Levitation.
Ozick, Cynthia. Levitation. Five Fictions. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1982.
8vo.; topstained yellow; three-quarter blue paper-covered boards; black cloth spine;
white dust-jacket printed in black, red, violet and yellow. In a specially made cloth slipcase.
First edition; prints stories that appeared in The New Yorker, American Journal, Partisan Review, Quest, Salmagundi and Triquarterly. A presentation copy, affectionately inscribed on the front endpaper: For Bernard Malamud – In homage, devotedly, & with the warmth of true love, Cynthia Ozick. Ozick recounts her first meeting with Malamud – albeit telephonically – in Malamud: Three Elegies, published by this firm in 1986, shortly after his death.
In 1976 I answered the telephone and heard privately an instantly recognizable public voice. I knew this voice with the intimacy of passionate reverence. I had listened to it in the auditorium of the 92nd Street Y reading an as yet unpublished tale called ‘The Silver Crown,’ a story so electrifying that I wished with all my heart it was mine. Since it was not, I stole it. In my version, I described the author as ‘very famous, so famous that it was startling to see he was a real man….Instead of bawling me out for usurping his story, he was calling with something else in mind. He had noticed that the dedication to a collection containing the stolen story was to my daughter, who was then ten years old. ‘Joy of my life,’ I had written. ‘I have to tell you,’ he said, ‘that I understand just how you feel.’ And he spoke of his own joy in being the father of his own children. (pp. 20-21)
Ozick goes on, “I recognized that I had been visited through this awkward instrument by an angel. I had been blessed, anointed, by an illumination of generosity fetched up out of the marrow of human continuity” (p. 21). When they finally met in person, Ozick could not bring herself to address him familiarly as “Bern,” nor could she say, “Mr. Malamud.” Instead, she called him “Maestro,” “because he is and always will be, one of our Masters” (p. 23). Ozick elaborates that, in fact, Malamud is a Jewish Master; “The Jewish spirit is the opposite of ethnicity or parochialism, and this cry out of Sinai is all over the Maestro’s work. It is everywhere” (p. 24).
Levitation prints five stories, including “Puttermesser: Her Work History, Her Ancestry, Her Afterlife,” “Shots,” “From a Refugee’s Notebook,” and “Puttermesser and Xanthippe.” “In these five mesmerizing ‘fictions,’ Cynthia Ozick continues to probe the unsettled, and unsettling, men and women who do not (or will not) fit into the world they inhabit, their lives merely skimming the surface of reality as they create worlds of our obsession, fantasy, and delusion” (dust-jacket).
Levitation is Ozick’s fourth book, and her third collection of short stories. The critical reception of this book solidified her literary reputation; it was followed in 1983 by The Cannibal Galaxy and a collection of essays, Art and Ardor.
Contemporary Authors Online, Gale, 2007. Reproduced in Biography Resource Center. Farmington Hills, Mich.: Thomson Gale. 2007. http://galenet.galegroup.com/servlet/BioRC
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