Cynthia Ozick Books

I found this at a used book store bargain bin, it is my second "Best American Series" book and I really enjoyed it. The variety of writing that can fall under the classification of "essay" is so vast that the editor has somewhat of a hard job in choosing. In this case Ozick focuses on retrospections, older people looking back on their lives. I appreciate the thematic organization, but I am certain these are not the "best", rather ones that have a common theme. But then, what is "the best"? J.M. Coetzee examines this question and more in "What is realism?", probably the most mind blowing essay of the bunch - I'm not sure if it's fiction, non-fiction or a lesson on writing but it really opened my eyes to some of the games and tricks of writing.

Other essays I enjoyed include Jeremy Bernstein's "The Merely Very Good" which is both an interesting history lesson about some famous 20th century physicists, and a lesson of what it means to be really smart, but not at the top of your field, second-tier. "A Peaceable Kingdom" by Edward Hoagland is a short beautifully romantic piece about the natural world at a mans summer mountain cottage, although it could just as easily be anyones back-yard (replace the bears with chipmunks). Louis Simpson's "Soldier's Heart" is a somewhat dark and effecting story of a WWII vet who had PTSD and ended up in the hospital getting elctro-shock therapy and the lifetime it took to recover and heal from both experiences. Finally, Diana Trilling's "A Visit To Camelot" is a re-telling of a party she went to at the Whitehouse with the Kennedys, it's magical.

Joyce Carol Oates essay , "They all just went away" tells of her childhood attraction for abandoned houses, and the story of one family whose house was set on fire by the outraged, drunken father. It is a masterful reflection on the fragility of human existence- and also provides an insight into her own rich and troubled imagination.
Edward Hoagland's reflects on his own relation to Biblical religion after his recovery from two years of blindness. He has a deep appreciation of the Biblical text, especially of Job. His essay is moving though he shows an imperfect understanding of normative Judaism especially in regard to its conception of Justice and Mercy.
William Styron tells of a misdiagnosis he suffered from while a Marine, and gives insight into the sexual norms and expectations of another time.
Julie Baumgold takes a look at the Elvis Myth and also at Elvis own tragic end.
One of my favorite essay writers Joseph Epstein writes of the roles naps have played in his life, and that of many other noted masters of midday refreshment. He in the course of this provides an insightful look into the subject of 'sleeping'.
On the basis of these essays alone I would say that this is a first- rate volume.

I'm really glad to meet this place. Now I am defencing these on Thomas Pynchon. So I wish you could send me a new list on Pynchon. Thank you.

I found this series a couple of years ago, and each issue is a treasure to enjoy. I often find myself reading about things outside my experience, outside what I expect to be interested in - and every time I learn and think and imagine and am given pleasure in the reading. The essay form, in the hands of these writers, is a grand and various opportunity for thought and exploration of grand themes and of the minutiae of human life.

Being of a younger generation, my acquaintances are generally surprised to find me reading a collection of essays. This provides me with a golden opportunity to share the wealth I have found in this book. Not only have the essayists here provoked thought and surprising emotion from me, but this art has pushed me in a new direction. Witnessing all of the unexpected beauty pouring from this book has made me want to write essays. I cannot wait to get my hands on the rest of this series. Fiction has been moved to the back burner. I am forever grateful.

Ozick writes with the great moral seriousness of one of her major mentors Henry James. She writes with very great intelligence and if her essays at times tend a bit to awkwardness they nonetheless always manage to provide new insight into the subject she addresses. She is naturally especially outstanding in her consideration of writers and writing.

When Cynthia Ozick wrote of critic James Wood that "he thinks with a sublime ferocity...[and his writing is characterized by] an intellectual daring that portends literary permanence," she might have been describing herself. A belletrist always, a polemicist when necessary (she agrees with Chekhov that writers should engage in politics only in order to protect themselves from politics), Cynthia Ozick is our most distinguished literary intellectual (perhaps she would prefer the old-fashioned word "thinker"). Some essays in this collection are much finer than others, but a great writer's poor performances have a way of not mattering a great deal. "A Drugstore in Winter," "Literature and the Politics of Sex: A Dissent," and "Justice (Again) to Edith Wharton" are extraordinary.

Avoid Cynthia Ozick if you would rather be hip than learned. If you wish to read a remarkable analysis of how we (they) came to revere the hip over the learned, turn to "The Question of Our Speech: The Return to Aural Culture," the collection's best essay. Ozick is a thinker of luminous seriousness. I reread her gratefully.

Cynthia Ozick is one of the finest essayists writing today. In this very rich volume she writes about Cyril Connaly, William Gaddis, Italo Calvino, J.M.Coetze, Primo Levi, Saul Bellow, Henry James, Dreiser, George Steiner, Sholem Aleichem, Agnon, and Bialik. In the title essay she writes in a more theoretically than in the other essays. " Metaphor" she writes," is also a priest of interpretation; but what it interprets is memory. Metaphor is compelled to press hard on language and storytelling; it inhabits language at its most concrete.As the shocking extension of the unknown into our most intimate, most feeling, most private selves, metaphor is the enemy of abstraction. Irony is of course implicit..Think how ironic your life would be if you passed through it without the power of connection! Novels, those vessels of irony and connection, are nothing if not metaphors. The great novels transform experience into idea because it is the way of metaphor to transform memory into a principle of continuity. By " continuity" I mean nothing less than literary seriousness, which is unquestionably a branch of life- seriousness"
These essays are at once serious and rewarding, challenging and enriching.

On the front cover of "Rescuers" are 12 photographs of some very nice looking people. They are pictures of people that you might meet every day; of friends and family, or someone that you might pass by on the street. They are the faces of very ordinary people, but they are also much more than that. They are the faces of people that risked their lives to save the lives of others during the Holocaust. They are the faces of the rescuers. There are many more photographs inside the book, of rescuers from countries all over Europe. Author Malka Drucker and photographer Gay Block interviewed and photographed the rescuers, seeking the heart of compassion and moral courage. They found that heart in men and women; the young and the old; and in people from all walks of life. Every story told by the rescuers is very moving. Some rescuers saved one person from death; some saved many thousands. All of the rescuers are worthy of the greatest respect and honor. The rescuers were sometimes asked the question of why they helped others to live, when so many other people stood by and did nothing. The rescuers would answer that question by saying that they were only doing what they knew was right. By caring for other people, they were acting the way that everyone should have been acting. One of the most inspiring truths found in the book, is the thought that we all have that same spark of goodness within our hearts, that was shown so nobly by the rescuers. We all have the capacity for doing what is right, even in times of the greatest fear and terror. This is a book that will warm your heart, and it is well worth reading.

This book is wonderfully formatted, arranged by geographic area of Europe. Each interview starts with black and white photos a person who helped Jews and other persecuted people during WWII. A personal narrative of that time in their lives follows, and each interview closes with a color photo of that person as they were in 1992 when the interviews were done. A complicated and moving picture of altruism emerges, and one gets a glimpse of how individuals chose to protect others at the risk of threat to themselves and their families.

In general I find this one of the best series of collection but this one was even better than the others. Afew essays were only mearly good but most of them were outstanding and left me thinking. One essay about how man of 60 views the world and hislife was exellent; then another essay about how a man of 90 views the world. Made for a great comparison

This is an excellent selection of Ozick's work . It includes what in my judgment is the finest piece of fiction that she has written the novella ,'Envy'. It also a number of her outstanding literary and historical reflections including some which touch upon her wise and insightful understanding of Jewish history.

It's incredible! Every time a new book of Ozick's is published, I give thanks to the Muses for having provided her the necessary inspiration. As usual, her sentences are gorgeous and lyrical; the characters are funny and utterly compelling.

"Dictation" is the only story contained that has not been previously published. It begins with the master Henry James and an emerging Joseph Conrad. Her characterizations of each man, as well as of Conrad's wife, are hilarious. Soon, however, the story shifts to the writers' amanuenses. For fear of ruining any of the story's surprises - there are many! - I will only say that the story may motivate you to go out and re-read, or read for the first time, certain stories by James and Conrad. (Though of course that may be a foolish enterprise, considering the story's "punch line.")

Familiar themes of morality and art are present, but Ozick explores them in a way I didn't expect.

I highly recommend this book to lovers of contemporary literature.

In 'Envy, or Yiddish in America' Ozick tells the story of a world, the world of those immigrant poets and writers in Yiddish who struggled to make a name in the New World and got nowhere. Against them is her main character, the one Yiddish writer who succeeds in an unbelievable way and whose works conquer America. This leading character is modeled obviously on the great I.B. Singer . In the story the other writers call him 'The Chazir ' or pig , not only because of his non- religious life style but obviously because he takes all the honors and rewards for himself. Ozick captures the language of this world, and its humor , the angry impossible humor of the Yiddish language itself. She writes with feeling of these frustrated difficult characters. This work I believe will be specially loved by writers but my guess is anyone who truly loves ' real literature' will find much pleasure in reading this work.

"Stella, cold, cold, the coldness of hell..." begins Cynthia Ozick's haunting story which takes place on a death march towards a Nazi concentration camp.

The second part of the novel is called "Rosa," which takes place in a hotel in Miami where Rosa, whose baby daughter Magda was murdered by the Nazis, lives. Here, she shows how the wounds of the past are too deep for healing though, of course, we wish it wasn't.

I have never read Cynthia Ozick's short story, The Shawl. Maybe because I was overloaded by the Holocaust Literature but I have to say that it is one of the most effective short story that I have ever read. It's the Most Dangerous Game and the Lady or the Tiger of our time. Cynthia Ozick's short story, The Shawl, is classic because of it's main character, Rosa Lublin, a Polish Jew, who is in a concentration camp with her niece, Stella, and her baby daughter, Magda who she conceals in the Shawl. It's a heartbreaking tale. I won't spoil the story for the readers here.
In Rosa, she is a 59 year old survivor living in Miami, Florida. She axed her business literally. Her niece Stella lives in Queens, unmarried and childless. I won't reveal Magda's fate here neither because it would spoil the story. Rosa is a secular Polish Jew with parents who were not religious at all. In this part of the book, the novella digs deeper into the guilt of the survivor. Rosa is alone in Florida but she doesn't miss her niece in New York. She recalls that my Warsaw is not your Warsaw, she tells an elderly Jewish gentleman, a retiree and semi-widower from New York. It's true, Warsaw was nearly completely demolished 90 percent from World War II. I was interested in how Rosa looked at her life. She gets a letter from Dr. Tree, a researcher who wants to study survivors. Rosa is uninterested. She feels robbed from the Holocaust of the life she might have had. She recalls three stages of life, before the war, during the war, and after the war. She still clinges to the shawl. Rosa Lublin is quite a fascinating character and creation because she has a mind of her own. She is not interested in zionism and firmly states how she rescued Stella from going to Palestine which became Israel. Rosa is still struggling to live on as if it didn't matter that she survived at all. She feels the guilt of going on. She desires the life she once had. I have to say that this book is worth reading for schools and adults everywhere. It is truly a classic in Holocaust Literature!

Their is no denying that Ozick is a brilliant writer. Her work breaths
pure brilliance. Ozicks' prose are generous,rich and reaching somewhere between epic poem or prolific essay. She is everything that you expect from a Jewish writer. But in the Shawl you see Ozick at her most sensitive and raw. Though everything is beutifully expressed, Ozick brings a sense of emotional heartache that you just don't see in any of her other work. And unlike many of her male counterparts, Ozicks', "Rosa," manages to capture a whole life, and a few others, in a scant sixty of seventy pages. A must read to short story fans.

This short work telling of the death of a child in the Shoah, and the subsequent life- destroying effect on the mother of the child is a disturbing and moving one. The symbolic 'shawl' connects the two parts of the work. It had helped keep baby Magda alive in a concentration camp, , and fifty years later the Mother Rosa holds on to as if it contained within it the life of her dead baby. Ozick's writing is brilliant especially in her depiction of the aging survivors in Miami. A note of hope enters in the figure of an elderly suitor Persky who attempts to woo Rosa back to a life of her own. But as Ozick makes painfully clear the message of Rosa's life is that what has been most loved in the past is far more real than any present or future can be.

Cynthia Ozick's "The Shawl" tells the story of Jewish women, her fourteen year old niece (Stella), and infant daughter on a death march to a concentration camp. Rosa, the mother is afraid that if her infant daughter Magda is found by the Nazi officer's that she will be killed, therefore she keeps her hidden away in her shawl throughout the entire march, and much of the time that they are in the camp. Rosa's fourteen year old niece, Stella, is jealous of the comfort that Magda has with her shawl during this horrific experience. Stella decides to take Magda's shawl one day while in the camp to warm herself from the cold, thus causing her to be discovered and killed. The characters in a story may give you a sense of actually being present in the events taking place in the story.

However, the section titled Rosa was a bit more confusing as one has to read in and out of her open verbal thoughts (speaking) and personal thoughts about those whom she encounters.

How late I learned the essential things in life! In my childhood, nailed to the Gemara, I led the life of a sage, and it was only later, when I was older, that I began to climb trees"
So we have the image of Babel the pale scholarly youth with 'spectacles on his nose and autumn in his heart" He after Chekhov is the great Russian short story writer.
Babel's greatness as a short-story is related to his realistic precision, and observational power. He sees often it seems into the heart of his characters with an objective and penetrating eye. He portrays soul- wrenching scenes of great violence, deprivation with a kind of detached objectivity. His stories like those of Chekhov perhaps like those of Russian writers especially often involve incidents of great cruelty.
It is interesting that the opening story tells of an eighty-six year old old-time Jew who living with his son and daughter- in law.The son is about to adopt the new faith of the Revolution.The old man realizing that he will have no place in the new order hangs himself- an act which Babel portrays as an act of courage and faith in God. And this while it seems to me showing a certain regrettable contempt for the Torah world to which the old man is bound.
Babel's early stories , the childhood tales of which the most famous is 'On a Dovecote'already have his characteristic realistic precision. The stories which make him most known , "The Red Cavalry " stories in which he tells of the Cossacks he rode with are another important part of the oeuvre.Here there is felt especially the great division in Babel between the world of power and physical force, and a kind sensitive inner life.Then there are the Odessa stories of Benya Krik, the world of Jewish gangsters, and of a colorful and yet cruel life once again precisely observed.
The tale of Babel's later years when under the shadow and threat of Stalin he spoke of himself writing 'in the genre of silence', and of his being murdered is the tale of a great writer cut down too soon.
We don't have all the stories we might have from this great master. But what we do have are the axe which breaks through the icy soul within.

There is little more I can say about this astonishing piece of work that has not already been said, but I will add my piece in the hope that it will encourage more people to read what is a genuinely important piece of writing.
Buy this book to appreciate Babel's portrayal of real and raw emotion, his comprehensive understanding of human character, his sparse, tight writing style that is both painfully lucid and beautifully poetic.

The one new thing I think has to be said is a defence of the picture on the front. What has to be understood is why this picture is there and why it looks the way it does; The cheek and mouth are sticking out that way for a very good reason! My only advice is to say if you do not know the full story don't comment on it. In any case, this is a wonderful, life-changing book that needs to be read by everyone.

Reviewers on Amazon tend to self-select; I've noticed that people (including myself) seem more willing to write reviews of books they loved than of books they disliked. This makes sense; I usually don't even finish reading a book I strongly dislike.

But I had to read this book for a class. It was possibly my least favorite work of literature that I have ever read. Babel's writing is sparse, dry, and frequently cryptic; often I struggled to figure out what was actually going on in the stories. I also found his characters opaque and mysterious, and not in a good way. And all his stories are gloomy, and apt to induce misery in an unsuspecting reader. Babel's writing is rich with layers of meaning, but its about as enjoyable to crack as a caluculus textbook. The difficulty I encountered in reading this book just made Russia seem insurmountably foreign to me. Instead of serving as a bridge to another culture, this book aroused a feeling of alienation in me.

I will not be so presumptuous as to say that Babel is a bad writer. But I must attest that Babel is not for everyone. On my scale--1 star.

Reading Babel is no picnic in the park. His words are often hard to understand, let alone relish. In Red Cavalry, as he evokes heartrending scenes of torture, deprivation, and corruption, it is often hard to read without almost begging the author for a point of view, a call to arms. Yet in his sharp, vivid--yet terse, accounts (somewhat naturalistic as characters succumb to the hideous corollaries of civil stife--hunger, unbridled violence, senseless cruelty, inhumanity) his compact, frugal stories are never sentetious or tendetious.

The Odessa Tales, the second part of his ouevre, is nearer and dearer to my heart. Immediately, I fell in love with a rabbi's narration of mythical gangster hero Benya Krik. Benya, a Jewish thug with a code of values, who no doubt has the power to empower the young minds of Jewish boys, commands respect as a charismatic desperado, so alien to the preconceptions of Jews as victims and middle-class pushovers, always dependent on the mercy of the ruling elite. Benya wends his way around authorities--whether monarchist or Bolshevik, not only marching to the beat of a different drum, but subjugating others to the beat. Scenes of Odessa, my hometown, are sumptuous though sparing in descriptions of wealthy and lowly merchants, sailors, criminals, and lackeys.

Having read these and other stories in Russian, I look forward to reading the translation in hopes of better understanding them in my adopted tongue. Babel is not the most facile read, but an important and long ignored voice in the Soviet literary canon. Enjoy.

A superbly written insider's look at the Russian revolution. Babel can convey the horrors of war with very few words. I enjoyed the best his sarcastic treatement of the bombastic communist rhetoric in such stories as "Salt" and "Treason" (maybe because I was exposed to it myself at one time).