LETTERS: Correspondence with David and Dusty Sklar.
LETTERS: Correspondence with David and Dusty Sklar.
Ozick, Cynthia. Archive of Correspondence, 1956-1981.
Thirty-seven autograph or typed (largely autograph) letters, notes and postcards (including
one picture postcard and one Jewish New Year's Day card), and two typed fair copies, signed, of her poems "The Seventeen Questions of Rabbi Zusya" and "In Praise of Irretrievables" (unpublished).
Cynthia Ozick, literary and cultural critic, novelist and short story writer, was born in 1928 in New York City to Russian immigrants. Her father made his living as a pharmacist but he was also a scholar of Yiddishized Hebrew; her uncle Abraham Regelson was a Hebrew poet. She graduated from Hunter Public School and earned her B.A. at New York University and her M.A. at Ohio State University. In 1952 she married lawyer Bernard Hallote.
Her first venture into professional writing was as an advertising copywriter. After a brief stint teaching at New York University, she began to devote herself to a philosophical novel, in a Jamesian mode, which eventually she left six-and-a half years of effort poured into another novel proved more fruitful. In
1966 Trust appeared.
She also published poems in magazines such as Judaism. In her 30s, however, she decided that she would give up writing poetry. When later asked why, Ozick answered: "I think I was thirty-six when I wrote my last poem. I submitted and re-submitted to the Yale Series of Younger Poets . . . and then I was forty, and I wasn't eligible anymore, and that was that."
As Ozick continued to write, she found she possessed a singular talent for short stories and essays. Her intelligence, wit and intensity endow these shorter forms with fierce energy. She published her first short story collection, The Pagan Rabbi, in 1971. The title story and the well-known "Envy," discussed at length in one letter, treat themes central to Ozick's work: Judaism and its relation to history and the world, themes which recur in her letters. Scholar Roberta Kalechofsky suggests Ozick's stories mark "a stage in the development of the form. Ozick has reinvested the short story with some of the dimensions and virtues of the novel-social density and philosophical earnestness and intensity…[and] reintroduced the prospect of the writer's commitment to values and ideas as well as to form and esthetic."
Since the publication of her first two books, Ozick has garnered numerous awards: a Guggenheim, A National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship, the Edward Lewis Wallant Award, the Strauss Living Award from the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters, and the Jewish Book Council Award. Three of her short stories have received first prize in the O. Henry Prize Stories competition and five have been included in Best American Short Stories volumes. One commentator has declared: "Ozick is clearly perceived as a powerful cultural force, a stylist and intellect of major significance."
Cynthia Ozick's "commitment to values and ideas" and her piercing intelligence everywhere illuminate her letters. Written largely before the publication of her first two books, the letters and postcards in the archive show her as a young woman and a nascent writer reflecting on the nature of courage, her Jewishness, the definition of humor, and her views on universalism. She discusses in detail [#4] her poem, "In Praise of Irretrievables" and [#33] one of her most important short stories, "Envy: Or Yiddish in America," which she calls "an elegy for the death of the Yiddish language & the culture it was a vehicle for." Large themes twine around the logistics of friendship and the joys and frustrations of daily life and work: "- I got a story in current Hudson Rev. … Life is still hell. No more news. No work. All drudgery. I am Housewife."
She is by turns erudite and down to earth. She celebrates her 30th birthday, bleakly records her father's recent death, encourages her friend's first stabs at writing, and bristles with primal anger at the suggestion she could abort an unexpected pregnancy. Editors and literary magazines are the object of caustic wit: "Even if Plimpton were awake & not asleep, how would you be able to tell the difference?" There is running commentary on what the friends are reading: "I'm reading a life of Tolstoy & so of course I am thinking of you. If it were a play it would be a soap opera! Young Dr. Tolstoy is always at the hospital with his hare-brained schemes…" Her inclination for the epigrammatic appears time and again: "It's a mark of age to be convulsed by youth's passion;" "Arrogance is a public vice; alone with himself, no one is arrogant;" and, "…all philosophy is truism: the trick is to receive the truism with a shock of revelation." In a lighter vein, she occasionally pauses to drop a bit of droll doggerel such as: "On Sarraute / I do not dote." In short, the archive's letters and notes and postcards are dense, often passionate, and always compelling.
While a few institutions hold individual letters or small groupings (one institution has eight letters), none holds an archive of this depth or resonance. A revealing and important archive.
Jewish American Literature, by Chametzky, et al, pp. 330-332.
American Women Writers, Vol. 3, by Mainiero, pp. 856-858.
Jewish American Women Writers: A Bio-Bibliographical and Critical Sourcebook, by Shapiro, et al., pp. 265-277.
The Feminist Companion, p. 822.
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