I have wanted to get to the core of Cynthia Ozick’s work and to grasp what motivates her, but the more I read about her, the more muddled were my conclusions. This 94-year-old Jewish writer has been delighting and provoking her followers for decades, yet I had a hunch there was something missing from the general consensus about her work.
Ozick was born in 1928 to adoring Jewish parents who owned a pharmacy in the Bronx. Soon enough, the Holocaust was raging overseas but Ozick was safely tucked away in a hammock behind her parent’s store, reading incessantly. She became enamored with Henry James and spent her twenties trying to emulate him in her lengthy novel Trustl. Critics found it tedious and emotionally inert. She fell out of love with James and decided that henceforth she would become a Jewish writer instead of an American writer who happened to be Jewish. She would allow her contemporaries, Philip Roth, Saul Bellow, Lionel Trilling, and Bernard Malamud to expend their energies assimilating; she would insist on not assimilating. She felt irritated and betrayed by WASP culture and the dismissive, casual, and snickering anti-Semitism among the pages of her former heroes: T.S. Eliot, Mark Twain, Ezra Pound, and even her former beloved Henry James.
She wrote a short piece about the Holocaust called “The Shawl,” which in less than 2,000 words traces the life of a mother named Rosa and her baby Magda who are on a forced march to a concentration camp. Ozick later regretted the piece, despite the fanfare it received, because she had come to believe that to fictionalize the Holocaust in any way was to desecrate the memory those lost as.
Another work, “Envy, or Yiddish in America” (1976), explores the psyche of an enraged Yiddish poet who envies another Yiddish poet whose work, translated for Anglophones, allowed him to reach a larger audience. He tags this more successful writer as “puerile, vicious, pitiable, ignorant.” Ozick’s characters are often consumed by jealousy or envy. She has spoken openly about her desire to be remembered — and the fear of obscurity. One senses, despite her accomplishments, that she believes the critics have overlooked her.
In “Alfred Chester’s Wig,” a personal piece she wrote for the New Yorker, she tenderly recalls a platonic friendship with a college boy. He listened to her attentively and once said that her face was pretty. But he soon moved on to others who were captivated by his charisma. He never became a successful writer, but she wonders if he remembers her, noting that not a day goes by when his face doesn’t flash before her. Soon afterwards, a man came along bringing with him boxes of marzipan to woo her. She married him and they eventually had a daughter. She barely allows the story’s buried regrets to surface, but still startles the reader with heartbreaking candor.
Ozick’s essays are master classes in explosive rhetoric and literary passion that overpower you with the strength, scholarliness, and inventiveness of her argument. In 2004, she wrote an article on anti-Semitism’s durability for the Observer that begins: “We thought it was finished. The ovens are long cooled, the anti-vermin gas dissipating into purifying clouds, cleansed air, nightmarish fable. The cries of the naked, decades gone, are mute; the bullets splitting throats and breasts and skulls, the human waterfall of bodies tipping over into the wooded ravine at Babi Yar, are no more than tedious footnotes on aging paper. The deportation ledgers, with their scrupulous lists of names of the doomed, what are they now? Museum artifacts. The heaps of eyeglasses and children’s shoes, the hills of human hair, lie disintegrating in their display cases, while only a little distance away the visitors’ cafeteria bustles and buzzes; sandwiches, Cokes, the waiting tour buses.”
One senses she uses Judaism to create her own borders which she relinquishes when she wishes. She has conceded that she is a skeptic and a rationalist, but is attracted to the magical blurriness of religious life and its aura. She often writes about Jews who reside at the fringes of religious life. In “Heir to a Glimmering World” (2004) she explores the exotic world of the Karaites who rejected the Talmud, insisting upon Torah alone, which ultimately relegated them to the dustbin of Jewish history. One of her characters, Professor Mitwisser, is drawn to this sect and their fanaticism, and we sense Ozick herself is drawn to those who become obsessed by a greater power, real or imaginary.
Critics such as Adam Kirsch and Joseph Epstein have weighed in on Ozick, admiring her talent, creativity, and unpredictability. Kirsch believes Ozick was especially sensitive to aspects of an American literary canon dominated by elitist Christian values – and prejudices that devalued Jews. She is known to be wary of reviewers who, she believes, are unable to look at the “horizonless freedoms, multiple histories, multiple libraries, multiple metaphysics and institutions” that have shaped an author’s life and writing.
Her new novel Antiquities, set in 1949, is a haunting chronicle of an old, embittered man named Lloyd Wilkinson Petrie. As one of the remaining trustees of the defunct Temple Academy of Boys, he has been asked to write a memoir of his time at the boarding school which has stirred up disturbing memories. He visits his late wife’s grave once a month, but never more. He is drawn to his secretary for solace. His son has decamped to California to pursue a flagging career in filmmaking. Their intermittent, empty phone conversations disquiet him.
Petrie recalls a particular day when a young man arrived at his harsh boarding school. He was instantly drawn to this boy with a strange name: Ben-Zion Elefantin. His first impression of the boy: “I never saw him eat a normal dinner. He seemed to live on bread and milk and hard-boiled eggs, and he always sat by himself. In chapel, even when reprimanded, he never removed his cap. In fact, I never saw him without it. And while the rest of us whispered and snickered and pretended to sneeze during the reading of the Gospel and all through the sermon, he was rigidly attentive. He joined in the singing of a few hymns, but for others he was willfully silent. In appearance, he was also uncommon. He was so thin as to approach the skeletal (his legs were nearer to bone than flesh) and this I attribute to the sparseness of diet. His complexion was what I believe is called olive, his hair was astounding red. And not the red of the Irish. As I write, I am put in mind of my father’s description of the red earth of his days with Cousin William: deeper and dense and more otherworldly than any commonplace Celtic red.” Petrie knows that befriending the boy will put him at odds with others, but he can’t help himself. He seeks him out and a closeness develops.
Petrie learns that the boy is an Elephantine Jew from Egypt, the very place his great cousin archeologist once roamed, and is part of a group of Jews who have been cut off from the Jews of Jerusalem who question their authenticity as Jews. Ben-Zion’s parents were brokers, but they were also seekers, who wandered the world looking for proof of their Jewish ancestry. He hoped one day they would come for him; it had been years since he had seen them. Petrie now understands that the rhythmic mumblings he hears every night and morning emanating from his friend’s room is the sound of praying. But he is obsessed with Ben-Zion – and recalling their intimate relationship as an old man, he realizes that lovelessness has defined his life.
The intensity of the prose suggests to me that the story mirrors Ozick’s biography. And it was with dismay that I came across a story by an ex-friend of hers, Merrill Joan Gerber, with whom she shared 33 years of intimate correspondence. These two Jewish women writers would commiserate about everything; their work, children, husbands, and health scares. Gerber writes of her shock in 2008 when she detects a change in register in Ozick’s letters — a nastiness bordering on harassment. She knew her friend was under pressure caring for her sick husband but the cruelty continued unabated. Ozick attacked Gerber for voting for Obama, and later on, for not voting for Trump, claiming Gerber was a traitor to the Jews. Ozick refused to conceal her disgust when Gerber’s daughters married a Gentile, and told her never to contact her again. Gerber, gentle and accommodating, and a bit of an Ozick groupie, wrote back one more time asking for permission to write about their friendship and quote from these letters. Ozick conceded.
Somehow this episode resonates with me because it fills in the blanks of countless interviews about Ozick where the interviewer seems flummoxed by a certain rigidity and coldness in her despite the sweet tea and cookies she might serve. It also made me realize that, like Petrie, Ozick’s grudges and resentments had pushed love and warmth away even when others were willing to stand her icy intolerance.
But what really floored me is how Cynthia Ozick transforms this angry and rigid malignity, that clearly holds a solid marker within her, into exquisitely wrought prose filled with insights about the fallibility of the human condition and the blind spots that hold us captive.
[Published by A.A. Knopf on April 13, 2021, 192 pages, $21.00 hardcover]