Cynthia Ozick's fiction is filled with characters in a state of identity crisis: “pagan rabbis,” Holocaust survivors, and frustrated artists who are struggling against the continual pressure of being Jewish in a hostile Christian environment. Not only do these characters stumble through America like “inevitable exiles” (Kielsky 23), but they are extremely conscious of their struggle and think a great deal about who they are in relation to those around them (Walden 2). Therefore, it is virtually impossible to read one of Ozick's texts without thinking a great deal about Jewish American identity.

Ozick's message, however, often is not clear; her texts are tightly condensed and often difficult, especially for the non-Jewish reader. Rather than mitigating the complexity of her fiction, Ozick's impressive volumes of essays further complicate the reader's understanding of her message. If one believes that Ozick's characters suffer from crises of identity because they are Jewish, it seems logical to browse Ozick's essays in search of what she believes to be the key elements of Jewishness, but one will again find the consummate artist challenging her readers. At various points, Ozick defines Jewishness as originating in the covenant (Art & Ardor 123), history, the avoidance of idolatry, the ability to make distinctions, and study (Metaphor & Memory 224). This is by no means an exhaustive list, but it demonstrates that Ozick avoids essentializing Jewish identity and posits the meaning of such an identity outside of one concrete, stable definition.

One of Ozick's most straightforward, yet most profound statements regarding Jewish identity indicates where a fruitful examination of this identity lies. “To be a Jew,” she asserts, “is to be old in history” (Metaphor & Memory 224). According to Paul Mendes Flohr in Contemporary Jewish Thought, a historical consciousness transmits traditions, rituals, and legends through generations (378) so that they may inform the present and the future. Such a definition of history indicates both the collective memory and the common ancestry of Jewish people, such as traditions passed down through centuries of Judaism and experiences of diaspora and exile due to persecution. On a familial, communal, or national level, this concept of history may also include memories of immigrating to America and growing up Jewish in an unfamiliar or hostile Christian environment. This lens of history encompasses the divergence of experiences that Jewish people have had in America, and yet calls into simultaneous play many elements that Ozick and literary scholars such as Leon Yudkin and Victor Strandberg have pinpointed as the foundation of Jewishness.

Identity, or a sense of self constructed through forces, institutions, and structures, however, is not created by a simple integration of the stories or collective and familial histories passed down by others. “To own a future is not only to redeem the past,” states Elaine Kauvar, “[but] to judge its meaning” (xii). One creates himself or herself when he or she makes sense of the past and then, according to Peter Kerry Powers, brings that past into a living relationship with the present (90) in order to inform the present and the future. I would extend Kauvar's and Powers' arguments to assert that history is not only judged by each individual, but reinvented and reconstructed by each individual as he or she selectively attends to details and carefully revises the historical narratives of others from his or her particular viewpoint. Each person then accommodates this invented history into his or her own consciousness or identity. A fruitful examination of the identities of Ozick's characters lies in their struggle to reinvent history and not in any consistent or unchanging definition of Jewishness.

Two excellent examples of texts by Ozick in which the main characters struggle to achieve self-knowledge through a reinvention of history are “The Pagan Rabbi” and “Envy; or, Yiddish in America.” Predictably, Ozick has not made this examination a straightforward one for the reader; he or she must struggle just as the characters do. According to Kauvar, Ozick “scrutinize[s] her [own] ideas from disparate angles” so that there is an “ongoing dialectic” regarding both history and identity (xiii). Sanford Pinsker expands this dialectic to a dialogic and describes the process that leads the reader to understand Edelshtein's identity in “Envy; or, Yiddish in America” as a triangle; Ozick creates three characters who carry Ozick's message between them (45). “The Pagan Rabbi” has a similar structure.

By combining Pinsker's concept of the triangle with Kauvar's insistence on the importance of history, I will demonstrate that meaning is most effectively derived from “The Pagan Rabbi” and “Envy; or, Yiddish in America” through a construction of the identities of the protagonists. This construction is accomplished by an analysis of the discourses of the three main characters of each story and a synthesis of these three viewpoints into a complex and coherent whole. This process is challenging for the reader because all three characters who make up these triangles are both telling the truth and completely off the mark; all three are both attractive and repulsive (Pinsker 47). In each story, the two supporting legs of the triangle cause the main character to rethink his construction of history and have a large impact on his identity. It is up to the reader to decide which parts of each triangle's legs' discourse is useful and relevant and then to combine these parts to inform the identity formation of the main character and ultimately the meaning of the story.

The title of “The Pagan Rabbi” reveals the primary tensions of the story, the divisions between holy and pagan, nature and study, Pan and Moses. The conflicting appeal of Pan and Moses is also a central theme of Ozick's first novel Trust. In Trust, the narrator is torn between her pleasure seeking, sensual biological father Nick and her deeply Judaic and learned stepfather Enock (Lowin 44). The narrator's struggle between Pan and Moses is a brief one; she sloughs off her interest in Pan to live “within the Jewish ideal” (Cohen 36). Ozick returns to the Pan versus Moses theme and complicates it in “The Pagan Rabbi.” Rabbi Kornfeld, a famous author of “remarkable” collections of responsa and Professor of Mishnaic History, finds himself inextricably drawn to nature, a practice typically denounced as “Idolatry” in Judaic Law. Kornfeld finds that he cannot choose between Pan and Moses without losing crucial parts of himself. He therefore attempts to reconstruct biblical history so that Pan and Moses are not mutually exclusive.

Kornfeld insists that, “It is false history, false philosophy, and false religion which declare to us human ones that we live among Things. … There is nothing that is Dead. … Hence in God's fecundating Creation there is no possibility of Idolatry, and therefore no possibility of committing this so-called abomination” (20–21). These statements exhibit Kornfeld's conclusion that the second commandment, which requires that Jews shun idols, is misleading. Kornfeld is also strongly attracted to the idea of a free soul and is anguished by the fact that men are “burdened” by being “chained” to their souls. He reconstructs biblical history to explain the origin of the rootedness of men's souls and the false commandment against Idolatry: “It was not out of ignorance that Moses failed to teach about those souls that are free. … [He knew] our ancestors … would not have abandoned their slavery in Egypt had they been taught of the free souls. … Therefore Moses never spoke to them of the free souls, lest the people not do God's will and go out from Egypt” (22–3). After convincing himself that he has accurately reconstructed biblical history and declaring that “the condition of men is evil and unjust” (22), Kornfeld desperately tries to free his own soul by communing with nature, confident that “if only I could couple with one of the free souls, the strength of the connection would likely wrest my own soul from my body … to its own freedom” (28).

It is clear the Kornfeld, tortured by the conflict between his faith and his love for nature, has attempted to choose a path between the two by breaking apart the binary that divides them and creating an intermediary space. In this intermediary space, faith and nature are not mutually exclusive, but mutual in their nourishment of the individual. Kornfeld successfully couples with the dryad Iripomonoeia, and experiences “marvels, blisses, and transports no man has slaked himself with since Father Adam pressed out the forbidden chlorophyll of Eden” (32). His story, however, is to have an unhappy ending. His soul, greedy to possess Iripomonoeia, escapes his body by attaching itself to her. However, Kornfeld is horrified by the sight of his nature-spurning, Torah-reading soul, who shows him that he cannot worship both nature and the word; he must choose one or the other. Moreover, because of Kornfeld's successful attempt to separate himself from his soul, he will lie in his grave alone and his soul will forever “walk here alone … in my garden” (36). Distraught, Kornfeld commits suicide by hanging himself from a tree with his prayer shawl. Ironically, nature and religion have joined to take him from this world and into the next.

The reader learns this information, which occurs before the narrative time of the story, through Kornfeld's suicide letter. However, Ozick creates a triangular narrative structure in which the narrator of the tale reads most of this letter aloud as both he and Kornfeld's widow comment on its content. The reader can construct Kornfeld's identity only by combining parts of each characters' assertions regarding history, both biblical history and personal history prior to the narrative time of the story, into a coherent whole.

Sheindel, Kornfeld's orthodox and uncompromising widow, has a very different interpretation of Kornfeld's actions than either of the other legs of this triangle. In her opinion, Judaic biblical laws and tradition are sacred and unchangeable, and Kornfeld's presumptuousness in altering them makes him a pagan. Her concrete and unwavering declarations provide a foil for her husband's quavering and uncertain struggle to integrate both Hellenic and Hebraic parts of his identity. A symbol of Sheindel's black and white approach to life is a fence. Sheindel wears the mark of a fence on her face; she was born in a concentration camp, and an SS guard attempted to kill her by hurling her against an electrified fence. Inexplicably, the current vanished from the fence at this moment and Sheindel was saved. She interprets Jewish law as a fence as well (Lyons 19), one that protects by clearly distinguishing between what belongs within and what should be kept without. In Sheindel's mind, the most damning aspect of Rabbi Kornfeld's struggle to integrate nature and the sacred is that “he scaled the Fence of the Law” (24), a fence that has both saved her life and given it coherence and meaning. Kornfeld's act of scaling the fence, according to Sheindel, can only lead him to join what lies beyond it; according to her, one is either Jew or pagan.

Although some readers may discount Sheindel's viewpoint because of her pitiless contempt for her deceased husband, Ozick supports Sheindel's points by highlighting that she has a long line of religious textual history behind her. The epigraph to the story, which asserts that one who worships nature “hurt[s] his own being,” is an excerpt from The Ethics of the Fathers, a text supported by hundreds of years of religious tradition and the Torah. This excerpt establishes the importance of religious study, and asserts that anything that disrupts or detracts from that study is forbidden. Sheindel possesses the ability to distinguish clearly between what is Jewish and what is not because her judgments are informed by religious texts and traditions.

The unnamed narrator of the story interprets Kornfeld's search in an entirely different manner. He and Kornfeld grew up as friends and went to seminary together; both of their fathers were rabbis. The narrator, however, became an atheist and married outside the Jewish faith. These events give the narrator a complex positionality. Although he is no longer a believer, he spent several years in a rabbinical seminary and is very knowledgeable about Jewish religion and law. This inside/outside position makes the narrator's interpretation of Kornfeld's questioning of the sacred very different from Sheindel's. Whereas Sheindel judges Kornfeld's reinterpretation of Moses as sinful, the narrator exclaims, “The man was a genius” (23). The narrator, when faced with doubt about his religion, relinquished his religion and became an atheist; he respects Kornfeld's straggle to reconcile nature and religion instead of abandoning his faith. In other words, while the narrator has crossed the “fence” of Judaism to stand firmly on the other side, Kornfeld has straggled to perch himself precariously atop the fence with a leg on either side; to the narrator, such a straggle is admirable and demonstrates a deeply religious identity, not a pagan one.

While all Sheindel feels for her husband after his death is scorn, the narrator states, “Pity him” (37). According to Vera Kielsky, the second commandment, which warns against idols and which Kornfeld has “proven” false, also makes a case for pity as “the fundament on which the Mosaic idea stands” (206). Therefore, in denying pity for her husband, Sheindel is not following the second commandment; like Kornfeld, she is outside of Judaic law in her refusal to adhere to the second commandment. The narrator reveals that he recognizes Sheindel's disobedience when he declares, “only the pitiless [implying her] are illusory” (37). The narrator launches his final attack on Sheindel's feelings of smug spiritual superiority when he commands, “Your husband's soul is in that park. Consult it” (37). The narrator views Kornfeld's struggle as admirable, exceptional, and even heroic, and his fall as worthy of pity. As an insider/outsider to the faith, the narrator interprets Kornfeld's pursuits as both intellectually ambitious and informed by faith, and therefore not sacrilegious. Instead of concentrating on the scandal of Kornfeld's story, the narrator focuses on the pain that Kornfeld's struggle caused him.

One place for the reader to begin interrogating the discourses of the major characters in an effort to discern which elements will be useful in the construction of Kornfeld's identity is by isolating the elements that make Kornfeld Jewish. In many ways, Kornfeld's reinvention of biblical history makes him more, and not less, Hebraic. According to Ruth Wisse, the midrashic mode of Jewish scholarship is concerned with providing a new reading for a familiar story (42). Kornfeld is never more within this tradition than when he is reinventing the story of Moses. Additionally, Kauvar asserts that Kornfeld's letter takes the form of a “responsa” by both its reasoning and style (44). Kornfeld is not turning his back on his religion, but using the form and style of the midrashic tradition to create a new tradition, one in which loving nature will not be a “hurt [against] his own being.” Kornfeld's enterprise is not to debunk religion, but to find a place within religion where he is comfortable to love both God and nature.

There are, however, definitely pagan elements in Kornfeld's reinvention of history. According to Ozick, a major standard of the Jewish idea is the second commandment or the avoidance of idols (Metaphor & Memory 224). This is a standard that distinguishes Jews from all other people. By asserting that the second commandment is false and by embracing nature, which is identified as an idol in the epigraph from The Ethics of the Fathers, Kornfeld is clearly disengaging himself from Hebraic practice. Furthermore, his lust for nature causes him to remain in the park until dawn for months, thus causing him to neglect his responsibilities to his synagogue and his family. His suicide can be interpreted as the height of his selfishness; what will happen to his wife and seven children? His rejection of Hebraism is also dramatized in his confrontation with his soul. When his stereotypically Jewish soul asserts, “the smell of Law is more radiant than moss. The taste of the Law exceeds clear water,” Kornfeld exclaims, “It is not mine! I will not have it be mine!” (36). He clearly rejects traditionally Jewish aspects of himself.

The narrator's position inside/outside the Jewish faith causes him to attempt to insert an intermediary space between the binaric divisions of Jew and pagan. The narrator judges Kornfeld as a brilliant intellectual whose only sin was to reach too far beyond his grasp. Kornfeld's last act is to call to his nature dryad, for whom he has forsaken his soul, for assistance. His cries fall on deaf ears. In an effort to integrate the sacred with nature, Kornfeld loses both. He is, according to the narrator, a pathetic figure, deserving of compassion and pity.

All three sides have their points; all are telling parts of the truth. At this point, one could assume that the reader is left to agree with the character that he or she finds most sympathetic or credible. However, the ending of the story prevents such a solution. When the narrator first meets with Sheindel to discuss Kornfeld's death, she tells him she disposed of the plants in her house: “I couldn't sleep in the same space with plants. They are like little trees” (15). The reader can infer that the trees remind her of what led her husband to his downfall; without his love of nature, he could have remained a model rabbi, husband, and father.

Although by the end of the story the narrator seems to disagree completely with Sheindel's assessment of Kornfeld, the last paragraph of the story reveals, “I remembered her [Sheindel's] earlier words and dropped three green house plants down the toilet.” Why does the narrator replicate Sheindel's action? He continues, “after a journey of some miles through conduits they straightway entered Trilham's Inlet,” the site of Kornfeld's suicide, “where they decayed amid the civic excrement” (37). Why does the narrator abhor (he trees? Do they signify the loss of a great mind? The impossibility of satisfactorily mediating the conflict between Hebraism and Hellenism?

Although Sheindel and the narrator dispose of their plants for different reasons, this action holds the key to understanding this story and Kornfeld's character. For both Sheindel and the narrator, the plants are a reminder of Kornfeld's failure. More specifically, they symbolize Kornfeld's failure to break down the binary between pagan and Jew and place himself between it. The reader, however, must break down this binary in his or her assessment of Kornfeld's identity. Kornfeld was neither pagan nor Jew, but both. He was neither selfish nor heroic, but both. It is in his struggle for identity where the truth of this story lies, and the houseplants symbolize this struggle. Although Sheindel and the narrator mourn different aspects of their loss (Sheindel the loss of a model rabbi, husband, and father, the narrator a loss of a great mind), the real pathos of the story is caused by the picture of a man who could not reconcile himself to the binaries his society placed on him. Kornfeld attempted to mitigate the discomfort he experienced within these binaries by rewriting biblical history, only to discover that his successful efforts to separate his body and soul produced a soul that he neither expected nor accepted. Therefore, he chose to take his own life. It is only through a critical examination of the viewpoints of all three characters in this story that a complex understanding of Kornfeld can be reached.

“Envy; or, Yiddish in America,” also utilizes the triangular structure to encourage the reader to construct a complex version of Jewish American identity, yet the reader may find the construction of Edelshtein's identity even more difficult than that of Kornfeld. Not only are all three characters that make up the discourse triangle in “Envy; or, Yiddish in America” unattractive, but none of them communicate their identities in a consistent manner. All of their identities are shifting due to a struggle between collective and personal history, which makes the reader's task of interpreting their discourses more difficult.

The main character of the story is Edelshtein, a Jewish American poet who writes in Yiddish and is frustrated by his anonymity. He asserts that his goal is to save Yiddish, which has been destroyed by the Holocaust: “a language that never had a territory except Jewish mouths, and half the Jewish mouths on earth already stopped up with German worms” (74). He warns all who will listen, “whoever forgets Yiddish courts amnesia of history” (74). As critic Vera Kielsky asserts, Yiddish is not only a language, but symbolizes the bond between Jewish people, is the location of Jewish culture, and is the “storehouse” of history (154). Edelshtein quotes the Talmud to reinforce the importance of Yiddish to Jewish identity in America: “in Talmud if you save a life it's as if you saved the world.” He continues, self-indulgently, “And if you save a language? Worlds maybe. Galaxies. The whole universe” (83).

These assertions may, on the surface, lead the reader to believe that Edelshtein is sincere and selfless in his effort to resurrect Yiddish, and by extension, Jewish history and culture. His use of Jewish history, however, makes him feel superior to other Jews rather than creating a bond of memory and connection with them (Powers 91). Furthermore, Edelshtein's solution to his problem reveals his hypocrisy; he wants to procure an interpreter. Obviously, translating his poetry into English will do nothing to save Yiddish, but it will, he believes, rescue him from obscurity. At heart, Edelshtein is languishing from envy of Ostrover, the Yiddish writer who is translated into English and enjoys immense fame. Edelshtein's only venue for his poetry is an obscure Yiddish periodical edited by his friend Baumzweig called Bitterer Yam,¹ while Ostrover is the subject of graduate dissertations and gives densely attended readings to adoring fans.

Edelshtein attends one such reading where Ostrover reads a new story that is a thinly disguised parable about Edelshtein. In the story, the main character gives one fourth of his soul to Satan to learn a new language that will guarantee his fame as a writer. However, this new language does not achieve the desired effect, and the writer makes the same bargain for another language, and then another, and then another. As a result, he loses his soul and arrives in hell where he must toss each page he writes into flames, but he declares, “No difference, no difference! It was the same up there!” (60). Ostrover's point is that it is Edelshtein's lack of talent, and not his lack of access to English, that causes his lack of fame.

Edelshtein is enraged by the story, and spends the rest of the evening railing at all who will listen. He blindly flees the reading, only to have an angry altercation with Paula Baumzweig, the wife of his friend and editor. Although he self-righteously insists in his anger that “Ostrover wanted to save only himself, Edelshtein wanted to save Yiddish,” Edelshtein cannot fool even himself; it is envy over Ostrover's success, and not a sense of duty to Yiddish, that causes much of his anguish. It becomes even clearer that Edelshtein is not a sincere advocate for Yiddish when he takes an honest look at himself. Ozick dramatizes this self-realization through the metaphor of a mirror through which Edelshtein sees himself as others do: “an old man crying, dragging a striped scarf like a prayer shawl” (67). This insight disturbs him so thoroughly that in despair, he “wishe[s] he had been born a Gentile” (68). Edelshtein, although he adopts a “Jewisher-than-thou” exterior, would forsake his Jewish identity for fame and positive regard.

Immediately after he makes this wish into the mirror, Ozick presents a dialogue between Ostrover and Edelshtein. In Edelshtein's rage following Ostrover's reading, Ozick presents the reader with several conversations between Edelshtein and others in the form of drama dialogue and several letters composed by Edelshtein that may or may not have been sent. Due to the multiple forms presented in this section of the short story and Edelshtein's obviously perturbed mental state, it is not clear whether his conversation with Ostrover actually occurred or is merely imagined. Nonetheless, this dialogue provides the reader with most of Ostrover's leg of the discourse triangle; even if Edelshtein imagined this conversation, Ostrover's words impact how Edelshtein sees Ostrover, and ultimately how he sees himself.²

During this dialogue, it is never quite clear to the reader who or what Ostrover is. Ostrover makes several contradictory statements that confuse the reader who is trying to construct his identity. He asserts, “I'm one of them” (68), “I'm only a make-believe Gentile,” and “I play at a Jew to satisfy them” (69). In the first line, it appears that Ostrover is aligning himself with the Gentiles. In the second, although he admits that he dons the exterior of a Gentile in a “make-believe” game, it seems clear that inside, he identifies himself as a Jew. In the third quote, the meaning is more complex. In acting the part of a Jew “to satisfy them,” Ostrover could internally identify as either Gentile or Jew. The satisfaction of another group does not necessarily impinge on Ostrover's identity. However, he never identifies who “them” is. Is it the Gentile community, or the Jewish one?

Ostrover's troubling parable further complicates his identity: “In my village when I was a boy they used to bring in a dancing bear for the carnival, and everyone said, ‘It's human!’—They said this because they knew it was a bear, though it stood on two legs and waltzed. But it was a bear” (69). Who is Ostrover, a Gentile who plays at being a Jew or a dancing bear of a Jew who plays at being a Gentile? Is the show independent of how Ostrover sees himself, or are the two intimately entangled? Although it is clear that Ostrover accurately interprets Edelshtein's hypocrisy in the line, “envy sounds the same in all languages” (83), Ostrover's credibility is seriously diminished when it is not clear to the reader who or what he is.

One way for the reader to organize Ostrover's words so that they may be usefully applied to Edelshtein's identity is to break down the binary between Jew and Gentile. Ostrover does not proclaim himself to be either Jew or Gentile; he insists that he “plays” the part of both when it is to his advantage. Yet again, Ozick is struggling with the Pan versus Moses debate and pointing to instances where the binary between the two breaks down.

Hannah, the daughter of one of Ostrover's interpreters, makes up the third leg of the triangle in this story. She both dramatizes Edelshtein's concerns about Jewish American identity and complicates the construction of Edelshtein's identity. Hannah, “born in 1945, the hour of the death camps” (91), represents the next generation of Jewish Americans. She speaks Yiddish, which as the “storehouse” of history should align her with her ancestors, but ironically, she wants nothing to do with them. During an angry altercation with Edelshtein on the night of Ostrover's reading, she clearly identifies herself only by what she is not; she tells Edelshtein she is not “your kind” of Jew, and asserts, “all you people want to do is suffer” (92). She clearly separates herself from her Eastern European Jewish ancestors and their heritage when she asserts, “history's a waste” (92). She has turned her back on the history and anguish of her people, and wants only “universalism” or assimilation into the American mainstream. She admires Ostrovet because “he speaks for everybody” (95). According to critic Sarah Cohen, this rush to assimilate reveals the internalization of anti-Semitism (60).

Hannah's feelings of anti-Semitism become clear when she shouts, “Hanging on my neck, him [her uncle] and now you, the whole bunch of you, parasites, hurry up and die” (97). Her lack of respect and love for her ancestors, many of whom share a lived memory of Hider, is appalling. More dangerous is her rush to forget all of those who have come before her. Her conception of history as a burden will not allow her to use history to bring meaning to her life. Her hate for her ancestors' history is really a self hate that paralyzes rather than assists identity construction. Without a history, she has no identity, and can only pinpoint what she is by rejecting what she thinks she is not.

Edelshtein is accurate in assessing that Jewish American identity is in grave danger due to American freedom, acceptance, and thus assimilation (Kielsky 151). He also pinpoints why assimilation threatens Jewish identity; it demands historical amnesia. However, because Edelshtein sometimes bastardizes Jewish history for his own personal gain, he lacks credibility in his interactions with others. For example, when he urges Hannah to “grow old in Yiddish … and carry your fathers and uncles into the future with you” (74), even he can see through his selfish siren song, as he indicates by asking, “What did the death of Jews have to do with his own troubles?” (75). The pull of his personal history has overshadowed a committed struggle to save Yiddish in America both because it so fully engages his personal energies and because it causes Edelshtein to become a lone railer whom others do not take seriously.

The truth of this story lies in the ways the characters use history to construct identity. All exhibit how to use history by how they misuse it. Although Edelshtein retains Jewish culture and history by speaking Yiddish, he also exploits historical memory for his own selfish ends. Instead of using history to inform his present, Edelshtein tries to invoke feelings of guilt in others so that they will help him in his quest for fame. Hannah refuses history, and therefore does not really know who she is or feel a connection to other Jews. Ironically, in her rejection of her ancestors, she allows them to define her by what they are not. Although Ostrover has immigrated from Poland and carries history with him, both through memory and his usage of Yiddish, Ozick never clearly presents Ostrover's identity to the reader. Therefore, the reader cannot identify Ostrover as Jew or Gentile, but must invent a classification in between these categories.

A desirable state of using history is one in which history informs what one is, and not just what one is not, as is true in Hannah's case. It is also a state in which collective and personal histories work together to inform identity construction rather than struggling against one another, as they do in Edelshtein's case. Finally, history arises from an internal straggle, and not a simple rejection of history or an employment of history when it suits one's ends. It is only through viewing Edelshtein's concern for Yiddish filtered through Hannah's violent disentanglement from history and Ostrover's bear dance that one can construct this lesson from the story.

Cynthia Ozick's triangular structure of creating meaning out of competing inventions of history prevents her stories' lessons from being simple, essentialist, or stereotypical. Ozick strongly implies that Jewish identity is both complex and always changing as each person straggles to discover who he or she is by reinventing personal and collective histories. If these strivings were not evident by her characters' actions, Ozick further highlights them by making her readers struggle as well. Ozick's structure of triangular discourse forces the reader to become an active participant in making meaning. One does not merely read Ozick's texts, but struggles to understand her by taking parts of characters' historical discourses and trying to fit them into the emerging picture of the main character's identity like a complex and shifting jigsaw puzzle. Such a painstaking enterprise prevents the reader from creating simplistic meaning from Ozick's stories and fosters constructions of Jewishness that are as complex as Ozick's vision.

Notes

1. Bitterer Yam is translated into Bitter Sea in English. However, the journal “had so few subscribers that Baumzweig's wife called it Invisible Ink” (47).

2. Also, although critics such as Lowin have asserted that Ostrover is a thinly veiled I. B. Singer, I will discuss Ostrover independent of Singer's biographical information in order to reach a conclusion regarding what Ozick is implying about Jewish identity on a larger scale.

Works Cited

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