Envy (Masterplots II: Short Story Series, Revised Edition)
At a glance:
- Author: Cynthia Ozick
- First Published: 1966
- Type of Plot: Satire
- Time of Work: The mid-twentieth century
- Setting: New York
- Principal Characters: Edelshtein, Baumzweig, Paula, Yankel Ostrover, Chaim Vorovsky, Hannah
- Genres: Short fiction
- Subjects: Values
- Locales: New York
The Story
The basic premise of this novella-length, seriocomic story is Edelshtein's envy of the success of the writer Yankel Ostrover and his obsession with sustaining Yiddish as a language. Parallel to this plot line is the contradiction involved in Edelshtein's ironic need for a translator, without which he can never achieve success as a writer, but with which he cannot really sustain Yiddish. Although Edelshtein finds American writers of Jewish extraction such as Philip Roth, Bernard Malamud, Norman Mailer, and Saul Bellow puerile, vicious, and ignorant, he reserves his...
[The entire page is 1484 words long]
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