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Cynthia Ozick is often considered one of the few writers willing to identify herself specifically as a Jewish writer. Yet this characterization of Ozick obscures more than it illuminates. By attending to the understudied themes of genealogy and sexuality in Ozick's work, a more complicated picture of her relation to Jewish identity emerges. This article shows how Ozick figures the ambivalent relation of Jewish identity and literature through deviant sexualities and genealogical breakdown, through a reading of her novella \"Envy; or Yiddish in America\" (1969). Drawing on studies of the biological imagination in Jewish literature, post-vernacular Yiddish histories, and recent critical scholarship on identity in Jewish literary study, I read Ozick as a theorist of the entanglement, tense but generative, of literature and desire. My reading seeks not only to revise our scholarly relation to this canonical figure, but also to use genealogy to ask how literature complicates normative models of identity in Jewish studies.

This article suggests that bringing Jewish literature and Jewish thought into conversation can deepen our understanding of each. As an illustration of this interdisciplinary methodology, I offer a reading of Cynthia Ozick's 1987 Messiah of Stockholm. I claim that Ozick has embedded an argument about the relationship of post-Holocaust Jewry to the past into the literary features of her novel. Her argument draws in particular upon Leo Baeck's account of Judaism as focused on the present and future in contrast to the worshipful approach to the past characteristic of other religions. At the same time, I offer a more nuanced take on the fear of idolatry so often noted in analyses of Ozick's work and situate that fear in relationship to the literary theories of her predecessor Bruno Schulz, who plays a key role in the novel, and her contemporary Harold Bloom.

This essay invites a dialogue between Henry James’s “The Aspern Papers” and Cynthia Ozick’s The Messiah of Stockholm through the notion of literary speculation. In both texts, the relations between the experiential and the literary are explored via Paul Ricouer’s theory of “threefold mimesis .” Jacques Derrida’s account of hauntology and secular messianism, moreover, underscores failures of justice, ethics, and hope. James’s poised tragi-comic narrative is juxtaposed with Ozick’s critique of imaginative self-indulgence. Both works culminate in the burning of manuscripts, figuring in turn the demise of personal or editorial yearnings, then the Holocaust’s merciless incineration of Jewish life and creativity.

Los dos relatos que conforman The Shawl retratan un episodio atroz de los campos de exterminio («The Shawl») y la alienación posterior de una superviviente («Rosa»). Aunque puedan partir de materiales históricos, ambos asuntos se reelaboran desde planteamientos ficcionales. La propuesta pretende indagar en la legitimidad ética y posibilidad de la plasmación estética del Holocausto y sus consecuencias. Frente al rigor historicista, la literatura debería ser capaz de comunicar y hacer comprender, si no lo que ocurrió, sí aquello que pudo haber ocurrido, si bien, cuando lo Real se resiste a ser constreñido por la palabra, ni siquiera la ficción puede develar de aquello que se resiste a la representación.

Shriver seems not to have considered, or not to have been able to consider, that conveying a message about Judaism and antisemitism, let alone \"the Jewish experience,\" may not be among the aims of a novel by Ozick.4 Given this overwhelming scholarly focus on the presumed conflict between Jewish ethics and (pagan) art, virtually no attention has been paid to the centrality of sexual and genealogical deviance in Ozick's work. Genealogy has received little attention from Jewish literary scholars more broadly, despite Western modernity's general association of Jews with sexual deviance and the specific centrality of what Dory Fox has characterized as \"the biological imagination\" in Jewish American culture.5 Genealogy has appeared, however, as a key term for recent critical work in Jewish literary study. \"7 Queerness, for Weiman-Kelman, names literature's capacity for relation across time at the precise point where socially sanctioned forms of relation (that is, reproductive family) become impossible or oppressive. Yet precisely there lies her writing's deepest appeal: displacing the (still all-too-vibrant) biopolitical crush of continuity with an aesthetic futurity of a queerer sort, Ozick thematizes and amplifies the affordances of literature for Jewish modernity.14 LIFE AND ART, OR, GENEALOGIES OF YIDDISH TRANSLATION Published in Commentary in 1969, \"Envy\" was one of Ozick's breakout stories and a major factor in establishing her reputation as a specifically (and polemically) Jewish writer-that is, \"a moralist who also happens to be a supreme stylist.

In Trained to Kill: Soldiers at War, Dr. Theodore Nadelson,3 writes that \"The soldier's privilege to kill is unlike anything most other individuals have ever experienced, and the soldier who kills is permanently changed, fixed to the death he has made\" (38)-a notion Nadelson further establishes when he writes, \"[The soldier] is disturbed in peace partly because he is not able to give up memories of war's wonder and of a contest survived\" (78). (109) As former paratrooper John Wolfe well knows and has written, \"Few things in this world are as unforgiving, pitiless, ungovernable, and irrecoverable as lead and steel loosed from a weapon\": The transfigurations they effect on the bodies of friend and foe alike form a permanent backdrop to all of a soldier's future visions. While others experience intervals of silence between thoughts, a combat veteran's intervals will be filled with rubbery Halloween mask heads housing skulls shattered into tiny shards, schemeless mutilation, and shocked, pained expressions that violent and premature death casts on a dead face. Theodore Nadelson, M.A. M.D. (1930-2003) was a clinical professor of psychiatry and vice chair for psychiatric education at Boston University School of Medicine and chief of psychiatric service at Boston Veterans Administration Medical Center. 4.

This paper explores women's Holocaust writing as feminist Midrashic post-Holocaust response. Emil Fackenheim's argument that Midrash is a potential form of response to the Holocaust is a springboard for thinking critically about Jewish feminist responses to the Holocaust. Reading women's Holocaust writing in this way exposes themes that mark Jewish feminist post-Holocaust response while also extending and enhancing that response. Three key examples of women's Holocaust writing are read as Midrash: Judith Isaacson's Seed of Sarah, Cynthia Ozick's \"The Shawl,\" and Ilona Karmel's An Estate of Memory. Spanning fiction and memoir, these familiar narratives highlight key themes of gender, embodiment, maternity, relationality, sexual vulnerability, and violence. [PUBLICATION ABSTRACT]

This article discusses the novel Heir to the Glimmering World and the ways in which Cynthia Ozick draws on Judaism's midrashic heritage, asserting writing and representation as ethically charged acts capable of both creation and destruction. Using interviews and Ozick's considerable body of criticism, this essay maps Ozick's concept of art and creativity, situating Heir within Ozick's ongoing interrogation of art and imagination within the Jewish tradition.

Cynthia Ozick's novel Heir to the Glimmering World caps the revision of her concept of art. In her early novels and essays, Ozick's views resembled the Romantics who considered art both sublimely uplifting and utterly destructive. Ozick associated art with idolatry and its destructive power with Moloch's penchant for destroying his worshippers. Since the early 1980s Ozick has been rethinking these views. In Heir to the Glimmering World she completes her revision. She now associates art with the civilizing discipline of Jewish laws that surround and constrain the Divine, Art is interpretation, not representation, of the Absolute. Heir to the Glimmering World is a novel of ideas that condemns the search for absolute authenticity and self-actualization, for pure art, as suicidally misguided.