Disruptive Memories: Cynthia Ozick, Assimilation, and the Invented Past

Abstract

He that applieth himself to fear God, And setteth his mind upon Law Most High, He searcheth out wisdom all ancients, And is occupied with prophets old. - The Wisdom Ben Sira The popular and academic successes Jewish writers in 1950s and 60s led John Updike - in what now seems high comedy - to a sustained fret over popularity things ethnic in American literature.(1) While Updike's paranoia about his unmarketable ethnicity has abated, predominance and importance Jewish writers certainly have not. Even as I was writing this essay, Philip Roth won P.E.N./Faulkner award for 1993. By almost any standard, achievement Jewish-American artists denotes a success that parallels general prominence Jewish-Americans in American life. Still, for Cynthia Ozick that very success marks a more profound failure. In her estimation, Jewish-American authors have too often bought literary success at price an internal colonialism, or - to use a more Ozickian term - at price an idolatry by which they eschew that which is historically Jewish in favor ephemera Jewish ethnicity. While Jewish writers maintain an ethnic exoticism that is currently attractive to an American audience, in Ozick's view they have lost a full-blown Jewish identity: To be a Jew is to be old in history, but not only that; to be a Jew is to be a member a distinct civilization expressed through an oceanic culture in possession a group essential concepts and a multitude texts and attitudes elucidating those concepts. Next to density such a condition - or possibility - how gossamer are stories those writers of Jewish extraction whose characters are pale indifferent echoes whatever lies at hand.... (Metaphor 224) In conflict between descent and consent outlined by Werner Sollors, Ozick is dismayed that, in her estimation, Jewish-American writers have eschewed descent - density Jewish civilization and memory - for easy currency consent which enables success in American mainstream. For Ozick, success Philip Roth, Norman Mailer, Henry Roth, and even Saul Bellow, marks failure specifically Jewish religious and ethical ideals and loss Jewish memory as an effective cultural force in present(.2) The centrality Jewish historical memory to Ozick's imagination suggests her commitment to central traditions Jewish religious thought and practice.(3) Wielding an iconoclastic club against Oedipalizing literary history practiced by Harold Bloom, Ozick affirms that [Jewish liturgy] posits recapturing without revision precursor's stance and strength when it iterates God, and God our fathers, God Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. Nearly every congeries Jewish thought is utterly set against idea displacing precursor. Torah includes meanings tradition and transmittal together. (Ardor 194) Thus, Elaine Kauvar is right to assert that for Ozick the principle continuity overwhelmingly takes precedence over desire to create new forms... (xii). However, such desire for continuity is as much a problem as it is a resource. If memory is at root Jewish life, contemporary cultural developments have threatened continuity that memory. Jewish memory, in Ozick's estimation, has faced a number threats in contemporary culture, not least which is threat assimilation. Ozick's sense Jewish cultural crisis motivates her work as she attempts to recreate collective memories through fiction. In balance this essay, I will analyze ways in which Ozick addresses threat assimilation as she forges a fiction that is at once contemporary and memorial, in keeping with history Jewish religious practice. Guarding against assimilation, to some extent, has been a constitutive feature Jewish religious imagination since Moses - as is evidenced by Biblical injunctions against worshipping idols and against intermarriage. …