In the following essay, Klingenstein examines Ozick's reflections on her Jewish and American identities.

In the following interview, Ozick offers her views on Jewish culture, her role as a Jewish writer, and the importance of the Holocaust.

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.

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.”

In the following interview, Ozick comments on her writing career and the influences behind The Messiah of Stockholm.

In the following excerpt, Strandberg examines the critical reaction to several of Ozick's works, including Trust and The Pagan Rabbi.

In the following essay, Lakritz compares The Messiah of Stockholm to Bruno Schulz's The Messiah.

In the following essay, Powers discusses Ozick's opinions about Jewish identity and the role of the Jewish-American author.

In the following essay, Krupnick compares Ozick's works to the writings of T. S. Eliot.

In the following essay, Cohen discusses Ozick's use of humor and satire in her writing.

In the following essay, Cooper examines Ozick's characterizations in her fiction.

In the following review, Bell discusses pieces of short fiction from several Jewish authors, including Ozick.

In the following essay, Cohen explores Ozick's sense of Jewish identity and its effect on her writing.

In the following essay, Cohen observes that with the publication of Metaphor & Memory, Ozick “can no longer claim she is a literary nobody.”

A Jewish writer not preoccupied with her characters' gender identity and more sure of her artistic identity is Cynthia Ozick. Finding the designation "woman writer" too confining and essentially discriminatory, she regards the entire range of human experience as the fit subject matter for her fiction. Exploring the consciousness of both male and female characters, she doesn't mind being considered a betrayer to the feminist cause or a trespasser in male territory. What does conce...

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 "Art & Ardor," which is by turns quarrelsome, quirky, unfair, funny and brilliant. Looked at one way, these essays, though originally published in magazines as divergent as Ms. and Commentary, are a unified and magisterial continuation of Miss Ozick's short stories by other names. Admirers of her three story collections ...

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 Stories" and "Bloodshed and Three Novellas"—to be perhaps the finest work in short fiction by a contemporary writer; certainly it is the work in that genre that has most appealed to me. Then the bound galleys of "Levitation" arrived, subtitled "Five Fictions." Immediately a voice whispered, ...

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 and the relation between them. The story, a small masterpiece, was entitled "Envy; or, Yiddish in America." In it she ironically but affectionately re-created the ambience of American Yiddish writers, for whom continuation of Yiddish, the language of the majority of the victims of the Holocaust, constitutes the most meaningful form o...

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 know of. Yet she steadfastly shuns overindulgence of any sort, and instead does what too few contemporary fiction writers do on a regular basis—think. Ozick is obsessed with the words she puts on paper, with what it means to imagine a story and to tell it, with what fiction is. The result is a body of work at once as rich as Grace Paley&#...

[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 well she writes. [The twenty-three essays collected in Art and Ardor], on subjects ranging from Edith Wharton to John Updike to Gershom Scholem, with stops in between for mulling over what art should be doing and what Jewishness is, are a pleasure to read for their vividness of thought and language…. Ozick is a writer of passionately held bel...

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 collection of literary essays it often passes right through the book under discussion. Whether this should be called transcending the author's limitations or missing her point may be a matter of taste. Miss Ozick polices modern literature and tries to arrest what she sees as self-indulgence. She seems to be morally insatiable, to want every autho...

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 primary school in the Middle West. Like so many of Cynthia Ozick's characters, he spends much of his time alone, and he is alone because he is guilty of hubris. He has not only allowed intellectual pretensions to calcify his heart, but he has also committed what Miss Ozick seems to regard as one of the worst sins of all—in creating a r...

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 publishers call "The Cannibal Galaxy" a novel; perhaps novella is more like it, because it is a single sunset, not a chain of days. The sunset is for Principal Joseph Brill of the Edmond Fleg School, set beside an unnamed Great Lake….

Ezra Pound once divided writers into carvers and molders. The molders—Balzac, Lawrence, Whitman—work fast, not much worried by detail or repetition or precision, impatient to get down the shape and flow of their inspiration, while the carvers—Flaubert, Eliot, Beckett—work with infinite slowness, painstakingly writing and rewriting, unable to go ahead until each phrase is balanced, each detail perfect. Cynthia Ozick is a carver, a stylist in the best and most complete sense: in la...

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 are few men in [the stories which make up Levitation], fewer gentiles, and hardly a single out-of-towner, but the result is anything but narrow; the absentees are hardly noticed. Cynthia Ozick has the enviable knack of moving, with impressive speed, in opposite directions at the same time; her specialities are prose poetry, intellectual slapsti...

If we postulate that the "scene" in fiction corresponds to the image in poetry, we may say that Ozick's interplay of fictional devices consistently develops scenes answering to Ezra Pound's Imagist Manifesto of 1913: they "transmit an intellectual and emotional complex in an instant of time." The pagan motifs converging into the night of Tilbeck's apotheosis; the Pagan Rabbi's breathtaking consummation of love with the dryad; Puttermesser chanting her ...

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 book, Art and Ardor, a collection of essays published last spring, revealed her to be one of the most vigorously intellectual of contemporary American authors. Still, no other fiction writer except Isaac Bashevis Singer has succeeded so brilliantly in harnessing what Ozick has called "the steeds of myth and mysticism" in the Jewish ...

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 inimitable—of the play of mind over matters of life and literature…. Cynthia Ozick puts everything she has into her essays—and that's a lot: wit, fierce intelligence, supple writing, and an absence of hackneyed opinion. Her subjects include literature, Judaism, feminism. Beginning one of her essays, you don...

Cynthia Ozick's new novel, "The Cannibal Galaxy" … is so rich in its tapestries it can be read variously as an incisive though ironic evaluation of the American private school system, as a commentary on the problems of assimilation increasingly faced by Jewish day schools, as a wry report on the aggressiveness of Jewish mothers asserting the educational prerogatives of their children; or as a book dealing with Jewish marginality, power and powerlessness, and generational conflict...

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 human condition. Her story of a school principal who becomes aware of the pinched nature of his life through the unexpected blossoming of a student he had considered dull manages to combine brilliantly detailed individual character portraits with a more general philosophical consideration of the unpredictability of life. Ozick's technique is ...