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To his credit, Singer wasn't rattled. "It cost me thirty dollars in taxi
fare to get here," he told them, "and it will also cost me thirty dollars
to get home. A clear loss of sixty dollars." (This from a notorious
penny-pincher.) "I am now going to give your treasurer forty dollars so
that he can run out and buy notepads and ballpoint pens for each of
you. Go home and write a story. Then, at your next meeting, you'll hear
exactly the stories you want. Don't call me. " When I relate the anecdote
to professional critics who pride themselves, above all else, on their
sophistication, they laugh-without quite realizing that they are often as
narrow-minded as the folks Singer encountered in Brooklyn. My point
is as simple as it is crucial: preconceptions of any sort are the enemies
of an engaged reading, and of art. [n Ozick's case, she has been spared
the ignominy of spits (although one of her novels was the ohject of an
ugly lawsuit), but not the peculiar adulation that talks about an Ozick
story in one breath and her "theology" in another. Granted, Ozick has
brought much of this grief onto herself, because she has hardly been sl1\'
about publishing manifestoes-on behalf of "New Yiddish" or Iiturgi–
cal fiction. These essays constitute a paper trail of some importance.
The rub is that Ozick has a nasty habit of changing her mind or, put
more charitably, of moving into some new imaginative territory just at
the point when her critics like to feel that they have a handle on the ele–
ments that make her, and her stories, tick.
What remains constant, however, is the artfulness of her art. What–
ever else fiction might be, it is not life, even when, at its most accom–
plished, it provides the illusion of life. Put a slightly different way,
serious fiction happens when the real is transmogrified into the Real.
How this happens is a question neither writers nor their critics can
answer with anything like precision; but at its vital center is surely the
imagination-ungendered, classless, and willfully ignorant of every–
thing that makes for op-ed opinions rather than stories. Ozick's hest fic–
tion strikes us as a case of the imagination freed from the voices, even
the Commandments, that govern her life as wife, mother, citizen,
defender of Israel, and cultural conservative. In the world her imagina–
tion creates, aesthetic principles dictate the endless array of choices a
writer must make to end up with characters who are credible and sto–
ries that are satisfying.
Still, worries a bout the interpenetrations of Art and Li fe contin ue,
especially for those, like Ozick, who cut their teeth on literary mod–
ernism. As a New York University undergraduate, Ozick avidly read
Partisan Review
and dreamed of the day when she, too, might be
counted among its contributors. Odd as this sounds now, at a time when
