Try to “possess one great literature, at least, besides (your) own: and the more unlike (your) own, the better.” So cautioned the critic Matthew Arnold. Years later, author Cynthia Ozick heeded his advice. Over the course of time she has populated her house of fiction with three mind-stretching novels and four collections of riveting short stories. To keep her fiction company, she has brought in a rich assortment of provocative essays to share the premises. In the preface to her 1983 collection of essays, Art & Ardor, she informs us how she happened to write these departures from fiction:

I have written over one hundred essays—some in the form of articles or fugitive pieces, others to serve a public occasion … three or four out of political necessity, as forays into advocacy journalism … the rest an outgrowth of reading and reviewing. … Most … out of unashamed print-lust. …

She bemoans the fact that she was an unknown freelancer, a literary orphan with no benevolent god-parents to sponsor her in the world of letters. Her essays, she claims,

were written on quicksand without a place to stand: no regularly supportive periodical, no professorship, no body of learning, no assurance, no early mark made for oneself.¹

Now, with her 1989 collection of essays, Metaphor & Memory, Cynthia Ozick, a Guggenheim fellow and recipient of the Straus Living Award from the American Academy and National Institute of Arts and Letters, can no longer claim she is a literary nobody, that her writing of essays is a trivial pursuit. While in the past she complained that readers paid too little attention to her essays, she now fears that people are taking them too seriously. She worries that her readers will “unfailingly trust the veracity of (her) non-narrative prose.”² Good Jew that she is, she doesn't want the profane utterances in her essays to be accorded the same reverence bestowed upon the holy pronouncements from the foot of Sinai. As essayist, she doesn't want to assume the lofty mantle of a “reliable witness,” a “committed intelligence, a single-minded truth-speaker.”³ In other words, she makes no hubristic claim to be the fashioner of Halakhah, authoritative Jewish law. Rather, she contends that her essays are laced with the aggadic, the inventive, the conditional, the subjective, even the poetic. Their subject matter is filtered through the kaleidoscope of her mind and takes on provisional shapes and hues. In such a protean state, they avoid the predictable and espouse the surprising. Therefore, she contends that there is no essential difference between her essays and her stories and novels, since they are all fictitious or “made-up in response to an excited imagination.”⁴ But, according to Ozick, what is doubly fictitious about the essay is that it attempts to pass for true belief.

In addition to possessing this shady fictionality, her essays, she claims, are like light bulbs which illuminate for a brief span of time, leaving us in the dark until she comes up with different replacements for them. She insists, therefore, that they not be mistaken for fixed, steady beacons lighting up the hidden corners of her fiction. Or, to switch metaphors, she maintains the hope that her essays not be “seized as a rod to beat the writer's stories with; or as a frame into which to squeeze the writer's stories; or collectively, as a ‘philosophy’ into which to pen the writer's outlook.”⁵

Yet who is to say that her cautionary foreward, itself a miniature essay, in Metaphor & Memory, is to be trusted? Ozick, as author, might very well be a conscious liar, an artful deceiver. Or she may unwittingly not be telling the truth about the connections between her essays and her stories. In either case, it is advisable to heed D. H. Lawrence's advice to “Trust the tale, not the teller of the tale.” Some of Ozick's essays in Metaphor & Memory do contain vital clues about some of her fiction, do articulate its ideational core. Conversely, in several instances the hobby horses that she rides in some of her stories go coursing through her essays, often without much disguise and with equal force.

The most obvious kinship between essay and story exists between her lengthy piece “Sholem Aleichem's Revolution” and her magisterial novella, “Envy; or, Yiddish in America.” The former expresses formal, academic admiration for the Mame Loshon, mother tongue, which she describes in her nonfiction as a “direct, spirited and spiritually alert language … rooted in the quotidian lives of ordinary folk.”⁶ The latter exudes a doting mother's affection for her precious child: “His Yiddish … still squeaked up to God with a littleness, a familiarity, an elbo-poke, it was still pieced together out of shtetl rags, out of a baby aleph, a toddler beys. …”⁷ But both works also trace the hostile reception accorded to Yiddish, especially by the intellectuals who regarded it as “a zhargon, Gibberish prattle, a subtongue, something less than a respectably cultivated language.”⁸ In her essay, however, Ozick painstakingly shows how Sholem Aleichem legitimatized the bastard Yiddish, invented a distinguished lineage for it, and elevated it to a place of honor, causing it to be translated by gifted literati like Hillel Halkin. Conversely, in her novella, Ozick painfully recounts the absence of translators for poor Edelshtein, the 67 year old Yiddish poet manqué who, in unresponsive fancy synagogues, conducts funerals for the deceased language and the world that it served. Yet, both works share a fundamental similarity. Though one is an elegy and the other a celebration, Ozick has, through her meticulous research and formidable power of invention, saved and revitalized Yiddish for us.

A less obvious linkage exists between Ozick's essay, “Primo Levi's Suicide Note” and her story, “Rosa.” Both deal with Holocaust victims, one fictive, one real, who were imprisoned in the “place without pity,” suffering the major torments of the Shoah experience: Nazi brutality, freezing, starvation, merciless selections, barbaric slaughter of loved ones, abject powerlessness. Both victims were subjected to the continued hell of the post-Auschwitz world. For them, the injury “extends through time, … and the Furies perpetuate the tormentor's work by denying peace to the tormented.”⁹ However, until his last book, The Drowned and the Saved, Levi did not lash out at his tormentors; he refrained, as he says, from trading “blows” with his external oppressors. As chemist-chronicler of the seething Holocaust cauldron, he was the detached spectator of the infernal brew, clinically examining the severity of contagion. Because the persona that appeared in the majority of his writing was devoid of anger, “violent feeling, or any overt drive to ‘trade blows,’”¹⁰ Ozick speculates that he had a dormant rage of resentment which, forty years later, ultimately erupted and turned inward, leading to his self-destruction.

Rosa was also consumed with violent rage, which she initially suppressed. By stuffing her baby's shawl in its mouth, she silenced her shrieks of protest against the Nazi murder of that baby, Magda. But thirty-five years later, when Rosa is in this country, she unleashes her fury. She “trades blows.” In Brooklyn she smashes her antique store because American customers are uninterested in her antiquated Holocaust past. She lashes out at a Jewish hotel manager for having “barbed wire on top of (his) fences,”¹¹ for abandoning her in the past and excluding her in the present. She burns Dr. Tree's wooden treatise, Repressed Animation, a reductive psychological study of Holocaust survivors. Unlike Primo Levi, she turns her rage outward and, by degrees, gets its poison out of her system. She puts to rest the ghost of her dead child which haunts her. Ending her isolation, she reconnects her telephone and waits to greet the embodiment of the ordinary, Mr. Persky, the button salesman.

Of course, one can make only so many comparisons between Rosa and Primo Levi. One is a fictional character whose fate Ozick controls, and the other is a real live character whom a different creator controls. Would that Ozick had been able to write a different ending for Primo Levi's life. But she does present a revised interpretation of his life through her unsettling analysis of his last book, The Drowned and the Saved, “a book of catching up after decades of abstaining … a book of blows returned by a pen on fire.”¹² By having Rosa give full vent to her retaliatory passion against Holocaust and post-Holocaust barbarity, Ozick advocates unrepressed animation when confronting savagery.

In “Primo Levi's Suicide Note” and “Rosa,” Ozick applies her version of Hebraism, which posits that literature “should not only be, but mean.”¹³ To corroborate her position, she draws upon “Judah Halevi, who accused Hellenism of producing ‘flowers without fruit,’ in contrast to the Jewish spirit, which bears the ripe fruit of responsibility and judgement.”¹⁴ Ozick explores the seduction of flowers over fruit and its consequences in her essay, “S. Y. Agnon and the First Religion,” and her story, “The Pagan Rabbi.”

In her analysis of Agnon's tale, Edo and Enam, she writes of a one-eyed yeshivah student, Gamzu, forsaking the study of righteous conduct in the Shulhan Arukh for the lure of exotic flowers and pagan songs performed by the beautiful enchantress, Gemulah, outside the Land of Israel. In her native country she is a mesmerizing oracle, one of the minor goddesses of the First Religion. When Gamzu weds her and brings her to live in Jerusalem, she becomes near mute and distraught, and the holy city is contaminated by her heathen presence. There is a mass exodus from it, the houses collapse, hatred and suspicion are unleashed. There is a rash of unexplained murders and deaths. Even the philologist, Dr. Ginath, obsessed with capturing the elusive beauty of her mysterious language, is a fatal victim of her charms, falling off a rooftop in his fruitless pursuit of her. Thus, Agnon is saying that the pagan, with its many enticements, and the monotheistic, cannot coexist in Jerusalem, the city of the Law. The man of science, Ginath, is punished for his intellectual pursuit of false goddesses. However, Gamzu, still wearing his yarmulka, and exerting the discipline to muffle Gemulah's song, lives. The First Religion is banished and Jerusalem regains its spiritual supremacy.

Near the end of her essay, Ozick questions her own incisive interpretation. She wonders whether Agnon is “finally on the side of lyrical sorcery or Torah,” since the Enamite hymns are praised for their “grace and beauty.”¹⁵ Such uncertainty does not prevail in her own story, “The Pagan Rabbi.” Like Gamzu and Dr. Ginath, her protagonist, Rabbi Isaac Kornfeld, a Talmudic scholar of “piety and brains,” is seduced by the beguiling world of nature to scale the Fence of the Law to become its pagan worshipper. Choosing Pan over Moses, he knows that his pantheism is a form of idolatry. Yet he still prefers the verdant tree of beauty to the unadorned tree of knowledge. And, for a time, he becomes an unfettered creature of the woodland, as opposed to the shackled occupant of the study and synagogue. But, just as Dr. Ginath's enchantment with the vocal sorceress, Gemulah, proves to be his fatal attraction, so Rabbi Kornfeld's affair with a tree dryad, Iripomonoeia, whose “sexual portion” is as “wholly visible as in any field flower,”¹⁶ leads to his undoing. 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.”¹⁷ Similarly, Isaac Kornfeld, distracted by nature, “hurts his own being” in that he hangs himself in his prayer shawl to return permanently to the earth's embrace. But the dryad is not there for him, and his suicide is in vain. Yet Ozick elicits a modicum of sympathy for the scholar who desires to become a noble savage, at one with the natural universe and seeing creation with original eyes, though she ultimately rejects Kornfeld's nature-loving Hellenism for his observant widow's law-revering Hebraism. Just as the Prophets recognized the Israelites' attraction to the heathen and reproached them for whoring after false gods and foreign idols, Ozick recognizes the appeal of natural beauty and, through this story, warns modern-day Jews of the injurious effects of choosing pagan esthetics over Jewish ethics and spirituality.

Clearly, the ideational content of Ozick's story, “The Pagan Rabbi,” published in 1966, has spilled over into her 1987 essay, “S. Y. Agnon and the First Religion,” and her interpretation of Agnon's tale, Edo and Enam, published in 1950. Since she claims that she only recently read Edo and Enam, we can make one of two assumptions. Either she superimposed her fictional working out of the struggle between Pan and Moses or Hellenism and Hebraism from The Pagan Rabbi onto her interpretation of Agnon's work, or she and Agnon had independently been grappling with giving expression to the Jewish idea of anti-idolatry in their respective stories. I suspect that, as self-defined Jewish writers, steeped in Jewish learning, they were giving fictional form to one of the most overriding concerns of Hebrew scriptures: the lure of, and resistance to, graven images.

In the concluding lines to her “Forewarning” of Metaphor & Memory, Ozick writes that she repudiates the

inference that a handful of essays is equal to a Weltanschauung: that an essay is generally anything more than simply another fiction—a short story told in the form of an argument, or a history, or even (once in a great while) an illumination …¹⁸

There are essays in Metaphor & Memory which are illuminations: “Bialik's Hint,” containing her prophetic literary credo, “Ruth,” her luminous reading of Hebrew Scripture, and the title essay, “Metaphor & Memory,” originally the 1985 Phi Beta Kappa Address at Harvard University, to name just a few. But since you are reading my own miniature essay, I caution you to distrust it. I may be lying. Read Cynthia Ozick's Metaphor & Memory for yourselves!

Notes

1. Cynthia Ozick, “Foreward,” Art & Ardor (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1983), p. x.

2. Cynthia Ozick, “Forewarning,” Metaphor & Memory (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1989), p. ix.

3. Ibid.

4. Ibid., p. xi.

5. Ibid.

6. Cynthia Ozick, “Sholem Aleichem's Revolution,” Metaphor & Memory, p. 173.

7. Cynthia Ozick, “Envy; or, Yiddish in America,” The Pagan Rabbi and Other Stories (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1971), p. 51.

8. Cynthia Ozick, “Sholem Aleichem's Revolution,” pp. 174–175.

9. Cynthia Ozick, “Primo Levi's Suicide Note,” Metaphor & Memory, p. 35.

10. Ibid., p. 36.

11. Cynthia Ozick, “Rosa,” The Shawl (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1989), p. 51.

12. Cynthia Ozick, “Primo Levi's Suicide Note,” p. 46.

13. Cynthia Ozick, “Bialik's Hint,” Metaphor & Memory, p. 223.

14. Ibid., p. 224.

15. Cynthia Ozick, “S. Y. Agnon and the First Religion,” Metaphor & Memory, p. 222.

16. Cynthia Ozick, “The Pagan Rabbi,” The Pagan Rabbi and Other Stories, p. 30.

17. Ibid., p. 3.

18. Cynthia Ozick, “Forewarning,” Metaphor & Memory, p. xii.