Volumes of a writer’s selected or collected work usually have a kind of a grandness to them, an authoritative summing up that pretends to the definitive, and are the outcome of retrospective weighing: the author, if they have made the selections, or a custodian of their work — spouse, editor, literary executor — has looked at years of production and decided that these writings will stand for what the writer and their work was. You can go further into their corpus and search out the oddities, the minor, the incomplete and occasional, the neglected, but this material before you is the main substance — it will offer the most up-front and prepossessing (some might say imploring) portrait, a testament, for better or worse, of what is past and aspires toward the enduring, a record colored and oddly shaped by the strengths and weaknesses of a particular mind either deceased or soon-to-be. And there, I’m not out of the first paragraph and mortality has entered, though I’d intended to hold it off longer. But how not to remark the truly remarkable fact that Cynthia Ozick, who has just published In a Yellow Wood: Selected Stories and Essays, is ninety-seven years old?
Out of deference to the longevity and not-even-a-little-diminished acuity of this writer, who in January published a new and typically vigorous essay in Harper’s, it feels wrong to make too much of this detail, which must be wearying to hear exclaimed. At the same time its influence is detectable throughout In a Yellow Wood. Born in 1928 into a world that is entirely different from our own, how many “worlds” has Ozick seen arrive and disappear? Decades now have the quality of whole epochs, and we experience within just a few years the kinds of transformation that formerly would have required far greater lengths of time. How overwhelming then for one’s life to span both sides of this break: carrying a memory of when life was indeed slower if still hectic, observing the acceleration of more recent times — all while in prolonged atemporal exchange with the ghosts of faraway voices and places through inexhaustible reading. Ozick’s mind has a rare traveling, encompassing, inhabiting power, and these short works taken in total, no matter how conventional and orderly they might seem on the surface, can at times create the sensation of being delivered from out of a roving spirit-like possession, as if by a voice that you could only half-jokingly compare to that of Coleridge’s ancient mariner, if, that is, the mariner was transfigured as a woman, Jewish, New Yorker, 20th-century-born. The sense of life observed and absorbed, lived, wasted, elapsed, pursued, endured, recounted, reckoned, and, most of all, thought, is thick in these pages.
Ozick herself brings a faintly melancholy tone of questioning to the volume’s introduction. Here she is again, as in the “forethoughts,” “forewarnings,” and “forewords” that have preceded the main texts of her previous essay collections, inquiring how to understand the nature of fiction and essays, both as forms in and of themselves and in relation to each other. (For someone who in these same notes has cast doubt about their value, she remains unable to shake them, and each addition to the series is another occasion for Ozick to consider the disparate and shared qualities of the story and essay — they are pendant essays to each volume, at once superfluous and charming.) But she’s now contemplating these old questions of purpose and form from the autumnal yellow wood of Frost’s “The Road Not Taken.” She draws on that poem’s diverging paths to describe disorientation, irresolution, even bewilderment, comparing simultaneous endeavors in short fiction and the essay to a traveler moving on different roads at once, adducing the image of a “Himalayan camel” with its double hump. Is this a crazed, affliction-like labor of exaltation, she wonders — what she calls “writerly fever” — or “has it been little more than hubris and folly?”
Wondering anxiously about the latter is unavoidable for any writer who isn’t completely delusional, especially when gathering their work against that work’s imminent forced conclusion. A well-known instance occurs in W. S. Merwin’s poem “Berryman,” when the speaker asks the older poet how someone can be sure if what they’ve written is any good and Berryman replies, “you can’t you can never be sure / you die without knowing / . . . if you have to be sure don’t write.” Ozick, though she has previously written that she believes her work will be forgotten and won’t even attain the bitter dignity of surviving as “minor,” is an American writer not quite like any other. Because we tend to be anthropological in our literary histories, you will probably hear her mentioned at some point alongside other prominent American Jewish writers of the last century — Bellow, Roth, Malamud, Paley, Leonard Michaels. With them she shares a cultural provenance and inheritance within the wider America, and like them the sanguinary nearness of Old World Eastern European and Russian Jewry didn’t keep her from claiming a place as an American writer, a boldly expansive one at that. (In fact, the nearness was indispensable.) But really she is unlike them in the scope of her engagement with Jewish religion, culture, and experience not only in but beyond America — with a theological shadow over her work not to be found over the others’ — and in her unrelenting focus on, and use of, history as the raw material of her art. The combination of these two qualities, and the manner of her approach to the latter, make her unique not just among the company above but among the broadest range of American writers.
In contrast to what I’ve just said, Ozick might claim that imagination is actually the primary material of her writing, and of course ultimately that must be true — imagination for any decent writer is a given, like air: required for the most basic elements of life in a work. But in Ozick, more than character and psychology and plot, more even than precursors, maybe almost as much as language itself, the historical particulars of a people, culture, events, and tradition tend to be the senseless clay out of which her imagination makes its forms. As she wrote in a 1974 essay following the Yom Kippur War, “Abstractions cannot be murdered. If only it were possible to elude every violation, past, present, and future, by becoming a universalist abstraction!”
And it’s this sense of the lonely particularity of life — and its memory — perpetually endangered, vaporizing (an Ozickian word), slipping away from our hopes and intentions and protections, that establishes an imperative across her work, whether the writing is comic, outlandish, tragic, elegiac, or some combination of these. The fixation with history isn’t as we find in W. G. Sebald’s novels, in which anecdote and dream-like accounts of memories and historical record emerge out of one another for hundreds of pages. In Sebald’s prose, the development of historical echo and convergence generates much of the books’ drama and power. They are at the front of a reader’s attention, functioning at times like the telling word or phrase in a theatrical soliloquy.
Ozick’s poetics of history — and its underlying double, forgetting — are more concealed, and operate in a less apparent way. They might seem at first glance to offer mere variety of setting — place and time — but these are not interchangeable or fancifully chosen or merely superficial details. In effect they have a kind of generative power not altogether unlike, say, inherited poetic form or narrative constraints, providing Ozick with occasion and an incipient tone, just as a chance sound might reveal to a musician the way into a new composition. It’s not the range and variety of detail within each piece that is formidable so much as the range and variety across pieces. The project undertaken through the temporally (and culturally) ranging inventions of her fiction and preoccupations of her essays is to give, in the old Shakespearean phrase she’s fond of quoting, her subjects “a habitation and a name” — to draw them in relief against an ever-proximate, ever-encroaching, totalizing background blur. That blur is time, calamity, death, oblivion.
Most of Ozick’s short fiction doesn’t challenge the genre. The work tends to offer recognizable examples of the short story, having a strong sense of narrative voice and character, incident, imagery, sequence, the revelatory detail. First person, third, male, female, old, young, Jewish, not, she follows imagination’s unruly dictates and would seem to have no indulgence toward contemporary reservations about writing characters who don’t share with an author what is called “identity.” For the most part, Ozick pulls it off, though there are times when the material gets away from her, as in the versions of African language in “A Mercenary.” Some might call the stories aesthetically “conservative” (an inadequate word for art) or “traditional,” and in terms of formal shape there’s something to that, except it doesn’t matter — they are animated by an inimitable restless intelligence. In the presiding voice that constructs each story, there’s an intricate tension between Ozick’s refusal to completely disappear and her simultaneous capacity to bring forward the red earth of her characters. The surface orderliness is a feint. It establishes both the frame and gallery in which her prose elaborates disquietingly living visions: hapless characters that move cynically, heartbrokenly, risibly, carrying in their flesh their own palpable ghostliness.
Here, in “Actors,” is a relic of the Yiddish theater in America escaping a nursing home called “Home for the Elderly Children of Israel” to harangue another actor mid-performance, a rub-your-eyes kind of apparition in a story that wittily plays off King Lear. The geriatric former actor rages against the indignities of his own diminishment by age (his body) and time (his art, its place in culture), savaging his daughter’s play — a Yiddish-influenced version of Lear — and a younger (but not young) actor’s performance in that play, simultaneously buffooning the tragic figure of Lear, buffooning himself and his former prowess on stage, and buffooning everything that the actor he is assailing, Matt, secretly hopes to be as an artist. The story strains in its comedy to the point of excess, but ultimately retains an edge against effervescent dissolution.
Elsewhere, history issues other forms of sabotage: in “The Bloodline of the Alkanas,” an accident confirms the folly of a life’s work when a preposterous writer’s archives are destroyed by burst pipes. Or it dispenses with mockery and comes down on defenseless individuals all at once, cruel and arbitrary, as in “The Story of My Family,” in which a Jewish boy in 19th-century Italy is reduced to a political object of the church, causing a deracination from which there can be no recovery. Or it’s personal history, disfigured by the accumulation of years, as in “Sin.” Here we meet an elderly painter in twilight — left behind by time, minimally provided for by a mostly absent younger woman with whom he has a troubling and ambiguous relationship, confined to a small home surrounded by massive new construction. The new city is flagrantly subduing the old, and there will be no renewal:
He stared me down with his milky eyes. Untamed wads of hair spilled over his collarbones. And again that stale aurora of things long eclipsed, those old grievances, if that’s what they were, unfurling hour after hour, the same, the same. And then again the same. The spittle on his lip when he scraped out yet another weighty breath. He looked, I thought, like someone’s abandoned messiah.
It becomes clear early on that this collection is not only varied in the texture and subjects of the stories, but also in its quality. The two opening pieces, “The Coast of New Zealand” and “The Biographer’s Hat,” were originally published in the New Yorker and are fairly ordinary examples of the kind of fiction that gets published in that and other literary periodicals: little tales about apparently interesting lives of nothingness, featuring people who live in basic material comfort and melancholy boredom, susceptible to whimsy in their unfulfillment. Both “The Bloodline of the Alkanas” and “Virility” are hard to take seriously, though the former is somewhat redeemed by its ending. The latter, however, is a trifle, a dated parlor game about a talentless nudnik becoming famous from stolen poetry. The story’s late turn, ridiculing widespread and fatuous sexism, has little effect within such a ridiculous premise. It’s surprising that this is the only piece included from Ozick’s first collection, The Pagan Rabbi and Other Stories, of 1971. There are obvious examples from that book that are far superior. Even if Ozick felt that they’ve been overemphasized in the evaluation of her work, or that they are juvenilia, there is no justifying the inclusion of “Virility” at the expense of the comically grotesque St. Augustine-parodying “The Pagan Rabbi” or the matchless “Envy; or, Yiddish in America.”
The fantastic, the fanciful, the implausible — they can produce unforgettable work or triviality. If “Virility” is an example of the latter, some of the best stories in the collection are examples of the former. “Usurpation (Other People’s Stories)” is immediately recognizable as work by the cracked demiurgical comic poet who wrote The Puttermesser Papers, a great American novel. The story has a glorious wildness and freedom, involving, among other things, the specter of a dead famous poet, the living specter of a goat that writes stories, a series of obscene blighting crowns, and a degrading ceremonial heaven where “there will be a cage for storywriters, who will be taught as follows: All that is not Law is levity.” “Bloodshed” is a mysterious and moving story in which faith and despair and history are brought together in abrupt conversation at a prayer house. There’s an underlying silence here that is trembled through with a terrible sense of God. It’s one of those stories that resists much commentary — it is simply there, seeming to contain everything while explicitly addressing close to nothing, evoking Wordsworth’s phrase “too deep for tears.” Reading these stories, it’s hard not to ask yourself, in what era, and at what publication, could they have been published? And then consulting the book’s bibliographical note, you realize, oh yes, of course: published by Gordon Lish at Esquire, 1974 and 1976 respectively, though they sound nothing like other writers more prominently associated with Lish.
There’s the strangeness of “Levitation,” in which, as in “Bloodshed,” though now in a different key, a narrow event — in this case, “a failed party” thrown by middling writers — acquires speed and vision in prose that by the story’s end holds much more than the circumstances would seem to allow. Both “Levitation” and “Bloodshed” feature secondary characters that survived the Holocaust, who bring it with them in their bodies and voices to far removed scenes in America. And there’s the otherworldly power of “A Hebrew Sibyl,” which is set in antiquity at the uneasy encounter between Grecian and Hebraic civilizations. The story is a pastoral elegy shaped by modern essayistic consciousness, but develops dramatically through an atmosphere of ancient rite and custom. It’s a story of family grief and the madness of bereavement, the necessity and pretension of ritual, and the loneliness of existence:
I had no fear of the snakes; they lived as I now lived, earthbound among the stones. I saw them as neighbors and companions, and at times amused myself by trailing them to their lairs . . . . And all around, the stones in the changing light showed their changing tempers: the configurations of their small shadowed juttings and hollows came to resemble human features. More than once it seemed that my father’s face looked out at me.
What do these stories have in common? Well, most obviously, they concern Jews and Jewish themes. They take substance from Jewish history remote and more recent, and, most significantly, the narrating voice draws heavily, even when not explicitly, on Jewish religious and literary tradition. But central as this is, Ozick’s work doesn’t require it either. “At Fumicaro” follows an American Catholic writer on a trip in Mussolini’s Italy, where his life is changed by an impulsive decision to marry a young pregnant chambermaid. It’s one of the collection’s most moving stories, a portrayal of how momentary decisions can be made in a spell of inexplicable intoxication, of tenderness and foolishness that suddenly but lastingly transforms our lives and others’. And the devastating “What Happened to the Baby?” is set in a Jewish American milieu — mid-century Catskills and New York City — but this cultural background remains just that, background, informing yet not the main line of the story. Substitute the Catskills for another place and you could rewrite it with characters of nearly any background, the principal divorced couple here being so pitifully drawn in their derangements. From the destruction of a chance event and what follows — years of incurable remorse and obsessing imprisonment in the past — we get an unnerving sense of the primal enigma and fallibility of people.
The stories take up about two-thirds of the book. Though the selection can be puzzling, in the end only a relatively small number of stories haven’t been included. The essays, on the other hand, take up only a third of the book, which is a considerable disservice to Ozick’s work in the genre. It’s not only that many essays have been omitted in favor of inferior stories, but that those that are included don’t consistently deserve the priority they’ve been given. My guess is that this unevenness and relative slightness has to do with two things.
First, there is the essay’s lower place in the hierarchy of literature. It remains a stubborn fact that our literary culture, whatever that might be, treats fiction as preeminent — when “literature” is spoken of, it’s most often according to standards set by fiction. Throughout her career Ozick has quoted Trilling’s “novel or nothing” with recognition, and in the introduction to this volume she acknowledges believing in the “supremacy of the short story as a corridor to human verity” (even as readers have told her that the essays are “better — more welcoming — than the fiction” — a judgment that I think isn’t indicative of prevailing opinions). The prestige of fiction probably has to do with what readers think is the unequaled degree of art to be found in story, character, psychology, dialogue, whereas the essay is an endeavor devoted to the shabbier, more earthbound terrain of argument, political aim, theory, or even, shudder to say, the conveyance of information — or if not this last, then the essay is, even worse, personal, and relies too heavily on the sentimental and autobiographical, and we should be ashamed to read such things, much less write them. In other words, fiction is governed by the free imagination, the essay by the workaday labors of mind.
Ozick in her introduction: “An essay . . . knows things, or purports to know them. A story begins by knowing nothing, and is compelled to unearth its own meaning; it has the uncanny power, besides, to beget newer stories.” This from the author of “She: Portrait of the Essay as a Warm Body,” which begins:
An essay is a thing of the imagination. If there is information in an essay, it is by-the-by, and if there is an opinion in it, you need not trust it for the long run. A genuine essay has no educational, polemical, or sociopolitical use; it is the movement of a free mind at play. Though it is written in prose, it is closer in kind to poetry than to any other form.
Of course that’s just a description of one kind of essay, maybe Ozick’s notion of the ideal essay, and it’s easy to think of exceptions. But as a description of the essay as a work of art on a level with the best fiction, it’s hard to do better. And yet, there remains a strange cultural tendency — or taste — that either doesn’t value such work in practice or has little interest in honoring it. Even when readers take pleasure in the essay, it seems difficult to shake the pervasive sense of the form as literature’s stepchild, treated with obliging courtesy and maybe even genuine interest, but with less affinity and certainly less preference than the blood children of fiction and (in some circles, at least) poetry.
Which brings us to what I think is the second likely explanation for the selection here: because we generally have a hard time reading essays as self-standing works of art, we place too much emphasis on their subjects or arguments. A symptom of this tendency: often when you look at publisher guidelines for proposing works of “nonfiction,” they don’t require a sample of the prose itself, as they do for fiction. Instead, you are told to submit a summary of the argument and an outline, or, if it’s a book, an annotated list of chapters. The possibility that a work of nonfiction might achieve something first and foremost on the basis of its prose doesn’t register. To be sure, when deciding whether to read a book of fiction, it is common among everyone from publishers to publicists to both the most rigorous and casual readers to ask what it’s “about” — the descriptive hooks of plot and character summaries, not prose excerpts, generally determine whether people buy or read a particular book. We can’t help ourselves — there has to be something for which the prose is container. We aren’t content to hear simply that the prose in a book will do justice to our existence in time, will make the world more fully itself in our apprehension, will deepen a reader’s sense of being alive. Even a writer such as Ozick, whose best essays do this, when making a selection of her work, can’t escape the expectation that such work must justify itself by weighty and notable subjects. We conflate subjects and occasions with literary distinction.
And so we get apparently “big” essays here on T. S. Eliot, Anne Frank, Helen Keller, Saul Bellow, and others. We also get a short essay on Bruno Schulz that you don’t need the volume’s bibliography to tell you was originally published in the New York Times Book Review, so exactly does it sound like a New York Times Book Review piece. In her 2016 collection Critics, Monsters, Fanatics, and Other Literary Essays, Ozick is at pains to distinguish between literary criticism and the book review, and the Schulz essay cannot get out of the latter category. It’s not the piece’s brevity but the punchy sense of formula: proceeding through a list of obligatory gestures while moving from point A to point B within a word count. In contrast, if we follow Ozick’s distinction, we can find the counter example of a brief essay that proves to be brilliant criticism in De Quincey’s “On the Knocking at the Gate in Macbeth.”
The Schulz piece isn’t “bad.” In fact, it’s quite good. Ozick is always worth reading, which I think is one of the most favorable things you can say about a writer — few are. It’s only that I can’t understand the selection of some of this work at the expense of much that’s been left out. The essays on big subjects listed above are all engrossing. They achieve what Ozick elsewhere has described as an intention to make an argument in something like story form. But well done as these are, if they weren’t written by Ozick, they likely wouldn’t be collected in a book. Something is lacking that is so brilliantly active in her other essays, both within this book and published elsewhere. That something is hard to name but unmistakable: a kind of surprise, or jolt, a detail or movement developed in musical and energetic prose that fixes memorable insights or images in the reader’s mind. You find it in the masterpiece included here on Virginia and Leonard Woolf, “Mrs. Virginia Woolf: A Madwoman and Her Nurse.” The essay is a majestic performance, mixing biographical-critical commentary and originality of perception to reveal new things from the available record, making observations and scenes that are like inspired discoveries, equal parts artifact and artifice: “In her he had married a kind of escutcheon; she represented the finest grain of the finest stratum in England. What he shored up against disintegration was the life he had gained — a birthright he paid for by spooning porridge between Virginia Woolf’s resisting lips.”
Several essays not included here have a power comparable to “A Madwoman and Her Nurse.” I remember first reading “Nobility Eclipsed” in The New Republic years ago and being amazed at the world it so vividly resurrected:
There was a period, in the first half of the twentieth century, when America — the land, its literature, its varied inhabitants and their histories — was sung in the Hebrew alphabet. Long epic poems on American Indians, the California Gold Rush, the predicament and religious expression of blacks in the American South, the farms and villages and churchgoers of New England, the landscape of Maine — these were the Whitmanesque explorations and celebrations of a rapturous cenacle of Hebrew poets who flourished from before World War I until the aftermath of World War II. But both “cenacle” and “flourished” must be severely qualified. Strewn as they were among a handful of cities — New York, Cleveland, Boston, Baltimore, Chicago — they rarely met as an established group; and if they flourished, it was in driven pursuit of an elitist art sequestered in nearly hermetic obscurity. They were more a fever and a flowering than a movement . . .
What follows is a winding critical history of these American poets who wrote in Hebrew, portraits of their lives and work and their fraught relationships, which all takes an unexpected turn when Ozick reveals a personal connection to this world. It is a singular mix of tribute and lament, cultural and familial history, first- and third-person narrative, a penetrating exploration of the happenstance of heritage and legacy and the unforgiving arduousness of the writer’s task — and it could only have been written by Ozick, out of the chance combination of her command of so much literary and historical material, her confessed inadequacy with Hebrew, and her relation to one of the poets. It is a peak example of a review essay that transcends its occasion — or, not so much “transcends” as so energetically and doggedly looks at its subject, which otherwise might be fleeting or of interest only to specialists, that both the subject and the essay gain a kind of haunting epic quality: history approaching myth.
Another missing essay is “Love and Levity at Auschwitz: Martin Amis,” with its meditation on the fundamental question confronting any artist who writes about the Holocaust: whether to interpret, to try to understand, the evil, or whether to accept and work from its eternal unfathomability. And from her 1996 collection Fame and Folly, “Alfred Chester’s Wig,” which is made of passages such as:
Time ran away with him, and hauled him from America to Europe to North Africa, and muddled him, and got in his way. His dogs — repulsive wild things he kept as pets — got in his way. His impatient and exotic loves got in his way. His fears and imaginings got in his way. Finally — the most dangerous condition for any writer — it was the desolation of life itself that got in his way: moral anguish, illness, helpless and aimless wanting, relentless loneliness, decline . . . I am convinced that he was intended for an end utterly unlike the one he had. I have always believed this — that his life as he was driven to conduct it was a distortion, not a destiny.
Also missing from Fame and Folly, are a couple of very short essays, “The Break” and “Existing Things.” The latter, a mere three pages, might seem at first no more than a light reminiscence or feuilleton, but it has a lyric poem’s compression, the swift associative breaking-out of imagination across the smallest frame, as if a demonstration of Emily Dickinson’s “The Brain — is wider than the Sky.”
In a Yellow Wood does include essays that by now we should call classics, such as “A Drug Store Eden” and “She: Portrait of the Essay as a Warm Body.” But what makes them, ultimately, more than their contents, is the same thing that elevates “Alfred Chester’s Wig” and “Existing Things”: the particular quality of their language, the verbal-intellectual rhythm of English prose sustained at an exacting, summoning level. Or as Ozick puts in another essay from Fame and Folly, citing a younger writer, “the passion for exactitude and sublimity.” Add to that melancholy and playfulness, and you find some basic idea of the elements that give everything in such work — the recollection of the dead, the substance of memory, the ephemeral, the indelible, the ethereal, the ideal, the in-danger-of-vanishing, the sense of the “evermore about to be” quality in things — lasting form. It can be a cliché to cite music as the commentary-defying high ideal of art, and yet, there is nothing more fitting to say for the best essays: to give a genuine idea of them by paraphrase would be as insufficient as trying to summarize a piece of music.
Ozick’s writing is always companionable, very often clarifying — her criticism can have a clearing-away-rubble effect on the mind, like the essays of William Gass or Marilynne Robinson, and her more personal or imaginative essays can be as lyric as those of Ginzburg and Lispector, pushing on the limits of our sensible world. The short fiction can be as sober as the work of 19th- and early 20th-century masters or as full of laughter as Gogol. There’s a good chance that someday both the short work and the novels — for which she’s probably best known — will be collected by the Library of America. Until then, this Everyman edition is an elegant, if incompletely representative, anthology. It’s the best we have so far and clearly flawed, inviting — or demanding — a more judicious filling-out in the coming years.
A ninety-seven-year-old is likely to be more death-haunted than a twenty-two-year-old, but not necessarily more death-stalked. The difference between them is that death has visibly claimed more of the ninety-seven-year-old, while temporarily holding off completion, and the twenty-two-year-old goes around seeming barely touched by death. However, this contrast is really just a result of corporeal impression and our perennially short-term perception. The ninety-seven-year-old may be statistically closer to death, but the underlying reality is so much more a matter of chance that the promise of years to the young can in an instant be revealed as false — there is a surety of copiousness to life, but it is the copiousness of illusion. This is not new knowledge to Ozick. As In a Yellow Wood makes evident, an awareness of the overriding brute force of accident has been like a pulse in her best writing from early on, informing its wild and moving comedy, its exquisite renderings of the tangible and intangible alike, and its portraits of all those battered characters leaning vaguely, desperately, toward the past, holding a weak light up over inadequate eyes, trying to understand what has vanished: lives, places, facts, convictions, dreams, the very reality of truth itself.
Adam Kosan is the author of North America: Two Travelogues (Greying Ghost, 2024).