Cynthia Ozick

Author

• Born: April 17, 1928
• Place of Birth: New York, New York

NOVELIST, SCHOLAR, AND WRITER

Ozick focuses on Jewishness and Judaism in her written words.

AREAS OF ACHIEVEMENT: Literature; scholarship

Early Life

Cynthia Ozick (OH-zihk) was born on April 17, 1928, in New York, New York, and grew up in the Bronx. Her parents, Celia Regelson and William Ozick, were Russian immigrants who came from an area comprising primarily Lithuanian Jewish families. At the age of five, Cynthia Ozick began to study in a cheder, a Jewish elementary school where she learned the basics of Judaism and the Hebrew language. Ozick was initially turned away from the school because it was not typical for girls to undertake this kind of study. She has suggested that this incident was the beginning of her awareness of feminist concerns. Although Ozick enjoyed growing up in the Bronx, she admitted that it was also difficult to be Jewish in her neighborhood. She recalls incidents where stones were thrown at her and she was called anti-Semitic names.

Ozick’s parents owned a drugstore, and she was often called upon to help with deliveries of prescriptions. Her father was also a Jewish scholar of sorts, skilled not only in Latin and German but also in Hebrew and the logic of the Talmud. Ozick attended Hunter College High School in Manhattan, a school known for its academic rigor, and later went on to earn a bachelor’s degree from New York University, where she graduated Phi Beta Kappa with honors in English. Ozick then proceeded to earn a master’s degree from Ohio State University, where she completed a thesis entitled “Parable in the Later Novels of Henry James.” This proved to be a significant project for Ozick, as the work of James would continue to inform much of her own writing throughout her career. In 1952, she married Bernard Hallote, an attorney, and together they returned to New York.

Over the next decade, Ozick devoted herself to her writing and finally published her first novel, Trust, in 1966. One year before its publication, Ozick gave birth to her daughter, Rachel, who went on to earn a PhD in Near Eastern studies and directs the Jewish studies program at the State University of New York at Purchase.

Ozick’s work has been widely recognized not only in the context of Jewish American writing but also in the broader area of contemporary American literature. Her novel The Puttermesser Papers (1997) was a finalist for the National Book Award and was also listed as one of the Top Ten books of the year by The New York Times Book Review. Along with novels, Ozick has written short fiction, essays, poetry, and plays.

Life’s Work

Many of Ozick’s earlier novels and essays deal with the issue of high art, and scholars have noted that her work suggests that she feels a connection to the Romantics, who regarded artistic endeavors as simultaneously destructive and enlightening. Consequently, a dominant trope in her writing is the notion of idolatry and the potential for art to become idolatrous. This central focus of her work coincides with her insistence, following literary critic Irving Howe’s famous declaration in 1977 of the impending demise of Jewish American literature, that the genre must return to Jewish religious and liturgical concerns rather than focus solely on Jewishness as a cultural or ethnic manifestation. The law of anti-idolatry is a major concern of Judaism, and Ozick’s attempt to negotiate the space between art and idolatry sets her writing apart from that of other Jewish American writers of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.

The defense of human over aesthetic and material concerns that would come to characterize much of Ozick’s fiction was explored famously in 1989, when Ozick published a novella called The Shawl. The novella has become one of the most important works of fiction pertaining to the Holocaust, but, more important, it is Ozick’s exploration of how best to represent the atrocities of this collective tragedy. While in many contexts Ozick has suggested that she is against writing Holocaust fiction, she has also articulated a compelling need to respond to the events of World War II in her work. The Shawl was subsequently produced for the stage in New York City and directed by Sidney Lumet.

Some of Ozick’s additional notable works include The Pagan Rabbi and Other Stories (1971), Art and Ardor: Essays (1983), The Cannibal Galaxy (1983), The Messiah of Stockholm (1987), Metaphor and Memory: Essays (1989), Fame & Folly (1996), and The Puttermesser Papers.

Her essay collection Quarrel and Quandary (2000) won the 2001 National Book Critics Circle Award for criticism. She has also received a Guggenheim Fellowship and a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship, in addition to winning the O. Henry Award.

In 2004, Ozick published Heir to the Glimmering World (published as The Bear Boy in the United Kingdom), a novel in which she returns again to questions of art and idolatry, using some of the traditional elements of the Victorian novel but setting them in the context of 1930’s New York. One of the main characters of the novel, Professor Mitwisser, is a scholar of the Karaites, a sect of Jews who were known for their literalist readings of the Hebrew Bible as well as their rejection of the excesses of interpretation and commentary. The novel’s primary focus is both the necessity and the danger of interpretation. One sees in this novel’s use of Talmudic logic an implicit nod to the Talmudist’s reason that characterized her father, according to Ozick.

Much like the tendency of Talmudic passages to defy the possibility of one monolithic interpretation, many of Ozick’s most significant stories depict characters that are torn between one world and another. Rarely in Ozick’s work do we get a sense of one side winning out over the other. Rather, the point often seems to be that there is something useful, and perhaps even more authentic, about the tension between art and idolatry, history and memory, the sacred and the secular.

In 2008, Ozick published Dictation: A Quartet, a collection of four short stories. Two years later, she published the novel Foreign Bodies, a work inspired by James's The Ambassadors. The works in her collection Critics, Monsters, Fanatics, and Other Literary Essays (2016) are loosely connected by the theme of literary criticism, which she argues is necessary.

The 2021 novel Antiquities follows a retiree who is reflecting upon his life, although his memory appears to be flawed. The 2022 collection Antiquities and Other Stories contains five tales, including the title story about the protagonist of her 2021 novel.

Significance

Ozick is especially important in the context of Jewish American literary studies. While many of her literary contemporaries—Saul Bellow, Bernard Malamud, and Philip Roth—have written fiction that seems to argue on behalf of the merits of Jewish secularism and assimilation into mainstream American culture, Ozick has consistently championed the importance of being a “Jewish” writer and of using her work to address concerns that are specifically Jewish in nature. Her writing is sharp, astute, creative, and often theoretical, and she is also one of the most prolific female writers within the Jewish American literary genre.

Bibliography

Franco, Dean J. “Rereading Cynthia Ozick: Pluralism, Postmodernism, and the Multicultural Encounter.” Contemporary Literature 49, no. 1 (Spring 2008): 56-84.

Halkin, Hillel. “What Is Cynthia Ozick About?” Commentary, January 2005, 49-55.

Kauvar, Elaine Mozer. Cynthia Ozick’s Fiction: Tradition and Invention. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1993.

Lowin, Joseph. "Cynthia Ozick b. April 17, 1928." The Shalvi/Hyman Encyclopedia of Jewish Women, 2021, jwa.org/encyclopedia/article/ozick-cynthia#pid-17225. Accessed 3 Sept. 2024.

Lowin, Joseph. "Cynthia Ozick (1928--)." Jewish Virtual Library, www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/cynthia-ozick. Accessed 3 Sept. 2024.