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PARTISAN REVIEW
impotent." What must have been much more difficult was tempering
Edelshtein's rages (many rendered with more than a few hints of Ozick's
approval) against the concrete evidence of Edelshtein's art. It is one
thing to have a Yiddish poet claim that he would be universally
acknowledged as a great poet if only he had a translator, and quite
another to have readers come to the same conclusion based on the
actual lines of his poetry.
If
Edelshtein's poetry were truly remarkable,
the effect would tip the story too far in one direction; conversely, if it
were so much junk, that, too, would disturb the delicate aesthetic bal–
ance of "Envy."
Ozick hits Edelshtein's middle-range talent squarely on the head:
At the edge of the village a little river,
Herons tip into it pecking at their images
when the waders pass whistling like Gentiles.
The herons hang, hamlllocks above the sweet sUlllmer-water.
Their skulls are full of secrets, their feathers scented.
The village is so little it fits into my nostril.
The roof's shimmer tar,
the sun licks thick as a cow.
No one knows what will come.
How crowded with mushroollls the forest's dark floor.
The result asks us to balance the Edelshtein who has made the recov–
ery-or at least the recognition-of Yiddish his "project" against the
frustrated poet who craves the public adulation that, in his view, has
unfairly fallen into Ow'over's lap. While Ozick has more than a little
sympathy for Yiddish, the story also makes it clear that those who con–
fuse fame with art not only delude themselves but also debase the cre–
ative process. Ostrover knows the pitfalls of both, and in ways that an
Edelshtein never will-not even after he sits in Manhattan's 92nd Street
YMHA and listens as his nemesis spins out a wicked parable about a
would-be writer who, by magic, becomes instantly fluent in one major
language after another, only
to
fail miserably in each of them.
Ostrover is hard, very hard, on his pathetic rival, but that is because
he has little patience for the world's distractions, whether they come as
partisan politics or a thick texture of rationalization. What Edclshtein
lacks, in a word, is a first-rate imagination, and about this unhappy fact,
he can rail at the universe, plunge into despair or, as "Envy" dramatizes,
so seamlessly combine the two that readers are not quite sure what
to
make of him, Is he martyr or shameless manipulator, a writer Illore
