Cynthia Ozick Summary

The author of two novels and dozens of essays, Cynthia Ozick is best known for her three collections of short fiction, The Pagan Rabbi and Other Stories (1971), Bloodshed and Three Novellas (1976), an... Read more

One of the most versatile contemporary American writers, Cynthia Ozick has written novels, short fiction, essays, poems, a play, and many articles and reviews. In the United States she has received th... Read more

In the following essay, Cohen observes that with the publication of Metaphor & Memory, Ozick “can no longer claim she is a literary nobody.” Try to “possess one great li... Read more

In the following interview, Ozick comments on her writing career and the influences behind The Messiah of Stockholm. [Materassi:] Let's begin with a standard “first question”: ... Read more

In the following essay, Lakritz compares The Messiah of Stockholm to Bruno Schulz's The Messiah. In recent years a debate has raged over the definition of the age. Some say with the end of t... Read more

In the following essay, Cohen explores Ozick's sense of Jewish identity and its effect on her writing. The waning of the immigrant experience and the depletion of the Yiddish culture which s... Read more

In the following essay, Powers discusses Ozick's opinions about Jewish identity and the role of the Jewish-American author. He that applieth himself to the fear of God, And setteth his mind ... Read more

In the following essay, Klingenstein examines Ozick's reflections on her Jewish and American identities. Writer Without Program It is a truth universally acknowledged that biographies are a ... Read more

In the following essay, Cooper examines Ozick's characterizations in her fiction. Cynthia Ozick's fiction is filled with characters in a state of identity crisis: “pagan rabbis... Read more

Critical Essay by Sarah Blacher Cohen A Jewish writer not preoccupied with her characters' gender identity and more sure of her artistic identity is Cynthia Ozick. Finding the designation �... Read more

Critical Essay by Publishers Weekly Ozick's first novel in more than 15 years [The Cannibal Galaxy] displays a complex, elegant style and deep sensitivity to the eternal difficulties of the hu... Read more

Critical Essay by Michiko Kakutani When we first meet the middle-aged bachelor named Joseph Brill [in "The Cannibal Galaxy"], he is presiding as the rather sour principal of a small pri... Read more

Critical Essay by Richard Eder Cynthia Ozick has stood immortality on its head. What fails and dies in her clenched and scintillating parable is learning and knowledge. What lives is life. The pub... Read more

Critical Essay by Edward Alexander In 1969 and 1970, Cynthia Ozick published, within a period of a few months, a short story and an essay that defined two American Jewish responses to the Holocaust a... Read more

Critical Essay by Leslie Epstein The prospect of reviewing a new book by Cynthia Ozick gave me great pleasure, since I believe her two previous collections—"The Pagan Rabbi and Other St... Read more

Critical Essay by A. Alvarez Ezra Pound once divided writers into carvers and molders. The molders—Balzac, Lawrence, Whitman—work fast, not much worried by detail or repetition or preci... Read more

Critical Essay by Katha Pollitt We may be living in "an era when the notion of belles-lettres is profoundly dead," as Miss Ozick says in her foreword, but it's thriving in ... Read more