Cynthia Ozick's Comic Art: From Levity to Liturgy (review)

150 SHOFAR Spring 1995 Vol. 13, No.3 Cynthia Ozick's Comic Art: From Levity to liturgy, by Sarah Blacher Cohen. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1994. 193 pp. $25.00. Sarah Blacher Cohen's critical study, Cynthia Ozick's Comic Art: From Levity to Liturgy, is a thoughtful introduction to a monumental though underrated writer. My real introduction to Cynthia Ozick came suddenly almost a decade ago at a conference, "Writing and the Holocaust." After three brutally intense days of papers, discussions, and nearly unbearable lunches, the major speakers assembled on a stage to conclude what could not be summarized. Hilberg, DesPres, Epstein, Heyen, Ozick, Applefeld-all were there. In the midst of final reflections, a young man stood up to rudely and loudly denounce the entire conference, since there had been, he claimed, no mention of Hitler's war against homosexuals. Ozick, with even greater vehemence, rose to reject his claims, saying that Hitler's victims had first been Jews, and gender or sexual preference had little to do with it. It was our identity as Jews, she shouted, and not as men, women, lesbians, or gays, that killed us. And so ended the conference. Ozick had opened it, with a moving reading of her Holocaust story "The Shawl," and she had ended it, making it clear that bearing the burden of the covenant and conscience was the Jewish lot and the source of an apparently eternal threat to our lives. Of the many piercing voices at the conference, many will remember only Ozick's. But Ozick's voice, strident, demanding, erudite, is not a popular one in the Jewish or wider cultural community. Probably the most traditionally Jewish of American writers today, Ozick insistently asks questions most Jews find uncomfortable. Thoroughly schooled in Yiddish, Hebrew, the Jewish Bible, and Jewish scholarship, Ozick asks how we can bind Jewish tradition into today's world, and she finds most of our attempts sorely wanting. Her style is dense, bitingly satiric, inaccessible to the many, and often mysteriously allusive. If Bellow is a writer who happens to be Jewish, Ozick is first a Jew and then a writer, committed to working out precisely that relationship between the artist and the Jewish covenant. Her lifelong goal has been to articulate what one of her characters in The Cannibal Galaxy calls the Dual Curriculum, the conflict between Pan and Moses, between the Enlightenment and covenant, between Hellenism and Hebraism. Ozick's prognosis for the culture is not good: the modern malaise consists in the preference for self-creation, the indulgence of the self, the worship ofArt itself, the search for false idols, over the call of the law. Book Reviews 151 Ozick has found her mouthpiece in Sarah Blacher Cohen, who lovingly walks readers through Ozick's reuvre, from her first novel Trust to her latest fiction, The Shawl. Cohen, Professor of English at the University at Albany, quotes Ozick in her epigraph: "All that is not Law is levity." Cohen's originality lies in fleshing out Ozick's comic genius, pitting levity against liturgy. For Cohen, Ozick reveals humans not as "ethereal paragons of virtue, but earth-bound, awkward creatures repeatedly committing the same mistakes and indiscretions...." Ozick uses ajewish humor in which, in Bellow's words, "laughter and trembling are so curiously mingled that it is not easy to determine the relations of the two." Cohen knows that unlike Bellow, Ozick finds no saving nobility in her characters. Rabbi Isaac Kornfeld fornicates with a dryad in a tree; joseph Brill abandons his jewish heritage for a pseudo-cosmopolitan identity. Ozick writes a "comedy of character which exposes the tainted nature of her protagonists." Cohen explains that Flannery O'Connor comes closer to Ozick: both writers are cynical, detached, and almost merciless in observing "their rash of errant behavior." And unlike Grace Paley's characters, Ozick's are obsessed with their miseries. Cohen brilliantly illustrates Ozick's "comedy of ideas" where many of her characters are "talking heads and talking texts." Cohen demonstrates how Ozick uses play to "implement a genuinely prophetic seriousness." The heart of Cohen's study is seven chapters, each devoted to one or more works. Her best writing...