Professor Kratka                                                                                                                                                                  Aaron King

November 21, 2019

The Influence of the Melancholy

            Like a cold mist creeping in over a windswept beach, melancholy obscures the perception of its victims, confusing their vision and creating an illusion that inhibits the clarity of the truth. By definition, melancholia is a specific form of mental illness characterized by depression or indifference. Often, melancholic people believe that control of their situation is more defined by their environment than what they do about it. This paper will explore the incorporation of the melancholy in pieces of fiction, “The Pagan Rabbi,” by Cynthia Ozick, and Seize the Day, by Saul Bellow, to show how the characters’ melancholic mindsets directly influence their decisions and how the reader should respond to those melancholy characters. In “The Pagan Rabbi”, Ozick uses the melancholic ideas of the characters to give each character a distinct perspective. Through the rabbi Isaac Kornfeld who is discontent within the restrictions of Mishnaic instruction, Ozick shows that any divergence from the Law ultimately results in death. For Sheindel, Kornfeld’s wife, melancholy appears in her spiteful disdain of her husband once she learns of his pagan ideas.  In Seize the Day, the main character, Tommy Wilhelm, is subject to melancholy reasoning which results in Tommy’s disheveled physical appearance, the loss of his money, and an estranged relationship with his family. His father, however, is far removed from the suffering of his son, conceitedly, yet comfortably oblivious of his son’s misfortune. His wife, Margaret, and his business partner, Dr. Tamkin, are only interested in Wilhelm’s money. Therefore, in both stories, the characters suffer from some form of melancholy that elicits a darker, more honest side of them.

            In “The Pagan Rabbi”, melancholy serves as the catalyst that drives Isaac Kornfeld to act on his desires. Discontent within the “fence of the Law”, Kornfeld neglects his duties as a teacher to his fellow Jews and begins searching for answers outside the scope of Judaic instruction. He concludes that there are two types of souls: the free and the indwelling. The former belongs to Nature and is free to roam outside the object to which it belongs, but the human is conditioned with the indwelling soul, which is trapped within the body. However, instead of accepting his fate as a victim of the indwelling soul like most melancholic people would, Kornfeld decides to take action. He seeks to free his soul when he writes, “If only I could couple with one of the free souls, the strength of the connection would likely wrest my own soul free from my body–seize, it as if by tongs, draw it out, so to say, to its own freedom” (Ozick,28). Kornfeld believes he can release his soul through intercourse with some free soul of Nature. Because Kornfeld cannot bear the thought of his soul staying trapped in his body as it rots to nothing, he realizes that to avoid this, he must somehow liberate his soul from his body, signaling his desperation to escape the melancholy circumstances of his existence. When he eventually acts on his ideas and copulates with a tree, he is gratified by a dryad who he clings to and does not release. Consequently, his soul stays with the dryad and is finally freed from his body. However, the dryad is repulsed the sight of Kornfeld’s soul and deserts it.

When Kornfeld sees his soul, he too is distraught by its image, for it is everything that he intended to escape by freeing himself from it. The image of his soul is an old man, reading from a Tractate of the Mishnah, only caring to study the Judaic Law; “He reads the Law and breathes the dust and doesn’t see the beauty of the flowers and won’t heed the beauty of the cricket chirping in the field” (35). The very law which he attempts to flee is ironically his inmost being. The significance in the image of Isaac Kornfeld’s soul is essential to the melancholic aspects of his character. His soul appears as a decrepit, old man who breathes dust and cannot appreciate the beauty of life around him. However, the soul informs Kornfeld that everything he was chasing was deceitful, and the only true beauty lies within the scripture.  Kornfeld’s soul embodies all that he deemed as worthless within Judaic teaching. This holds significance because, no matter how far Kornfeld’s body and ideas stray from the Law, his soul remains on the path of righteousness, within the “Fence of the Law.”

In utter desperation to regain the beauty of Nature which his soul rejected, Kornfeld concludes that he will only experience full freedom by joining the dryad in killing himself. The rabbi then “…grabbed his prayer shawl by its tassels and whirled around him once or twice until I had unwrapped it from him altogether, and had wrapped it on my own neck and in one bound came to the tree” (36). Kornfeld shows common signs of depression by accepting that he can no longer control his fate and deciding that his only way out of this misery is death. By killing himself, Kornfeld is also exchanging the so-called truth of his soul for a figment of his imagination, an illusion that inhibits him from seeing the truth. Kornfeld’s ideas are preposterous. His delusional relationship with some mystical girl does not present the idea of a sound mind. However, although Kornfeld is not a relatable character, Ozick uses his melancholy aspect to express her conclusion that any distraction from the law will lead to death. The melancholy attributes of Kornfeld, although subtle, deeply influence his decisions.

After Sheindel learns of her husband’s ideas, she asserts that he was not a true rabbi, but a pagan. Sheindel, by the grace of her God, survives the concentration camp only to marry someone who rejects all that she believes in. Sheindel reveals her opinion when she says, “I don’t destroy his honor. He had none… He was a pagan” (22). Sheindel expresses her melancholy characteristics through a cold indifference to the fate of her husband, distancing herself from him and his paganism. She realizes that nothing she does can change what has happened and so accepts her unfortunate destiny. Sheindel’s reaction to Kornfeld, like most readers’ reactions, is normal because a rabbi, a leader of the Jewish people, has turned against the ways of God to explore the pagan pleasures of Nature.

In his article The Daemonic Life of Objects: Object-Oriented Criticism and Cynthia Ozick’s “The Pagan Rabbi,” Dillon Rockrohr explores how Kornfeld imposes human attributes on inanimate objects and discusses object-oriented ontology in the daemonic life of fiction. I will focus, however, on the correlation between Kornfeld stepping outside the law, and speculative realism as an abandonment of correlationism, presented in this article. Rockrohr considers the epistemological sanction that Kornfeld transgresses when he considers ideas outside the Jewish Law.

Similar to Kornfeld discarding the Law, speculative realism debates that outside the law of correlationism, there is only the objective thought of the subjective thinker, unaffected by interaction with other objects. Contrarily, since everything is interactive, Rockrohr asserts that “Correlationism does away with the idea that we can adequately represent reality apart from its relation to us, but in doing so it also makes it impossible to know ourselves as subjects apart from our relation to the objects of our knowledge” (Rockrohr, 215). In other words, since each person is part of reality, no one can fully understand anything because each subjective interpretation is affected by its interconnection with those objects or materials, creating a transformative experience, and therefore cannot be purely objective. Just as Kornfeld does with Nature, speculative realists would look into themselves to find the single distinction of the object which they are seeking to define. Kornfeld “…simply failed to reckon with the terms of his cohabitation with the daemonic life of things” (223). Thus, Kornfeld makes the dubious mistake of thinking that his single interpretation of the daemonic world is definitive when he is exposed to the world of the dryad and other free souls. It is impossible for Kornfeld to become a completely free soul when he admits that there is a distinction between the free and indwelling souls because he will always carry the traits of the indwelling. Divorced from reality, Kornfeld acts outside the law as speculative realism cannot act within the laws of correlationism because the Law sets any idea outside what it knows as occulted, but both Kornfeld and speculative realism maintain that the laws negate the ideas they confront.

            Unlike Kornfeld who arrives at the conclusion that the only escape from the melancholy is through death, Tommy Wilhelm finds another way out. However, before this happens, he must undergo many hardships. Wilhelm, the protagonist in Seize the Day, has obvious characteristics of melancholy. First of all, Wilhelm has very low self-esteem. He dresses only to pass the inspection of his father, takes medication to soothe his emotional discomfort, and rarely cleans himself, all displaying his indifference towards himself. Bellow writes, “He was beginning to lose his shape, his gut was fat, and he looked like a hippopotamus” (Bellow, 28). Wilhelm is gaining weight, smoking constantly, and overall, living an unhealthy lifestyle.  Moreover, he lives in filthy conditions. His Pontiac is grimy with ash, full of trash, and covered in grease. Wilhelm’s apartment is a veritable junkyard. These aspects portray a depressed man who cares little for himself, apathetic to his state of existence.

            In comparison, Tommy Wilhelm’s father, Dr. Adler, seems untouched by the melancholy aspects that are drowning his son. Dr. Adler is a wealthy, retired doctor who is removed from the suffering of his son. In fact, the two are at opposite ends of the spectrum. Where Wilhelm lives an unhealthy lifestyle, Dr. Adler has steam baths and massages. When Wilhelm is at his wit’s end for lack of money, his father is practically rolling in it. The only thing that can seem to bother the doctor is his son’s inability to create the same success that he did, so he lies to his friends about the welfare of his son, bragging that he makes five figures. Dr. Adler feels no sympathy for his son, and the last thing he would do is help Wilhelm.

            When it comes to money, Wilhelm is in trouble. Throughout his life, he made some bad career decisions; “After much thought and hesitation and debate, he invariably took the course he had rejected innumerable times” (23). Beginning with a man named Maurice Venice who said he could set up Wilhelm with an acting job, once Wilhelm committed money to him, Venice dropped him. Wilhelm also left his wife, Margaret, but is still paying for many of her and their children’s needs. Moreover, Wilhelm recently partnered with Dr. Tamkin, a self-acclaimed psychologist who thinks himself quite bodacious, to invest in the public market, buying stocks in lard and rye; however, Dr. Tamkin is a pathological liar, and he eventually steals what is left of Wilhelm’s money. Wilhelm realizes, “…from the moment when he tasted the peculiar flavor of fatality in Dr. Tamkin, he could no longer keep back the money” (55). In other words, Wilhelm feels that he is predestined to make every mistake, and there is little to nothing he can do to prevent it, common symptoms of a melancholic character. Wilhelm realizes his state of depression when he thinks, “In any moment of quiet when sheer fatigue prevented him from struggling, he was apt to feel this mysterious weight, this growth or collection of nameless things which it was the business of his life to carry about” (36). Not only is he aware of his own melancholy, but he accepts it as his destiny. It is aggravating to the reader to see Wilhelm’s inability to be productive, always making the wrong decisions and never accomplishing his goals.

            Finally, Tommy Wilhelm struggles with the strained relationships of his family. He wants a divorce from his wife, but she will not give it to him, and his father will not give him the money he needs to get by. Wilhelm and his father are estranged because Dr. Adler, the heartless, isolated, greedy man, terrified only by the thought of death, will not contaminate his being with the care of his failed son, the repulsive embarrassment of his life. Dr. Adler states, “I don’t understand your problems… I never had any like them” (46). Wilhelm and his father cannot see eye to eye on issues concerning Wilhelm’s wellbeing, causing Wilhelm to become further sorry for himself and Dr. Adler to despise his son, even more, thus precipitating the vicious cycle.  His wife also spites him saying, “‘Are you in misery?” she was saying. “But you have deserved it”’ (106). It often feels like Margaret is right, and many times, Wilhelm is more than deserving of this spite, but at some point, the reader must choose between the cold hand of Wilhelm’s family and a more compassionate response to a man who tries, but can never get it right.

            In her article, On Saul Bellow’s Seize The Day: “Sunk Though He Be Beneath the Wat’ry Floor”, Elizabeth Frank investigates the different characters in Seize The Day and their representations of different perspectives in the real world. When Wilhelm, in search of Dr. Tamkin, ventures into the darkness of a funeral service, he is finally able to express his anguish over his failed life. Here, Frank writes, Wilhelm comprehends “…the mortality of everything, the vanity and fragility and futility, the imperfections and failures of ourselves and our fates, the utter, terrifying fact of existence itself, the failure of life to live up” (Frank, 79). This insight clarifies the little closure that Wilhelm experiences, that others also fail, others also suffer, and he is not alone in his walk of life. Later, she asserts that Dr. Adler represents the isolationist who cuts himself off from the pain of others, neat and tidy within his business. He does not want the slovenly habits of his failed son to reflect a bad light on his image. Wilhelm, she claims, embodies the miserable, the unfortunate, who seem to only fail at what they do. Frank’s idea, however, is that everyone must choose between a Dr. Adler and a Tommy Wilhelm because if not, each is at the mercy of a character like Dr. Tamkin, someone who will exploit each one’s weaknesses and run off with the benefits.

            Just as object-oriented ontology is not a fully conclusive understanding of an object, melancholy does not give a full understanding of these novels because each book and each character can be observed from multiple perspectives. These other points of view combined with the melancholy perspective may give the reader a better insight to the character, but as speculative realism reminds us, no object, including fiction, can be fully definitive because each is constantly interacting with its environment, and even the perspective of each reader will provide a new outlook on the object. In this case, however, melancholy highlights important themes and features of specific characters in these two novels. From Isaac Kornfeld’s obsession with the daemonic world to Tommy Wilhelm’s constant failures, each character encounters melancholy aspects of themselves that inhibit them from continuing through their life without having to somehow confront these restraining features. While Kornfeld sees his only escape as death, Wilhelm is able to recognize that he fails and that others, even though they try, are also inevitably imperfect. Therefore, although melancholy tends to be a deterring attribute, the characters use their melancholy aspects to arrive at some conclusion about themselves and others who they interact with, especially for Wilhelm who feels that now he is able to recognize that which is constraining him, there is hope that he will be able to overcome his melancholy aspects, navigate those treacherous waters, and begin to make a life for himself.

Works Cited

Bellow, Saul. Seize the Day. Harmondsworth, Middlesex: Penguin Books, 1990. Print.

Frank, Elizabeth. “On Saul Bellow’s ‘Seize the Day:’ ‘Sunk Though He Be beneath the Wat’ry Floor.”(Saul Bellow at Eighty).” Salmagundi, no. 106 7, 1995, p. 74.

Ozick, Cynthia. The Pagan Rabbi and Other Stories. New York: E.P. Dutton, 1983. Print.

Rockrohr, Dillon. “The Daemonic Life of Objects: Object-Oriented Criticism and Cynthia Ozick’s ‘The Pagan Rabbi.’” Symploke, vol. 26, no. 1, 2018, pp. 207–224.

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.

 

Professor Clark                                                                                                                                                                    Aaron King

October 21, 2019

Annotated Bibliographies

Svonkin, Craig. “Ozick, Cynthia.” Encyclopedia Judaica, 2^nd ed. Michael Berenbaum and Fred Skolnik, vol. 15, Detroit MI: Macmillan Reference USA, 2007, pp. 557-558.

                        In the entry on Cynthia Ozick in Encyclopedia Judaica, Craig Svonkin provides a comprehensive overview of important events in Ozick’s life. Svonkin claims that Ozick’s work explores the conflicts between the Jewish and pagan worlds. The entry offers information regarding Ozick’s origins and accomplishments and gives a comprehensive summary and analysis of controversial issues confronted in her writings.

                        Contained is a short summary of each piece of literature Ozick published. Svonkin determines that the most common themes in her work combine philosophy, comedy, and tragedy to display Judaism as it is responsible for the past and future, the devastating impacts of the Holocaust, and the life of Jews in America after the Holocaust. He presents a summary of Ozick’s literature from her earliest published story, Trust, in 1966, to her collections of essays, Quarrel and Quandry in 2000. Svonkin claims that Ozick takes Judaism more seriously than other post-World War Two Jewish authors, believing that any of her work published in English was somewhat a betrayal of Judaism, and therefore to remain Jewish, must focus on themes central to Judaism and reject assimilation with the western world. She emphasizes the Jewish commitment to faith as an answer for contemporary idolatries.

                         This source contributes valuable information regarding a timeline of Ozick’s works. The entry imparts useful information regarding what Ozick accomplished as well as giving a small insight into some of her literary works. This source contains accurate biographical information; however, if the reader is looking for a more extensive analysis of a particular work, this would not be a good source for that. Svonkin excels in providing a summary of important occurrences and works from Ozick’s life.

Finkelstein, Norman. The Ritual of Creation: Jewish Tradition and Contemporary Literature. New York, State University of New York Press, 1992, pp 65-78

                        Norman Finkelstein’s book, The Ritual of Creation: Jewish Tradition and Contemporary Literature, analyzes certain literary concepts significant to Jewish-American authors and offers an evaluation of several of these authors’ works including Cynthia Ozick’s. In his chapter about Ozick, Finkelstein concentrates on Ozick’s struggle for historical validation. He uses Ozick’s literature to identify how her work opposes normal ideas of historical literature.

Finkelstein states that it is a common assumption in the literary world that only religious writing endures the passing of time. A central idea to Ozick’s writings is the balance between historical truth and parables. Finkelstein refers to it as the Malakah – the Mosaic Law – and the Aggadah – a fictional story or parable. Another aspect is linearity, or predictability throughout Ozick’s work. There are few surprises in Ozick’s writing. A tension between imagination and faith is another common aspect. Ozick uses her interpretation of a period set in time and a timeless lesson to show her readers that historical relevance does not need to come through religious works only. However, she longs for a metaphorical “shtetl of the soul” to protect and nurture the Jewish-American identity through historically redemptive literature. Finkelstein believes that Ozick’s writing has less to do with history and more to do with a Jewish interpretation of the experience.

                        This book is an excellent resource to gain knowledge of concepts important to Jewish American literature as well as to attain a deeper insight of themes central to Ozick’s writing. The theory most commonly addressed is Ozick’s struggle with the common assumptions of writing. She uses several methods to disprove previous ideas of historical validity in literature. Finkelstein does an excellent job of explaining these ideas through Ozick’s writings. This source offers the reader a deeper understanding of why Ozick writes with her unique style and how she is able to contend the assumed theories of historical relevance.

Canales, Gustavo Sanchez. “‘Prisoners gradually came to Buddhist positions’: the presence of PTSD symptoms in Rosa in Cynthia Ozick’s The Shawl.” Studies in American Jewish Literature, vol. 30, 2011, p. 29+. Gale Academic OneFile, https://link.gale.com/apps/doc/A309589408/AONE?u=cuny_ccny&sid Accessed 16 Oct. 2019.

                        In Gustavo Sanchez Canales’s article, “Prisoners gradually came to Buddhist positions”: the presence of PTSD symptoms in Rosa in Cynthia Ozick’s ‘The Shawl’, he explores the possibility of Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) in the main character, Rosa. Canales is Senior Lecturer of English and Vice-Dean for Research and Innovation at the Autonomous University of Madrid.

Canales begins by observing that Ozick feels it wasn’t her place to write a fictional story about the Holocaust because she didn’t experience it, and she has unintentionally offended those who did. She feels that stories from the Holocaust should be based on real events. Canales continues to explain how other authors have analyzed the roles of art, symbolism, and identity in the story, but the effects of PTSD in The Shawl have been overlooked.

Canales hypothesizes that Rosa Lublin has PTSD. He observes how her actions strongly correlate with the symptoms of PTSD and it would explain many of the illogical actions that Rosa takes. He begins by explaining the situations that could cause PTSD and that Rosa has definitely experienced them and is therefore eligible for the diagnosis. Then he describes how her current symptoms such as her fantastical fixations of her dead daughter are clear signs of PTSD. Rosa has immediate associations when one of her senses discerns what she is presently experiencing, be it the heat of Miami, the sight of barbed wire, or the associations with fire. Another common symptom of patients with PTSD is outbursts of rage. Rosa shows this many times throughout the story from ranting at Dr. Tree to smashing her cups to yelling at Finkelstein.

One aspect of the story Canales suggests that I had not thought of before was that Magda may have been a product of rape. Although never explicitly indicated, Canales notes places in the story where Ozick may have subtly implied it. This would obviously be another reason for Rosa having PTSD. Another idea that Canales presented and I had not been fully aware of is that Simon Persky could be a redemptive motive in the story. He helps Rosa begin to relate to people again and instigates positive change in Rosa’s life. Persky begins to untangle Rosa’s life and initiates the healing process. I found this article to be extremely informative and a good analysis of aspects of The Shawl which before were not obvious. Canales excels at connecting common themes in the story from fire to barbed wire. This article would be useful for a study concerning ideas addressed in The Shawl.  

Hellerstein, Kathryn. “The envy of Yiddish: Cynthia Ozick as translator.” Studies in American Jewish Literature, vol. 31, no. 1, 2012, p. 24+. Literature Resource Center, https://link.gale.com/apps/doc/A309589421/LitRC?u=cuny_ccny&sid  Accessed 16 Oct. 2019.

            In her article, The envy of Yiddish: Cynthia Ozick as translator, Katherine Hellerstein illustrates how Cynthia Ozick manipulates the English and Yiddish language to her advantage. Hellerstein observes, “Ozick layers the English prose of ‘Envy’ with Yiddish–inserting actual Yiddish phrases, sentences, and stanzas of poems; translating Yiddish idioms and sayings into an English that is often deliberately unidiomatic, and bending and reversing English syntax with Yiddishisms that transform English into Yinglish.”

Ozick, Hellerstein claims, uses Yiddish expressions in place of English ones and vice versa to create a fused combination of the two languages that leads the reader to the emotions of the character. Ozick uses the combination of the two languages to her advantage to keep the meaning obscure so that more than one result can be interpreted. The joke, though, is only obvious to the reader who speaks both languages. This leads to Hellerstein’s next point in which she confirms that Ozick is showing spite to the reader who only knows English and has to go to the dictionary every time to look up a word. Another aspect that Ozick uses is diminutive to give a feel of the insignificance that was key in the world of Yiddish. Ozick also trivializes the poems written in Yiddish and translated to English, but she then advocates these poems and therefore gives them a reason to be included in her works. The last idea that Hellerstein expounds on is how the character’s sexual desires influence the language. The translations or expressions of these thoughts also imply the relevance of Yiddish in future generations and the necessity of continuation of the Yiddish culture through reproductive means.

When infusing the two languages, Ozick uses the English to sound Yiddish and the Yiddish to sound English, but still keeps the two separated because the ironies are subject to the reader’s comprehension of the piece. Essentially, Ozick has crafted a barrage of double meanings to indulge the reader. Hellerstein demonstrates how translation in Ozick’s work gives the reader a transformation to a higher understanding or even enlightenment. Her analysis of Ozick’s writings helps the reader more fully understand the influence of Yiddish in Ozick’s works and the repetitive styles that help her express the character’s emotions. This source provides useful information about Ozick’s writing styles.

Goren, Arthur. The American Jews: Dimensions of Ethnicity. Massachusetts, Belknap Harvard, 1982, pp. 73-114

                        Arthur Goren’s book, The American Jews: Dimensions of Ethnicity, explains the migration of Jews to America from 1654 through to the 1970s. I will focus, however, on the last two sections concerning the twentieth century. Goren expounded on the different demographics of Jewish society in America and how that changed through immigration. As well, he exhibits the influence that Jews had on business in the twentieth century. Another major topic he discusses is the antisemitism Jews faced, not only on college campuses around the United States, but also discrimination encountered at work. Goren traces the migration of Jews around the country. For instance, in Harlem, New York, the population of 177,000 in 1923 had diminished to under 5,000 by 1930, while other communities outside New York City were rapidly expanding. Then the 1970s saw Jewish women entering leadership positions in the synagogues. The floor was changing geographically as well. After the creation of the state of Israel in 1948, now many Jews were emigrating back from the homeland to America, leaving that which their ancestors had sacrificed their lives to gain. Goren determines that the Jews, now removed by generation from the horror of the Holocaust and no longer faced with the discrimination shown to their ancestors, were straying from their ancestral foundations and moving towards the more secular America.

Goren’s comprehensive study of the migration of Jews to America is a useful insight into how the Jewish-American identity came into existence. The study thoroughly describes the hardships that new immigrants faced as they stepped out into the unknown dangers of the New World. Goren gives helpful graphs and other statistical data on an array of subjects ranging from small businesses to women in religious leadership roles. Dimensions of Ethnicity is a reliable source for information regarding important historical events for Jews in America.

Heilman, Samuel. Portrait of American Jews: The Last Half of the 20^th Century. University of Washington Press, USA, 1995.

                        Samuel Heilman’s book, Portrait of American Jews, provides extensive research on Jews in America beginning in the 1950s through the 1990s. The book focuses on the demographics of Jewish-American ethnicity, religion, education, and secularism.

                        The book is divided into three chronological time periods and offers an in-depth analysis of various aspects concerning Jewish conditions in America. The first period covers the fifties. Heilman concentrates on Jewish assimilation to American life, and how over the years, the immigrant Jews slowly integrated with American society and gradually felt accepted. With most Jews finally immigrated to America by the late sixties, Heilman investigates how Jewish life progressed. More Jews started attending synagogue, and Jewish education slowly integrated into American schools, moving from their Jewish identity towards the more secular education. With more interaction between the Jewish community and the rest of America, Heilman observes the shift towards intermarriage and a decline in antisemitism. The seventies saw the emergence of two types of Jews. The secular Jews saw their identity as a Jew more symbolic, but the more orthodox were deeply concerned with the plight of American Jews. In the eighties and nineties, Heilman tracks the Jewish population growth, residential patterns, orthodoxy, marriage, and the idea of the Jewish identity. He also covers the Jewish political influence and economic situation.

Heilman provides a comprehensive index in the back of the book, citing all his sources and giving his work a well-researched, comprehensive plan. This source would provide exceptionally useful for any research on Jews in America in the second half of the twentieth century. The book gives the reader an extensive understanding of the Jewish-American identity, based on historical information presented in this work. Heilman observes almost every aspect critical to the formation of Jewish life in the United States in the twentieth century.

Professor Clark                                                                                                                                                                    Aaron King

October 22, 2019

Literacy Narrative: Writing Reimagined

            As the pain in my fingers burned deep into my forearm, my name and the date etched their ways into the piece of paper, and subsequently, the table below it. From first grade through high school, writing was something that I did only out of great necessity. Just as my handwriting style was cramped, so was my imagination. The idea that repulsed me the most, though, was writing about someone else’s work. These ideas, however, were subject to change.

            First of all, writing was a painful process for me. When my concentration level rose, so did the pressure beneath the tip of my pen. I would crush out words, sentences, even paragraphs in colored braille. Many attempts made to correct my form, using rubber pen-holders and even a foam layer beneath the page, but all to no avail. The only visible change this brought about was a paper filled with holes. Thus, writing, in general, became an imposition. Much to the chagrin of my teachers and parents, I lost all resolve to initiate the flow of consciousness from my mind to the paper. Most of the assignments were excessively structured so that there was only one correct conclusion. Moreover, I believed that the dissected analysis of written work was one of the most deplorable steps that could be taken towards that piece of literature. To endeavor into the heart of an author’s work and categorize its every step stripped that work of its uniqueness and beauty. All this I thought until an English class in high school changed my perspective completely.

            As I sat down on the first day of class, I was thinking, “Another hellish year of mind-numbing, English literature where we will proceed to heartlessly scrutinize the ‘Great American Classics’, only to suck out the very breath that their authors blew so tenderly into them.” A summons from the front of the classroom dragged my attention from my spinning thoughts. The man whose voice had issued forth the invitation would indelibly change my perception of writing and literature. Mr. Ken introduced me to a profound understanding of the purpose of writing and subsequently, what I, the reader, must do to fully comprehend the authors’ philosophies.

            The revelation did not come immediately, though. I initially disregarded this opportunity, for, in my mind, nothing set this class apart from previous English classes, none of which had left any lasting value with me. After reading a couple of novels, Mr. Ken advised me to change my writing style. Instead of analyzing the book and dissecting each page, I should not only evaluate the complete work to deduce what the author intended to convey but do so through multiple lenses to gain a perspective for why the author made a certain argument or even wrote the book. With time came change; slow, but steady. At first, the idea seemed absurd and the motive, ambiguous. However, I eventually realized that presenting this idea as an open assignment where I was able to assess the work as a whole, where every characteristic of the story painted a single, magnificent collage, enabled me to break free from the iron-structured format I had been instructed to use for previous assignments. This new approach encouraged me to investigate the authors’ intentions in writing the story. Although not fully convinced by this new method, I reveled in the freedom of expression.

             Now empowered to communicate my thoughts, I slowly began to enjoy writing and literature. As I read more books, I understood a deeper motivation behind the authors’ writings and found that, often, their works revealed something in me that I did not know about myself; I found another side of me I did not know existed. My assessments of the authors’ writings gradually moved from a stagnant analysis to a colorful interpretation. Reading became entertainment instead of an assignment, and I was finally able to appreciate literature. No longer did I spend the day dreading the assignment to discover the ideals hidden in a story, but I saw it as a challenge to disclose the author’s very nature. The saying, “You write what you are” came alive, and I was able to apply it to my own life.

            Although I still wrote on paper, and my hand grew tired from the long hours spent carefully developing masterpieces, there was a new inspiration in my assignments, a profound revelation that I could now express anything through my writing. I created new worlds in which my imagination could thrive, so I did not mind the ache in my arm. With the assignments open-ended, I had the freedom to express my unique elucidations of literature and discover characteristics about myself that were previously obscure. I am forever indebted to Mr. Ken for the invaluable lessons he taught me, not only about writing but about myself and what I am capable of.

Professor Kratka                                                                                                                                                                  Aaron King

September 24, 2019

Summary Response: The Shawl

            Cynthia Ozick’s novel, The Shawl, contains two short fictional stories concerning Rosa, a Jewish mother, and her infant daughter, Magda. In the first story, Rosa faces the horror of the concentration camps. In the second, she appears as an old woman in Miami, Florida. Throughout the novel, Rosa struggles to accept the past and refuses to categorize herself.

The scene unfolds as Rosa, with Magda concealed in her shawl, is deported to a concentration camp. Magda spends her days in the camp, silently hidden within the folds of the shawl. Then one day, the shawl is stolen and Magda cries. When a guard discovers the crying child, he murders Magda against the electric fence in front of Rosa.

Throughout The Shawl, Ozick uses common themes to portray certain ideas. Ozick makes the story slightly unlikely to distance the text from reality. This becomes apparent when Magda is smuggled into the camp under Rosa’s shawl. As well, her writing style uses as few words as possible to keep the story nonspecific to any historical event. However, she is still able to portray the horror of the concentration camps and the inhumanity of the whole Holocaust. Ozick’s work is also linear, or predictable. The reader knows from the very first lines of the story that Magda will die.

In the second part of the story, Rosa, an old lady now, has crammed her life into a dirty, stuffy apartment in Miami, Florida. Unlike the cold hell of the concentration camp, Miami’s heat consumes Rosa, an opposite climate, but still a living hell for her. At the laundromat, she meets a flirtatious, old man, Simon Persky. Already married and much older than Rosa, Persky amplifies Rosa’s vulnerability. “My Warsaw is not your Warsaw” (19). Although both are Jews from the same city, Rosa alienates herself from him and the rest of the world claiming that she will never fit any categorized identity after what she has experienced. She believes that there is no life after the war, only before and during, another indication of Rosa’s inability to break with her past.

When Rosa receives a letter from a Doctor James Tree concerning a study he is performing on Holocaust survivors, she becomes enraged. She realizes that Mr. Tree, in conducting this analysis, refers to her as a statistic, the precise entity which she refuses to identify with. Ozick uses the study by Doctor James Tree to show how the world views survivors of the Holocaust, not as normal human beings that experienced extreme hardship, but as some lower being that is useful for statistical evidence. This is crassly observed when Dr. Tree notes that Rosa should refer to chapter six in his book about the nature of baboons. Rosa does not want to fit into some larger category. She is a victim, but she wants to be removed from the rest and maintain her unique identity.

The protagonist is unattractive in appearance and thought, so the reader feels no personal attachment to the story. For instance, when Rosa loses a pair of her underwear, it seems completely logical to her that someone, maybe even Persky, stole her underwear and hid it under the sand. Dignity is a subliminal, common theme throughout The Shawl. The lost underwear is like Rosa’s dignity; without it, she feels exposed. It is something that she has lost through past experiences and is looking to regain, but she is looking in the wrong places Rosa believes she has rediscovered her dignity through writing letters to her daughter.

The shawl that Magda used in the camps has been kept through time, and Rosa uses the shawl’s scent as a catalyst to create a fantasy world; Rosa creates an image as if Magda were still alive. In that false reality, Rosa writes letters to her daughter where she provides a logical explanation for her illogical actions. Through these letters, she avoids desecrating the memory of her daughter, everything that she does gains reason, and Rosa can reset her world and recreate a parallel universe with Magda as a flourishing young woman. In reality, however, she cannot accept that her daughter is no longer alive; she is tied down by these ideas, unable to come to terms with the past.

Throughout The Shawl, Rosa attempts to come to terms with the past but is unable to break away from the experiences she has suffered through. This can be observed in most areas of her life. She cannot socialize normally with anyone else, cannot categorize herself as a survivor, and cannot find her dignity, so subsequently she creates a reality where she has the freedom from these ideas. The dignity she feels in this false reality is a dignity that she should feel in normal society, but because she is distanced by the experiences of the Holocaust and the contempt that everyone shows her, she feels the safest and most comfortable staying in that false dimension.