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such Hebrao-Judaic themes as the fate of Anne Frank's diary and the
Book of Job . Less familiar to readers of her essays will be long devel–
opments on Raskolnikov-evoked as Dostoyevsky's Unabomber-and
the translation of Kafka. There are short appreciations of Gertrude Stein
and the much admired Sebald, a virtuoso riff on as humble an object as
a ladle, a glorious concluding essay on New York's Phoenix-like ability
to re-emerge, different from itself, out of its own ruins, and a series of
autobiographical pieces on losing a first job, falling in love, and discov–
ering Eden as a child in a garden behind a Bronx pharmacy.
There is, nonetheless, a coherence in Ozick's vision here, though it is
best gauged against the backdrop of her stunning earlier volumes.
If
poetic "quandary" seems to trump polemical "quarrel" in the present
case, it may be said that at the inception of Ozick's career as an essay–
ist it was precisely polemical "ardor" that had the drop on "art." Indeed
the heart of the early essays lay in the polemical force of a very Judaic
ardor directed against an all-too-pagan or "idolatrous" art. Ozick wrote
with consummate sophistication, but it was as though the Second Com–
mandment were all the literary theory she needed. Her source was the
theologian Leo Baeck on "romantic religion." Paganizing, sentiment–
bound Christianity was prototypically romantic, and, as such, the
model of aesthetics, in its cultish dimension, itself. Against the ambient
"romanticism," Ozick would revive a neo-classical sensibility: wed to
the Law and its commandments, fundamentally deed-bound, in a word,
Jewish.
In
a profound way, the very notion of a "Jewish writer" was
said to be an oxymoron. Abraham-in skirts, no less!-had come to
destroy the idols.
To say as much, though, is to overlook the profound pathos of
Ozick's achievement, which came across as anything but "applied"
Baeck. For both thematically and stylistically, it was clear that no one
would pay a higher price for the dismantling of the aesthetic" idol" than
Ozick herself. One did not write that resplendently without having more
than a passing investment in the aesthetic, and indeed the essays told us
of full decades of presumably deluded enthrallment to the later Henry
James, then the "aesthetic paganism" of E. M. Forster, decades whose
fruit her readers, to their ravishment, were now partaking of amidst
paroxysms of ambivalence the author herself did everything to sustain.
It
was as though Abraham, never more the son of his father Terach, had
decided to convert his reader to idolatry before destroying the idols.
In
the idiom of Ozick's fiction, we were "pagan rabbis" all, victims of that
"dual curriculum"
(The Cannibal Galaxy)
in which Arnold's classic
