Creation's Covenant: The Art of Cynthia Ozick

Cynthia Ozick established the prevailing critical context for interpreting her fiction when she rather controversially claimed that no fiction produced by Jews in the Diaspora has had lasting value except that which is "centrally Jewish" (Art, 155). As her readers have consistently attested, Ozick's characters share an abiding concern with their status as Jews. ¹ For Ozick, though, there can be no fiction that is "centrally Jewish" that is not also somehow a reflection on the Jew's covenant with the one true Creator. As Suzanne Klingenstein observes, "the nature of the creative drive, condemned in Genesis as yetzer ha-ra (Gen. 6:5, 8:21), is the fundamental issue" confronted by her fiction (52). ² Characters such as Isaac Kornfeld of "The Pagan Rabbi" or the narrator of "Usurpation" find themselves almost literally torn between their desire to create and the injunction not to be idolaters. Ozick's work, therefore, is concerned not only with what it means to be a Jew but with what both the fact and idea of creation mean to the Jew who would also write imaginative literature. So pointed has been Ozick's critical writing on this issue that her readers have been tempted to think that Ozick writes fiction in order to write theology, when actually it is probably more accurate to say that she writes theology in order to create more vibrant fictions. As Ozick's most perceptive critic, Elaine Kauvar, counsels, even if "for Ozick imaginative art never can be equated with what is deliberately Jewish," then it is also true that she "has always treated her tradition as a threshold rather than a terminus" ("An Interview," 361). ³ In the critical context Ozick provides for her work, exploring the possibilities of creation endows her fiction with the presumption of possibly achieving the sacred. ⁴ While Ozick is not actually a blasphemous or idolatrous writer even by her own strict definition, her fiction would lack its imposing power did it not risk this possibility. ⁵ Ozick's interest in idolatry reflects her ambition to realize in her fiction culturally and aesthetically appropriate forms in which to express her creative desire. ⁶

In a 1993 interview Ozick offers a definition of the term "Jewish culture" that tentatively seems to include the possibility of writing fiction as something other than a heretical act. She notes that "since the rise of Haskalah," "the idea of what Jewish culture is about has been radically altered. We seem not to know what to do with this difference in perception of the nature of textual culture; it is simply too new in Jewish life, no more than something over a hundred years old" (Kauvar, "An Interview," 365). She cites Abraham Cahan as the first American example of this shift and suggests that Jewish culture "is evolving within a new concept that it never used before, namely, belle-lettres" (365). Implying that she is a product of this shift, Ozick asks "to be let off this hook--the hook, I mean, of speaking for a tradition" (361). Although Ozick is apparently backing off here from her earlier insistence that her fiction contradicts her understanding of the Jewish tradition, this conflict still comprises the drama out of which she invents her fictions. Hannah Wirth-Nesher has eloquently written that "Ozick's only recourse out of the paradox of inventing fictions that defy her own dictum is to seek forms that will require continuity, that will make literature liturgical in that evokes the texts of Jewish civilization." Wirth-Nesher adds that "what this means is that 'liturgy' becomes a dynamic concept, one that requires reexamination within Jewish culture" (313). Wirth-Nesher's remarks underscore the fact Ozick's work has been strongest when working within (or against) prior Jewish texts, be they secular works by writers such as Malamud or Agnon or Peretz, or more traditional modes of Jewish inquiry such...