THE CRITICAL RECKONING

Cynthia Ozick, thirty-eight years old when Trust launched her career, was fifty-five when William Scheick and Catherine Rainwater produced the first sustained effort of Ozick scholarship, a seventy-five-page segment of the summer 1983 Texas Studies in Literature and Language that included an introduction, an interview, a bibliography, and my own long essay. The first book of criticism on Ozick was Harold Bloom's Cynthia Ozick (1986), a collection of essays intended to represent “the best criticism so far available” on Ozick's fiction. It is an accurate reflection of her career, and not a reproach to Bloom's book, that twenty years after publishing Trust, such a collection would consist of thirteen book reviews (eight in the NYTBR) with an average length of three pages, along with six essays averaging (not counting my own) nine pages. Bloom includes a bibliography with another twenty-five items, twenty of which are reviews of two or less pages. The book thus furnishes a good starting point for a quick scan of the Ozick critical spectrum as of the mid-1980s.

In Bloom's book two reviews of Trust establish the opposite polarities of early Ozick criticism. David L. Stevenson praises Trust for its originality, calling it “that extraordinary literary entity, a first novel that is produced by a rich, creative imagination, not an imitation of someone else's work or thinly disguised autobiography.” Eugene Goodheart, however, faults the book for its “discontinuity between language and reality or between expression and feeling,” a failure that he ascribes to the unaccountably embittered mood of the narrator. The “fog of chronic dyspepsia” emanating from “the barren ground of the heroine's sullennesses” notably envelops Allegra Vand, who thus becomes “more like an hallucinated projection of the heroine's resentment than a credible mother or wife or woman.”

Taken together, these two reviews point beyond text to subtext. Stevenson's remark that Trust is not thinly disguised autobiography does not preclude its being well-disguised autobiography, and Goodheart's focus on the narrator's sullennesses points to the connection between the book and Ozick's own buried narrative. For Ozick, the living subtext beneath the text of Trust was the bitterness of her fourfold deprivation: as a victim of academic/literary misogyny; as an artist condemned to see tripe like Allegra's Marianna Harlow lionized while her own work languished in oblivion; as a woman prohibited by Judaic sexual taboo from participating in the Laurentian consummation of Tilbeck's apotheosis; and as a Jew whose culture has been marginalized and threatened with extinction in the era after the Holocaust. Goodheart was right to note the radical extreme in the mood of Trust, but he was less perceptive than Stevenson in failing to observe the high achievement of Trust despite the flaws caused by the narrator's sullenness.

In its coverage of The Pagan Rabbi (1971) Bloom's book discloses two signs of better days for Ozick criticism: the addition of a full-blown essay by Josephine Z. Knopp to its two brief reviews (the first real essay in Ozick criticism); and a consensus among the three concerning the extraordinary degree of originality in her stories—“her unique vision of the truth,” as Knopp puts it. For Paul Theroux, Ozick's “imaginative daring” in conceiving “people and situations who [sic] are rarely if ever seen in American novels” makes her laudably different from “Malamud, Bellow, Roth and Co.” Concerning “Envy; or, Yiddish in America,” Johanna Kaplan risks an outright encomium: “I found myself overwhelmed by the story and … amazed at its effect on me. I read it, reread it and lent it to friends, all as in a fever.”

Gone now are complaints of Ozick's overblown style, which has become—Kaplan says—“sharpened, clarified, controlled” so as to make her “a kind of narrative hypnotist.” The argument now moves to questions of theme and credibility. Ozick's ground theme, Kaplan says, which “runs through all the stories and all the characters,” is “a variant of the question: what is holy?” Is holiness a feature of “the extraordinary” (dryads or sea nymphs), or is it found in “what is … unthinkingly discounted” (daily life)? Theroux, though agreeing with Kaplan that “Envy” is “excellent in all ways,” finds Ozick's excursions into fantasy “insufficiently dramatized and unpersuasive,” in part because the narrators of these stories (such as “The Pagan Rabbi” and “The Dock-Witch”) are in a crazed condition.

In these reviews of The Pagan Rabbi, feminist criticism makes its first response to Ozick's fiction, to the effect of illustrating the denseness of the male commentator. Though Paul Theroux calls “Virility” a “superb story” for its treatment of plagiarism, he fails to see Ozick's blatantly rendered feminist purpose. Josephine Knopp, however, observes that here Ozick “demolishes the male supremacists with the same hilarious derision that she employs against the anti-Semites in ‘Envy.’” Extending Knopp's insight, we may say that the seven stories in The Pagan Rabbi embody a recurrence of the fourfold deprivations that demoralized the narrator of Trust: literary misogyny (“Virility”), Jewish sexual/religious taboos (“The Pagan Rabbi,” “The Dock-Witch”), dismal failure of artistic ambitions (“Envy,” “The Suitcase”), and Jewish/Gentile cultural incompatibilities (“The Butterfly and the Traffic Light” and, to some extent, all the stories). The difference since Trust is Ozick's more consistent grasp of narrative voice, mood, and style, which sometimes attains tour-de-force effectiveness in The Pagan Rabbi.

Thomas R. Edwards, in his review of Bloodshed (1976), brings to expression a hitherto unspoken problem in Ozick's readership, the bewilderment of the goy. “Bloodshed,” he admits, “is hard for a goy to make out,” and “Usurpation” is confusing enough to create his generalized “doubts about her work.” Nonetheless, Edwards argues that even a Gentile cannot help but respond to “the best thing” in Bloodshed, “the marvelous novella ‘A Mercenary.’” In addition, Ozick's preface, Edwards says, alleviates the confusion about “Usurpation”—“Certainly her gloss on ‘Usurpation’ is more coherent and moving than the story itself.”

That opinion, however, is strongly contested by Ruth Wisse in her essay “Ozick as American Jewish Writer.” Calling Ozick “a selfish and somewhat nasty finagler” for defending her plagiarism in “Usurpation,” Wisse condemns the “self-justification and special pleading” of the preface, which “betrays the insecurities of both the artist and the Jew.” The harshness of this attack may have influenced Ozick's later decision to say, “The Preface to Bloodshed is a piece of fiction like any other” (Scheick 258)—perhaps the least credible statement in all her writing. By far the most substantial essay on Ozick up to that time (the June 1976 Commentary), Wisse's critique places her against the larger backdrop of contemporary and earlier Jewish-American writing. As against Bellow-Malamud-Roth's “twin themes of marginality and victimization,” Wisse says, Ozick is the “spokesman and most audacious writer” among a new generation of writers who are culturally secure enough to return without anxiety to “the ‘tribal’ and particularistic aspects of Judaism.” Yet, she argues, Ozick's preface, by allowing the author to become “her own translator,” reveals her contradictory craving to be understood among the Gentiles despite her claim that a Christian civilization is innately incapable of understanding indigenous Jewish literature.

By 1982, the year of Levitation: Five Fictions, the fifty-four-year-old author was beginning to establish a reputation. But though Leslie Epstein begins her review by calling Ozick's earlier books, The Pagan Rabbi and Bloodshed, “perhaps the finest work in short fiction by a contemporary writer,” she finds Levitation disappointing because “each of these works … [shies] crucially from the kind of resolution we rightly demand from imaginative fiction.” Characterization turns out to be Ozick's weak suit, in Epstein's view, as exemplified by the Puttermesser-Xanthippe saga. The most humanly engaging character in the Puttermesser stories, she says, is neither Puttermesser nor Xanthippe but Uncle Zindel, who teaches the heroine Hebrew lessons until the narrator intervenes to declare him nonexistent—disheartening proof, for Epstein, of how the text “quails before the demands of, the powers of, imagination.” And the title story, “Levitation,” is perhaps most damaged of all by this disengagement from real characters, which occurs not only in Ozick's portrayal of Jews who supernaturally levitate “into the glory of their martyrdom” but most crucially in the portrait of Feingold's wife, Lucy. Because she is a Christian, Epstein says, “the dice are loaded against this character, the deck [is] patently stacked.” Lucy's lapse from her Christian heritage into a wild vision of its pagan roots means that “the game is no longer being played by the rules of fiction. Probability, necessity, recognizable human feeling are replaced by laws of what can only be called mystical vision.”

In this critique of Lucy's character, Epstein was one of the first to touch upon a serious long-term problem. Like Toni Morrison, Cynthia Ozick combines a superb ability to render her own cultural heritage with a plainly limited comprehension of the majority culture that encompasses/oppresses it. Although there is no mystery about a black or Jewish writer's lack of empathy for things white or Christian, art requires emotional discipline to avoid turning into propaganda. Such discipline may be too weak when Ozick's hatred of “the whole—the whole!—of Western Civilization” (a claim resembling Morrison's statement that “my hatred of white people is justified”) produces the hypocritical William of Trust, the cartoonlike evangelist at the end of “Envy,” and the more serious but inadequate effort to characterize Lucy as a Christian in “Levitation.”¹ It is nonetheless appropriate to ask, regarding this failure of imagination, how many Gentile writers have rendered the figure of the Jew to better effect than Ozick has rendered her Christian (Lucy)? Chaucer, Marlowe, Dickens, Hemingway—as we glance back through the centuries, the portraiture of the Jew by Gentiles has not presented much solid ground from which to attack Cynthia Ozick's portrayals of Christian characters, particularly as viewed after the Holocaust.

Katha Pollitt's essay on Art & Ardor (1983), Ozick's first volume of essays, is an unusually penetrating and graceful exercise in Ozick criticism. Calling the book “a unified and magisterial continuation of Miss Ozick's short stories by other means,” Pollitt divides these essays among three Ozicks—“the rabbi, the feminist, and a disciple of Henry James”—who sometimes work against each other (e.g., feminist versus Jew), sometimes in symbiosis. It was the Jamesian Ozick who ripped into Other Voices, Other Rooms “like someone going after a hummingbird with a chainsaw,” and the rabbi whose subliminal motive for doing so could have been Capote's complaint about a “Jewish mafia” in American letters. It was the rabbi and feminist who ascribed the invention of “homosexual manners” to Lytton Strachey, thereby “eliminating Oscar Wilde and a century of dandyism with a stroke of the pen.” Among the inspired conjectures of Pollitt's critique is her linkup between Ozick's essay on Maurice Samuel and Yankel Ostrover in “Envy.” So too she links Ozick's essay on Harold Bloom with Isaac Kornfeld in “The Pagan Rabbi.”

The schism between Ozick the rabbi and the Jamesian Ozick underlies Sanford Pinsker's judgment that “the ardor of her Jewishness takes a fearsome toll on her discussions of Art.” For him, however, the affirmation of her Jewish heritage in Art & Ardor means that “Ozick has recovered from her long Jamesian night of the soul.” Something similar occurs in “Puttermesser and Xanthippe,” according to Elaine Kauvar's learned analysis of that novella. Bringing a Socratic dialogue, Theaetetus, to bear, along with the Kabbalistic Book of Creation by Gershom Scholem and James's “The Lesson of the Master,” Kauvar sees Puttermesser and the golem as initially reflecting two parts of a split personality—the mature and rational Jewish intellect versus “Puttermesser's primitive self” whose “cries for love and life” have been “sacrificed for dedication to the intellect.” Although Xanthippe returns to earth in the end, after her sexual fire becomes too rampant for a civilized community, Puttermesser learns from the golem the need to recover “the experience of the ordinary and vital passions of humanity.” To judge from this essay, Kauvar's forthcoming (as of this writing) book on Ozick will be a landmark contribution to Ozick studies—greatly learned in Jewish lore and otherwise illuminating.²

The timing of Bloom's book enabled it to encompass, at its far end, Ozick's second novel, The Cannibal Galaxy (1983). Of the four reviews that are here reprinted, Edmund White's best illustrates her status among other artists. White praises Ozick for her moral intensity—for “always submitting experience to an ethical inquiry”—and finds “the very secret of Miss Ozick's art” in her juxtaposition of “vivid hard circumstance and things that were only imagined.” But as a much-admired stylist himself, he reserves his main laurels for her handling of language: “Precisely on account of her style, Miss Ozick strikes me as the best American writer to have emerged in recent years.” What best illustrates her “astonishingly flexible and vital language” is her handling of metaphor, which “animates every page of the novel.” A. Alvarez, however, chooses exactly the same feature as his point of attack. Although he credits the Jamesian subtlety of the work, calling it “‘The Beast in the Jungle’ replayed,” he faults its “startling overinflation” of style, which makes it “far less convincing than Ozick's shorter fiction.” As compared with the stories, he says The Cannibal Galaxy has “degenerated into mannerism. The rhetoric and imagery proliferate like tropical undergrowth … until the narrative chokes and expires.”

If this disagreement over style represents critical subjectivity—each to his own taste—the religious response is more objective and more collegial. Max Apple's biblical stance toward The Cannibal Galaxy relates the title metaphor to the second sentence of Genesis (which Ozick cites in the novel): “And the earth was astonishingly empty.” Calling the phrase “empty and desolate” the “center of this wonderful novel,” Apple ramifies its cosmic, social, and personal meanings: “Empty and desolate is … the uncreated universe, … post-Holocaust Europe, … suburban American life and education, … [and] an aging man who has no offspring.” But against it all, in Apple's view, the L'Chaim! principle prevails: “From the destruction of the European Jews, from the emptiness of Brill's life, from the failures of the dual curriculum a wonder emerges: an artist.” Not an artist (Beulah Hilt) only, but two artists, as Apple renders his closing tribute to the real-life artist and her biblical sources: “Tohu vavohu, emptiness and desolation. From the void the cosmos. From the Fleg School Beulah Hilt. From the mummified prose surrounding us these glorious words of Cynthia Ozick.”

Margaret Wimsatt, also in the Bloom collection, sees not the Hebrew Bible but a Christological construct at the center of The Cannibal Galaxy, namely, the main character's role as “perhaps a prototype of the Wandering Jew.” In various ways that is of course true, geographically in Brill's wanderings from France to the Great Lakes, culturally in his movement away from his Jewish heritage. But Joseph Brill is not the true subject of Ozick's novel, in Wimsatt's judgment; “her real interest is in problems, in philosophy, in mortality, in monotheism”—which is to say, religion. Ozick's final objective, Wimsatt says, is to call the Jew back from his wanderings, reminding him that “these [Western/pagan] arts were forbidden by Jahweh to his people; they were left to the Canaanites and the Greeks. For monotheists the path to wisdom is marked only by Midrash and commentary.”

Finally, there is Harold Bloom's own contribution to his collection, featuring his characteristic blend of uncommon learnedness, intelligence, and willingness to promote his own obsessions. Predictably, Bloom discovers the anxiety of influence in Ozick's self-confessed usurpation of other people's stories—another instance of “agonistic strivings between writers.” For Bloom, Ozick's most crucial struggle, however, is not with Jewish forebears like Singer or Malamud but with the Gnostic heresy that has preoccupied Bloom himself for much of his academic lifetime, for did she not say that she “lusts after forbidden or Jewish magic”? (Although the Ozick-Bloom relationship is too tangled to unravel here, I recommend Erella Brown's “The Ozick-Bloom Controversy,” in the Studies in American Jewish Literature of spring 1992, as an excellent study of their mutual misjudgment.) Because of Bloom's magisterial stature in contemporary criticism, his designation of “Envy” and “Usurpation” as “novellas unequalled in [Ozick's] own generation” comprises a milestone of appreciation.

In sum, Bloom's book, representing the best criticism available when the author was in her mid-fifties, projects a cacophony of contradictory voices. The Ozick of Harold Bloom purveys Gnostic heresy under the anxiety of pagan influence; for many Jewish critics—Kauvar, Knopp, Pinsker, Rosenberg, Wisse, et al.—Ozick the rabbi emerges triumphant; for Edwards the bewildered goy and White the fellow artist, the Jewish Ozick commands less interest than the storyteller and stylist. Though the voices sometimes contradict each other—for example, praising and damning the same story for its handling of metaphor (White and Alvarez on The Cannibal Galaxy)—their variety keeps the field of critical discourse free and open.

Turning from Bloom's book to the wider field of Ozick criticism, we find the Zeitgeist bringing postmodern ideology increasingly into play. Concerning feminism, Ozick quarreled early on with those separatist feminists who insisted on absolute gender difference of the intellect and imagination. One such feminist is Barbara Koenig Quart, whose review of Art & Ardor (1983) finds Ozick's rejection of female separatism “particularly odd in view of her enormous concern for Jewish identity, and her scorn for ‘universalists’ (mainly Jews who insist they are just like everyone else).” Because of Ozick's distance from “the fertility and vitality of contemporary feminism” and its “liberating effect of acknowledging that women have a different … experience,” her essays on Edith Wharton and Virginia Woolf are seriously defective in Quart's judgment. By refusing “any degree of sympathetic identification” with these fellow women artists, Ozick herself commits sexism—observing the childless, nonresponsible state of Wharton and Woolf, for example, without realizing that by those standards “the equally childless and duty-free Henry James should be open to similar criticism.”³

Levitation (1982) provided the occasion for E. M. Broner to transfer such doubts about Ozick's feminist loyalties from her essays to her fiction. “The Sewing Harems,” according to Broner's review in the Ms. of April 1982, “is an attack on women bonding, on womanly gods, and on the concept of utopian society that informs much of today's feminist fiction.” Worse yet, during our present period of “the rebonding of mothers and daughters in fiction, in literary studies and oral histories of our foremothers,” Ozick produces “no natural births, rather miraculous ones [like Puttermesser creating Xanthippe], and the offspring turn upon their mothers.” Or mothers turn upon offspring, like Puttermesser decreating Xanthippe, leaving a set of disturbing questions in the wake of this “dazzling and worrisome” book:

What is the lesson to women here? … Are we the devouring vagina that Freud … would dream of? … One wonders: Why did the mothers have to kill the daughters? Why does one of our best writers, a woman, join the chorus of male voices?

Yet another mode of feminist protest came in reply to “Notes toward Finding the Right Question,” Ozick's attempt to address the troubling question of woman's inferior place within Orthodox Judaism. Even her beloved Maimonides, she admits, “frequently uses the phrase ‘women and the ignorant’” to denote female inferiority, and he also “recommends wife-beating.”⁴ Ozick's answer to the dilemma is to deny any connection between this sort of sexism and “the Voice of the Lord of History.” Through lack of theological understanding, she maintains, Jewish males have emulated the worldwide pattern of their sex in elevating mere sociological bias to a divine status. The fall of man through Eve's lapse, for example, Ozick defines as a Christian and not Judaic convention. The answer to the problem of Jewish religious sexism, she concludes, requires amending the silence of Torah, which, though not justifying female inferiority, admittedly failed to specify a Mosaic Commandment: “Thou shalt not lessen the humanity of women.” By reason of its “single missing Commandment,” Ozick says, “Torah—one's heart stops in one's mouth as one dares to say these words—Torah is in this respect frayed.” It is the historic task of our age to institute the missing Commandment—“not … for the sake of women; [nor] … for the sake of the Jewish people. It is necessary for the sake of Torah; to preserve and strengthen Torah itself” (151, 152).

In a rebuttal of Ozick's essay entitled “The Right Question is Theological,” Judith Plaskow insists that Ozick has evaded the theological basis of patriarchy. Comparing “the situation of the Jewish woman … to the situation of the Jew in non-Jewish culture,”⁵ Plaskow says that real feminism thus “demands a new understanding of Torah, God, and Israel: an understanding of Torah that begins with acknowledgment of the profound injustice of Torah itself” (231). In 1984, five years after her “Notes toward Finding the Right Question” was published, Ozick put out a biblical exegesis to bear out her title, “Torah as Feminism, Feminism as Torah.” Here she insists that the basic precepts of Judaism—man being made in the image of his Creator, for example—give no occasion nor example to validate male supremacy, because the image of the Creator has no face or gender. And so the quarrel between feminism and Torah springs from a false reading of Torah, with feminism, not Holy Writ, thereby falling into danger: “if Jewish feminism does not emerge from Torah, it will disintegrate.”⁶

It seems reasonable to suppose that this sort of deference to Orthodoxy gives proof enough of Ozick's Jewish identity. Coincident with her emergence as a “Jewish writer,” however, Ozick's fictions have provoked sharp controversy among Jewish-American intellectuals, among whom some have gone so far as to publicly declare her an anti-Semite. Ironically, the worst such storm of bitterness arose in response to one of her earliest, finest, and most “Jewish” stories, “Envy; or, Yiddish in America”:

There was a vast brouhaha over this story. A meeting was called by the Yiddish writers, I learned later. The question was whether or not to condemn me publicly. Privately, they all furiously condemned me. Simon Weber … compared me to the “commissars of Warsaw and Moscow,” anti-Semites of the first order. I was astonished and unbelievably hurt. … What I had intended was a great lamentation for the murder of Yiddish, the mother-tongue of a thousand years, by the Nazis. Instead, here were all these writers angry at me.

(Teicholz 179)

Bloodshed, Ozick's most purely “Jewish” book, merely extended the controversy. On one hand, Rosellen Brown thinks the title story “fails” because of Ozick's commitment to Orthodoxy: “the inhibition against tale-telling has taken its toll.” Though she goes on to say that “Ozick's failures are infinitely more interesting than most writers' successes,” Brown continues to fault the specifically Jewish character of Ozick's craft, which makes the stories “move like Talmudic argument, not like stories on their way to a destination.” On the other hand, Pearl K. Bell, alarmed over “the apostasy of assimilation” among modern Jewish intellectuals, praises Ozick for her “most uncompromising indictment of the Jewish surrender to Gentile America.⁷ But then again, from the point of view of other Jewish writers Ozick's uncompromising indictment seems nothing more than an instance of arrogant fanaticism. Deborah Heiligman Weiner writes:

This contempt of Ozick's is overpowering. She doesn't offer a viable alternative with which to replace Jewish literature as it is today, yet she feels free to level criticism at those who make the effort. For example, she doubts whether Isaac Bashevis Singer … is a writer of “Jewish stories” at all, since no other writer departs so thoroughly and so deliberately from the mainstream of Mosaic vision.

We have arrived back at that texture Ozick imposes on the world, that false dichotomy: the Pagan versus the Mosaic.⁸

Compounding the confusion is Ozick's own sense of weakness concerning her Jewish identity. The Second Commandment forbids not only her storytelling, she confesses, but also her passion for Jewish history, which has become another idol that she has raised “instead of” God: “I am in thrall to the history of the Jews. It is the history of the Jews that seizes me ultimately. … History is my master and I its servant.”⁹ Nor is being stiff-necked before God Ozick's only transgression against her Jewish heritage. She has also succumbed, she admits, to that very process of assimilation that she has loudly decried in de-Judaized writers like Philip Roth and Norman Mailer. R. Barbara Gitenstein reports Ozick's act of confession:

Last Sunday night, I saw a 1938 Polish-made Yiddish film called Teyve. I was amazed to learn about all the layers and layers of forgetfulness and assimilation I—who am dedicated to not forgetting, who despise assimilation … discovered in myself. … Mamaloshen [Yiddish] is the language of my emotions, but I don't possess it.¹⁰

In case this sort of self-criticism proved insufficient, help was never very far away. Eugene S. Mornell, for example, attacked Ozick for holding a view of Judaism so narrow as to consider Harold Bloom “anti-Judaic. And not only Bloom but the Kabbalists, the Hasidim, Gershom Scholem. (What a long list she must have.)”¹¹ Earl Rovit, reviewing Levitation, also deplores Ozick's tendency “to issue exclusionary decrees,” by which she divides the world between “the fold of an Orthodox sensibility and those who deviate, a category capable of expanding to include everyone except some death-camp survivors.’”¹² And Burt Jacobson too accuses Ozick of maintaining a “view of Judaism [that] is extremely narrow and historically inaccurate.” Because her “rigid puritanical stance reifies the tradition into an idol,” he says, she replicates “the idol-making she imputes to Bloom,” cutting herself off meanwhile from those deep springs of creativity evidenced by the “mystical flights … [of] so great a luminary as Rabbi Akiva himself.”¹³

But yet, it was the flights of mysticism in “Levitation”—the scene of levitation—that brought on Joseph Epstein's cry of protest: “Madam, I implore you, get those Jews down, please!” The “atmosphere up there, in that living room aloft, … finally seems extremely thin,” Epstein explains. “I prefer my Jews grounded.”¹⁴ Because her stories are so fanciful—Epstein names “Levitation,” “The Pagan Rabbi,” and “Bloodshed” to make the point—Epstein pronounces them “willed and schematic,” “a muddle.” Saying, “I admire almost everything about her … but her stories,” Epstein considers her probably “a better essayist than novelist”—mainly because the essays manifest a more credible realism.

Although Ozick renounced “the heavy mantle of ‘Jewish writer’” in 1984,¹⁵ commentary about her Jewishness continued to dominate the criticism of the later 1980s. To a large extent, this tendency reflected her readers' enhanced understanding of the theme of idolatry in her writings, but several critics moved beyond that insight to make new observations. Haim Chertok, in “Ozick's Hoofprints,” makes an excellent point about Ozick's use of the concept of “waiting” in the Jewish ethos:

Waiting entails both self-control and a sense of the purposes of history. It is for Ozick a heroic Jewish occupation and profession. … As she notes in “The Fourth Sparrow,” [Gershom] Scholem's masterwork details the cataclysmic upheaval of the Jewish world when it surrendered to the pretensions of Sabbatai Sevi, when it grew tired of waiting for the end of days. Messianism run amok is likewise the very center of fictions like “Puttermesser and Xanthippe” and “The Sewing Harems.” Murder itself ensues.

(emphasis Chertok's)¹⁶

Janet Handler Burstein's contribution to the “Jewishness” discourse is to take Ozick's argument against idolatry into new ground. Citing Ozick's definition of imagination as “the power to penetrate evil, to take on evil, to become evil,” Burstein identifies a peculiarly Jewish notion of evil that Ozick's fiction often propagates, most notably in “The Pagan Rabbi”:

the sense of fluid or amorphous identity … which is a given for the artist, is anathema to Jewish thought; the root preoccupation of Leviticus … is precisely to classify, to fix phenomena within their categories, and to forbid the mixing of categories that would cloud the boundaries between one form or kind of life and another.¹⁷

Exemplifying this mixing of categories is the tree nymph in “The Pagan Rabbi,” at once “commandingly human in aspect” and “unmistakably flowerlike” and therefore illustrative of “both the seductive delights and the moral dangers that Ozick associates with art” (89–90).

Ellen Pifer's superb analysis of the Puttermesser stories adds a new complexity to this larger view of the “Jewishness” of Ozick's fiction. The narrative reflexivity and fantasy in these stories, says Pifer, do more than signify Ozick's place within postmodern or antirealist literature. More important, by refusing to “bestow apparently godlike authority on an author or biographer,” they counteract the risk of idolatry that storytelling engenders by competing with God's creation.¹⁸ In contrast to Puttermesser's ruinous lapse into the power of magic and fantasy, Ozick's artistic creativity thus “testifies to [her] profoundly moral commitment as an artist. Like most of her other fiction, both the Puttermesser stories [in Levitation] employ post-modernist techniques to convey a deeply orthodox vision of reality.”

In 1987, the publication of The Messiah of Stockholm set the stage for our final chorus of cacophonous critical voices. Dismissed by Paul Stuewe as “a surprisingly lightweight and undistinctive novel,” it was hailed by Harold Bloom as a “brilliant new novel” which portrays, in Lars, “the most persuasive and poignant figure” in all Ozick's fiction, while also displaying (in the “Messiah” manuscript) “certainly the most vivid and revelatory prose she has published so far.”¹⁹ Because this book reflects Ozick's “awareness that her earlier view of art as idolatry was too severe,” The Messiah of Stockholm “marks the central point in Ozick's writing to date,” Bloom says, enabling her “to reconcile her need to create tales, idols of a sort, and her desire to continue as a truster in the covenant, a moral follower of Jewish tradition.” As a result, she is “helping to mature an American Jewish literature that may aid in the larger venture of seeking continuity in an authentic American Jewish culture.”

Bloom's delight in seeing Ozick become “a true daughter of [Bruno] Schulz, whose Jewishness … is fascinatingly implicit in his writing,” was not universally infectious. Janet Malcolm, for one, found the “Messiah” manuscript within the novel—which Bloom called her “most vivid and revelatory prose” yet published—both badly written and un-Schulzian: “it could not possibly have been written by Schulz. His delicate, poetic stories are about as far as you can get from the stiff, cerebral, didactic piece of surrealism that Ozick has concocted.”²⁰ Calling the world of this novel “completely artificial,” Malcolm attributes its “strange failure” to the total incompatibility between Ozick's “stern Sinaitic art” and Schulz's concept of fiction as pure escapist playfulness. For Robert Alter, likewise, the novel failed stylistically, its “wild hyperbole” betraying “an attempt to substitute rhetorical intensity for experiential depth.”²¹ Worse yet, in flat contradiction to Bloom, Alter declares this novel not only un-Schulzian but disastrously un-Jewish. “The location of The Messiah of Stockholm makes it her first pervasively ‘Gentile’ fiction,” Alter observes, and the result of that choice is to make the book un-Ozickian as well:

I would not for a moment suggest that a Jewish writer needs to write about Jewish subjects, but it is peculiar that so much of what Cynthia Ozick cares about most deeply … is excluded from this book: the Jewish people as the bearer of a distinctive history; Judaism with its uncompromising monotheistic imperatives; Israel as a radical new possibility in the Jewish relation to history. … In Cynthia Ozick's new novel …, the absence of either Israel or of a persuasive sense of real history is a symptom of the narrow limits of the merely literary notions within which her fiction is enacted.

(54, 55)

In the fall 1987 Studies in American Jewish Literature, Daniel Walden not only disagreed with this judgment, calling The Messiah of Stockholm “Ozick's most profound and well-crafted work to date” (173), but devoted the entire issue to a book-length collection of essays called “The World of Cynthia Ozick.” The giant thrust given Ozick scholarship by this volume extends beyond the journal itself into the books undertaken by several of its authors: Sanford Pinsker (see below), Sarah Blacher Cohen (in progress), and Elaine Kauvar (see p. 205, note 2). The gem of the collection is Cynthia Ozick's own essay, “The Young Self and the Old Writer,” which adds importantly to our conception of the artist. Calling the Old Writer “dangerous, slippery, however overtly responsible and conscientious,” Ozick impersonates a post-modern sensibility (“undoubtedly Yale-derived” is her sly phrase) by raising fundamental questions about her identity:

Isn't autobiographical writing, selective and therefore skewed—isn't all writing—essentially fiction? … The Old Writer is aware of what a trickster she has been. Is she, for instance, a “Jewish writer” at all? … In fiction, is there such a thing as “Jewish subject-matter,” or is there only subject-matter? Who will definitively settle for the notion that a tale is about its subject-matter anyhow?

(165)

Walden's introduction to the collection augments this portrait of the artist by relating Ozick's conflicted identity—as a modernist who reveres tradition, an Orthodox Jew who wants women rabbis, a rationalist skeptic who veers off into mysticism—to the inner springs of her creativity: “The point is that the tension she lives with is the energy that drives her” (2). And Diane Cole adds some new brush strokes by tracking down Ozick's random essays in “The Uncollected Autobiography of Cynthia Ozick.” One of Cole's discoveries is a memoir by Ozick's mother, Shifra Regelson Ozick, about the family's difficult passage in 1906 from Russia to New York. In an Esquire essay about a schoolmate of Ozick's, Cole found a prototype of the parasitic Chimeses in “An Education.” And in two New York Times essays, one written under a pseudonym (“Trudi Vosce”), Cole found good reason for Ozick's Zionist militance. In one she decried the murder of her teenaged cousin by a Palestinian terrorist, and in the other—a prelude to The Shawl, Cole says—she interviewed a Jewish woman imprisoned for ten years in a Siberian labor camp and prevented for fourteen more years from emigrating to Israel.²²

The major critical achievement in this volume belongs to Elaine M. Kauvar for her two essays “The Dread of Moloch: Idolatry as Metaphor in Cynthia Ozick's Fiction” and “Courier for the Past: Cynthia Ozick and Photography.” In the first of these, Kauvar sifts through Talmudic lore, Greek legend, and aesthetic theory to construe “The Doctor's Wife,” “Rosa,” and The Cannibal Galaxy as “a midrash of the Second Commandment”—a major phase of Ozick's cultural warfare against postmodern unseriousness: “In an age devoid of values, depersonalized by autonomous technique, dehumanized by solipsism, disrupted by cultural anomie, diminished by opaque language, and deadended by ahistoricism, Cynthia Ozick's fiction replenishes, familiarizes, universalizes, connects, enlightens, and redeems” (127). The other essay, arguing that photography is Ozick's “summarizing metaphor for art,” brings a powerful sense of history to bear on “Shots” and other writings: “The enduring importance of memory to the Jewish people originates in the Hebrew Bible where remembrance is pivotal, where the command to remember is absolute, and where the various declensions of the verb zakhar (‘to remember’) appear at least one hundred and sixty-nine times” (130). In both essays Kauvar makes crucial use of Ozick's “Judaic” preference for the caterpillar (in a state of “becoming”) over the butterfly (the perfected thing).

Bonnie Lyons' essay, “Cynthia Ozick as a Jewish Writer” (an appropriate title for the whole collection), makes some astute observations about Ozick's cultural inconsistencies: “sometimes she defines Judaism as a unique and distinct religious vision, at other times she treats it as something like a synonym for moral seriousness” (14). So, too, Lyons observes, in rejecting feminism as biologically deterministic Ozick forgets that Jewishness also has a biological component, except for the few proselytes. Lyons' analysis of “The Pagan Rabbi” and the Puttermesser-Xanthippe stories ranks with the best criticism of those stories.

S. Lillian Kremer's “The Splendor Spreads Wide: Trust and Cynthia Ozick's Aggadic Voice” likewise ranks with the best criticism of Trust. By focusing on Enoch's conversion from Communist to observant Jew, Kremer shows how “Jewish history … and Jewish values function as the novel's enduring touchstone” (27). In the end, the force of the Holocaust is so harrowing as to overwhelm the Hellenic paganism associated with Tilbeck, Kremer argues persuasively, and that is why a “Hebraic coda” terminates the book with Tilbeck the nature god dead, and Vand the Holocaust scholar immersed in Orthodox worship. Kremer astutely notes how Ozick's scale of Jewish history reaches back in Trust to Hitler's Roman prototype, Titus (TR 152)—two leaders of vast superpowers, separated by two millennia, whose efforts to exterminate Judaism ended in lost empires while Judaism lives on.

Of the other essays in “The World of Cynthia Ozick,” space permits only a mention. Jeffrey Rush's “Talking to Trees: Address as Metaphor in ‘The Pagan Rabbi’” uses Paul Ricoeur's and Tzvetan Todorov's theories to distinguish Jewish from Gentile ideas of metaphor. Ellen Serlen Uffen's “The Levity of Cynthia Ozick” extends the idea of the golem from “Puttermesser” to “Virility,” “A Mercenary,” “Envy,” and “The Pagan Rabbi.” Amy J. Elias' “Puttermesser and Pygmalion” sees pagan versus Jewish views of art—“creation-as-Galatea and creation-as-golem”—as posing “the central conflict in ‘Puttermesser and Xanthippe’” (67). Sanford Pinsker's “Astrophysics, Assimilation, and Cynthia Ozick's The Cannibal Galaxy” applies the cannibalism metaphor culturally to the main characters. Cecilia Konchar Farr's “Lust for a Story: Cynthia Ozick's ‘Usurpation’ as Fabulation” cogently illuminates that greatly convoluted story with help from Robert Scholes's Fabulation and Metafiction. Joseph Cohen's “‘Shots’: A Case History of the Conflict between Relativity Theory and the Newtonian Absolutes” relates Ozick's parable about photography to the great battle of modern physics, “between relativity as promulgated by Einstein, Bohr, Heisenberg, and their associates and the principles which have come down to us from Sir Isaac Newton” (98). Sarah Blacher Cohen's “Cynthia Ozick and Her New Yiddish Golem” compares Xanthippe to earlier golem prototypes, both Jewish and Gentile (e.g., Frankenstein), as well as to the Freudian id. And finally, Mary J. Chenoweth's indispensible bibliographical essay is a comprehensive reference work for writings by and about Cynthia Ozick through June of 1986.

To complete the critical Wunderjahr 1987, the University of Missouri Press brought out Sanford Pinsker's brief but usefully intelligent book, The Uncompromising Fictions of Cynthia Ozick. Beginning with mention of Ozick's earlier American forebears, chiefly Hawthorne and Melville for their theme of “Original Sin,” Pinsker also sees the lineaments of Anne Bradstreet and Emily Dickinson in the aged poetess of “Virility.” Pinsker's review of Ozick's Jewish-American predecessors—Abraham Cahan, Henry Roth, Philip Roth, Delmore Schwartz, and Saul Bellow—also yields good insights, including the argument that her “uncompromising attacks on such ‘pagans’ as Harold Bloom, Norman Mailer, Allen Ginsberg, and Philip Roth are thinly disguised attacks against aspects of herself” (40).

Pinsker's analyses of the fiction can also be illuminating. He explains the inferiority of “The Dock-Witch” to “The Pagan Rabbi,” for example, by arguing that the secular character of “The Dock-Witch” deprives it of dramatic tension, making it a portrait of Pan with no Moses for counterpoint. He writes well about Ozick's version of the “secret sharer” theme that connects Bleilip and the rebbe in “Bloodshed,” Morris and Lushinski in “A Mercenary.” (He is ingenious in seeing Morris as a black version of the Jewish “hapless, and comic, schlemiel”—a man at ease in the African jungle but victimized by the far worse “jungle out there” in New York City.) The finest segment of Pinsker's book, I would say, is his discussion of one of Ozick's most complex, problematic stories, “Usurpation” (80–85).

In 1988 Joseph Lowin's Cynthia Ozick accomplished a giant stride in Ozick criticism.²³ As the director of the Midrasha Institute of Jewish Studies, Lowin brought to bear an uncommon mastery of the Judaic lore relevant to Ozick's writings. As a Ph.D. in French literature, Lowin also made good use of his direct access to European literati without lapsing into the Derrida/Foucault/Lacan style of guru jargon. And as a correspondent of Cynthia Ozick's, Lowin assembled information of crucial value concerning the personal and literary development of the author.

Tracing her career in roughly chronological order, Lowin begins with a succinct but informative chronology of the artist's life, followed by two chapters that explain her early career, including several ventures in poetry. The idea of Midrash strongly affects Lowin's commentary, coming into play in the “Teaching and Preaching” function that he finds prevalent in Ozick's work—in her essays, in such stories as “An Education” and “Bloodshed,” and in such novels as Trust and The Cannibal Galaxy (52). Another of Lowin's ideas is to organize chapters that pair off Ozick's writings in dialectical fashion: “A Jewish Fantastic: ‘The Pagan Rabbi’ and ‘Levitation’” (chapter 5) versus “A Jewish Realism: The Cannibal Galaxy” (chapter 6); and “Rewriting Others: ‘Usurpation (Other People's Stories)’” (chapter 7) versus “Rewriting Herself: ‘The Shawl’ and ‘Rosa’” (chapter 8). Although the whole book is a commendable achievement in criticism, I judge its finest segments to be its discussion of “Usurpation” (90–105), its analysis of the Puttermesser stories (chapter 9), and its penultimate chapter on The Messiah of Stockholm—a book that he considers “a culmination of Ozick's rewriting activity and the logical conclusion of much she has written to date” (145). A misfortunate lapse in Lowin's judgment, as in Pinsker's before him, arises in the book's concluding paragraph: “Of one last thing we may above all be certain: We have not yet seen Ozick's masterpiece” (165). That seems a harsh burden to impose on a highly accomplished sixty-year-old writer.

In 1989, Vera Emuma Kielsky's Inevitable Exiles applied an even stronger Jewish consciousness to Ozick's fiction than did Pinsker and Lowin.²⁴ As her subtitle indicates—Cynthia Ozick's View of the Precariousness of Jewish Existence in a Gentile Society—Kielsky sees Ozick's fiction as a weapon of cultural warfare: “Her fiction … is an undisguised assault on Jewish vulnerability to the Gentile standards, and are [sic], in effect, Jewish attacks on spheres of Gentile predominance” (11). By limiting her coverage to selected stories from Ozick's three collections, Kielsky scants a considerable range of material germane to her topic, but she gains enough space to make an in-depth analysis of these ten stories. In many of these stories Kielsky sees the Jewish characters as schizoid, torn between conscious pride in being one of God's chosen people and subconscious desire to be rid of the stigma of being Jewish (20). Her treatment of this schism in the Morris-Lushinski relationship of “A Mercenary” is especially astute (52–53), but she also writes well about Ozick's wide-ranging analogies: of “The Pagan Rabbi” and Goethe's Faust; of “The Dock-Witch,” the Circe episode in The Odyssey, and Heine's “Die Lorelei”; of “Puttermesser and Xanthippe” and the Book of Genesis. Her correlation of the Undine myth (“The Dock-Witch”) with the Undine of the Kabbala (132n) is another useful bit of learning.

Unlike Lowin, who sees Ozick's vision as redemptive (e.g., The Messiah of Stockholm “brings redemption both to the creation of God and the creations of man,” 161), Kielsky brings her analysis of the fiction to a terminus of extreme pessimism. Puttermesser, Una Meyer, Edmund Gate, and Edelshtein—in her analysis—appear unredeemable: “In all four stories, … her protagonists … finally lose control over their destinies. … Her stress lies on … the pathology rather than the remedy, for she seems not to believe that there is a solution to the protagonists' problems” (195). Before leaving Kielsky's book, we should note with gratitude its excellent bibliography.

There remains Lawrence S. Friedman's Understanding Cynthia Ozick.²⁵ In his preface, Matthew J. Bruccoli (the general editor of the Understanding Contemporary American Literature series) declares modest intentions—these books “are planned as a series of guides or companions for students or good nonacademic readers.” But in fact Friedman's book, like Lowin's, is exemplary criticism—astute, learned, and cogently written. Like Lowin and Pinsker, he is at his best when discussing “Usurpation” (24–25 and 107–13), but he is also good at making illuminating conjectures. The closing sentence of “Bloodshed,” for example (“Then you are as bloody as anyone”), evokes for Friedman Stephen Crane's classic novella: “in this case the blood shed by Jews throughout a tragic history … becomes the red badge of Jewish identity” (106). So, too, Friedman sees the shadow of Philip Roth's Amy Bellette (the girl who thought she was Anne Frank) behind Lars Andemening's supposition that he was the son of Bruno Schulz (160). He expatiates in new ways on the connections between Ozick's Adela in The Messiah of Stockholm and the Adela of Bruno Schulz's two published books (164–65), and he detects the presence of Jerzy Kosinski not only in “A Mercenary” but in The Shawl (118). His discussion of the golem-making tradition likewise offers new insights (135–36), as does his analogy between Freudian psychology (in “Freud's Room”) and idolatry (3).

In the late 1980s and early 1990s, the teachings of “Critical Theory” inevitably made inroads into Ozick criticism. Earl Rovit's “The Two Languages of Cynthia Ozick,” while happily eschewing the Derridean penchant for opacity, in effect deconstructs Ozick's writings so as to find “a manner similar to that of an animated comic strip” in which “the whole enterprise seethes in a steady turbulence of rage.”²⁶ Characters such as Bleilip, Edelshtein, and Isaac Kornfeld are offered in evidence of this thesis: “As in cartoons, motives are reduced to single adrenal urgencies, personality is equated with blunt obsession, and the fluidity of normal human intercourse is grotesquely rendered in a series of collisions when a caricatured dread or desire comes into thudding impact against its immutable or immovable limit” (37). Because this “cartoonlike style,” which is “blunt, didactic, comic, judgmental, often cruel, and severely moralistic,” is often juxtaposed with Ozick's “second language, the style of ‘the nimbus’ or … the corona-style [as seen in Beulah Hilt's paintings],” Rovit believes “the central problem of Ozick's art is the existence of two languages whose generic structures incarnate different purposes which impel them in contrary directions” (40–42). Observing that “her typical tale travels from rage to grief,” Rovit considers her cartoon style “energized by the rage, her corona-style by the grief” (47). Despite his admiration for The Messiah of Stockholm as “a nearly sustained and breathless stylistic tour de force,” Rovit considers Ozick's work badly damaged by its harsh didacticism: “even an unsentimental reader may feel that the comic mechanisms designed to expose and punish vice have themselves become vicious in their instrumentality” (44).

In Michael Greenstein's “The Muse and the Messiah: Cynthia Ozick's Aesthetics,” Ozick's work gets placed (or should I say sited?) within a flowering garden of Theoretical Phrases: “self-consuming artifacts on the borderline between modernism and postmodernism,” “floating signifiers that inhibit frozen signification,” “an infinity of heretical hermeneutics.” Fortunately, among his clumps of jargon Greenstein includes a number of useful insights, especially by way of interpreting Ozick's imagery. For example, he links the zebras at the end of The Messiah of Stockholm to the striped uniforms worn by death-camp inmates, and he relates Joseph Brill's name (meaning “spectacles” in Hebrew) to a pattern of sight images in The Cannibal Galaxy. Readers who find the dichotomy/continuity between modernism and postmodernism interesting may consult another Greenstein essay, “Ozick, Roth, and Postmodernism,” for a discussion of “Ozick's alignment with some, not all, aspects of postmodernism” in The Messiah of Stockholm.²⁷ They may need to watch out for “the undertow of metonymic reality” (58), however, in numerous constructions like the following: “realistic novels are predominantly metonymic both in their horizontal connections and in a vessel's relationship between container and its contents” (59). Or: “In this realm of uncertainty, through a crack in the wall, and during a translucent dusk, ‘no one knew’ about barbaric epistemology in Sweden's no-man's-land” (57).

Since its publication in 1987, controversy over The Messiah of Stockholm has become a (perhaps the) major feature of Ozick criticism. Anne Redmon regrets the burning of the Messiah manuscript, an irresponsible act that “liberates” Lars to become “a slab of insensitivity” in the conclusion. Sylvia Barack Fishman, however, while agreeing that Lars is “wrong in capitulating to the world of easy popularity at the end of the novel,” holds that Lars also was wrong to idolize Schulz and his manuscript, which got him “involved in a pagan, inhuman enterprise.”²⁸ Elizabeth Rose differs from Redmon and Fishman in thinking that in the end the novel affirms Ozick's Jewish values, by “celebrating the end of Lars's alienation” and returning him to “an ordinary life within a community.”²⁹ Sanford Pinsker, however, seeing nothing ordinary about it, believes that “one will have to look deeper than the work of Bruno Schulz” or even than “contemporary Jewish theology” to understand Ozick's novel: “My own hunch is that the Kabbalah explains much of the energy in The Messiah of Stockholm.”³⁰ Pinsker's fine essay compares Roth's resurrection of Anne Frank in The Ghost Writer with Ozick's recovery of Schulz in The Messiah of Stockholm.

To conclude, the last decade has been a good one for Ozick criticism, ending in a plethora of awards and honors. Inasmuch as they, too, comprise a form of literary criticism, I shall end this section on The Critical Reckoning with a brief checklist of these honors (with thanks to Bloom, Lowin, Friedman, and others for their compilations): 1968—Fellow, National Endowment for the Arts; 1971—Jewish Book Council Award and B'nai B'rith Heritage Award for The Pagan Rabbi; 1973—American Academy of Arts and Letters Award for Literature; 1975—First Prize in O. Henry Prize Stories competition for “Usurpation”; 1977—Jewish Book Council Award for Bloodshed; 1982—Guggenheim Fellowship; 1983—Strauss Living Award from the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters; 1984—Honorary Doctorates from Yeshiva University and Hebrew Union College and Distinguished Alumnus Award from New York University, First Prize of O. Henry Prize Stories competition for “Rosa”; 1985—Presenter of Phi Beta Kappa Oration at Harvard University; 1987—Honorary Doctorate from Hunter College; 1988—Elected to American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters.

On 28 December 1992, Cynthia Ozick gave a reading at the Modern Language Association convention in New York City. To an overflow crowd of many hundreds who packed the large assembly hall, she recited passages from “Alfred Chester's Wig” and “Puttermesser Paired.” (The two segments she read described, respectively, her fruitful rivalry with Chester in their Freshman English class, and the failed Venetian honeymoon of George Eliot and her much younger bridegroom, John Cross.) What made the occasion even more triumphant than it seemed was the coincidental scheduling of her reading at the same hour as that of Ralph Ellison, a few doors away. Probably most people in the room, including Ozick herself (so she told me), would have helped honor the grand master of African-American fiction had the schedule permitted. As it was, this large throng of admirers, in making their painful choice, confirmed how high a place she holds in the estimate of her contemporary readers. …

Notes

1. Toni Morrison's comment appears in her interview with Tom LeClair in the New Republic 21 March 1981, 29.

2. My book, which was completed in the summer of 1992 and revised to suit my editors that fall, was not affected by Elaine Kauvar's subsequent publication, in April 1993, of Cynthia Ozick's Fiction: Tradition and Invention (Indiana University Press). Having just now been asked to review it for American Literature magazine, I feel assured from scanning its contents that our approaches to Ozick's oeuvre are so different as to pose no serious problems of duplication. As I had supposed, Kauvar's fusion of a brilliant critical intelligence with a rich knowledge of Jewish and classical lore figures to render her critique permanently unsurpassed in the shelf of Ozick criticism. Because her study is so perceptive and substantial on a page-by-page basis, I cannot hope to summarize it here. Instead, I urge my reader to turn to it as an essential landmark of Ozick criticism. So far as my own book is concerned, I consider it to be complementary to rather than competitive with Kauvar's superb exegesis.

3. Barbara Koenig Quart, “An Esthete in Spite of Herself,” Nation, July 23–30, 1983, 87.

4. See “Notes toward Finding the Right Question,” reprinted in On Being a Jewish Feminist (New York: Schocken Books, 1983), 131.

5. Judith Plaskow, “The Right Question is Theological,” On Being a Jewish Feminist 226.

6. Ozick, “Torah as Feminism, Feminism as Torah,” Congress Monthly, September/October 1984, 7–10.

7. Rosellen Brown, review of Bloodshed in the New Republic, 5 June 1976, 30–31; Pearl K. Bell, “New Jewish Voices,” Commentary, June 1981, 63.

8. Deborah Heiligman Weiner, “Cynthia Ozick, Pagan vs. Jew (1966–1976),” Studies in American Jewish Literature 3 (1983): 186.

9. On page 183 of her essay, Ms. Weiner (see note 8 above) cites this passage from Ozick's “Four Questions of the Rabbis,” Reconstructionist, 18 February 1972, 23.

10. R. Barbara Gitenstein, “The Temptation of Apollo and the Loss of Yiddish in Cynthia Ozick's Fiction,” Studies in American Jewish Literature 3 (1983): 194. Gitenstein considers Ozick's yearning for a Yiddish art to be in conflict with her status within modern American literature: “She does not feel that such self-contradiction can be overcome in Jewish literature” (200).

11. Eugene S. Mornell, letter to the editor, Commentary, May 1979, 8. By way of refuting Jacobson and Mornell (8), Ozick extends the definition of “literature in the service of God” to include not only Midrash and Talmud but also writings by such Gentiles as Thomas Mann, George Eliot, Jane Austen, and Tolstoy.

12. Earl Rovit, “The Bloodletting,” Nation, 20 February 1982, 207–8.

13. Burt Jacobson, letter to the editor, Commentary, May 1979, 7–8.

14. Joseph Epstein, “Cynthia Ozick, Jewish Writer,” Commentary, March 1984, 67. My other citations from this essay occur on pages 66–69.

15. Ozick, letter to the editor, Commentary, May, 1984, 10.

16. Haim Chertok, “Ozick's Hoofprints,” Modern Jewish Studies, Annual 6, published by Yiddish magazine 6, no. 4 (1987): 11.

17. Janet Handler Burstein, “Cynthia Ozick and the Transgressions of Art,” American Literature 59, no. 1 (March 1987): 87.

18. Ellen Pifer, “Cynthia Ozick: Invention and Orthodoxy,” in Contemporary Women Writers: Narrative Strategies, ed. Catherine Rainwater and William J. Scheick (Lexington: UP of Kentucky, 1985), 91.

19. Review by Paul Stuewe in Quill & Quote, May 1987, 25. Harold Bloom, “The Book of the Father,” NYTBR, 22 March 1987, 1, 36.

20. Janet Malcolm, “Graven Images,” New Yorker, 8 June 1987, 102–4. This quote is cited from page 103.

21. Robert Alter, “Defenders of the Faith,” Commentary, July 1987, 52–55. This quote is cited from page 53.

22. The “Trudie Vosce” essay was published in The New York Times Magazine on March 16, 1978 (A26); the other essay in the Times Sunday Magazine of 14 March 1971.

23. Joseph Lowin, Cynthia Ozick (Boston: G. K. Hall, 1988).

24. Vera Emuma Kielsky, Inevitable Exiles (New York: Peter Lang, 1989).

25. Lawrence S. Friedman, Understanding Cynthia Ozick (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1991).

26. Earl Rovit, “The Two Languages of Cynthia Ozick,” Studies in American Jewish Literature (SAJL) 8, no. 1 (Spring 1989): 36, 34.

27. Michael Greenstein, “The Muse and the Messiah,” SAJL 8, no. 1 (Spring 1989): 50–65, and “Ozick, Roth, and Postmodernism,” SAJL 10, no. 1 (Spring 1991): 54–63.

28. Anne Redmon, “Vision and Risk,” Michigan Quarterly Review 27, no. 1 (Winter 1988): 210; Sylvia Barack Fishman, “Imagining Ourselves,” SAJL 9, no. 1 (Spring 1990): 91.

29. Elizabeth Rose, “Cynthia Ozick's Liturgical Postmodernism,” SAJL 9, no. 1 (Spring 1990): 99.

30. Sanford Pinsker, “How Philip Roth and Cynthia Ozick Reimagine Their Significant Dead,” Modern Fiction Studies 35, no. 2 (Summer 1989): 234.