“Cynthia Ozick: A Jewish Woman Writer and Her Many Paradoxes”

Cynthia Ozick is one of the most valued contemporary American writers, whose fiction, according to many critics, exemplifies “the Jewish writer oxymoron” (Ozick 1989:178). Ozick respects the Jewish Covenant and its tradition, but she uses her imagination to invent stories; she worries about the temptations of paganism and the dangers of idolatry, but she fabricates fictional golems; she strongly refuses the label "woman writer", but she writes essays in defense of feminism, demanding equal rights with respect to the Torah; she despises the treatment of Jewish history (and of the Shoah in particular) as fiction, but she "cannot not write about it". In short, Cynthia Ozick's art resists narrow categorization and her fiction overcomes rigid confines, both literary and ideological. Dazzling and witty, erudite and irreverent, pugnacious and unpredictable, Cynthia Ozick’s production includes hundreds of publications that embrace many different topics and genres from short stories to literary reviews, from novels to translations, from poems to essays and drama. The aim of this study is to offer an analysis of Cynthia Ozick's literary production as representative of both contemporary American literature and Jewish culture.