Cynthia Ozick

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Cynthia Ozick 1928–, American writer, b. New York City, grad. New York Univ. (B.A., 1949), Ohio State Univ. (M.A., 1950). Her fiction, written with high intelligence, elegant incisiveness, and sharp, frequently satiric wit, is mainly concerned with facets of Jewish life and thought including the Holocaust and its legacy, the Jewish presence in contemporary life, and Jewish mysticism and legend. Ozick's novels began with the lengthy Trust (1966) and continued with The Cannibal Galaxy (1983), The Messiah of Stockholm (1987), The Shawl (1989), The Puttermesser Papers (1997), Heir to the Glimmering World (2004), and Foreign Bodies (2010). Her collections of short fiction are The Pagan Rabbi and Other Stories (1971), Bloodshed and Three Novellas (1976), Levitation: Five Fictions (1982), and Dictation: A Quartet (2008). Ozick's literary criticism and other intellectually rigorous essays have been collected in Art and Ardor (1983), Metaphor and Memory (1989), Fame and Folly (1996), Quarrel and Quandary (2000), and The Din in the Head (2006). Early in her career Ozick published poetry, and in her later years she has written plays.

Bibliography: See studies by H. Bloom, ed. (1986), S. Pinsker (1987), J. Lowin (1988), V. E. Kielsky (1989), L. S. Friedman (1991), E. M. Kauvar (1993), S. B. Cohen (1994), V. H. Strandberg (1994), and D. Fargione (2005).

Ozick, Cynthia (1928– ),Bronx‐born fiction writer and literary critic. Her first novel, Trust (1966), she herself describes as “Jamesian.” She began it after doing a master's thesis on James at Ohio State. The involved plot has a female narrator emotionally abandoned and financially deprived by relatives, who becomes witness to aftershocks of the Holocaust. Her first book of stories, The Pagan Rabbi and Other Stories (1971), is about immigrant intellectual Jews in America; The Cannibal Galaxy (1983) is a short novel about a Swedish book reviewer entranced by Judaism and by the discovery of a manuscript of the Polish author Bruno Schulz, a Holocaust victim; The Shawl (1989) contains two novellas. The Puttermesser Papers (1997) is a novel comprising five short pieces of fiction with the brilliant Jewish New Yorker Ruth Pettermesser at their center. American Jews and the Holocaust experience feature in stories in Levitation (1982) and in the novellas in Bloodshed (1976). Essays have been gathered in Art and Ardor (1983), Metaphor and Memory (1987), Metaphor and Myth (1989), Fame and Folly (1996), and Quarrel and Quandary (2000).