SOURCE: Lakritz, Andrew. “Cynthia Ozick and the End of the Modern.” Chicago Review 40, no. 1 (winter 1994): 98–117.

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 Second World War, a new era has emerged which old labels no longer suffice to name, and the new name which seems to have taken strongest hold is “postmodern.”¹ Others have criticized this movement toward new paradigms under the assumption that the post-war period represents elements of thought and culture that are in important ways extensions of modernism, indeed, of romanticism itself.² Cynthia Ozick's book The Messiah of Stockholm in some ways identifies itself as “postmodern” in the sense that it is consciously about a man who has come after, come too late, and lives in a time...