Understanding Cynthia Ozick

Discussing Jewish themes in Ozick's writings, examines the literary evocation of the Holocaust in the novels "Trust" (1966), "The Messiah of Stockholm" (1987), and in the story "The Shawl" (1989).

From one of our most preeminent writers, a tale that captures the shifting meanings of the past and how our experience colors those meanings In Antiquities, Lloyd Wilkinson Petrie, one of the seven elderly trustees of the now-defunct (for thirty-four years) Temple Academy for Boys, is preparing a memoir of his days at the school, intertwined with the troubling distractions of present events. As he navigates, with faltering recall, between the subtle anti-Semitism that pervaded the school's ethos and his fascination with his own family's heritage--in particular, his illustrious cousin, the renowned archaeologist Sir William Matthew Flinders Petrie--he reconstructs the passions of a childhood encounter with the oddly named Ben-Zion Elefantin, a mystifying older pupil who claims descent from Egypt's Elephantine Island. From this seed emerges one of Cynthia Ozick's most wondrous tales, touched by unsettling irony and the elusive flavor of a Kafka parable, and weaving, in her own distinctive voice, myth and mania, history and illusion.

With dashing originality and in prose that sings like an entire choir of sirens, Cynthia Ozick relates the life and times of her most compelling fictional creation. Ruth Puttermesser lives in New York City. Her learning is monumental. Her love life is minimal (she prefers pouring through Plato to romping with married Morris Rappoport). And her fantasies have a disconcerting tendency to come true - with disastrous consequences for what we laughably call "reality." Puttermesser yearns for a daughter and promptly creates one, unassisted, in the form of the first recorded female golem. Laboring in the dusty crevices of the civil service, she dreams of reforming the city - and manages to get herself elected mayor. Puttermesser contemplates the afterlife and is hurtled into it headlong, only to discover that a paradise found is also paradise lost. Overflowing with ideas, lambent with wit, The Puttermesser Papers is a tour de force by one of our most visionary novelists. "The finest achievement of Ozick's career... It has all the buoyant integrity of a Chagall painting." -San Francisco Chronicle "Fanciful, poignant... so intelligent, so finely expressed that, like its main character, it remains endearing, edifying, a spark of light in the gloom." -The New York Times "A crazy delight." -The New York Time Book Review

A small group of Jews weave a web of intrigue and fantasy around a book reviewer's contention that he is the son of Borus Schultz, the legendary Polish writer killed by the Nazis before his magnum opus, THE MESSIAH, could be brought to light.

In a collection that includes new essays written explicitly for this volume, one of our sharpest and most influential critics confronts the past, present, and future of literary culture. If every outlet for book criticism suddenly disappeared — if all we had were reviews that treated books like any other commodity — could the novel survive? In a gauntlet-throwing essay at the start of this brilliant assemblage, Cynthia Ozick stakes the claim that, just as surely as critics require a steady supply of new fiction, novelists need great critics to build a vibrant community on the foundation of literary history. For decades, Ozick herself has been one of our great critics, as these essays so clearly display. She offers models of critical analysis of writers from the mid-twentieth century to today, from Saul Bellow, Bernard Malamud, and Kafka, to William Gass and Martin Amis, all assembled in provocatively named groups: Fanatics, Monsters, Figures, and others. Uncompromising and brimming with insight, these essays are essential reading for anyone facing the future of literature in the digital age.

In her sixth novel, Cynthia Ozick retells the story of Henry James’s The Ambassadors as a photographic negative, retaining the plot but reversing the meaning. Foreign Bodies transforms Henry James’s prototype into a brilliant, utterly original, new American classic. At the core of the story is Bea Nightingale, a fiftyish divorced schoolteacher whose life has been on hold during the many years since her brief marriage. When her estranged, difficult brother asks her to leave New York for Paris to retrieve a nephew she barely knows, she becomes entangled in the lives of her brother’s family and even, after so long, her ex-husband. Every one of them is irrevocably changed by the events of just a few months in that fateful year. Traveling from New York to Paris to Hollywood, aiding and abetting her nephew and niece while waging a war of letters with her brother, facing her ex-husband and finally shaking off his lingering sneers from decades past, Bea Nightingale is a newly liberated divorcee who inadvertently wreaks havoc on the very people she tries to help.

A teenage girl goes to work for a chaotic family of Jewish immigrants, in a New York Times bestseller that’s “a cause for celebration” (Ann Patchett). In the 1930s, New York is swarming with Europe’s ousted dreamers, alien families adapting to a new world. Rose Meadows unknowingly enters the lives of one such family when she answers an ad for an “assistant” to a Herr Mitwisser, the patriarch of a large household living in an obscure little neighborhood, in a remote corner of the sparse and weedy northeast Bronx. With an uncertain future, and no clear idea of her duties, Rose—orphaned at eighteen and recently turned out by lover—has become a refugee among refugees. Expelled from Berlin’s elite, Professor Mitwisser—a researcher obsessed with an arcane religious doctrine—lives with his wife, a prominent physicist now quietly going mad, and Anneliese, their willful sixteen-year-old daughter. When Anneliese’s fierce longing draws a new outcast into the fold—a vagrant actor running from fame—it’s up to Rose to quell the emotional, sexual, spiritual, and societal tempests brewing within the Mitwissers unsettled home. Hailed by the New York Times as “the most accomplished and graceful literary stylist of our time,” Cynthia Ozick is a recipient of the National Book Critics Circle Award, the PEN/Nabokov Award and PEN/Malamud Award, and Heir to the Glimmering World is yet another triumph from the author of the National Book Award finalist The Puttermesser Papers and Foreign Bodies. “A heroine to love, a story we can’t let go of, gorgeous sentences, and ideas to wrestle with. I didn’t just read the book, I devoured.” —Ann Patchett

A collection of essays on the joys of great literature from the New York Times–bestselling author and winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award. One of America’s foremost novelists and critics, Cynthia Ozick has won praise and provoked debate for taking on challenging literary, historical, and moral issues. Her new collection of spirited essays focuses on the essential joys of great literature, with particular emphasis on the novel. With razor-sharp wit and an inspiring joie de vivre, she investigates unexpected byways in the works of Leo Tolstoy, Saul Bellow, Helen Keller, Isaac Babel, Sylvia Plath, Susan Sontag, and others. In a posthumous and hilariously harassing “(Unfortunate) Interview with Henry James,” Ozick’s hero is shocked by a lady reporter. In “Highbrow Blues,” and in reflections on her own early fiction, she writes intimately of “the din in our heads, that relentless inner hum,” and the curative power of literary imagination. The Din in the Head is sure to please fans of Ozick, win her new readers, and excite critical controversy and acclaim. “Open the collection anywhere—I guarantee it—and you will feel the bite of her distinctive voice.” —Sven Birkerts, Los Angeles Times “The passion that fills these essays is invigorating. In our age of irony and commercial pandering, we need writers like Ozick.” —Danielle Chapman, Chicago Tribune