion, the marriage seems unusually companion-
able; they are both novelists, as well as "Hebrews," and they love their
professional intimacy: "Sometimes . . . it seemed to them that they were
literary friends and lovers, like George Eliot and George Henry Lewes" (4).
As writers, they share a view of literature that makes them feel "lucky in
each other. . . . Lucy said, 'At least we have the same premises'" (6).

The central point of "Levitation," however, is that they don't have the
same premises. Whereas her concept of "Ancient Hebrew" leads inevitably
to Jesus as her stopping point—that supersessionist attitude of Christians so
infuriating to Ozick—his concept of "Hebrew" begins in the Middle Ages
and ends in World War II. Which is to say, Feingold is a Jew, not a Hebrew;
and as such, he is obsessed with Jewish, not biblical, history: "Feingold's
novel—the one he was writing now—was about [the] survivor of a massacre
of Jews in the town of Estella in Spain in 1328. From morning to midnight
he hid under a pile of corpses, until a 'compassionate knight' (this was the
language of the history Feingold relied on) plucked him out and took him
home to tend his wounds" (4-5).

When they throw a party to advance their professional interests, this

dichotomy between "Jew" and "Hebrew" widens enormously. To Lucy's
dismay, her husband insists upon pouring out his obsessions upon the com-
pany: "Feingold wanted to talk about. . . the crime of the French nobleman
Draconet, a proud Crusader, who in the . . . year 1247 arrested all the Jews
of the province of Vienne, castrated the men, and tore off the breasts of the
women" (11). Eventually, she is driven to cut him off: "There he was, telling
about. . . [h]ow in London, in 1279, Jews were torn to pieces by horses....
How in 1285, in Munich, a mob burned down a synagogue. Feingold was
98 Readings

crazed by these tales, he drank them like a vampire" (12-13). In a

Christological maneuver resembling a priest administrating the sacrament,
Lucy "stuck a square of chocolate cake in his mouth to shut him up" (13).

There is one guest, however, who does not want Feingold to shut up: a
man who updates Jewish history. A Holocaust survivor, he describes in a
whisper the slaughter at (apparently) Babi Yar, gripping the other listening
Jews with hypnotic power but leaving Lucy alone and bewildered: "Horror;
sadism; corpses. As if . . . hundreds of Crucifixions were all happening at
once . . . bulldozers shoveling those same sticks of skeletons" (14). As the
whisper rasped on, the "room began to lift. It ascended . . . levitating on the
little grains of the refugee's whisper. . . . They were being kidnapped, these
Jews, by a messenger from the land of the dead" (15). Eventually, they
levitate beyond her range of hearing, rapt in their necrotic visions, leaving
her alone with her revulsion:

A morbid cud-chewing. Death and death and death. . . . "Holocaust," some-

one caws dimly from above; she knows it must be Feingold.... Lucy decides it
is possible to become jaded by atrocity. She is bored by the shootings and the
gas and the camps. . . . They are tiresome as prayer. (19)

As the Jews soar up and away, she comes to a realization. Essentially she
is not Jewish nor Ancient Hebrew nor Christian: she is a pagan, a believer in
the Dionysian gods of the earth. What evokes this insight is her recollection
of Italian peasants dancing, shouting "Old Hellenic syllables," and ringing
bells like those "the priests used to beat in the temple of Minerva" (17). In
this scene "she sees what is eternal: before there was the Madonna there was
Venus, Aphrodite ... Astarte.... the dances are seething.... Nature is their
pulse. . . . Lucy sees how she has abandoned nature, how she lost the true
religion on account of the God of the Jews" (18). Despite their intentions,
then, neither partner can assimilate to the other: he tries to cease being a
Jew, but cannot; she tries to cease being a Gentile, and cannot.

Of the three recurring themes in "Levitation," two (paganism and Jewish

identity) are treated seriously, and one (the Feingolds as artists) is handled
with levity. (They comically subvert the tale in which they appear, for
example, by agreeing "on the importance of never writing about writers,"
4). In "Shots," the portrayal of the artist is the central theme, calling up
Ozick's most serious intentions. The art form in "Shots" is photography—a
subject she has touched upon with great sensitivity in many writings but
most notably when she discusses biography (see her essay on Edith Wharton,
for example, AA11-12). "When I read biographies," she told Elaine Kauvar,
"I simply fall into those pictures. I think I spend more time drowning in old
Readings 99

photographs in biographies than in the text" (Kauvar 397). 15 She is "drawn

to the eeriness of photography," she says, because of "the way it represents
both mortality and immortality. It both stands for death and stands against
death because it's statuary" (396). Far from fostering illusion, a photograph
exposes "hidden reality." It is a net that can snare "absolutely total reality.
It's the capturing of what is, and in the is-ness there is God knows what"—a
mysterious quality that makes a photograph "an impenetrable comment on
reality" (397-98).

In "Shots" photography shortly becomes an analogue for Ozick's own

vocation as a writer. The tale ranges into allegory along the way, but with
the saving virtue of being meaningful both on a symbolic plane and on the
level of immediate realism. The allegory begins with the motif of
infatuation, initially with the art form itself. What the camera (or literature)
offers its devotee is the power to raise the dead ("Call it necrophilia.... Dead
faces draw me," 39), to preserve youth ("time as stasis . . .the time . . . of
Keats's Grecian Urn"), to touch eternity. For the camerawoman who narrates
"Shots," these powers are summed up in two images. One, from her
childhood, is an ancient photo of "the Brown Girl," showing the face in
youth of a patient at the nearby Home for the Elderly 111—which face has
since become one with the Home's "brainless ancients, rattling their china
teeth and . . . rolling . . . their mad old eyes inside nearly visible crania"
(140). The other image is her own handiwork, a happenstantial
photograph of an assassination that blinks in an instant from life to death:
"I calculated my aim, . . . shot once, shot again, and was amazed to see
blood spring out of a hole in his neck" (43).

Here is witnessed the "eeriness of photography, the way it represents both

mortality and immortality." But the infatuation grows beyond her embrace
of a magic box. While on assignment to cover a public symposium, she
becomes enthralled to one of its speakers, a professor of South American
history. If Ozick's mode in this story were realism, doubtless the professor's
subject would be Jewish history; for her portrayal of the artist, his subject
doesn't matter. What does matter is the photographer's compulsive
immersion in the professor's subject, which brings her into open rivalry
with his wife, Verity. Though she is a perfect wife, a paradigm of multiple
abilities, "He didn't like her. . . . His whole life was wrong. He was a dead
man . . . ten times deader than [the assassin's victim]" (47).

Here the symbolism becomes complicated. If Verity (Conventional Real-

ism) is unable to bring her husband out of his rigor mortis condition, she
nonetheless has little to fear from her photographer rival, who has her own
handicaps. Though she gets deeply into Sam's sphere (as Verity can not),
and though she does revitalize him, hers must at best be a partial claim on
100 Readings

his favor: she (Art, Imagination) may be History's off-hours paramour;

Verity is his lawful and permanent companion. For all their affinities, the
ways of Art and History are not finally compatible. "You really have to wait
[for the picture to develop]," she tells him; "What's important is the
waiting." It is during the wait that art happens: "If you have a change of
heart between shooting your picture and taking it out of the developer, the
picture changes too" (52).

Like so many other Ozick tales, "Shots" ends in a flare of combat. Verity
and her historian husband, for their part, overcome the narrator by dressing
her in archaic brown clothes, making her a "Period piece" (in Verity's
phrasing). The period piece cannot resist this inevitability; eventually even
the artist must submit to time and history. "I am already thirty-six years old,
and tomorrow I will be forty-eight," she says (56), and thereby completes a
circle: "I'm the Brown Girl in the pocket of my blouse. I reek of history"
(56). But in one respect she registers a final prevalence of art over history.
With all the intensity of the sex drive, she captures the image of her
adversary for eternity: "I catch up my camera . . . my ambassador of desire,
my secret house with its single shutter, my chaste aperture.. . . I shoot into
their heads, the white harp behind. Now they are exposed. Now they will
stick forever" (57).

As though to confirm the theme of "Shots," the next fragment of

Levitation, "From a Refugee's Notebook," derives from photography its
primary illumination. "Freud's Room," the opening section of "From a
Refugee's Notebook," subjects the creator of psychoanalysis to his own
invention via pictures of the famous studio in Vienna. What most engages
the narrator is Freud's collection of primitive idols in the background,
"hundreds of those strange little gods" which "represent the deep primitive
grain of the mind Freud sought" (61). Had he looked deeply enough, Freud
would have discovered that primitive grain in himself, notably in his
simultaneous role as both Moses and Pan—the rationalist supervisor of the
psyche subject to the Dionysian dream-life that those idols imply. In the end
Freud's idols evoke a link with the golem-making propensity of the
subsequent "Puttermesser and Xanthippe" narrative: "Is the doctor of the
Unconscious not likely to be devoured by his own creation, like that rabbi
of Prague who constructed a golem?" (64).16

The other link to Puttermesser in "From a Refugee's Notebook" is the

utopia/dystopia motif of "The Sewing Harems," a heavy-duty satire on the
antimaternal fringe of contemporary feminism. By sewing shut their labia,
thereby suppressing reproduction, these women make the planet less pol-
luted and crowded while giving themselves "greater opportunities to add to
their goodness via self-improvement and self-development" (70). Because
Readings 101

the attitude being lampooned is so obviously untenable, it is not clear why

Ozick spent her talent on such a target. Perhaps, as she remarked about
"Virility," it is because subtlety risks failure to be understood; or perhaps in
this case she wanted to offset the arguably anti-maternal implications of her
"Hole/Birth Catalogue" essay, in which she demolished the
"anatomy-is-destiny" argument.

The ongoing motif of Jewish identity is carried through "From a

Refugee's Notebook" by the narrator. Though uncommonly vague—the
epigraph of the piece ascribes "European or perhaps South American origin"
to this otherwise "unidentified" figure—the narrator discloses Jewish
identity in three stages. First, we are told that the Refugee-narrator must
rely on pictures of Freud's room because he/she will not visit "any land
which once suckled the Nazi boot" (59). More telling still is the narrator's
expertise with bolts of cloth (like that of the Miamians in The Shawl),
which suggests a long sojourn within the largely Jewish garment industry of
New York: "I can, with eyes shut, tell you which is rayon and which silk,
which the genuine wool and which the synthetic . . ." (62). And finally,
there is the dead giveaway of the role of Moses, cited here as Freud's
counterpart in overriding the spontaneous rule of nature (63). This last
motif in particular forms a link with the final, major entry of Levitation,
"Puttermesser and Xanthippe."

Puttermesser
In the "Works in Progress" column of the New York Times Book Review
of 6 June 1982 (page 11), Cynthia Ozick gave a brief preview of the work
that would soon comprise the centerpiece of Levitation. "Here are 54 pages
of a novel begun some time ago, still breathing, with a live protagonist,"
she writes, adding that when she abandoned the project years ago, the
protagonist "seemed old; now I am creeping up on her age." An odd
resistance emanates from the author toward her story—"I'm afraid of it. I
see how much I don't want this woman who wants me"—but she does
admit a powerful affinity with her theme: "Oh, admit it—the dream of
happiness! I want to invent virtue and happiness!"

More than half of Levitation is given over to Ozick's model seeker of

virtue and happiness, an urbanite named Ruth Puttermesser who is
thirty-four in the prefatory segment ("Puttermesser: Her Work History, Her
Ancestry, Her Afterlife"), forty-six in the novella-length "Puttermesser and
Xanthippe," and mid-fiftyish in "Puttermesser Paired"—a sequel that ap-
peared in the New Yorker of 8 October 1990. Apart from her marital status
(single) and job (a lawyer), Puttermesser is clearly an alter ego of her maker.
102 Readings

Possessing "one of those Jewish faces with a vaguely Oriental cast" (23), she
is devoutly loyal to New York, guilty over piano lessons fudged in child-
hood, angry at her subjection to job discrimination, exultant over her
studies in Hebrew grammar, and so hungrily intellectual that her dream of
the afterlife is an eternal reading binge featuring Ozick's favorite subjects
and authors:

She reads anthropology, zoology, physical chemistry, philosophy, . . . about

quarks, about primate sign language, . . . what Stonehenge meant.
Puttermesser . .. will read at last. . . all of Balzac, all of Dickens, all of Turgenev
and Dostoevski (her mortal self had already read all of Tolstoy and George
Eliot); . . . and the whole Faerie Queene and every line of The Ring and the
Book . . . at last, at last! (33)

From that heavenly list, George Eliot would later prove the most consequen-
tial, providing the basis for the 1990 novella "Puttermesser Paired."

Meanwhile, although Ozick wrote in 1976 that "Literature-as-game was

exactly what I had been devotedly arguing against" (BL 8), the most distinc-
tive feature of the first Puttermesser story is its postmodern sense of litera-
ture as artifice and play. The modernist realism of Trust and Bloodshed now
gives way to open authorial intrusion into the text: "Now if this were an
optimistic portrait [Ozick writes at mid-point] . . . [her] biography would
proceed romantically . . . to a bower in a fine suburb." But the postmodern
uncertainty principle will not permit so tidy a plot line: "Perhaps she will
undertake a long-term affair with Vogel;. . . perhaps not" (31). At times the
author interrupts her writer-persona with strident objections: "Stop. Stop,
stop! Puttermesser's biographer, stop! Disengage, please. Though it is true
that biographies are invented, not recorded, here you invent too much" (35).
The sketch ends in a similar fashion, with a postmodern confession of
artistic aporia: "Hey! Puttermesser's biographer! What will you do with her
now? (38).

The author's postmodern presence can also be readily detected behind

Puttermesser's ethnic feelings—in her disdain for the assimilated Jew who
rules her workplace ("a blue-eyed Guggenheim, a German Jew" who had
gone to Choate), and in her distrust of her WASP bosses in the law firm,
blue-eyed, close-shaven, and with "such beautiful manners even while drunk"
(30, 31). A familiar reason why those beautiful manners remain unavailing
relates to her name ("Puttermesser" being Yiddish for "Butterknife"), as it is
expounded for her by her Orthodox Uncle Zindel:

By us we got only messer, you follow? By them they got sword, they got lance,
they got halberd. . . . So help me, what don't one of them knights carry? Look
Readings 103

up in the book . .. you'll see cutlass, pike, rapier, foil, ten dozen more. By us a
pike is a fish. Not to mention what nowadays they got—bayonet stuck on the
gun. ... But by us—what we got? A messer! Puttermesser, you slice off a piece
butter, you cut to live, not to kill. (34-35)17

The revelation that Uncle Zindel does not exist (he died before Puttermesser
was born) just adds to the postmodern fun.

In the same "Works in Progress" column of the New York Times Book
Review mentioned above, Ozick reveals a major shift in aesthetic theory
between the two "Puttermesser" segments of Levitation (the briefer of
which was written earlier). Inasmuch as the postmodern playfulness of
"Puttermesser: Her Work History" had led to a dead end—"Hey!
Puttermesser's biographer! What will you do with her now?"—Ozick
proceeds to renounce the postmodern in favor of an earlier, better concept
of fiction:

I am thinking about the old lost power of "having a subject," . . . about the
malaise of subjectlessness, which leads to parody or to nihilism: esthetic "dis-
tance," distaste, the "absurd," affliction, dead ends, death. Oh, happiness
without parody! Why not, why not? To drill through the "postmodern" and
come out on the other side, alive and saved and wise as George Eliot.

Although the wisdom of George Eliot would have to wait for the grand
impersonations of "Puttermesser Paired," her novella of 1990, "Puttermesser
and Xanthippe" has substance enough to carry the quest for virtue and
happiness to mock-epic proportions, broken into the epic's obligatory twelve
sections ("books," we might say) that are numbered with Roman numerals.
It likewise upholds the epic mode by making the destiny of a whole society
(New York City) depend on the wisdom, courage, and resourcefulness of its
epic heroine, Ruth Puttermesser. To this ancient Greek narrative form
Ozick conjoins the medieval Jewish legend of the golem of Prague (the
subject of a 1920s silent movie made in Austria). Though she violates the
Jewish tradition for the feminist purpose of making her golem a female,
Ozick in most respects follows the pattern of the Grand Rabbi of Prague.
Made of earth and breathed into life through the speaking of the Name, the
golem is raised up to save its creator's people from mortal danger: a forth-
coming pogrom for the Jewish community of medieval Prague; an imminent
total collapse into utter civic, social, and economic chaos for New York
City.

Like her medieval predecessor, Xanthippe—named, with feminist ardor,

after Socrates' supposedly overbearing wife—is marvelously effective at her
task of redeeming the doomed and damned metropolis. Wearing a toga
104 Readings

(136), or a "sari brilliant with woven flowers" (141), Xanthippe the Jewish
golem elides into a Greek goddess risen from earth, thereby giving a new
twist to Ms. Ozick's old Hellenism-Hebraism dichotomy. Here our female
Pan and Moses work in harmony, as it were, with Puttermesser using the
golem's magic to effect a transformation of New York City. (While it lasts,
this Jewish/Greek collaboration comprises a triumph of the "Dual Curricu-
lum" that Joseph Brill dreams of effecting in Ozick's next book, The Canni-
bal Galaxy.} Elected mayor, Puttermesser rids the city of its crime, ugliness,
and debt: "Everyone is at work. Lovers apply to the City Clerk for marriage
licenses. The Bureau of Venereal Disease Control has closed down. The
ex-pimps are learning computer skills. . . . The City is at peace" (135).

But as we would expect in an Ozick story, the collaboration between Pan

and Moses is short-lived as Xanthippe turns out to be not merely a Greek
goddess but a sex goddess, who in the end has to be dissolved into the earth
again because of her uncontrollable nymphomania. Succumbing to the un-
ruliest of gods ("Eros had entered Gracie Mansion," 138), Xanthippe be-
comes Puttermesser's adversary, consuming the mayor's entire slate of city
officers in her sexual fire; and when the golem returns to the earth, her
magic goes with her, leaving the city in its normal ruined condition. With
Puttermesser's closing outcry—"O lost New York! . . . O lost Xanthippe!"
(58)—Levitation as a whole attains a circular structure: it began with a
levitation and ends with a collapse back to ordinary reality.

Postscript 1990: "Puttermesser Paired"

Perhaps because her public life had failed so haplessly in "Puttermesser
and Xanthippe," or perhaps in response to the conservatism of the 1980s,
the heroine of "Puttermesser Paired" (in the New Yorker of 8 October 1990)
displays some strong contrasts with her earlier manifestation. Most notably,
she now withdraws totally from the larger community to pursue an exclu-
sive interest in her interior life. New York, in turn, lapses from an object of
Puttermesser's reformist zeal to a setting—both stimulating and suffocating,
culturally rich and socially sordid—for her private fantasy of perfect love
and friendship. And there are other contrasts: as a strict "rationalist,"
Puttermesser no longer practices golem magic; as a fiftyish bride, she no
longer eschews marriage; and as an impersonator of George Eliot, she no
longer evinces a paramount interest in Jewish identity. Instead, mindful of
George Eliot the artist-hero, the story develops Ozick's long-standing theme
of impersonation in terms of artistic identity.

The idea of Puttermesser reliving the life of George Eliot apparently

carried over from the title story in Levitation, where a husband and wife,
Readings 105

both novelists, achieved an ideal intimacy: "Sometimes, closing up their

notebooks for the night [from which they read aloud to one another], it
seemed to them that they were literary friends and lovers, like George Eliot
and George Henry Lewes" (LE 4). On numerous grounds it is natural that
Cynthia Ozick would feel strong affinities with George Eliot. As women
artists, each had to fight her way into a male-dominated principality of
prestigious achievement; each tasted major success only when nearing the
age of forty. As inheritors of a powerful religious heritage, each had to
subordinate that heritage to the artist's calling, with Ozick agonizing over
her "Jewish writer oxymoron" and Eliot finally sloughing off her Christian
evangelism in favor of a freethinker's credo. 18 And, although Eliot was far
more prolific than Ozick, each achieved excellence in a broad variety of
forms and genres—poetry, plays, essays, stories, and novels. Uniquely among
Gentile writers, Eliot also portrayed Jewish characters not merely with sym-
pathy but with an uncomplicated admiration that some critics found
propagandishly sentimental, a charge notably laid against Daniel
Deronda.19 Most important of all, Ozick found in Eliot and her
contemporaries the convergence of the Judaic ethos with the art of fiction:

The novel at its nineteenth-century pinnacle was a Judaized novel: George

Eliot and Dickens and Tolstoy were all touched by the Jewish covenant: they
wrote of conduct and of the consequences of conduct: they were concerned
with a society of will and commandment. At bottom it is . . . the novel as a
Jewish force. ("Toward a New Yiddish," AA 164)

In her essay on Edith Wharton, Ozick remarked that we "have always

known (Freud taught us only how to reinforce this knowledge), that the
secret self is the true self, that obsession is confession" (AA 25). Her own
obsession, here and in many other tales, focuses on the idea of the imper-
sonator. In "Puttermesser Paired," the most fundamental difference between
Ozick/Puttermesser and George Eliot is precisely the theme of impersonation,
which is Ozick's obsession but not Eliot's. That difference is also, obviously
enough, the measure of change that marks off the Victorian novel from the
postmodern sensibility. The idea of a real, stable, and unitary self would have
seemed as natural to Eliot as to her contemporary Charles Darwin; in the late
twentieth century, impersonation would seem equally natural for many
writers for whom selfhood is a dubious construct—one thinks of Philip Roth,
John Earth, and Thomas Pynchon as engaging impersonators.

Another difference between Ozick and Eliot is the sharp-edged humor

with which Ozick renders her subject, both Puttermesser and New York
City being subject to an ongoing satire that varies between acerbic and
106 Readings

gentle. The high-toned seriousness of George Eliot's Mordecai in Daniel

Deronda has no counterpart here, primarily because Puttermesser, unlike
her maker, has no religious seriousness. For her, being Jewish means having
a mother who, between complaints about the heat in Miami, nags her
daughter to get married; it means scanning the ads in the New York Review
of Books in search of a love partner; it means enduring the Age of the Slob
in contemporary courtship manners (Puttermesser counts two pairs of cor-
duroy trousers and one of denim on the couch during a singles party); it
means soliciting strangers to make up the minimal number of witnesses
necessary for a Judaic Reform wedding.

But these cultural deficiencies argue all the more ardently in favor of
Puttermesser's obsessive project, to impersonate George Eliot and thereby
"to leave New York behind, to be restored to glad, golden Victoria." All she
needs is the right man to impersonate Eliot's ideal love mate, George Lewes,
so as to emulate their original "marriage of true minds, admitting no imped-
iment." When the right man appears, the copyist-painter Rupert Rabeeno,
the metamorphosis seems complete. Like one of Henry James's confidantes,
Rabeeno readily agrees to the role assigned to him, to the extent of immers-
ing the two of them in readings about the Eliot-Lewes honeymoon. But it
turns out that he has a more subtle role in mind. In his vocation as a
professional copyist—a task that he insists on defining as original creativ-
ity—his eye falls not on Lewes but on a copyist of Lewes: the man named
John Cross who married George Eliot after Lewes' death and then retraced
for their honeymoon the exact itinerary of the Eliot-Lewes honeymoon
almost three decades earlier. What broke the spell for the Cross-Eliot union
was the humiliating fiasco of his sexual nonperformance (as Ozick renders
it), which may have hastened George Eliot's death just nine months after the
wedding. For Puttermesser, too, her wedding ends in disillusionment as her
bridegroom, whom she understood to have accepted the role of Lewes,
instead reveals himself to be impersonating John Cross: he abandons
Puttermesser on their wedding night without fulfilling his amorous duties.

Beginning with the title, "Puttermesser Paired," and extending through a

broad web of details, the story expounds its theme of duplication and
duplicity. Puttermesser's first conversation with Rupert, when she finds him
copying Jacques-Louis David's painting of the Death of Socrates in the
museum, should have sufficed as a warning. The cultural thrust behind
David's original painting was yet another copyist's impersonation: the at-
tempt of the French Enlightenment to emulate the classical age of Greece
and Rome. Later, ironically, David lived on to serve a similar function as the
grand artist of the French Revolution when it—renouncing the Roman
Readings 107

Empire as an undemocratic model—merely substituted another

impersonation, emulating the Roman Republic.

The fact that Socrates is Rabeeno's subject casts an ironic light on Ozick's
ground theme of pagan enticement, which has shifted its ground from the
erotic to the intellectual not through any decline in Puttermesser's libido but
because of the weakness of the postmodern male.20 In this novella about
imposture, a wry mimickry of Death in Venice seems to unfold, with the role
of Aschenbach given over to the younger man who comes unglued at the
prospect of sexual nexus. (In the mid-1950s, Ozick had urged Death in
Venice upon her friend Alfred Chester, who wrote back to her, she says,
"exalted. It was, he said, among the great works of literature.")21
Romantically ensconced above the Grand Canal, the youthful bridegroom
has eyes with "lids as raw and bloody as meat, stretched apart like an
animal's freshly slaughtered throat. . . . The eyeballs had rolled off under
the skin."

Even Mann's unhealthy atmosphere infects George Eliot's Venice—"The

bitter, putrid wind, the drains, the polluted canal . . ." (69). Eliot herself
initially appears rejuvenated by the May-December honeymoon—"It all at
once struck her that, with her pleasant figure and loosened hair, she had, in
the looking-glass, the sweetness of a bride of twenty-two: she did not feel
old at all." Unfortunately her groom's potency fell off with his clothing: "He
had discarded his cravat—it was a thick serpent on the floor" (68).
Meanwhile, as in Mann, a "raucous party" happens by with the gondoliers
releasing paganlike "blasts of laughter,. . . and singing, and this time a
tremulous guitar" (69). Though her death did not occur in Venice, George
Eliot's demise a few months after the honeymoon fiasco seems comparable
to that of Mann's pathetic victim of Eros-out-of-season.

In their total effect, the Puttermesser stories accomplish for Cynthia

Ozick something comparable to what the Rabbit novels have done for John
Updike, permitting the author to respond to personal and social change
over a long-term period. The affinity for alliteration in Rabbit, Run (Redux,
At Rest, etc.) and "Puttermesser Paired" hints at a deliberate echo, but there
is more to it than that. Near contemporaries, the two writers began their
careers at nearly the same time, espousing a curiously similar cultural focus,
with Updike's modern/Greek synthesis in The Centaur (1962) giving Ozick
a terrific case of "Writer's Envy" midway through her fling with the pagan
gods in Trust (1966).22 Their obvious differences—man/woman, Christian/
Jew, suburbanite/New Yorker—produce in this case a pleasant sense of
complementarity as opposed to the often embittered "differance" of race/
class/gender theory. ("I love John Updike" was Ozick's opening line of her
review of Bech, AA 114.) With Puttermesser now nearing retirement age,
108 Readings

perhaps we can look forward to a "Ruth at Rest" segment in the midterm

future, hopefully of a more benign character than Rabbit's pathetic exit
from the Updike tetralogy.

"At Fumicaro"
Levitation (1982) appeared to unblock a fresh stream of creativity for
Ozick during the 1980s, as she followed that book with two novels, The
Cannibal Galaxy (1983) and The Messiah of Stockholm (1987), the
novella "The Shawl" (1983, 1989), and two essay collections, Art & Ardor
(1983) and Metaphor & Memory (1989). Before we pass on to those works
in subsequent chapters, however, one other work of the 1980s deserves a
brief commentary, partly for its unique character among Ozick's writings.

In the New Yorker of 6 August 1984, Cynthia Ozick published a novella,

"At Fumicaro," that tried a hitherto unattempted narrative strategy. Going
beyond Trust, with its narrator's mutedly Gentile sensibility, "At Fumicaro"
posits an avidly Christian central character, so devoutly Roman Catholic as
to have "few Protestant and no Jewish friends" (32), and so bent on
Christ-like sacrifice that he marries his three-months-pregnant peasant
chambermaid three days after meeting her. (More subtly, however, by this
marriage he reenacts Joseph Brill's avoidance, in The Cannibal Galaxy, of
union with an intellectually equal female.) The story is also unique in having
no Jewish characters, apart from passing mention of a priest named
Father Robin ("Ne Rabinowitz"), as though to belie thereby its setting in the
Italy of the Mussolini-Hitler prewar alliance. In short, she attempted to
bring off an act of cultural impersonation such as she castigated Updike for
undertaking in his Bech novels—an act that she insisted could not succeed
beyond the strict limits of light satire.

Possibly her satire on the Catholic tradition is light enough to touch an

occasional nerve without stirring resentment. Her protagonist, Frank
Castle, has a name that evokes the medieval past of the Church without
specifying the Crusader/Inquisition horrors that drove Feingold mad in
"Levitation." Attending a conference entitled "The Church and How It Is
Known" (presumably omitting how Jews have known it), Castle should
be well pleased with the social climate of the affair, directed as it is by an
American whose name is allegorically WASPish—"Mr. Wellborn." And the
religious conference itself is broadly satirized, with topics ranging from the
imperative of sexual purity (an idea that further inflames Castle's lust for
his teenage sex partner) to varieties of terminal dullness ("The Dioceses of
Savannah and Denver Compared"; "Parish or Perish").

Behind this pseudo-Catholic facade, however, familiar outlines of the old

Readings 109

pagan enticement soon appear, transposing Ozick's Pan versus Moses theme
into Pan versus Christ. A telling sign is the response of Castle's audience to
his paper depicting the reality of evil as the "corridor to Christ." By the time
he finishes, his listeners—including the priests—have drifted outdoors in
pursuit of their true religion, the worship of nature. With its majestic vista
overlooking Lake Como—and beyond it, "like distant ice-cream cones, the
Alps"—the village of Fumicaro can obliterate at a glance the two Christian
millennia since the gods of nature possessed this land: "Glorious disc of a
lake! . . . It summoned eternally. The bliss of its flat sun-shot surface. . . ."
We are reminded that Frank's name-saint—and San Francesco is an
important reference in this story—was a near-heretical figure for his
immersion in nature. (The other saint that Ozick cites importantly,
Augustine, also suits her neopagan theme because of his illicit fathering of
a son named Deodatus—"Given by God").23

As always, the essence of the pagan enticement is illicit sex, which here
binds the three main characters in an odd triad. The main character, Frank
Castle, is reminiscent of the Pagan Rabbi in his sudden lapse from Catholic
monasticism—his initial intention "to be strong and transcendent above the
body"—to ardent erotic carnality. The Tilbeck figure of the tale is another
conference participant whose name, Percy Nightingale, bears the pantheistic
overtones associated with two Romantic poets. With—belying his name—
"the pouncing syllables of a hawk," Nightingale evokes the image of sexual
predation both in his habit of appearing minus his trousers and in his
rabbitlike appearance, which is suspiciously like that of Updike's favorite
practitioner of free love: "his eyes, blue overrinsed to transparency, were
humps in a face flat as zinc.. . . His shirt was white, his [naked] thighs were
white, his shoes the same." A defender of (the prewar) Hitler—"At least he
holds off against the Commies"—Nightingale clearly favors Nazi-Fascist
culture, a truly neopagan resurgency, over the Christian heritage that he
nominally serves. To the charge that "you are forgetting Christ" Nightingale
replies: "Oh Jesus God. I never forget Christ. Why else would I end up in
this goddam shack in this godforsaken country? Maybe the Fascists'll make
something out of these Wops yet. Put some spine in 'em."

If Nightingale is a more engaging version of the evangelist in "Envy; or,

Yiddish in America"—the Christian as intellectual huckster—the third mem-
ber of the triad is the serious exponent of pagan affinities. Repeatedly crying
"No belief! No belief!" she has compelling reason for her renunciation of
the Christian ethos that, in this seat of Catholic power, failed to protect her
from incestuous rape; and compelling reason, also, to doubt the Christian
God Who failed to forestall the pregnancy that resulted from her forced
sexual encounter. Initially, the girl's words touch a secret nerve in Frank
110 Readings

Castle's religious psychology, "because every day of his life he had had to
make this same pilgrimage to belief all over again, starting out each dawn
with the hard crow's call of no belief." But soon he sees her as a divinely
ordained subject of conversion (his academic specialty), which he can ac-
complish by marrying her and thus restoring her capacity for Christian
belief: "He had, he saw, been led to Fumicaro . . . for the explicit salvation
of one needful soul."

Predictably, the needful soul turns out to be his own, and it is his fiancee
who meets the need by bringing him to her ancient but vital rites of idolatry.
Viviana's favorite idol—a statue of San Francesco—has a pedigree of
probable classical vintage: "The torso had crumbled. It hardly looked holy.
. . . [It] might have been as old as a hundred years, or a thousand; two
thousand. Only an archeologist could say." It does not require an
archeologist, however, to link this crumbling graven image with two
authentic icons of the Christian faith, Leonardo's Last Supper and the Pieta,
which are badly deteriorating—and further corrupted by renovators—when
Castle goes to view them.

In this setting of Fascist Italy, that physical deterioration bears obvious

symbolic implications for Frank Castle. They begin with the irrelevance of
the religious conference at Fumicaro, with its high-minded and
unlistened-to papers on Churchly idealism. For all his crude vulgarity,
Nightingale is right to wonder why "anyone shows up for these things," and
Castle himself comes to think of its participants as fostering "a
sham—mountebanks all." But the unreality of Christian idealism leaves
Christian idolatry exposed more clearly as something real and terrifying. As
figured in a peasant girl, Viviana, idolatry may seem little more than a
harmless throwback to primitive times: "She gave God a home
everywhere—in old Roman tubs, in painted wooden dolls: it did not
matter. Sticks and stones." But Frank Castle's encounter with a lifesize
crucifix—"a medieval man of wood"— makes him wonder about the
cruelty behind the central icon of the Christian religion. "Red paint, dry
for seven centuries, spilled from the nail holes," he muses, moving him to
"reflect on their [the nails'] cruelty—a religion with a human corpse at the
center, what could that mean?"

At best, what the corpse at the center will mean is an otherworldly

fixation contrary to the L'Chaim! principle. At worst, the corpse at the
center prophesies what idolatry always predicates in Ozick's writing: a
bloody lapse into the inhuman, the uncivilized, the ungodly. Immediately
following this paragraph about the religion with a corpse at its center, Ozick
portrays a sudden appearance of Fascist propaganda: "In the streets there
were all at once flags, and everywhere big cloth posters of II Duce flapping
on the sides of buildings." During the next half decade, the new idolatry
Readings 1ll

would claim fifty million dead, including the six million Jews. Ozick's
excursion into a Catholic/Christian consciousness thereby effects in the end
a connection to Jewish history: fresh blood flowing from those medieval nails.
Because "At Fumicaro" is an excerpt from a novel-in-progress, Ozick has
recently stated misgivings about its potential for misleading her readers. In
the finished novel, she says, Frank Castle will turn out to be a converted
Jew, and his child will bear the brunt of the theme, which will question how
a child of mixed parentage handles the contradictions of Jewish-Christian
ancestry. As it happens, several years after publishing "At Fumicaro," Ozick
developed a close relationship with just such a young person, an extremely
bright and engaging thirtyish daughter of a German-Jewish father and
German-Catholic mother. Whether the novel will trace the life pattern of
this person (who as an adult chose to change from Catholic to Jew) remains
to be seen, but it seems plausible that the young woman's story may have
affected Ozick's original plans for "At Fumicaro." The completed book, if
and when it appears, figures to extend Ozick's range into a new and very
important permutation of her master theme, the quandaries of Jewish
identity. Meanwhile, Ozick's exposition of that theme in her three novels of
the 1980s will complete our set of readings.

The Cannibal Galaxy: Curriculum Duel

There is no Jew alive today who is not also resonantly Greek.

"Bialik's Hint"

In approaching The Cannibal Galaxy, we shall begin with the standard

formulation that Western civilization has a Greek mind, a Roman body, and
a Jewish soul.24 As propagated by the majority culture in Europe and the
Americas, this formulation generally accredits both the civilization as it now
stands and its three ancient tributaries for their admirable achievements.
Away back in her first novel, however, Cynthia Ozick was
writing—according to her later recollection—out of a violent hatred of the
whole of Western civilization: "all of it."25 The reason for this hatred is of
course "Jewish history," in so far as that history comprises a record of
interaction between Jews and Gentiles.

From the perspective of Jewish history, the Greek mind and Roman body
have had little relevance to the Jewish soul. Matthew Arnold to the contrary,
in Ozick's view Hellenism and Hebraism have more typically proved incom-
patible adversaries than complementary pillars of modern culture. With
112 Readings

respect to Ozick's writing, the Greek mind presents itself mainly by way of
subverting the Law and the Prophets in Trust, The Pagan Rabbi,
"Usurpation (Other People's Stories)" in Bloodshed, and the
Puttermesser-Xanthippe episodes of Levitation. Hellenic-Hebraic
incompatibility does not suffice, however, as grounds for the hatred to
which Ozick confesses. It is the third part of the Jewish/Greek/Roman triad
that must claim this distinction: the Roman body which has presented
something more serious than enticement and subversion for Judaic culture
to contend with. From the Emperor Titus through the Inquisition, from the
pogroms to the Holocaust, the "Roman body" of Western
civilization—that is, the expanse of Europe bequeathed by Rome to
Christendom—has repeatedly undertaken the physical annihilation of the
Jewish people and their culture. This fact is the groundwork of The
Cannibal Galaxy; and Principal Brill's failure to acknowledge it contributes
largely to the failure of his experiment in Jewish/Western education.

This is not to deny the role of mediocrity in Brill's failure. The sign of
mediocrity—"you stopped too soon"—applies to many of Brill's actions,
most notably those involving his relationship with Hester Brill's apparently
unremarkable daughter Beulah. But his most egregious instance of stopping
too soon is his excision from the Dual Curriculum of the Jewish history
which he himself lived through in Vichy France, suffering the loss of his
parents and several siblings as well as traumatic concealment in a convent
basement and a farmer's hayloft. Because he falsifies both Jewish history
and Western civilization by this excision of truth, his Dual Curriculum
cannot effectively sustain Jewish identity, which is thereby subject to the
two leading implications of the book's title: the Judenrein effects of the
Holocaust in Europe (a continent that she considers "one vast Jewish
graveyard");26 and the likelihood of assimilation in America.

Ironically, Principal Brill persists in his autolobotomy concerning Jewish

history even though his dwelling place throughout his career as principal (a
converted hayloft) is a daily reminder of his Holocaust experience—as is the
stable downstairs through which he must pass, a virtual replica of the
convent basement in which he was hidden. Those two hiding places repre-
sent a sort of Dual Curriculum in themselves, revealing the two extremes by
which Europe has threatened for centuries to extinguish the Jewish heritage.
Brill's experience of the hayloft, where he was starved and frozen and at one
point clubbed senseless by his host farmer (for bathing himself in the nearby
brook), typifies Jewish life vis-a-vis the lower classes of Europe since the
Dark Ages, particularly in the shtetls of Eastern Europe. The hayloft episode
stands for the agony of Jewish survival through a millennium of persecution
by peasants, soldiers, and urban mobs who killed, burned, and ghettoized
Readings . 113

Jews in random spasms of cruelty and ignorance. The animal imagery of the
episode—Brill sleeping between two cows for warmth, defecating "side by
side with oxen," his "palms as hard and dented as goat horns," he himself
"more and more turning into a beast of the field," having lost his will to
read (32, 33)—underscores the thinness of "civilization" on this side of
Europe.

The convent basement represents the opposite extreme of Europe: the

best fruit—within the strictures of the Holocaust years—of Western and
Christian civilization. The brave, kindly nuns who risk their own lives to
protect Brill are not merely preferable to the peasant farmer; without irony
we may say that they exemplify the supreme Christian values of
humanitarian love, sacrifice, and fidelity. Moreover, the basement itself,
though it is dark and confined, contrasts with the hayloft by nourishing the
life of the mind after the fashion of Europe's grand intellectual tradition.
Here Brill enters the exaltation of high learning while devouring the old
priest's superb library. It is true that Brill's monastic regimen requires him to
shut off the radio, an act that insulates him from the ranting against Jews
broadcast throughout Nazified Europe, but that seems a small price to pay
for what he imbibes of traditional Europe in his hideout. (This gesture,
however, portends his later excision of the Holocaust from his Dual
Curriculum.) In his involuntary cloister Brill develops a passion for
certain Enlightenment writers and their Romantic-modern successors:
Corneille, Racine, Rousseau, Heine, Proust, and the mysterious Edmond
Fleg.

Like the kindly nuns, the French priest who owned these books exem-
plified Christianity at its best—"he had had a dangerous reputation for
liberalism" (20)—but with the added grace of a probing, independent intel-
lect. When, gradually, Brill realizes "that the old priest had loved thought
more than Jesus" (21), he recognizes a Gentile version of the Jewish mind, a
judgment borne out by the priest's partiality for an obscure Jewish writer
named Edmond Fleg (originally Edmond Flegenheimer, 22). It is through
the writings of Fleg that Brill becomes enthralled to the Dual Curriculum,
for it is Fleg who formulates for Brill the synthesis between Jewish and
European cultures. In his books about the Judeo-Christian tradition—Jesus,
raconte par le Juif Errant (Jesus, as told by the Wandering Jew), Le Juif de
Pape (The Pope's Jew), L'Enfant Prophete (The Prophesied Child, 21-22)—
Fleg has accomplished a fusion that the old priest, in a marginal comment,
found irresistible. (The priest's statement incidentally reflects a view that
Cynthia Ozick has often stated in her own right about Western civilization
at large—in her oral interview with Kay Bonetti, for example, recorded in
April 1986 by the American Audio Prose Library.) This is the priest's comment:
114 Readings

The Israelitish divinely unifying principle and the Israelitish ethical inspiration
are the foundations of our French genius. . . . [Edmond Fleg] harmonizes the
rosette of the Legion d'Honneur in his lapel with the frontlets of the Covenant
on his brow. (22)

From Fleg's example Brill derives his vision of his life's mission: "The fusion
of scholarly Europe and burnished Jerusalem. . . . Corneille and Racine set
beside Jonah and Koheleth. . . . the civilization that invented the telescope
side by side with the civilization that invented conscience—astronomers and
God-praisers uniting in a majestic dream of peace" (27).

In time, the brutality of the hayloft episode cancels Europe from Brill's
dream; afterward, "[he] never once meditated on the intellectual union of
Paris and Jerusalem" (34). Dreaming instead "of razing Paris to the ground"
(34), he has learned the lesson of the Holocaust—"Europe the cannibal
galaxy. Edmond Fleg's Parisian Jerusalem a smoky ruin. He saw how France
was Egypt" (83). In taking his dream to America, however, Brill fails to
absorb the lesson from the other Europe, the high civilization of Christian
goodness and intellectual achievement experienced by him in the nuns'
cellar. That lesson is the danger that the majority culture, in its most
appealing dress, will cannibalize the Judaic heritage through assimilation.
The transmitter of enlightenment in this case is not Edmond Fleg but the
fifteen-year-old girl who discovers Brill in the basement and who turns out
to be another Jewish refugee in hiding.

This girl epitomizes both meanings of the book's title: assimilatio n and
Holocaust. By Nazi calculation there is no question that she is a Jew, and the
fact that she is in hiding confirms beyond question Brill's repeated remark
that "You're a Jew" (29). But though she would certainly have died in the
Holocaust were it not for the grace of the nuns who shelter her, she insists
that she is not a Jew but a third-generation Catholic. ("My grandfather on
my father's side was the first," 29). The girl's name, Renee, clearly suggests
the assimilationist status in which thousands of Jews expected to find refuge
from persecution; her reply to being called a Jew—"I don't care. I'm not
afraid" (30)—likewise duplicates the tragically misplaced confidence of
those countless victims of the Cannibal Galaxy.

It is not Nazis but the kindly, courageous nuns who disclose the great
danger that Renee's assimilationist experience engenders:

"Is she a Jew?" [Brill asks the nun] "She is of the same family as Our
Lord." "She said she's a third-generation Catholic."
Readings . 115

"She is already beautiful in the faith. She wishes to be as we are, and we

thank Our Lord for the gift of His blood through His seed of the flesh.
Monsieur Brill, be calm." (31)

Even the girl's punishment for sneaking into the basement discloses this
more benign form of the Cannibal Galaxy at work. Her translation of Julius
Caesar into English is a bridge from the classical past of Western civilization
to its imminent future, with no niche provided for the Judaic heritage other
than whatever a Catholic education might make of it.

Brill's education is of course the main subject of Ozick's narrative, and his
departure from the convent in a nun's habit implies the cultural overlay that
might have superseded his Jewish heritage had he remained subject to the
good sisters' teachings like Renee of the "born again" nomenclature. The
subsequent hayloft episode, by proving a timely reminder of the Europe that
most Jews have immemorially had to cope with, effectively relieves Brill of
any delusions he might have nourished about Christian goodness as a basis
for future Jewish life in Europe. Christian evangelism, however, even in so
godly a countenance as that of the good nuns, is never for Brill the most
dangerous attraction of non-Holocaust Europe. That distinction goes
instead to the pagan enticement of idolatry—an infallible sign in Ozick's
work of the cannibal propensities in any civilization.

During his upbringing in Paris, preeminently Europe's City of Light and

of the Enlightenment, Brill's education veered off early toward the pagan
enticement in a minor emanation of the book's title. The Dual Curriculum
that he frames in the convent basement had its long foreground in these
Paris years, in the tension between Brill's life as an immigrant Jew and the
pleasure he experienced while "drinking in Western Civilization at the Uni-
versity" (11). Originally there was no tension, but rather gratitude toward
Paris for its Vieille du Temple boulevard: "such a noble name, such rever-
ence for the pieties and principles of an ancient people—a street called after
the overrun and rubbled lost Temple of Jerusalem!" (7). But when told by a
classmate about Jonathan le Juif, a medieval violator of the Eucharist who
brought punishment on all the Jews of Paris, Brill realized that "he lived in a
place where there had once been a pogrom no different from the pogrom in
the savage Czarist village his parents had fled" (7). Even so, despite the role
of the Eucharist (or Host) in this tale of medieval cruelty, the Jewish youth
was torn in two by its blandishments: "After that Joseph kept secret from his
father and from Rabbi Pult everything he was savoring about damsels and
chivalry and—he hardly let his eyes pluck at the words—the Holy Grail.
116 Readings

They would have judged these enchantments and glorious histories to be

frivolity, idolatry" (7).

From this time forward, the battle goes badly for the Jewish component
of Brill's personal Dual Curriculum. On the Jewish side are the constraints
of his father's fish market, situated among "fruit hawkers and drygoods
peddlers, vegetable carts and street criers, all in the dialects of the immi-
grants from Kiev and Minsk and Lithuania" (6). (Brill's ancestral ties to
Minsk—also Ozick's ancestral city—suggest not only the pogroms that
drove his parents to Paris but also the geographic span of the coming
Holocaust, from France across Germany and Poland to deep inside Euro-
pean Russia.) So Brill's foremost concern is to conceal the signs of his
origins: "The University inspired him to alter his diction. . . . It was humili-
ating to be an immigrant's child and fill one's mouth with the wrong noise.
Every night Joseph scrubbed the fish smell off his hands with an abrasive
soap that skinned his knuckles mercilessly" (12). This class snobbery, so
typical of Ozick's "Europe," would contribute later to Brill's ruin, bringing
his "scheme of learning luminous enough for a royal prince or princess" to
an incongruous end: "Instead he was educating commoners, weeds, the
children of plumbers" (57).

The formal education of Joseph Brill proceeds in a fashion analogous to

these surface manners of speech and grooming. Despite Rabbi Pult's
teachings from Hillel and Akiva—Enlightenment figures eighteen centuries
ahead of their time, he tells Joseph (7)—it is Gentile idolatry that takes the
youth's imagination, particularly as exhibited in the museum just two blocks
away from the Vieille du Temple. Here the stone images, set in "a secret
flowery courtyard emblazoned with statuary" (8), merely epitomize the true
meaning of idolatry: the worship of anything instead of God. The chief
instance of idolatry by this standard is a woman of the French
Enlightenment period, Madame de Sevigne, whose portrait hangs in the
museum (which was once her home) and whose daughter comprised the
idolatrous object: "she loved her daughter obsessively, pathologically, so
much so that she spent her life penning her longing in letter after letter" (10).
For Joseph, the enticement of her idolatry lies in the correlation between art
and passion. The mother's "unreasonable passion for her undistinguished
daughter had turned the mother's prose into high culture and historic
treasure," creating "the purest and most perfect French hitherto written in
the land," which in turn "had molded the literature of France" (10-11).

From Brill's (and Ozick's) point of view, Madame de Sevigne's grand

achievement—converting passion into art—has in time become the hall-
mark of the Gentile culture that entices him, a culture that could go under
the name of European modernism. Aesthetics, a Greek legacy, prevails over
Readings 117

ethics, the Jewish legacy, in this view of the Dual Curriculum. Brill's tutor in
the Aesthetics of European Modernism is Claude, his supersophisticated
college friend and mentor. "Claude was an aesthete," we are told, whose
"worship of beautiful things and beautiful words" soon enlists Brill's ardent
devotion (12, 14).

Claude's impeccable taste shortly throws open to Brill the art works of
the Louvre, the writings of modern neopagans (Pierre Louys' Aphrodite and
Paul Valery's response to "Leonardo's naked sketches," 13), and a personal
encounter with Cynthia Ozick's favorite modern neopagan, E. M. Forster,
who reads to a group of young intimates from his secret homosexual novel
Maurice (14-15). Although Ozick had once immersed herself in Forster,
reading The Longest Journey every year and drawing upon his "Greeky
heroes" for her portrayal of Tilbeck in Trust (Ltr 1/14/82), she later found
him ethically deficient (for preferring "situational ethics" to the universal
decrees of the Covenant) and intellectually conflicted (for worshiping
Demeter, the goddess of fertility, while affecting a defense of homosexuality.
In The Cannibal Galaxy Forster associates Demeter with Brill's future,
15).27

Though nearly submerged by these neopagan aesthetic temptations, the

Jewish half of Brill's personal curriculum at last makes a comeback of sorts
when Claude moves too strongly toward homosexual seduction. His sexual
kiss—"not as two bold friends kiss"—awakens the old Jewish revulsion: "it
frightened him terribly; it made him think of Leviticus" (15). It also makes
him question somewhat the whole concept of the Enlightenment, whose
chief luminary, Voltaire, "could not be trusted; even Voltaire had contempt
for Leviticus" (15). And most important, the incident soon reveals what the
primacy of aesthetics over ethics really implies about European modernism
in the last prewar decade:

After that he kept away from Claude. Claude was scornful, and called him
Dreyfus, and inveigled his friends into calling him Dreyfus too. Joseph was
again isolated. . . . Reluctantly, Joseph brought this news to Rabbi Pult . . .
[who said:] "Joseph, the Enlightenment engendered a new slogan: 'There is no
God, and the Jews killed him.' Joseph, this is the legacy of your Enlighten-
ment." So Joseph abandoned literature and history, the side of the mind that
. . . was like a cave teeming with bestial forms; he looked for a place without a
taint. He . . . thought of the stars. (16)

Herewith, Joseph Brill has reached a moment of unpleasant awareness

familiar to other Ozick protagonists. Reminiscent of what happened to
Lushinski in "A Mercenary" ("Morris had called him Jew") and
Tchernikhovsky in "Usurpation" (called "kike" by the Canaanite idols he
had begun to worship), Brill's strong effort to assimilate has met bedrock
rejection.
118 Readings

In the end the goys call him Jew: "He had felt an unknowable warmth and
feared it. It had betrayed him and called him Dreyfus" (16). Rather than
revert to the Jewish ethos, however, Brill tries to pursue his Dual Curricu-
lum in a new direction. Being "sick of human adventure," he will give up the
Aesthetics of Western Civilization in favor of its science: "He . . . set out to
learn the cold, cold skies" (16). And he will take his vision to a New World
untainted by blood and ash of pogrom and Holocaust—a place, that is to
say, without "Jewish history."

The new place, however, reminds him on every side of Jewish history, not
only via the hayloft where his school's benefactress insists he must live, but
in the very shape of the school buildings: "The Edmond Fleg Primary School
had the forthright design of a freight train on the move: three hapless
boxcars" (17). The lake by which the school sits, likewise, is "an inside
ocean" reminiscent of "the Mediterranean, Europe's old puddle" (17); and
even the chairs bequeathed to the school by the defunctive factory bear
disturbingly idol-like imagery: legs, arms, a gigantic hand in which to sit, and
a replica of a globe topped by a cross. Perhaps America is, as Hawthorne
might have phrased it, the Old World yet, at least in so far as it has inherited
Western civilization. But rather than acknowledge the Jewish history implicit
in these reminders, Principal Brill turns away from this vital subject just as
he earlier turned away from "human adventure" so as to study the "cold,
cold stars."

As a result, the Jewish component of his Dual Curriculum will once again
fall victim to the Gentile enticement, with no Renee or hayloft episode to
correct the balance in the American Eden. Absent the tough-mindedness of
Jewish history, Brill's Dual Curriculum is a bowl of mush. 28 Instead of
creating "a children's Sorbonne dense with Hebrew melodies" (36), Brill
lowers himself to the American level of mediocrity, sanitizing both halves of
his Dual Curriculum with his tale of Two Tantes:

"Two aunties nurtured me," he often explained, "my Torah TANTE and my
Paris TANTE, each the heiress of an ancient line." And then he would weave the
"atmosphere" of each, the Talmud auntie analytical, exegetical, an extraordin-
ary cogitator . . . at the same time a softie, merciful, her bundles tumbling and
tears often in her eyes; the Paris auntie, though herself very old, nevertheless
aeons younger than the Talmud auntie, and rather more callous, a bit cold, . . .
her gaze an ascent of gargoyled spires and her lips overflowing with Bau-
delaire. "From these two TANTES," he would say (using the French intonation)
. . . "I derived my inspiration for the Dual Curriculum." (61-62)

The Paris auntie was "rather more callous" than the Talmud auntie, "a bit
cold." So much for the Inquisition, the pogroms, the Holocaust, and Brill's
Readings 119

life in the hayloft and basement of Western civilization. He does not tell
them—his audience of students' mothers—about Edmond Fleg, nor about
the nuns, nor about his "hidden life" (62). To cite the book's major leitmotif,
he "stopped too soon" (63). Instead he retreats into his astronomer's per-
sona ("I am still in pursuit of the stars," 62), thereby turning his school's
motto, Ad Astra, into a slogan of evasion.

The central relationship of the novel is Brill's encounter with the one
person who sees through his evasion, Hester Lilt, a European intellectual of
his own age, temper, and refugee background. Among the multiple pur-
poses served by this character, Ozick uses Hester Lilt to satirize two
contrasting adversaries of American feminism. On one side, Hester's cool
dispassion about her daughter mocks the maternal frenzies of the "Jewish
mother" syndrome, evident in virtually all the mothers Brill deals with.
"Encirclement, preservation, defense, protection. . . . That was why they
lived, and how: to make a roiling moat around their offspring" (64). On the
other side, Hester's absolute self-reliance—her state of manless emotional
and intellectual independence—unsettles Principal Brill's easy assumption
of male superiority. Up to now, he had been the mothers' "ruler; . . . their
god; their gleaming seated Buddha" (40), but Hester is so different that "it
was hard for him to think of her as a woman" (50). With her "mannish
signature," her "man's voice: full and low," and her discomfiting manner of
"speaking so directly" to him (51), Hester embodies the feminist truism that
equality with men requires a woman to adopt the male code of manners.

Hester's most crucial role, however, relates not to feminism but to

parenting, and in this respect the judgment upon Hester is a mixed one. To
her credit, perhaps, her daughter does in the end—possibly in emulation of
the totally self-reliant mother—develop her innate genius so as to become
an internationally celebrated, prize-winning painter. Or possibly this
success occurred in spite of Hester's failure as a mother, which imposed a
scandalous waste of hope and youth on the hapless child by giving her over
to Principal Brill's unworthy institution. Certainly the endless humiliation
and sense of inferiority bred into the child under Brill's tutelage call to mind
the "Old School Hurts" so vividly recounted in Ozick's own reminiscences
of Public School 71.29 (In her audiotape interview with Kay Bonetti, Ozick
indicated her judgment that Hester had failed her daughter by putting her
through such a miserable grade school experience.)

The key issue, in any case, is Principal Brill's "parenting" of his charges,
particularly with respect to this one and only wunderkind to have passed
through his domain of power. Beulah's lack of a biological father makes
Brill's "fathering" all the more potentially significant, both with regard to
transmitting the Judaic tradition to the child (a prime obligation of any
120 Readings

Jewish father) and with respect to any young artist's need for an appropriate
patronlike figure. With respect to transmitting the Judaic tradition, Brill
shuffles his eighth-grade teachers so as to make Rabbi Sheskin Beulah's
instructor, a man "who appeared to believe in sacred texts" and seemed
capable of "turning Scripture into story." But Sheskin's story, instead of
inculcating ethical conscience, purveys mere entertainment—"Old King
David was dying. He was dying in this very room" (97-98). Among the
doodles with which Sheskin's class escapes its boredom—"balloons, eggs,
dogs' ears, women's lips and breasts"—Brill notices something different
about Beulah's drawing, a reminder of the subject matter he has excised
from Jewish history: "Brill glimpsed a drawing of a house. . . . He looked
again: the whole house was on fire, and the trees all around it, even the sky
behind—a conflagration" (97-98).

Beulah's other fathering need, for an adult male's inspiration and confi-
dence in her budding talent, also elicits an inadequate response on Brill's
part. Assuring her that "you are not a genius, and neither am I," he centers
her attention on the three Jewish faces pictured on his wall—Freud,
Spinoza, and Einstein. Although they are indeed figures of genius, "very
intelligent men [who] never stopped too soon" (85), Brill himself does stop
too soon by failing to include any artists or women among his exemplary
models. The chauvinist purpose of this gesture, moreover, becomes
inescapable when he stations those three male faces against the "would-be
gynecocracy" (94) of hostile mothers in his office.

To suit Beulah's needs, Hester is a better educator than Brill not only as a
model of feminist freedom but also in her capacity for the arts. Her
professional status as an "imagistic linguistic logician" (47), for example,
occasions an Ozick-style definition of the image: "Every image, she said,
has its logic: every story, every tale, every metaphor . . . is inhabited by a
language of just deserts" (88). And it is Hester's lecture at midpoint in the
novel that disseminates the book's most crucial images: the fox whom the
four rabbis saw running across the ruined Temple; the laughter of Akiva, the
rabbi who inferred the Temple's resurrection from seeing the fox while the
others wept over its ruin; and the cannibal galaxy metaphor (67-70). ("The
Laughter of Akiva" was the title Ozick used for the portion of this book she
published in the New Yorker of 10 November 1980.)

From her fables of Akiva and the fox, Hester derives the book's chief
motif of failure: "we have stopped too soon" (69). Because her lecture
concerns "the hoax of pedagogy" ("The hoax is when the pedagogue stops
too soon," 66,68), there is a special irony in Brill's pedantic response to her
imagery: "From all these—the bee, the little fox, the laughter of Akiva,
especially the cannibal galaxy—Brill did not feel estranged. He suspected, in
Readings 121

fact, that the lecturer's familiarity with the midrash was secondhand, and
not out of the original text or tongue" (70). But he is "estranged" from
Hester's primal meaning, that her daughter has been victimized by Brill's
low estimate of her. His error, based on "the judgment from early
performance" that victimized Ozick's own childhood, was Hester's central
instance of "the hoax of pedagogy" (66). Her chief contribution to her
child's well-being occurs after Beulah's miseducation at Brill's hands has
run its course, and the mother at last places her daughter in an environment
suitable for burgeoning young talent. So the narrative curve circles back to
Paris, City of Light, world mecca for painters, and site of Brill's education
in the Holocaust and the Aesthetics of European Modernism.

Because Paris signifies merely European aestheticism for his former

student, Beulah's success via Paris signifies bitter failure for Brill's grand
educational project. Although he had sold the rich benefactress on bringing
"a shadow of the Sorbonne into being in the middle of America" (36), Paris
in his memory was greatly removed from "the high muse of Europe she
meant to snare" (36). Instead of "the waters of Shiloh springing from the
head of Western Civilization" (36), what he had seen was how "fire and
steam had transformed the world" (23): Rabbi Pult's books turning to ash in
a bonfire, while "creatures like centaurs" roamed the streets with clubs and
rocks and his family were jammed like stockyard cattle in a sports stadium
awaiting their transport to a death camp. For Beulah to redeem her talent in
this place without knowledge of its Jewish history gives special meaning to
her mother's essay, "On Structure and Silence"—first read by Brill fifteen
years after Beulah brought it to his office. Too late (he stopped reading too
soon), Brill encounters its central idea, "Silence is not random but shaping"
(101), which describes the effect of his own silence in shaping the
de-Judaized art of Beulah Lilt.

Especially appalling is the postwar extirpation of Judaic culture even

within the tiny Jewish population that still lives in Paris. Brill's own sisters
deny Jewish history to the extent that they "resisted memory" and "would
not let him speak of loss" (133). Meanwhile, their sightseeing with Brill's
stepson Albert comprises a wholly de-Judaized list of tourist attractions—
the Eiffel Tower, the Bastille, Notre Dame, the Arc de Triomphe,
Montmartre, the Elysee Palace, Versailles (127). Worse yet are the vacuous
American pastimes that have taken root in this ancient center of high
culture: the circus and a Disney movie for Albert, a shopping spree for
Brill's wife, Iris, at "some really decent stores, the sort of places you'd
almost expect to see back home" (133).

The culmination of this judenrein effect occurs during Brill's visit to that
grand repository of Western civilization, the Louvre, where he glimpses the
122 Readings

fourteen-year-old Beulah Lilt going through the halls with her classmates to
gaze "with vivid eyes at old Greek wine jugs" (131). In these halls displaying
the artifacts of five millennia there will be no semblance of a Dual
Curriculum. Guarded at its entrance by the Winged Victory, the building's
classical galleries seem entirely given over to pagan antiquity, "as if there
had never been a Hebrew people, no Abraham or Joseph or Moses. Not a
trace of holy Israel" (131). Instead, Beulah's tour moves past "a glowing
torso of Apollo . . . a Spartan horseman . . . the Venus de Milo . . . Isis on a
throne of gold" (131). In the end the Jewish heritage disappears from
Beulah's mind as completely as holy Israel vanishes from sight among these
pagan idols. As a young artist interested only in "the colors, the glow, . . .
above all the forms of things" (156), she will make her mark as a disciple of
European modern aesthetics and neopaganism. Appropriately, she names
her career-making series of paintings after ancient Greek statuary, the
Caryatids (145). Beulah's credentials in European modern aesthetics are
approved and certified by none other than Brill's aging anti-Semitic
schoolmate Claude, who reappears now as a pseudo-British,
quasi-aristocratic critic to endorse the art work of the ex-Jewish expatriate
Beulah Lilt.

In Beulah's success—both the earliness of her breakthrough, as opposed

to Ozick's despairing decades of oblivion, and its triumph over "Old School
Hurts"—Cynthia Ozick's dream self is vindicated. Ozick's interview with
Elaine Kauvar makes the connection explicit. "The story of Beulah is me,
the sense of having been written off," she says; "I'm Beulah in school.
Absolutely, Beulah is P.S. 71 for me, there's no question about that." Ozick
likewise admits that the book's "protest against 'the prediction from earli-
ness'" embodies her "arguments with Freudian [deterministic] thought"
(389). Because of her conflicted concept of art, however, Beulah also repre-
sents Ozick's nightmare self, the de-Judaized art-for-art's-sake practitioner
she would likely have become if her own education had resembled Brill's
eviscerated curriculum. "I'm not Beulah at the end," she says, because

she repudiated the Jewish cultural side of her education. She said she forgot it,
and she escaped and ascended into the nimbus. She left obligation, the idea of
duty, perhaps. She left a sense of a moral civilization. She became an aesthete.
(Kauvar 381)

What remains for Brill's later years is the total de-Judaization of his own
family as the House of Brill gradually becomes altogether consumed by the
cannibal galaxy of Jewish-American assimilation. Although he "wore his
Yarmulke always" and took care to have his infant son circumcised (67,
136), on all sides the pagan incursion predominates. Brill's graduation
Readings 123

ceremonies feature songs about the Knights of the Round Table and the
March from Aida (118-19), his de-Judaized bride bears the unbiblical name
of a flower, Iris (sometimes confused with Daisy), his downstairs neighbors
are uproarious Greeks reminiscent of the Purses in Trust, and his
wunderkind son disdains things Jewish. Just as Beulah Lilt becomes a
totally Europeanized artist, so as to earn Claude's aestheticist approval,
Brill's son becomes a totally Americanized business student, fluent in
French but not Yiddish, and his stepson Albert abandons both Judaism and
America by moving to Canada.

The closing sentence of the novel, describing how "Beulah Lilt's language
assailed him endlessly, endlessly," focuses on a "flaming nimbus" that
"sometimes spread" out of the "calculated and enamel forms" of her art
work. It is a subliminal image, to be sure, and it would likely mean
different things to different observers; but the reason for Brill's fixation on
the flaming nimbus most plausibly relates to the Holocaust—that crucial
life experience which he has suppressed and denied through a lifetime. In
this respect, the scene compares with the end of "A Mercenary," where
Lushinski's simple act of smoking a cigarette evokes first the blue and white
colors of the Israeli flag, and then the Jewish self that he killed and buried
in Holocaust Poland.

For Brill the coup de grace to his life's work is his successor's renaming of
the school as the Lakeside Grade School—a fully Americanized and
de-Judaized construction. But the disappearance of Edmond Fleg's name
gives us one last instance of the "stopped too soon" motif. Although the
Holocaust galvanized Jewish identity around the world for people of
Ozick's generation, Jewish identity has also rested with equal weight on the
miracle engendered by the aftermath of the Holocaust, the restoration of
Israel. That motif is the other subject toward which Principal Brill
displays an indifference that proves fatal for his Dual Curriculum.
Decades before Gorchak changed the name of the Edmond Fleg School,
Brill had himself betrayed the name by failing to fully emulate Fleg's
example. When he had first read Fleg's work back in the nuns' cellar, he
had observed the final terminus of Fleg's odyssey as follows: "In a decade
or so Edmond Fleg, ne Flegenheimer, had gone from a skeptical playwright
and (Joseph imagined) stylish Parisian boulevardier to a Jew panting for
Jerusalem" (22). Those last five words, set off against Brill's other failure
to acknowledge Jewish history, summarize the full measure of Brill's
inadequacy. His grand experiment in Dual Education failed, at the last,
because with respect to both Israel and the Holocaust, he—in the book's
most significant instance of the theme—stopped too soon.
 124 Readings

The Messiah of Stockholm: Gift of the Magi

Oh, why can we not have a magic God like other peoples?

--"Usurpation"

In The Messiah of Stockholm Cynthia Ozick managed the unlikely feat of

synthesizing within one shadowy figure her three disparate master themes —
Jewish identity, the pagan enticement, and the dangerous efficacy of art. Her
agency for achieving this effect was the figure of Bruno Schulz, a Jewish
writer of magic stories who in 1942 was shot dead in the street of his Polish
village by a Nazi officer. In the style of a classic quest novel—one could cite
forebears from Don Quixote to Thomas Pynchon's V.—the main character
of this story, Lars Andemening (who believes he is Bruno Schulz's son),
hunts the lost masterpiece by Schulz called The Messiah. Because Schulz was
an actual historical figure, Ozick incidentally uses her opportunity to deliver
a sly critique of the postmodern "metafictional" approach to literature
which Philip Roth—to whom she dedicates this novel—brought to a
consummation a year earlier (1986) in The Counterlife. (Her dedication,
however, is also a tribute to Roth for getting Schulz published in English.)

The three main strands of her novel come into view very quickly, even
before we get to her opening sentence. Opposite the title page, the self-portrait
sketched by Schulz is a haunting image of this tragic-mysterious figure, a face
whose willful strength is at once evocative of both waste and triumph. Shot in
the street by an SS man when he ventured into a forbidden, "Aryan" section of
town, Schulz stares from this page like an icon of Miltonic prophecy from
Areopagitica: "Who kills a man kills a reasonable creature, . . . but a good
book is the precious life-blood of a master spirit, embalmed and treasured up
on purpose to a life beyond life." But yet, we cannot help but understand that
when Schulz was murdered, his book The Messiah met its un-Miltonic demise
as his co-victim of Jewish identity. Despite his Catholic fiancee and his
paganized fiction, written in Polish not Yiddish, the life and work of Bruno
Schulz were cut off in midcareer solely because he was a Jew.

The pagan enticement in this novel, which ramifies into manifestations

ranging from a fairy-tale format to the Messiah of the Gospels (Christianity
here being a pagan religion), also asserts its power before we reach the
opening sentence of the novel proper. Ozick's choice of an epigraph, cited
from Schulz's own The Street of Crocodiles, 310 brings this theme to the fore
with a Spinozan force reminiscent of The Pagan Rabbi:

My father never tired of glorifying this extraordinary element—matter. "There

is no dead matter," he taught us, "lifelessness is only a disguise behind
Readings . 125

which hide unknown forms of life. . . . The Demiurge was in possession of

important and interesting creative recipes. Thanks to them, he created a
multiplicity of species which renew themselves by their own devices. . . .
[Even] if classical methods of creation should prove inaccessible for evermore,
there still remain some illegal methods, an infinity of heretical and criminal
methods."31

Ozick has presented this Demiurge in many earlier guises: as Tilbeck

procreating "illegitimate issue" in Trust; as the dryad seductress of "The
Pagan Rabbi" and the Phoenician sea goddess in "The Dock-Witch"; as the
dai-mon of artistic fecundity in "Usurpation"; and as the idolatrous
imagination flouting the Second Commandment across the whole range of
her writings. In this novel the Demiurge ("Dr. Eklund") assumes the
sophisticated guise that we often see in a Henry James novel—the
duplicitous European who perpetrates a scheme of exploitation while
affecting the role of a confidant to the book's protagonist.

Besides Schulz's self-portrait and his paragraph from The Street of

Crocodiles, one further intervention detains the reader from Ozick's opening
sentence of The Messiah of Stockholm. This prefatory citation consists of
two brief lines from the popular Swedish writer Par Lagerkvist, which are
rendered both in Swedish and in English translation: "I am the star that
mirrors itself in you"; and "Your soul is my home. I have no other." In both of
these quotations, which together constitute an imagistic account of the
efficacy of art, the "I" and "you" stand in for the artist and audience
respectively. The latter statement—"Your soul is my home. I have no
other"—is a version of Milton's "life beyond life" that art makes possible
via the artist's mirror/ reader of the first statement. In Ozick's novel, Lars
Andemening is that ideal reader with respect to Bruno Schulz, having by his
obsession made himself Schulz's "son" in a deeper way than mere biological
paternity would have predicated. Behind Andemening, however, Cynthia
Ozick is the actual reader-conjurer of Schulz who uses her art to summon
his ghost from the Nazi killing field. Finally we, as Ozick's readers, in turn
perform the meta-fictional magic of "redeeming" (she favors that word)
both her art and Schulz's through our assumption of the mirroring
function.

It is a precept as old as Aristotle that conflict is the essence of drama, and

a precept as recent as Faulkner that the most meaningful form of conflict is
"the heart in conflict with itself," which is "the only thing worth writing
about" in Faulkner's Nobel formulation. For Ozick, the heart in conflict
traces back to her earliest formative years: to her love of fairy tales as a
girl—pagan, magical, forbidden, irresistible—versus her favorite writer in
the "Judaic" mode of nineteenth-century fiction, Henry James, a reality-
126 Readings

centered apostle of the ethical imagination. The most crucial Jamesian motif
in The Messiah of Stockholm is the format of a highbrow detective story,
like The Portrait of a Lady or The Wings of the Dove, in which the
protagonist-detective gradually sheds comforting illusions in favor of an
enhanced but tragically sordid perception of reality. The opening sentence
of The Messiah of Stockholm—now that we have finally reached it—is a
notable amalgam of the two voices. In an unmistakably Jamesian
style—seventy-two words that herd three "when" clauses toward a
periodic main statement—the sentence pits its subordinate clauses,
brimming with the world's vitality ("when the literary stewpot boils over,"
"when gossip . . . is most untamed and swarming"), against its main
statement: "[now] Lars Andemening could be found in bed, napping." That
final word, "napping," combines with the earlier "stewpot" to form the
dramatic crux of the work, indicating the counterpoint of opposites that
comprises the overall design of the novel. Throughout the book we can
measure Andemening's relation to the reality principle by his distance from
the stewpot, the daily three o'clock gathering point of his worldly-wise
peers in the book reviewing trade.

At the outset Lars's daily naps during the stewpot hour signify his total
withdrawal into his private domain of illusion. This would not be an Ozick
novel, however, if the "napping" signified mere illusion. The whole great
realm of imaginative creativity falls within its realm: the creation of art, of
value, of sustaining (if illusory) relationships, of a world more answerable to
the needs of the psyche than anything the external setting—the dark, cold
onset of a Stockholm winter—can emulate. Those needs are of course the
original reason for the existence of fairy tales, which on a higher level of
imagination evolved into myths like the concept of the Messiah. Given the
incompatibility between his interior life and the reality principle, Lars's
daily nap during the stewpot hour, along with the solitude of his late-night
work schedule and his refusal to have a telephone, is more a protective
tactic than a mind-dead hibernation—though it resembles hibernation in its
calendar span from November to early March (3).

Prior to his waking "in the kitchen of Sleeping Beauty's castle, when the
trance is broken and all the pots begin to boil again" (112), the dream life of
Lars Andemening is irradiated with the world's inherent passion and mean-
ing, much as in the epigraph from The Street of Crocodiles: "There is no
dead matter.... The range of these forms [of life] is infinite and their shades
and nuances limitless." Because he had "long ago thrown himself on the
altar of literature" (7), the pagan gods have rewarded him with their living
presence. His workplace, an ancient building in Stockholm's Gamla Stan
(Old City) that "hints at ancient festivities lasting till dawn" (10), seems
possessed by poltergeists—a place "subject to spectral mutterings, . .. growl-
Readings 127

ing, or . . . even whistling under their feet" (10). Nearby, in another "old,
old" building that seemed like "a benign dungeon, scalloped with monastic
arches," the Library of the Swedish Academy offered a rich repast of pagan
lore—"many-stanzaed Eddas," "old Norse twilights," the "cold gods with
their winking breastplates and their hot whims. Hammer of the terrible
Thor. Odin and Freya" (16). Even the churches disclose their pagan origins
as the twisting snowflakes give their steeples "the look of whirling Merlin
hats" (18).

At the center of this medieval township is the antique bookshop operated

by Heidi, the sole confidante of Lars and herself a creature out of a medieval
storybook—"a thick globular dwarf of a woman" (19) who looks "as if she
were a forest gnome" (20). Enhancing this effect is her display window,
given over chiefly to the pure theater of royalty in a quasi-fairy-tale mode:
"a formidable edition ... with color pictures of the Royal Family: the
wavy-haired King tall and fair and unperturbed, the two little Princesses
charming in a garden, the diffident little Prince in a sailor suit. . ., and the
shiveringly beautiful Queen" (19). And when Lars asks her help in finding
a tutor in Polish, Heidi produces a refugee "Princess," a "Radziwell
actually," to keep the quasi fairy tale going a little longer (26).

Like a Jamesian protagonist, then—like Isabel Archer with Madame Merle,

or Milly Theale with Kate Croy—Lars gratefully accepts Heidi's gift of
intimacy: "He was grateful: Heidi had fallen into his condition alongside
him, a companion, a fellow collector of his father's fate, a kind of partner"
(32). And like those Jamesian heroines, he seems not to notice certain
warning signs that the intimacy is spurious. Despite the fantasy theater of
royalty in her display window, for example, the fiction section in her shop
heavily favors the "Jewish" reality principle—"the newest Americans,
North and South, the oldest Russians, that large and steady company of
nineteenth-century Englishmen and Englishwomen [Ozick's favorite,
"Judaic" mode of realism in fiction], a whole forest of Balzac; and then the
dictionaries and encyclopedias" (19).

Most crucially, Heidi's reality principle extends to the figure of Bruno

Schulz, whose death as a Jew outweighs (for her) all the magic of his pagan
artistry. Because of its portrayal of direct contradiction between Schulz's
Jewish identity and his pagan enticement, this scene is one of the most
important in The Messiah of Stockholm, reminiscent of Bleilip's despair in
"Bloodshed," of Lushinski's buried self in "A Mercenary," of Feingold's
crazed storytelling about atrocities in "Levitation," of the map (of Europe)
made of vomit in Trust. Lars's relation with his "companion," his "partner,"
his "fellow collector of his father's fate" begins its gradual unraveling with
this moment of realization of their difference:
128 Readings

It was the shooting that drew her. The shooting; the murder. Shot in the
streets! Lars suspected that Heidi cared more for his father's death than for his
father's tales, where savagely crafty nouns and verbs were set on a crooked
road to take on engorgements and transmogrifications: a bicycle ascends into
the zodiac, rooms in houses are misplaced, wallpaper hisses, the calendar
acquires a thirteenth month. Losses, metamorphoses, degradations. In one of
the stories the father turns into a pincered crab; the mother boils it and serves
it to the family on a dish. Heidi shouldered all that aside: it was the catastro-
phe of fact she wanted, Lars's father gunned down in the gutters of Drohobycz
along with two hundred and thirty other Jews. A Thursday in 1942, as it
happened: the nineteenth of November. Lars's father was bringing home a loaf
of bread. (32-33).

Clearly, Heidi's passionate fidelity to fact—naming the exact date of the

killing, the number of other victims, the loaf of bread in transit—bespeaks
the "Jewish history" side of Cynthia Ozick's literary imagination, while
Lars's affinity for Schulz's magic transformations of his world reflects the
longings Ozick confessed to in works like "Usurpation": "The Jews have no
magic. . . . oh, why can we not have a magic God like other peoples?" (BL
134-35). In effect, the disparity between Heidi's and Lars's views defines the
conflict at the heart of The Messiah of Stockholm. From this point in the
novel, the conflict between "Jewish history" and the pagan imagination
governs the remaining dozen chapters, as Lars moves gradually toward his
simultaneous waking and disillusionment—from his nap of imagination to
his place around the stewpot.

Complicating the issue is the role reversal that Lars and Heidi play out
concerning her own "Jewish history." Although she judges Lars "a master of
the insubstantial: a fantasist" (32), her own obsession with Schulz's death
displays a core of self-protective fantasy. If Lars's fantasy is his appropria-
tion of Schulz as his father, Heidi's is her appropriation of Schulz as a
surrogate for her own life memories. Whereas Lars has assimilated Schulz's
pagan fictions, Heidi has fed like a vampire on Schultz's real-life biography—
the "wild action" surrounding his death (38-39), his abandonment of "the
world of the Jews" for the sake of his Catholic fiancee (35), his craving for
intimacy in a letter: "/ need a companion. I need a kindred spirit close by
me. I long for an acknowledgement of the inner world whose existence I
postulate. . . . I need a partner in discovery" (36, emphasis Schulz).

In her appropriation of Schulz's life instead of his art, Heidi fastens most
crucially on the shooting as a surrogate for her own Holocaust memories.
With the shooting, her own Jewish history ceased, along with her Jewish
identity. She has assumed instead a German identity, totemized in "that
funny old German lamp" that "was all she thought worth bringing with her
128 Readings

It was the shooting that drew her. The shooting; the murder. Shot in the
streets! Lars suspected that Heidi cared more for his father's death than for his
father's tales, where savagely crafty nouns and verbs were set on a crooked
road to take on engorgements and transmogrifications: a bicycle ascends into
the zodiac, rooms in houses are misplaced, wallpaper hisses, the calendar
acquires a thirteenth month. Losses, metamorphoses, degradations. In one of
the stories the father turns into a pincered crab; the mother boils it and serves
it to the family on a dish. Heidi shouldered all that aside: it was the
catastrophe of fact she wanted, Lars's father gunned down in the gutters of
Drohobycz along with two hundred and thirty other Jews. A Thursday in
1942, as it happened: the nineteenth of November. Lars's father was bringing
home a loaf of bread. (32-33).

Clearly, Heidi's passionate fidelity to fact—naming the exact date of the

killing, the number of other victims, the loaf of bread in transit—bespeaks
the "Jewish history" side of Cynthia Ozick's literary imagination, while
Lars's affinity for Schulz's magic transformations of his world reflects the
longings Ozick confessed to in works like "Usurpation": "The Jews have no
magic. . . . oh, why can we not have a magic God like other peoples?" (BL
134-35). In effect, the disparity between Heidi's and Lars's views defines the
conflict at the heart of The Messiah of Stockholm. From this point in the
novel, the conflict between "Jewish history" and the pagan imagination
governs the remaining dozen chapters, as Lars moves gradually toward his
simultaneous waking and disillusionment—from his nap of imagination to
his place around the stewpot.

Complicating the issue is the role reversal that Lars and Heidi play out
concerning her own "Jewish history." Although she judges Lars "a master of
the insubstantial: a fantasist" (32), her own obsession with Schulz's death
displays a core of self-protective fantasy. If Lars's fantasy is his appropria-
tion of Schulz as his father, Heidi's is her appropriation of Schulz as a
surrogate for her own life memories. Whereas Lars has assimilated Schulz's
pagan fictions, Heidi has fed like a vampire on Schultz's real-life biography—
the "wild action" surrounding his death (38-39), his abandonment of "the
world of the Jews" for the sake of his Catholic fiancee (35), his craving for
intimacy in a letter: "/ need a companion. I need a kindred spirit close by
me. I long for an acknowledgement of the inner world whose existence I
postulate. . . . I need a partner in discovery" (36, emphasis Schulz).

In her appropriation of Schulz's life instead of his art, Heidi fastens most
crucially on the shooting as a surrogate for her own Holocaust memories.
With the shooting, her own Jewish history ceased, along with her Jewish
identity. She has assumed instead a German identity, totemized in "that
funny old German lamp" that "was all she thought worth bringing with her
Readings 129

from Germany," with its lampshade shaped like an innocent flower (a daisy)
supplanting the infamous Jew's-skin lampshade of the Holocaust years (20,
19). Most important, she has revised her role in the Holocaust from that of a
death camp inmate to that of a Gentile sympathizer who threw food at night
over the camp fence (42-43). But Heidi's fixation on death—like that of
Enoch Vand in Trust—betrays her identity as a Jewish survivor: only a
survivor "could see straight through to the skeleton" so as to see "the
xylophone of the ribs" in her husband, or see "no more than a clean skull"
in looking at Lars (40). Now it is Lars who is the reality-centered skeptic—
"I saw what your name used to be"—and Heidi who retreats into a new
realm of concealment: "There are plenty of Bavarian burghers called Simon.
They're all Catholic" (44).

Despite her claim to the reality principle, then, Heidi seems as subject as
Lars to the Schulzian precept that Lars is most fond of citing to her: "Reality
is as thin as paper" (37, 59).32 Her apostasy toward the reality principle in
turn undermines her attack on Lars's idolatry—that is, her condemnation
(itself a telltale sign of her Jewish culture) of his "ceremonial mystification"
of Schulz and the "smoldering cultishness in all of it" (33). So he will carry
on as a "priest, a holy man" of his pagan ancestor worship (29), yielding
more deeply to the "sorcery in it" (31) as he seeks alignment of his own
vision with his father's magic eye. Still spurning conventional realism, just
as "his father too had shunned the stewpot" (64), he juxtaposes its thin gruel
and the transcending power of the Schulzian imagination:

There was ... in all of them, the whole three-o'clock crew:—the weak honey of
reverence. Literary creatures who served, sidestepped, and sometimes sold out
the Muses. Their so-called scandals, their scramblings, their feuds, their poly-
morphous life in the stewpot: how innocent, how distant from the palaces of
live thunder, how weak they were before the altar of Lars's father's unmoving
eye. (64)

With that transforming eye freed now from Heidi's skepticism, Lars finds
the auxiliaries in Heidi's circle easily amenable to his magic narrative. The
mysterious Dr. Eklund, for example, resembles (when he finally appears) a
sea captain, with a "seaweedy merman's odor" (89), thereby evoking earlier
pagan sea gods in Ozick's work such as Tilbeck in Trust and the title
character of "The Dock-Witch." Lars's filial counterpart, Adela—Schultz's
putative daughter—appears carrying the lost manuscript of The Messiah
like "a witch with a rattle" (70), evoking "old fables: buried vessels, spells,
incantations, magical instant dyings" (78). Adela's putative mother, Schulz's
teenaged mistress, exhibits the protean guises of a fairy tale, recurring an-
drogynously in the artist's illustrations as "A little man in a top hat. . . . A
130 Readings

boy with big buttons. A fellow in riding boots. A woman in high heels
wearing a coat with a fur collar. All of those. Sometimes she's naked" (81).
And the magic talismans of fairy lore abound throughout Lars's narrative,
offering the private supernatural empowerment that makes such totems
immemorially seductive. Several of these magic totems are personal, like the
ancient "fabled chair" in Lars's hallway associated with "magical
deliveries" (69), the white beret that Adela leaves behind in lieu of The
Messiah manuscript (87), and the key to Heidi's shop. But the central totem
of magic power is the "amphora" bearing the lost manuscript, which
touches on traditional myths that range from Hebe's cup in Greek
antiquity, to Ali Baba's jar of Arabic legend, to the chalice of early
Christian genesis (101).

As a symbol of cultural appropriation, this motif of originally Jewish

creation—The Messiah—ensconced within a pagan/Christian vessel carries
significant implications. In terms of the Second Commandment, it may be a
wholesome sign of Lars's waking when he burns the false Messiah in its
pagan jar—a Messiah made doubly false by the latter-day forgery added to
its original author's apostasy. Through this act Lars may expiate his
Schulz-ian heresy of reducing reality to the thinness of a sheaf of paper and
then committing idolatry toward this manmade artifact: "[The Messiah] had
possessed, for one holy hour, his house; his bed; his quilt. He ought to have
been on his knees to it. . . . He might have knelt there—gazing—before the
caves and grottoes of his quilt" (82). The flames in the jar may also,
however, portend the Holocaust writ small, the token of a whole culture—
apostate and Orthodox alike—that was turned into ash along with six
million bodies. Certainly the "roasting" smell that assails Lars everywhere
in the city, along with his sense of ever-present "chimneys" (17), hints at the
historic calamity that swallowed up Bruno Schulz and his handiwork.

But then again, the inconceivable atrocity of the Holocaust, like the onset
of the Swedish winter, may be all the more reason for turning away from the
stewpot, the world out there, the Judaic reality principle, in favor of the
inviolable realm of imagination, the magic sustenance of myths and idols,
the secret warmth of the quilt. And at this dark, cold time of year, from
which half the world seeks refuge in the Advent story, what myth could be
more relevant than the dream of the Messiah, divine purveyor of world
redemption? Given her memories of P.S. 71, when she was accused of deicide
and ostracized for not singing Christmas carols, Cynthia Ozick could not be
expected to produce an orthodox Messiah from a Christian point of view;
and given her respect for the Orthodox Jewish heritage, neither would she
be likely to apply artistic license to the Messiah of the prophets (Isaiah most
notably)—a Messiah who in fact has no part in this novel. Instead she
frames her own parable around the Christmas story, with Schulz's Messiah
Readings 131

its sacred text, brought forward by Adela as "angel" of Annunciation (83);

with Dr. Eklund, Heidi, and Adela later appearing as three Magi bearing
gifts, the paper-filled amphora (appropriately, the word Magi is a cognate of
Magic); and with Lars subserving the Magic Narrative as Advent child.

As a master image dominating the text, Ozick's child imagery serves

contrary purposes regarding the theme of myth and idolatry. Its negative
meaning is arrested development, the stunting of spiritual growth that char-
acterizes Romantic religion as opposed to the Judaic encounter with time
and history. From the outset Ozick stresses this facet of Lars's character. At
age forty-two, he "looked much younger," like "a messenger boy," with his
face revealing "unripeness," "something irregular—undigested—in his spirit,"
the stance of "an arrested soul" (3, 4, 6). But the positive meaning of the
child image is rejuvenation, an antidote to the soul-snuffing despair that
time and history have too often visited upon the psyche, especially the
Jewish psyche aware of Holocaust horrors. Rejuvenation is the leading
effect of the child motif, with self-purification a secondary effect of Ozick's
recurring birth imagery.

Having cut his links with the stewpot by ridding himself of telephone and
typewriter, Lars reverts to the pure, unborn state and moves in phases from
there. Beginning with "the face of a foetus" (6), he seemed "almost new-
born" (9) until his "bed of rebirth" (73) brings on a Blakean state of
innocence: "What a baby you are, Lars. Naive" (93). The innocence in
turn makes belief possible, most notably belief in the efficacy of the text
he craves to idolize—a text that Ozick swathes in its own Christological
ambience: "That cradling of The Messiah: good God, hadn't he held it in
his arms?" (82). Between this "cradling" of The Messiah (itself "a round
baby," 115) and the "swaddling clothes" of Lars's own infancy (92), Ozick
echoes enough of the Gospels to underscore the danger of the pagan
enticement. Lars's rebirth via pagan/Christian myth can come about only by
the extirpation in him of Jewish history, which is to say, Jewish identity.
The Jew in Lars Andemening has thereby been superseded.

Lars's condition thus signifies the split identity of Jewish modernity. Like
Lushinski in "A Mercenary," he has buried his Jewish self, the cave of his
quilt serving as both burial crypt for Lazarus Baruch (his secret Jewish
name, 101) and as womb for his pagan self fathered by Bruno Schuiz. To
achieve the new birth there must first be a burial, right here in his bed-site:
"On account of this father [Bruno Schuiz] Lars shrank himself. He felt he
resembled his father: all the tales were about men shrinking more and more
into the phantasmagoria of the mind. One of them was about a man in his
sleep, his fall into the bedclothes. . . . like the captive of a great bowl of
dough" (5). So long as the Jew is dead, napping through the stewpot hour,
132 Readings

the pagan can live, on fire with the power of his magic narrative and its
transcendent vision.

Throughout the magic narrative, vision is a prevalent issue. Described

early on as "probably on the brink of needing glasses" (6), Lars peers "into
the thickest dark through a lens of snow" on his midnight walk to Heidi's
shop (17). In his work as a reviewer, he is already possessed of subliminal
powers of seeing that somehow relate to his father:

Something happened in him while he slept. . . . [His] lids clicked open . .. and
he saw. what he saw, before he had even formulated a word of it, was his
finished work. He saw it as a kind of vessel. . . . In its cup lay . . . [an] eye. A
human eye: his own; and then not his own. His father's murdered eye. (8)

So long as the magic narrative lasts, its sign is the eye bequeathed him by
his artist father, the transformative eye of pagan imagination: "I can see my
father's eye. It seems to be my eye, but it's his. As if he lets me have his own
eye to look through" (41). Under its gaze, reality appears to reverse itself: the
people of the stewpot appear unreal—"wax faces, wax eyes with (this was
odd) wax tears of pain or reproach or deprivation: Gunnar and Anders and
... even Nilsson, all of them wax exhibits ... invisibly controlled by distant
wireless computers"—while to the contrary "his father's eye, . . . a violent
white ray, was spilling out the wilderness of God. A vivid bestiary strangely
abundant, discharging the white light of plenitude" (68).

In reducing the real people of the stewpot to wax effigies, the eye reveals
the menace of its heresies: the idolatry that here turns people into wax might
elsewhere turn millions more into ash. When that measure of idolatry does
occur in chapter 13, swallowing up the Jews of Drohobycz, that would be
for Lars his waking moment. But meanwhile, the visionary powers of the
pagan dispensation are too intoxicating to give over, as they enlarge to
assume religious dimensions. Writing "reviews [that] are practically
theology" (66), Lars echoes the glad tidings of the Gospels in a sort of
Annunciation: "He had proclaimed [to the stewpot] the return of his
father's lost book. . . . And the daughter! . . . [He] had proclaimed her, in
order to proclaim the risen Messiah" (67). And his Ascension into the
otherworldly, which happens when his magic eye holds in view the
original Messiah— "The original! Recovered; resurrected;
redeemed"—nearly consumes the eye itself in a daimonic seizure: "Lars,
looking with all his strength, felt his own pupil consumed by a conflagration
in its socket. As if copulating with an angel whose wings were on fire"
(104).

Lars's reading of the Messiah manuscript is of course his paramount

experience of the radiant eye doing its work. After it is authenticated by a
Readings 133

forgery expert—Dr. Eklund the "holographic authority" who scans the

pages with "the great [magnifying glass] lens circling" (102-3)—Lars finds
in Bruno Schulz's lost masterpiece a geyser of creativity reminiscent of the
Demiurge in the book's opening epigraph. Once again the illicit creative
powers in this scene are associated—like the pagan gods in Trust and The
Pagan Rabbi—with the sea:

Lars thought of those mountain ranges growing out of the chasm of the world,
along the bottommost spine of the sea, so platonically dark and deep that even
the scuttling blindfish swim away, toward higher water—but within this . . .
abyss are crisscrossing rivers, whirlpools twisting their foaming necks, multi-
ple streams braiding upward, cascades sprouting rivulets like hairs, and a
thousand shoots and sprays bombarding the oceanscape's peaks. (106)

Impressive as it seems, it is notable that nothing in this welter of primal

energy is alive, and what was alive is now dead. That is to say, the Adela of
Schulz's earlier books (after whom Lars's "sister" was presumably named)—
"the servant girl . . . in Cinnamon Shops and Sanatorium" (106)—is here
reduced by "the preternaturally cornucopian eye of the genie" to inanimate
matter. The Adela of The Messiah first appears as "a bald rag doll left on a
shelf" with scalp made of porcelain, then transmutes into "a tailor's dummy,
canvas over bent wires," and finally emerges as the object of Lars's (and
Ozick's) metaphysical revulsion, the inhuman endpoint of Magic Narrative
(in her essay on Schulz, Ozick called his Adela "a kind of proto-Nazi," AA
226):

she had become one of those Mesopotamian priestly statues carved out of
stone only for the sake of their terrifying smiles. Finally Lars took in that she
had turned . . . into an idol. Her eyes were conventional green jewels. This
idol, made of some artificial dead matter, was never called Adela . . . [but] he
recognized her all the same. (107)

In sum, the world of The Messiah, which is set in Schulz's hometown of

Drohobycz, has become "peopled (but that word was unsuitable) by idols,"
covering the whole range of pagan antiquity—"plump Buddhas," "Egyptian
figurines," "mammoth Easter Island heads," and numerous shapes of "large
stone birds—falcons, eagles, vultures, hawks, oversized crows hewn out of
black marble. Each of these idols was considered to be a great and powerful
god or goddess" (107). Irresistibly, as The Messiah's story line moves from
pagan antiquity toward the present, idolatry and dehumanization move
apace toward that which Lars's napping, his new childlike identity, and his
Magic Narrative were designed to evade. The story line moves, drawing
Lars with it, back toward reality, toward Jewish history, toward the Holo -
134 Readings

caust. When "no human beings remained in Drohobycz, only hundreds and
hundreds of idols," they include some beautifully crafted specimens made
by "ingenious artisans," a "handful of masterpieces," but a familiar and
sinister turn develops when "sacrificial bonfires" begin to spring up all over
town, in which the smaller idols are seized by the stronger ones and flung
into the flames (109). Behind the whole scene we discern at last the cannibal
feast of old Canaanite times, "the iron maw of some huge lazy Moloch"
insatiably devouring its burnt offerings.33 Its apocalyptically consummate
offering, as the Magic Narrative reaches its climax, is The Messiah itself,
which comes on first as a living image of vivisection (as if a "spleen . . . or a
pancreas, or a bowel, or a brain" had "set out to live on its own"), but
shortly mutates into The Book which it is, covered with "inky markings
[that] showed themselves to be infinitely tiny and brilliantly worked
drawings of those same idols that had taken hold of the town of Drohobycz"
(109-10). These printed characters—"peculiar tattoos," "a type of cune-
iform," "an unknown alphabet" (110)—suggest both the Holocaust ("tat-
toos") and pagan antiquity, but they also correlate with Ozick's lines in her
preface to Bloodshed: "As if ink were blood" (BL 12).

Thus exposed as death-worshiping idolatry, The Messiah of Bruno Schulz

collapses "with the noise of vast crashings and crushings," taking the other
idols with it into its grand dissolution, but yielding up "out of the caldron of
that great wind" a small bird, carrying in its beak a single strand of dried
hay. The bird brings to mind as its paramount reference the dove that
returned to Noah's Ark (the prototype of the Ark of the Covenant, sacred to
four thousand years of Judaism) bearing a redeeming sprig of green olive to
show that the Flood was abating. Just as Schulz's Messiah proves an
anti-Messiah, bringing the fires of Moloch instead of redemption, the bird
it releases has the opposite function of that of Noah's dove, its piece of
dried hay bringing death as its touch dissolves each idol "into flecks of
sparks fading to ash" (111). A secondary reference for the bird of death could
be the conclusion of Moby-Dick (an Ozick favorite), whose
Promethean-Satanic protagonist sought blasphemous vengeance against the
cosmic powers that had maimed him, but instead of killing the great whale
that he saw as the agent of those cosmic powers, he ended up killing only
himself and his crew and a solitary bird that Tashtego's hammer nailed to
the mast at the last moment of the ship's sinking.

So the apocalypse ends, the napper awakes, and Lars finds himself "in the
kitchen of Sleeping Beauty's castle, when the trance is broken and all the
pots begin to boil again" (112). As the magic eye fades, Lars cannot suppress
regret for his lost visionary powers:
Readings 135

Lamentation remained. . . . That despoiling, withdrawing light, a

lightning-explosion. As though—for an inch of time—he had penetrated into
the entrails, the inmost anatomy, of that eye. Whoever had dipped into the ink
that covered the pages of The Messiah had dipped into the vitreous gelatin of
that sufficing eye. (115)

But the eye is gone, "over and done with" (124), turned into "a very small
mound of ash" (139). And as the napper awakes, "like a man in a coma who
has unexpectedly come to, having been declared asleep for life" (132),
identity within Lars has shifted. The pagan idolater is superseded now by
the Jew who espouses the Second Commandment: "A pack of swindlers. .
. . You want to be in competition with God, that's the thing" (128). 34

With this return to the reality principle, Ozick's narrative technique changes
accordingly. From this point on, the Magic Narrative is replaced by a
contrary mode of storytelling, the psychological realism of Henry James. As
in James's novels, clarity of sight is a continuing motif—Lars even begins
wearing glasses (129)—but now it serves to expose reality rather than find
an alternate to it. What Lars mainly sees, in Jamesian fashion, is the scam to
which he has been subject, and—echoing another Jamesian motif—the
metaphor that dominates his thought is that of the theater: actors
performing a play. Unaware of the change in their spectator (like Madame
Merle in her final performance before Isabel Archer), they continue to ply
the Magic Narrative in its full Christological regalia. Dr. Eklund calls for
"the heralding," the "annunciation" of the sacred text—"The good news must
be given out. That The Messiah is here" (115). Heidi presses upon him,
Gospel-wise, the necessity for faith: "If it's not believed in, it might as well
not exist" (115). And Adela assumes the pose of Madonna and Child, with
the jar as holy infant: "Across from him Adela stood, the brass amphora in
her arms. It made him think of . . . a round baby" (115). But what he discerns
with increasing clarity is a Passion Play, directed by "Dr. Eklund's rawest
stage voice" (118), with Lars himself assigned to the role of impassionata
("an impassioned soul!" 120): "You were born to it, Mr. Andemening....
You've absorbed it. What we need from you now is some word. A judgment.
Is it worthy? Is it beautiful? Will you embrace it?" (118-19).

Knowing now that he "has fallen among players; among plotters" (119),
Lars comes into his final Jamesian role, that of detective out to unmask his
victimizers and close down their theater of illusions. "How theatrical they
were, Dr. and Mrs. Eklund! Two old troupers in rehearsal," he observed
among his earlier impressions (92). Now the stage master Dr. Olle Eklund
quickly breaks down to "a wheeler-dealer in shady manuscripts" (121) with
136 Readings

the original name of Alter Eckstein. (Its German meaning—"Old

Cornerstone"—is vague, but the pun on "Altar" could combine with his
incessant match lighting to suggest a heathen sacrificial site.) Lars's "sister"
Adela assumes her real name of Elsa Vaz, acknowledges her real paternity
as Eckstein's rather than Bruno Schulz's daughter, and recovers her
white beret—a sort of angel's halo in the Magic Narrative—that Lars flings
spiral-ing down the stairwell after her (142). Heidi, unmasked as a false
confidante, sells her shop and leaves the city.

Going over wholly to the stewpot, Lars is its faithful celebrant now,
espoused to all those features of the reality principle that he had formerly
abjured: an upscale new apartment, with not only a telephone but an
answering machine, not only a typewriter but a word processor, and a
cubicle of his own at the Morgontorn. His work too reflects his new
orientation, winning an army of avid readers. Instead of writing "reviews
that are practically theology," he practices market journalism with popular
pieces about detective novels and star autobiographies; instead of "those
indecipherables that steam up from the stomach-hole of Central
Europe"—Kafka, Musil, Canetti, the exponents of "existential dread"—he
gives his readers "the Swedes and the more companionable Americans"
(132).

Like the Morgontorn building with its state-of-the-art renovations, Lars

has modernized himself, casting the quilt-napper out of his being with the
smooth dispassion of the exterminators ousting mice from the broken walls
of the building. All that remains to complete the exorcism is the detective's
terminal confrontation with "Adela," to compel her confession of fraud and
close the case to perfection. At first, that appears an easy task, requiring
only his constant use of the theater metaphor applied with maximum irony—
"part of the scenery," "playacting," "stage fright," "cast of characters,"
"you masqueraded" (137-39). So extorted, the confession is easily come by:
"She lowered her head. 'I came to say you were abused'" (139). But to his
chagrin the case doesn't end there. For one thing, despite her false role she
says true things about his past affinity for Magic Narrative, born of a need
beyond the range of the reality principle: "you still don't know where you
were born. A fairy tale. You picked yourself a make-believe father out of a
book" (138). And the little boy she has brought with her, a feverishly sleepy
napper, presents what Lars cannot help but regard as a deja-vu situation:
"Tell me,... is there a father for this boy somewhere? Or is he going to have
to figure one out for himself?" (139).

"Adela's" unintelligible answer to his question—perhaps "Divorced," or

"It might have been 'Forced,' or 'Lost,' or 'Crushed'" (139)—traces back
thirty years to the opening pages of Trust, and its narrator's inexpressibly
mute, deep hunger for the right kind of fathering. It reminds us also of an
Readings . 137

even earlier manuscript, Ozick's master's thesis on parable in the later

novels of Henry James. What we finally have in The Messiah of Stockholm
is a parable, never intended as naturalistic realism, in which Ozick has
played out with fresh imaginings her familiar dilemma of the Jewish artist.
On one hand, the dread of false fathering is real. To revere a Bruno Schulz as
the artist-father is to risk the damnation of idol worship, the blasphemy of
being in competition with God, the diabolism of serving the inhuman, the
deathly, the maw of Moloch. Though this seems an extreme argument, we
might consider the relevance to this case of the lessons of "Bloodshed": of
the two guns that Bleilip is carrying, "It is the toy we have to fear," just as it
was the toy shower head that in the end breathed out the terminal horror of
Auschwitz (BL 71).

So the toy—the idea of the thing—hugely matters, because the

imagination, if not restricted by some external power (the Second
Commandment, Conscience), is inevitably subject to perverse wanderings, to
idolatry, to the rationalizing of evil. And yet, in a case like this, the
repressed is sure to return, giving voice to the other half of the "Jewish
writer" oxymoron. Clearly the ephemeral satisfactions of Lars
Andemening's new journalism cannot in the end match the ageless glories
of art. His new eyeglasses, designed for stewpot discernments, will never
survey the ecstatic heights accessible to the Magic Eye. His state of the art
telephone/answering machine in its sleek new quarters will never deliver the
"spectral mutterings" of the old building, hinting of "ancient festivities
lasting till dawn." And though he has presumably matured, with his waking,
beyond the need for such unreal things—"Impossible to mistake him now
for anything but a man of middling years" (134)—somewhere inside there
may yet reside a little boy who is napping, feverishly sleepy, craving the
right kind of fathering, the Magic Narrative. Lars hints as much of himself to
"Adela" just before their final parting:

He said humbly, "I once had a child. She was taken away. I don't have her
any more."
"Platonic. Literary." She didn't believe him, and why should she? It was
himself saying it: a father-inventor can just as easily invent a child. (141)

In its closing chapter—a page-long epilogue—it appears that The Messiah

of Stockholm does give the child in Lars Andemening the last word, in the
sense that something in him reverts after all to the Magic Narrative. Despite
his commitment to the stewpot, he finds himself subject to "hallucination,"
most notably in converting "that smell of something roasting—all through
Stockholm" into a primal scene of burnt offering: "as if Stockholm, burning,
138 Readings

was slowly turning into Africa: the smell, winter or summer, of baking
zebra" (143). Since the book makes no previous reference to Africa or its
zebras, we are left to surmise that the baking zebra sublimates two scenes
from the Magic Narrative. The first is the image of sacred print—Lars has
been reading Bruno Schulz's extant novel, Cinnamon Shops—as an animal
being slaughtered: "He had washed his fingers in that half-familiar dread
print like a butcher with a bloody sheep in his grip" (23). With scriptlike
lines crossing its body, baking zebra can well stand in for the sheep—and
for Schulz's Messiah—in the epilogue.

The other scene tells us what the smell over Stockholm actually evokes
from the Magic Narrative: not Africa, but Poland; not zebras, but idols
being consumed in Moloch's sacrificial flames:

Bright-torsoed gods, and in particular the little Near Eastern goddesses with
their fragile budding breasts and their necklaces, . . . and occasionally even an
exquisite miniature Venus-copy no bigger than a finger, were being chopped
up or melted down to gratify the iron maw of some huge lazy Moloch. Day
and night honeyed swirls of hot incense and the acrid smoky smell of roasting
metal circled over Drohobycz. (109)

Although the matured man in Lars forswears idolatry, along with "that
perjured eye, thrown like a broken blind coal among the cinders of the brass
amphora" (144), the smell evokes a hallucination too precious to abandon, a
fantastic hope that perhaps one pagan idol, Schulz's Messiah, somehow
survived the Moloch flames of the Holocaust. So the epilogue ends with
Lars vouchsafed a glimpse, "inside the narrow hallway of his skull," of a
paradox and a parable: "the man in the long black coat, hurrying with a
metal garter box squeezed under his arm, hurrying and hurrying toward the
chimneys" (144). The paradox inheres in the figure dressed in the garb of
Orthodox Judaism using the brief span that remains of his doomed life to
assure the future life of a heretically blasphemous pagan text. The parable is
the deep human need for imaginative art that necessitates the paradox.

Concerning that need, Bruno Schulz will have the last word, directed
toward the deficiencies of ordinary reality. "Are we to betray the last secret
of that district, the carefully concealed secret of Crocodile Street?" he asks,
to which he answers: "Let us say it bluntly: the misfortune of that area is
that nothing ever succeeds there, nothing can ever reach a definite conclu-
sion. Gestures hang in the air, movements are prematurely exhausted and
cannot overcome a certain point of inertia." So the Street of Crocodiles,
which is to say naturalistic realism, is peopled by T. S. Eliot's Hollow
Men—"Paralysed force, gesture without motion"—and it terminates in
Eliot's "Unreal City," whose victims suffer "a fermentation of desires, pre-
Readings 139

maturely aroused and therefore impotent and empty" in a place of

"modernity and metropolitan corruption" (Street 103,105). For Ozick, this
unresolved conflict between imagination and reality was to carry over into
her next novella, "The Shawl."

The Shawl: Tale of Two Cities

[In my youth] I was slow to "get" social clues—especially about this thing called "class."
(Ltr 7/13/90)

After she wrote "The Shawl" and "Rosa" in 1977, Cynthia Ozick
waited four and seven years before publishing them, separately, in the New
Yorker, and a full twelve years before publishing them together in book
form under the title of The Shawl. Her reluctance to publish, she says,
stemmed from her aversion to making a work of art about the death
camps.35 Given her view that all fiction is idolatry, this point of view
regarding the Holocaust is certainly understandable. Even so, there is an
additional reason why this book may have been Ozick's most painful
writing experience: namely, the annihilation of her protagonist's
Jewishness under the pressure of more urgent claims of identity,
particularly those of motherhood. In the end, the tensions between cultural,
maternal, and class-based modes of identity are as largely responsible for
the designation of "Rosa Lublin, a madwoman" (13) as is her trauma in
the death camp.

Undergirding Rosa's problems of identity are the contrasting sites of

"Jewish geography" that distinguish the unified text of The Shawl (1989)
from its two components parts, "The Shawl" and "Rosa." In the unified
text, two thriving Jewish-American cities, New York and Miami, are
juxtaposed with two sites of European-Jewish horror, Warsaw and the
death camp (presumably Auschwitz). But along with their obvious
contrasts, America and Nazified Poland display some curious resemblances.
Though Poland was bitterly cold and Miami intensely hot, they both strike
Rosa like settings from hell. "Cold, cold, the coldness of hell," says the
opening sentence of "The Shawl," while in Miami, "The streets were a
furnace, the sun an executioner. . . . She felt she was in hell" (14). What
makes them both hellish is their evisceration of Jewish identity—-in the
death camp through physical annihilation, and in Miami through displacing
traditional Jewish culture in favor of contemporary American hedonism.
With New York City likewise unable to sustain Rosa's sense of self, no site
outside her imagination serves to answer her need for identity. (Significantly,
the one site in the
140 Readings

world unarguably capable of sustaining Jewish identity, the State of Israel,

gets only one dismissive mention from this Holocaust victim.)

Against her fixed grid of geographical places, Ozick develops her

successive modes of identity. The most fundamental, coming first both in
human biology and in Ozick's book, is the idea of identity centered in the
body. William James maintained a genteel tone toward this depressing
precept, noting that "The world experienced—otherwise called 'the field of
consciousness'—comes at all times with our body as its center."
Characteristically, Jean-Paul Sartre seemed to relish the nausea that he
associated with this insight: "A dull and inescapable nausea perpetually
reveals my body to my consciousness.. . . [It] is on the basis of this nausea
that all concrete and empirical nauseas (nauseas caused by spoiled meat,
fresh blood, excrement, etc.) are produced and make us vomit." 36

In The Shawl both the death camp and Miami evoke the nausea that the
spirit suffers on finding itself trapped in a decaying cylinder of flesh. In
Auschwitz, starvation, disease, and random murder render body
consciousness more intense—"On the road they raised one burden of a
leg after another" (5)—but eventually they effect an annihilation of the
body, so that the death camp inmates increasingly identify themselves with
nothingness: "The weight of Rosa was becoming less and less; Rosa and
Stella were slowly turning into air" (6), and Magda's starving belly is "fat
with air" (5). Miami by contrast is airless—"In her room it was hot, hot
all night. In Florida there was no air" (47)—but the same theme of bodily
decrepitude prevails, here because of old age: "Everyone had canes,
dowager's humps, acrylic teeth, shoes cut out for bunions. Everyone wore
an open collar showing mottled skin, ferocious clavicles, the wasted
foundations of wasted breasts. . . . If she moved [in her seat] even a little, an
odor would fly up: urine, salt . . ." (24).

This alienation from one's body, caused in youth by the death camp
horrors and later by the aging process, results in a bifurcation of identity
throughout The Shawl. On the one hand, the goyish fantasy of angels
replaces the human body as the anchor of Rosa's identity during her death
camp trauma: "Rosa did not feel hunger; she felt light,... like someone in a
faint, in trance,... someone who is already a floating angel, alert and seeing
everything, but in the air, not there, not touching the road" (3-4). So too her
infant daughter Magda turns into an angelic creature at her death, hitting
the electric fence "like a butterfly touching a silver vine" (9). 37 Decades
later, this recourse to fantasy still sustains Rosa, bringing Magda to Miami
as an angel/butterfly, filling the room with her "hair . . . as yellow as
buttercups" and her "sky-filled eyes" (65).

The opposite side of this bifurcation, with identity subhumanized to a

Readings 141

bestial level, threads through the text in a web of animal imagery: Magda is
like a squirrel wrapped in the shawl (4) or like a lioness (39); Rosa is like a
"led animal" (22), a "ragged old bird with worn feathers" or "sluggish bird"
(23, 30), a stork (23), a dog (29, 30, 40), and a wolf (10). Implicitly but very
significantly, Dr. Tree compares the Jewish tribal sense to "The Way of the
Baboons" (60). Even the insects participate in the general decline as "squads
of dying flies" in Miami (13) appear to replace the butterflies of the death
camp (8).

From this bifurcation between angel and animal, additional dualities

proliferate: the imaginary versus the rational, the ideal versus the real,
vitalism versus death consciousness, and—to translate these dualities into
the Jewish idiom—L'Chaim! versus Moloch. In every instance throughout
The Shawl, the decrepitude of the body gives precedence to the latter part
of these binary opposites. Between fantasy and the reality principle, the
Jewish ethos must choose reality even if that is unarguably where Moloch
holds residence.

The sovereignty of death is not a new idea in Ozick's writing, nor does it
necessarily derive from the Holocaust. Back in her first novel, Trust, she
posed the idea as a question: "Who can revere a universe which will take
that lovely marvel, man (. . . aeons of fish straining toward the dry, gill into
lung, paw into the violinist's and dentist's hand), and turn him into a carbon
speck?" (373). And in her essay "The Hole/Birth Catalogue," she asserts
that "all the truth any philosophy can really tell us about human life is that
each new birth supplies another corpse. . . . What is a baby-machine [a
woman's body] if not also a corpse-maker?" (AA 255). But yet, so strong is
the L'Chaim! principle in Ozick's consciousness that it pervades death itself
in her essay "The Biological Premises of Our Sad Earth-Speck." Here she
assents to the natural law that—as John Updike put it in Rabbit Redux—to
live is to kill. Life on earth, she admits, survives only by feeding on other
life, but the resulting expansion of life's kingdom justifies the whole
Darwinian process:

Now the planet whereon we live and die decrees the rule of prey (or, to say it
plainly, the ingestion of one creature by another) for the benefit of the planet
itself: that it may multiply in all its diversity and teem with ever-renewing
plenitudes of kind and of form. (AA 235)

The Holocaust differed from this Darwinian struggle, she says, by killing
solely to propagate death rather than to generate new life out of the killing
process:

The Holocaust—the burnt offering of the Jewish people in the furnace of the
German Moloch—is an instance of aberration so gargantuan that it cannot
142 Readings

leave wary nature ... unshaken. Killing for the pangs of hunger, nature always
celebrates; but killing . . . on behalf of the adoration of death, nature abhors.
(AA 236-37)

Although the Auschwitz episode occupies only seven pages, the intensity
of its death consciousness threatens to overwhelm the fifty pages of "Rosa."
Nearly starved to death, Stella—"her knees were tumors on sticks, her
elbows chicken bones" (3)—is reduced in spirit to pure beastly appetite,
hungry beyond the reach of any taboo: "Stella gazed at Magda [her infant
niece] like a young cannibal... . [Rosa] was sure that Stella was waiting for
Magda to die so she could put her teeth into the little thighs" (5). Later, in
Miami, Rosa's subconscious would transpose Stella into the role of victim
of this ultimate sacrilege: "Sometimes Rosa had cannibal dreams about
Stella: she was boiling her tongue, her ears, her right hand, such a fat hand
with plump fingers . .." (15). Magda herself, ostensibly a bundle of new life,
has become a death's head, her one tooth resembling "an elfin tombstone of
white marble" (4) as the shawl in which she lies "buried away deep" (5)
becomes her shroud. As she expires on the electric fence in the "ash-stippled
wind" (7), death becomes vocal for the moment, the "sad, grainy voices" in
the wires "[going] mad in their growling" during the immolation.

Confirming the sovereignty of death for Rosa is the heartless sarcasm of

nature during this scene, figured in the contrast between the horror inside
the fence and radiant beauty on the outside:

The sunheat murmured of another life, of butterflies in summer. . . . On the

other side of the steel fence, far away, there were green meadows speckled with
dandelions and deep-colored violets; beyond them, even farther, innocent tiger
lilies, tall, lifting their orange bonnets. In the barracks, they spoke of "flowers,"
of "rain": excrement, thick turd-braids, and the slow stinking maroon water-
fall that slunk down from the upper bunks. . . . (8-9)

Though it has presumably kept the Jewish ethos alive through centuries of
bitter persecution, the L'Chaim! ethos appears overmatched at last, its
eternal flame swallowed up in crematoria fires. The theme of The Shawl is
the question whether Jewish identity, perhaps abetted by Jewish geography
(the move from Auschwitz to Miami), can survive this greatest of all
historical traumas. Or to rephrase the question: Can the two primary modes
of Jewish identity survive their mutual contradiction—L'Chaim! versus the
sufferings of Jewish history?

It would appear that the answer is No. Jewish identity in Rosa's case is
overwhelmed not only by the fires of Moloch turned on her own body but
also, paradoxically, by Moloch's leading adversary: motherhood. The ma-
Readings 143

ternal passion that arrests Rosa at the moment her baby is immolated,
keeping her traumatized for the next forty years beyond the reach of reality,
cancels her Jewish heritage. In the name of her lost motherhood, Rosa
violates that most fundamental precept of Jewish law, the taboo against
idols. Explicitly, in her letter to Magda, she worships Motherhood "instead
of" God: "To have the power to create another human being.. . . To pass on
a whole genetic system. I don't believe in God, but I believe, like the Catho-
lics, in mystery" (41). And not only does she worship the image of her
daughter instead of God, she further flouts Jewish law by her reliance on
magic to conjure up the lost child's reappearance.38 As a rational religion,
Judaism condemns magic and the occult, but such magic is Rosa's only
recourse for recovering her beloved daughter. The child's name, Magda
(which has the same root as Magic) heightens the impression of heresy. 39
The narrative bears a curious resemblance to Toni Morrison's Beloved in
this respect, though Morrison appears to favor the recourse to the occult
that Ozick finds heretical.

The shawl itself is Rosa's magic totem of motherhood, a direct link

spanning forty years to her lost child. Deliberately echoing—it would seem—
the Shroud of Turin stories, which were much in the news during the period
when Ozick wrote this work, Rosa imparts to the shawl a
quasi-Christologi-cal ambience: "Magda's shawl! Magda's swaddling cloth.
Magda's shroud. The memory of Magda's smell, the holy fragrance of the
lost babe" (31). Rosa's gravitation toward Christianity (more specifically,
Roman Catholicism) heightens with Stella's warning that Rosa is making a
"relic" of her daughter (42) as well as turning the shawl into an "idol" that is
broadly comparable to the "True Cross" (31-32). The motif culminates in
the reverence for the Virgin and Child whose statue Rosa remembers from her
mother's kitchen, even citing her mother's poem to the "Mother of God"
(41).
As bad as it is from the Jewish point of view, this affinity for Christian
otherworldliness is not the worst instance of Rosa's penchant for escape
from reality. The worst comes when, abandoning the reality principle
completely, Rosa rests her ideal of perfect Motherhood on two transparent
fabrications. The first of these involves Magda's paternity; Rosa cannot
abide the idea that Magda's father is a death camp officer:

Your father was not a German. I was forced by a German, it's true, and more
than once, but I was too sick to conceive. Stella has a naturally pornographic
mind, she can't resist dreaming up a dirty sire for you, an S.S. man! (43)

But Rosa's claim that her Polish fiance fathered Magda (43) is belied by the
baby's clearly Teutonic features—"not Rosa's bleak complexion, dark like
144 Readings

cholera, it was another kind of face altogether, eyes blue as air, smooth
feathers of hair nearly as yellow as the Star sewn into Rosa's coat. You could
think she was one of their babies" (4).

Rosa's other denial of reality is her insistence that Magda is still alive. "To
keep [Stella] quiet," Rosa writes to her imagined Magda—now supposedly a
grown woman in New York City—"I pretend you died" (42). For all the
pathos of the case, a comic tone initially affects Rosa's fantasy in so far as
she embodies the parental pride so often lampooned by Jewish comedians in
the phrase "My son, the doctor." For Rosa the phrase is amended to "My
daughter, the doctor," with her mother's pride amplified by Magda's suc-
cess in nabbing a successful husband—"Magda, a beautiful young woman
of thirty, thirty-one: a doctor married to a doctor; large house in
Mamaroneck, New York; two medical offices, one on the first floor, one
in the finished basement" (35).

It soon transpires, however, that Rosa's noble ideal of Motherhood masks

a class-consciousness that is a deadly enemy of Jewish identity, second only
to Nazism itself. This motif of class snobbery, in turn, gradually evolves into
the central irony of the book, the real reason for the Jewish geography
which undergirds Ozick's portrayal of post-Holocaust betrayals of Jewish
identity. In juxtaposing the Old World and the New, The Shawl shows the
Jewish idea torn by class-based conflict: Poland versus America; Warsaw
versus New York/Miami; high-class European culture versus vulgar,
low-class American; Rosa versus Persky.

By beginning The Shawl with seven searing pages that portray Rosa's
suffering in the death camp, culminating in the scene of Nazi infant-murder,
Ozick evokes maximum sympathy for her protagonist. But her death camp
victim in "Rosa" turns out, in "The Shawl," to be a Jewish anti-Semite.
Moreover, Rosa's anti-Semitism is in no way attributable to the trauma that
she suffered in the death camp, in the way that Lushinski's anti-Semitism in
"A Mercenary" was Holocaust-related. Instead, she was born and raised as
a Jew-hater during the glory years of that great center of Jewish culture,
Warsaw—"the world capital of Yiddish literature" in the 1920s according
to historian Ronald Sanders.40

Rosa's last name, Lublin, adds a layer of irony to this characterization by

referring to the city in Poland where the Nazis planned in 1939 to establish a
Jewish version of an American Indian reservation. (Hitler got his idea of the
concentration camp from reading about Indian reservations in Karl May's
greatly popular Western novels.)41 Here some 400,000 Jews were to estab-
lish an agricultural commune called Lublinland, where their capacity for
self-sufficiency could be experimentally tested. In fact, some 200,000 Jews
did get crushed into the Lublin ghetto, where they lived as many as ten to a
Readings 145

small room and suffered mass starvation.42 Lublin soon became, along with
Auschwitz, a preeminent killing center with huge gassing facilities.

Despite the common heritage of Jewish suffering implied in her patronym,

Rosa insists on her difference from the Jewish rabble around her. Even her
daughter the doctor, though originally imagined in the role of medical
practitioner, ascends (in Rosa's fantasy) above that typically Jewish mold
into the WASPish Ivy League professoriat, so as to pursue a blatantly hea-
then interest as Professor of Greek Philosophy at Columbia University (39).
Her precious daughter, that is to say, is not really a Jew. Rosa herself takes
every opportunity to assert her cultural superiority to these crassly vulgar
American Jews in Miami. Although they appear to maintain the Jewish
tradition of highbrow bookishness—"She saw them walking with Tolstoy
under their arms, with Dostoyevsky" (16)—she is not fooled for a moment:
"she had nothing in common with them." (As a Pole, she would not in any
case re greatly impressed by Russian novels—unlike Ozick, a daughter of
Russian Jews who reveres Tolstoy.) And from the moment she meets Persky,
her fellow immigrant from Warsaw, her recurring refrain would be "My
Warsaw isn't your Warsaw" (18).

Rosa's Warsaw differs from Persky's not only because Persky escaped the
city before Hitler became its master, but more important—to Rosa—because of
the class system that prevailed in Poland before the war, dividing that nation's
Jews into disparate, unrelating segments. Before Hitler "unified" these segments
within a single scapegoat category, Rosa's family had belonged to the most
perfectly assimilated segment of the Jewish intelligentsia, having totally
abandoned its Jewish heritage in favor of the Europe of the Enlightenment.
Theirs is the Europe of Allegra Vand in Trust—"this fountain of the world (she
called it life, she called it Europe) all spectacle, dominion, energy, and honor.
And all the while she never smelled death there" (TR 78).

Even now, decades after the Holocaust, Rosa yearns to resurrect that
totally de-Judaized ideal of civilization:

The Warsaw of her girlhood: a great light: she switched it on, she wanted to
live inside her eyes.... the house of her girlhood laden with a thousand books.
Polish, German, French; her father's Latin books. . . . Cultivation, old civiliza-
tion, beauty, history! (20-21)

Notably absent from that bookshelf given over to the languages of the
genocide are the Torah, the Talmud, the Jewish philosophers. Nor of course
is the vulgate tongue of working-class Jews allowed to defile this aristocratic
ambience. Rosa's reverie specifically recalls the triumph within her family
heritage of the European high style over the Yiddish low:
146 Readings

Surprising turnings of streets, shapes of venerable cottages, lovely aged eaves,

unexpected and gossamer turrets, steeples, the gloss, the antiquity! Gardens.
Whoever speaks of Paris has never seen Warsaw. Her father, like her mother,
mocked at Yiddish; there was not a particle of ghetto left in him, not a grain of
rot. Whoever yearns for an aristocratic sensibility, let him switch on the great
light of Warsaw. (21)

Persky, of course, comes from a different Warsaw, that of the

peddler-class migrants from the even lower class rural shtetl, and Rosa is
chagrined to think that these ignorant Americans would not understand the
difference between them:

[Persky was] From Warsaw! Born 1906! She imagined what bitter ancient
alley, dense with stalls, cheap clothes strung on outdoor racks, signs in
jar-goned Yiddish... . The Americans couldn't tell her apart from this fellow
with his false teeth and his dewlaps and his rakehell reddish toupee bought
God knows when or where—Delancey Street, the Lower East Side. A dandy.
Warsaw! (20)

The fact that Persky has escaped this poverty through realizing the
American Dream does not impress Rosa in the slightest. Instead, Persky's
success in the junk-jewelry business—"buttons, belts, notions,
knickknacks, costume jewelry" (25)—only confirms his irredeemable
vulgarity. But here again Rosa's indifference to Jewish history betrays her
stuntedness of spirit. When Jews in medieval Europe were prohibited from
economic competition with Christians, virtually every mode of livelihood,
from guildhall to farmyard, was closed to them. Only ragpicking and usury,
occupations deemed unsuitable for Christians, were left wide open for
Jewish development. With great enterprise the Jews of Europe and America
eventually used those openings to establish two fabulously successful
industries: great banking houses that have helped finance Western
commerce and industry since the Renaissance; and the giant garment
industry that we associate preeminently with New York City. Rosa simply
fails to understand what it means when she notes how, in the laundromat,
Persky "handled the clothes like an expert" (19). Nor does she grasp the
Jewish triumph over the ragpickers' lot that is on display in the general
expertise of the transplanted New Yorkers around her: "They knew good
material. Whatever you wore they would feel between their fingers and give
a name to: faille, corduroy, herringbone, shantung, jersey, worsted, velour,
crepe" (16). If Rosa's Warsaw was not Persky's Warsaw, neither was her
New York the working-class city of the garment workers.

In her letters to (the imaginary) Magda, Rosa demonstrates how her class
Readings 147

hatred carried right through the Holocaust, as though the true outrage of
the thing were her forced proximity to Jews from the lower orders. Of the
Warsaw Ghetto, she writes, "most immediately we were furious because we
had to be billeted with such a class, with these old Jew peasants worn out
from their rituals and superstitions, phylacteries on their foreheads sticking
up so stupidly, like unicorn horns, every morning" (67). The Holocaust's
dissolving of class boundaries was really quite intolerable:

Can you imagine a family like us—my father who had been the
director-general of the Bank of Warsaw, my sheltered mother, almost
Japanese in her shyness and refinement . . . all of us, who had lived in a tall
house with four floors and a glorious attic ... imagine confining us with
teeming Mockowiczes and Rabinowiczes and Perskys and Finkelsteins, with
all their bad-smelling grandfathers and their hordes of feeble children! (66)

Completing this circuit of Jewish anti-Semitism is Rosa's contempt for

Israel, presumably by reason of its low-class genesis. "If not for me," she
confides to Magda, "they [the Zionist rescue workers] would have shipped
Stella with a boatload of orphans to Palestine, to become God knows what....
A field worker jabbering Hebrew" (40). With Israel thus dismissed out of
hand, and Poland made Judenrein by decree of its Nazi and Communist
rulers, there remains (for Rosa) only America as a site of contemporary
Jewish culture. Here is where Ozick can bring her theme of cultural conflict
to its culmination, playing off Rosa's European heritage against
Jewish-American mores.

The general depravity of American civilization is implicit in the first

words Persky says to her in the laundromat, reading from a Yiddish
newspaper about a storekeeper who had managed to survive both Hitler
and Stalin ("a camp in Siberia," 17) but succumbed to the savagery of
contemporary urban life: "in Westchester, not even the Bronx . . . robbers,
muggers, . . . they finish him off. From Siberia he lives for this day!" (18).
The specific vulgarity of American Jewry comes across through Persky
himself, who publicly picks seeds from his dental plate (26), whose idea of
cultural elegance is his kinship to a B-grade movie actress ("Betty Bacall,
who Humphrey Bogart the movie star was married to, a Jewish girl," 22),
and whose button business Rosa finds crass and pathetic: "Persky's life:
how trivial it must always have been: buttons, himself no more significant
than a button. . . . All of Miami Beach, a box for useless buttons!" (55).

Unwittingly, however, Persky motivates Rosa's one instance of Jewish

mores at work. As a result of her notion that he stole her underpants in the
laundromat, Rosa makes a grand tour of sleaze-filled Jewish Miami in
search of the missing garment. Here her reflexive embarrassment over her
148 Readings

sexuality suggests that the ancient Hebrew taboos still hold sway. "Because
of her missing underwear, she had no dignity before him" (55), she thinks
when she finds Persky waiting for her; and her revulsion against the two
young men having homosexual intercourse on the beach evokes an outright
biblical anathema: "'Sodom!' she hissed, and stumbled away" (49).

Beyond vulgarity and sexual corruption there remains for Rosa one last
great blemish on American Jewry, and this one is indeed serious.
Contradicting the soul of Judaism, these people place no value on Jewish
history. Most grievously, as Rosa tells Magda, they have no Holocaust
memory, no interest in the way it was:

When I had my store I used to "meet the public," and I wanted to tell
everybody—not only our story, but other stories as well. No one knew
anything. This amazed me, that nobody remembered what happened only a
little while ago. (66)

Rosa's failure to find an audience for her Holocaust narrative—"I said all
this in my store, talking to the deaf" (69)—results in two acts of madness: it
is the chief reason why she smashed up her antique store, and also why she
writes these letters to her ideal audience, the imaginary Magda. The
narrative in the letters, however, contains blazing ironies, especially in this
final letter to Magda. The reason Rosa focuses her letter on the tramcar, in
which Polish Gentiles rode serenely through the horrors of the Warsaw
Ghetto, is that the tram signified her forced change from Polish to Jewish
identity, and with it her lapse from high- to low-class status:

Every day, and several times a day, we had these witnesses. . . . They were all
the sort of plain people of the working class with slovenly speech who ride
tramcars, but they were considered better than we, because no one regarded us
as Poles anymore. . . . And with all this—especially our Polish, the way my
parents enunciated Polish in soft calm voices with the most precise articula-
tion, so that every syllable struck its target—people in the tramcar were
regarded as Poles . . . and we were not! They, who couldn't read one line of
Tuwim, never mind Virgil. . . . (69)

Like Joseph Brill in The Cannibal Galaxy and Lushinski's parents in "A
Mercenary," Rosa is a child of Europe more than of Israel. To Magda she
boasts of the artifacts in her father's house that date back to Europe's
genesis, particularly the Greek vases in his collection, most of them replicas
but one an archeological find that he personally dug up in Crete, the cradle
of Hellenic civilization (68). So too her pride in her father's command of
Latin—he knew the "first half of the Aeneid by heart" (69)—sets off her
Euro-Hellenism against her disdain for all things Jewish: the Yiddish Ian-
Readings 149

guage, the low-class Jews of Miami, and the resurrected State of Israel. As
with thousands of other assimilated European Jews, Rosa's Jewish identity
thus derives solely from the legal strictures imposed by the Nazi overlords.
Because her upbringing as an upper-class Pole left no space for the Judaic
ethos, she has no cultural strength to draw upon in the face of her two
Holocaust-caused obsessions: her death consciousness, and her propensity
to live in fantasy rather than reality. In a word, she has no recourse to the
L'Chaim! principle.

This deficiency is the distinguishing feature of Rosa's character. The other

two main characters, Stella and Persky, represent two alternatives to Rosa's
loss of Jewish identity. Although Stella shared Rosa's experience of
Auschwitz, she maintains the L'Chaim! attitude by expunging the past from
her consciousness. Calling for "the end of morbidness," Stella tells Rosa,
"It's thirty years, forty, who knows, give it a rest. . . . For God's sake, don't
be a crazy person! Live your life!" (63, 31, 33). And Persky has no past that
needs forgetting; his Warsaw, of pre-Hitler vintage, is not Rosa's. Like
American Jews in general, these two Americanized Jews assume the
L'Chaim! principle as a spontaneous philosophy of life. Whereas Rosa
maintains that "all philosophy is rooted in suffering over the passage of
time" (41), Persky reasserts Stella's philosophy of the present moment in
advising Rosa, "You can't live in the past" (23). 43

If anything, the other Jews in The Shawl outdo Persky in their ability to
live in the present moment. Ignoring the aging process and the decay of their
flesh (the "rolls of wide fat" on their necks, the dentures, the "blue-marbled
sinews" on their calves), these "flirts of seventy" continue to believe in "the
seamless continuity of the body" (28). So triumphant is the present moment
for these old people that the past becomes wholly subsumed in it, converted
into another version of time present: "Little by little they were forgetting
their grandchildren, their aging children. More and more they were growing
significant to themselves. . . . Every table surface a mirror. In these mirrors
the guests appeared to themselves as they used to be, powerful women of
thirty, striving fathers of thirty-five" (29).

Rosa of course cannot share this splendid reversion to the prime of their
lives. Her mirror of the past yields not powerful women and striving fathers
but a rabid skeleton compelled to watch her infant flung upon the hot wires.
Her revulsion against the past is the deepest reason she smashed up her
antique store in New York—"Antiques. Old furniture. . . . I had a specialty
in antique mirrors. Whatever I had there, I smashed it" (26). Neither the
present moment, normally sanctified by the L'Chaim! principle, nor the
past, normally sanctified by the Jewish reverence for history, avails as a
mode of life-meaning for Rosa, and with their loss she is no longer a Jew.
150 Readings

Any doubts on that score are settled by Persky's brief survey of her
apartment: "I don't see no books neither. You want me to drive you to
the library?" (57). A Jew with no interest in books is an oxymoron
explainable only by the dead soul syndrome, a condition that Rosa openly
lays claim to on several occasions:

Rosa said, "I was looking for something I lost."

"Poor Lublin, what did you lose?" "My life." (55)

Eventually this discourse between Persky and Rosa produces the

culminating impasse in the book, a final confrontation of Memory versus
L'Chaim!:

"But it's over," Persky said. "You went through it, now you owe yourself
something."
"This is how Stella talks.... She wants to wipe out memory." [ellipsis mine]
"Sometimes a little forgetting is necessary," Persky said, "if you want to get
something out of life."
"Get something! Get what?"
"You ain't in a camp. It's finished. Long ago it's finished. Look around,
you'll see human beings."
"What I see," Rosa said, "is bloodsuckers." (58)

Conveniently appearing at this moment, by way of his letter to Rosa, is

"[Dr.] Tree the bloodsucker!" (61), with his slander against tribal loyalty
implicit in his chapter title, "Defensive Group Formation: The Way of the
Baboons" (60). Dr. Tree—whose name suggests an anglicization of the
German-Jewish "Baum"—undermines Persky's principle of forgetting by
extending it into a form of Buddhism that is an inhuman monstrosity of
nonattachment. In a further affront, Tree derives this philosophy from his
studies in the psychology of Holocaust survivors:

It begins to be evident that prisoners gradually came to Buddhist positions.

They gave up craving and began to function in terms of non-functioning, i.e.,
non-attachment. . . . "Pain" in this view is defined as ugliness, age, sorrow,
sickness, despair, and, finally, [a special insult to Rosa as mother] birth.
Non-attachment is attained through the Eightfold Path, the highest stage of
which is . . . consummated indifference. (37-38)

But if Persky's argument for forgetting is travestied by Tree's letters,

Rosa's argument for Memory is also undercut by her deepening reliance on
fantasy to bring back her lost Magda. Her brightest fantasy in the whole
Readings 151

book lights up these closing pages: "The whole room was full of Magda....
Magda's hair was still as yellow as buttercups. . . . Magda's sky-filled eyes
. . . were like two obeisant satellites. Magda could be seen with great
clarity" (64-65). The book ends thus in ambiguity. In a terminal
confrontation, Rosa conjures up Magda's presence by means of her
memory-based magic, but Rosa also invites Persky to come upstairs with
his L'Chaim!-based realism. Who will prevail is an unanswered question.
 3
Judgment

The Critical Reckoning

Cynthia Ozick, thirty-eight years old when Trust launched her career,
was fifty-five when William Scheick and Catherine Rainwater produced the
first sustained effort of Ozick scholarship, a seventy-five-page segment of
the summer 1983 Texas Studies in Literature and Language that included
an introduction, an interview, a bibliography, and my own long essay. The
first book of criticism on Ozick was Harold Bloom's Cynthia Ozick (1986),
a collection of essays intended to represent "the best criticism so far
available" on Ozick's fiction. It is an accurate reflection of her career, and
not a reproach to Bloom's book, that twenty years after publishing Trust,
such a collection would consist of thirteen book reviews (eight in the
NYTBR) with an average length of three pages, along with six essays
averaging (not counting my own) nine pages. Bloom includes a bibliography
with another twenty-five items, twenty of which are reviews of two or less
pages. The book thus furnishes a good starting point for a quick scan of the
Ozick critical spectrum as of the mid-1980s.

In Bloom's book two reviews of Trust establish the opposite polarities of

early Ozick criticism. David L. Stevenson praises Trust for its originality,
calling it "that extraordinary literary entity, a first novel that is produced by
a rich, creative imagination, not an imitation of someone else's work or
thinly disguised autobiography." Eugene Goodheart, however, faults the
book for its "discontinuity between language and reality or between
expression and feeling," a failure that he ascribes to the unaccountably
embittered mood of the narrator. The "fog of chronic dyspepsia" emanating
from "the barren ground of the heroine's sullennesses" notably envelops
Allegra Vand, who thus becomes "more like an hallucinated projection of
the heroine's resentment than a credible mother or wife or woman."

152
Judgment 153

Taken together, these two reviews point beyond text to subtext.

Stevenson's remark that Trust is not thinly disguised autobiography does
not preclude its being well-disguised autobiography, and Goodheart's focus
on the narrator's sullennesses points to the connection between the book
and Ozick's own buried narrative. For Ozick, the living subtext beneath the
text of Trust was the bitterness of her fourfold deprivation: as a victim of
academic/ literary misogyny; as an artist condemned to see tripe like
Allegra's Marianna Harlow lionized while her own work languished in
oblivion; as a woman prohibited by Judaic sexual taboo from participating
in the Laurentian consummation of Tilbeck's apotheosis; and as a Jew
whose culture has been marginalized and threatened with extinction in the
era after the Holocaust. Goodheart was right to note the radical extreme in
the mood of Trust, but he was less perceptive than Stevenson in failing to
observe the high achievement of Trust despite the flaws caused by the
narrator's sullenness.

In its coverage of The Pagan Rabbi (1971) Bloom's book discloses two
signs of better days for Ozick criticism: the addition of a full-blown essay by
Josephine Z. Knopp to its two brief reviews (the first real essay in Ozick
criticism); and a consensus among the three concerning the extraordinary
degree of originality in her stories—"her unique vision of the truth," as
Knopp puts it. For Paul Theroux, Ozick's "imaginative daring" in
conceiving "people and situations who [sic] are rarely if ever seen in
American novels" makes her laudably different from "Malamud, Bellow,
Roth and Co." Concerning "Envy; or, Yiddish in America," Johanna Kaplan
risks an outright encomium: "I found myself overwhelmed by the story
and . . . amazed at its effect on me. I read it, reread it and lent it to friends,
all as in a fever."

Gone now are complaints of Ozick's overblown style, which has become—
Kaplan says—"sharpened, clarified, controlled" so as to make her "a kind
of narrative hypnotist." The argument now moves to questions of theme
and credibility. Ozick's ground theme, Kaplan says, which "runs through all
the stories and all the characters," is "a variant of the question: what is
holy?" Is holiness a feature of "the extraordinary" (dryads or sea nymphs),
or is it found in "what is. . . unthinkingly discounted" (daily life)? Theroux,
though agreeing with Kaplan that "Envy" is "excellent in all ways," finds
Ozick's excursions into fantasy "insufficiently dramatized and
unpersuasive," in part because the narrators of these stories (such as "The
Pagan Rabbi" and "The Dock-Witch") are in a crazed condition.

In these reviews of The Pagan Rabbi, feminist criticism makes its first
response to Ozick's fiction, to the effect of illustrating the denseness of the
male commentator. Though Paul Theroux calls "Virility" a "superb story"
for its treatment of plagiarism, he fails to see Ozick's blatantly rendered
154 Judgment

feminist purpose. Josephine Knopp, however, observes that here Ozick

"demolishes the male supremacists with the same hilarious derision that she
employs against the anti-Semites in 'Envy.'" Extending Knopp's insight, we
may say that the seven stories in The Pagan Rabbi embody a recurrence of
the fourfold deprivations that demoralized the narrator of Trust: literary
misogyny ("Virility"), Jewish sexual/religious taboos ("The Pagan Rabbi,"
"The Dock-Witch"), dismal failure of artistic ambitions ("Envy," "The
Suitcase"), and Jewish/Gentile cultural incompatibilities ("The Butterfly and
the Traffic Light" and, to some extent, all the stories). The difference since
Trust is Ozick's more consistent grasp of narrative voice, mood, and style,
which sometimes attains tour-de-force effectiveness in The Pagan Rabbi.

Thomas R. Edwards, in his review of Bloodshed (1976), brings to

expression a hitherto unspoken problem in Ozick's readership, the
bewilderment of the goy. "Bloodshed," he admits, "is hard for a goy to make
out," and "Usurpation" is confusing enough to create his generalized
"doubts about her work." Nonetheless, Edwards argues that even a
Gentile cannot help but respond to "the best thing" in Bloodshed, "the
marvelous novella 'A Mercenary.'" In addition, Ozick's preface, Edwards
says, alleviates the confusion about "Usurpation"—"Certainly her gloss on
'Usurpation' is more coherent and moving than the story itself."

That opinion, however, is strongly contested by Ruth Wisse in her essay

"Ozick as American Jewish Writer." Calling Ozick "a selfish and somewhat
nasty finagler" for defending her plagiarism in "Usurpation," Wisse
condemns the "self-justification and special pleading" of the preface, which
"betrays the insecurities of both the artist and the Jew." The harshness of
this attack may have influenced Ozick's later decision to say, "The Preface
to Bloodshed is a piece of fiction like any other" (Scheick 258)—perhaps the
least credible statement in all her writing. By far the most substantial essay
on Ozick up to that time (the June 1976 Commentary), Wisse's critique
places her against the larger backdrop of contemporary and earlier
Jewish-American writing. As against Bellow-Malamud-Roth's "twin themes
of marginality and victimization," Wisse says, Ozick is the "spokesman
and most audacious writer" among a new generation of writers who are
culturally secure enough to return without anxiety to "the 'tribal' and
particularistic aspects of Judaism." Yet, she argues, Ozick's preface, by
allowing the author to become "her own translator," reveals her
contradictory craving to be understood among the Gentiles despite her
claim that a Christian civilization is innately incapable of understanding
indigenous Jewish literature.

By 1982, the year of Levitation: Five Fictions, the fifty-four-year-old author

was beginning to establish a reputation. But though Leslie Epstein begins
her review by calling Ozick's earlier books, The Pagan Rabbi and Blood-
Judgment 155

shed, "perhaps the finest work in short fiction by a contemporary writer,"

she finds Levitation disappointing because "each of these works . . . [shies]
crucially from the kind of resolution we rightly demand from imaginative
fiction." Characterization turns out to be Ozick's weak suit, in Epstein's
view, as exemplified by the Puttermesser-Xanthippe saga. The most humanly
engaging character in the Puttermesser stories, she says, is neither
Putter-messer nor Xanthippe but Uncle Zindel, who teaches the heroine
Hebrew lessons until the narrator intervenes to declare him
nonexistent—disheartening proof, for Epstein, of how the text "quails before
the demands of, the powers of, imagination." And the title story,
"Levitation," is perhaps most damaged of all by this disengagement from
real characters, which occurs not only in Ozick's portrayal of Jews who
supernaturally levitate "into the glory of their martyrdom" but most
crucially in the portrait of Feingold's wife, Lucy. Because she is a
Christian, Epstein says, "the dice are loaded against this character, the deck
[is] patently stacked." Lucy's lapse from her Christian heritage into a wild
vision of its pagan roots means that "the game is no longer being played by
the rules of fiction. Probability, necessity, recognizable human feeling are
replaced by laws of what can only be called mystical vision."

In this critique of Lucy's character, Epstein was one of the first to touch
upon a serious long-term problem. Like Toni Morrison, Cynthia Ozick
combines a superb ability to render her own cultural heritage with a plainly
limited comprehension of the majority culture that encompasses/oppresses
it. Although there is no mystery about a black or Jewish writer's lack of
empathy for things white or Christian, art requires emotional discipline to
avoid turning into propaganda. Such discipline may be too weak when
Ozick's hatred of "the whole—the whole!—of Western Civilization" (a
claim resembling Morrison's statement that "my hatred of white people is
justified") produces the hypocritical William of Trust, the cartoonlike evan-
gelist at the end of "Envy," and the more serious but inadequate effort to
characterize Lucy as a Christian in "Levitation."1 It is nonetheless appropriate
to ask, regarding this failure of imagination, how many Gentile writers have
rendered the figure of the Jew to better effect than Ozick has rendered her
Christian (Lucy)? Chaucer, Marlowe, Dickens, Hemingway—as we
glance back through the centuries, the portraiture of the Jew by Gentiles has
not presented much solid ground from which to attack Cynthia Ozick's
portrayals of Christian characters, particularly as viewed after the Holocaust.

Katha Pollitt's essay on Art & Ardor (1983), Ozick's first volume of
essays, is an unusually penetrating and graceful exercise in Ozick criticism.
Calling the book "a unified and magisterial continuation of Miss Ozick's
short stories by other means," Pollitt divides these essays among three
156 Judgment

Ozicks—"the rabbi, the feminist, and a disciple of Henry James"—who

sometimes work against each other (e.g., feminist versus Jew), sometimes in
symbiosis. It was the Jamesian Ozick who ripped into Other Voices, Other
Rooms "like someone going after a hummingbird with a chainsaw," and the
rabbi whose subliminal motive for doing so could have been Capote's
complaint about a "Jewish mafia" in American letters. It was the rabbi and
feminist who ascribed the invention of "homosexual manners" to Lytton
Strachey, thereby "eliminating Oscar Wilde and a century of dandyism with
a stroke of the pen." Among the inspired conjectures of Pollitt's critique is
her linkup between Ozick's essay on Maurice Samuel and Yankel Ostrover
in "Envy." So too she links Ozick's essay on Harold Bloom with Isaac
Kornfeld in "The Pagan Rabbi."

The schism between Ozick the rabbi and the Jamesian Ozick underlies
Sanford Pinsker's judgment that "the ardor of her Jewishness takes a
fearsome toll on her discussions of Art." For him, however, the affirmation
of her Jewish heritage in Art and Ardor means that "Ozick has recovered
from her long Jamesian night of the soul." Something similar occurs in
"Putter-messer and Xanthippe," according to Elaine Kauvar's learned
analysis of that novella. Bringing a Socratic dialogue, Theaetetus, to bear,
along with the Kabbalistic Book of Creation by Gershom Scholem and
James's "The Lesson of the Master," Kauvar sees Puttermesser and the
golem as initially reflecting two parts of a split personality—the mature and
rational Jewish intellect versus "Puttermesser's primitive self" whose
"cries for love and life" have been "sacrificed for dedication to the
intellect." Although Xanthippe returns to earth in the end, after her sexual
fire becomes too rampant for a civilized community, Puttermesser learns
from the golem the need to recover "the experience of the ordinary and vital
passions of humanity." To judge from this essay, Kauvar's forthcoming (as
of this writing) book on Ozick will be a landmark contribution to Ozick
studies—greatly learned in Jewish lore and otherwise illuminating.2

The timing of Bloom's book enabled it to encompass, at its far end,

Ozick's second novel, The Cannibal Galaxy (1983). Of the four reviews that
are here reprinted, Edmund White's best illustrates her status among other
artists. White praises Ozick for her moral intensity—for "always submitting
experience to an ethical inquiry"—and finds "the very secret of Miss Ozick's
art" in her juxtaposition of "vivid hard circumstance and things that were
only imagined." But as a much-admired stylist himself, he reserves his main
laurels for her handling of language: "Precisely on account of her style, Miss
Ozick strikes me as the best American writer to have emerged in recent
years." What best illustrates her "astonishingly flexible and vital language"
is her handling of metaphor, which "animates every page of the novel."
Judgment 157

A. Alvarez, however, chooses exactly the same feature as his point of attack.
Although he credits the Jamesian subtlety of the work, calling it "'The Beast
in the Jungle' replayed," he faults its "startling overinflation" of style, which
makes it "far less convincing than Ozick's shorter fiction." As compared
with the stories, he says The Cannibal Galaxy has "degenerated into man-
nerism. The rhetoric and imagery proliferate like tropical undergrowth . . .
until the narrative chokes and expires."

If this disagreement over style represents critical subjectivity—each to his

own taste—the religious response is more objective and more collegial. Max
Apple's biblical stance toward The Cannibal Galaxy relates the title
metaphor to the second sentence of Genesis (which Ozick cites in the
novel): "And the earth was astonishingly empty." Calling the phrase "empty
and desolate" the "center of this wonderful novel," Apple ramifies its
cosmic, social, and personal meanings: "Empty and desolate is . . . the
uncreated universe, . . . post-Holocaust Europe, . . . suburban American
life and education,. . . [and] an aging man who has no offspring." But
against it all, in Apple's view, the L'Chaim! principle prevails: "From the
destruction of the European Jews, from the emptiness of Brill's life, from the
failures of the dual curriculum a wonder emerges: an artist." Not an artist
(Beulah Hilt) only, but two artists, as Apple renders his closing tribute to
the real-life artist and her biblical sources: "Tohu vavohu, emptiness and
desolation. From the void the cosmos. From the Fleg School Beulah Hilt.
From the mummified prose surrounding us these glorious words of
Cynthia Ozick."

Margaret Wimsatt, also in the Bloom collection, sees not the Hebrew
Bible but a Christological construct at the center of The Cannibal Galaxy,
namely, the main character's role as "perhaps a prototype of the Wandering
Jew." In various ways that is of course true, geographically in Brill's
wanderings from France to the Great Lakes, culturally in his movement
away from his Jewish heritage. But Joseph Brill is not the true subject of
Ozick's novel, in Wimsatt's judgment; "her real interest is in problems, in
philosophy, in mortality, in monotheism"—which is to say, religion. Ozick's
final objective, Wimsatt says, is to call the Jew back from his wanderings,
reminding him that "these [Western/pagan] arts were forbidden by Jahweh
to his people; they were left to the Canaanites and the Greeks. For
monotheists the path to wisdom is marked only by Midrash and
commentary."

Finally, there is Harold Bloom's own contribution to his collection,

featuring his characteristic blend of uncommon learnedness, intelligence,
and willingness to promote his own obsessions. Predictably, Bloom discovers
the anxiety of influence in Ozick's self-confessed usurpation of other
people's stories—another instance of "agonistic strivings between writers." For
Bloom, Ozick's most crucial struggle, however, is not with Jewish
forebears like
158 Judgment

Singer or Malamud but with the Gnostic heresy that has preoccupied Bloom
himself for much of his academic lifetime, for did she not say that she "lusts
after forbidden or Jewish magic"? (Although the Ozick-Bloom relationship
is too tangled to unravel here, I recommend Erella Brown's "The
Ozick-Bloom Controversy," in the Studies in American Jewish Literature of
spring 1992, as an excellent study of their mutual misjudgment.) Because of
Bloom's magisterial stature in contemporary criticism, his designation of
"Envy" and "Usurpation" as "novellas unequalled in [Ozick's] own
generation" comprises a milestone of appreciation.

In sum, Bloom's book, representing the best criticism available when the
author was in her mid-fifties, projects a cacophony of contradictory voices.
The Ozick of Harold Bloom purveys Gnostic heresy under the anxiety of
pagan influence; for many Jewish critics—Kauvar, Knopp, Pinsker,
Rosenberg, Wisse, et al.—Ozick the rabbi emerges triumphant; for Edwards
the bewildered goy and White the fellow artist, the Jewish Ozick commands
less interest than the storyteller and stylist. Though the voices sometimes
contradict each other—for example, praising and damning the same story
for its handling of metaphor (White and Alvarez on The Cannibal
Galaxy)— their variety keeps the field of critical discourse free and open.

Turning from Bloom's book to the wider field of Ozick criticism, we find
the Zeitgeist bringing postmodern ideology increasingly into play.
Concerning feminism, Ozick quarreled early on with those separatist
feminists who insisted on absolute gender difference of the intellect and
imagination. One such feminist is Barbara Koenig Quart, whose review of
Art and Ardor (1983) finds Ozick's rejection of female separatism
"particularly odd in view of her enormous concern for Jewish identity, and
her scorn for 'universalists' (mainly Jews who insist they are just like
everyone else)." Because of Ozick's distance from "the fertility and vitality
of contemporary feminism" and its "liberating effect of acknowledging that
women have a different. .. experience," her essays on Edith Wharton and
Virginia Woolf are seriously defective in Quart's judgment. By refusing "any
degree of sympathetic identification" with these fellow women artists, Ozick
herself commits sexism—observing the childless, nonresponsible state of
Wharton and Woolf, for example, without realizing that by those
standards "the equally childless and duty-free Henry James should be
open to similar criticism." 3

Levitation (1982) provided the occasion for E. M. Broner to transfer such

doubts about Ozick's feminist loyalties from her essays to her fiction. "The
Sewing Harems," according to Broner's review in the Ms. of April 1982, "is
an attack on women bonding, on womanly gods, and on the concept of
Utopian society that informs much of today's feminist fiction." Worse yet,
during our present period of "the rebonding of mothers and daughters in
Judgment 159

fiction, in literary studies and oral histories of our foremothers," Ozick

produces "no natural births, rather miraculous ones [like Puttermesser
creating Xanthippe], and the offspring turn upon their mothers." Or
mothers turn upon offspring, like Puttermesser decreating Xanthippe,
leaving a set of disturbing questions in the wake of this "dazzling and
worrisome" book:

What is the lesson to women here? ... Are we the devouring vagina that Freud
. . . would dream of? . . . One wonders: Why did the mothers have to kill the
daughters? Why does one of our best writers, a woman, join the chorus of
male voices?

Yet another mode of feminist protest came in reply to "Notes toward

Finding the Right Question," Ozick's attempt to address the troubling ques-
tion of woman's inferior place within Orthodox Judaism. Even her beloved
Maimonides, she admits, "frequently uses the phrase 'women and the
ignorant'" to denote female inferiority, and he also "recommends
wife-beating."4 Ozick's answer to the dilemma is to deny any connection
between this sort of sexism and "the Voice of the Lord of History." Through
lack of theological understanding, she maintains, Jewish males have
emulated the worldwide pattern of their sex in elevating mere
sociological bias to a divine status. The fall of man through Eve's lapse, for
example, Ozick defines as a Christian and not Judaic convention. The
answer to the problem of Jewish religious sexism, she concludes, requires
amending the silence of Torah, which, though not justifying female
inferiority, admittedly failed to specify a Mosaic Commandment: "Thou
shall not lessen the humanity of women." By reason of its "single missing
Commandment," Ozick says, "Torah— one's heart stops in one's mouth as
one dares to say these words—Torah is in this respect frayed." It is the
historic task of our age to institute the missing Commandment—"not. . .
for the sake of women; [nor] . . . for the sake of the Jewish people. It is
necessary for the sake of Torah; to preserve and strengthen Torah itself"
(151, 152).

In a rebuttal of Ozick's essay entitled "The Right Question Is Theologi-

cal," Judith Plaskow insists that Ozick has evaded the theological basis of
patriarchy. Comparing "the situation of the Jewish woman . . . to the
situation of the Jew in non-Jewish culture,"5 Plaskow says that real femi-
nism thus "demands a new understanding of Torah, God, and Israel: an
understanding of Torah that begins with acknowledgment of the profound
injustice of Torah itself" (231). In 1984, five years after her "Notes toward
Finding the Right Question" was published, Ozick put out a biblical exe-
gesis to bear out her title, "Torah as Feminism, Feminism as Torah." Here
she insists that the basic precepts of Judaism—man being made in the image
160 Judgment

of his Creator, for example—give no occasion nor example to validate male

supremacy, because the image of the Creator has no face or gender. And so
the quarrel between feminism and Torah springs from a false reading of
Torah, with feminism, not Holy Writ, thereby falling into danger: "if Jewish
feminism does not emerge from Torah, it will disintegrate." 6

It seems reasonable to suppose that this sort of deference to Orthodoxy

gives proof enough of Ozick's Jewish identity. Coincident with her
emergence as a "Jewish writer," however, Ozick's fictions have provoked
sharp controversy among Jewish-American intellectuals, among whom
some have gone so far as to publicly declare her an anti-Semite. Ironically,
the worst such storm of bitterness arose in response to one of her earliest,
finest, and most "Jewish" stories, "Envy; or, Yiddish in America":

There was a vast brouhaha over this story. A meeting was called by the
Yiddish writers, I learned later. The question was whether or not to condemn
me publicly. Privately, they all furiously condemned me. Simon Weber . . .
compared me to the "commissars of Warsaw and Moscow," anti-Semites of
the first order. I was astonished and unbelievably hurt. . . . What I had
intended was a great lamentation for the murder of Yiddish, the
mother-tongue of a thousand years, by the Nazis. Instead, here were all these
writers angry at me. (Teicholz 179)

Bloodshed, Ozick's most purely "Jewish" book, merely extended the

controversy. On one hand, Rosellen Brown thinks the title story "fails"
because of Ozick's commitment to Orthodoxy: "the inhibition against
tale-telling has taken its toll." Though she goes on to say that "Ozick's
failures are infinitely more interesting than most writers' successes,"
Brown continues to fault the specifically Jewish character of Ozick's craft,
which makes the stories "move like Talmudic argument, not like stories on
their way to a destination." On the other hand, Pearl K. Bell, alarmed over
"the apostasy of assimilation" among modern Jewish intellectuals, praises
Ozick for her "most uncompromising indictment of the Jewish surrender to
Gentile America.7 But then again, from the point of view of other Jewish
writers Ozick's uncompromising indictment seems nothing more than an
instance of arrogant fanaticism. Deborah Heiligman Weiner writes:

This contempt of Ozick's is overpowering. She doesn't offer a viable

alternative with which to replace Jewish literature as it is today, yet she feels
free to level criticism at those who make the effort. For example, she doubts
whether Isaac Bashevis Singer . . . is a writer of "Jewish stories" at all, since no
other writer departs so thoroughly and so deliberately from the mainstream
of Mosaic vision.
Judgment 161

We have arrived back at that texture Ozick imposes on the world, that false
dichotomy: the Pagan versus the Mosaic.8

Compounding the confusion is Ozick's own sense of weakness

concerning her Jewish identity. The Second Commandment forbids not
only her storytelling, she confesses, but also her passion for Jewish history,
which has become another idol that she has raised "instead of" God: "I am
in thrall to the history of the Jews. It is the history of the Jews that seizes
me ultimately. . . . History is my master and I its servant." 9 Nor is being
stiff-necked before God Ozick's only transgression against her Jewish
heritage. She has also succumbed, she admits, to that very process of
assimilation that she has loudly decried in de-Judaized writers like Philip
Roth and Norman Mailer. R. Barbara Gitenstein reports Ozick's act of
confession:

Last Sunday night, I saw a 1938 Polish-made Yiddish film called Teyve. I was
amazed to learn about all the layers and layers of forgetfulness and
assimilation I—who am dedicated to not forgetting, who despise assimilation
. . . discovered in myself. . . . Mamaloshen [Yiddish] is the language of my
emotions, but I don't possess it.10

In case this sort of self-criticism proved insufficient, help was never very
far away. Eugene S. Mornell, for example, attacked Ozick for holding a
view of Judaism so narrow as to consider Harold Bloom "anti-Judaic. And
not only Bloom but the Kabbalists, the Hasidim, Gershom Scholem. (What
a long list she must have.)"11 Earl Rovit, reviewing Levitation, also deplores
Ozick's tendency "to issue exclusionary decrees," by which she divides the
world between "the fold of an Orthodox sensibility and those who deviate,
a category capable of expanding to include everyone except some
death-camp survivors.'"12 And Burt Jacobson too accuses Ozick of
maintaining a "view of Judaism [that] is extremely narrow and historically
inaccurate." Because her "rigid puritanical stance reifies the tradition into
an idol," he says, she replicates "the idol-making she imputes to Bloom,"
cutting herself off meanwhile from those deep springs of creativity evidenced
by the "mystical flights . . . [of] so great a luminary as Rabbi Akiva
himself."13

But yet, it was the flights of mysticism in "Levitation"—the scene of

levitation—that brought on Joseph Epstein's cry of protest: "Madam, I
implore you, get those Jews down, please!" The "atmosphere up there, in
that living room aloft,... finally seems extremely thin," Epstein explains. "I
prefer my Jews grounded."14 Because her stories are so fanciful—Epstein
names "Levitation," "The Pagan Rabbi," and "Bloodshed" to make the
point—Epstein pronounces them "willed and schematic," "a muddle." Say-
ing, "I admire almost everything about her . . . but her stories," Epstein
162 Judgment

considers her probably "a better essayist than novelist"—mainly because

the essays manifest a more credible realism.

Although Ozick renounced "the heavy mantle of 'Jewish writer'" in 1984,15

commentary about her Jewishness continued to dominate the criticism of
the later 1980s. To a large extent, this tendency reflected her readers'
enhanced understanding of the theme of idolatry in her writings, but several
critics moved beyond that insight to make new observations. Haim
Chertok, in "Ozick's Hoofprints," makes an excellent point about Ozick's
use of the concept of "waiting" in the Jewish ethos:

Waiting entails both self-control and a sense of the purposes of history. It is

for Ozick a heroic Jewish occupation and profession. . . . As she notes in "The
Fourth Sparrow," [Gershom] Scholem's masterwork details the cataclysmic
upheaval of the Jewish world when it surrendered to the pretensions of
Sab-batai Sevi, when it grew tired of waiting for the end of days. Messianism
run amok is likewise the very center of fictions like "Puttermesser and
Xanthippe" and "The Sewing Harems." Murder itself ensues, (emphasis
Chertok's)16

Janet Handler Burstein's contribution to the "Jewishness" discourse is to

take Ozick's argument against idolatry into new ground. Citing Ozick's
definition of imagination as "the power to penetrate evil, to take on evil, to
become evil," Burstein identifies a peculiarly Jewish notion of evil that
Ozick's fiction often propagates, most notably in "The Pagan Rabbi":

the sense of fluid or amorphous identity . . . which is a given for the artist, is
anathema to Jewish thought; the root preoccupation of Leviticus . . . is
precisely to classify, to fix phenomena within their categories, and to forbid
the mixing of categories that would cloud the boundaries between one form
or kind of life and another.17

Exemplifying this mixing of categories is the tree nymph in "The Pagan

Rabbi," at once "commandingly human in aspect" and "unmistakably
flow-erlike" and therefore illustrative of "both the seductive delights and
the moral dangers that Ozick associates with art" (89-90).

Ellen Pifer's superb analysis of the Puttermesser stories adds a new com-
plexity to this larger view of the "Jewishness" of Ozick's fiction. The narra-
tive reflexivity and fantasy in these stories, says Pifer, do more than signify
Ozick's place within postmodern or antirealist literature. More important,
by refusing to "bestow apparently godlike authority on an author or biogra-
pher," they counteract the risk of idolatry that storytelling engenders by
competing with God's creation. 18 In contrast to Puttermesser's ruinous
Judgment 163

lapse into the power of magic and fantasy, Ozick's artistic creativity thus
"testifies to [her] profoundly moral commitment as an artist. Like most of
her other fiction, both the Puttermesser stories [in Levitation] employ post-
modernist techniques to convey a deeply orthodox vision of reality."

In 1987, the publication of The Messiah of Stockholm set the stage for our
final chorus of cacophonous critical voices. Dismissed by Paul Stuewe as "a
surprisingly lightweight and undistinctive novel," it was hailed by Harold
Bloom as a "brilliant new novel" which portrays, in Lars, "the most
persuasive and poignant figure" in all Ozick's fiction, while also displaying
(in the "Messiah" manuscript) "certainly the most vivid and revelatory
prose she has published so far."19 Because this book reflects Ozick's
"awareness that her earlier view of art as idolatry was too severe," The
Messiah of Stockholm "marks the central point in Ozick's writing to date,"
Bloom says, enabling her "to reconcile her need to create tales, idols of a
sort, and her desire to continue as a truster in the covenant, a moral follower
of Jewish tradition." As a result, she is "helping to mature an American
Jewish literature that may aid in the larger venture of seeking continuity in
an authentic American Jewish culture."

Bloom's delight in seeing Ozick become "a true daughter of [Bruno]

Schulz, whose Jewishness . . . is fascinatingly implicit in his writing," was
not universally infectious. Janet Malcolm, for one, found the "Messiah"
manuscript within the novel—which Bloom called her "most vivid and
revelatory prose" yet published—both badly written and un-Schulzian: "it
could not possibly have been written by Schulz. His delicate, poetic stories
are about as far as you can get from the stiff, cerebral, didactic piece of
surrealism that Ozick has concocted."20 Calling the world of this novel
"completely artificial," Malcolm attributes its "strange failure" to the total
incompatibility between Ozick's "stern Sinaitic art" and Schulz's concept of
fiction as pure escapist playfulness. For Robert Alter, likewise, the novel
failed stylistically, its "wild hyperbole" betraying "an attempt to substitute
rhetorical intensity for experiential depth."21 Worse yet, in flat contradiction
to Bloom, Alter declares this novel not only un-Schulzian but disastrously
un-Jewish. "The location of The Messiah of Stockholm makes it her first
pervasively 'Gentile' fiction," Alter observes, and the result of that choice
is to make the book un-Ozickian as well:

I would not for a moment suggest that a Jewish writer needs to write about
Jewish subjects, but it is peculiar that so much of what Cynthia Ozick cares
about most deeply . . . is excluded from this book: the Jewish people as the
bearer of a distinctive history; Judaism with its uncompromising monotheistic
164 Judgment

imperatives; Israel as a radical new possibility in the Jewish relation to his -

tory. . . . In Cynthia Ozick's new novel. . ., the absence of either Israel or of a
persuasive sense of real history is a symptom of the narrow limits of the merely
literary notions within which her fiction is enacted. (54, 55)

In the fall 1987 Studies in American Jewish Literature, Daniel Walden not
only disagreed with this judgment, calling The Messiah of Stockholm "Ozick's
most profound and well-crafted work to date" (173), but devoted the entire
issue to a book-length collection of essays called "The World of Cynthia
Ozick." The giant thrust given Ozick scholarship by this volume extends
beyond the journal itself into the books undertaken by several of its authors:
Sanford Pinsker (see below), Sarah Blacher Cohen (in progress), and Elaine
Kauvar (see p. 205, note 2). The gem of the collection is Cynthia Ozick's
own essay, "The Young Self and the Old Writer," which adds importantly to
our conception of the artist. Calling the Old Writer "dangerous, slippery,
however overtly responsible and conscientious," Ozick impersonates a post-
modern sensibility ("undoubtedly Yale-derived" is her sly phrase) by raising
fundamental questions about her identity:

Isn't autobiographical writing, selective and therefore skewed—isn't all

writing—essentially fiction? . . . The Old Writer is aware of what a trickster
she has been. Is she, for instance, a "Jewish writer" at all? . . . In fiction, is
there such a thing as "Jewish subject-matter," or is there only subject-matter?
Who will definitively settle for the notion that a tale is about its subject-matter
anyhow? (165)

Walden's introduction to the collection augments this portrait of the

artist by relating Ozick's conflicted identity—as a modernist who reveres
tradition, an Orthodox Jew who wants women rabbis, a rationalist skeptic
who veers off into mysticism—to the inner springs of her creativity: "The
point is that the tension she lives with is the energy that drives her" (2). And
Diane Cole adds some new brush strokes by tracking down Ozick's random
essays in "The Uncollected Autobiography of Cynthia Ozick." One of
Cole's discoveries is a memoir by Ozick's mother, Shifra Regelson Ozick,
about the family's difficult passage in 1906 from Russia to New York. In an
Esquire essay about a schoolmate of Ozick's, Cole found a prototype of the
parasitic Chimeses in "An Education." And in two New 'York Times essays,
one written under a pseudonym ("Trudi Vosce"), Cole found good reason
for Ozick's Zionist militance. In one she decried the murder of her teenaged
cousin by a Palestinian terrorist, and in the other—a prelude to The Shawl,
Cole says—she interviewed a Jewish woman imprisoned for ten years in a
Judgment 165

Siberian labor camp and prevented for fourteen more years from emigrating
to Israel.22

The major critical achievement in this volume belongs to Elaine M. Kauvar

for her two essays "The Dread of Moloch: Idolatry as Metaphor in Cynthia
Ozick's Fiction" and "Courier for the Past: Cynthia Ozick and
Photography." In the first of these, Kauvar sifts through Talmudic lore,
Greek legend, and aesthetic theory to cpnstrue "The Doctor's Wife,"
"Rosa," and The Cannibal Galaxy as "a midrash of the Second
Commandment"—a major phase of Ozick's cultural warfare against
postmodern unseriousness: "In an age devoid of values, depersonalized by
autonomous technique, dehumanized by solipsism, disrupted by cultural
anomie, diminished by opaque language, and deadended by ahistoricism,
Cynthia Ozick's fiction replenishes, familiarizes, universalizes, connects,
enlightens, and redeems" (127). The other essay, arguing that photography
is Ozick's "summarizing metaphor for art," brings a powerful sense of
history to bear on "Shots" and other writings: "The enduring importance of
memory to the Jewish people originates in the Hebrew Bible where
remembrance is pivotal, where the command to remember is absolute, and
where the various declensions of the verb zakhar ('to remember') appear
at least one hundred and sixty-nine times" (130). In both essays Kauvar
makes crucial use of Ozick's "Judaic" preference for the caterpillar (in a
state of "becoming") over the butterfly (the perfected thing).

Bonnie Lyons' essay, "Cynthia Ozick as a Jewish Writer" (an appropriate

title for the whole collection), makes some astute observations about Ozick's
cultural inconsistencies: "sometimes she defines Judaism as a unique and
distinct religious vision, at other times she treats it as something like a
synonym for moral seriousness" (14). So, too, Lyons observes, in rejecting
feminism as biologically deterministic Ozick forgets that Jewishness also has
a biological component, except for the few proselytes. Lyons' analysis of
"The Pagan Rabbi" and the Puttermesser-Xanthippe stories ranks with the
best criticism of those stories.

S. Lillian Kremer's "The Splendor Spreads Wide: Trust and Cynthia Ozick's
Aggadic Voice" likewise ranks with the best criticism of Trust. By focusing
on Enoch's conversion from Communist to observant Jew, Kremer shows
how "Jewish history . . . and Jewish values function as the novel's enduring
touchstone" (27). In the end, the force of the Holocaust is so harrowing as
to overwhelm the Hellenic paganism associated with Tilbeck, Kremer argues
persuasively, and that is why a "Hebraic coda" terminates the book with
Tilbeck the nature god dead, and Vand the Holocaust scholar immersed in
Orthodox worship. Kremer astutely notes how Ozick's scale of Jewish his-
tory reaches back in Trust to Hitler's Roman prototype, Titus (TR 152)—
166 Judgment

two leaders of vast superpowers, separated by two millennia, whose efforts

to exterminate Judaism ended in lost empires while Judaism lives on.

Of the other essays in "The World of Cynthia Ozick," space permits only
a mention. Jeffrey Rush's "Talking to Trees: Address as Metaphor in 'The
Pagan Rabbi'" uses Paul Ricoeur's and Tzvetan Todorov's theories to
distinguish Jewish from Gentile ideas of metaphor. Ellen Serlen Uffen's "The
Levity of Cynthia Ozick" extends the idea of the golem from "Puttermesser"
to "Virility," "A Mercenary," "Envy," and "The Pagan Rabbi." Amy J. Elias'
"Puttermesser and Pygmalion" sees pagan versus Jewish views of art—
"creation-as-Galatea and creation-as-golem"—as posing "the central
conflict in 'Puttermesser and Xanthippe'" (67). Sanford Pinsker's
"Astrophysics, Assimilation, and Cynthia Ozick's The Cannibal Galaxy"
applies the cannibalism metaphor culturally to the main characters. Cecilia
Konchar Farr's "Lust for a Story: Cynthia Ozick's 'Usurpation' as
Tabulation" cogently illuminates that greatly convoluted story with help
from Robert Scholes's tabulation and Metafiction. Joseph Cohen's "'Shots':
A Case History of the Conflict between Relativity Theory and the
Newtonian Absolutes" relates Ozick's parable about photography to the
great battle of modern physics, "between relativity as promulgated by
Einstein, Bohr, Heisenberg, and their associates and the principles which
have come down to us from Sir Isaac Newton" (98). Sarah Blacher Cohen's
"Cynthia Ozick and Her New Yiddish Golem" compares Xanthippe to
earlier golem prototypes, both Jewish and Gentile (e.g., Frankenstein), as
well as to the Freudian id. And finally, Mary J. Chenoweth's indispensible
bibliographical essay is a comprehensive reference work for writings by and
about Cynthia Ozick through June of 1986.

To complete the critical Wunderjahr 1987, the University of Missouri

Press brought out Sanford Pinsker's brief but usefully intelligent book, The
Uncompromising Fictions of Cynthia Ozick. Beginning with mention of
Ozick's earlier American forebears, chiefly Hawthorne and Melville for
their theme of "Original Sin," Pinsker also sees the lineaments of Anne
Bradstreet and Emily Dickinson in the aged poetess of "Virility." Pinsker's
review of Ozick's Jewish-American predecessors—Abraham Cahan, Henry
Roth, Philip Roth, Delmore Schwartz, and Saul Bellow—also yields good
insights, including the argument that her "uncompromising attacks on such
'pagans' as Harold Bloom, Norman Mailer, Allen Ginsberg, and Philip
Roth are thinly disguised attacks against aspects of herself" (40).

Pinsker's analyses of the fiction can also be illuminating. He explains the

inferiority of "The Dock-Witch" to "The Pagan Rabbi," for example, by
arguing that the secular character of "The Dock-Witch" deprives it of
dramatic tension, making it a portrait of Pan with no Moses for
counterpoint.
Judgment 167

He writes well about Ozick's version of the "secret sharer" theme that
connects Bleilip and the rebbe in "Bloodshed," Morris and Lushinski in "A
Mercenary." (He is ingenious in seeing Morris as a black version of the
Jewish "hapless, and comic, schlemiel"—a man at ease in the African jungle
but victimized by the far worse "jungle out there" in New York City.) The
finest segment of Pinsker's book, I would say, is his discussion of one of
Ozick's most complex, problematic stories, "Usurpation" (80-85).

In 1988 Joseph Lowin's Cynthia Ozick accomplished a giant stride in

Ozick criticism.23 As the director of the Midrasha Institute of Jewish Studies,
Lowin brought to bear an uncommon mastery of the Judaic lore relevant to
Ozick's writings. As a Ph.D. in French literature, Lowin also made good use
of his direct access to European literati without lapsing into the Derrida/
Foucault/Lacan style of guru jargon. And as a correspondent of Cynthia
Ozick's, Lowin assembled information of crucial value concerning the per-
sonal and literary development of the author.

Tracing her career in roughly chronological order, Lowin begins with a

succinct but informative chronology of the artist's life, followed by two
chapters that explain her early career, including several ventures in poetry.
The idea of Midrash strongly affects Lowin's commentary, coming into play
in the "Teaching and Preaching" function that he finds prevalent in Ozick's
work—in her essays, in such stories as "An Education" and "Bloodshed,"
and in such novels as Trust and The Cannibal Galaxy (52). Another of
Lowin's ideas is to organize chapters that pair off Ozick's writings in
dialectical fashion: "A Jewish Fantastic: 'The Pagan Rabbi' and
'Levitation'" (chapter 5) versus "A Jewish Realism: The Cannibal Galaxy"
(chapter 6); and "Rewriting Others: 'Usurpation (Other People's Stories)'"
(chapter 7) versus "Rewriting Herself: 'The Shawl' and 'Rosa'" (chapter 8).
Although the whole book is a commendable achievement in criticism, I judge
its finest segments to be its discussion of "Usurpation" (90-105), its analysis
of the Puttermesser stories (chapter 9), and its penultimate chapter on The
Messiah of Stockholm—a book that he considers "a culmination of Ozick's
rewriting activity and the logical conclusion of much she has written to
date" (145). A misfortunate lapse in Lowin's judgment, as in Pinsker's
before him, arises in the book's concluding paragraph: "Of one last thing we
may above all be certain: We have not yet seen Ozick's masterpiece" (165).
That seems a harsh burden to impose on a highly accomplished
sixty-year-old writer.

In 1989, Vera Emuma Kielsky's Inevitable Exiles applied an even stronger

Jewish consciousness to Ozick's fiction than did Pinsker and Lowin.24 As
her subtitle indicates—Cynthia Ozick's View of the Precariousness of Jew-
ish Existence in a Gentile Society—Kielsky sees Ozick's fiction as a weapon
168 Judgment

of cultural warfare: "Her fiction . . . is an undisguised assault on Jewish

vulnerability to the Gentile standards, and are [sic], in effect, Jewish attacks
on spheres of Gentile predominance" (11). By limiting her coverage to
selected stories from Ozick's three collections, Kielsky scants a considerable
range of material germane to her topic, but she gains enough space to make
an in-depth analysis of these ten stories. In many of these stories Kielsky
sees the Jewish characters as schizoid, torn between conscious pride in being
one of God's chosen people and subconscious desire to be rid of the stigma
of being Jewish (20). Her treatment of this schism in the Morris-Lushinski
relationship of "A Mercenary" is especially astute (52-53), but she also
writes well about Ozick's wide-ranging analogies: of "The Pagan Rabbi"
and Goethe's Faust; of "The Dock-Witch," the Circe episode in The
Odyssey, and Heine's "Die Lorelei"; of "Puttermesser and Xanthippe" and
the Book of Genesis. Her correlation of the Undine myth ("The
Dock-Witch") with the Undine of the Kabbala (132n) is another useful bit
of learning.

Unlike Lowin, who sees Ozick's vision as redemptive (e.g., The Messiah of
Stockholm "brings redemption both to the creation of God and the creations
of man," 161), Kielsky brings her analysis of the fiction to a terminus of
extreme pessimism. Puttermesser, Una Meyer, Edmund Gate, and
Edelsh-tein—in her analysis—appear unredeemable: "In all four stories, . . .
her protagonists. . . finally lose control over their destinies.. . . Her stress lies
on . . . the pathology rather than the remedy, for she seems not to believe
that there is a solution to the protagonists' problems" (195). Before
leaving Kielsky's book, we should note with gratitude its excellent
bibliography.

There remains Lawrence S. Friedman's Understanding Cynthia Ozick.25

In his preface, Matthew J. Bruccoli (the general editor of the Understanding
Contemporary American Literature series) declares modest intentions—
these books "are planned as a series of guides or companions for students or
good nonacademic readers." But in fact Friedman's book, like Lowin's, is
exemplary criticism—astute, learned, and cogently written. Like Lowin and
Pinsker, he is at his best when discussing "Usurpation" (24-25 and 107-13),
but he is also good at making illuminating conjectures. The closing sentence
of "Bloodshed," for example ("Then you are as bloody as anyone"), evokes
for Friedman Stephen Crane's classic novella: "in this case the blood shed by
Jews throughout a tragic history . . . becomes the red badge of Jewish
identity" (106). So, too, Friedman sees the shadow of Philip Roth's Amy
Bellette (the girl who thought she was Anne Frank) behind Lars
Andemen-ing's supposition that he was the son of Bruno Schulz (160). He
expatiates in new ways on the connections between Ozick's Adela in The
Messiah of Stockholm and the Adela of Bruno Schulz's two published books
(164-65), and he detects the presence of Jerzy Kosinski not only in "A
Mercenary" but
Judgment 169

in The Shawl (118). His discussion of the golem-making tradition likewise

offers new insights (135-36), as does his analogy between Freudian
psychology (in "Freud's Room") and idolatry (3).

In the late 1980s and early 1990s, the teachings of "Critical Theory"
inevitably made inroads into Ozick criticism. Earl Rovit's "The Two
Languages of Cynthia Ozick," while happily eschewing the Derridean
penchant for opacity, in effect deconstructs Ozick's writings so as to find "a
manner similar to that of an animated comic strip" in which "the whole
enterprise seethes in a steady turbulence of rage."26 Characters such as
Bleilip, Edelsh-tein, and Isaac Kornfeld are offered in evidence of this
thesis: "As in cartoons, motives are reduced to single adrenal urgencies,
personality is equated with blunt obsession, and the fluidity of normal
human intercourse is grotesquely rendered in a series of collisions when a
caricatured dread or desire comes into thudding impact against its
immutable or immovable limit" (37). Because this "cartoonlike style,"
which is "blunt, didactic, comic, judgmental, often cruel, and severely
moralistic," is often juxtaposed with Ozick's "second language, the style of
'the nimbus' or . . . the corona-style [as seen in Beulah Hilt's paintings],"
Rovit believes "the central problem of Ozick's art is the existence of two
languages whose generic structures incarnate different purposes which
impel them in contrary directions" (40-42). Observing that "her typical tale
travels from rage to grief," Rovit considers her cartoon style "energized by
the rage, her corona-style by the grief" (47). Despite his admiration for The
Messiah of Stockholm as "a nearly sustained and breathless stylistic tour de
force," Rovit considers Ozick's work badly damaged by its harsh
didacticism: "even an unsentimental reader may feel that the comic
mechanisms designed to expose and punish vice have themselves become
vicious in their instrumentality" (44).

In Michael Greenstein's "The Muse and the Messiah: Cynthia Ozick's

Aesthetics," Ozick's work gets placed (or should I say sited?) within a
flowering garden of Theoretical Phrases: "self-consuming artifacts on the
borderline between modernism and postmodernism," "floating signifiers
that inhibit frozen signification," "an infinity of heretical hermeneutics."
Fortunately, among his clumps of jargon Greenstein includes a number of
useful insights, especially by way of interpreting Ozick's imagery. For exam-
ple, he links the zebras at the end of The Messiah of Stockholm to the striped
uniforms worn by death-camp inmates, and he relates Joseph Brill's name
(meaning "spectacles" in Hebrew) to a pattern of sight images in The Canni-
bal Galaxy. Readers who find the dichotomy/continuity between modern-
ism and postmodernism interesting may consult another Greenstein essay,
"Ozick, Roth, and Postmodernism," for a discussion of "Ozick's alignment
with some, not all, aspects of postmodernism" in The Messiah of Stock-
170 Judgment

holm.27 They may need to watch out for "the undertow of metonymic
reality" (58), however, in numerous constructions like the following:
"realistic novels are predominantly metonymic both in their horizontal
connections and in a vessel's relationship between container and its
contents" (59). Or: "In this realm of uncertainty, through a crack in the
wall, and during a translucent dusk, 'no one knew' about barbaric
epistemology in Sweden's no-man's-land" (57).

Since its publication in 1987, controversy over The Messiah of Stockholm

has become a (perhaps the) major feature of Ozick criticism. Anne Redmon
regrets the burning of the Messiah manuscript, an irresponsible act that
"liberates" Lars to become "a slab of insensitivity" in the conclusion. Sylvia
Barack Fishman, however, while agreeing that Lars is "wrong in
capitulating to the world of easy popularity at the end of the novel," holds
that Lars also was wrong to idolize Schulz and his manuscript, which got him
"involved in a pagan, inhuman enterprise."28 Elizabeth Rose differs from
Redmon and Fishman in thinking that in the end the novel affirms Ozick's
Jewish values, by "celebrating the end of Lars's alienation" and returning
him to "an ordinary life within a community." 29 Sanford Pinsker, however,
seeing nothing ordinary about it, believes that "one will have to look
deeper than the work of Bruno Schulz" or even than "contemporary Jewish
theology" to understand Ozick's novel: "My own hunch is that the
Kabbalah explains much of the energy in The Messiah of Stockholm."30
Pinsker's fine essay compares Roth's resurrection of Anne Frank in The
Ghost Writer with Ozick's recovery of Schulz in The Messiah of
Stockholm.

To conclude, the last decade has been a good one for Ozick criticism,
ending in a plethora of awards and honors. Inasmuch as they, too, comprise a
form of literary criticism, I shall end this section on The Critical Reckoning
with a brief checklist of these honors (with thanks to Bloom, Lowin,
Friedman, and others for their compilations): 1968—Fellow, National
Endowment for the Arts; 1971—Jewish Book Council Award and B'nai
B'rith Heritage Award for The Pagan Rabbi; 1973—American Academy of
Arts and Letters Award for Literature; 1975—First Prize in O. Henry Prize
Stories competition for "Usurpation"; 1977—Jewish Book Council Award for
Bloodshed; 1982— Guggenheim Fellowship; 1983—Strauss Living Award
from the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters;
1984—Honorary Doctorates from Yeshiva University and Hebrew Union
College and Distinguished Alumnus Award from New York University, First
Prize of O. Henry Prize Stories competition for "Rosa"; 1985—Presenter of
Phi Beta Kappa Oration at Harvard University; 1987—Honorary Doctorate
from Hunter College; 1988—Elected to American Academy and Institute of
Arts and Letters.

On 28 December 1992, Cynthia Ozick gave a reading at the Modern

Judgment 171

Language Association convention in New York City. To an overflow crowd

of many hundreds who packed the large assembly hall, she recited passages
from "Alfred Chester's Wig" and "Puttermesser Paired." (The two segments
she read described, respectively, her fruitful rivalry with Chester in their
Freshman English class, and the failed Venetian honeymoon of George Eliot
and her much younger bridegroom, John Cross.) What made the occasion
even more triumphant than it seemed was the coincidental scheduling of her
reading at the same hour as that of Ralph Ellison, a few doors away.
Probably most people in the room, including Ozick herself (so she told me),
would have helped honor the grand master of African-American fiction had
the schedule permitted. As it was, this large throng of admirers, in making
their painful choice, confirmed how high a place she holds in the estimate of
her contemporary readers.

Judeo-Christian

As the foregoing Critical Reckoning illustrates, the essential "Jewishness" of

Cynthia Ozick's writing has been the primary focus of virtually every
commentator. That Jewishness, in turn, rests largely on a sense of history
which, for our present purpose of judgment, requires emendation. The
Holocaust and, before that, the murderous pogroms that drove millions of Jews
to America were European, not American, phenomena. Admittedly,
immigrants from the Old World frequently brought their biases with them so
that, even when diluted within the next generation of New York schoolchildren,
they could inflict some "old school hurts" on a tender-age child. The American
Protestant tradition at large, however, spoke in decidedly friendlier tones. If the
most popular poet of nineteenth-century America may be considered a
trustworthy guide, "The Jewish Cemetery at Newport" implies a powerful
public empathy:

How came they here? What burst of Christian hate,

What persecution, merciless and blind,
Drove o'er the sea—that desert desolate—
These Ishmaels and Hagars of mankind?

If Longfellow is arguably unrepresentative—in 1854 a dubious

proposition—there remains undeniable evidence of public opinion in the
newspapers. At about the same time as Longfellow's poem, Emily
Dickinson's local newspaper ran the following piece from the widely
distributed Congregational Journal (of New England's foremost church), as
the lead article on the newspaper's front page:
172 Judgment

POSITION AND INFLUENCE OF THE JEWS

The existence of the Jews is the living miracle of the world. They are
scattered and down-trodden, and yet, according to the most accurate statistics, are
as numerous as they were when they left the land of Egypt, the return made to
Bonaparte giving about three million. . . . They may be banished, but cannot be
expelled; be trodden down, yet cannot be crushed. Only in the United States,
France, Holland, and Prussia are they fully citizens; but in spite of British
statutes, the Russian ukase and Turkish curse, they prosper still. The great nations
of antiquity, the Egyptians and Assyrians, the Romans and Saracens, as well as
the modern Turks and Christians, have attempted to destroy them, but in vain:
while penal laws and cruel tortures have only served to increase their
indomitable obstinacy.

This Christian empathy with Jewish history, told in surprising detail, is

prelude to an equally fraternal assessment of time present, again told in
surprising detail:

But Jews exist not only as a monument and a miracle: Jewish mind has
exerted a powerful influence on the world. . . . In politics we have Metternich
in Austria, D'Israeli in England. . . . In money power the Jews hold in their
hands the destinies of kingdoms and empires. . . . The Rothschilds, the Bar-
ings, and Sir John Montefiero are all Jews, and with their banking establish-
ments scattered over Europe and Asia, wield a sceptre more powerful than
monarchs hold. Coming to the literary profession . . . we find the Jews promi-
nent here as in active life. The most renowned in Astronomy have been Jews,
as the Herschels in England and Arago in France. . . . Spinoza, the famous
infidel, was a Jew. . . .
Such have been and are the Jews. Mysterious nation! Inexplicable enigma! A
living, perpetually omnipresent miracle! A race so indomitable, so imperish-
able, must have been raised up and preserved for some grand purpose. 31

A year later, on 11 May 1854, the lead article on page one again featured
the drama of Jewish history—this time without borrowing its substance
from a church-related journal. Theodor Herzl himself could scarcely exceed
this measure of Christian exultation over the fulfillment of the promise of
the Covenant for God's Chosen People:

ROTHSCHILD AND PALESTINE

It is rumored in Paris that M. de Rothschild offered the Turkish Sultan a huge

loan to fight the Crimean War in return for a mortgage on Palestine. . . . Palestine is
the Lord's inheritance for the seed of Abraham. The Turkish power holds it. That
power must give way before the plans of Divine Providence. Its downfall is
imminent; and who shall next own Palestine? Evidently the Jews. Why has
Providence raised them up and placed in their hands an
Judgment 173

amount of wealth equal to that of many an entire kingdom? May it not be for
such a time as this? . . .
. . . New forms of government arise all over Europe, and the Jews return
to their fatherland under the deed of Rothschild. These are the thoughts
which quickly spring up in our mind upon reading of Rothschild's Turkish
bargain.

Whether, outside of America, a big-city non-Jewish newspaper would

display this level of front-page zeal is a significant question. Nonetheless, in
correspondence with me, Cynthia Ozick has turned a cold eye on these
expressions of Christian empathy. Longfellow's poem, which I sent her to
illustrate how I introduced her segment of my Modern American Fiction
course, became the occasion of an MLA talk and later turned up in an essay
about Christian "supersession" of Jewish culture.32 Beneath his superficial
sympathy, Ozick argued, Longfellow revealed "no notion that Jewish
history is anything other than the history of victimization by Gentiles; no
understanding that Jewish history is above all intellectual history, the
history of a continuing people, a continuing land, and a continuing
literature." Longfellow's general ignorance of the Judaic tradition in turn
reflected America's refusal to reciprocate the willingness of its Jews to learn
about Christian culture. And those friendly voices in Emily Dickinson's local
newspaper, in Ozick's view, are belied by that invidious reference to
Rothschild wealth—a long-standing danger signal to anyone versed in
Jewish history.

The issue at last comes down to a difference of opinion. In my reply to

Cynthia Ozick, I insisted that I know these people, having grown up among
their descendents in a New England township. According to my observation
and experience, the sentiments I have cited had no trace of envy,
anti-Semitic or otherwise. Rather, they were typical of American Christian
culture in the time of Longfellow and Dickinson: in a few years similar
beliefs were to lead these Christian folk in all innocence toward enormous
sacrifice in the vineyards where the Grapes of Wrath are stored. And
despite the presence of anti-Semitism in American life, evangelical
Protestantism is still broadly philo-Semitic as typified, for example, by the
popular singer Pat Boone, who on national television declared himself a Jew
inasmuch as he defined Christianity as the fourth branch of Judaism. Back in
the 1950s, the famously Christian voice of T. S. Eliot said something similar
by way of rebuking his old friend Ezra Pound. He could accept ridicule
on other grounds, Eliot said, but he would not tolerate any further attacks
on his religion, which included the Jewish religion. 33

Because T. S. Eliot effectively reoriented modern literature toward Chris-

tianity, his place in Ozick's canon of criticism has special significance. As
174 Judgment

recently as 1976, in her preface to Bloodshed, she called The Waste Land
"the greatest modern poem" (BL 9). In the New Yorker of 20 November
1989, however, she published a very long essay in which she decries her own
former enlistment in the "nearly universal obeisance to an autocratic,
inhibited, narrow-minded, and considerably bigoted fake Englishman" (121).
Not only is his poetic oeuvre "amazingly small in the light of Eliot's
towering repute," she says, but the mind behind those celebrated poems
turned out to be, one might say, a dried tuber: "His reach, once broad enough
to incorporate the Upanishads, shrank to extend no farther than the
neighborhood sacristy, and to a still smaller space: the closet of the self"
(150, 151). And one sure sign of Eliot's intellectual bankruptcy, if not
outright corruption, was his post-Holocaust assertion that "if Christianity
goes, the whole of our culture goes"—"as if [Ozick goes on to say] the best
of European civilization (including the merciful tenets of Christianity) had
not already been pulverized to ash throughout the previous decade" (126).

Revulsion against Christian culture is an understandable response to

Jewish history within Ozick's post-Holocaust generation, but a proper
evaluation of her achievement cannot allow this sort of grand judgment to
go unquestioned. Did the best of European civilization, including Christian
virtue on the Continent, really turn totally and permanently to ash during
the Nazi epoch? If so, wasn't that fact as obvious in 1976 as in 1989? In
which case didn't the leading apologist for a Christian society deserve
condemnation rather than, or along with, praise for The Waste Land in the
preface to Bloodshed? It appears that a missing middle term muddles the
argument. Along with Eliot's anti-Semitic streak and other character defects
(which Rossell Hope Robbins delineated back in 1951 in The T. S. Eliot
Myth), I infer that the missing term is Ozick's long-standing resentment of
supersessionism—Eliot's breezy assumption of Christian hegemony in works
like The Idea of a Christian Society and Notes towards the Definition of
Culture.34 (Incidentally, I am convinced that Harold Bloom's Kabbalah and
Criticism was written expressly hum the same resentment of the Chris-
tianized graduate study of his youth.)

In part, the Zeitgeist probably explains the radical difference in tone and
stance between 1976 and 1989. Postmodern theory has encouraged whole-
sale disdain toward the authority figures of modernism, coupled with valor-
ization of previously marginalized cultures. But at times this zeal for revi-
sion leads to conclusions one would not expect from a writer immersed in
millennia of history. In "Bialik's Hint," Ozick argues that "the Enlighten-
ment 'Judaized' Europe" by bringing to fruition the Hebraic ideal of "moral
seriousness," which she claims is "a wholly Enlightenment idea" (MM 229,
240n). The obvious question that she raises here is whether her time scale is
Judgment 175

off by fifteen centuries—whether, that is, we should really ascribe the

Judaization of Europe (and subsequently America) more largely to the
philosophies of the Enlightenment than to the Christian missionaries of the
later Roman Empire. If we postulate that those Hebraic ideals came to the
Enlightenment via its Christian heritage—a more likely influence, I think,
than (as Ozick argues) that of the Jews whom the Enlightenment
emancipated— then perhaps the difference between Christian and Jew is
less profound and their affinities more deeply rooted than Ozick usually
predicates.

Not even the Holocaust, which for many Jews stretched the Judeo-Christian
hyphen to Grand Canyon proportions, can be held to represent a total
Christian-Jewish rupture. Holocaust historians, it is true, sometimes appear
to argue otherwise, as when Claude Lanzmann's Shoah portrays Polish
collaborators gladly helping their conquerors establish a Judenrein
continent, or when Ozick herself describes the Nazi massacre at Babi Yar as
occurring "with the zealous complicity of the Ukrainians." 35 Yet, history
has become a suspect discipline in recent times, held culpable of masking its
author's personal agenda under a pretense of objectivity. As great a
historian as Raul Hilberg told me that he was interested in describing only
the people who killed Jews, not their saviors, which is why he made no
mention of Raoul Wallenberg's heroic rescue work in his original edition of
The Destruction of the European Jews, even though he had heard about it.
In any case, the historical record of Gentile Holocaust resisters figures to be
woefully incomplete, especially as regards those who perished during the
course of their frightful risk taking.

Counteracting somewhat this imbalance in perspective is the testimony of

Israel Shahak, a survivor of the Warsaw Ghetto and Bergen-Belsen from
1942 to 1945 who says his opinions have been confirmed in talks with many
other survivors of similar experiences. Shahak, calling Lanzmann "a
prisoner of his own prejudices," pronounces Shoah "presumptuous and
racist" for associating Holocaust guilt with nationality. Citing instances he
saw of Jewish blackmailers, spies, and ghetto police victimizing other
Jews, he judges these turncoats as "perfectly equal in their wickedness"
with the "criminal minority" of Poles and Germans who facilitated the
Holocaust. These victimizers—like their heroic contraries, the Gentiles
who saved Jews—"behaved in a way which is neither Jewish nor Polish but
typically human," according to Shahak's passionately stated argument. 36

Another defender of the Poles, Norman Davies, puts Polish wartime

anti-Semitism in the context of the Hitler-Stalin partition. When Stalin's
police took over their half of Poland, not only were the native Poles
savagely brutalized by the disproportionately Jewish Soviet police; in
addition, Polish Jews in large numbers publicly welcomed the Soviet
conquest. The Yad
176 Judgment

Vashem archive in Israel confirms that "the Jews welcomed the Red Army
with joy"; that Jewish youth groups "toured the countryside smashing
Catholic shrines"; that in Pinsk young Jews built an Arc de Triomphe for
the invaders; that, in the view of many Poles, "Jews were seen to be dancing
on Poland's grave"—for their own historically understandable reasons, to
be sure. Ironically, Polish Jews under Stalin's rule soon found his oppression
so unbearable that "thousands of Jewieh refugees swarmed westward
toward the Nazi zone," by one eyewitness account, creating a scene where a
Nazi commission "was greeted by crowds of Jews chanting 'Heil Hitler' in
the hope of getting permission to cross the frontier." 37

At some point, any mature philosophy of culture must subordinate its

assertion of "difference"—in this case, Christian versus Jew—to the deeper
mystery of the individual human personality. Nobody in the world can say
why some persons brought up as Christians turned out to be death camp
torturers while others gave up their lives, and risked those of their families,
to save hapless strangers. Nobody knows why some Jews became Stalin's
murderous Cheka agents, as cold-blooded as Hitler's Gestapo, while others
have given lavishly of themselves to alleviate the world's sufferings. In the
end we can only say that all human beings receive their culture as a historic
given, a fixed framework within which the individual conscience will define
itself according to the unaccountable moral laws of its own being. The only
culture worth valorizing is finally the one that is attested through the
conscience of these superior moral beings, whether Christian, Jew, Moslem,
atheist, or whatever.

In 1992, Cynthia Ozick came around to praise the Christian West in an

essay titled "Of Christian Heroism."38 As an apologia, it begins rather
unpromisingly with Clare Boothe Luce's (perhaps apocryphal) complaint
about being bored with hearing about the Holocaust, to which a Jewish
friend of hers replies that he understands her perfectly, being fatigued to
tears from hearing so often about the Crucifixion. But Ozick goes on to
render a stately tribute to those truest of all saviors of Western civilization,
the handful of brave and compassionate and mostly Christian people who
risked their own and their families' lives to save thousands of Jews from
destruction: "They are the heroes of Nazified Europe. They are Polish,
Italian, Romanian, Russian, Hungarian,. . . and [nota bene] German. They
are urban and rural; . . . sophisticated and simple; . . . nuns [as in The
Cannibal Galaxy] and socialists." Though few, their importance is
enormous, belying the "brainwashing process by philosophers who [for
centuries have] emphasized man's despicable character." In the end, "It is
from these undeniably heroic and principled few that we can learn the full
resonance of civilization."
Judgment 177

Despite her fears of cultural cannibalism, then, Ozick can sometimes

show enthusiasm for an assimilationist perspective. In "Bialik's Hint," she
credits the influx of "pagan" culture into Judaism for the famous
"bookish-ness" of modern Jews: "It was the gradual superimposition of the
Socratic primacy of intellect upon the Jewish primacy of holiness that
produced the familiar, and now completely characteristic, Jewish personality
we know. . . . [Thus] there is no Jew alive today who is not also resonantly
Greek" (MM 236). And she regards the converse as equally valid—that there
is no "Greek" (Euro-American) alive today who is not resonantly "Jewish."
Ozick proves the latter theorem in her closing tribute to the language of the
first, Sinaitic, "Enlightenment." Speaking of Hebrew as "the original vessel
for the revolution in human conscience," she says:

Because of the power of scriptural ideas, there is hardly a language left on the
planet that does not, through the use of its own syllables and vocabulary, "speak
Hebrew." All languages have this Hebrew-speaking capacity, as the literatures of
the world have somewhat tentatively, yet honorably, demonstrated. If this is
true, it is a proof that Hebrew does not have a unique ability, by divine right, so
to say, to carry certain ideas, although the genius of Abraham and Moses and
the Prophets runs like mother milk through its lips. (MM 239)

As she concludes "Bialik's Hint," Ozick predicts an accelerating "fusion of

what we are as the children of the Enlightenment, [and] what we are as the
children of Israel" (MM 239). According to this essay, then—in which Ozick
also makes her peace with the "Jewish writer oxymoron"—the differences
between Christian and Jew, however orthodox both may be, are secondary to
what they hold in common, which includes both their secular public life and
their Hebraic cultural roots. Despite the saturation of her work in Jewish
subject matter, then, and despite the plethora of perfectly valid "Jewish"
commentary about this work, Cynthia Ozick's final definition as an artist is:
an American writer. For all her fears of cultural loss, she is as American as
Herman Melville, as Samuel Clemens, as William and Henry James.

Amerikaner-Geboren

In her fiction, essays, and interviews, the fear of cultural loss has assumed
increasing importance for Cynthia Ozick. The one great counterweight to
this fear—the restoration of Israel—has elicited single-minded exultation on
Ozick's part, but even this miracle of modern history has its bitter ironies,
including Israeli indifference toward the death of Yiddish culture along with
the rekindling of the war with the Canaanites that began four millennia ago.
178 Judgment

In any case, the predicament of Jews in the Diaspora, not the success of
those in Israel, has claimed the center stage of her writings. Concerning
these Jews Ozick's most common term of anxiety is "impostor"—a phrase
she uses repeatedly in interviews to describe the cultural exchanges that so
threaten her characters' Hebraic heritage.

As we look back over the roll call of Ozick's protagonists, we find instance
after instance of characters who abandon their actual birthright (frequently
a Judaic, not merely Jewish, heritage) in vain pursuit of some apparently
superior culture—which is what Ozick really means by the word "idolatry."
For the Jewish-manque narrator of Trust, the deadly temptation is the
double appeal of WASP aristocracy and its nemesis, Tilbeck's irresponsible
paganism; for the Pagan Rabbi and for Tchernikhovsky in "Usurpation," it
is the allure of pantheism; for Lushinski in "A Mercenary" and Bleilip in
"Bloodshed," the danger arises from that cultural pit of blackness called
secularism; for Joseph Brill in The Cannibal Galaxy and Rosa in The Shawl,
the Jewish soul's enemy is assimilation into America or "Europe"; for
Puttermesser, the irresistible lure inheres first in golem magic and then in
the high literary culture of Victorian England; for Lars Andemening in The
Messiah of Stockholm, the adversary is Ozick's own vocation in the magic
realm of art. For all these characters the idea of impersonation is bound up
with exchanging one's own true culture for another.

Because this fear of cultural assimilation, expropriation, and supersession

has been strongly present, criticism of Cynthia Ozick has taken so
relentlessly "Jewish" a coloring as to obscure her affinities with the
traditional American mainstream. But in fact, Ozick's long-term portrayal
of her cultural heritage under siege places her in a long and stately
American tradition. In this respect, she resembles not only other preservers
of a threatened minority heritage—Toni Morrison, Maxine Hong
Kingston, Louise Erdrich—but also the canonical names of the majority
culture, many of whom also deplored the loss of their native heritage beneath
a tidal wave of change. One thinks, for example, of Cooper's jaundice, via
Leatherstocking, toward the arrival of Jacksonian democracy; of Twain
treating with contempt America's migration from Edenic St. Petersburg to
the citified corruptions of the Gilded Age; or of Faulkner's bitter irony—in
Sanctuary, for example— on witnessing the Snopesist New South
displacing the Old. According to Robert Penn Warren, this sense of a
culture under siege is required for the highest level of imaginative writing:

The old notion of a shock, a cultural shock, to a more or less closed society—
you know, what happened in the Italian Renaissance or Elizabethan England.
After 1918 the modern industrial world . . . hit the South and all sorts
of
Judgment 179

ferments began. . . . There isn't much vital imagination, it seems to me, that
doesn't come from some sort of shock, imbalance, need to "relive," redefine
life."

Apropos of Warren's thesis, the Holocaust and Restoration of Israel

produced a cultural shock that contributed to the primacy of the "Jewish
novel" during the two decades after the war, the time of Ozick's own
artistic incubation.

Despite the uniqueness and magnitude of those two events, however,

Ozick's artistic sensibility discloses a profile made familiar by earlier writers
of the American mainstream. Let us start with Ozick's obsessive theme of
dualities—her way of portraying her own conflicted affinities with Tilbeck
and Enoch, Pan and Moses, Puttermesser and Xanthippe, Bleilip and the
rebbe, Feingold (the Jewish history fanatic) and his Gentile wife Lucy (who
reads Jane Austen's Emma "over and over again"), and Joseph Brill's Dual
Curriculum. What is this schizoid condition, after all, if not her version of
Faulkner's assertion, in his Nobel Prize address, that "the problems of the
human heart in conflict with itself . . . make good writing because only that
is worth writing about"?

Faulkner had his own obsessive version of the theme, notably his pride
and guilt regarding the South, but it did not begin with him. Tracing back,
we have Mark Twain's very name implying the theme of duality (twain,
twin, two-ness), and Twain too invested himself in a series of contrary
characters—Huck the realist (Twain's version of Ozick's Sinaitic conscience)
versus Tom the pagan-romantic; the Connecticut Yankee (Twain's
rationalism triumphant) versus Joan of Arc (Twain's sentimentality
personified); and those extraordinary twins in Pudd'nhead Wilson. In the
end, Ozick's fundamental dualities extend a tradition that traces back to the
American Renaissance movement, embracing both the transcendentalists
and their adversaries. On the latter side we have Poe, who foreshadowed
Freud by pitting his "Spirit of Perverseness" against "Conscience Grim" in
"The Imp of the Perverse," "William Wilson," and other stories; we have
Hawthorne, with his subtle interplay of guilt and innocence; and we have
Herman Melville (selected by Ozick for membership in Puttermesser's
mayoral cabinet), whose subtitle to Pierre—"Or, The Ambiguities"—is a key
to all Melville's thought: to "The Conflict of Convictions" in his Civil War
poems; to his incongruous empathies with both Ahab and Ishmael; to his
arguments for and against the hanging of Billy Budd.

On the transcendentalist side even those two ur-monists, Ralph Waldo

Emerson and Henry David Thoreau (namesakes respectively of Sonny and
Throw Purse in Trust), prove to be dualists with respect to the human
personality. "We are conscious of an
180 Judgment

animal in us, which . . . is reptile and sensual, and perhaps cannot be wholly
expelled," Thoreau writes in Walden; "I fear that we are such gods or demi-
gods only as fauns and satyrs, the divine allied to beasts" (Walden, chapter 11,
"Higher Laws"). And Emerson reminds us vividly that the true basis of
duality is neither Christian nor Jewish but the condition of being human:

Man is . . . a stupendous antagonism, a dragging together of the poles of the

Universe. He betrays his relation to what is below him,—thick-skulled,
small-brained, . . . hardly escaped into biped. . . . But the lightning which
explodes and fashions planets and suns, is in him. . . . [Here] they are, side by
side, god and devil, mind and matter, . . . riding peacefully together in the eye
and brain of every man.40

For Ozick, as we are told again and again, the most painful version of this
innate duality was the "Jewish writer oxymoron." That too has its perfect
correlative in the American tradition, as for example in Melville's
"Christian writer oxymoron" after finishing Moby-Dick: "I have written a
wicked book, and feel spotless as the lamb."41 Janet Handler Burstein put it
well in "Cynthia Ozick and the Transgressions of Art":

In asking whether art impedes the making of moral choices Ozick, of

course, takes her place in a distinguished line of American artists from
Hawthorne and James to Pound and Gather. All ideologies, the Calvinist as
well as the Judaic, civil religion as well as aestheticism, limit choice. (85)

Going beyond mere blasphemy, Faulkner, that purveyor of the old heroic
virtues and verities of the heart, pronounced the serious writer a criminal
species, capable of any wickedness—Faulkner cited killing his own
grandmother—if it will advance his art. This paradigm of the artist as
criminal-blasphemer was heralded again by Ralph Waldo Emerson, most
notably in "Uriel." In this poem, cited by Robert Frost (in A Masque of
Reason) as "the greatest Western poem yet," Uriel speaks such
blasphemous truths that heaven is shaken:

The balance beam of Fate was bent;

The bounds of good and ill were rent;
. . . out of the good of evil born,
Came Uriel's voice of cherub scorn,
And a blush tinged the upper sky,
And the gods shook, they knew not why.
Judgment . 181

Far from being a Jewish peculiarity, Ozick's fear that her art flouts the
divine Command is well within the mainstream of major American authors.

Even apart from questions of blasphemy and crime, there remains,

prominent in Ozick's work, the chief nightmare of the writer agonistes: the
impossibility of being understood. Among Ozick's haunting procession of
isolates are several who clearly represent her own crushed hopes*—Beulah
Lilt, incognito in Brill's school; Edelshtein, unreadable without a translator;
Edmund Gate's Aunt Rivka, stripped of glory on account of her gender.
These are poignant figures, to be sure, but what could really be more
classically American than the portrait of the wounded artist? Bartleby the
Scrivener, Melville's surrogate fugitive from the Dead Letter Office; the
anathemized Walt Whitman, who (the New York Times declared in 1856)
"roots like a pig among a rotten garbage of licentious thoughts"; the
reclusive Emily Dickinson, plucker of sour grapes like "I'm Nobody! Who
Are You?"; Faulkner, begging for hack work as his great novels went out of
print during the war—these figures and many others form a main line of
American literati among whom Ozick's wounded artists might find easy
blood kinship at last. There is nothing inherently or distinctively Jewish about
this syndrome.

Nor does Ozick's long flirtation with pantheism bespeak a particularly

Jewish sensibility. Emily Dickinson, for example, expresses a Christian
version of the Pagan Rabbi mode when she ends "My Sabbath" ("The
gentian weaves her fringes") in a pantheistic parody of the Trinity—"In the
name of the bee / And of the butterfly / And of the breeze, amen!" Although
Ozick mentions Spinoza in "The Pagan Rabbi," that great Jewish-pantheistic
philosopher had no direct influence on this story; instead she was writing
from the American mainstream tradition. In answer to my query about
who promoted her pantheistic leanings, she refers to the cluster of
luminaries who have sustained American literature from the beginning—the
Romantic and transcendentalist writers:

In high school and college I was saturated in the Romantic poets, yes, and
wrote a college honors thesis on Blake, Coleridge, Wordsworth, and Shelley. I
was a zealous monist then, captivated by the fusion of soul and nature.
Spinoza, however, never took my attention or allegiance—have you ever tried
reading Spinoza? (Ltr 6/6/90, emphasis hers)

Among the transcendentalist literati after whom she named the Purse
children in Trust—Manny (Whitman), Sonny (Emerson), Al (Alcott)—the
boy named Throw (Thoreau) calls to mind a particularly impressive
analogy between a passage in Walden and one in "The Pagan Rabbi":
182 Judgment

It is false history, false philosophy, and false religion which declare to us that
we live among Things. . . . The molecules dance inside all forms, and within
the molecules dance the atoms, and within the atoms dance still profounder
sources of divine vitality. There is nothing that is Dead. There is no Non-life.
Holy life subsists even in the stone, even in the bones of dead dogs and dead
men. (PR 20-21)

The earth is not a mere fragment of dead history, . . . not a fossil earth, but a
living earth; compared with whose great central life all animal and vegetable
life is merely parasitic. (Walden, chap. 17, "Spring")

One could cite many other instances in which Cynthia Ozick displays ties
that transcend the surface exotica of her Jewish materials. Eliot's The
Cocktail Party, for example, has structural analogies with "Levitation,"
particularly in that both works center upon a cocktail party at which the
true identities of the participants get sifted out: a Christian martyr in
Eliot; Jewish martyrs in Ozick. Ozick's recurring motif of the impostor is
likewise a familiar American theme: the fabrication of a deracinated self
readily links her Lushinski ("A Mercenary") and Dr. Eklund (The Messiah of
Stockholm) with figures ranging from Jay Gatsby to the King and the Duke
to Melville's Confidence Man. And nothing is more characteristically
American than the jaundiced view of class discrimination that links the
creator of Allegra Vand and Rosa Lublin with writers as various as Dreiser,
Fitzgerald, Joyce Carol Gates, and Toni Morrison.

The conflicted nature of Ozick's fiction also places her in the American
mainstream. Although she speaks of the Judaic need for art "to judge and
interpret the world," her fictional closures often turn out to be as
ambiguous as the significance of Hawthorne's A, or Melville's whale, or
Strether's decision not to live all he can with Maria Gostrey. In this respect,
her essays contrast with her fiction exactly according to William Butler
Yeats's formulation: rhetoric (Ozick's essay writing) is a quarrel with other
people, poetry (Ozick's fiction) a quarrel with oneself. And, as the critics
have engagingly demonstrated, the latter quarrel is finally unresolvable. At
the end of Trust, will the artist-heroine go forth to forge in the smithy of her
soul an oeuvre in. the mold of her natural Hellenistic father, Tilbeck, or of
her spiritual stepfather, Enoch Vand? We must look to her next book for an
answer, where "The Pagan Rabbi" merely repeats the question: how much
of Ozick goes into the rabbi's exultant apotheosis, and how much lingers
with its nemesis, the constraining strictures of the Law?

And the conflicts continue to the end of the Ozick oeuvre. In "Blood-
shed," who really gets the last word, Bleilip the despairing skeptic or the
orthodox rebbe? In The Cannibal Galaxy, should we consider America the
Judgment 183

Jewish Eden to be also a cannibal galaxy? In The Messiah of Stockholm, is

Lars better off in possession of Schulz's Eye or as a companion of the
stewpot? And what should we make, in either case, of the book's closure—a
man in a long cloak carrying a box toward the chimneys? Which is better
for Rosa to choose as The Shawl closes—Magda filling the room or Persky
on his way upstairs? Magic or reality? Imagination or L'Chaim? Despite its
Judaic call to judgment, Ozick's artistic sensibility proves as protean in these
dilemmas as Melville's regarding Captain Vere, Robert Penn Warren's
regarding Willie Stark, or Updike's regarding Rabbit Angstrom. In being
fraught with dualities, Ozick's Jewish art is quintessentially American.

Even Ozick's most distinctively Jewish feature, her fidelity to "ethical

monotheism" (as she defines the essence of Judaism), is centrally within the
American grain. In calculating our debt to the Jewish heritage, Upton
Sinclair traced the modern crusade for social justice directly to the ethical
enlightenment of Hebrew antiquity, almost as though he had been reading
"Bialik's Hint":

No, there is one thing and one thing only which distinguishes the Hebrew
sacred writings from all others, and that is their insistent note of proletarian
revolt, their furious denunciation of exploiters, and of luxury and wantonness,
the vices of the rich. Of that note the Assyrian and Chaldean and Babylonian
writing contain not a trace.. .. [The] true, natural-born rebels of all time were
the Hebrews. They were rebels against oppression in ancient Judea, as they are
today in Petrograd and New York; the spirit of equality and brotherhood
which spoke through Ezekiel and Amos and Isaiah . . . speaks today through
. . . the Socialist and Anarchist agitators, following the same tradition,
possessed by the same dream as the ancient Hebrew prophets. 42

Culminating Ozick's "Americanness" are her numerous affinities with

those two models of ur-WASP high culture, the brothers James. In her early
work, Henry James's "international theme" was evidently an example that
Ozick would have followed if the Holocaust had not redefined the Euro -
pean half of that Jamesian compound. Throughout her career, we may
ascribe to James more than any other mentor Ozick's central obsession with
the theme of the impostor—the trusted and crucially influential friend who
is not what he/she seems. Whether we look at the narrator's phony father
figures in Trust or the faithless tutors of Joseph Brill and Lars Andemening,
the ancestral figures of Milly Theale and Isabel Archer come to mind,
stalked by trust-breaking predators. But the James-Ozick connection is not
simply a matter of the lesson of the master. If Allegra Vand expressed the
Jamesian lure of Europe for the young Ozick, a reversal of sorts occurred for
the older Henry James, drawing him into belated embrace of the L'Chaim!
184 Judgment

principle via his dread of the wasted life in The Beast in the Jungle and other
stories. Broadly considered, what better defines the L'Chaim! concept than
Lambert Strether's much-touted summation in The Ambassadors, "Live all
you can. It's a mistake not to"?

In the New Criterion of January 1993, Ozick presents perhaps her final
major revision of the Ozick-James connection in her essay "What Henry
James Knew." Whereas she began her career in fiction trying to emulate the
success of James, what intrigues her now is James's deepest experience of
failure. When James was booed off the London stage on 5 January 1895, this
lapse into (as he put it) "the most horrible hours of my life" compounded
other recent tragedies—the untimely death in 1892 of his sister Alice and the
suicide in 1894 of Constance Fenimore Woolman. To some degree, Ozick
remarks, James had reason to feel complicity in both deaths, if—as it seemed—
Alice's talent had been fatally suffocated by the brilliance of her older
siblings and if Woolman's hunger for intimacy with James had remained
coldly unreciprocated. Suffusing this whole wretched period, moreover, was
James's deepening sense of "the essential loneliness of my life" (James's
emphasis, as Ozick notes)—a predicament worsened by his hopeless
infatuation with several younger men of his acquaintance. James's
homoerotic isolation comprises a reasonable fascimile, we might say, of
Ozick's recurring sexual misfit—the narrator of Trust, Una in "An
Education," the doctor in "The Doctor's Wife," Edelshtein in "Envy," Joseph
Brill and Lars Andemening in the later novels. Increasingly, the later Henry
James came to approximate an Ozick character.

Ostensibly, Ozick's interest in James's dark night of the soul focused on the
way it affected his late fiction. "James is one of that handful of literary
proto-inventors—ingenious intuiters—of the unconscious," she says of this
period; "it is the chief reason we count him among the imperial moderns"
(18). Particularly in The Awkward Age, she argues, his "descent into an
interior chaos" made him, "finally and incontrovertibly, a modernist" (22).
But the unconscious works on the critic as well, most pointedly in affecting her
choice of a subject. If the triumphant youthful James now yields in her esteem
to the older James who was tormented by grief, guilt, and failure, perhaps her
new empathy touches on something deeper than his rebirth in the
modernist canon. Their deepest affinity, one may surmise, is that James has
become more like Ozick herself as a result of his sufferings, having drunk
deeply from the bitter cup of artistic rejection, wounded self-confidence,
and outsider status—a condition made all the worse by his easy early
victories (in contrast to her career). Withal, this most WASPish of American
writers has become more Judaized, being touched to the quick by a tragic
knowledge (recalling her title "What Henry James Knew") that makes his
later affirmation of the
Judgment 185

L'Chaim! attitude—"Live all you can"—all the more resonant. In this late
essay of Ozick's, it may be said, these two writers, one quintessentially WASP
and the other quintessentially Jewish-American, display a newly deepened,
because painfully earned, cultural interchange.

Sustaining that cultural intercourse, I would say, is a bedrock of affinity

between Ozick's ethical monotheism and the religious thought of the
greatest and most quintessentially American philosopher, William James.
Ozick's Pan-versus-Moses formulation translates readily into James's
monism versus pluralism, which he considered, in "Pragmatism and
Religion," not only "the final question of philosophy" but "the deepest and
most pregnant question that our minds can frame."43 Like Ozick, James
eschewed the God-in-Nature heresy—"Now I am myself anything but a
pantheist of the monistic pattern"44—while favoring a religious sensibility
committed to ethical action. For Enoch Vand in Trust, ethical action is the
immovable anchor to which his Jewish sensibility holds fast despite even the
Holocaust and its enticement toward atheism. "Dedication to one's work in
the world is the only possible sanctification," he says (TR 560), a view that
he earlier upheld against his wife's incomprehension:

[Allegra] "You're always making things sound as if the universe depended on

. . . every single private act." [Enoch] "Maybe it does." (TR 141)

Ozick's fidelity to that idea is echoed everywhere in William James.

"Today," James says in The Varieties of Religious Experience, "helpfulness
in general human affairs is . . . reckoned as a species of divine service."45 And
again, in "Pragmatism and Religion," James declared, "I believe that each
man is responsible for making the universe better, and that if he does not do
this it will be in so far left undone."46 In "The Dilemma of Determinism" he
claims that "the final purpose of our creation seems most plausibly to be the
greatest possible enrichment of our ethical consciousness."47 At the bottom
of these imperatives is James's Torah-like evocation of the design set forth
by the Creator:

Suppose that the world's author put the case to you before creation, saying: "I
am going to make a world not certain to be saved, a world the perfection of
which shall be conditional merely, the condition being that each several agent
does its own 'level best.' I offer you the chance of taking part in such a world."
(Pragmatism 187)

Such echoes of the Judaic ethos remind us why Cynthia Ozick is as

American as William James. Although Gentile America may not be as
"Jewish"
186 Judgment

as Cynthia Ozick with regard to Yiddish speech and kosher laws, its
Christian past brings with it a profoundly Jewish soul. The theological
grounds for argument—whether, on one side, God degrades himself via
Incarnation; or whether, on the other, God elects a Chosen People on a
biologically determined (tribal) basis—can perhaps be bypassed in favor of
the common culture. That broadly Judeo-Christian heritage, promulgating
the "moral seriousness" that made William James the kind of thinker he
was, is a final reason why the Jewish fiction of Cynthia Ozick is essentially,
not marginally, American.

Major/Minor

In her 1986 oral interview with Kay Bonetti, Cynthia Ozick defined
her place in the literary pantheon as "minor, minor, minor." Not until 1992,
however, in "Alfred Chester's Wig" (in the New Yorker of 30 March), did
Cynthia Ozick define the term and its implications. Initially, the designation
reads like a death certificate for the small-fry stranded below the heights of
Olympus:

The economy of writing always operates according to a feudal logic: the

aristocracy blots out all the rest. There is no middle class. The heights belong
to, at most, four or five writers, a princely crew: the remainder are invisible,
or else have the partial, now-and-then visibility that attaches to minor
status. (84)

Even more chillingly, she asserts, apropos of Alfred Chester, that "minor
writers are mainly dead writers who do not rise again." The word "mainly,"
however, opens a loophole of hope that expands into a larger sense of
usefulness:

To be able to say what a minor writer is—if it could be done at all—would

bring us a little nearer to defining a culture. The tone of a culture cannot
depend only on the occasional genius, or the illusion of one; the prevailing
temper of a society and a time is situated in its minor voices. . . . There can be
no major work, in fact, without the screen, or ground, of lesser artists against
whom the major figure is illuminated. (96)

Concerning the criteria separating major from minor, she observes that
"quantity is not irrelevant." Among those who demonstrate that "abun-
dance counts" she cites Balzac and James, though she allows for the possi-
bility of "blazing exceptions" like Wuthering Heights. Another defining
Judgment 187

term is "sectarianism," a monomaniac narrowness of interest always

indicative of minor status: "Nothing displays minorness so much as the
'genre' novel, however brilliantly turned out, whether it is a Western or a
detective story . . ., even when it is being deliberately parodied as a
postmodernist conceit" (97). "Parochialism," by contrast, bespeaks a
universal applicability present in major fiction: "All 'parochialisms' are
inclusive. Sholem Aleichem's, Jane Austen's, Faulkner's, Garcia Marquez's
villages have a census of millions" (97). So, too, the minorness of
monomania plays off against the major character of "obsessiveness":
"Geniuses are obsessive: Kafka is obsessive, Melville is obsessive.
Obsessiyeness belongs to ultimate meanings; it is a category of
metaphysics" (97). Lastly, the category of minor can result, as in Alfred
Chester's case, from the practice of "ventriloquism," which Ozick defines as
a flight from reality related to an "excessive love of literature." "What
ventriloquist writers want is to live inside other literatures," Ozick explains;
"[Chester] saw landscapes and cities through a veil of bookish imaginings"
(97, emphasis hers).

Clearly, by her own definition of the term, Ozick is not a major author,
one of the four or five Titans bestriding the stage of her lifetime—a Joyce,
Mann, or Faulkner. She lacks both their vast abundance of pages and their
huge, ongoing impact on the world of letters both during their own time
and later. But at the same time, her own self-designation as triply minor is
unreliable. Like Hawthorne rendering his Puritan heritage, Ozick breathes
life into a parochial, not sectarian, vision of Jewish-American life, and she
does so with obsessive, not monomaniac, urgency. Where Hawthorne
journeyed across two centuries of time to reach his subject, burying himself
for years in ancestral lore to do so, Ozick crosses a quarter-globe of space,
immersing herself in her ancestral lore so as to situate herself in the
European-American ground of twentieth-century Jewish identity. Her
"village," a site that includes the imagined Auschwitz and Warsaw of The
Shawl as well the observed Jewish enclaves of Miami and New York, has its
census of millions.

For Cynthia Ozick, the designation "minor" relates substantially to her

choice of a form. Although she has written several novellas that rank with
the best in the language—with Conrad's "Youth," Melville's "Bartleby the
Scrivener," Faulkner's "The Bear"—she has nothing to match up with the great
novels by those writers. In effect, she is a strong contender for the
championship of something less than the heavyweight division. Yet, in her
own words, "minor status is not always the same as oblivion." Her list of
minor immortals, which includes Edward Lear, W. S. Gilbert, and Max
Beerbohm, ends modestly in a parenthesis: "(There are a handful more
among the living)" (97). But all writers, major or minor, have the same
end in mind:
188 Judgment

"what they really work for is that transient little daily illusion—phrase by
phrase, comma after comma—of the stay against erasure." A major poet,
Robert Frost, defined that last phrase memorably: "The utmost of ambition
is to lodge a few poems where they will be hard to get rid of, to lodge a few
irreducible bits where [Edwin Arlington] Robinson lodged more than his
share."48

I would judge that Ozick's finest work—including "Envy," "A

Mercenary," "Usurpation," "Bloodshed," "The Pagan Rabbi," many scenes
in Trust and the other novels—is so stunningly original and brilliantly
rendered as to fit Frost's measure. She is a minor writer, that is to say, in the
classic fashion of Stephen Crane, Katherine Anne Porter, and Flannery
O'Connor, whose best work, though limited in abundance, figures to retain
literary immortality. By way of suggesting what characteristics make her
"irreducible bits" most "hard to get rid of," my final section on Judgment
will be a brief postscript of personal evaluation.

Postscript: An Appreciation

Ten years ago, I ended my long essay "The Art of Cynthia Ozick" with
a brief personal assessment of her career. Although the intervening decade
has seen a wide expansion of both Ozick's own oeuvre and criticism about
her, nothing has happened to substantially alter my original opinion. I am
therefore reprinting my comments largely, though not completely, as they
were. My greatest regret in ending this work is that even a book-length
study cannot do justice to Ozick's style, which she rightly
described—speaking of Trust—as "mandarin" and "lapidary," making
"every paragraph a poem" (BL 4). Of her writing at large, she says,
"nothing matters to me so much as a comely and muscular sentence.. . . I
miter every pair of abutting sentences as scrupulously as [my] Uncle Jake
fitted one strip of rosewood against another" (MM 109-10). Of her prose
rhythms she says, "Cadence is the fingerprint, isn't it?" (Teicholz 170). Her
favorite metrical device is to put the main statement up front and then
attach to it a long string of modifiers to form a rising curve of feeling. Here,
for example, that curve of mounting excitement rests upon a fantasy of
reversing the Holocaust in the name of the "To Life!" ethos:

As if the reel of history . . . could be run backward: these mounds of ash,

shoes, teeth, bones, all lifted up, healed, flown speck after speck toward
connection, toward flowering, grain on grain, bone on bone, every skull bloom-
ing into the quickness of a human face, every twisted shoe renewed on a vivid
Judgment 189

foot, every dry bone given again to greening. Ezekial's vision in the valley of
bones. (AA 230)

As she warms to her subject, the style of this passage illustrates Ozick
verging into prose poetry, especially evident in the incantatory rhythm
resulting from her use of repetition: "every" repeated three times, "bone"
and "grain" and "toward" and "speck" repeated twice in quick succession.
Special rhetorical power is gained from verbal nouns and adjectives that
give the sense of immediate action .happening now: "lifted," "healed,"
"flown," "flowering," "blooming," "renewed," "greening," and "twisted."
The four-part repetition of bone/bones, the last time being "dry bone,"
plays off against the imagery of fertility—"flowering," "blooming,"
"renewed," "greening." And the short final line about Ezekiel's vision,
thumping in anapestic tetrameter, gives a rhythmically emphatic close to this
apocalyptic paragraph.

Ozick did not require a sublime subject like this one, however, to
summon up her powers of cadence. From "Alfred Chester's Wig," in the
New Yorker of 30 March 1992, we cull a sentence about the pleasure of
visiting Manhattan's musty used-book stores: "Gradually, the cellar smells
would be converted, or consecrated, into a sort of blissful incense; nostrils
that flinched in retreat opened to the tremulous savor of books waiting to be
aroused, and to arouse" (84). Here, with Hawthornesque precision,
delicacy, and wit, Ozick moves within the scope of one sentence from
metaphors of church worship ("converted," "consecrated," "incense") to
those of sexual seduction ("tremulous," "to be aroused, and to arouse").
Given her propensity to view literature as a violation of her religion, that
metaphorical progression from sacred to profane seems particularly
appropriate.

As these examples imply, I was first attracted to Ozick's stories by the

continous execution of her art—the line by line, scene by scene, page by
page vivacity of imagination and vigor of style. If we postulate that the scene
in fiction corresponds to the image in poetry, we may say that Cynthia
Ozick's interplay of fictional devices consistently develops scenes answering
to Ezra Pound's Imagist Manifesto of 1913: they "transmit an intellectual
and emotional complex in an instant of time." The pagan motifs converging
into the night of Tilbeck's apotheosis; the Pagan Rabbi's breathtaking con-
summation of love with the dryad; Puttermesser chanting her beloved golem
back to a pile of mud; Tchernikhovsky insolently at ease in Zion; Lushinski
in Africa contemplating his buried self in Warsaw; the living idols turning
cannibalistic in The Messiah of Stockholm; the total immersion of the senses
in Auschwitz to begin The Shawl—such scenes bespeak a gift of the first
order of talent. Likewise, the irreducible bits that Robert Frost spoke of
190 Judgment

must include the many dramatic verbal battles that Ozick renders with a
perfect ear for speech patterns: Edelshtein versus the evangelist in "Envy,"
Bleilip versus the rebbe in "Bloodshed," German versus Jew in "The Suit-
case," Brill versus Hester Lilt in The Cannibal Galaxy, Rosa's letters versus
her niece's letters in The Shawl. Though not prolific in the fashion of Joyce
Carol Oates or Saul Bellow, her stream of creativity has been outstandingly
pure.

The confrontations at the center of her art emanate in turn from a

profoundly conflicted mind. She hates the whole of Western civilization
but takes pride in the Jewish groundwork of that civilization. She protests
the reduction of "Jewish history" to what has been done to Jews but
saturates her writings with just that version of Jewish history. She calls
America a Jewish Eden but thinks its cannibal's eye is fixed on her
four-thousand-year heritage. Her fiction exemplifies the Jewish writer
oxymoron, every page a blasphemy against the Second Commandment, every
book a revelry of pagan enticement. Her life propounds another oxymoron,
that of an Orthodox Jewish feminist, who reveres the ancient Sinaitic Law
but demands an Equal Rights Amendment to Torah. Happily married since
age twenty-five, she invariably portrays marital estrangement or self-willed
singlehood in her characters. She embodies, that is to say, the modern
precepts announced by Yeats, that poetry is a quarrel with oneself; by Joyce
Carol Oates, that "the spirit of contrariety lies at the heart of all passionate
commitment"; by John Updike, that "to be a person is to be in a situation of
tension, is to be in a dialectical situation. A truly adjusted person is not a
person at all—just an animal with clothes on."49

But in the end her work is unified, all the same, by the admonitory temper
that turns her tales into parables of failure. Ethical monotheism does have
its final say in the ruin of Lushinski, who fails to keep his Jewish self in its
Polish grave; of Puttermesser, whose cultural apostasies fail to save her city
or her marriage; of Brill, whose neglect of Jewish history turns his Dual
Curriculum into mush and his student-genius into a pagan; of Rosa, whose
class-based anti-Semitic feelings block access to the healings of the L'Chaim!
principle. Under the fault lines of Ozick's schizoid creativity lies the granite
core of her Judaic heritage, which finds expression in an unrelenting
consistency of ethical judgment.

Although her ensconcement within a minority culture may initially seem

to limit her appeal to a larger audience, I have found, despite my Gentile
upbringing, that the obstacles to understanding her work have little to do
with her Jewish materials. They result, rather, from her willful adherence to
basic aesthetic principles. A holdover (aesthetically) from the modern period—
the Age of Eliot, Faulkner, Joyce—she is no more inclined to simplify her
Judgment 191

complex art, so as to ease her reader's task, than she is to falsify her view of
reality, so as to thrive in the marketplace. Her Jewish heritage, for the most part,
is no more exclusionary than Hawthorne's or Faulkner's regionalism. What
matters in the end is the imaginative power to elevate local materials toward
universal and timeless significance.

By that standard, I judge Ms. Ozick's work to be memorably successful. Her

variety and consistent mastery of style; her lengthening caravan of original and
unforgettably individualized characters; her vivid dramatization through these
characters of significant themes and issues; her absorbing command of narrative
structure; her penetrating and independent intellect undergirding all she writes—
these characteristics of her art perform a unique service for her subject matter,
extracting from her Jewish heritage a vital significance unlike that transmitted by
any other writer. In the American tradition, Cynthia Ozick significantly
enhances our national literature by so rendering her Jewish culture into a fine, if
irremediably conflicted, art.
Notes

Chapter 1. The Matrix of Art

1. Because my Chapter 1 delineates the writer's intellect rather than her biography as
such, I provide the following biographical outline, with special thanks to Joseph Lowin
for the chronology in his Twayne Series book, Cynthia Ozick (Boston: G. K. Hall, 1988):

Cynthia Ozick was born on 17 April 1928 in New York City, the second child of
William and Shifra Regelson Ozick and the niece of the writer Abraham Regelson. From
1933 to 1941 she attended the local school, P.S. 71 in the Pelham Bay region of the
Bronx; from 1942 to 1946, Hunter College High School in Manhattan; from 1946 to
1949, New York University, graduating Phi Beta Kappa with English Honors. In 1950
she earned her master's degree in English at Ohio State University with a thesis on Henry
James, after which she spent a dozen years working on two huge novels, Mercy, Pity,
Peace, and Love (unpublished) and Trust. In 1952 she married Bernard Hallotte, a
lawyer; on 24 September 1965 she gave birth to their only child, Rachel. Additional
biographica are included as relevance dictates within my main text.

2. Wallace Fowlie, Memory: A Fourth Memoir (Durham and London: Duke University
Press, 1990), 3; Joan Didion, "On Morality," in Slouching toward Bethlehem (New York:
Delta Books, 1968), 158; and Cynthia Ozick, "Spells, Wishes, Goldfish, Old School
Hurts," New York Times Book Review (NYTBR) for "The Making of a Writer" column,
31 January 1982, 24. In Art & Ardor this essay is reprinted under the title "A Drugstore in
Winter," and my citation appears on page 304.

3. Ltr 6/6/90. The comment on childhood reading is cited from Conversations with
Reynolds Price, ed. Jefferson Humphreys (Jackson and London: University Press of
Mississippi, 1991), 195.

4. Arthur Hertzberg, The Jews in America (New York: Simon and Schuster,
1989), 13. Although the historian Lucy Dawidowicz condemned this book for its
condescending snobbery—"not so much a history as a sermonizing put-down"—she does
not dispute the reality of immigrant Jewish poverty (Commentary 89, no. 1 [January
1990]: 49). Along with poverty, Hertzberg identifies one other chief characteristic shared
by Jewish immigrants: "a conscious anti-European streak." This resentment, Hertzberg
says, targeted not only Gentile persecutors but also rich European Jews and their rabbis
whose failure to help their poor relations contributed to the exodus of the latter to
America.
Among Ozick's characters, Edelshtein in "Envy" well illustrates Hertzberg's points. A
Europe hater who decries "Western Civilization, that pod of muck" (PR 42), he says "Our
[Jewish] reputation as . . . scholars is mostly empty. In actuality we are a mob of working
people, laborers, hewers of wood. . . . [But] tickle the lawyer and you'll see his
grandfather sawed wood for a living" (85)
 5. In reviewing Richard Lingeman's biography of Dreiser in the New York Times Book
Review of 9 November 1986 (29-31), Ozick declared Sister Carrie "the first
recognizably 'American' novel—American in the way we feel it now." Superseding
Howells, Wharton, and James in this respect, Dreiser's book enables us "to experience
the unfolding of literary history—to see how the English novel, itself an immigrant,
finally pocketed its 'papers' and became naturalized."

6. I am much obliged to my colleague Kalman Bland, of the Duke Religion

Department, for these translations. He also suggested that perhaps Cynthia Ozick
profoundly relates to the word Oz that she cites from Psalm 138:3, a Hebrew word
meaning "strength."

7. NYTBR, 2 December 1979, 59.

8. Apropos of Chester's unappealing appearance, Ozick cites Gore Vidal's remark, in his
introduction to a posthumous collection of Chester's writings, that "I did have the great
good luck never to have so much as glimpsed Alfred Chester." But clearly his appearance did
not offend Truman Capote, who wrote his private telephone number in Chester's address
book while Chester was still Ozick's college classmate.

10. "We Are the Crazy Lady and Other Feisty Feminist Fables." First published in Ms.
magazine (Spring 1973); republished in The Dolphin Reader, 2d ed., ed. Douglas Hunt
(Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1990), 673-74. Hereafter cited in my main text as "CL." Ltr
10/26/82. In "Toward a New Yiddish," she remarks of Trust that "my work did not
speak to the Gentiles, for whom it had been begun, nor to the Jews, for whom it had been
finished" (AA 158).

11. Vera Emuna Kielsky, in Inevitable Exiles (New York: Peter Lang, 1989), cites
Ozick's denial that she is an Orthodox Jew: "I don't even like the phrase 'Orthodox.'
. . . It's a Christian word . . . meaning right belief. And how are those words—right
belief—Jewish? They just aren't" (25). Because "Orthodox Jew" is a widely used
designation among Jews of all persuasions, I do not regard Ozick's disclaimer as a
binding prohibition.

12. In her interview with Elaine Kauvar, Ozick said, "I don't find a contradiction
between Judaism and feminism," mainly because these problematic traditions are
late-blooming effects of assimilation. For example: "In the Orthodox Synagogue,
that mehitzah (partition in the synagogue separating men from women during prayer),
that line of division. . . . Ironically, its origin is very late, and it comes out of an
assimilatory impulse. It came about in the tenth century under the influence of
Moslem culture" (Kauvar 387).

13. Linda Zatlin, "Cynthia Ozick's Levitation: Five Fictions," Studies in American
Jewish Literature 4 (1985): 121.

14. Miriam Cooke, "War and Gender," Newsletter of the Center for International
Studies (Duke University) 3, no. 2 (Spring 1991): 3.

15. Barbara Gitenstein lectured on Ozick at the American Literature Association

Convention in Washington, D.C., on 24 May 1991.

16. Ozick, "The Seam of the Snail" (MM 109).

17. In "A Mercenary," the African tribesman Morris becomes the spokesman of this
Jewish idea (along with many others): "'At bottom,' Morris said, "there is no
contradiction between the tribal and the universal. Remember William Blake, sir:
'To see a world in a grain of sand'" (BL 33).

18. Because the King James translation of the Bible is generally considered excellent, I
am quoting it here. The Hertz edition of the Hebrew Bible (1973) gives translations
that are very close to the King James.

19. Rabbi Leo Baeck, who strongly influenced Ozick, reads the Jacob-Esau and
Isaac-Ishmael stories in this fashion in This People Israel (Philadelphia: Jewish
Publication Society of America, 1964), 250-60.

20. Leo Baeck, Judaism and Christianity (New York, 1958), 189-92, 212.

21. Faulkner in the University, ed. Frederick L. Gwynn and Joseph Blotner (New York:
Vintage, 1965), 161.

22. Ltr 8/11/90. Apropos of the Jewish avoidance of an image of God, Camille
Paglia, in her magnum opus Sexual Personae (New York: Vintage, 1991) observes that
"Judaism's campaign to make divinity invisible has never fully succeeded" (139).

23. According to the British ambassador to Germany, the idolatry of Hitler-worship

was compounded by the Fuhrer's own instance of Ozick's idolatry-of-art thesis. In 1939
the Nazi leader stated: "All my life I have wanted to be a great painter in oils. . . . As
soon as I have carried out my program for Germany, I shall take up my painting. I feel
that I have it in my soul to become one of the great artists of the age and that future
historians will remember me not for what I have done for Germany, but for my art."
Sewanee Review 77 (Autumn 1969): 701.

24. Leo Baeck, This People Israel: The Meaning of Jewish Existence (Philadelphia,
1964), 124.

25. NYTBR, 4 December 1977, 66.

26. Among the transcriptions I have seen of this widely quoted passage, I consider
Leni Yahl's the most plausible. See her The Holocaust: The Fate of European Jewry,
1932-1945 (New York: Oxford, 1990), 115.

27. George Bernard Shaw, chapter 7 of "The Revolutionist's Handbook," in Man

and Superman (Baltimore: Penguin Books, 1966), 240.

28. In "Idolatry in Miami," Francine Prose's piece about "The Shawl," Ozick is
quoted as saying, "Like everyone else, . . . I required a dawning. I was having the life
that Anne Frank would have had simultaneously. I can never think of my high school
years without realizing how normal they were, and how, at that very moment, the
chimneys were roaring away" (NYTBR, 10 September 1989, 39).

29. Ozick, "A Liberal's Auschwitz," in The Pushcart Prize: First Edition (New
York, 1976-77), 152.

30. Ibid. 151.

31. Ozick, "Jews and Gentiles," Commentary, June 1971, 106.

 32. Ozick, "A Liberal's Auschwitz" 152.

33. All the comments by Ozick in this paragraph are cited from the Symposium
"The Changing Culture of the University," Partisan Review 58, no. 2 (1991): 400.

34. Ozick, "The Holidays: Reply to Anne Roiphe," New York Times, Section C, 28
December 1978, 1 and 6. Subsequent citations in this paragraph come from this same
source.

35. In the New Republic of 20 May 1991, Robert Alter argues in a long essay,
"From Myth to Murder," that Martin Luther, "who had no French or English
counterpart," was a crucial reason "why anti-Semitism turned genocidal in Germany,
and not in France or England" (38). Luther's "scurrilous pamphlet, The Jews and Their
Lies, [was] reissued in a popular edition by the Nazis in 1935," Alter observes. In it,
Luther denounced the Jews for usury, for poisoning wells, for drinking the blood of
Christian children, and, not least, for killing Christ. In revenge, he famously called for
genocide: "So we are even at fault for not avenging all this innocent blood of our Lord
and of the Christians which they shed. . . . We are at fault for not slaying them" (37). On
the other hand, Heinrich Graetz—a favorite source for Ozick—in his History of the Jews
(Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society of America, 1891-98) cites Luther's pamphlet
"Jesus Was Born a Jew" as calling for "Christian love" toward Jews, who "are
blood-relations of our Lord; therefore, the Jews belong to Christ more than we. . . .
Therefore, it is my advice. . . that we treat them kindly" (4:470).

36. "The Intermarrying Kind," Newsweek, 22 July 1991, 48-49.

37. Cited from Howard M. Sachar's A History of the Jews in America (New York:
Knopf, 1992) in NYTBR, 28 June 1992, 29. Sachar describes how the revelations of the
death camps transformed both Jewish and Gentile attitudes in America, changing public
opinion from 72 percent against any U.S. involvement in Palestine in 1945 to 76 percent in
favor of a Jewish homeland in Palestine in 1946.

38. Ozick, "Jews and Gentiles" 106.

39. In addition to scanning Graetz's enormous work, I also drew information about
Jewish history in Europe from Martin Gilbert's succinct but richly informative Atlas of
Jewish History (n.p.: Dorset Press, 1976).

40. According to Heinrich Graetz, the Puritan Commonwealth assumed so philo-Semitic

an attitude that "the only thing wanting to make one think himself in Judaea was for the
orators in Parliament to speak Hebrew" (History of the Jews 5: 27-28).

41. These two stories about Ozick's parents appear in her essay "All the World Wants
the Jews Dead," Esquire 82, no. 5 (November 1974): 104, 207. The ubiquity of "Jewish
history" in her fiction is seen in the reappearance of this dreadful episode in the otherwise
farcical satire "Virility," in which the protagonist's whole family was murdered: "—his
mother, raped and slaughtered;. . . his father, tied to the tail of a Cossack horse and sent
to have his head broken on cobblestones" (PR 224).

42. Wesley A. Kort, Shriven Selves: Religious Problems in Recent American Fiction
(Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1972), 111-12. "Very little is said in the Bible about this period
of darkness. Where was God between the death of Joseph and the call of Moses? . . . No
use or meaning can be seen . . . in the darkness and pain of Egypt, and Egypt remains the
great black hole of the Bible."

43. Ozick, "A Contraband Life," Commentary 39, no. 3 (March 1965): 92.

44. See Prose, "Idolatry in Miami" 39: "I worry very much that [the Holocaust] is
corrupted by fiction and that fiction in general corrupts history."

45. John Toland, Hitler: The Pictorial Documentary of His Life (Garden City,
NY: Doubleday, 1978), 1.

46. Newsweek (8 April 1991, 50) reported that the Law of Return "offers automatic
Israeli citizenship to any Jew (which it defines as anybody having a Jewish
grandparent)"—a definition that would apparently embrace Adolf Hitler. For a learned
discussion that traces the "Who Is a Jew?" controversy back a millennium to Maimonides
and Halevi, see Baruch Frydman-Kohl's essay in Judaism 41, no. 1 (Winter 1992):
64-80.
A vastly influential opinion, because it was laid before tens of millions of
newspaper readers, was Ann Landers' effort to resolve the biology-versus-culture
question. To the question whether "a person who was born of Jewish parents [can]
become a Gentile if he would rather not be Jewish," Ms. Landers replied: "One's ethnic
makeup can neither be chosen nor changed. A Jew who wishes to dissociate himself from
Judaism and take up Catholicism, Christian Science or Confucianism, for example, is still
a Jew by heritage. No amount of disavowing will transform him into a Gentile" (Durham
Morning Herald, 9 September 1984).

47. Ltr 6/6/90. Despite her rage over the Holocaust, Cynthia Ozick declares that "I
cannot imagine finding the notion of 'collective guilt' anything but abhorrent. . . as
applied to Germans or anyone else" (Ltr 5/26/90). It is worth mentioning, in this respect,
that far from choosing Hitler as their leader, the German people in their last free election
(March 1932) chose Paul Hindenburg as president by a margin of almost six million
votes, despite the issues that played powerfully in Hitler's favor: the humiliation of
Versailles, fear of Communism, and Depression-era unemployment for perhaps eight
million Germans. See John Toland, Adolf Hitler (New York: Doubleday, 1976),
262-65.

48. Ronald Sanders, The Shores of Refuge (New York: Henry Holt and Company, 1988),
483. Leni Yahl, in The Holocaust, says that Himmler and Heydrich seriously supported the
Madagascar plan, and that "Hitler appeared to favor the scheme and referred to it several
times in the summer of 1940" (253-54).

49. For much of what I know about the Holocaust, I am indebted to Raul Hil berg's The
Destruction of the European Jews (Chicago: Quadrangle, 1961; Revised and Definitive
Edition, New York: Holmes and Meier, 1985).

50. Obviously playing on Solzhenitsyn's title "One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich,"
Ozick's "24 Years in the Life of Lyuba Bershadskaya" was published in the New York
Times Magazine of 14 March 1971 under the pseudonym Trudie Vocse to protect Ozick's
relatives in the Soviet Union. Among the Nazi-like brutalities that she cites is a
twenty-eight-day train ride to the gulag in a tiny cage shared by six women, during
which water was given only three times and food not at all. Many corpses were hauled
down the aisle during the journey.

51. Hilberg, Destruction of the European Jews 358-59.

52. See Istvan Deak, "Who Saved Jews? An Exchange," New York Review of
Books, 25 April 1991, 60; and Leni Yahl, The Rescue of Danish Jewry: Test of a
Democracy (Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society of America, 1969). Deak writes:
"During the initial stages of the rescue operation, only well-to-do Danish Jews could afford
the short voyage to Sweden. Private boatmen set their own price and the costs were
prohibitive. . . . Afterward, when organized Danish rescue groups stepped in to coordinate
the flight and to collect funds, the average price per person fell [dramatically]. . . . The
rescue operation took place with the connivance of the local German naval command."
Hilberg describes the German army command in Denmark as also thwarting the Gestapo
(Destruction of the European Jews 360).

53. Ozick, "All the World Wants the Jews Dead" 103.

54. Ernest Hemingway, The Sun Also Rises (New York: Scribner's, 1954), 22. Robert
Cohn effects an interesting correlation between "L'Chaim!" and the pagan fertility gods
in this scene, in that for him to "Choose Life!" means to possess Lady Brett sexually. But
later, he reasserts the ancient Judaic anathema toward Astarte when he calls Brett
"Circe," claiming that "she turns men into swine" (144).

55. Toni Morrison, The Bluest Eye (New York: Pocket Books, 1972), 125. My
subsequent reference to "brown girls" cites pages 67-68.

56. This appalling fact was reported in Harper's Magazine, August 1991, 11.

57. See Scott Donaldson, By Force of Will (New York: Viking Press, 1977), 147, 200.

58. Ozick's sharpest juxtapostion of these values occurs in "The Suitcase." Here
Genevieve relentlessly pursues the Jewish principle of truth telling, which her WASP
adversary subordinates to the ideal of "class": "'Dignity,' Mr. Hencke said. 'Dignity before
all. I subscribe to that'" (PR 125).

59. AA 164, 182n. The more recent critics came to Ozick's attention through an essay by
Irene H. Chayes entitled "Revisionist Literary Criticism" in Commentary (April 1976).

60. Ozick's review of The Wapshot Chronicle, titled "Cheever's Yankee Heritage,"
appeared in the Antioch Review, Summer 1964, 263-67.

61. "Culture and the Present Moment," Commentary, December 1974, 35.

62. Although Ozick reproduced some of this discourse on Hardy in Art & Ardor
(see "Innovation and Redemption: What Literature Means"), this quotation comes from
her original version, "Query: Where Are the Serious Readers?" in Salmagundi, Summer-Fall
1978, 72-73.

Chapter 2. Readings
1. The general reader, unfortunately, does not have ready access to Ozick's poetry,
which is scattered about in many magazines. That situation is being somewhat alleviated
by a special edition of some poems presently being prepared by a publisher in Ohio, but
its limited and very expensive character still rules out any wide access to Ozick's
poetry.

2. Ozick was sufficiently impressed by this story to repeat it in "Envy": "The disciples
of Reb Moshe of Kobryn . . . had no awe for their master when he hung in air, but when he
slept—the miracle of his lung, his breath, his heartbeat!" (PR 87).

3. For a compelling argument on the other side of this polarity, see Lillian Kremer's
excellent essay "The Splendor Spreads Wide: Trust and Cynthia Ozick's Aggadic Voice"
(Studies in American Jewish Literature 6 [Fall 1987]: 24-44). In Part 3 of my book I
comment briefly on this article.

4. The Portable Wolfe, ed. Maxwell Geismar (New York: Viking Press, 1946), 582.

5. "Gustave Nicholas Tilbeck was an unashamed borrowing from E. M. Forster's

Greeky heroes" (Ltr 1/14/82). In "Toward a New Yiddish," first published in 1970, she
wrote: "In my thirties I worshipped E. M. Forster for the lure of his English paganism.
Fifteen years [i.e., her first two novels] went into a silent and shadowed apprenticeship
of craft and vision" (AA 157).

6. A student of mine, Andrew Ginsberg, remarked how the incongruous WASP-Jew

marriage of Allegra and Enoch corresponds in many ways to the relationship between
Leonard and Virginia Woolf that Ozick discusses in "Mrs. Virginia Woolf: A Madwoman
and Her Nurse" (AA 27-54). Her essay on Edith Wharton (AA 3-26) likewise evokes
many resemblances to Allegra Vand, especially regarding the deleterious effect of great
wealth on the development of personality.

7. I discuss Leo Baeck under "Judaism" in Chapter 1. His essay on "Romantic

Religion," Ozick says (in his Judaism and Christianity), "broke open the conceptual egg of
my life." (Ltr 1/14/82).

8. NYTBR, 4 December 1977, 66.

9. Sophocles, Antigone, trans. E. F. Wading (Baltimore: Penguin, 1960), 148.

10. Ozick's esteem for Emerson has remained constant through the decades (unlike her
stance toward T. S. Eliot). In "The Master's Mind," an essay about Henry James's
ambiguous sexuality, Ozick incidentally calls Emerson "the philosopher of individualism
who stands as a kind of Muse to all subsequent American culture and society" (New York
Times Magazine, 26 October 1986, 52).

11. Selections from Ralph Waldo Emerson, ed. Stephen E. Whicher (Boston:
Houghton Mifflin, 1960), 177.

12. Epigraph is from Commentary 86, no. 6 (December 1988): 48. Republished in MM as
"S. Y. Agnon and the First Religion," where Ozick softened the force of the cited
sentence by adding "Nevertheless" before (and omitting "even" from) "one cannot be
sure."

13. Through its pattern of role reversals, "Virility" clearly argues Ozick's case for gender
as a social construct. As Gate slips from virile to feminine status when his failure
becomes manifest, so Margaret moves from feminine status—conventional wife and
mother—to become a super-successful business manager when the chance offers. ("She's
a very capable businesswoman—she's simply never had the opportunity," PR 250.) She
also usurps the traditional male privilege of sexual freedom, taking Gate as her lover
with impunity while she is still married.

14. The would-be writer's characterization as a goat has no connection with the Judaic
tradition of the scapegoat. Instead, he embodies the medieval symbol of lust—not sexual
desire in this instance but lust after success as an artist. "Age makes no matter," the
ghost of Tchernikhovsky tells him. "Lust you can count on. I'm not speaking of the
carnal sort. . . . Teetering on the edge of the coffin there's lust. After mortality there's
lust, I guarantee you. In Eden there's nothing but lust." Ozick confirms the motif in
her own voice in her preface to Bloodshed: "Why do I, who dread the cannibal touch of
story-making, lust after stories more and more?" (BL 153, 12).

15. Kauvar's essay, "Courier for the Past: Cynthia Ozick and Photography," is the best
discussion in print about this subject (Studies in American Jewish Literature 6 [Fall
1987]: 128-46).

17. The Smithsonian magazine of August 1990 includes a splendid set of photographs of
Freud's room, with many separate shots of the figurines. The accompanying text by Helen
Dudar describes Freud's avid lifelong interest in the collection; his deep envy of Heinrich
Schliemann, the archeologist who dug up Troy; and his deeply rooted classical education,
which made "the old Greek and Roman civilizations and even-older cultures . . . familiar
territories for him" (104). Ozick too spent her formative high school years imbibing a
classical education. The pacifist implications of Puttermesser's name were first assigned
to the pseudo-Jewish African tribesman Morris in "A Mercenary": "He believed in
civilizing influences; even more in civility. If he thought of knives, it was for buttering
scones" (BL 51).

18. It is worth noting, however, that in contrast to Eliot, Ozick has staunchly affirmed
her identity as an Orthodox Jew throughout her career; George Eliot may have earned
extra approval from Ozick by turning against her evangelical Christian heritage, for
example in essays like "Evangelical Teaching: Dr. Gumming."

19. Extended segments of Daniel Deronda read as though Eliot had turned into a
nineteenth-century Cynthia Ozick. Eliot's rendering of Jewish-Christian history, for
example, sounds like Feingold's discourse in "Levitation": "[near] the Rhine at the end of
the eleventh century, . . . in the ears listening for the signals of the Messiah, the Hep! Hep!
Hep! of the Crusaders came like the bay of bloodhounds; and in the presence of those
devilish missionaries with sword and firebrand, the crouching figure of the reviled Jew
turned round erect, heroic, flashing with sublime constancy in the face of torture and
death. . . ."
Eliot likewise displays Ozick-like tones regarding the Hebraic heritage in this novel:
"Where else is there a nation of whom it may be as truly said that their religion and law
and moral life mingled as the stream of blood in the heart. . . . They struggled to keep their
place among the nations like heroes,—yea, when the hand was hacked off, they clung
with the teeth; but when the plough . . . passed over the last visible signs of their national
covenant . . . they said, 'The spirit is alive, let us make it a lasting habitation,—lasting
because movable,—so that it may be carried from generation to generation, and our sons
may . . . possess a hope built on an unchangeable foundation.'" Works of George Eliot:
Daniel Deronda, Vol. 3 (New York: Bigelow, Brown, n.d.), 150, 369.

20. In a real-life analogy, Camille Paglia, the high priestess of contemporary sexual
psychology, shares the Puttermesser/George Eliot dilemma: at age forty-four, she says
younger men are too immature to interest her while men her own age are too far over the
hill to satisfy her physically.

21. See "Alfred Chester's Wig" in the 30 March 1992 New Yorker. In this long essay
she cites Mann's Greek affinities: "Aschenbach noted with astonishment the lad's perfect
beauty. His face recalled the noblest moment of Greek sculpture . . ." (91).

22. In her letter of 1/14/82 Ozick called The Centaur "a beautiful novel that moved
me and killed me with envy." She spent so many years writing Trust, however, that by
the end of that period "I had eradicated from my brain the least trace of Writer's Envy.
. . . It simply came to me one day that the world is enriched and augmented by the
multiplicity of gifts that adorn it."

23. Camille Paglia, in her magisterial Sexual Personae (Vintage: New York, 1991), roundly
confirms Ozick's view of the Catholic-pagan connection: "Christian saints are reborn
pagan personae. . . . The Romanism in Catholicism is splendidly, enduringly pagan"
(139).

24. "A Jewish soul, a Greek mind, and a Roman body" was Huston Smith's
definition of the Catholic Church in an essay called "The End of Religion" (NYTBR, 25
July 1971, 6). I find the phrase equally applicable to the whole Western heritage.

25. See "We Are the Crazy Lady and Other Feisty Feminist Fables," first published in
Ms. magazine (Spring 1973).

26. Ltr 6/6/90: "You ask whether it is 'worthwhile' for me to forego seeing ancient
sacred sites, like the thousand-year-old Jewish cemetery in Worms. . . . I have to confess
that I think of the whole continent of Europe as one vast Jewish graveyard."

27. Ozick's negative critique of Maurice, which first appeared in Commentary in 1971,
has been reprinted in Art & Ardor (61-79).

28. Judging from her one year of college teaching, Ozick herself was none too
sanguine about American students. In "The College Freshman" (Confrontation,
Spring 1968, 41) she writes: "Imagination he does not recognize. . . . He scorns or
suppresses talent. . . . [He] despises learning and is oafishly contemptuous of it. . . . He is
a moral idiot." This sense of limitations, however, does not excuse Principal Brill,
educated at the Sorbonne, from the pursuit of excellence.

29. In Chapter 1, "Beginnings," I denote Ozick's expressions of outrage toward her early
schooling, especially in "We Ignoble Savages" (Evergreen Review 3, no. 10
[November-December 1959]).

30. Street of Crocodiles and Cinnamon Shops are interchangeable titles for the same book,
drawn from two of its contrapuntal chapters. The Cinnamon Shops—so named for their
dark paneling and filled with "strange and rare books, old folio volumes full of astonishing
engravings and amazing stories"—signify the warm, sheltering comfort of the imaginative
life in which Schulz's father escapes the dismal darkness and cold of a Polish winter: "At the
time of the shortest, sleepy winter days . . . my father was already lost, sold and
surrendered to the other sphere." The Street of Crocodiles represents the grubbiness of
ordinary reality—the town's "industrial and commercial district, its soberly utilitarian
character glaringly underlined" (trans. Celina Wieniewska [New York: Walker and
Company, 1963], 78, 82, 94). Heidi's bookshop, Lars's entrance to a magic world, relates
to the one title, and the stewpot relates to the other: "'Crocodiles!' Nilsson yelled up.
'Always after a sensation'" (ME 65).

31. Ozick's citation is from Schulz's "Treatise on Tailors' Dummies or The Second Book
of Genesis" (Street 49-50). The occasion for the father's treatise occurs, in the previous
chapter, "Tailors' Dummies," after his nemesis, the maid Adela, has thrown out his
collection of exotic birds: "The affair of the birds was the last colourful and
splendid counter-offensive of fantasy which my father . . . had led against the trenches
and defence-works of a sterile and empty winter" (40). Ozick's Adela, by contrast, helps
perpetrate Lars's fantasy, and so becomes herself birdlike—"the beautiful little bird-bone of
her nose! . . . the dove-colored feathers of her hair!" (ME 125).

32. Schulz originally wrote: "Reality is as thin as paper and betrays with all its cracks
its imitative character" (Street 99).

33. Ozick's essay on Bruno Schulz decries both the man's cultural apostasy as "an
assimilated, Polish-speaking Jew, not so much a Jew as a conscious Pole" and the novel's
religious intentions. "What is being invented" in The Street of Crocodiles, she says, "is
Religion—not the taming religion of theology and morality, but the brute splendors of rite,
gesture, phantasmagoric transfiguration, sacrifice, . . . repugnance, terror, cult. The
religion of animism, in fact, where everything comes alive with an unpredictable and
spiteful spirit-force, . . . where there is no pity" (AA 226). Her fictional rendering of this
religion clearly reflects her revulsion.

34. Schulz's father in Street stands guilty of Lars's accusation: "We wish to be creators
in our own, lower sphere; we want to have the privilege of creation, . . . we want—in one
word—Demiurgy. . .. [We] wish to create man a second time" (50-52).

35. In her interview with Francine Prose, Ozick describes her great abiding fear of
"making art out of the Holocaust. . . . I worry very much that this subject is
corrupted by fiction and that fiction in general corrupts history." She traces the origin
of "The Shawl" to William Shirer's The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich: "There was a
line in there, just one line in a very, very fat book, that spoke about babies being thrown
against electrified fences, and I guess that image stayed with me" (NYTBR, 10
September 1989, 1, 39).

36. "The Experience of Activity," in A Pluralistic Universe from The Philosophy of

William James, ed. Horace M. Kallen (New York: Modern Library. 1925), 156.
Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness (New York: Washington Square Press, 1966),
347-54, 445.

37. This image haunted Ozick long before The Shawl. In "The Pagan Rabbi" she
describes an infant saved by a deus ex machina: "they were about to throw her
against the electrified fence when an army mobbed the gate; the current vanished from
the wires" (PR 7).
38. The prototype of Rosa Lublin's maternal passion appears in The Cannibal Galaxy
(a book dedicated to Cynthia Ozick's daughter Rachel) under the name of Madame de
Sevigne, an eighteenth-century French noblewoman who made a living icon of her
daughter: "The mother, according to one source, was 'insane'—she loved her daughter
obsessively, pathologically, so much so that she spent her life penning her longing in
letter after letter. 'How I should like to have a letter from you! It is nearly half an hour
since I received the last!' she once wrote" (10). In the same vein, Rosa writes to her lost
child: "Magda, my Soul's Blessing: Forgive me, my yellow lioness. Too long a time since
the last writing. . . . And so half a day passes without my taking up my pen to speak to
you" (40).

39. The names of Rosa, Stella, and Magda are Latin cognates for the images
associated with the Christ child's Advent: Rose (signifying the Incarnation); Star (over
Bethlehem); and Magi (three Wise Men).

40. Ronald Sanders, The Shores of Refuge (New York: Henry Holt, 1988), 411. The
Pilsudski regime, which took power in 1926, proved very friendly to the Jews of Poland, so
that by 1931, Sanders says, "56 percent of [Poland's] doctors, 33.5 percent of its
lawyers, and 22 percent of its journalists, publishers, and librarians were Jews" (413).

41. "[Hitler] claimed that he got the idea for concentration camps from the British
camps in the Boer War and from American Indian reservations." See John Toland,
Hitler: The Pictorial Documentary of His Life (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1978), 8.

42. See Martin Gilbert, Atlas of Jewish History (n.p.: Dorset Press, 1984), 97; and Raul
Hilberg, The Destruction of the European Jews (Chicago: Quadrangle Books, 1961),
137-39.

43. In terms of William James's The Varieties of Religious Experience, Rosa and
Persky/Stella are here exhibiting the two types of innate disposition into which
(James thought) the human species divides itself, the morbid-minded versus the
healthy-minded. An ability to live exclusively in the present moment is precisely the
defining and enabling characteristic of the latter. Persky also illustrates Henry James's
famous dictum in The Ambassadors: "Live all you can. It's a mistake not to."

Chapter 3. Judgment
1. Toni Morrison's comment appears in her interview with Tom LeClair in the New
Republic 21 March 1981, 29.

2. My book, which was completed in the summer of 1992 and revised to suit my editors
that fall, was not affected by Elaine Kauvar's subsequent publication, in April 1993,
of Cynthia Ozick's Fiction: Tradition and Invention (Indiana University Press). Having
just now been asked to review it for American Literature magazine, I feel assured from
scanning its contents that our approaches to Ozick's oeuvre are so different as to pose no
serious problems of duplication. As I had supposed, Kauvar's fusion of a brilliant critical
intelligence with a rich knowledge of Jewish and classical lore figures to render her
critique permanently unsurpassed in the shelf of Ozick criticism. Because her study is so
perceptive and substantial on a page-by-page basis, I cannot hope to summarize it here.
Instead, I urge my reader to turn to it as an essential landmark of Ozick criticism. So
far as my own book is concerned, I consider it to be complementary to rather than
competitive with Kauvar's superb exegesis.

3. Barbara Koenig Quart, "An Esthete in Spite of Herself," Nation, July 23-30, 1983, 87.

4. See "Notes toward Finding the Right Question," reprinted in On Being aJewish
Feminist (New York: Schocken Books, 1983), 131.

5. Judith Plaskow, "The Right Question Is Theological," On Being a Jewish Feminist

226.

6. Ozick, "Torah as Feminism, Feminism as Torah," Congress Monthly,

September/October 1984, 7-10.

7. Rosellen Brown, review of Bloodshed in the New Republic, 5 June 1976, 30-31; Pearl
K. Bell, "New Jewish Voices," Commentary, June 1981, 63.

8. Deborah Heiligman Weiner, "Cynthia Ozick, Pagan vs. Jew (1966-1976)," Studies in
American Jewish Literature 3 (1983): 186.

9. On page 183 of her essay, Ms. Weiner (see note 8 above) cites this passage from Ozick's
"Four Questions of the Rabbis," Reconstructionist, 18 February 1972, 23.

10. R. Barbara Gitenstein, "The Temptation of Apollo and the Loss of Yiddish in
Cynthia Ozick's Fiction," Studies in American Jewish Literature 3 (1983):
194.Gitenstein considers Ozick's yearning for a Yiddish art to be in conflict with her
status within modern American literature: "She does not feel that such self-contradiction
can be overcome in Jewish literature" (200).

11. Eugene S. Mornell, letter to the editor, Commentary, May 1979, 8. By way of refuting
Jacobson and Mornell (8), Ozick extends the definition of "literature in the service of
God" to include not only Midrash and Talmud but also writings by such Gentiles as
Thomas Mann, George Eliot, Jane Austen, and Tolstoy.

12. Earl Rovit, "The Bloodletting," Nation, 20 February 1982, 207-8.

13. Burt Jacobson, letter to the editor, Commentary, May 1979, 7-8.

14. Joseph Epstein, "Cynthia Ozick, Jewish Writer," Commentary, March 1984, 67. My
other citations from this essay occur on pages 66-69.

15. Ozick, letter to the editor, Commentary, May, 1984, 10.

16. Haim Chertok, "Ozick's Hoofprints," Modern Jewish Studies, Annual 6, published by
Yiddish magazine 6, no. 4 (1987): 11.

17. Janet Handler Burstein, "Cynthia Ozick and the Transgressions of Art,"
American Literature 59, no. 1 (March 1987): 87.

18. Ellen Pifer, "Cynthia Ozick: Invention and Orthodoxy," in Contemporary Women
Writers: Narrative Strategies, ed. Catherine Rainwater and William J. Scheick
(Lexington: UP of Kentucky, 1985), 91.
19. Review by Paul Stuewe in Quill & Quote, May 1987, 25. Harold Bloom, "The
Book of the Father," NYTBR, 22 March 1987, 1, 36.

20. Janet Malcolm, "Graven Images," New Yorker, 8 June 1987, 102-4. This quote is
cited from page 103.

21. Robert Alter, "Defenders of the Faith," Commentary, July 1987, 52-55. This quote is
cited from page 53.

22. The "Trudie Vosce" essay was published in The New York Times Magazine on
March 16, 1978 (A26); the other essay in the Times Sunday Magazine of 14 March
1971.

23. Joseph Lowin, Cynthia Ozick (Boston: G. K. Hall, 1988).

24. Vera Emuma Kielsky, Inevitable Exiles (New York: Peter Lang, 1989).

25. Lawrence S. Friedman, Understanding Cynthia Ozick (Columbia: University of South

Carolina Press, 1991).

26. Earl Rovit, "The Two Languages of Cynthia Ozick," Studies in American Jewish
Literature (SAJL) 8, no. 1 (Spring 1989): 36, 34.

27. Michael Greenstein, "The Muse and the Messiah," SAJL 8, no. 1 (Spring 1989):
50-65, and "Ozick, Roth, and Postmodernism," SAJL 10, no. 1 (Spring 1991): 54-63.

28. Anne Redmon, "Vision and Risk," Michigan Quarterly Review 27, no. 1 (Winter 1988):
210; Sylvia Barack Fishman, "Imagining Ourselves," SAJL 9, no. 1 (Spring
1990): 91

29. Elizabeth Rose, "Cynthia Ozick's Liturgical Postmodernism," SAJL 9, no. 1 (Spring
1990): 99.

30. Sanford Pinsker, "How Philip Roth and Cynthia Ozick Reimagine Their
Significant Dead," Modern Fiction Studies 35, no. 2 (Summer 1989): 234.

31. I am grateful to the American Antiquarian Society in Worcester, Massachusetts,

for letting me research this item from the Springfield Republican of 3 June 1853.

32. Ozick, "Poetry and the Parochial," Congress Monthly 53 (November/December 1986):
7-10.

33. I heard Pat Boone's comments on Johnny Carson's "Tonight Show." T. S. Eliot's
comment appeared in a letter to Pound that is cited in Lyndall Gordon's Eliot's New
Life (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1988), 341n.

34. Louis D. Rubin, Jr., a distinguished Jewish-American professor of English at the

University of North Carolina, wrote in a generous spirit about Eliot's anti -Semitism
in "The Mencken Mystery," Sewanee Review 94, no. 3 (Summer 1991): 447: "In certain
circles it is the fashion to label persons such as T. S. Eliot and several of the more
prominent Nashville Agrarians as fascists, in part because of comments made about Jews
during the 1930s. What is wrong with this attitude is that it draws upon the knowledge of
what anti-Semitism led to in hate-crazed post-1918 Europe—the systematic slaughter of
millions of innocent people—and attributes the emotional motivations behind that
slaughter to people who had no such objective remotely in mind and, if given the choice,
would doubtless have died before allowing it to happen."

35. Ozick, "All the World Wants the Jews Dead," Esquire 82, no. 5 (November 1974):
207.

36. Israel Shahak, "'The Life of Death': An Exchange," New York Review of Books,
29 January 1987, 46. Professor Shahak supports other contrarian arguments in this
article, insisting that the Holocaust was not a singular, incomparable act of genocide;
that some Israeli partisans are guilty of Nazi-like racism toward Palestinians; and that
the sacred Torah itself decrees pseudo-Nazi exterminations: "No significant. . .
discussion of the human significance of the Holocaust of the Jews can . . . take place if
people more courageous than Lanzmann will also not ask questions of those Jews who
believe in the 'essential' holiness and rightness of such texts as 'you shall save nothing
alive that breathes' (Deuteronomy 20:16) or 'do not spare them, but kill both man and
woman, infant and suckling' (I Samuel 15:3) or the Nazi-like 'selection' described as
being carried out in cold blood on women and children by the orders of Moses: 'Now
therefore, kill every male among the little ones, and kill every woman who has known
man by lying with him. But all the young girls who have not known man by lying with
him keep alive for yourselves' (Numbers 31:17-18)" (48).

37. Norman Davies, "Poles and Jews: An Exchange," New York Review of Books, 9 April
1987, 43. Davies does not, of course, make these statements to exculpate Poles guilty of
assisting the Holocaust; his motive is to indicate, as did Israel Shakar, the common
humanity of both peoples—the fact that "Jews given the chance will behave as well or
badly as anyone else."

38. Cynthia Ozick, "Of Christian Heroism." Partisan Review 59, no. 1 (1992).

39. Floyd C. Watkins, John T. Hiers, and Mary Louise Weeks, Talking with Robert
Penn Warren (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1990), 29-30.

40. I have cited Emerson's "Fate" from Stephen Whicher's edition, Selections from
Ralph Waldo Emerson (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1960), 340.

41. Melville made this statement in a letter to Hawthorne, dated 17 November 1851.
See the Norton Critical Edition of Moby-Dick, ed. Harrison Hayford and Hershel
Parker (New York, 1967), 566.

42. An Upton Sinclair Anthology (New York: Farrar & Rinehart, 1935), 218.

43. William James, Pragmatism (New York: New American Library, 1955), 189.

44. William James, The Will to Believe and Human Immortality (New York: Dover
Publications, 1956), Preface to the Second Edition [of the latter essay], vi.

45. William James, The Varieties of Religious Experience, Foreword by Jacques Barzun
(New York: Mentor Books, 1968), 275.

46. William James, "Pragmatism and Religion," in Pragmatism (New York: New
American Library, 1955), 181.

47. William James, "The Dilemma of Determinism," in The Will to Believe and Other
Essays in Popular Philosophy (New York: Dover Publications, 1956), 169.

48. The citation is from Frost's 1935 Introduction to King Jasper.

49. Joyce Carol Gates, Contraries: Essays (New York: Oxford Press, 1981), ix; and
John Updike Interview, Paris Review, Spring 1969, 101.
 Index

Asterisk marks indicate writings of Cynthia Ozick.

Abraham (in Bible), 19, 22, 38, 49, 78, 90-96, 102, 112, 127, 128,
122,172, 177 134, 137, 154, 160, 170, 174,
Adams, Henry, 69 188, 201nl4
The Aeneid, 9, 148 *"Bloodshed," 95-96, 127, 137, 154,
*"Agnon's Antagonisms," 81, 201n12 160, 161, 167, 168, 178,182,
*"Alfred Chester's Wig," 10-11, 107, 188, 190
171, 186-87, 189, 196n8, Bloom, Harold, 22, 23, 24, 25,
202n21 49, 86, 91, 152-158 passim,
*"A11 the World Wants the Jews Dead," 161, 163, 166, 174
42-43 Bonetti, Kay, 113, 119,186
Alter, Robert, 163-64, 198n35 Boone, Pat, 173, 207n33
Alvarez, A., 157, 158 * *"Boston Air," 59
"Apocalypse" (poem), 58 Broner, E. M., 158-59
Apple, Max, 157 Brown, Erella, 158
Arnold, Matthew, 9, 24, 54, 56, 111 Brown, Rosellen, 160
*Art & Ardor, passim: 3-8, 13, 17-34, Bucknell Review, 54
41, 48-52, 56, 98, 105, 108, Buddhism, 76, 80, 119,133, 150
133, 141, 155-58,189 Burstein, Janet Handler, 162, 180
*"The Artist, Ha Ha" (poem), 60 *"The Butterfly and the Traffic Light,"
Astarte (Venus), 11, 24-25, 68, 98, 84-85, 154, 165
122, 200n54
*"At Fumicaro," 108-11 *The Cannibal Galaxy, 5, 7, 16, 18,
32, 34, 52, 108, 111-23, 148,
Baeck, (Rabbi) Leo, 20, 25, 67, 89, 156-57, 158, 165-69 passim,
201n7 176, 178, 182, 190, 204n3S
Bell, Pearl K., 160 Capote, Truman, 53, 156, 196n8
Bellow, Saul, 27, 68, 90, 96, 154, 166, Chaucer, Geoffrey, 36, 155
190 Cheever, John, 53
*"'Bialik's Hint," 111, 174-75, 177, 183 Chekhov, Anton, 12, 86-87
*"The Biological Premises of Our Sad Chenoweth, Mary J., 166
Earth-Speck," 141 Chertok, Haim, 162
Bismarck, Otto, 38 Cohen, Joseph
Blake, William, 9-10, 57, 131, 181, Cohen, Sarah Blacher, 164, 166
197nl7 Cole, Diane, 164-65
Bland, Kalman, 196n6 *"The College Freshman," 203n28
*Bloodshed, vii, 6, 24, 27, 33, 34, 56,
 210 Index

Commentary, 58, 154 Esquire, 164

Congregational Journal, 171-73 Ethical Monotheism, 21-22
Cooke, Miriam, 16 Ezekiel (in Bible), 183, 189
Covenant, the, 19-20, 21, 26, 27, 33,
44,50 Farr, Cecilia Konchar, 166
*"Culture and the Present Moment" Faulkner, William, 21, 25, 44, 62,
68-69,125, 178,179, 181,
(Round Table Discussion), 55
187, 190-91
Davies, Norman, 175-76 Feminism, 8, 2-18,153-54,
Dawidowicz, Lucy, 195n4 156, 158-60, 165, 196n12
Deak, Istvan, 199n52 *" Fire-foe" (poem), 58
de Man, Paul, 61 Fishman, Sylvia Barack, 170
*"The Depth of Loss and the Fitzgerald, Scott, 44, 182
Absence of Grief," 16 *"Five Lives" (poem), 58
de Rougemont, Denis, 76 Forster, E. M., 12, 24, 25, 53, 64, 75,
*"Diaspora" (poem), 59 117, 200n5
Dickinson, Emily, 7, 57, 58, 166, 171, Fowlie, Wallace, 3
173, 181 Frank, Anne, 168, 197n28
Didion, Joan, 3 Freud, Sigmund, 8, 17, 28, 48, 52,
*"The Dock-Witch," 83, 125, 129, 100,105, 122, 159, 166, 169,
153,154,166,168 201n16
*"The Doctor's Wife," 8, 85-86, 165, *"Freud's Room," 97, 101, 169
184 Friedman, Lawrence S., 168-69
Dreiser, Theodore, 5, 182, 196«5 *"From a Refugee's Notebook," 100,
*"A Drugstore in Winter." See "Spells, 101
Wishes, Goldfish, Old Frost, Robert, 180,188, 189
School Hurts" Frydman-Kohl, Baruch, 199n46

*"An Education," 8, 92, 95,164, 167, Gass, William, 49

184 Genesis (in Bible), 19-20, 157,168
Edwards, Thomas R., 154, 158 Gibbon, Edward, 9, 24
Elias, Amy J., 166 Gilbert, Martin, 198n39
Eliot, George, 12, 50, 97, 102, 103, Ginsberg, Allen, 51, 166
104-7, 171, 202n19, Ginsberg, Andrew, 201n6
206n11, Eliot, T. S. 44, 57, Gitenstein, Barbara, 16, 161, 205n10
69, 138,173-74, 182, 190, Gnosticism, 76, 81, 158
Goodheart, Eugene, 152-53
207n34
Graetz, Heinrich, 35, 43, 198n35,
Ellison, Ralph, 63, 171
198n40
Emerson, Ralph Waldo, 69, 74, 81,
Graves, Robert, 17
179, 180, 201n10
Greenstein, Michael, 169-70
*"Envy; or, Yiddish in America," 8,
37, 43, 87, 88-90, 92, 109, Hardy, Thomas, 55-56
153-66 passim, 184, 188, Harris, Mark, 29-30
190, 195-4, 200n2 Haskell, Molly, 17
Epstein, Joseph, 161-62
Epstein, Leslie, 154-55
 Index 211

Hawthorne, Nathaniel, 5, 60, 118, *"Judaism and Harold Bloom"

166, 179, 180, 182, 187, 189, ("Literature as Idol: Harold
191 Bloom"), 22, 49, 91
Hellenism versus Hebraism. See Pan Jung, Carl Gustav, 87
versus Moses
Hemingway, Ernest, 5, 35, 44, 46-47, Kafka, Franz, 54, 187
85, 155, 200n54 Kaplan, Johanna, 153
Hertzberg, Arthur, 4, 195n4 Kauvar, Elaine, 8, 28, 52, 54, 98-99,
Hilberg, Raul, 28, 41, 94, 175, 122, 156, 158, 164, 201n15,
199-200n52
205n2
Keats, John, 83, 87, 99
Hitler, Adolf, 23, 27, 38-41, 59, 89,
Kielsky, Vera Emuma, 167-68
108, 109, 144-45, 147, 149, Knopp, Josephine Z., 153, 154, 158
165, 175-76, 197n23, Kort, Wesley, 198n42
198-99n46, 199n47, Kostelanetz, Richard, 49
199n48, 204n41 Kremer, S. Lillian, 165-66, 200n3
*"The Hole/Birth Catalogue," 17, 48,
101,141 Landers, Ann, 199n46
Holocaust, 6, 15, 16, 23, 28, 34, Lanzmann, Claude, 16, 175
38-41, 59, 61-62, 87, 88, 90, *"The Laughter of Akiva," 120
95, 96, 98, 112-116, 118, Law of Return, the (Israel), 198n46
Lawrence, D. H., 3, 78
120,123,129, 130, 133, 134,
Letters, C. Ozick to V. Strandberg:
139-51, 153, 155, 157, 165,
vii, ix, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9,12, 14,
171, 174, 175, 178, 183, 188, 20, 21, 24, 28, 39, 42, 48,
189n37, 198n44, 199n47, 57, 63, 78, 79, 81, 117, 139,
48, 52, 204n35, 207n34, 36, 181, 195n3, I96nl0, 197n22,
37 199n47, 200n5, 201n7,
202n22, 203n26
Idolatry (or Second commandment), *Levitation, 5, 34, 82, 97-105, 108,
22-24, 26, 31, 49, 83, 91, 112, 154-55, 158-59, 161
93,116,125,130,133-34,135 *"Levitation," 34-35, 97-98, 104-5,
137,161-69 passim, 108, 155, 161, 182
178,189, 190, 203-4n33, Literary Review, The, 60
204n34 *" Literature and the Politics of Sex: A
*"Innovation and Redemption: What Dissent," 17
Literature Means," 23, 51 *"Literature as Idol: Harold Bloom."
*"In the Yard" (poem), 59 See "Judaism and Harold Bloom"
*"The Intruder" (poem), 58 Isaiah Longfellow, Henry Wadsworth, 171,
(in Bible), 16, 22, 58, 130, 183 173
Lowin, Joseph, 167, 168
Jacobson, Burt, 161 Luce, Clare Boothe, 176
James, Henry, 5, 12, 14-15, 48, Luther, Martin, 33, 198n35
54-55, 56, 60, 64, 73, 78-79, Lyons, Bonnie, 165
86, 106, 125, 126, 127, 135,
137, 156, 157, 158, 177, MacDonald, Dwight, 87
180,183-85,186, Mailer, Norman, 17, 19, 161, 166
205n43
James, William, 21, 177, 184-85,
205n43
*"The Jamesian Parable: The Sacred
Fount," 54-55
Joyce, James, 78, 187, 190
 212 Index

Maimonides, 159, 199n46 Oates, Joyce Carol, 190

Malamud, Bernard, 91, 154, 158 *"Of Christian Heroism," 176
Malcolm, Janet, 163 Orwell, George, 5
Mann, Thomas, 107, 187, 202n21, Ozick, William, and Shifra Regelson
207n11 (parents of C. Ozick), 4, 5,
Marvel, Andrew, 58 8, 16, 34, 37,164, 198n41
Marx, Karl, 28 The Pagan Rabbi, vi, 34, 37, 41, 42,
Melville, Herman, 12, 79, 85, 134, 81-90,112, 133, 153-54, 170
166, 179-83 passim, 187 "The Pagan Rabbi," 5, 9, 18, 59,
*"A Mercenary," 18, 40, 90, 93-95, 82-83, 89, 109, 125,
117,123, 131, 144, 148, 154, 153,154,156, 161, 162-63,
166, 167, 168, 178, 182, 188, 165, 166, 168, 181,
189, 202n17 182, 188, 189, 204«37
Paglia, Camille, 197n22, 202n20,
202n23
*Mercy, Pity, Peace, and Love, 9 Pan versus Moses (Hellenism versus
*The Messiah of Stockholm, 5, 8, 16, Hebraism), 4, 9, 24-25, 64, 71,
34, 41,124-39,163-64,167, 82, 84, 90, 95, 100, 109,111-12,
168, 169, 170, 178, 182, 161, 166, 179, 185, 201-2n16
183,189 Partisan Review, The, 8, 87
*Metaphor & Memory, 8, 9, 47, 108, Pifer, Ellen, 162-63
174, 177, 188 Pinsker, Sanford, 156, 158, 164, 166-
Micah (in Bible), 22 167, 170
Milton, John, 124, 125 Plaskow, Judith, 159
Moers, Ellen, 17 Poe, Edgar Allan, 179
Moloch, 23, 24, 32, 48, 67, 72,134, *Poems by C. Ozick, 57-60, 200n1
137, 138, 141, 142, 165 Pollitt, Katha, 155-56
*"Morals and Mores" (poem), 57 Postmodernism, 50, 91, 102-3, 105,
Mornell, Eugene S., 161 107, 124, 158, 162, 164, 165,
Morrison, Toni, 44-45, 143, 155, 169-70, 174,187
178, 182 Pound, Ezra, 173,189
*"Mrs. Virginia Woolf: A Prairie Schooner, The, 60
Madwoman and Her Nurse," 201n6 *"Previsions of the Demise of the
Ms., 158-59 Dancing Dog," 17
Price, Reynolds, 4
Napoleon, 36 Proust, Marcel, 17, 113
New Criterion, The, 184 Psalms, The, 5, 196n6
New Criticism, the, 3 P.S. 71 (Public School 71), 6, 7, 8, 9,
Newsweek, 33 46, 119,122,130
New Yorker, The, 10, 101, 104, 108, *"Puttermesser: Her Work History,
120, 130, 174, 186, 189 Her Ancestry, Her Afterlife," 101
New York Review of Books, The, *"Puttermesser and Xanthippe,"
106 101, 103-4
New York Times, The, 14, 32, 101, *"Puttermesser Paired," 101, 102, 103,
103,152, 164, 181 104-8
*"Notes toward Finding the Right
Question," 159
 Index 213

*Puttermesser Stories, 5, 8, 60, 82, 97, Smithsonian, 201n16

101-8, 112, 155, 156,159, 162, Sontag, Susan, 49, 55
167, 168, 171, 178, 179, 189, Sophocles, 69
202nI7 Soul-Words, 44-48
*"Spells, Wishes, Goldfish, Old School
Quart, Barbara Koenig, 158 Hurts," ("A Drugstore in
Winter"), 3-4, 5, 7, 8,
11,122,171
Redmon, Anne, 170
Spinoza, Benedict, 21, 83, 124, 172,
*"A Riddle" poem, 60
181
*"The Riddle of the Ordinary," 23
Springfield Republican, The, 171-73,
Robbins, Rossell Hope, 174
Roiphe, Anne, 32, 33 206n31
*"Rosa," 139, 165, 167, 170 Stalin, Joseph, 39-41, 45-46, 64, 89,
Rose, Elizabeth, 170 147, 175-76
Roth, Philip, 18, 19, 53, 90,105,106, Stevenson, David L., 152-53
154,161,166,168, 169, 170 *"Stile" (poem), 60
Rovit, Earl, 161,169 Studies in American Jewish
Rubin, Louis D., Jr., 207n34 Literature, 158, 164-66
Rush, Jeffrey, 166 Stuewe, Paul, 163
Styron, William, 29-30
*'The Suitcase," 41, 87-88, 89, 154,
Sabbatai Sevi, 32 190, 200n58
Sachar, Howard M., 198n37 *'The Syllable" (poem), 58
Sanders, Ronald, 144, 204n40
Sartre, Jean-Paul, 140
Scheick, William, vii, 27, 152, 154 Talmon, (Rabbi) Shamaryahu, 31
Schulz, Bruno, 124-39 passim, 163, Teicholz, Tim, 7, 26, 160, 188
168, 170, 203n30, 203n31,
*"Terrain" (poem), 58
203n32, 33, 204n34
*"The Sense of Europe," 60-62 Texas Studies in Literature and
*"The Sewing Harems," 100-101, Language, vii, 152
158-59, 162 Theroux, Paul, 153
Shahak, Israel, 175 Thoreau, Henry David, 65, 179-80,
Shakespeare, William, 29 181-82
Shaw, George Bernard, 28, 48 TIME, 14
*The Shawl, 4, 8, 16, 27, 34, 38, 40, Toland, John, 199 47, 204n42
101,139-51, 164-65, 169, Tolstoy, Leo, 102, 105, 206n11
178, 183, 187, 189, 190, "'Torah as Feminism, Feminism as
204n38, 39 Torah," 159-60
*"The Shawl," 139, 167, 189, 197n28 "Toward a New Yiddish," 18, 30, 33,
Shirer, William, 204n35 49, 105
*"Sholem Aleichem's Revolution," 47 Trilling, Lionel, 12-13
*"Shots," 97, 98-100, 165, 166 "Trudi Vosce" (pseudonym for C.
Sinclair, Upton, 183 Ozick), 164-65, 199n50,
Smith, Huston, 203n24 206n22
*Trust, 4, 5, 8, 9-10, 13-14, 15, 18,
25, 27, 28, 34, 35, 41, 43, 57, 58,
59, 60, 62-81, 82, 83, 92, 102,
 214 Index

Trust (continued) Walden, Daniel, 164

107, 112, 123, 125, 127, 129, 133, Warren, Robert Penn, 62, 178-79,
136, 141, 145, 152-53, 154, 155, 183
165, 167, 178, 179, 182, 183, ""We Are the Crazy Lady and Other
184, 185, 188, 189, 196n10, Feisty Feminist Fables,"
202n22 12-13, 15, 18
Twain, Mark (Samuel Clemens), 177, *"We Ignoble Savages," 6
178, 179 Weiner, Deborah Heiligman,
160-61
Uffen, Ellen Serlen, 166 Wharton, Edith, 58, 98, 105, 158,
Updike, John, 19, 25, 28-30, 43, 53, 201n6
68, 76, 107-8, 109, 141, 183, *"What Henry James Knew," 184
190, 202n22 White, Edmund, 156, 158
*"Urn-Burial" (poem), 59
Whitman, Walt, 57, 83, 181
*Usurpation (Other People's Stories),"
Wilde, Oscar, 156
24, 59, 90-92, 95, 112, 117,
Wimsatt, Margaret, 157
125, 128, 154, 158, 166, 167,
Wisse, Ruth, 154, 158
168, 170, 178, 188, 189, 190,
Wolfe, Thomas, 62
201n14
*"Women and Creativity: The
Demise of the Dancing
Vico, Giovanni Battista, 25
Dog," 80, 85
Vidal, Gore, 196nS
*"The Wonder-Teacher" (poem), 60
Violet Fairy Book, The, 4
Virginia Quarterly Review, The, 60 Woolf, Virginia, 58, 158, 201n6
*"Virility," 13, 16, 85, 101, 153-54,
166, 198n41, 201n13 Yahl, Leni, 197n26, 199n48, 52
""Vision me old-age grief" (poem), Yeats, William Butler, 60, 182, 190
58 *"The Young Self and the Old
*"Visitation" (poem), 60 Writer," 164
Voices within the Ark: The Modern
Jewish Poets, 60 Zatlin, Linda, 16
Voltaire, 30, 117
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