Word: ozick
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...fails to recognize genius when it comes his way. Beulah Lilt, who sits immobile | and mute in the classroom, is destined to become a great artist. Poor Beulah! i A quiet, tiny child, self-immured, she seems to suffer from "an unremitting bewilderment," much like the young Cynthia Ozick, as she recalls herself. In the novel, Ozick has reserved some of her most luminous prose to endow this girl-child with tender life. Though bursting with irony and wit, The Cannibal Galaxy takes on a fearful seriousness when Ozick cites this fragment from the Talmud: "The world rests...
...Cannibal Galaxy seems to suggest that it is all but impossible for Jews to break into the surrounding culture with their heritage intact. Their loss, and the world's, of such a vast and distinctive tradition would be a tragedy. As Ozick has warned, "The annihilation of idiosyncrasy assures the annihilation of culture." But we may take heart: the sense of her commanding novel is that Cynthia Ozick has prevailed, as ever more readers are attracted by the universal appeal of her Jewishness. Hers is a triumph for the idiosyncrasy that animates all art. -By Patricia Blake
...Sometimes I feel I am a cannibal galaxy unto myself," says Cynthia Ozick, in a sweet, girlish voice. She is sipping tea on the back porch of the rambling, old-fashioned house in New Rochelle, N.Y., she shares with her husband, Attorney Bernard Hallote, and her teen-age daughter Rachel. Ozick was up most of the previous night writing, engaged in what she describes as "the fight between self and self." She explains: "Ancestrally, I stem from the Mitnagged [literally opponent] tradition, which is superrational and superskeptical. That's the part of me that writes the essays...
...Ozick can scarcely credit the notion that she is widely regarded as a formidable intellectual. "It seems like a hoax, a vast mistake," she says. Born in New York City in 1928, she was raised in the Pelham Bay section of The Bronx, a middle-class neighborhood. "At P.S. 711 was dumb, cross-eyed, and couldn't do arithmetic; I think the image of what we are when we are little kids is our image for life. Everything went wrong for me then, including the anti-Semitism of the teachers and the kids...
Last January Ozick was chosen by the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters to receive one of the Mildred and Harold Strauss Livings, an annual tax-free award of $35,000 for a minimum of five years. "When I first read the letter announcing it," she recalls, "I sat at the kitchen table bawling away and saying, 'I can't accept this.' My husband said: 'Are you mad?' It went on that way for more than a month. I wallowed in guilt. I thought: How did this happen to me? What about everybody...