The Jewish Memory And Literary Redemption

In current American literary world, voices are prominently heard from the second generation of Jewish immigrants, represented by Saul Bellow, Bernard Malamud, Phillip Roth and Cynthia Ozick. These Jewish writers either grew up with a Jewish background or received an education in the Jewish tradition, but they had all experienced both assimilation and anti-Semitism, and that is why these two issues are always involved in their works. Among these Jewish writers, Cynthia Ozick is an extraordinary self-styled spokesperson of American Jewish literature and the most audacious writer of her age.The years between the 1920s and the 1960s witnessed not only Ozick's growth as a notable Jewish writer but the whole process and success of America's assimilation as well. In structural assimilation, most American Jews became members of the American middle-class or professionals after years of efforts. With cultural assimilation, American Jews had sufficiently taken American dominant values whereas they adhered only symbolically to Judaism, Jewish cultural values and behavioral patterns. Those assimilations inevitably cause the identificational assimilation. Meanwhile, the force of anti-Semitism has never been weakened. As a result, over a million Jewish-born Americans had given up their Jewish heritage completely and stopped being Jewish by the end of the 1960s.This attenuated Jewishness also showed up in literary circle, and the identity problem became a sensitive issue among the Jewish writers. Primarily, these writers were kept in the Jewish fold simply because of others' insistence that they belonged there. On many occasions, most Jewish writers declared that they were Americans who happened to be Jewish; they were writing as Americans for all humankind, instead of being so parochial as to write just for Jews. Unlike Bellow, Malamud or Roth who refuse the designation as American-Jewish writers, Cynthia Ozick not only prefers being called the Jewish writer, but also observes the world through the eyes of a deeply committed Jew. Her writing is a powerful expression of a Jewish ethos. She characterizes her claims as a call for a liturgical literature impregnated with the values of Judaism. This thesis explores by what means do Cynthia Ozick achieves her "Liturgical literature". The author of this thesis carries out analysis in three major branches: dominant themes, argumentations in essays, and narrative techniques, to illustrate Ozick's "Liturgical literature" from different angles, make a full understanding of Ozick's art, and explain Ozick's most prominent characteristic as an American Jewish writer. Having demonstrated the previous relevant explanations by other critics while having her own understanding on Ozick's art, the author of this thesis defines "Liturgical literature" and claims that Ozick's "Liturgical literature" is "a type of perception" generated under a specific historical condition. It is believed that living and writing in an "assimilation trend" while facing ubiquitous anti-Semitism, Jewish writers risk parochialism by creating distinctive Jewish characters and touching particular Jewish themes. However, Ozick's stories earn this designation in virtue of a perspective shaped by her sense of religiosity, which intertwines with the feeling of Jewish national pride and the desire for defending Jewish national dignity. These stories succeed in placing contemporary Jewish problems within their historical framework, thus reflecting the unusual existing status of Jews and their modern spirit, as well as revealing the significance of the link between the present and the Jewish past. The author of this thesis believes that by all these racial traits did Ozick form her own style and the notable "Liturgical literature", which takes the same function as ethnic literature and Diaspora literature.The author of this thesis mainly discusses five aspects of Ozick's "Liturgical literature": Firstly, Ozick writes self-consciously for her people and more generally, Judaism. This is supported by expressions in her fictions, namely "to judge and interpret the world according to traditional Jewish values." Secondly, having Judaism as the dominant force in her works, Ozick takes Jewish identity as her major theme. The author of this thesis finds that a typical Ozick-story reveals the status of the Jews' physical and spiritual exile, defines the Jewish post-Holocaust experience, and finds contemporary American Jews' beset by competing ideologies. Thirdly, since Ozick has to respond to history as proof of her faith, she pays homage to Jewish history in her writings. Ozick shapes her observations of the past and presents them into interpretable meaning. Fourthly, Ozick's writing, filled with Jewish Halakha and Aggadah, unfolds its affinity to Jewish Mysticism. Lastly, Ozick's literary writings have their ethical orientation and functions, through which Ozick arouses Jews from sinking down, urges them to keep the Jewish identity as well as Jewish consciousness.To make thorough research on Ozick's "Liturgical literature", the author of this thesis carries out several case studies of Ozick's literary works. For the perspective of "dominant themes", the author argues that Jewish identity and historical consciousness are Ozick's main liturgical themes. At various points, Ozick expresses Jewishness as "originating in the covenant and history, resisting idolatry, making distinctions with other religions, and study". With the analysis of one of Ozick's fictions, The Shawl, the author of this thesis finds that Ozick attaches primary importance to Jewish identity and historical consciousness in it. The Shawl integrates Jewish identity with loyalty to the Jewish past, just as what is found in Holocaust rememberances. Rosa, originally a despairing mother who totally relied on the shawl to protect her baby Magda in Concentration Camp, turns out to be to be a pagan who violates the most fundamental precept of Jewish law thirty-five years later. The tensions between cultural, maternal, and class-based modes of identity are largely responsible for Rosa's paganizing. For Ozick, abandoning Jewishness under a despairing situation may be psychologically understandable but morally unforgivable. Ozick reveals the whole process of Jews' apostatizing reflected by her protagonist Rosa The author of this thesis makes reasoning on the betrayal of apostates like Rosa in the following four aspects: firstly, it is Holocaust that horribly destroys the faith of Jewish people. The suffering in Concentration Camp turns them into walking corpses with neither sympathy nor hope, and makes them question their God and their prayer. Moreover, it is Diaspora that inevitably breaks the heritage of Jewish history and literature. The cohesive communities are disintegrated, and the ethnic ties are weakened. In addition, it is the mass assimilation that greatly influences Jewish values and living styles. Due to the impact of "Hedonism" in the U.S. at that time, some Jews abandoned the tradition and sermon. But besides these external traumas, it is class snobbery that fatally leads the post-Holocaust betrayals of Jewish identity, which proves to be Ozick's motif.With further exploration of "Envy", the author of this thesis figures out Ozick's appeal to historical consciousness. Ozick endows her characters in the story with either great struggle for historicity or attempt to reinvent history, so as to achieve the Jewish identity in the new historical environment. For one thing, Ozick pins her hope on this kind of people while showing great respect to their passionate and innovative endeavor; for another, Ozick bemoans their slippery slope of identity due to their failure of grasping the essence of Jewishness. For liturgical redemptive purpose, Ozick criticizes her protagonist Edelshtein's ultranationalism and gives an appropriate suggestion that a Jew should place collective history and personal history together for identity construction rather than struggle between one another. Moreover, Ozick takes Ostrover and Hannah as examples to reveal that a Jew should seek identity from his/her own racial history, not the goyish history.The author of this thesis also tries to give an account of some argumentations in Ozick's essays. Being described as an author "with Greek mind and Jewish Soul", Ozick used to struggle between Pan and Moses, Hellenism and Hebraism, Magic and Law. Facing Harold Bloom's proposition that "Literature is idol", a common issue that all Jewish writers encountered and struggled, Ozick makes a deep meditation on it. In the process of exploring the answer to this issue, Ozick generated the idea of "Liturgical literature", a Jewish fiction which can maintain both its redemptive ethnic function and its western art modality. She assures the reader that literature, even the imagination that serves it, can be anti-idolatrous and forms a reflection of a certain kind of "moral seriousness", essentially "Jewish".The Cannibal Galaxy is selected by the author of this thesis to demonstrate Ozick's mental development on this issue. Brill, the protagonist, has once encountered the dilemma and conflicts between Jewish literature and Western civilization, just like Ozick. He devotes himself to incorporating the two cultures into a "Dual Curriculum". The author of this thesis holds that the success of his "dullest student" Beulah exposes Brill's Dual Curriculum as a sham and forces its dreamy proponent to confront the emptiness of his ambitions. And that reflects Ozick's motif: any attempt to merge Jewish values into post-Enlightment ones have never succeeded, such "duality" is bound to end in mediocrity or cannibalism. Western Civilization can not sustain Jewish culture; only the Jewish literature that touches on the liturgical or the redemptive lasts permanently.However, the author of this thesis suggests that a further reading of The Cannibal Galaxy in the light of Ozick's essay "Bialik's Hint" may interpret both Ozick's optimism about the possibilities of the mutual enrichment of counterposed cultures and an underlying continuity in her thinking. In a sense, Hester's philosophy and Beulah's paintings miraculously bring together Jewish and Western cultures, become products of a liturgical imagination, and are graven images that bear interpretation, which impose themselves powerfully upon the memory.The author of this thesis holds that similar to Hester's philosophy and Beulah's paintings, Ozick's art can be described as a kind of perfect mixture; her writing is believed to be a proper "conciliation" of "Law" and "Imagination". Through 30 year's writing practice, Ozick indeed creates several ethnical fictions from a Jewish point of view which she once labeled "liturgical", under the cover of Christian language and imagination which symbolizes the Western civilization.Along with Ozick's liturgical themes and argumentations, the author of this thesis discovers that there is an additional aspect, narrative techniques, which labels Ozick's writings as "liturgical". As a stylist, Ozick integrates some certain techniques from Jewish and non-Jewish culture, and forms her specific liturgical narration. Deeply rooted in the Old Testament and its Ten Commandments and greatly inspired by the ancient wisdom of Mosaic Law, Ozick's orthodox vision and morality is essentially tied to Jewish history and traditions, as well as to the suffering of the Jewish people. As a writer with sense of religion, Ozick takes the responsibility of promoting these spiritual truths, and pass on them to her people. However, far from creating orthodox or didactic effects, her literary modes vary from conventional realism to parable and fantasy.The Puttermesser Papers is selected in this thesis for a case study of Ozick's narrative techniques. Drawing upon the traditions and lore of Judaism, Ozick conjures her Jewish magic to illuminate the moral dimensions of both fiction and contemporary reality. The stories in The Puttermesser Paper, through Ozick's skillful narrative techniques such as Biblical Narrative, parody and reflexivity in narration, convey the motif to the reader easily: with the dangerous tendency of artistic creativity and appreciation to become a kind of idolatry, it is urgent for Jews in Diaspora to keep the moral and spiritual obligation, to maintain their cultural identity and to see themselves within a living history.Taking all the "dominant themes in Ozick's fictions, the argumentations in her essays and the narrative techniques in story-telling" into consideration, the author of this thesis reaffirms Ozick's literary works as "liturgical literature": a new kind of literary genre written in Judeo-English, but mainly based on Jewish history and the special historical encounter of Jews, which involves a turning to religious Judaism and Jewish ideas, employs historical covenanted imagination to carry out redemption in Diaspora and rekindle a cultural renaissance.The author of this thesis notices that Ozick once asserted that "the self-conscious Jewish writer who remembers, who maintains an awareness of history against the blandishments of the momentary and the immediate, in turn will be remembered, will become a part of (at least Jewish) literary history." In fact, of any Jewish-American writer alive today or in the recent past, Ozick is considered to be the most vociferous and perhaps the only spokesperson of Jewish-Diaspora literature. With her writings that return to traditional Hebraic values, Ozick has already been remembered and gained broad respect. "Liturgical literature", as she wishes and has once claimed in essays, "has the configuration of the ram's horn: strength given to the inch-hole and the splendor spreads wide". Nowadays, most critics appreciate Ozick's contribution to expanding American literature and encouraging American literary tradition to be re-assimilated into the Jewish tradition.With the analysis above, this thesis acknowledges the remarkable achievement that Ozick has made, as she has produced an appreciation of the moral richness in the 20th century Jewish literature, preserved Jewish tradition in the midst of the extraordinary challenges of that century, and spread it out into the air.