Cynthia Ozick's Fiction: Tradition and Invention (review)

Book Reviews 133 are excellent, but this reviewer regrets that Lassner does not cite and appears not to have used Wheeler M. Thackston's excellent translation of The Tales of the Prophets of al-Kisa'i (Boston, 1978). Similarly, although Lassner was forced to circumscribe his study by the sheer number of sources available for this tale, he would have culled some enjoyable details from the tenth-century Persian accounts recorded by Ibn Khalaf al-NisabiirI. These caveats aside, Lassner's study will surely become a must for alI scholars who study isra:Jiliyat, that body ofJewish lore that found its way into Muslim religious and literary consciousness. Vera B. Moreen Department of Religion Swarthmore College Cynthia Ozick's Fiction: Tradition and Invention, by Elaine M. Kauvar. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1993. 264 pp. $29.95. Although· he had plenty of opinions on all kinds of issues, D. H. Lawrence advised us to "trust the tale not the teller." When a writer of fiction publishes essays, delivers lectures, and gives interviews as often as Ozick does, readers will inevitably try to make the tales fit the teller's stated views. In Understanding Cynthia Ozick (1991), a short but insightful book reviewed recently in Shofar (Vol. 12, No. 1 [Fall 1993], pp. 107-108), Lawrence Friedman suggests that "many of Ozick's essays ... reflect in theoretical, often polemical form the same moral and aesthetic concerns that surface in her fiction," especially "those essays which trace the contours ofJewish belief' (p. 9). Following Ozick's "Forewarning" to Metaphor & Memory, Elaine Kauvar asserts the contrary: "Cynthia Gzick's essays and stories are frequently irreconcilable; both are more profitably read by acknowledging their confiicting viewpoints and competing ideas" (p.2). In practice, however, Friedman's looser sense of "concerns" and "contours" allows him to grant each of Ozick's fictional works more of its own moral and intellectual space than Kauvar does. For Kauvar, Gzick's commitment to tradition precedes her artistic impulse toward invention, as her subtitle indicates, both in importance and in generative power. Although Kauvar stresses Gzick's inventiveness, she reads the fiction as works of an imagination responding dialectically but not irreconcilably to a powerful central idea-the human need for moral, spiritual and cultural traditions anchored (at least for Jews) by a covenantal apprehension of the 134 SHOFAR Winter 1995 Vol. 13, No.2 Divine. Kauvar reads the fiction as cautionary tales of the impoverishment of the human spirit when those traditions and the covenant on which they are based are ignored, supplanted, repudiated, or ruptured by a historical trauma such as the Sboab. Kauvar's discussions of Ozick's fiction are thus embedded in elaborate networks of cross-references to the essays and .other stories in order to point up thematic continuities nearly obscured by such literary strategies as doubling, splitting, and juxtaposition. Kauvar's book is valuable for its perception of intra- and intertextual dialogues within Ozick's fiction and nonfiction, and for placing Ozick in dialogue with such Jewish writers as Singer, Kosinsky, Glatstein, Malamud, Agnon, Wiesel, and Baeck. Kauvar's synthesis of philosophical consistency with literary variety is challenged by an interview with Ozick which just appeared in the Canadian journal Brick (No. 46 [Summer 1993D. Here Ozick goes much further than Kauvar does in protesting the conflation of essayist and artist: "Ideas and essays belong, I think, to the civic, that is to the citizenly self, to the Jew. But fiction and the imaginative life are free of any kind of constraint, any kind of allegiance. I think I'm least Jewish when I'm writing fiction" (p. 44). This position leads to a recantation ofthe idea that "there's something idolatrous about the act of creation itself," a position which Kauvar underscored in several of Ozick's essays and such early works of fiction as "Usurpation" and which she often invokes as a touchstone. Dismissing this position as a "feverish state or ideational eruption," Ozick admits that "I did carry on quite a bit about the idolatry of writing" but avers that "the idea is no longer of any importance to me." Later in the interview, Ozick amplifies her objection to using her...