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PARTISAN REVIEW
gion" - be it Christianity or "sacramental" modernism-threatened to
swamp the this-worldly, history-wise ardor of classical Judaism in the
earlier volume, it is the idealist spirituality of universalist politics that
now threatens to drown the sensuous specificity of the work of art itself.
There is a fine essay, for example, on the translation of Kafka, in
which a certain exalted impossibility of translation
pace
Benjamin is
made to resonate with a comparable "impossibility" at the heart of
writing itself, as lived by Kafka. And in the face of those twin impasses,
the two eminently fluent versions of
The Trial
currently available in
English- the Muirs' Kafka-in-the-voice-of-Somerset-Maugham and the
more recent Mitchell effort at a colloquial American Kafka- seem all
too well-intentioned betrayals. Well-intentioned betrayal, the "loath–
someness" of ordinary wisdom, it turns out, is the subject of the impor–
tant essay following the Kafka piece, "The Impious Impatience of Job."
For "Job," among other things, is a meditation less on the betrayals of
Job's would-be consolers or friends than on a hurt or antinomy so deep
that friendship itself may be
essentially
too superficial
not
to betray it.
(At which point, we may note how far from E. M. Forster's classic
encomium to friendship Ozick has come.) And if one wanted an emblem
of the depth of that reality, it would be the pre-Israelite God-names (EI,
Eloah, Shaddai) in the text: for they are all "papered over" by the
"seamlessness of translation." Once again, the translator as (false)
friend, the drama of what Kundera, in a volume that resonates deeply
with
Quarrel
&
Quandary,
calls
Testaments Betrayed.
The essay following the development on Job, "Who Owns Anne
Frank?" is explicitly about a legacy betrayed . Here the subject is the
active complicity of Otto Frank in the bowdlerization of his daughter'S
diary lest it appear unduly Jewish. The situation was further aggra–
vated-that is, the ordeal of Anne Frank further "infantilized, Ameri–
canized, homogenized, and sentimentalized"-when the diary moved to
Broadway, at which point "the particularized plight of the Jews in hid–
ing was vaporized into what [Garson] Kanin called 'the infinite.'"
It
is
a circumstance that so rattles the author that she proposes, quite
provocatively, that the "Holocaust-denial industry" is itself "in part a
spin-off of the Anne Frank industry." And thus it is that in the name of
a universalizing "wisdom," Lillian Hellman and Anne Frank's other
dejudaizing sympathizers join up, within the logic of Ozick's volume,
with the "friends" of Job and the all-too-fluent translators of Kafka.
There are other nefarious universalizers in the book, all evoked in
memorable terms . Styron's celebrated novel on a Polish-Catholic victim
of Auschwitz is provocatively seen as "a softly polemical device to
