Levitation by Cynthia Ozick
"Levitation" by Cynthia Ozick is a collection that includes four short stories and a novella, emphasizing the complex dynamics between Jewish artists and their historical legacy. The title story introduces the Feingold couple, who host a gathering for writers, confronting themes of identity and cultural disconnection as they navigate relationships with secular and Jewish guests. The narratives often feature female protagonists grappling with their artistic ambitions amidst societal expectations and personal crises. Other stories, such as "Shots," delve into the power of art to capture moments in time, while exploring themes of obsession and unfulfilled relationships.
Ozick's work also reflects on broader issues of creativity, tradition, and the potential pitfalls of idolization within artistic expression, particularly from a Jewish perspective. Through characters like Ruth Puttermesser, the collection probes the challenges of maintaining a connection to tradition without succumbing to stagnation. Overall, "Levitation" presents a nuanced exploration of the female artist's struggle, marked by a blend of realism and magical elements, ultimately serving as cautionary tales about the costs of creative ambition and the weight of history.
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Subject Terms
Levitation by Cynthia Ozick
First published: 1982
Type of work: Novella and short stories
Form and Content
In Levitation: Five Fictions, Cynthia Ozick presents the reader with four short stories and a novella, all of which focus on the problematic relationship between the Jewish artist and history. This book, Ozick’s third collection of short fiction, features women protagonists whose lives are disrupted by their own creations.
“Levitation,” the work that opens and names this collection, begins as a couple named Feingold try to rise above their secondary status as authors by giving a party for famous writers. Although no stars attend, the Feingolds’ apartment fills with minor writers. In the dining room, the guests are either gentiles or very secular Jews. In contrast, the living room is dominated by a Holocaust survivor surrounded by Mr. Feingold and the more intense, serious Jewish guests. Standing in the hall between the two groups, Lucy Feingold, a convert to Judaism, realizes that she rejects the Jews and their fascination with history and anti-Semitism. A dual vision ensues, allowing her to see the living room, with its human links to the past, rise upward toward the ceiling; meanwhile, she imagines herself joining a pagan festival in a park, emphasizing her choice of Hellenism over Hebraism.
“Shots” also focuses on the difficulties posed by an artist’s struggle to understand her relationship to the past; the unnamed, first-person, female narrator has become a photographer in order to freeze people into a moment of time. After capturing a murder on film, the narrator becomes aware of the power of “shooting” someone with a camera. Appropriately for someone fascinated with preserving the past, the narrator develops an infatuation with an unhappily married historian. The story ends as the narrator remains entrapped in this asexual, nonproductive relationship, referring to her camera as “my chaste aperture, my dead infant, husband of my bosom.”
The short pieces entitled “From a Refugee’s Notebook” are introduced with a short passage that explains that two “fragments were found in the vacated New York apartment of an unidentified refugee from an unspecified land.” The first relic is a meditation on a picture of Sigmund Freud’s study in Vienna in which the narrator notes the presence of hundreds of small, carved, ancient stone gods. Speculating that Freud has attempted to become a god by “standing apart from nature” through the invention of the id, ego, and superego, the essay contrasts Freud’s paganism with Moses’ monotheism. The second fragment, “The Sewing Harems,” continues the exploration of the dangers of disrupting nature’s rhythms. Making the locale for this story the planet Acirema, a word meant to be read backward, Ozick satirically comments on America’s fascination with issues of reproduction. In Acirema, women decorate themselves by sewing their skin with thread, and some of these artists of the body band together, sewing up their vaginas to reduce the world’s population. Their plan backfires when these “sewing harems” actually increase the population after societal reaction produces a cult celebrating fertility and motherhood.
The problems of social change are more gracefully explored in the Puttermesser stories; the first of these stories has the long, three-part title “Puttermesser: Her Work History, Her Ancestry, Her Afterlife.” Although she is a New York lawyer and an independent, unmarried woman, Ruth Puttermesser longs for her lost Jewish tradition and imaginatively constructs conversations in which a long-dead uncle teaches her Hebrew. This story ends with a challenge to Puttermesser’s biographer, Ozick herself, to imagine where to go with Ruth’s story.
Ozick picks up Puttermesser’s life history twelve years later in the novella Puttermesser and Xanthippe. Now forty-six, Puttermesser loses her married lover when she prefers reading Plato to having sex; further, her life is complicated by periodontal disease and her demotion at City Hall. In response, Puttermesser, in a sort of fugue state, draws on her knowledge of Jewish folklore and forms a golem, an artificially formed being reputed to aid Jewish communities in times of trouble. Although the golem, Xanthippe, initially helps Puttermesser become mayor, institutes a plan for an urban utopia, and restores order to the city, it ultimately grows out of control. Puttermesser finally unmakes her creation, and the city reverts to its previous, ungovernable state.
Context
Levitation: Five Fictions reflects Cynthia Ozick’s fascination with the problems of creativity for a Jewish artist. For Ozick, the artistic act always carries within it the danger of creating false idols, thereby betraying monotheism. In this collection of stories, the central characters are female, and the challenges inherent in Ozick’s view of creativity are seemingly complicated by the protagonists’ gender. Ozick’s previously published fiction, however, which includes male protagonists, illustrates that the temptations that she presents to her protagonists apply equally to males and females. Although all of her characters in this collection are women who fail to achieve satisfaction personally and artistically, Ozick clearly indicates that their sterility emanates from their inability to uphold tradition without fossilizing it.
Ozick states in her introduction to Bloodshed: Three Novellas that her function as a writer is “to judge and interpret the world.” Ozick’s harsh judgment of her characters and the twentieth century that they inhabit is reminiscent of Flannery O’Connor or Muriel Spark. This author demands that her protagonists struggle with a world in which the wrong moral choice inevitably leads to violence, death, or slow decay. Through her device of emotionally distancing characters from the reader, Ozick allows their actions to be seen clearly, almost as case studies.
Ozick often inserts magical elements into otherwise ordinary stories to alert the reader to the metaphysical struggles that are present. Through her use of the fantastic, she underscores the displacement of her characters in the world and their resultant inability to produce, physically or creatively. The failed woman artist is the representative artist; by “judging” and “interpreting” such failures, Ozick provides cautionary tales for those women who desire to create.
Bibliography
Bloom, Harold, ed. Cynthia Ozick. New York: Chelsea House, 1986. This collection covers Ozick’s works up to 1983. Although many of the pieces are merely brief book reviews, Victor Strasberg’s contribution includes a brief but illuminating discussion of Ozick’s novellas. Bloom’s introduction is interesting for its treatment of Ozick’s essays.
Currier, Susan, and Daniel J. Cahill. “A Bibliography of Writings by Cynthia Ozick.” Texas Studies in Literature and Language 25, no. 2 (Summer, 1983): 313-321. This complete listing of Ozick’s works up to 1983 is dated, but it is helpful in that it cites works that are not usually cited in other listings.
Friedman, Lawrence S. Understanding Cynthia Ozick. Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1991. An entry in the Understanding Contemporary Literature series, this book is designed for those who are unfamiliar with works that use nontraditional literary forms and techniques. Particularly helpful introduction for first-time readers of Ozick’s fiction.
Kauvar, Elaine M. Cynthia Ozick’s Fiction:Tradition and Invention. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1993. A close reading of Ozick’s fiction that avoids theoretical approaches. In the chapter that deals with the stories in Levitation, Kauvar emphasizes the links between the stories and their symbolism. Ozick’s sources and references are exhaustively explored.
Library Journal. CVI, January 1, 1981, p. 75.
Lowin, Joseph. Cynthia Ozick. Boston: Twayne, 1988. A very readable interpretation of Ozick’s fiction, this book is also useful for its chronology, selected bibliography, and first chapter, which provides a brief biography of Ozick.
Ms. X, April, 1982, p. 94.
The New York Review of Books. XXIX, May 13, 1982, p. 22.
The New York Times Book Review. LXXXVII, February 14, 1982, p. 11.
Newsweek. XCIX, February 15, 1982, p. 85.
Pinsker, Sanford. The Uncompromising Fictions of Cynthia Ozick. Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1987. A brief analysis that includes a short chapter on Levitation entitled “Dreams of Jewish Magic/The Magic of Jewish Dreams.”
Saturday Review. IX, February, 1982, p. 58.
Time. CXIX, February 15, 1982, p. 74.
Times Literary Supplement. April 23, 1982, p. 456.
Zatlin, Linda. “Cynthia Ozick’s Levitations:Five Fictions.” Studies in American Jewish Literature 4 (1985): 121-123. An investigation of the tensions between creativity and Judaism in Levitation.