Collected Stories
by Cynthia Ozick
Weidenfeld & Nicholson, $270
Cynthia Ozick may be today's finest literary stylist. Over four decades, she has drawn a worshipful following among serious-minded readers, who celebrate her philosophical commitment and lapidary prose.
Whether in her opinionated essays or her less didactic fiction, Ozick's writing is fired by a deep moral purpose that stems from her Judaism. Yet ultimately she's a comic writer, whose combination of playfulness and intellectualism - in novels such as The Cannibal Galaxy (1983), The Messiah of Stockholm (1987) and The Puttermesser Papers (1997) - echoes Saul Bellow at his most earnest. Ozick's insular themes, hinging on Judaism and literary production, haven't endeared her to the general reading public, and her often archaic prose, ridged with biblical and literary allusions, isn't easy. Although her admirers won't be surprised if she's awarded the Nobel Prize, she's little read outside the US.
Yet the publication of Ozick's Collected Stories, on the heels of her nomination for last year's Man Booker International Award, suggests that her readership is growing. The book draws together the three collections that largely made Ozick's reputation - The Pagan Rabbi and Other Stories (1971), Bloodshed and Three Novellas (1976) and Levitation: Five Fictions (1982). These stories define the challenge of being a diasporic Jew as a conflict between the worship of idols and covenant, Pan and Moses. In her 1970 essay Towards a New Yiddish, Ozick calls for post-Holocaust Jewish writers to resist Gentile influences through writing that is 'centrally Jewish in its concerns and thereby liturgical'. Defining a Jew as 'someone who shuns idols', Ozick urges Jewish writers to avoid 'aestheticised, poeticised and thereby paganised' writing that, in privileging style over morality, amounts to idolatry.