SOURCE: Rosenberg, Meisha. “Cynthia Ozick's Post-Holocaust Fiction: Narration and Morality in the Midrashic Mode.” Journal of the Short Story in English 32 (spring 1999): 113-27.

In the following essay, Rosenberg investigates how Ozick's use of the midrashic mode, which finds its origins in “to search” or “to inquire,” allows her to approach the topic of the Holocaust.

Cynthia Ozick's writings can be viewed in light of a midrashic mode by virtue of her need to sustain Jewish tradition in the wake of great devastation—the Holocaust. What is the proper mode of representation for an event that is arguably unprecedented, not only in the history of the Jews, but in the history of humankind? Figurative discourse about the Holocaust has experienced considerable objections,¹ haunted as it still is by Theodor Adorno's famous pronouncement that to write poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric. This despite the fact that Adorno later qualified his...