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Cynthia Ozick

 
Britannica Concise Encyclopedia: Cynthia Ozick
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(born April 17, 1928, New York, N.Y., U.S.) U.S. novelist and short-story writer. She graduated from New York University and received an M.A. from Ohio State University. She wrote often on Jewish themes, and much of her work presents a struggle with the notion that artistic creation can be a hubristic attempt to rival the Creator. Among these works are Trust (1966), Leviathan (1982), The Messiah of Stockholm (1987), The Shawl (1990), and The Puttermesser Papers (1997). Her essays have been collected in Art & Ardor (1983), Metaphor & Memory (1989), and Fame & Folly (1996).

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Works: Works by Cynthia Ozick
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(b. 1928)

1966Trust. Ozick's dense, Jamesian first novel concerns a young woman's search for identity. After a less-than-enthusiastic critical response and limited commercial success, Ozick would turn to short fiction to establish her literary reputation.
1971The Pagan Rabbi, and Other Stories. Ozick's first collection of stories depicts various attempts at self-realization by characters faced with irreconcilable demands. The title story, one of her finest, explores the implications of a rabbi's suicide and the clash between secularism and Judaism.
1976Bloodshed and Three Novellas. Ozick's acclaimed second collection of short fiction includes "Usurpation," the O. Henry contest winner for 1975.
1982Levitation: Five Fictions. The title work of this collection, regarded as one of Ozick's greatest achievements, treats the dilemmas faced by a Jewish-Christian married couple. The collection continues Ozick's examination of the difficulty of being Jewish in modern Western society.
1983Art and Ardor. In this highly praised collection of essays, Ozick explores the demands of religious belief and artistic creation. Critics admire her passion for her subject and her moral subtlety. Ozick's own dilemma, as she eloquently shows, is how to maintain her Jewish identity while remaining a thoroughly modern writer.
1983The Cannibal Galaxy. This novel is about Joseph Brill, a Jewish child hidden in a French convent during the Holocaust. Although he aspires to be an astronomer, his later career in the United States is a failure. Critics single out Ozick's deft handling of what would become her signature theme: how to remain a Jew in a secular, assimilationist world.
1987The Messiah of Stockholm. Ozick's novel concerns Lars Andemening, a Polish refugee who takes a Swedish name but fantasizes that he is the son of Bruno Schulz, the famous Polish Jewish writer who wrote about and was a victim of the Holocaust. His fate poses yet another version of Ozick's much-praised quest for what it means to be a contemporary Jew.
1989The Shawl. The volume is made up of the harrowing title story, about Rosa Lubin's failed attempt to hide her baby in her shawl to keep it from concentration camp guards, and a novella revisiting Rosa's life three decades later, at a Miami hotel for retirees.
1996Fame and Folly. Ozick describes the subject of this essay collection as "famous literary figures in our famously rotting century who have been associated with one sort of folly or another." Figures include Isaac Babel, H. G. Wells, and Henry James.
1997Puttermesser Papers. Ozick adds new and collects previously published stories dealing with the Jewish American attorney Ruth Puttermesser, whose vivid fantasy world springs into disturbing life, including the creation of a golem who helps Ruth transform New York City.

Quotes By: Cynthia Ozick
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Quotes:

"After a certain number of years our faces become our biographies. We get to be responsible for our faces."

"I'm not afraid of facts, I welcome facts but a congeries of facts is not equivalent to an idea. This is the essential fallacy of the so-called scientific mind. People who mistake facts for ideas are incomplete thinkers; they are gossips."

"The usefulness of madmen is famous: they demonstrate society's logic flagrantly carried out down to its last scrimshaw scrap."

"In saying what is obvious, never choose cunning. Yelling works better."

"Wondrous hole! Magical hole! Dazzlingly influential hole! Noble and effulgent hole! From this hole everything follows logically: first the baby, then the placenta, then, for years and years and years until death, a way of life. It is all logic, and she who lives by the hole will live also by its logic. It is, appropriately, logic with a hole in it."

"One reason writers write is out of revenge. Life hurts; certain ideas and experiences hurt; one wants to clarify, to set out illuminations, to replay the old bad scenes and get the Treppenworte said -- the words one didn't have the strength or ripeness to say when those words were necessary for one's dignity or survival."

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Wikipedia: Cynthia Ozick
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Cynthia Ozick
Born April 17, 1928 (1928-04-17) (age 81)
New York City, New York, United States
Occupation Writer
Nationality American
Writing period 1966 - Present

Cynthia Ozick (born April 17, 1928) is an American short story writer, novelist, and essayist.

Ozick was born in New York City. She earned her B.A. from New York University and went on to study English Literature at Ohio State University, where she completed an M.A.

Ozick's fiction and essays are often about Jewish American life, but she also writes on a broad range of topics including politics, history, and literary criticism. Furthermore, she has written and translated poetry.

Her most recent novel, Heir to the Glimmering World (2004), called The Bear Boy in the United Kingdom, received much praise in the literary press. Most recently, Ozick published The Din in the Head, her sixth collection of literary essays.

In 1986, she was selected as the first winner of the Rea Award for the Short Story. Ozick was on the shortlist for the 2005 Man Booker International Prize, and in 2008 she was awarded the PEN/Malamud Award established by Bernard Malamud’s family "to honor excellence in the art of the short story".

Contents

Partial list of works

Novels

  • Trust (1966)
  • The Cannibal Galaxy (1983)
  • The Messiah of Stockholm (1987)
  • The Puttermesser Papers (1997)
  • Heir to the Glimmering World (2004) -- (published in the United Kingdom as The Bear Boy (2005)

Shorter Fiction

  • The Pagan Rabbi and Other Stories (1971)
  • Bloodshed and Three Novellas (1976)
  • Levitation: Five Fictions (1982)
  • Envy; or, Yiddish in America (1989)
  • The Shawl (1989)
  • Collected Stories (2007)
  • Dictation - A Quartet (2008)

Essays

  • All the World Wants the Jews Dead (1974)
  • Art and Ardor (1983)
  • Metaphor & Memory (1989)
  • What Henry James Knew and Other Essays on Writers (1993)
  • Fame & Folly: Essays (1996)
  • Quarrel & Quandary (2000)
  • The Din in the Head: Essays (2006)

Drama

  • Blue Light (1994)

Miscellaneous

  • A Cynthia Ozick Reader (1996)
  • The Complete Works of Isaac Babel (introduction 2001)

Reviews

External links

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Britannica Concise Encyclopedia. Britannica Concise Encyclopedia. © 2006 Encyclopædia Britannica, Inc. All rights reserved.  Read more
Works. The Chronology of American Literature, edited by Daniel S. Burt. Copyright © 2004 by Houghton Mifflin Company. Published by Houghton Mifflin Company. All rights reserved.  Read more
Quotes By. Copyright © 2008 QuotationsBook.com. All rights reserved.  Read more
Wikipedia. This article is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License. It uses material from the Wikipedia article "Cynthia Ozick".  Read more