Cynthia Ozick | |
|---|---|
| Born | April 17, 1928 New York City, U.S. |
| Occupation | Writer |
| Education | Hunter College High School New York University (BA) Ohio State University (MA) |
| Period | 1966–present |
| Notable awards | American Academy of Arts and Letters, 1988 |
| Signature | |
 | |
Cynthia Ozick (born April 17, 1928) is an American short story writer, novelist, and essayist. [1]
Cynthia Ozick was born in New York City. The second of two children, Ozick was raised in the Bronx by her parents, Celia (née Regelson) and William Ozick. They were Jewish immigrants from Russia, and proprietors of the Park View Pharmacy in the Pelham Bay neighborhood. [2]
She attended Hunter College High School in Manhattan. [3] She earned her B.A. from New York University and went on to study at Ohio State University, where she completed an M.A. [2] in English literature, focusing on the novels of Henry James. [4]
She appears briefly in the film Town Bloody Hall , where she asks Norman Mailer, "in Advertisements for Myself you said, quote, 'A good novelist can do without everything but the remnant of his balls'. For years and years I’ve been wondering, Mr. Mailer, when you dip your balls in ink, what color ink is it?" [5]
Ozick was married to Bernard Hallote, a lawyer, until his death in 2017. Their daughter, Rachel Hallote, is a professor of history at SUNY Purchase and head of its Jewish studies program. Ozick is the niece of the Hebraist Abraham Regelson. [4]
Yale University has acquired her literary papers. [6] A forthcoming special issue of Studies in Jewish American Literature will examine her contributions to the art of non-fiction. [7]
Ozick's fiction and essays are often about Jewish American life, but she also writes about politics, history, and literary criticism. In addition, she has written and translated poetry.
Henry James occupies a central place in her fiction and nonfiction. The critic Adam Kirsch wrote that her "career-long agon with Henry James... reaches a kind of culmination in Foreign Bodies, her polemical rewriting of The Ambassadors ." [8]
The Holocaust and its aftermath is also a dominant theme. For instance in "Who Owns Anne Frank?" [9] she writes that the diary's true meaning has been distorted and eviscerated "by blurb and stage, by shrewdness and naiveté, by cowardice and spirituality, by forgiveness and indifference." [10] Much of her work explores the disparaged self, the reconstruction of identity after immigration, trauma and movement from one class to another. [2]
Ozick says that writing is not a choice but "a kind of hallucinatory madness. You will do it no matter what. You can't not do it." She sees the "freedom in the delectable sense of making things up" as coexisting with the "torment" of writing. [11]
In 1971, Ozick received the Edward Lewis Wallant Award and the National Jewish Book Award [12] for her short story collection, The Pagan Rabbi and Other Stories . [13] For Bloodshed and Three Novellas, she received, in 1977, The National Jewish Book Award for Fiction. [12] In 1997, she received the Diamonstein-Spielvogel Award for the Art of the Essay for Fame and Folly. Four of her stories won first prize in the O. Henry competition. [3]
In 1986, she was selected as the first winner of the Rea Award for the Short Story. In 2000, she won the National Book Critics Circle Award for Quarrel & Quandary. [14] Her novel Heir to the Glimmering World (2004) (published as The Bear Boy in the United Kingdom) won high literary praise. Ozick was on the shortlist for the 2005 Man Booker International Prize, and in 2008 she was awarded the PEN/Nabokov Award and the PEN/Malamud Award, which was established by Bernard Malamud's family to honor excellence in the art of the short story. Her novel Foreign Bodies was shortlisted for the Orange Prize (2012) and the Jewish Quarterly-Wingate Prize (2013). [15]
The novelist David Foster Wallace called Ozick one of the greatest living American writers. [16] She has been described as "the Athena of America's literary pantheon", the "Emily Dickinson of the Bronx", and "one of the most accomplished and graceful literary stylists of her time". [4]
 |
| Title | Year | First published | Reprinted/collected | Notes |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| The coast of New Zealand | 2021 | Ozick, Cynthia (June 21, 2021). "The coast of New Zealand". The New Yorker. 97 (17): 50–57. | ||
———————
Nilanjana Sudeshna "Jhumpa" Lahiri is a British-American author known for her short stories, novels, and essays in English and, more recently, in Italian.
Bernard Malamud was an American novelist and short story writer. Along with Saul Bellow, Joseph Heller, Norman Mailer and Philip Roth, he was one of the best known American Jewish authors of the 20th century. His baseball novel, The Natural, was adapted into a 1984 film starring Robert Redford. His 1966 novel The Fixer, about antisemitism in the Russian Empire, won both the National Book Award and the Pulitzer Prize.
Alice Ann Munro is a Canadian short story writer who won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2013. Munro's work has been described as revolutionizing the architecture of the short story, especially in its tendency to move forward and backward in time, and with integrated short fiction cycles, in which she has displayed "inarguable virtuosity". Her stories have been said to "embed more than announce, reveal more than parade".
Joyce Carol Oates is an American writer. Oates published her first book in 1963, and has since published 58 novels, a number of plays and novellas, and many volumes of short stories, poetry, and non-fiction. Her novels Black Water (1992), What I Lived For (1994), and Blonde (2000), and her short story collections The Wheel of Love (1970) and Lovely, Dark, Deep: Stories (2014) were each finalists for the Pulitzer Prize. She has won many awards for her writing, including the National Book Award, for her novel them (1969), two O. Henry Awards, the National Humanities Medal, and the Jerusalem Prize (2019).
Norman Manea is a Romanian writer and author of short fiction, novels, and essays about the Holocaust, daily life in a communist state, and exile. He lives in the United States, where he is a Professor and writer in residence at Bard College.
Abraham Regelson was an Israeli Hebrew poet, author, children's author, translator, and editor.
Edward Lewis Wallant was an American novelist who wrote The Pawnbroker (1961). It was adapted into an award-winning film of the same name, directed by Sidney Lumet and starring Rod Steiger. He also worked in the 1950s an art director at advertising firm McCann-Erickson.
The Jewish Book Council, founded in 1944, is an American organization encouraging and contributing to Jewish literature. The goal of the council, as stated on its website, is "to promote the reading, writing and publishing of quality English language books of Jewish content in North America". The council sponsors the National Jewish Book Awards, the JBC Network, JBC Book Clubs, the Visiting Scribe series, and Jewish Book Month. It previously sponsored the Sami Rohr Prize for Jewish Literature. It publishes an annual literary journal called Paper Brigade.
Rebecca Newberger Goldstein is an American philosopher, novelist, and public intellectual. She has written ten books, both fiction and non-fiction. She holds a Ph.D. in philosophy of science from Princeton University, and is sometimes grouped with novelists such as Richard Powers and Alan Lightman, who create fiction that is knowledgeable of, and sympathetic toward, science.
Deborah Eisenberg is an American short story writer, actress and teacher. She is a professor of writing at Columbia University.
Arthur Allen Cohen was an American scholar, art critic, theologian, publisher, and author.
Helen Frances Barolini was an American writer, editor, and translator. As a second-generation Italian American, Barolini often wrote on issues of Italian-American identity. Among her notable works are Umbertina (1979), a novel which tells the story of four generations of women in one Italian-American family; and an anthology, The Dream Book: An Anthology of Writings by Italian American Women (1985), which called attention to an emerging, and previously unnoticed, class of writers.
Elizabeth Graver is an American writer and academic.
Steve J. Stern is an American author from Memphis, Tennessee. Much of his work draws inspiration from Yiddish folklore.
The Jewish Quarterly-Wingate Literary Prize is an annual British literary prize inaugurated in 1977. It is named after the host Jewish Quarterly and the prize's founder Harold Hyam Wingate. The award recognises Jewish and non-Jewish writers resident in the UK, British Commonwealth, Europe and Israel who "stimulate an interest in themes of Jewish concern while appealing to the general reader". As of 2011 the winner receives £4,000.
Michael Gorra is an American professor of English and literature, currently serving as the Mary Augusta Jordan Professor of English Language and Literature at Smith College, where he has taught since 1985.
Molly Antopol is an American professor and author, writing both fiction and nonfiction. As of 2023, she is an Assistant Professor of English and Creative Writing at Stanford University. Her primary research interests include the Cold War and the Middle East.
The Tenants is the sixth novel of Bernard Malamud, published in 1971.
Ayelet Tsabari is an Israeli–Canadian writer.
| International | |
|---|---|
| National | |
| Academics | |
| Artists | |
| People | |
| Other | |
