Cynthia Ozick: A New York Jewish Life of Letters

Ms. Ozick does more than ingest chocolate in the big brick house where she’s lived for 50 years. She’s been writing for seven decades: short stories galore; seven novels, the first of which, “Trust,” was published in 1966; literary criticism; essays on culture and current events; plays; and translations of Yiddish poetry into English, even though she insists she’s “monolinguistic, like most Americans.” Her body of work is “unrivaled by any living American author,” this newspaper’s fiction reviewer wrote in March. (He was reviewing a collection of her stories and essays, published by Everyman’s Library, titled “In a Yellow Wood.”)

Although she attends an Orthodox synagogue, Ms. Ozick prefers to describe herself as “just generically Jewish.” If there’s a theme that dominates her oeuvre, it’s Jewishness, particularly Jewish life in America, which has of late infected her with sorrow. Jewishness, she says, is “co-extensive, or coterminous, with American life. You couldn’t pull Jews and America apart. Until now.” She means the period since Oct. 7, 2023.

Seated at her dining table, Ms. Ozick trembles as she speaks of “the mystery of that day in October.” On the very morrow, “it was as if, in this country and everywhere in the world, permission was suddenly given.” She means permission for antisemitism. Her consternation is “profound,” she says: “How could an event like that, a terrible massacre so minutely recorded by the perps, open these permissive floodgates?”

The question torments her. “It’s a greater puzzle than antisemitism itself. The whole world was standing there, suppressing antisemitism, and when Oct. 7 happened, it said, ‘Oh, look. It happened. So we can do it, too.’ ” Her last published commentary, which appeared on these pages, addressed these events. Titled “Antisemitism and the Politics of the Chant,” it asked whether we’ve “come to the end of a Golden Age” in America, especially for its Jewish citizens. She fears we have.

The massacre gave a green light for “Jew-hate,” she says. “But for some exceptions, there was no sympathy. It was as if this country changed overnight. Changing demography is part of it.” She brings up New York’s mayoral election, in which the Democratic nominee, Zohran Mamdani, has refused to abjure the slogan “globalize the intifada.” Ms. Ozick calls his likely victory “a crisis. How did we get to Mamdani, in New York?” This is the city where she grew up.

After Oct. 7, she confronted a question about the country to which her Jewish parents fled from Russia, and where they found great happiness in their lives as Americans. “Is it now the beginning, little by little, of the disintegration of what we’ve come to call the Judeo-Christian in America. Is the legacy of the Founding Fathers coming to an end?” (After that question, she apologizes for using a “cliché.”)

Ms. Ozick, who has her head in her hands as she speaks, abruptly pulls herself together. “I think I should be reprimanded for gloominess,” she says, “and for taking a negative view.” She recalls advice she got from Ruth Wisse, “my friend, whom I admire.” Ms. Wisse, a professor emerita of Yiddish literature at Harvard, has exhorted Ms. Ozick to “pay attention to the potential of our democracy, and heal the situation that way. She is always a corrective to me for this negativity.”

Ms. Ozick describes herself as being in “the waiting room” of life, a phrase she picked up from a friend. She isn’t waiting idly or fatalistically: “I started a new story a couple of days ago, and I like it so far. But I don’t know where it’s going.” She’s written 1,000 words and says it won’t go much longer than 3,000. “That’s as far as my aspiration goes.” She isn’t about to write another novel: “I’d be blank. I wouldn’t know what to say.”

What she’s also doing as she pops Hershey’s Kisses is compiling a collection of “deathbed statements.” She gives me her three favorite examples. Gertrude Stein, on the brink of her death, said “What is the question?” Goethe said: “More light.” And Henry James, a man on whom Ms. Ozick has written extensively and admiringly, said “Ah, is this the distinguished thing?” She has adopted James’s last words as her own, she says. “So, if I get a slight twinge of abdominal pain, I ask, ‘Is this the distinguished thing?’ ”

Does Ms. Ozick judge writers by how they portray Jews in their fiction? Henry James expressed some disdain. Her response is almost painfully guarded. “He has, sort of, in passing, antisemitic references. He will speak of some Jewish characters having a proboscis.” She shrugs her shoulders and says in mitigation: “His class, his times.” She allows that “it’s irritating” but also comes to his defense, pointing out how he had dropped his friendship with a French writer, Léon Daudet (1867-1942), on learning that the latter was implacably hostile to Alfred Dreyfus, the Jewish French army officer who was falsely accused of treason in 1894.

Ms. Ozick is forgiving of Charles Dickens for the anti-Jewishness apparent in Fagin, a character in “Oliver Twist.” She suggests Dickens compensated by giving us Mr. Riah, a noble Jew, in “Our Mutual Friend,” his final novel. She does, however, “have a quarrel with that most quoted of lines in Shakespeare”—Shylock’s monologue in Act 3, Scene 1 of “The Merchant of Venice.”

The monologue—in which Shylock asks “Hath not a Jew eyes?”—has been “praised and praised and praised,” she says. “Do I not have this? Do I not have that? You could take the central word in there”—Jew—“and substitute ‘dog’ or any other mammal, and that speech would work just as well. What of Jewish culture or thought did Shakespeare have knowledge of? There were no Jews in England. He never saw a Jew in his life. And so he could know nothing.” Even so, Ms. Ozick asks, “was this the best that he, Shakespeare, could do?” Shakespeare, she says admiringly, “could do anything.” This didn’t “have to be a speech about mammals.” The Bard let himself down.

Ms. Ozick’s lifelong rule, when faced with writers who display antisemitism in their work, is: “Don’t throw the baby out with the bathwater. With one exception—Ezra Pound, because he committed treason. I don’t think the ‘Cantos’ are enough of a baby to keep him.” (Pound, an American poet, made broadcasts from Italy in support of Mussolini and the Nazis during the World War II. He was charged but never tried because he was ruled to be of “unsound mind.”)

Ms. Ozick says a flood of childhood memories are “coming into my head”—the result of her advanced age and of a desire to remember America as it used to be. “I can relive scenes,” she says. The antisemitism she witnesses today “in public squares and streets and most awfully in university campuses” has prompted her to ask herself how different things were when she was a child in the Bronx, where her parents owned the Park View Pharmacy in Pelham Bay. She has described the pharmacy as her “drugstore Eden,” where she did deliveries as a young girl. The customers were always giving her a nickel, as a tip. “ ‘Go buy yourself an ice cream cone,’ they would say. And I would respond primly, out of conscientiousness, ‘No thank you.’ Because I was the daughter, and part of the establishment.”

There was antisemitism, but it was different: “I will tell you about Catherine Montalbano. She was 5 and I was 6. We were playmates. And she had two grandmothers, her paternal and her maternal, and one was very skinny and small and one was big and fat.” Both grandmothers yelled at the girls a great deal for making noise and getting in the way. One day “we were quarreling, as little kids do, and she called me ‘a dirty Jew.’ I knew what that meant and ran home crying to my grandmother.”

Cynthia’s grandmother said: “Go back to Catherine and say to her, ‘You go your way and I’ll go my way.’ ” She was, “in this simple way, expressing an American metaphysics: you know, we’re side by side.” In other words, espousing a credo of religious tolerance and pluralism. “Mr. Mamdani doesn’t want us to be side by side,” she adds, jolting us into the present.

Ms. Ozick insists on pointing out that she and Catherine—two little girls who fought over a slur—remained friends. Children are forgiving and resilient. Besides, Catherine “had a nice family. And her uncle was the fish man in the neighborhood. The Bronx in the 1930s was still in the late 19th century.”

Ms. Ozick also recalls “the Irish kids who came out in the streets to beat up the Jewish kids as they were coming out of Hebrew school.” She describes this as if it were a rite of passage, and adds that the same Irish boys, “as well as the Italian kids,” went on to become “the spine of the best American citizenry.” In telling me this, Ms. Ozick offers another childhood recollection.

“My brother, who was six years older than me, was beat up by Billy Hayes, an Irish kid who lived down the block.” Ms. Ozick’s brother came home crying to their mother. The Bronx, she says, was “semirural then. It was the Depression. Empty lots everywhere. There were snakes—literally—in the grass. And my mother picked up a stick from one of these lots, pressed it into my brother’s hand, and took him away to take care of Billy Hayes.” Ms. Ozick quips that her mother was “proto-Zionist.”

There’s more to the story. Years later, in 1947, she was at New York University, a 19-year-old studying for her bachelor’s degree. “It was the time of the GI Bill, and the place was flooded with old men—28, 29, 32, or more, many already married, living in Quonset huts in Long Island.” This was “a different NYU, much less fancy, much less prestigious.”

One day, as she was sitting in the cafeteria, “this guy, still in his uniform, as so many of them were, comes up to me and says, ‘Are you Cynthia from the drugstore?’ ” He had recognized her, and he said he was William Hayes from Pelham Bay. “He told me that he had opened up”—liberated—“one of the concentration camps while serving in Europe and that he would never be the same again.”

This experience had clearly “made a difference in his life,” so she didn’t ask: “Hey, are you the same Billy Hayes who beat up my brother?” But she knew he was. Ms. Ozick pauses to make sense of it all, before saying, “I think it was a tremendous emblem of the continuation of the meaning of this country.”

“This is a good country. It’s a great country. And now, it’s disintegrating.”

Mr. Varadarajan, a Journal contributor, is a fellow at the American Enterprise Institute and at New York University Law School’s Classical Liberal Institute.