"Do We Not Know the Meaning of Aesthetic Gratification?": Cynthia Ozick's The Shawl, the Akedah, and the Ethics of Holocaust Literary Aesthetics

Bruno Schulz, the Polish Jewish author of brilliant phantasmagoria, was gunned down by a Nazi officer in the Drohobycz ghetto in 1942. He left behind a small corpus of narrative work, published in English under the titles The Street of Crocodiles and Sanatorium Under the Sign of the Hourglass. 1 Another manuscript to which he had devoted several years, The Messiah, remained unfinished. Presumably it perished in the Holocaust, for it has never been recovered. Two recent novels, David Grossman's See Under: Love ('Ayen 'erekh 'ahavah)2 and Cynthia Ozick's ( The Messiah of Stockholm ),3 both turn the influence of Bruno Schulz and an evaluation of the events of his life to explicit thematic focus as they engage, too, in an imaginative reconstruction of the lost work, The Messiah. Though they have written very different books in different languages, Ozick and Grossman both take the same constellation of tensions as the raw material of their texts, and they elaborate on this fundamental similarity of concerns as part of a meditation on the power of the imagination, the possibilities of artistic expression, and Jewish identity in the second generation after the Holocaust.

Reinventing Bruno Schulz: Cynthia Ozick's The Messiah of Stockholm and David Grossman's See Under: Love

I did it in five pages in “The Shawl”, and I don’t admire that I did it. I did it because I couldn’t help it. It wanted to be done. I didn’t want to do it, and afterward I’ve in a way punished myself, I’ve accused myself for having done it. I wasn’t there, and I pretended through imagination that I was. I’ve also on occasion been punished in angry letters from people who really were there. But I wasn’t there, and the story is not a document, it’s an imagining.” (Kauvar 391)

"Prisoners Gradually Came to Buddhist Positions": The Presence of PTSD Symptoms in Rosa in Cynthia Ozick's The Shawl

Jane Heir to the Glimmering World: Cynthia Ozick's Victorian Vision

Justice You Shall Pursue: Jewish American Pragmatism

W HETHER she is lecturing the literary establishment on its parochialism at the MLA convention, or pointing out to George Steiner the defects of his universalism, Cynthia Ozick's is the most provocative of contemporary Jewish-American voices. Also one of the most disquieting, for she lifts up again and again the vexed and intricate tangle of Jewish attitudes toward art that many readers would rather not see so clearly. Embedded in a nonJewish cultural tradition, schooled in techniques that help interpret that tradition, and accustomed to value art and artists as the finest achievements of our civilization, we listen to Ozick's misgivings with more than a little discomfort. Despite her own writing, for all her admiration of Henry James and George Eliot, Ozick's conviction that art is idolatrous for Jews announces itself in essay after essay; works of art can be redeemed, turned toward the service of God, only when they reveal "moral purpose."1 In asking whether art impedes the making of moral choices Ozick, of course, takes her place in a distinguished line of American artists from Hawthorne and James to Pound and Cather. All ideologies, the Calvinist as well as the Judaic, civil religion as well as aestheticism, limit choice. For the Jewish writer, however, the status of cultural outsider affects the context in which such choices are made. And for the traditionalist Jewish writer, who takes seriously the God who, in George Steiner's words, "not only prohibits the making of images to represent Him" but also "does not allow imagining," the problem of art, obedience, and moral

https://www.jstor.org/stable/pdfplus/2926486.pdf

Janet Handler Burstein

Papers

Cynthia Ozick and the Transgressions of Art