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...
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Cynthia Ozick's stature as a writer came through a long apprenticeship, during which she often read eighteen hours a day. Having so intensely lived within literature herself, she can by a few deft all...
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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...
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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 liter...
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In the following essay, Krupnick compares Ozick's works to the writings of T. S. Eliot.
I want to start with my title: “Cynthia Ozick as the Jewish T. S. Eliot.” I have been asked...
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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”: How...
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In the following interview, Ozick offers her views on Jewish culture, her role as a Jewish writer, and the importance of the Holocaust.
American Jewish writers too often face the unreasonable demand t...
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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 the ...
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In the following essay, Cohen discusses Ozick's use of humor and satire in her writing.
“Can one write comically without knowing one is doing it?” Cynthia Ozick posed this rhetori...
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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 so e...
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In the following excerpt, Strandberg examines the critical reaction to several of Ozick's works, including Trust and The Pagan Rabbi.
The Critical Reckoning
Cynthia Ozick, thirty-eight years ol...
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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 upo...
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In the following essay, Alkana offers a positive assessment of The Shawl, noting Ozick's stance against universalism in stories such as “The Shawl” and “Rosa.”
For A...
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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 spe...
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In the following review, Bell discusses pieces of short fiction from several Jewish authors, including Ozick.
In 1954, this magazine published “The Magic Barrel,” which was an immediate ...
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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,&#...
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In the following essay, Klingenstein studies the Holocaust and the theme of Jewish-American visits to Germany as exemplified in the writings of Cynthia Ozick and Rebecca Goldstein.
The question of Ger...
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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 �...
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Critical Essay by Phyllis Rose
In Art & Ardor, Ozick's perfectionist, self-critical habits produce a book which surprises and delights on every line, a model—except that her prose is...
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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 hum...
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Critical Essay by Barbara Koenig Quart
[Even] if one wants to argue with Ozick every step of the way—and I only want to argue with her every third step—one must start by noting how very ...
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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 prim...
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Critical Essay by Patricia Blake
The Cannibal Galaxy, Cynthia Ozick's first full-scale novel in 17 years, comes as a welcome reminder of her commanding powers as a storyteller. Her previous boo...
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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 publish...
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Critical Essay by Joseph Cohen
Cynthia Ozick's new novel, "The Cannibal Galaxy" … is so rich in its tapestries it can be read variously as an incisive though ironic evaluat...
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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 an...
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Critical Essay by Robert R. Harris
Self-consciousness about writing fiction can lead to overindulgent prose and the substitution of egoism for ideas. Cynthia Ozick is the most self-conscious writer I ...
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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 Sto...
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Critical Essay by Adam Mars-jones
Cynthia Ozick is a woman, and Jewish, and a New Yorker; these conditions in combination might be expected to produce a narrow art, if any at all. And certainly there ...
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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 precis...
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Critical Essay by Anatole Broyard
The ardor in Cynthia Ozick's "Art and Ardor" is for dissent. She is a brilliant disagreer whose analysis is so penetrating that in this collectio...
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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 "...
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Critical Essay by Victor Strandberg
If we postulate that the "scene" in fiction corresponds to the image in poetry, we may say that Ozick's interplay of fictional devices consiste...
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Cynthia Ozick
