SOURCE: Krupnick, Mark. “Cynthia Ozick as the Jewish T. S. Eliot.” Soundings 74, nos. 3–4 (fall–winter 1991): 351–68.

I want to start with my title: “Cynthia Ozick as the Jewish T. S. Eliot.” I have been asked whether I ought to have said: “Cynthia Ozick as a Jewish Eliot.” And no doubt I should have, for Ozick exemplifies only one of many versions of T. S. Eliot among American Jewish writers of the past half-century. There has been for example, the Eliot of Lionel Trilling, the leading literary figure in his circle of New York intellectuals in the 1940s. And we have had the art critic Clement Greenberg and his Eliotic Trotskyism, notably in his famous essay “Avant-Garde and Kitsch.” And after Trilling and Greenberg there came the poet Delmore Schwartz and his idea of Eliot as “international hero.”

What follows will not be a full comparative study of Eliot and Ozick. Mostly I want to talk about Ozick and I have drawn Eliot into the discussion mainly to launch my essay, on the principle that it helps in learning to think about a writer whom we have only recently come to know to set her in relation to a writer we have been reading for a long time. My excuse for introducing Eliot rather than someone else as a reference point is that Ozick herself has frequently remarked on Eliot in essays and interviews and that only a short time ago she published an interesting long essay on Eliot in The New Yorker (Nov. 20, 1989) that confirmed my sense that he has been a major influence on her.

What kind of influence? Eliot was a poet, and Ozick writes short stories and novels. But the fact that their creative work has been in different genres is not crucial because the Eliot I shall be adducing is not Eliot the poet but Eliot the literary critic and theorist of culture. And the problem I shall be most concerned to address is one that Eliot himself raised: the problem of the relation between religion and literature. Ozick deals with this problem in her essays and her fiction, but in terms slightly different from Eliot's. She alerts us to the conflict between two kinds of religion: traditional religion on the one hand, and the modernist religion of art on the other.

By traditional religion I mean orthodoxy, or at least these writers' versions of orthodoxy: the Anglo-Catholicism of Eliot and the normative Judaism of Ozick. By the religion of art I refer to a particular phase of literary history, the early decades of this century, when writers like Joyce and Proust composed monumental bodies of work that were to serve their audiences not as mere verbal artifacts but as secular scriptures, in competition with God's Word. Literature had never been so ambitious, and readers gathered about these great works in the spirit of acolytes, blurring the distinction between sacred and profane texts. That older tradition of high modernism lives on in some of our contemporaries, including Cynthia Ozick, though in her writing it exists in conflict with religious tradition.

I shall start by pointing out some likenesses between Ozick and Eliot. Then I shall approach the general question of the two religions by way of a look at several fictional texts by Ozick. And, at the end, I shall sum up by trying to place Ozick's work historically in relation to her precursors in American Jewish writing. I want to make clear from the outset that I find her to be a serious and challenging writer, worthy of being discussed alongside her most gifted precursors, like Bellow and Malamud, and her better-known contemporary, Philip Roth. More than any novelist of the past fifteen or so years, Ozick has changed our idea of the possibilities of American Jewish writing and set a new direction for that writing. And I believe her importance is owing in great measure to her formulation and execution of a literary project that is part of a larger religious-cultural project.

That claim brings me back to the Eliot connection. In her New Yorker essay, Ozick keeps returning to the fact of Eliot's cultural authority in America during the 1940s and 50s, when she was starting out as a writer. The strategy of her essay is to focus on Eliot's role as high priest of the religion of modernism. She conveys with a certain reverence the literary mood of the immediate post-World War II period, when a deeply conservative and traditionalist writer, with a powerfully authoritarian streak, became a model for the rebellious young. And this situation Ozick contrasts with what she regards as the anything-goes spirit of the 1960s.

Her essay is at once an autobiographical memoir of American academic literary life in the age of Eliot and a defiant affirmation of the continuing relevance of that youthful initiation. Her essay helps us see how the acolyte of the late 1940s has herself become a conservative priestess in her own right—and at the same time a major artistic innovator like Eliot. “As I see it,” Ozick writes, “what appeared important to me at twenty-one is still important; in some respects, I admit to being arrested in the Age of Eliot, a permanent member of it, unregenerate. The etiolation of high art seems to me a major loss. I continue to suppose that some texts are worthier than other texts. The same holds for the diminishment of history and tradition: not to incorporate into an educable mind the origins and unifying principles of one's own civilization strikes me as a kind of cultural autolobotomy. Nor am I ready to relinquish Eliot's stunning declaration that the reason we know so much more than the dead writers knew is that ‘they are that which we know.’” And Ozick goes on to invoke Eliot's authority in support of the traditionalist position in the contemporary quarrel over the literary canon.

This, then, is Ozick's stance in our contemporary quarrel of the ancients and moderns. It is a familiar enough position and worth citing only because Ozick's Judaism gives it a special inflection. For her traditionalism grows out of her reading of the Second Commandment, which enjoins God's Chosen People not to bow down before idols of their own making, or, in Ozick's formulation, not to blur distinctions, between matter and spirit, between creature and Creator. Her opposition to idolatry informs her sharp attacks on American Jewish writers and critics who have advocated some version of art for art's sake. Artistic creativity Ozick suspects to be in its essence magical and heretical. She sees the fiction writer, like the literary or political intellectual, as disposed to worship idols she has herself created, instead of the living God.

Ozick worked out this position in a few powerful essays that are reprinted in a collection, Art & Ardor, which she published in 1983. The best-known of these essays, “Toward a New Yiddish,” which was first published in 1970, clarifies the historical provenance of Ozick's program.

That essay grows out of the specific experience of the American 1960s, the decade in which Ozick, already in her late 30s, found herself as a writer. She found herself, particularly as a polemicist, by way of a bitter clash with the dominant spirit of the age in politics and literature alike. For Ozick there were two main movements in the 60s: political radicalism, chiefly as represented by the New Left, and a revival of art for art's sake, which was associated with figures like Susan Sontag and William H. Gass. What both movements had in common, in Ozick's view, was an aestheticizing outlook, a fetishizing of surfaces that she finds to be at odds with Jewish moral seriousness and the Jewish commitment to history. In addition to these tendencies of the 60s there was also Ozick's continuing grief over the Holocaust, which has meant for her not only the death of individuals but the death of the Yiddish language and the Jewish civilization to which it gave voice.

Here I would point again to the Eliot connection. For he also protested against what he regarded as the decline of Romanticism into a decadent aestheticism, and he too responded with a traditionalist program to the disorder unleashed by a world-historical catastrophe. For Eliot that catastrophe was World War I, which confirmed him in the passion for authority that, paradoxically, affected his generation as innovative, as a rebellion against the Romantic status quo. One of Eliot's best essays describes the transition from the Victorian moralism of Matthew Arnold to the fin-de-siècle aestheticism of Walter Pater and Oscar Wilde. For Eliot that transition was a decline that could only be arrested by the recovery of a classical faith, and so he directed the attention of his readers away from Swinburne and the swoon of late Romanticism to the medieval Catholicism of Dante, which predated individualism, democracy, secularism, and all the commonplace features of liberal modernity.

Now, Ozick is by no means as programmatic or as systematic a thinker as Eliot. Neither is she even remotely as authoritative a figure in the general culture. Indeed, it is one of the burdens of her New Yorker essay that no writer today can hope to have Eliot's authority. So my linking her with Eliot, following hints in her own writing, is meant only to be suggestive. What I would suggest is that Ozick sums up a longing, similar to Eliot's, for order and orthodoxy following a great historical catastrophe. Whereas Eliot would recreate the medieval Christian community, Ozick would recreate the lost world of pre-World War II East-European Yiddishkeit, which was similarly organized about religious belief.

Ozick portrays as expansive that Yiddish-language culture long patronized by emancipated Westernized Jews as narrow. What rationalist, assimilated Jews have dismissed as parochial, she celebrates as truly universal. Her great text on this subject is her early novella “Envy,” which is subtitled “Yiddish in America.” In that story the main character, Hershel Edelshtein, suffers from being marginalized as a Yiddish poet in a culture, modern-day America, in which practically no one any longer reads Yiddish. Everything conspires to remind Edelshtein that he is used up, a leftover from a vanished world. In glossy, up-to-date New York, he is a reminder to younger, assimilated Jews of a narrow, superstitious shtetl world from which their grandparents escaped just in time. But Edelshtein will not go gently onto the garbage heap of history. Toward the end of the story he has this vision:

He saw everything in miraculous reversal, blessed—everything plain, distinct, understandable, true. What he understood was this: that the ghetto was the real world, and the outside world only a ghetto. Because in actuality who was shut off? … To whom, in what little space, did God offer Sinai?

We might be inclined to call this the compensatory fantasy of a failed poet, but fourteen years after “Envy,” in an essay entitled “Bialik's Hint,” which is reprinted in Ozick's recent collection Metaphor & Memory, she fills out this vision of history, presenting it in all seriousness as her own, not as tragicomic epiphany. She asserts the universality of Judaism as a world civilization and decries the effects of the secularization of the Jewish people in the wake of the Enlightenment and the Emancipation of the Jews from their ghettos.

It is this kind of argument I have in mind in speaking of Ozick as the Jewish T. S. Eliot. Her preoccupation with the opposition of metropolis and province, center and periphery, echoes a similar preoccupation in Eliot. The Anglo-Catholic poet was famously concerned with the contrast between a classical culture and a provincial one. For Eliot, centrality was a positive term, and the central literary-cultural tradition was Latin and Catholic. In contrast with the universality of Rome, even the great English classics, including Shakespeare and Milton, were provincial. And Eliot had a vision of world history—from the Roman Empire to the Holy Roman Empire—that corresponded to his vision of a literary tradition founded on the legacy of Virgil to Dante. In Eliot, as Frank Kermode argues, the histories of religion, literature, and empire were all gone.

Consider the basis on which Ozick celebrates the ghetto. Is it not simply a Jewish version of the so-called “organic” society that Eliot, and the New Critics after him, praised as an alternative to atomistic liberal-secular modernity? Ozick's praise of Yiddishkeit is only the most recent affirmation of what is by now one of the most dependable conventions of High Modernism. And Ozick adapts a Jewish version of yet another familiar Eliotic idea: the dissociation of sensibility. Like Eliot, she is hostile to the liberal Enlightenment. For Ozick the Enlightenment and Emancipation have brought in their wake a kind of Jewish writing that isn't fully Western and isn't really Jewish. It is a writing, she argues, that is diluted by assimilation and accommodation, that is pledged either to art for art's sake or to a superficial sociological realism which, in both cases, has not kept faith with what she calls “the Jewish idea,” and which as a consequence will not last.

I want now to turn to Ozick's fiction. T. S. Eliot's name will come up somewhat less frequently, but he will be present all the while, especially in my underlying conception of Ozick's involvement with the central problem of religion and literature, or, as I am putting it, the conflict in her fiction between religious orthodoxy and the religion of art.

I have said that the Holocaust is the decisive historical influence on Ozick's writing. Moreover, I am discussing Ozick as a specifically Jewish writer. Since three of the four stories I look at touch on the Holocaust, I want to emphasize that in my view she is not centrally a Holocaust novelist. I would say that Ozick's deepest concerns have more to do with her own situation as a Jew and as a writer than with the destruction of Europe's Jews. The main factor in that situation, the situation of the writer-as-believing-Jew, is a combination of attraction and repulsion in her attitude to her own creative imagination. She is almost constantly aware of her art as the potential enemy of her Judaism, and much of the energy of her attack on alleged idolaters like Harold Bloom seems to me displaced from her uneasiness about aestheticizing and idolatrous tendencies in her own work. I turn now to two linked stories, “The Shawl” and “Rosa,” which have recently been reprinted and which confront the Holocaust and its effects more directly than any other of Ozick's fictions. “The Shawl” came first, in 1980. It is only eight pages and as elemental as a mother's love for her baby, which is Ozick's subject. The context of the mother-infant bond is not sketched in, but enough details are given to make plain that we are in the world of the Nazi death camps.

Every thing is contained in the image of the shawl, which the baby sucks on after Rosa, the mother, can no longer nurse her. The baby is wrapped and rocked as in a cradle, tangled in a bower made up of breasts and shawl. It seems a magical shawl, or perhaps a prayer shawl, a tallis, that nourishes the baby, providing sustenance—the only sustenance, in the absence of the mother's milk—in a place of ultimate darkness. But when they reach the death camp, the older child, Stella, steals the shawl from the baby so that she may cover herself. The baby, Magda, crawls out of the barrack in search of it. Then, in full view of Rosa, who discovers the baby's absence too late, Magda is snatched up by a helmeted figure and hurled to her death against the camp's electrified fence. The infant's death, by fire, is Ozick's condensed image of the Holocaust.

The curious thing is that the story is shocking but does not produce grief. I have said that “The Shawl” is notable among Ozick's fictions for its directness, but that statement needs to be qualified. The subject-matter is stark and elemental, but Ozick's treatment of it is not. Her prose is not at all simple. It is very highly wrought, heavy with metaphor. The prose has been adjusted to Ozick's overall intention, which is not to convey a mimetic description of concentration camp horrors, but, rather, to offer a parable centered about a life-giving image, the shawl, which is used so as to stand for the most elemental human connectedness and, more than that, memory, continuity, trust, faith.

After Magda's fiery death, Rosa is herself sustained by the shawl. In order to stifle her scream, which would not save the baby but would call attention to herself and cause her to be killed as well, Rosa stuffs the shawl into her mouth: “She stuffed it in and stuffed it in, until she was swallowing up the wolf's screech and tasting the cinnamon and almond depth of Magda's saliva; and Rosa drank Magda's shawl until it dried.” What is the significance of this object, this symbol, which miraculously enables a baby to live after her mother can no longer nurse her but for which, in the end, the baby dies, and which saves the mother from the same fate?

“Rosa,” a longer fiction published three years later, in 1983, offers a sequel and a clarification. In “Rosa,” the mother is still alive. It is now some thirty years after the action of “The Shawl,” and Rosa is in her late 50s, a mad old woman just barely surviving emotionally and physically among other old Jews in Miami Beach. We learn that when Rosa had first come to America, after the war, she had lived in Brooklyn, where she operated a second-hand furniture store. But in Brooklyn she had been driven mad by grief over loss of her daughter and the calm indifference of her customers to that grief. One day Rosa had taken a big hammer and, bit by bit, destroyed everything in her store. It's very much to the point that the store Rosa destroyed had specialized in antique mirrors.

Rosa's subjective antique mirror is her memory of her privileged, assimilated Jewish family in pre-Hitler Warsaw. Of her banker father she recalls that he had “mocked at Yiddish; there was not a particle of ghetto left in him, not a grain of rot.” Now, in America, Rosa refuses to resume her life. She doesn't know Yiddish and will not master English. The result is that she is cut off from the lower-class American Jews of Miami Beach. Rosa lives almost exclusively in memory and fantasy, imagining that Magda is still alive, married and a professor in New York. The shawl is now more than ever a symbol of endurance, love, faith, memory—but also of delusion and disavowal. That is to say, the shawl has become a highly ambiguous symbol.

It may be that for Ozick all symbols are inevitably ambiguous. How could it be otherwise, given that her aesthetic is complicated by her fidelity to a divine commandment that prohibits idolatry and seems to cast doubt on all forms of aesthetic representation? Here we may again compare Ozick's project of recovery with Eliot's. Eliot also worried about the adequacy of language to his religious vision, notably in the first two of his “Four Quartets,” though he was not as consistently troubled as Ozick by the sense that his literary vocation was corrupted from the start by virtue of the need to traffic in images and verbal representations.

The shawl remains Ozick's major symbol in “Rosa,” but a cluster of counter-symbols enters the story by way of a new character, 75-year-old Simon Persky, whom Rosa meets in a laundromat. A simple, well-meaning man, Simon had come to America from Poland long before the war and had made a living in the button business. Rosa, still a snob even in her present debilitated condition, reflects on his life: “how trivial it must always have been: buttons, himself no more significant than a button.”

The story turns on an item of apparel even less dignified than a button. Simon Persky has helped Rosa with her laundry, but when she gets back from the laundromat she discovers that she is missing a pair of underpants. In her madness Rosa is sure that Persky has stolen the pants. The story as a whole turns on the contrast between the magical shawl, the symbol of Rosa's privileged pre-war existence, of her European life generally, and the underpants, symbol of the disenchanted present, the banality of survival in Miami Beach. The paradox is that the magical shawl which has been Rosa's link to life is also the antique mirror of narcissism that keeps her from life. The movement of the story is away from the imagination's privileged object, the shawl, to simple buttons and frayed underwear. In opposition to the glamour of art, Ozick directs us in this story to a renewed appreciation of what she has elsewhere called “the riddle of the ordinary,” the redemptive potency of the commonplace.

The problem is how to rescue art from the imputation of idolatry; the solution is for art not to serve its own ends but to serve God's ends. Strangely, imagination becomes redemptive only by demystifying itself. So, at the end Rosa is restored to living history—but at some cost. The shawl is caused to lose its aura. Now it is only a “colorless cloth (which) lay like an old bandage; a discarded sling.” With Ozick, then, we have a covenanted Jew, deeply orthodox in her attitude to the Law, whose vocation as an artist involves her in repeated violations of the divine commandment against idolatry. She meets the conflict head-on by making it the subject of her art. She characteristically ends her stories with the demystification and sometimes the destruction of the chief object of her main character's desire, which is also the object or symbol about which Ozick the artist has organized her story. She thereby gives us an art committed to its own unmaking.

The same pattern also underlies Ozick's comic novella “Puttermesser and Xanthippe,” a tour de force about a golem set loose within the bureaucracy of modern-day New York City. This oddly named story is an exercise in the genre of the fantastic—Xanthippe is a golem, a non-human creature made of earth but sprung full-blown from Ruth Puttermesser's overactive imagination. But this is a golem set loose not in sixteenth-century Prague, as in the famous version that Gershom Scholem has recounted in his studies of Jewish mysticism, but in a New York recognizably that of its previous mayor, Ed Koch.

Puttermesser is a highly learned, unmarried lawyer who works in the city bureaucracy. Despite great dedication and years of quiet self-sacrifice, she is summarily fired by a cynical new boss following a post-election shake-up. Wounded but not burnt out, Puttermesser dreams up a plan to rescue the city from governmental venality and incompetence. The dream proves mother to the fact. There appears one day in Puttermesser's bed a child, the offspring of her imagination, a material being whom Puttermesser thinks of as Leah but who calls herself Xanthippe, the name of the legendarily shrewish wife of Socrates. This creature is not a human child but a golem who deviates from previous golems in a number of respects, chief of which is her female gender. Also, Xanthippe may be the first golem created to effect the cleansing of a municipal bureaucracy.

As Puttermesser's—now Mayor Puttermesser's—righthand woman, Xanthippe proceeds to carry out the mayor's “Plan for the Resuscitation, Reformation, Reinvigoration, and Redemption of the City of New York.” At first everything goes beautifully. New York is on its way to becoming a “gan eydn,” a recovered Eden. Reason, order, right rule prevail in the polis. But there is a flaw in this new Paradise, as there had been in the old one. Puttermesser's former lover, Morris Rappaport, comes to town and initiates a willing Xanthippe into the mysteries of sexuality, whereupon this previously exemplary civil servant goes on a sexual rampage, leaving chaos in her wake. The city is well on its way to becoming more of a Babylon than ever until a horrified Puttermesser resolves to put her genie back in the bottle. She reverses the process of creation and in the end restores to earth, in a touching pagan burial ceremony, the golem who has become an agent of Eros and confusion.

Now what can we make of this rather elaborate joke? Ozick the cultural conservative can hardly have gone to so much trouble merely to persuade her readers that Puttermesser's political utopianism can also be a form of idolatry. No, I think the political theme is only an occasion for a complicated working out of a profound ambivalence that we saw in Ozick's doubletake on the magical shawl, an ambivalence about created artifacts that is the structural principle underlying her fiction and generating its diverse manifestations.

I have commented on the provenance of the golem story in Jewish mysticism. Ozick insists that Puttermesser is a thoroughgoing rationalist committed to the Law. So is her creator Cynthia Ozick, a self-professed Mitnagid, that is, an opponent of Hasidism and, more generally, of mysticism. But that is Ozick the citizen, Ozick the critic of literature and mystical religion. That is Ozick the exponent of normative Judaism. As a writer of fictions, however—and here I quote from Ozick herself: “as a writer I absolutely wallow in mystery religion.” So we start with a conflict, which she herself points out, between Ozick the daughter of the Talmud and the Ozick who first attracted widespread attention with a short story about a rabbi fatally drawn to nymphs and dryads: a pagan rabbi.

We might think of the conflict as parallel to the tension T. S. Eliot acknowledged between his own classicizing criticism and his highly subjective, anguished poems. Ozick's critical essays differ from her fiction in similar ways, but the conflict in Ozick also exists within the individual fictions themselves.

In “Puttermesser and Xanthippe,” the unruly double must be returned to earth. As Xanthippe is dying, she cries out in a childlike voice: “Life! Love! Mercy! Love! Life!” But the golem has got out of hand and must be destroyed. To the sister-daughter-secret sharer she has brought into being and is now determined to return to earth, Puttermesser says: “Too much Paradise is greed.” The idea, I think, is that the recovered Paradise will need to be a creation of God, not a heavenly kingdom we have ourselves invented in the image of our own desires. The golem as redemptive object is like the shawl in being constructed by human imagination. But then, like any other idol, it must be returned to its original elements. We might put it that Ozick in her fiction wants to have it both ways. She gives and then she takes away, imagining the story and then destroying it before our eyes. Before she can be punished for the presumption of setting up in competition with God, she disavows her own creation, even, as in this story, literally burying it.

The modern writer dreams of a story that will be perfect, a story to end all stories and defeat time once and for all. But the religion of art bucks up against orthodox religion, which says that such a dream is idolatrous, a heretical displacement of a yearning that ought to be directed toward God. The golem-motif in “Puttermesser and Xanthippe” carries us further into the vexed question of the relation between religion and literature. For it obliges us to consider more closely the hunger for redemption that is common to religion and to art as a substitute-religion. We have considered the shawl and the golem as redemptive symbols. But all along Ozick has been attracted by another symbol, a symbol that is itself composed of symbols: the literary text.

Ozick's most recent novel, The Messiah of Stockholm, brings together the preoccupation of her earlier fiction with idolatry and the related question of language and textuality. The messiah of her title is itself a title, of a book that the Polish-Jewish writer Bruno Schulz was working on at the time of his murder by the Nazis in 1942. But the messiah is also Ozick's main character, Lars Andemening, a book reviewer for a Stockholm daily newspaper, who thinks he is Schulz's son and who has dedicated himself to an obsessive search for his supposed father's lost manuscript. Lars is a would-be messiah who would redeem his supposed father and save the world by way of his father's text. I keep saying “supposed” father because, although Lars is a refugee and an orphan, Ozick's novel gives us no reason to believe that Lars is anything but deluded. Bruno Schulz had no children.

But The Messiah of Stockholm is not concerned with psychopathology. What Ozick cares about is not psychology and character but ideas, especially metaphysical ideas. The emotional origins of Lars's obsession are of little interest to his creator compared to his single-minded discipleship. Lars is wholly devoted to literary texts. Another character's mockery of him is not mistaken. She says: “You think the world is made up of literature. You think reality is a piece of paper.” Madness, perhaps, but how many modernist and postmodernist writers, from Mallarmé to Borges, have believed just that. And how closely that conviction resembles the language-mysticism of the Kabbalah. It is an attitude that can't help but appeal to writers of a religious impulse who cannot affirm any god but their own creativity. As a writer, rather than as a believing Jew, Ozick is much attracted to this modern heresy. At the same time, her fear of unchecked imagination disposes her to shy away from the literary equivalent of antinomianism. Here she shares a suspicion with T. S. Eliot, who deprecated William Blake's self-invented mythology in comparison with Dante's recourse to an established framework of religious belief.

Lars Andemening's search for Bruno Schulz's Messiah leads to his relationship with a mysterious Stockholm bookseller named Heidi Eklund, who Lars thinks to be herself a death camp survivor. The story comes to a crisis when there appears on Lars's doorstep another mysterious figure, a woman about Lars's age, who claims to be Schulz's lost daughter and who purports to be in possession of the lost manuscript. Ozick's novel reaches its climax in a chapter near the end, in which the supposed text of Schulz's Messiah is unveiled. The novel The Messiah of Stockholm does not quote from the manuscript of The Messiah, but it does summarize its contents. The setting is Drohobycz, the small town in Galicia in which Schulz lived his whole life and in which his extant fictions are set. But this is a Drohobycz wholly given over to idols, with no human inhabitants to worship them. Left to themselves, the idols have set the village on fire: “The town was on fire, idols burning up idols in a frenzy of mutual adoration.” The novel's messiah intervenes in this holocaust of the idols.

The messiah is a huge, unwieldy surrealist contraption, an inhuman, organic, pulsing machine made up of hundreds of wings that are actually pages covered with an unreadable script. It is hard to guess what this is all about, although Ozick volunteers that the manuscript as a whole “was about creation and redemption. It was a work of cosmogony and entelechy.” As for the unreadable letters, Ozick says: “it was now clear that Drohobycz had been invaded by the characters of an unknown alphabet.” Nearly as soon as the messiah appears, the unwieldy contraption begins to self-destruct. As it falls apart, a small bird flies off, as at the end of the Biblical story of the Flood.

After the revelation of what is claimed by the Eklunds to be Schulz's long-lost text, Lars decides that the whole thing has been fake: that Heidi and her husband are frauds and that the text is a forgery. They are imposters, and he, Lars, has been a fool in thinking that he is the son of Schulz. Liberated from his delusion, Lars puts an end to the Eklunds' scheme and to his own redemptive quest by setting fire to the manuscript. The flames of the Holocaust burn everywhere in Ozick's fiction. Here what is consumed is a secular text that had seemed to promise Lars a divine revelation.

When the infernal machine self-destroys, Lars is restored to ordinariness, as Rosa and Ruth had been in the earlier stories. But Ozick, always ambivalent in such matters, does not celebrate his return to the quotidian. Lars is freed from his obsession with Bruno Schulz and his language mysticism, but freed for what? He becomes just another routine reviewer for his newspaper and in most respects just like everybody else. Gone is Lars's mystical faith in literature and with it his hope for a messianic deliverance.

If we ask about the larger meaning of this strange novel, we are brought back to the pattern of making and unmaking that we have seen to be central to Ozick's art. The destruction time after time of the redemptive object suggests a principle of frustration and deferral that is the signature of Ozick's Judaism. Her fictions reveal a never-ending search for a messiah and her insistence that the search can never be concluded, at least on terms that we stipulate. Haunted by the idea of deliverance, Ozick insists in her fiction on remaining in the wilderness. Attracted to mystical apocalypticism, she nevertheless sees to it that the end is infinitely deferred.

Readers of fictions like Ozick's story “Usurpation” know that the object which she most invests with her redemptive hopes is language itself. That investment in language has roots both in Jewish Kabbalism and in the modernist religion of art. Ozick participates in both traditions, the religious and the secular-literary. More and more, it seems, her subject is not quotidian life, certainly not the sociological reporting and critique that have been the stock in trade of earlier Jewish novelists. Rather, her distinctive subject-matter is textuality itself, as in The Messiah of Stockholm, which offers commentary on Bruno Schulz's extant texts and organizes itself about an imagined but not actually existing text, The Messiah of Schulz. But as these pretexts are only profane texts, Ozick's own stories are also only profane. The modern secular priest or priestess of art can only be an imposter or forger, a plagiarist or usurper. Lars tells Dr. Eklund, the forger of Schulz's Messiah: “You want to be in competition with God. …” That is Ozick's reminder to herself of the dangers and limits of her own art.

The heresy, which is her own, must be exposed, the imposture brought to light. Ozick will not accept, as Harold Bloom does, the functional equivalence of sacred and profane texts. This principle of frustration and loss might seem dispiriting. But in fact the ever renewed destruction of the text becomes a principle of productivity, requiring that the attempt be ever renewed. Irving Howe once described the struggle for socialism in America as “steady work.” He meant that the realization of socialism could not be expected any time soon. Similarly, given the conflict between her Judaism and her commitment to the religion of art, Ozick has steady work. She has a great theme, and there is no likelihood of the central conflict in her work being resolved. Such a writer can be assured of steady work for as long as her strength—or her ambivalence—holds out.

I have said that Ozick's program of Jewish cultural renewal has affinities with T. S. Eliot's proposals for a Christian society. They are joined, too, by their religious orthodoxy and their sense of the tension between religion and modern secular culture. Just as she resembles Eliot in these respects, so does she differ from her American Jewish precursors, both the writers of fiction and the critical intellectuals. For Jewish writing in America has been mainly secular in orientation. I want to consider briefly the Jewish novelists, then the critics, as part of an effort to place Ozick historically.

Saul Bellow and Philip Roth have insisted that they be regarded as American rather than as Jewish writers. There is every reason to take them at their word. Just consider, for example, an early Bellow novel like The Adventures of Augie March, which was published in 1953. Bellow leaves little doubt about his intention in that novel of creating an all-American hero who may be Jewish but who is, more importantly, a descendant of Huckleberry Finn. Bellow's novel begins with Augie's credo: “I am an American, Chicago born … and go at things as I have taught myself, free-style, and will make the record in my own way.”

Augie March is unusual among Bellow's novels in its open-hearted celebration of America. The novel belongs to a specific historical moment: the revulsion against Marxist ideology and the corresponding discovery of virtue in American cultural traditions that was commonplace in Bellow's intellectual circle in the immediate post-World War II period. But even if we take our examples from Bellow's later work, stories and novellas like “The Old System” or, more recently, The Bellarosa Connection, we find that Bellow is writing about Jewishness rather than about Judaism. The question he is asking is this: What has happened to the Jews in America? Or, to put it a little differently, what has been the impact of America on the “old system” of values the Jews brought with them from East Europe? That is to say, Bellow has been concerned above all with the immigrant and post-immigrant experience. He has focussed on the specifically American life of the Jews, as against Ozick's concern, as she puts it, with what it means to be a Jew, not locally or sociologically, but in principle. This is not at all to say that Bellow's writing is devoid of ideas or metaphysical aspirations. On the contrary, it's just that when Bellow's Jews do express transcendental longings, these longings have little to do with Judaism as such.

Ozick is a latter-day New York intellectual as well as a writer of fiction. But here, too, she is a Jewish critic with a difference. She has commented on politics but never from within the half-century debate among Jewish intellectuals about Marxism and anti-Marxism. That debate, specifically about Stalinism, has been the indispensable context for understanding the work of critics like Lionel Trilling and Irving Howe. It's beside the point for understanding Ozick.

Here, too, history favors the new departure she represents. For just as the end of the immigrant experience and the inexorable assimilation of the Jews have made the older style of ethnic novel appear pale and dated, so the end of the Cold War has made the older terms of cultural debate less relevant to the present. Ozick represents a new kind of Jewish writing—we could call it a kind of Jewish postmodernism—and a new Jewish attitude. That attitude, shaped in some part by the Holocaust, registers a deep disappointment with the older kind of Jewish secular intellectualism and the assimilationism that went along with it. Ozick has traded in the 1930s–40s universalism of advanced attitudes in politics and the arts in favor of the recovery of an ancient Jewish civilization as it was organized around Judaism as a universal religion. And, finally, the establishment of a Jewish state in Israel has encouraged a pride in membership that, again, marks a shift from the abstract pride in alienation and marginality of the American Jewish writers and intellectuals of the 1930s and 40s.

It is a curious irony that Ozick's traditionalism should seem so innovative in relation to the established styles of American Jewish creative writing and criticism. And it is a further irony that her conscious cultivation of a sense of tradition should now remind us of a writer, T. S. Eliot, whose traditions were so different but whose religious-cultural program now appears so much closer to Ozick's own than is the program of any well-known American Jewish writer or intellectual of the generation before hers.