Interpretation Of The Jewish Themes In Cynthia Ozick's Fiction

Contemporary Jewish American female writer Cynthia Ozick is considered as one of Jewish American literary treasures. Since the publication of her first fiction Trust in 1966, Ozick has become the focus of literary critics and received many awards, including coveted O. Henry Prize. At the beginning of writing, she positioned herself as an American writer and repositioned as a Jewish writer six years later. Ozick has been always stressing her Jewish identity to the world. Reading Ozick's works, we can know the Jewish religious culture background and the Jewish history and experience is the ineffaceable bottom color in her fiction. As we know, since the Jewish Diaspora, the Jews have experienced many stupendous changes and vicissitudes of life for millennia while maintaining Jewish tradition and culture. As second generation of Jewish immigrants, Ozick received orthodox Jewish education and experienced assimilation and anti-Semitism, which are the inherent plights almost all the Jews face.Since the 1960s, Ozick realized the great impact of assimilation on Jewish life. In the process of Jewish assimilation in present America, Jewish immigrants and their descendants'intermarriage with other ethnic groups and conversion to other religions consequently attenuate the bonds between the Jewish Americans and worsen the situation of Jewish identity crisis. However, the assimilation does not to eliminate anti-Semitism. Recently, anti-Semitic launched campaign called the Holocaust Ozick's thought about the fate of the modern Jews in the plights which the Jews encounter.The first part begins with a brief summary of the history of Jewish immigrants and the main themes of Jewish American literature which draws the Jewish experience in the United States during different periods, and then introduces Ozick's life, her great achievements and the literary review.The second part first points out that Jewish identity crisis and Yiddish plight in the aftermath of assimilation. Then it focuses on the themes of monotheism and anti-idolatry in The Pagan Rabbi and Heir to the Glimmering World to unscramble her fictions and understand her religious consciousness. It points out the protagonists'lives are engulfed because they don't stick to Ten Commandments when they face the lure of paganism and idolatry which is universal in the mainstream of American society, reflecting Ozick's opposition to assimilation for it is tantamount to surrender to disappearance and her opinion that the Jews should say no and no again to the fakeries and allures of the gentile world. In the light of Jewish experience in Diaspora Period, Ozick advocates that the Jews should adhere to Jewish religious traditions and stick to Ten Commandments to maintain their ethnic solidarity and strengthen national cohesion, rather than efface their culture heritage in assimilationThe third part begins with a brief introduction of history of anti-Semitism and the disaster happened to the Jews ----the horrors of totalitarian movements, especially the events of Nazi genocide, and then denounces the movement of Holocaust denial. Through analysis of Ozick's representative novels Rosa and The Shawl, the part centers on Ozick's opposition to Holocaust denial, showing the indelible memory in Holocaust and expressing the opinion that oblivion is tantamount to betrayal and remembering is a necessary rebuke to those who say the Holocaust never happened or has been exaggerated, and criticizing anti-Semitism and the shameful acts to distort history in the movements of Holocaust revision.The conclusion part affirms Ozick's outstanding contribution to Jewish cultural inheritance, and simultaneously points out that her writing is confined by her Jewish identity and she does explore the solution of Jewish cultural survival from the deeper perspectives of cultural exchange and integration.