ARACNE

Cynthia OzickOrthodoxy and Irreverence

A Critical Study

Daniela Fargione

Copyright © MMVARACNE editrice S.r.l.

www.aracneeditrice.itinfo@aracneeditrice.it

via Raffaele Garofalo, 133 A/B00173 Roma

tel. (06) 93781065

ISBN 88–548–0066–X

Rights are reserved for every Country.

Ist edition: May 2005

To Giulia

vii

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

I would like to express my appreciation to a number of people who

encouraged me to conclude this project, providing me with enormous

affection and support for my undertaking. I am especially indebted to

my American academic advisor Maria Tymoczko, whose loving

guidance and generosity make her the most desirable teacher and

friend a student can wish for; without her influence this book would

have never been written.

Invaluable support came from my maestra, Barbara Lanati, who

has taught me a great deal about American literature, translation, and

life. Thanks to Susanna Basso and Rossella Bernascone for making

me love translation.

I would also like to extend my gratitude to Edmondo Bertaina for

his “irreverence” and presence, and to all the friends who helped with

the logistical and pragmatic aspects of this work. Special thanks to

Luisa Balacco, Paola Bracco, Matilde Domestico, Grazia Giua, Scott

D. Rubin, Alberto Spadafora.

A very special acknowledgment to my family for their constant

love.

ix

TABLE OF CONTENTS

XI PREFACE

1 A BRIEF BIOGRAPHY OF CYNTHIA OZICK

9 CYNTHIA OZICK AND JEWISH LITERATURE

15 THE PARADOX OF BEING A “JEWISH WRITER”:

CYNTHIA OZICK AND IDOLATRY

21 THE PARADOX OF BEING A “WOMAN WRITER”:

CYNTHIA OZICK AND FEMINISM

27 CYNTHIA OZICK AND BIOGRAPHY

33 TWO RECURRENT MOTIFS IN OZICK’S OEUVRE: NEW YORK CITY

AND PHOTOGRAPHY

43 CYNTHIA OZICK AND LANGUAGE

55 CYNTHIA OZICK AND GENRES

55 Biography

57 Poetry

59 Narrative and essays

61 Translation

65 A RATIONALE FOR TRANSLATING

CYNTHIA OZICK INTO ITALIAN

73 CRITERIA FOR A SELECTION OF CYNTHIA OZICK’S WRITINGS

74 Poetry

76 Short stories

77 Essays

Table of contents x

79 TRANSLATION STRATEGIES

81 Poetry

87 Narrative and essays

95 POEMS / POESIE

97 Il treno dei pendolari attraversa Harlem

98 Rebus

100 Nel giardino

101 Greci

103 SHORT STORIES / RACCONTI

105 Pietra

133 Invidia, ovvero: lo Yiddish in America

189 Lampi

207 ESSAYS / SAGGI

209 La Lezione del Maestro

216 Il monologo di un traduttore

226 Il messaggio suicida di Primo Levi

241 BIBLIOGRAPHY

xi

PREFACE

In 1970 Cynthia Ozick attended a conference at the Weizmann

Institute in Israel to deliver a controversial paper.1 Although she stated

that she was "a writer, slow and unprolific, largely unknown...,"

ironically deploring the fact that she was still "on the Hallote's

payroll,"2 her literary production had already gained credence as a

very polemical one. Dazzling and witty, erudite and irreverent,

pugnacious and unpredictable, Cynthia Ozick is currently one of the

most respected contemporary American authors. Her production

includes hundreds of publications that embrace many different topics

and genres from short stories to literary reviews, from novels to

translations, from poems to essays and, recently, drama. Over the

years, she has received various awards and prizes: the American

Academy of Arts and Letters Award for Literature, a Guggenheim

Fellowship, four first prizes for the O. Henry Prize Stories, a Jewish

Book Council Award, and a Mildred and Harold Strauss Living

Award. She holds honorary doctorates from many American and

international universities and in 1985 she delivered the Phi Beta

Kappa Oration at Harvard University. Ozick's belletristic qualities

have been amply recognized in the United States. Her literary career,

however, has been subject to a very slow process of artistic growth,

primarily because of a long “silent and shadowed apprenticeship of

craft and vision” (Ozick 1983:157).

1 The essay in question is “America: Toward Yavneh” published in Judaism 19,

Summer 1970, 264-82. It was reprinted as “New Yiddish: Language for American

Jews” in Jewish Digest 18 (February 1973). In 1983 it was included in her collection

of essays Art & Ardor with the title “Toward a New Yiddish”. 2 In 1952, Cynthia Ozick married Bernard Hallote, a wealthy and successful

lawyer.

Preface xii

The purpose of this book is to offer a selection of Ozick’s literary

works in an Italian version. I would like to provide the Italian reader

with a varied and significant sample of Ozick’s work, showing her

literary skills in three genres: poetry, short fiction, and essay writing.

As for any anthology, the choice of the individual pieces depends on

the personal taste of the compiler. On the one hand my selection

reflects my literary preferences and on the other it serves different

purposes. After a brief biographical sketch of the writer, I will explore

Ozick’s position within a Jewish American literary context. Then, her

linguistic patterns in relation to her recurrent themes will be

examined. This process will also involve an analysis of my translation,

as translation is already an interpretation of a text belonging to a

specific linguistic and cultural system. Finally, I will provide a brief

reflection on the Italian Jewish editorial market, which is currently

burgeoning great consensus. Some speculations about the possible

effects of this translation on the Italian context will follow. Which

literary gaps would it fill? How would it compare to the few other

Italian translations of Ozick’s fiction?

1

A BRIEF BIOGRAPHY OF CYNTHIA OZICK

Ozick arrived at literary success quite late in her life. The second

child of immigrants, Cynthia Ozick was born in New York City on 17

April 1928 and grew up in the Pelham Bay section of the Bronx where

her parents ran the Park View Pharmacy. Her father, William (Velvl)

Ozick, moved to America from White Russia at the age of twenty-one,

while her mother, Celia (Shiphra) Regelson, was smuggled across the

Russian border when she was only nine years old. Ozick’s parents are

an important presence in her writings and are the object of genuine

reverence and respect. In “A Drugstore in Winter” (1983), Ozick de-

picts with affection and richness the details of her parents’ long days

in the pharmacy, toiling and desperately struggling against the De-

pression. Cynthia Ozick herself worked in the pharmacy as a delivery

girl. She describes her father as a “discreet and inscrutable” man

(300), grinding and mixing powders, while her mother, “on her feet

until one in the morning,” is a generous and exuberant woman. Al-

though Ozick’s parents had economic difficulties, the writer does not

seem to have any perception of them.

Mingled with the “coffee smell, the tarpaper smell, the eerie hon-

eyed tangled drugstore smell” (301), the smell of books also entered

this world. Ozick recalls the Traveling Library as wonderland, she

describes her infatuation with literature and reading which became

the only dimension where she could feel at home with the rest of the

world and with herself. At school she was a fish out of water, an

outsider, always compelled to defend and valorize her Jewish heri-

tage. She recalls: “In P.S. 71 I carry, weighty as a cloak, the inerica-

ble knowledge of my scandal — I am cross-eyed, dumb, an imbecile

at arithmetic; in P.S. 71 I am publicly shamed in Assembly because

I am caught not singing Christmas Carols…I am incognito. No one

knows who I really am” (Ozick 1983:303). A statement like this

A brief biography of Cynthia Ozick 2

shows the writer’s recognition in childhood of her inadequacy

within a Western/Christian context, but it also explains her inclina-

tion in her future artistic career to overcome her old frustrations by

means of irony. Ozick’s painful memories of her school years found

some sort of compensation in the magic spell cast by literature. Fi-

nally, her vigorous appetite for books helped to find herself and her

true passion, a passion that will stay forever: “I am no longer an in-

cognito, not even to myself” (Ozick 1983:303) she recalls, and she

adds: “in winter dusk… in the secret bliss of the Violet Fairy Book,

I both see and do not see how these grains of life will stay forever”

(304).

She soon started imagining a future as a writer, without knowing

that she would need to face humiliations and endure difficulties be-

fore fulfilling her dream. Her first confrontation with them took

place at the age of five and a half, when her bobe (grandmother) took

her for the first time to Rabbi’s Meskin’s Yiddish-Hebrew “room” to

start cheder, Jewish religious instruction for boys only. “Take her

home; a girl doesn’t have to study” was the admonition of this “very

ancient rabbi, awesomely dignified, bearded, and formidable” (Kau-

var 1985:384). That, according to Ozick, also marked the beginning

of her feminism. “We went home,” Ozick remembers, “and the next

day my bobe girded her loins and took me back” (384). And at the

end of the instruction, when her grandmother went to collect her, the

rabbi told her that the little girl had a “goldene kepele,” a golden lit-

tle head. The excruciatingly hurtful recognition of being the only

Jew at school and the only girl in a male world set her apart. Ozick

states: “It was very strange to me to have two lives like this: on the

school side, where I was almost always the only Jew, and in cheder

where I was almost always the only girl” (Kauvar 1985:385). These

childhood experiences became raw material for her future writing.

The rabbi, for instance, serves as a model for the character of

Sheskin in The Cannibal Galaxy (1983), a novel whose story is set in

an all-day Jewish elementary school, while her memories of school-

day sufferings reverberate in the pages of both Trust (1966) and “An

Education” (1972). She remembers feeling inferior and worthless, al-

though she also admits that her gender possibly helped her in her de-

cision to become a writer.

A brief biography of Cynthia Ozick 3

One of the reasons why I felt free to say from earliest childhood that I was

going to be a writer is that if I had been a boy, I would have had to be some-

thing else. But it wasn’t important for a girl; it didn’t matter. It couldn’t be

taken seriously. It really didn’t matter what I did because I was going to get

married and that would be that. So I think that in a way being a girl gave me

a kind of freedom to become a writer. (Kauvar 1985:385, 386)

Implicit in this statement are two of Ozick’s features, namely her

sense of defiance toward practices of male superiority and male ostra-

cism, and her penchant for ironic treatment of them. Later in her liter-

ary career, she would combine these two elements in her fiction. Some

of her female characters, for example, such as the narrator in Trust,

Una in “An Education,” and Ruth Puttermesser, show a strong con-

tempt toward marriage, but they also share the same predilection for

writing.

Early in her life, Ozick had already assimilated the various lessons

learned in her first school years. Her sense of alienation for being a

victim of cultural bias, her disappointment in belonging to the

“wrong” gender, her sense of inadequacy stirred by her obtuse (mainly

female) teachers, affected Ozick’s choice to force her way in the

world of literature. Here is her way to achieve her freedom: to enter

the literary world and become an artist. After P.S. 71, Ozick went to

Hunter High School in Manhattan (1941-46), where her bookish pas-

sion gained her excellence in various areas, especially in the study of

Latin and the classics. In the spring of 1946, the writer entered New

York University, where she studied under the supervision of Lionel

Trilling. In her essay “Washington Square, 1946” (1985), Ozick’s

memory of her eagerness to attend college is mixed with a sense of

nostalgia for everything new that is awaiting her there, the “allure of

the celestial unknown…I felt my youth like a nimbus” (Ozick

1989:113). She remembers arriving there with the same hesitant en-

thusiasm of an initiate, carrying her lunch in a brown paper bag, and

soon feeling humiliated by finding out that “Tuesday isn’t Wednes-

day” (114): by mistake she arrived a day early. Still carrying her lunch

bag, which took on “a greasy sadness” (114), Ozick took advantage of

this “muddle” to explore the environment and to ponder on three

omens that inhabit the street across from the main building: a pretzel

man, the Chock Full o’ Nuts and a newsstand, where she is to buy her

A brief biography of Cynthia Ozick 4

first “real” book, that is “not for the classroom” (117). If the pretzel

man is the “guardian of the garden of the jettisoned” (114), the Chock

Full stands for the commons: it is a bazaar, an arena, the match-

maker’s office, the gossip parlor, the center of political activity, and a

place for “the flashing of engagement rings” (116), all motifs later

displayed in her short story “An Education.” But it is the third element

of this scene, the newsstand, that deserves her complete attention. This

is not a regular newsstand, as they also sell special magazines, such as

the Partisan Review (that she still does not dare and cannot afford to

buy), which, in her mind, is “the table of the gods” (114). There are so

many things that she does not yet know, but what she knows is that

Washington Square will “wake” her.

After graduating from college, Ozick set out for Columbus, Ohio,

where she enrolled in the Department of English at Ohio State Uni-

versity. After earning a Master’s degree with a thesis entitled “Par-

able in the Later Novels of Henry James,” and refusing to pursue a

Ph.D., she “became Henry James” (Ozick 1989:294). Ozick claims

that her first encounter with her master occurred by chance: “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,”1 but James’s influence on her writings would stay forever.

In “The Lesson of the Master” she explains, “I carried the Jamesian

idea, I was of his cult, I was a worshiper of literature, literature was

my single altar; I was, like the elderly bald-headed James, a priest at

that altar; and that altar was all my life” (Ozick 1989:294). As she

recalls in this intriguing essay, when she felt prompted to choose be-

tween the mutually exclusive options of art and life, she chose art

and she regretted it for the rest of her life. That choice came out of

misunderstanding of her master’s lesson, because to become Henry

James at the age of twenty-two meant to spoil her best youthful

years. Besides, she suggests, James had written his lesson toward the

end of his life, when the temptations of life were probably less

strong. She concludes her essay by stating that “Influence is perdi-

1 Ozick. Letter to Victor Strandberg (6 June 1990). Quoted in Strandberg

1994:14.

A brief biography of Cynthia Ozick 5

tion” (297), although Henry James can certainly be ascertained as a

constant presence throughout her writing career.

Her identification with the older artist is also the reflection of the

youngster’s naiveté: she could not possibly achieve in her youth what

her master had attained over a lifetime. She spent years in excessive

rumination, being engaged with the composition of a massive “phi-

losophical” novel entitled Mercy, Pity, Peace, and Love (MPPL) —

“an endless suck at that Mippel” (Rainwater and Scheick 1983:257),

she would later comment on the book, her first abortive attempt at the

novel. MPPL was followed by Trust, another long-conceived work

(Ozick labored over it for six and a half years); it was published in

1966, the year after her daughter, Rebecca, was born. A satirical work

about postwar America, written à la mode de James, it “contained

everything — the whole world” (Ozick 1972:42), including many of

the themes and issues that accompanied her for the rest of her writing

career: the search for the father, the eternal struggle between Pan and

Moses, idolatry, as well as a typical Jamesian flavor in the characteri-

zation and in the juxtaposition of America and Europe. Her “struggle

for exactitude” as Kauvar has justly defined her excessive search for

the perfect word was also Jamesian. Years later, with a touch of nos-

talgia, she recalled, “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 am-

bition or monastic patience or metaphysical nerve, and fortitude. That

belongs, I suppose, to the ambition, strength, and above all arrogance

of youth.”2

Yet, Trust did teach Ozick a crucial lesson. If in a way the novel

contains the whole world, there is also an element, Ozick confessed,

that she consciously left out: “the question of the narrator’s sensibil-

ity” (Ozick 1972:42). She was afraid, in fact, of being recognized and

labeled as the writer of a “woman’s novel,” so that she proceeded to

strip her character “of everything, even a name” (Ozick 1972:42). The

nameless sexless narrator of Trust in search for an identity is also a

WASP. Years later, in a letter to Victor Strandberg, Ozick claimed

that with this novel she “became a Jewish writer” and that never again

2 Ozick. Letter to Victor Strandberg (14 January 1982). Quoted in Strandberg

1994:15.

A brief biography of Cynthia Ozick 6

would she succumb to the temptation to discard her heritage, both as a

woman and as a Jewish American writer.

“After such an extended immolation,” Ozick said in an interview,

“I needed frequent spurts of immediacy — that is short stories which

could get published right away” (Rainwater and Scheick1983:258).

The Seventies and early Eighties were very prolific years for Ozick. If

her first fifteen years of apprenticeship were an attempt to emulate

Henry James and E.M. Forster, during the following fifteen years she

engaged in a relentless struggle to refine her style, to find her own

point of view, and to adopt suitable channels to express it. Her literary

status grew extensively. She was artist-in-residence at City College

from 1981 to 1982, and in the following few years five of her stories

were chosen for republication in Best American Short Stories. Many

awards were granted to her, including the Guggenheim and the Na-

tional Endowment for the Arts Fellowship. In 1982, she published an-

other collection of short stories, Levitation: Five Fictions, and later

she devoted herself to the composition of two novels: The Cannibal

Galaxy, that was published in 1983, and The Messiah of Stokholm

(1987).

Philip Lowin, in his biographical sketch of Cynthia Ozick, reports a

definition that the writer has given of herself. After fifty years of writ-

ing, she is now an “elderly novice” (www.us-israel.com), Ozick

claims. This statement can probably be applied to the one genre that

she has started to explore only in recent years: drama. In 1990, in fact,

Ozick decided to dramatize her novella “The Shawl” (1980) and its

sequel “Rosa.” This last story was included in a new edition of “The

Shawl,” that was published in 1989. The play bears the title Blue Light

(1994) and its first production, under the direction of Sidney Lumet,

was staged in 1996. This version was the result of many revisions of

the original and followed a first abortive attempt in 1990. That year,

producer Robert Brustein was compelled to cancel it because of a lim-

ited budget.

The Nineties have witnessed Ozick’s return to both prose and essay

writing, and — surprisingly — her debut in Internet publication. In the

fall 1996 she contributed to Internet magazine Slate with a ten-day

“Diary.” Her most recent publication is a collection of essays, Quarrel

& Quandary, that was published in the year 2000.

A brief biography of Cynthia Ozick 7

Finally, Heir to the Glimmering World, a new long-expected novel,

was published in December 2004. This is the story of Professor

Rudolph Mitwisser, an internationally renowned Jewish scholar of

Karaism, who escapes from Germany to the USA during the difficult

years of the Great Depression. Completely immersed in his study, he

“was drawn to schismatics, fiery heretics, apostates—the lunatics of

history” (Ozick 2004:64), since the Karaites were members of an ob-

scure Jewish sect founded in Persia in the eigth century. They rejected

the Talmud and the teachings of the rabbis in favor of strict adherence

to the Bible as the only source of Jewish law and practice. Their re-

fusal of any interpretations of the Jewish written word, thus, equates

to the refusal of life, as “out of the soil of strenous cogitation, which is

the engine of holy inspiration […], burst the sweet buds of Conduct

and Conscience. The Rational Mind is the Inspired Mind” (Ozick

2004:74).

Ozick counterbalances the rejection of interpretation with the idea

of overinterpretation. This is represented by the family’s generous

benefactor, James Philip A’ Bair, a young millionaire whose wealth

rests on the popularity of his father’s books for children whose main

character is Bear Boy, i.e. James himself as a child. James’s impossi-

bility to refuse the life that his father has invented for him, makes him

a fundamentalist, a modern Karaite, eventually a refugee like all the

other characters of the book.

As we have seen, over the years Cynthia Ozick has proved to be a

very eclectic writer: a meticulous and energetic poet, a caustic and ar-

gumentative essayist, a quirky and provocative fabulist. Any new pub-

lication is a literary event, and the frequent speaking invitations ex-

tended to her testify the recognition that has been accorded to one of

the most outstanding contemporary American writers.

9

CYNTHIA OZICK AND JEWISH LITERATURE

Both Ozick’s literary work and criticism about her have re-

cently largely expanded. Her first publications, however, received

lukewarm responses, while her later novels and essays have been

mostly considered as the quintessence of the “Jewish Idea” written

by a devoted champion of Judaism. Steeped in the Jewish tradition

with all its clashing viewpoints, Ozick’s production has been mis-

read for a long time. Fortunately, a third phase in criticism began

in the early Nineties. Scholars such as Elaine Kauvar, Victor

Strandberg, and Sarah Blacher Cohen have recently pointed out

that Ozick’s Jewish heritage “is no more exclusionary than

Hawthorne’s or Faulkner’s regionalism” (Strandberg 1994:191).

Elaine Kauvar, in particular, underlines that the common tendency

of critics to view Ozick’s fiction solely as “a product of American

Jewish writing...not only restricts Ozick’s art severely, but it also

erects rigid criteria by which art is to be judged” (Kauvar

1993:xvii). Critical parochialism only denies her stubborn auton-

omy and her original unpredictability. Yet, despite Ozick’s refusal

of ethnic designation and cultural marginality, her fiction has of-

ten been seen as representing Jewish literary tradition only. This

judgment may also justify her crucial position in a literary phe-

nomenon that Lillian Kremer defines as “Jewish American literary

renaissance” (Kremer 1993:572).

In order to understand Cynthia Ozick’s contribution to Jewish lit-

erature, I have explored both the American and the Italian editorial

markets. The results of this search made me aware of the great atten-

tion that Jewish literature is currently drawing. In Italy, for example,

many American Jewish writers are being translated from English, a

phenomenon that I will investigate in the second part of this book. In

this section I will illustrate the evolution of American Jewish literature

Cynthia Ozick and Jewish literature 10

in relation to the crucial concern of Jewish identity. This conflicted

debate also clarifies Ozick’s position. Because it seems impossible to

arrive at a univocal definition, I suggest to view Ozick’s literature as

representative of this multiplicity.

Many current studies on Jewish American culture and literature

have acknowledged “a renewal of interest, on the part of American

Jews, in things Jewish.”1 These last twenty years or so have witnessed

an enormous and steady increase in the number of Jewish publica-

tions, a more tangible attention to both Judaic texts and midrashic nar-

rative modes, a proliferation of scholarship on the Holocaust and the

State of Israel, and an expansion of Jewish literature courses and Jew-

ish studies programs in American and English universities. This un-

precedented popularity has triggered a lively debate that has involved

both the American reading public at large and the more specific circles

of Jewish scholars in academia.

In the late 1960s and early 1970s many critics were predicting an

approaching “Kaddish time” for Jewish writing.2 In 1969 Robert Alter

1 Kauvar Elaine M. “Introduction: Some Reflections on Contemporary American

Jewish Culture.” Contemporary Literature 34 (Fall 1993): 3, p. 337. For further

reading, see Bilik, Dorothy Seidman. Immigrant Survivors. Post-Holocaust Con-

sciousness in Recent Jewish American Fiction. Middletown, CT: Wesleyan Univer-

sity Press, 1981; Solotaroff, Ted and Nessa Rappoport (eds.). The Schocken Book of

Contemporary Jewish Fiction. New York: Schocken, 1992; Kremer, Lillian S.

“Post-Alienation: Recent Directions in Jewish-American Literature.” Contemporary

Literature, 34 (Fall 1993): 3, pp. 571-591; Baskin, Judith R. (ed.) Women of the

Word. Jewish Women and Jewish Writing. Detroit: Wayne State University Press,

1994; Baumgarten, Murray. “Reading Cynthia Ozick: Imagining Jewish Writing.”

Contemporary Literature 37 (Summer 1996), pp. 307-314; Wirth-Neshe, Hana (ed.

and introd.). What is Jewish Literature? Philadelphia, Jerusalem: The Jewish Publi-

cation Society, 1994/5754; Halio, L. Jay and Ben Siegel (eds.) Daughters of Valor.

Contemporary Jewish American Women Writers. Newark: University of Delaware

Press, 1997; Dershowitz, Alan M. The Vanishing American Jew. In Search of

American Identity for the Next Century. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1998; Wade,

Stephen. Jewish American Literature Since 1945. An Introduction. Chicago, Lon-

don: Fitzroy Dearborn Publishers, 1999. 2 Dershowitz, in The Vanishing American Jew, speaks of a possible “Kaddish

time” (Kaddish is the prayer for the dead) for American Jewish Community. “But

reports of the death of Judaism,” he continues, “may be premature — if we can

change the way we think, and act about Jewish survival.” According to Dershowitz

Cynthia Ozick and Jewish literature 11

claimed that “the vogue of Jewish writing, quickly exhausting its artis-

tic possibilities, offers many indications that it may be falling into a

declining phase of unwitting self-parody” (Alter 1969:9). His views

were strongly supported by Irvin Howe, who asserted that “Jewish fic-

tion has probably moved past its highpoint,” and that “insofar as

[American Jewish fiction] draws heavily from the immigrant experi-

ence, it must suffer a depletion of resources, a thinning-out of materi-

als and memories” (Howe 1977:16). The waning of the immigrant ex-

perience and the perils of assimilation (or “Yankeezation” to use one

of Ozick’s expressions) prompted Leslie Fiedler to write in 1986 that

Jewish American dominant themes “have peaked” (Fiedler 1991:117).

Yet, in his introduction to a recent collection of Jewish American

short stories published in 1998, Gerald Shapiro cunningly notes,

Maybe Howe was right about the death of Jewish-American fiction, but the

good news is that the current crop of writers…apparently missed the obituary

notice. (viii)

Prophecies of death have been eventually dismissed. Far from be-

ing moribund, Jewish fiction has given proof of being vigorous, ener-

getic, vibrant and, especially, diverse. However, one of the most im-

portant issues concerning Jewish literature that seems to function as a

sort of common denominator among writers consists in the very defi-

nition of the subject in question. As Stephen Wade points out, “per-

haps more than any other aspect of modern writing in the USA, the

Jewish strand also contains the most prominent debate about nomen-

clature and definition” (Wade 1999:16). Pervasive treatment has been

given to this passionate debate since the Haskalah or Jewish Enlight-

enment.3 This is an eternal dilemma, the definition of “the indefin-

“American Jewish life is in danger of disappearing, just as most American Jews

have achieved everything we ever wanted: acceptance, influence, affluence, equal-

ity.” This is mainly due to a “skyrocketing rates of intermarriage and assimilation, as

well as ‘the lowest birth rate of any religious or ethnic community in the United

States.’” (Dershowitz 1998:1,6). 3 An eighteenth-nineteenth century movement among central and eastern Euro-

pean Jews which began in Germany under the leadership of Moses Mendelssohn

(1729-1786). It was designed to make Judaism more cosmopolitan in character by

promoting Jewish cultural renewal through knowledge of and confrontation with is-

Cynthia Ozick and Jewish literature 12

able” (Hana Wirth-Nesher 1994:3-12). Many scholars have tried to lo-

cate different factors which could determine the matrix of Jewish lit-

erature. A wide range of possibilities may be taken into account: from

biological determinism (Jewish literature is literature written by Jews)

to the specific themes explored (universal topics such as conflict be-

tween generations and ethical commitment), from religiosity (which

implies some measure of suffering that ennobles human victims) to

the domination of the written word or the written text (and thus the

honor of being an intellectual), from the use of a specific language

(Hebrew? Yiddish? Ladino? the author’s language?) to a sacred re-

spect for history (to which the issues of memory and heritage are at-

tached). Stephen Wade also mentions “the idea of ‘the little man’” (4),

a stock character so successfully interpreted by Woody Allen in many

of his films: this is the idea of the nebbish (a pitifully ineffectual, luck-

less and timid person) and the schlemiel (an awkward and unlucky

person for whom things never turn out right). Finally, Ben Siegel

quotes a self-mocking definition according to which “a Jew is anyone

another Jew says is a Jew” (Siegel 1997:20).

This interesting challenge has been taken up by many Jewish writ-

ers too. Saul Bellow finds that “laughter and trembling” are central

elements in Jewish stories where laughter usually has the function to

“simply restore the equilibrium of sanity” (Bellow 1963:35) nullified

by the effect of trembling. Elie Wiesel has also offered his own defini-

tion, claiming that,

A Jewish writer is, in the final analysis, a Jew who has chosen the art of writ-

ing to extol or to condemn a certain way of living, believing, fighting, or in

one word: being. He remains a Jew even if he writes against Jews. Except

that in this case, he will be an apologetic Jew and an inauthentic writer. (Wie-

sel 1973:xiii)

The fact remains that even though readers cannot approach any

text completely ignoring a whole framework of expectations dictated

by familiar myths (or stereotypes) and crystallized ideas about who

is a Jew and what Jewish literature is, it is also true that more than

sues external to the Talmudic tradition, and by encouraging adoption of the dress,

customs, and language of the surrounding populations.

Cynthia Ozick and Jewish literature 13

one of these definitions may apply simultaneously. Hence, one single

short story or novel may fit into more than one of the following cate-

gories: American fiction, Jewish fiction, Jewish-American fiction,

Holocaust literature, Survivor testimony, and so on. Jewish litera-

ture, in this sense, seems to be destined to remain the product of a

hyphenated culture.

Moreover, there is also the other side of the coin that requires pon-

dering. The difficulty in pinning down a satisfactory formula for iden-

tifying Jewish literature also arises from a general lack of familiarity

with Jewish culture and tradition and — even more deplorable — a

complete ignorance among American Jews of the classical texts that

constitute the real skeleton of that very culture. In her insightful arti-

cle, Elaine Kauvar makes this point distinguishing between the second

and the third generation of American Jews. She explains that while the

second generation was so eager to be immediately assimilated within

the fabric of American society and “succumbed to the lure of Ameri-

can culture” (338), the third generation “has withdrawn from that po-

sition” (338) and while witnessing “a re-emergence of theology,” its

“religious tradition continues as Jewish activism, nostalgia, and even

mere kitsch and sentimentality” (339). This phenomenon is reflected

in the lack of familiarity of many American Jews with their own tradi-

tion, symbols, and historical past. This is the reason why Ozick con-

stantly advocates a return to classical texts and to a particularism that

would otherwise vanish.

Deeply concerned with the “precariousness of Jewish survival,” as

she explains in her article “All the World Wants the Jews Dead”

(1974), Cynthia Ozick envisions Jewish life in modern America as

weak, shallow, and punctuated by many empty rituals where food has

substituted for liturgy by taking on an unholy meaning of collective

redemption. In “Full Stomachs and Empty Rites” (1967) she sardoni-

cally lists the three necessary steps that a person has to accomplish in

order to become a Jew: first s/he needs to visit a rabbi to learn about

Ruth and Naomi; second, s/he needs to buy a star of David to wear on

a gold chain around her/his neck; finally, s/he needs to learn how to

cook blintzes (34). She concludes by claiming that the essence of

American Jewish consciousness is “a pastrami sandwich; and all the

rest is Commentary” (36). Jewish loyalty seems to find its last bastion

Cynthia Ozick and Jewish literature 14

in gastronomical celebrations at official religious offices. Against this

trivialization of Jewish life, this collective forgetfulness of principles

of faith and religious substance stands Cynthia Ozick’s bold assump-

tion that a Jew is “something more than what is. Being a Jew is some-

thing more than being an alienated marginal sensibility with kinky

hair. Simply: to be a Jew is to be covenanted” (Ozick 1983:122).

Ozick reminds her readers that Jewish life is regulated by laws, by a

series of precepts of Jewish conduct which, on the one hand reinforce

Abraham’s brith (covenant with God) and respect for tradition, on the

other guarantee continuity and the transmittal of the original monothe-

istic values.