Cynthia Ozick

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Cynthia Ozick (born April 17, 1928 in New York City ) is an American writer. In novels and stories that are rich in fantastic and comic elements, as well as in an abundance of pointed essays , she asks about the special requirements of Jewish life in the present and insists on the importance of Jewish tradition in view of the experiences of the 20th century.

life and work

Ozick grew up in the Bronx, the younger of two children of a pharmacist couple . Her parents came from Lithuania with its rationalist and anti-mystical tradition of Judaism. The father was a Talmud scholar with a wide range of language skills, the mother a sister of the poet Abraham Regelson . In addition to the regular American school, Ozick attended the Jewish cheder school, where she was taught in Hebrew - and saw that she was ostracized in one place as a Jew and in another as a girl. A keen reader from an early age, she attended Hunter College in New York and Ohio State University , where she completed her literary studies with a thesis on Parable in the Later Novels of Henry James . Henry James is the subject of many of her essays to the present day.

Ozick defined herself as a writer early on , but never published her first novel, Mercy, Pity, Peace, and Love , which she had worked on for years. The second, Trust , the story of a young woman who seeks her way between very different father figures, appeared in 1966.

At the same time she acquired a thorough knowledge of classical Jewish literature. Also in 1966 appeared the story The Pagan Rabbi ("The Pagan Rabbi"), the story of a scholar who is seduced by preoccupation with pantheistic ideas to fall in love with a tree nymph . In 1969, Envy, or Yiddish in America followed , in which an unsuccessful Yiddish poet runs up against a famous colleague (who bears Isaac Bashevis Singer's traits ).

Numerous other stories followed, which received a lot of attention and prestigious awards. A story from 1980, The Laughter of Akiva , she expanded on her next novel The Cannibal Galaxy ( The cannibal galaxy ) over a French-Jewish Holocaust survivor who founded a school in the Midwest, classic-in which he Jewish and ideally combine the humanistic curriculum. While Ozick, in an essay from this period, Bialik's Hint (printed in Metaphor & Memory ), also presents such a connection as an ideal in its own right, it causes its school principal to fail terribly. In the novel, this happens mainly to a woman, a linguist, who thinks little of his project and whose daughter goes through a very unexpected development at school.

In the 1980s, Ozick began to collectively publish her essays. Issues that she often tragically and comically brings to failure in the novels and stories are discussed and represented here, so that her work as a whole suggests the juxtaposition of the aggadic and halachic , narrative and didactic strands in the Talmud . In the essay Towards a New Yiddish from 1970 (now in Art & Ardor ), for example, she asks about the possibilities of an English enriched by Jewish culture to take on the legacy of Yiddish, which was lost in the Holocaust. In Metaphor and Memory , the title essay of the volume of the same name, she contrasts the classical Greek and Jewish use of metaphors : in one case they are historically unique phenomena and remain fascinating, non-binding “ idols ”, in the other they are enriched with historical experience and thereby gain moral weight.

A special place in Ozicks work take two stories one from 1980 and 1983, The Shawl ( The scarf ) and Rosa . The first describes in a few pages the experience of a young woman who is taken to a concentration camp with her starving little child in her arms and has to watch how it is grabbed and thrown against an electric fence as it takes its first steps. In the second, the same woman is exposed to the recurrence of her memories years later in the USA. The stories are considered an important literary confrontation with the Holocaust. The Shawl has been included in numerous anthologies, and Ozick worked on a stage version in the 1990s.

The third published novel, The Messiah of Stockholm ( The Messiah of Stockholm ) in 1987, tells the story of a Swedish literary critic, who is a son of Polish-Jewish, was shot by the Nazis author Bruno Schulz holds. However, when the manuscript of his last novel The Messiah , believed to be lost, is leaked to him, he believes he has recovered and destroys it.

In 1997 Ozick published The Puttermesser Papers , five in some cases older stories that can also be read throughout as a novel, about Ruth Puttermesser, a New York lawyer who initially had a modest income but was well-read, whose wishes are wonderfully realized, so that she becomes a female golem created and becomes mayor of their city. In 2004, the novel was published Heir to the Glimmering World ( The remote splendor of the world ). In 1935, an orphaned young woman ended up in the household of a German-Jewish family of scholars who were stranded in the Bronx without any means but without books. The rich legacy of a children's book author who was the subject of these children's books and is now completely uprooted as an adult supports them on a whim. The father of the family is a religious scholar and tries to find new sources on the Jewish sect of the Karaites , but life also sets other priorities here.

In her sixth novel Foreign Bodies ( Miss Nightingale in Paris ) from 2010 Ozick varies the plot of Henry James' novel The Ambassadors ( The Messenger ) from 1903: While there is a middle-aged man is sent by a friend to France to her son To save the clutches of an elderly French woman, whereupon he falls for both the country and the woman, Ozick's heroine comes to France in 1952 on an assignment from her brother and finds his son married to a woman who lost her first family in the war, whereupon it faces its own repressed history.

In 1954 Ozick married Bernard Hallote, who later became a lawyer, and their daughter Rachel was born in 1965.

Awards

Literary awards

In 1986 Ozick was the first recipient of the Rea Award for the Short Story , an award specifically for short stories. In 2008 she received the Nabokov Award from the American PEN

Other awards

In 1986, Ozick was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences . She has been a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters since 1988 . In 2001 she received the Guardian of Zion Award from Bar Ilan University .

Works

German editions

  • The cannibal galaxy. Piper, Munich 1985.
  • Putter knife and her golem. (Contains from the band Levitation: Five Fictions (1982), the stories Levitation , shots , putter blade.. The history of their activity your origin your future life and putter blade and its Golem , and the stories The scarf (1980) and Rosa (1983) ). Piper, Munich 1987.
  • The Messiah of Stockholm. Piper, Munich 1990.
  • The distant shine of the world. Pendo, Munich 2005.
  • Miss Nightingale in Paris. Graf, Munich 2014, ISBN 978-3-86220-039-9 .

American editions

Novels

  • Trust. 1966.
  • The Cannibal Galaxy. 1983.
  • The Messiah of Stockholm. 1987.
  • The Putter Knife Papers. 1997.
  • Heir to the Glimmering World. 2004.
  • Foreign bodies. 2010.

stories

  • The Pagan Rabbi and Other Stories. 1971.
  • Bloodshed and Three Novellas. 1976.
  • Levitation: Five Fictions. 1982.
  • The Shawl. 1989. (includes The Shawl and Rosa )
  • Dictation: A Quartet. 2008.

Essays

  • Art & Ardor. 1983.
  • Metaphor & Memory. 1989.
  • Fame & Folly. 1996.
  • Quarrel & Quandary. 2000.
  • The Din in the Head. 2006.

Secondary literature

  • Till Kinzel: Golem in America: The golem material in modern American literature using the example of Cynthia Ozick's The Puttermesser Papers and Marge Piercy's He, She and It. In: Till Kinzel (Ed.): 150 years of Herrigsche Gesellschaft. Anniversary publication of the Berlin Society for the Study of Modern Languages. (= Studies on English literature. 23). LIT, Berlin 2007, pp. 177-201.
  • Jane Statlander: Cultural dialectic. Ludwig Lewisohn and Cynthia Ozick. Lang, New York 2002, ISBN 0-8204-5849-X .

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Book of Members 1780 – present, Chapter O. (PDF; 289 kB) In: American Academy of Arts and Sciences (amacad.org). Retrieved January 19, 2019 .
  2. ↑ Academy Members. American Academy of Arts and Letters, accessed January 19, 2019 .
personal data
SURNAME Ozick, Cynthia
BRIEF DESCRIPTION American writer
DATE OF BIRTH April 17, 1928
PLACE OF BIRTH New York City