SOURCE: Ozick, Cynthia, and Elaine M. Kauvar. “An Interview with Cynthia Ozick.” Contemporary Literature 34, no. 3 (fall 1993): 358–94.

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 that they be responsible for reinforcing and revitalizing Jewishness. To yield to such a demand is to renounce the freedom of imaginative writing, an unthinkable sacrifice for a serious writer. Small wonder that American Jewish writers—Philip Roth and Stanley Elkin come immediately to mind—have vigorously resisted the label “Jewish writer” together with its attendant restrictions. Yet more than they have with Roth or Elkin, critics have unquestioningly regarded Cynthia Ozick as a Jewish writer whose muses not only are Jews but whose ideas are limited to Judaism. Ozick, in fact, has always treated her tradition as a threshold...