SOURCE: Cohen, Sarah Blacher. “Cynthia Ozick: Prophet for Parochialism.” In Women of the Word: Jewish Women and Jewish Writing, edited by Judith R. Baskin, pp. 283–98. Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1994.

The waning of the immigrant experience and the depletion of the Yiddish culture which so enriched that experience have prompted some critics to write an epitaph for the dying body of Jewish-American writing in the postwar period. Thus, Ruth Wisse has written that Jewish-American literature “derives its strength from the peculiar tension of the Jew who is native to two cultures while fully at home in neither; hence the more fully the Jew becomes integrated into the larger culture, the less the tension and the fewer the creative energies generated by it.”¹

This charge may apply to the totally assimilated Jewish writers who, like Philip Roth's Portnoy, say the equivalent of “stick your suffering heritage up your suffering ass. I happen also to be a human being.”² But it doesn't apply to a new group of American Jewish writers of the 1970s and 80s who have attempted to express their artistic vision in Jewish terms. Unconcerned about real or imagined charges of parochialism, they have freely explored the particularistic aspects of Judaism and have even speculated on the impoverishment of English as a literary language. They have worn their ethnic label conspicuously for they have proudly defined themselves as Jews. As Wisse observes, “their interest is not in the sociological or even the psychological legacy of a Jewish background, but in the national design and religious destiny of Judaism, in its workable myths.”³ Graduating from jumping in and out of the melting pot and creating a great splash for the spectators, they have concentrated on replenishing their minority puddles to sustain themselves rather than becoming inundated by the American mainstream.

The movement's prime diver into the reservoir of Jewish sources is Cynthia Ozick, who delivered a prophetic address at the American-Israel Dialogue of 1970, exhorting American Jewry to move “Toward Yavneh,” that is, toward the creation of an authentic Jewish culture in the Diaspora. In this pronouncement, Cynthia Ozick admonished the Jews to stop whoring after the false gods of assimilationism and devote themselves to cultivating their own peculiar treasure: a new literature of cultural rebirth, “a liturgical literature [that] has the configuration of the ram's horn: you give your strength to the inch-hole and the splendor spreads wide.”⁴ The image of the shofar, or ram's horn, associated with biblical history and the most holy days of the Jewish New Year, was to rally the Jews to repent their sins to God and humanity so they could be redeemed. The shofar also sounded the call to the Jews to remember the tragedies of Jewish history, to avoid the forbidden lure of idolatry, and to return to their own origins. The shofar's piercing sound was meant to chastise all those universalist Jews who denied their own heritage by blowing into the wide or wrong end of the shofar: Bernard Malamud for his protest, “I am not a Jewish writer; I am a writer who is a Jew”⁵; Allen Ginsberg, with his loud persuasion that religions are “allee samee”;⁶ and even Saul Bellow, who wanted to be regarded as a great public writer and thus resented the Protestant majority for labeling him a Jewish writer or, as he said, for “giving a dog a bad name in order to hang him.”⁷

Taking issue with this universalist stance, Cynthia Ozick contended that nothing produced by Jews in the Diaspora would last except what was produced in their own literary ghettos. For she had argued elsewhere, “all genius is parochial. Shakespeare wrote out of a tiny island, Yeats out of a still tinier one. Tolstoy had all the spaciousness of Russia, yet imagined the world mainly out of the French-speaking fraction of the Russian nobility.”⁸

In “Toward Yavneh” Ozick further maintained that the only surviving Jewish literature would be that written in a Jewish tongue. Or as she said, “Literature does not spring from the urge to Esperanto but from a particular tribe, with its particular language.”⁹ This particular language she termed “Judeo-English,” or “New Yiddish,” the mode of expression for a new liturgical literature, not didactic or prescriptive but “Aggadic, utterly freed to invention … experiment, enlightenment, profundity, humanity.”¹⁰ Just as the Jews introduced Jewish ideas and Jewish intonations into the German language and created Yiddish, so, she claims, they can inject the Jewish sensibility, the Jewish vision, into English and create a distinctive language for their need in the American Diaspora. Ozick believes Jews have a choice. They can totally embrace Gentile culture and entirely lose their identity, or they can refashion the Diaspora language into their own unique linguistic gift. As she powerfully expresses the alternatives: “If we blow into the narrow end of the shofar, we will be heard far. But if we choose to be Mankind rather than Jewish and blow into the wider part, we will not be heard at all.”¹¹

These impassioned comments sound more like those of an inspiring prophet than a perspiring writer, able to realize such lofty visions. Yet Cynthia Ozick's fiction through the years has provided substantial evidence for her claims. Her most effective stories and novellas, notably “The Pagan Rabbi” and “Envy; or, Yiddish in America,” are modern-day parables grounded in Judaic teachings in which Ozick functions as a prophet in Abraham Joshua Heschel's sense of the term: her narrative voice is neither that of a “singing saint” nor a “moralizing poet,” but that of an “assaulter of the mind.”¹² In contrast to many twentieth-century American novelists whom the Hemingway code of physical heroism made ashamed to think, she has “brain on the brain,” a phrase she uses to describe Saul Bellow.¹³ Like him, she is intoxicated with a wide range of ideas that have produced a heady brew of original thought.

The assaulting mind of the prophet is especially evident in the title story of Cynthia Ozick's first collection, The Pagan Rabbi and Other Stories,¹⁴ where her protagonist, Isaac Kornfeld, a talmudic scholar of “piety and brains,” is torn between worshiping the beguiling world of nature and obeying the prohibitions against pantheism contained in Leviticus and Deuteronomy: “Ye shall utterly destroy all the places of the gods, upon the high mountains, and upon the hills, and under every green tree. And the soul that turneth after familiar spirits to go a-whoring after them, I will cut him off from among his people” (16). The pagan, however, exerts a greater force upon him than does monotheism. And for a time he becomes an unfettered creature of the woodland, as opposed to the shackled occupant of the study and synagogue. In this respect, he is like those fictional heroes of Yiddish literature who yearned to free themselves from the bondage of rigorous talmudic study, from the narrowing confines of shtetl culture, to experience the physical raptures of the natural world.¹⁵ But nature for Isaac is not just a hedonistic playground or a welcome respite from rabbinical burnout. It is a powerful heathen force that draws him away from traditional Judaism so that he becomes a Pagan Rabbi committed to the belief that “Great Pan lives” (17).

Isaac, however, suffers the consequences for his rabbinic dereliction of duty. According to the story's epigraph, which Ozick has chosen from The Ethics of the Fathers, “He who is walking along and studying, but then breaks off to remark, ‘How lovely is that tree!’ or ‘How beautiful is that fallow field!’—Scripture regards such a one as having hurt his own being” (3). Similarly, Isaac Kornfeld “hurts his own being” by attempting to have his Torah-bound soul commune with a free-souled woodland nymph. Though he derives orgiastic pleasure from his florophilia and plant sodomy, he pays a terrible price for it: the loss of his immortal Jewish soul. Too late he realizes that “The sound of the Law is more beautiful than the crickets. The smell of the Law is more radiant than the moss. The taste of the Law exceeds clear water” (36). Abandoned by his soul who would have sung him David's songs in his grave, Isaac, in despair, hangs himself with his prayer shawl and in death is rejected by his fickle flowerchild.

Ozick has us initially sympathize with the rabbi's desire to become a noble savage who is at one with the natural universe and sees creation with original eyes. But she ultimately rejects Isaac Kornfeld's nature-loving Hellenism for his observant widow's law-revering Hebraism. Just as the prophets reproached the Israelites for worshipping nature deities and foreign idols, Ozick, through this story, warns modern-day Jews of the injurious effects of choosing pagan aesthetics over Jewish ethics and spirituality. Like the prophets, who were more conservative than revolutionary, “calling men back to an older obedience rather than breaking new religious ground,”¹⁶ Ozick chastises Isaac Kornfeld for wanting to be a creature of nature, leading a life of ease and spontaneity. She rebukes him for turning his back on painful Jewish history and living in the sensual present. She warns of the dire consequences of choosing the verdant tree of beauty over the unadorned tree of knowledge. Finally, like the prophets who “can speak words which clarify God's will,”¹⁷ she makes necessary distinctions between the pagan and the holy in her story by instructing us to appreciate the marvels of nature, but not to worship them “instead of” God. She cautions us not to revere “the rapture-bringing horizon instead of God, the work of art instead of God.”¹⁸

Thus Ozick would not have us read Isaac Babel's “The Awakening” to heed the old man's admonition to the young narrator, a studious urban Jew: “And you dare to write! A man who doesn't live in nature, as a stone does or an animal, will never in all his life write two worthwhile lines.”¹⁹ By standing apart from nature and differentiating between the natural and the sacred, Cynthia Ozick has written liturgically in “The Pagan Rabbi.” As a contemporary prophet of powerful inspiration bidding us worship God who transcends nature, not a deity within nature, she has, in her deft fusion of art and revelation, transformed “the divine afflatus into divine sentences.”²⁰

Even more divine are the sentences in Ozick's “Envy; or, Yiddish in America,” her most inventive and profound liturgical piece of fiction.²¹ As in “The Pagan Rabbi,” she is the hortatory prophet censuring American Jewry for its self-destructive embrace of an alien culture's aesthetics, but she is also the ironic prophet inveighing against the abandonment of an authentic Yiddish tradition and the inflation of an inauthentic talent in its place. Employing the prophet's style, which is both sardonic and “charged with agitation, anguish, and a spirit of nonacceptance,”²² she berates American Jews for their peremptory dismissal of the best Yiddish authors. By translating into English only those inferior writers who specialize in the sensational and the modish, they, along with the Holocaust, have consigned to death the formerly vibrant Yiddish culture.

Filled with what Heschel terms the prophet's “sympathy with the divine pathos, the communion with the divine consciousness,”²³ Cynthia Ozick creates Edelshtein, a sixty-seven-year-old Yiddish poet, desperately striving for the past forty years to have his talents recognized in America. In one respect, he is still the fearful little man of the shtetl who has a Chaplinesque sense of himself as the accidental and insignificant creature barely surviving in the hostile world. In another respect, he has the hauteur of the high priest of Yiddish culture, deriding superficial Jewish-American writers and a facilely translated Yiddish author, Yankel Ostrover, who have made financial killings in the literary marketplace.

Edelshtein's feelings of extreme inferiority and extreme superiority incur Ozick's ironic treatment. When he is the insecure shtetl figure, she compassionately views him as a saintly fool in his valiant efforts to keep Yiddish alive for American Jews: “Sometimes Edelshtein tried to read one or two of his poems. At the first Yiddish word the painted old ladies of the Reform Temples would begin to titter for shame, as at a stand-up television comedian. Orthodox and Conservative men fell instantly asleep. So he reconsidered and told jokes” (43).

Ozick acknowledges the ruefully comic incongruity of Edelshtein's mourning the death of Yiddish in synagogues that have become Cecil B. DeMille amusement parlors and fancy catering halls. Like Micah and Amos, ironically railing against the “idolatry of wealth, … and self-indulgence,”²⁴ she ridicules the gastronomic Judaism and edifice complexes of nouveau riche American Jewry: “The new Temples scared Edelshtein. He was afraid to use the word shul in these places—inside, vast mock-bronze Tablets … prayerbooks printed in English with made-up new prayers in them. … Everything was new. The refreshment tables were long and luminous [with] … snowheaps of egg salad … pools of sour cream … pyramids of bread … Hansel and Gretel houses of cream cheese and fruitcake” (44). Such lavish display, including the “soaring” architecture with “Scripture riveted on in letters fashioned from 14-karat-gold molds” (44), cannot, however, distract Edelshtein from his mourner's grief. Comparing him to a “wanton stalk in the heart of an empty field” (70), as he declaims his Yiddish verse before a vanished audience, she makes us weep for him.

But Ozick transforms her sympathy into castigation of Edelshtein when he becomes the supercilious Yiddish purist. This is not to suggest that she totally disagrees with his assessment of American Jewish literature. With the exception of Saul Bellow, whom she respects as the “most purely and profoundly ideational”²⁵ of the Jewish-American novelists, she shares Edelshtein's belief that they are largely ignorant of their Jewish heritage, yet reviewers praise them for their ethnic wit and perception. Indeed, much of the story's amusement stems from the fact that Edelshtein acts as the stringent literary critic who employs the quaint accent and fractured syntax of Yiddishized English to pronounce his unkind judgments. He deplores, for example, the cheap way Jewish-American novelists add Yiddish local color to their work: “Their Yiddish. One word here, one word there. Shikseh on one page, putz on the other, and that's the whole vocabulary. … They know ten words for, excuse me, penis, and when it comes to a word for learning, they're impotent” (79–80). Or he mocks his best friends' two sons, “literary boys” who had “spit out the Yiddish that had bred them” (45) to become experts of gentile literature, with their Ph.D. theses on Sir Gawain and the Green Knight and the novels of Carson McCullers.

However, Edelshtein is most envious and thus most merciless in his lampooning of Yankel Ostrover, the third-rate Yiddish writer who enjoys national and international acclaim because his modernist English translators have “freed him of the prison of Yiddish” (47). Edelshtein maliciously calls the Polish-born Ostrover der chazer, the pig, “because of his extraordinary white skin, like a tissue of pale ham” (46), and because of his pornographically grotesque subject matter—“men who embraced men, women who caressed women, sodomists of every variety, boys copulating with hens, butchers who drank blood for strength beneath the knife” (47).

But what most hurts Edelshtein is that Ostrover is the only Yiddish writer whose works have been saved, that is, translated into English. He plaintively asks: “Why Ostrover? Why not somebody else? What occult knack, what craft, what crooked convergence of planets drove translators to grovel before Ostrover? … Who had discovered that Ostrover was a “modern”? His Yiddish … still squeaked up to God with a littleness, a familiarity, an elbow-poke, it was still pieced together out of shtetl rags, out of a baby aleph, a toddler beys—so why Ostrover? … Ostrover was to be the only evidence that there once was a Yiddish tongue? … And all the others lost? … Snuffed out … As if never?” (51).

Clearly, Ostrover, whose fiction about imaginary Polish villages reeks of the occult and the pornographic, is Ozick's caricature of Isaac Bashevis Singer.²⁶ But rumor also has it that Edelshtein is Ozick's thin disguise for the Yiddish poet Jacob Glatstein, whose views of Singer were even harsher than those of Edelshtein. In a 1965 essay, “The Fame of Isaac Bashevis Singer,” Glatstein censures Singer for his “tales of horror and eroticism,” infected with “all kinds of spiritual and physical depravity,” and populated with heroes sullied by “villainy, brutality, and cynicism at every turn.” Glatstein further claims that Singer's stories are “more attuned to the non-Jewish than to the Jewish reader,” to whom Singer's themes “are a distasteful blend of superstition and shoddy mysticism.”²⁷

Sharing Glatstein's views of Singer, Ozick utilizes her prophet's irony as a “way of telling the truth” about the fraudulent Ostrover. “Extending a partial perspective into a more comprehensive one,” she thus depicts Ostrover not as a serious author committed to his subject matter and craft, but as a joke machine mechanically rattling off one wisecrack after another.²⁸ She reveals him to be a titillator of the masses with his simplistic aphorisms, “dense and swollen as a phallus” and his “naked swollen sentences with their thin little threadbare pants always pulled down” (51). Moreover, she compounds her ironical treatment of him by having his shallow public honor him in the same room as the pantheon of great Jewish figures—Moses, Einstein, Maimonides, Heine—whose names are emblazoned on the majestic frieze lining the ceiling of the Ninety-second Street Y. Because she has the Yiddish Yankel Ostrover Americanize himself to become “Yankee Doodle” Ostrover, she makes him into a “worldwide industry” (62), who “can stand up forever and dribble shallow quips and everyone admires him for it” (63).

Departing from drollery to prophetic denunciation, Ozick, like Jeremiah inveighing against the false prophet whose “disingenuousness was the mark of a charlatan,”²⁹ has Edelshtein attack Ostrover for being an obscene literary faker and for perpetrating hoaxes of translation to gain fame. If reading an author's work in translation is, as the Hebrew poet Bialik notes, “kissing the bride through the veil,”³⁰ then so many deft hands have improved the appearance of Ostrover's bride that she scarcely resembles his flawed original. Because Ostrover, a cripple in English, hires a stable of skillful translators to make the bride ravishing for the avant-garde and commercial reading public, Ozick reveals that the talent Ostrover has is not for the invention of innovative fiction but for pressuring his translators to transform his lackluster Yiddish into polished English. Because he woos one translator and drops the other, he keeps them in a “perpetual frenzy of envy for each other” (55), so that Ozick's story becomes a prophet's exposé of authorial rivalry as well as translator rivalry.

Ozick, like the prophets who took the populace to task for their false judgments, condemns the idiocy of the literary establishment for valuing lifeless prose cosmetically touched up by multiple translators rather than the vitality of a living language created by a talented single author zealously committed to Yiddish. But Edelshtein is not that impassioned devotee and practioneer of Yiddish. What Ozick finds most objectionable about him is his hypocrisy. Much as he mocks Ostrover, he also prefers to escape from the “prison of Yiddish” (47), or from being Jewish, if he could achieve fame. Thus, Ozick criticizes him for lamenting the waning of Yiddish when he actually laments the waning of an audience to appreciate his creativity.

Edelshtein's hypocrisy is attacked not by the author but by Hannah, a twenty-three-year-old American woman, fluent in Yiddish, whom Edelshtein implores to be his translator. The more desperate he becomes to obtain her services, the more anguished is the language he employs to depict the fate of Yiddish during the Holocaust. “A little while ago there were twelve million people—not including babies—who lived inside this tongue and now what is left? A language that never had a territory except Jewish mouths and half the Jewish mouths on earth already stopped up with German worms” (74). But Edelshtein immediately berates himself for exploiting the grisly details of the Holocaust to gain sympathy for his literary plight, for using international tragedy to call attention to his personal crisis.

No matter what Edelshtein's motives are or how impassioned his pleas, Hannah refuses to be his personal messiah and save his dying poems. Acting as a midwife to his creativity would prevent her from giving birth to the poetry gestating within herself. To guard against being exploited, she indignantly lashes out at him: “You jealous old men from the ghetto … You bore me to death. You hate magic, you hate imagination, you talk God and you hate God, you despise, you bore, you envy, you eat people up with your disgusting old age—cannibals, all you care about is your own youth, you're finished, give somebody else a turn!” (94, 97–98).

On one level Hannah's diatribe appears to be a legitimate feminist complaint of an emerging woman artist who wishes to develop her own talent and not waste her energies translating the oeuvre of an old Yiddish male she doesn't respect. She accuses him of being too Jewish, of clinging to suffering, of revering history, and most damning of all, of producing works that were “little puddles,” not the “mainstream” (95). The only Yiddish writer she admires is Ostrover, for being an author of many visions: “A Freudian, a Jungian, a sensibility … A contemporary” (95).

We are not to side with the young woman, however. Her devotion to the worldly Ostrover, who speaks for humanity, and her scorn of the ghetto poet, who speaks for Jews, shows the limitations of American-born Jewish youth who would readily sacrifice the parochial for the universal and in so doing lose their claim to any distinctiveness. Because Yiddish is an indigenous part of Edelshtein, who had the misfortune of living at a time when Yiddish “died a sudden and definite death” (42), Ozick sympathizes with his desire to communicate and be understood in an alien land. She can even forgive his envy for those who achieve a spurious kind of communication, and she endows him with a sense of pride to compensate for his maltreatment.

Thus, when Hannah banishes Edelshtein from her universalist house of fiction, claiming he doesn't interest her, he is compelled to view his ghetto identity not as a burden but as a blessing. In the Jewish equivalent of a Flannery O'Connor revelation, Edelshtein has an epiphany:

He saw everything in miraculous reversal. … 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? Who then was really buried, removed, inhabited by darkness? To whom, in what little space, did God offer Sinai? Who kept Terach and who followed Abraham? … Suppose it turns out that the destiny of the Jews is vast, open, eternal, and that Western Civilization is meant to dwindle, shrivel, shrink into the ghetto of the world—what of history then? Kings, Parliaments, like insects, presidents like vermin, their religion a row of little dolls, their art a cave smudge, their poetry a lust.

(96)

This “miraculous reversal” that Edelshtein envisions represents Ozick's championing, like the prophets before her, of the superiority of the Judaic contribution to civilization. This passage contains her refutation of the belief that Jews are a culturally backward people, bereft of intellectual curiosity, totally consumed with obscurantist learning. Rather, she proudly asserts that the Jews' text-centeredness and monotheism have enriched a spiritually impoverished world.

“Envy,” however, does not end with such an optimistic vision, but a pessimistic one. In a random telephone call Edelshtein encounters the anti-Semitic venom of a Christian proselytizer: “Christianity is Judaism universalized. … Our God is the God of Love, your God is the God of Wrath” (100). When Edelshtein refutes his position, he retaliates with standard Jew-baiting insults: “Even now, after … how many years in America, you talk with a kike accent. You kike, you Yid” (100). These remarks are offensive in their own right because they echo the sentiments of anti-Semites through the ages. But Edelshtein finds them even more painful because many Jews, themselves unaware of the grandeur of their own heritage, accept such pejorative views of Judaism and unassimilated Jews. Such self-hatred prompts a sizable number of Jewish artists to abandon Jewish sources of creativity in pursuit of worldly fame. It also causes the majority of American Jews to abandon Yiddish for fear of being considered “kikes.” Thus the final words Edelshtein shouts at the bigot are: “Amalekite! Titus! Nazi! The whole world is infected by you anti-Semites! On account of you, children become corrupted. On account of you, I lost everything. My whole life! On account of you I have no translator!” (100).

The forlorn, vulnerable Edelshtein resembles the fate of Yiddish itself that Maurice Samuel described as an exile language “in a double sense, with the language of the people in exile and long in exile among the elite of that people.”³¹ Edelshtein is also bereft of supporters just as Yiddish literature is bereft of a physical territory, a supportive nation, a lengthy tradition, and a sustaining culture. Finally Edelshtein is rejected by the Hebraists and the American avant-gardists just as Yiddish literature has been shunned by the towering giants of the Hebraic past and the post-Enlightenment present.

As the title “Envy; or, Yiddish in America” suggests, Cynthia Ozick has written two stories.³² The first, “Envy” is a ruefully amusing tale of a crotchety old man seeking translation for his sentimental poems while seething with jealousy of a slickly translated rival author. The more profound second story, “Yiddish in America,” is about a thousand-year-old Jewish language and culture, almost destroyed in a decade by the Holocaust, and its precarious fate in America. Since Yiddish poetry for Ozick has a “liturgical impulse” and is a “continuation of Scripture,” the story is about the struggle of the liturgical to find a place in the secular.³³ But the secular has been overrun by the pagan, and even its most learned and artistic inhabitants have had a “memory operation” (97) and suffer from cultural amnesia so that liturgical Yiddish is in danger of being forgotten and doomed to extinction. But Cynthia Ozick, the writer as prophet, has roused our concern for Yiddish, stimulated a reawakened interest in it, and, for a time, rescued it from oblivion.

Cynthia Ozick's aim as a prophet who strikes when her irony is hot³⁴ is to lift human beings up, not to push them down, to remind them of their commitments: “God has a controversy with you.”³⁵ Thus Ozick wages a controversy with her fictional characters for abandoning Jewish sources of creativity and choosing the more universal; in real life she also takes issue with self-hating Jews who have no knowledge of the worth of their heritage. In a 1978 New York Times reply to Anne Roiphe for her article “Christmas Comes to a Jewish Home,” Cynthia Ozick chastises her for being an unsuccessful assimilationist “because she has no gift of her own to offer the majority. … Bankrupt, she borrows from her neighbor's spiritual house all its furnishings; or else moves right in and calls this universalism. She cannot invite her neighbor into her own historic house because it isn't only that her cupboard is bare; all the rooms are empty. She has taken all her worldly notions from the majority culture, including the majority's mistakes, even when they are mistakes about herself.”³⁶ Of her own Jewish identity, Ozick asserts: “It is not sufficient for me to be someone's symbol. I am not a Jew only under duress; my Jewish conviction derives not from what Anne Roiphe repeatedly calls the ghetto, but from the voice of Sinai.”³⁷ Indeed this voice of Sinai, blending with Cynthia Ozick's ironic prophetic voice, will make her fiction heard a long time, for she has blown loud and clear into “the narrow end of the shofar.”³⁸

Notes

1. Ruth Wisse, “American Jewish Writing, Act II,” Commentary 61 (June 1976), 40.

2. Philip Roth, Portnoy's Complaint (New York, 1970), 84.

3. Wisse, “American Jewish Writing,” 41.

4. Cynthia Ozick, “America: Toward Yavneh,” Judaism 19 (Summer 1970), 280.

5. Bernard Malamud in a question-and-answer period. University at Albany, State University of New York, April 9, 1975.

6. Quoted in Wisse, “American Jewish Writing,” 41.

7. Quoted in Cynthia Ozick, “Hanging the Ghetto Dog,” New York Times Book Review (March 21, 1976), 47.

8. Ibid.

9. Ozick, “America,” 275.

10. Ibid., 280.

11. Ibid., 282.

12. Abraham Joshua Heschel, The Prophets (New York, 1962), 10.

13. Cynthia Ozick, “What Drives Saul Bellow,” in her Metaphor & Memory (New York, 1989), 13.

14. Cynthia Ozick, “The Pagan Rabbi,” in her collection The Pagan Rabbi and Other Stories (New York, 1971). Further citations to this story are in parentheses in the text of the essay.

15. Ruth Wisse, “American Jewish Writing,” 41–42, points out that in the works of Mendele, Sholem Aleichem, Peretz, Bialik, Feierberg, and Tchernikhowsky, the physical world of sun, storm, trees, and rivers provides a model of freedom counterposed to the self-denial of shtetl culture.

16. Daniel Jeremy Silver. A History of Judaism: From Abraham to Maimonides (New York, 1974), 80.

17. Ibid., 79.

18. Cynthia Ozick, “The Riddle of the Ordinary,” in her Art & Ardor (New York, 1983).

19. Isaac Babel, “Awakening,” in The Collected Stories of Isaac Babel, ed. and transl. Walter Morison (New York, 1934), 311–12.

20. Silver, History, 79.

21. Cynthia Ozick, “Envy; or, Yiddish in America,” in The Pagan Rabbi and Other Stories. Further citations to this story are in parentheses in the text of the essay.

22. Heschel, Prophets, 6.

23. Ibid., 37.

24. Israel Knox, “The Traditional Roots of Jewish Humor,” Judaism 12 (1964–65), 331.

25. Ozick, “America,” 266.

26. In Yiddish circles Edelshtein has been identified with the poet Jacob Glatstein, who publicly deplored the rising fame of Isaac Bashevis Singer and criticized his work for being shallow. Cynthia Ozick, however, has denied these associations.

27. Jacob Glatstein, “The Fame of Isaac Bashevis Singer,” Congress Biweekly (December 27, 1965), 17–18.

28. Knox, “Traditional Roots,” 329.

29. Silver, History, 83.

30. Hayyim Nachman Bialik (1873–1934), quoted by Sarah Blacher Cohen, “The Jewish Folk Drama of Isaac Bashevis Singer,” in her edited collection, From Hester Street to Hollywood: The Jewish-American Stage and Screen (Bloomington, Ind., 1983), 198.

31. Maurice Samuel, In Praise of Yiddish (New York, 1971), 8.

32. Joseph Lowin, Cynthia Ozick (Boston, 1988), 20.

33. Cynthia Ozick, “Prayer Leader,” Prooftexts 3 (1983), 1.

34. For an extended analysis of irony in all of Cynthia Ozick's fiction, see Sarah Blacher Cohen, Cynthia Ozick's Comic Art: From Levity to Liturgy: The Fiction of Cynthia Ozick (Bloomington and Indianapolis, Ind., 1994).

35. Lowin, Ozick, 21.

36. Cynthia Ozick, “The Holidays: Reply to Anne Roiphe,” New York Times (December 28, 1978), C6.

37. Ibid.

38. Cynthia Ozick, “America,” 282.