Cynthia Ozick (b.1928) is an American novelist, short-story writer, essayist, and intellectual whose works examine being Jewish in contemporary life.
Born in New York City to Jewish immigrants from Russia, Ozick was educated at New York University and Ohio State University. In college, she became obsessed with Henry James, and she spent seven years trying to write a novel in his style. Her first novel, Trust (1966,) is the story of a woman’s rejection of her wealthy American Jewish family and her search for her renegade father in Europe.
Ozick’s well-known works, The Pagan Rabbi and Other Stories (1971,) Bloodshed (1976,) Levitation (1982,) The Cannibal Galaxy (1983,) and The Messiah of Stockholm (1987,) express the Jewish ethos, mysticism, and history.
Ozick has also written essays on life and literature, collected in volumes such as Art and Ardor (1983,) Metaphor & Memory (1989,) Fame & Folly (1996,) Quarrel & Quandary (2000,) The Din in the Head (2006,) and Critics, Monsters, Fanatics, and Other Literary Essays (2016.)
Ozick’s recent novels include The Puttermesser Papers (1997) and The Bear Boy (2005.) Henry James’s The Ambassadors inspired her novel Foreign Bodies (2010.)
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We often take for granted the very things that most deserve our gratitude.
—Cynthia Ozick
Topics: Gratitude
In saying what is obvious, never choose cunning. Yelling works better.
—Cynthia Ozick
Topics: Communication
When something does not insist on being noticed, when we aren’t grabbed by the collar or struck on the skull by a presence or an event, we take for granted the very things that most deserve our gratitude.
—Cynthia Ozick
Topics: Obstacles, Difficulty, Vision, Goals, Aspirations, Gratitude, Blessings
To imagine the unimaginable is the highest use of the imagination.
—Cynthia Ozick
Topics: Imagination
The usefulness of madmen is famous: they demonstrate society’s logic flagrantly carried out down to its last scrimshaw scrap.
—Cynthia Ozick
Topics: Madness
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