Professor Kratka Aaron King
October 24, 2019
Cynthia Ozick: The Jewish Identity
John W. Gardner once said, “Excellence is doing the ordinary extraordinarily well.” Throughout her life, Cynthia Ozick surpassed the ordinary to surprise the world with her talent as an author. Ozick has created masterpieces, pursuing daunting questions concerning the Jewish identity in America. Many readers observe common themes in Ozick’s work such as Janet Cooper’s analysis of identity, based on the selective application of the past in The Pagan Rabbi where Ozick constructs a character who disregards his task as a rabbi and falls victim to nature’s allure. One of Ozick’s novels that epitomizes her work is her short story, The Shawl. All stories, however, have a beginning. For Ozick, this was in 1928.
Cynthia Ozick was born in April of 1928 in New York City to Jewish Russian immigrants (Svonkin, Craig, Encyclopedia Judaica, 557). From very early on in life, Ozick instinctively was attracted to writing, conscious that she was never not a writer. Influenced early by the poetry of her uncle, Abraham Regelson, fairy tales, and fiction inspired her with an eerie ecstasy, “It’s an attack on the soul”. Aware of her passion, she began writing at age seventeen with “grown-up, mature style” (Materassi, Mario, Imagination Unbound, 86). Ozick studied at New York University and completed her degree in Masters of Arts in literature at Ohio State University in 1950, writing her thesis on novels by Henry James (Svonkin, 557).
Ozick wrote an array of novels during her life addressing many current issues that concerned Jews in America. In the 1960s, she began writing short stories and published her first novel, Trust, in 1966. The novel describes a young woman’s search for her identity amid modern America. Her second novel, The Pagan Rabbi and Other Short Stories, in 1971, presents the conflict of nature and Judaism. Bloodshed, published in 1976, describes a man’s struggle with Theism. Ozick’s novels, Levitations: Five Fictions, in 1982; The Cannibal Galaxy, in 1983; The Messiah of Stockholm, in 1987; and The Shawl, in 1989 address the impact of the Holocaust and its consequent effects on the lives of Jews. The Shawl is arguably one of her most controversial novels. The work contains two short stories; the first describes the life of a Jewish woman, Rosa Lublin, during the Holocaust and the atrocities she experiences. The second depicts how Rosa relates to these traumatic events. In 1997, Ozick published the Puttermesser Papers, assuming a lighter tone of a Jewish woman discovering her identity in New York City. Then in 2004, Ozick’s work, Heir to the Glimmering World describes a teenager who works for a professor, deeply entrenched in the study of the Karaits (Svonkin, 557-558).
Some readers question how Ozick maintains her credibility as a Jew and a writer at the same time. However, Ozick believes that being Jewish and simultaneously writing fiction is impossible for her. In the Jewish mindset, she is forced to react within the constructs of a philosophical, uncompromising system, but when she writes fiction, Ozick can generate realities where the character’s identity is detached from these concepts. Ozick claims, “…[W]hen I am a well behaved Jew, living by my conscience, then I am not a writer at all, because I think writing and conscience are very often contradictory” (Materrasi, 90-91). This is based on the idea that all fiction, to some extent, is idolatrous. However, when she is writing, she enters the minds of her characters and can write and imagine things that diametrically opposes the way she lives in reality. Ozick enjoys writing fiction because all the ideas are in the author’s head, and there is no cross-over to reality. Thus, we arrive on the doorstep of Ozick’s quandary. The characters in her stories encounter hardships that inform their identity, but they must react in the knowledge that their actions have consequences.
A critical aspect observed throughout Cynthia Ozick’s writings is her character’s identity in response to his or her interpretation and application of the past. In the article, Triangles of History and the Slippery Slope of the Jewish American Identity in Two Stories by Cynthia Ozick, the author, Janet Cooper, argues that when a character understands the past, he or she selectively creates a historical narrative that advises his or her identity (Cooper, 182). This idea is strongly observed in Ozick’s novel, The Pagan Rabbi when Isaac Kornfeld, the protagonist, recreates Mosaic Law with pagan ideas to his advantage. Cooper reveals the triangulation through the eyes of the narrator, a friend of Kornfeld; the judgments of Scheindel, Kornfeld’s wife; and Kornfeld’s suicide note. Kornfeld, she claims, extrapolates his ideas from Judaic Law and exploits them by interpreting pagan ideas through it. This is his selective narrative which he then uses to eventually make love to a pagan nymph. His deviance from the narrow road of Hebraic practice leads Kornfeld to believe that he is gaining the deepest sense of freedom and the closest integration of the sacred and nature by killing himself when in reality, he is doing just the opposite (Cooper, 188).
One of Ozick’s most outstanding novels is The Shawl. This piece epitomizes the works of Ozick, capturing the raw emotion of its characters, but painting a rugged picture of the horror of the Holocaust. In the first story, Rosa, her niece, Stella, and her infant daughter Magda, are deported to a concentration camp. Eventually, Stella takes Magda’s shawl, the object that kept her securely hidden; Magda cries, is discovered, and is murdered in front of Rosa. The second story describes Rosa’s life many years later. Now as an old woman living in Miami, Florida, Rosa cannot seem to accept the past for what happened. She revises her historical narrative to create an image from the past of her daughter, Magda as if she were still alive. Unable to deal with the horror of the truth, Rosa hides behind the veil of this false reality.
In his article “Prisoners Gradually Came to Buddhist Positions”: The Presence of PTSD Symptoms in Rosa in Cynthia Ozick’s ‘The Shawl’, Gustavo Canales exposes some critical ideas that arise concerning Rosa’s wellbeing. He postulates that Rosa is a victim of Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD). All symptoms common to PTSD victims are demonstrated in Rosa’s actions. The diagnosis is well established, based on the trauma she faced with the death of her daughter. Rosa has immediate associations when one of her senses discerns what she is experiencing, be it the heat of Miami, the sight of barbed wire, or associations with fire. Another, subtler basis for PTSD, although not directly discussed by Ozick is the idea that Magda may be a product of a rape by one of the Nazi officials. Canales indicates multiple instances where Ozick may have implied it. This may be why Rosa is so uncomfortable in her relationship with Simon Persky, an older gentleman who flirts with Rosa (Canales, 36).
To me, The Shawl elicits the exceptional qualities of Ozick as a writer. Her ability to express the horror of such a catastrophic event as the Holocaust is exceptional. The atmosphere she constructs by minimizing excess repetition, and the emotion her characters convey gives the story an almost sacred aura. Rosa, like many survivors of the Holocaust, struggles to understand why she still is alive when so many like her were killed. Therefore, she creates a false reality by selectively creating a past where she can justify the wrongdoings of her current situation and forget the reality which she lives in. The story evokes strong emotional imagery to give the reader a full sense of the suffering of the Holocaust. Ozick uses the novel to introduce the outsider to the suffering of humanity and the eternal consequence of the Holocaust.
Works Cited:
Canales, Gustavo Sánchez. “‘Prisoners Gradually Came to Buddhist Positions’: The Presence of PTSD Symptoms in Rosa in Cynthia Ozick’s ‘The Shawl.’” Studies in American Jewish Literature (1981-), vol. 30, 2011, pp. 29–39.
Cooper, Janet L. “Triangles of History and the Slippery Slope of Jewish American Identity in Two Stories by Cynthia Ozick.” MELUS, vol. 25, no. 1, 2000, pp. 181–195.
Materassi, Mario, and Ozick, Cynthia. “Imagination Unbound: An Interview with Cynthia Ozick.” Salmagundi, no. 94/95, 1992, pp. 85–113.
Ozick, Cynthia. The Shawl. First Vintage International ed., Vintage Books, 1990.
Svonkin, Craig. “Ozick, Cynthia.” Encyclopedia Judaica, vol. 15, 2007, pp. 557–558.
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