Ozick, Cynthia (1928-…), is an American author whose works consistently address fundamental questions of Jewish life. Ozick often incorporates Jewish myth and lore into modern circumstances in her novels, short stories, and essays. Ozick’s major themes include the shadow of the Holocaust over Jewish identity, the tensions between heritage and assimilation among Jewish immigrants, and the moral significance of storytelling. The Holocast was the systematic, state-sponsored murder of Jews and others by the Nazis during World War II (1939-1945).
Ozick believes “that stories ought to judge and interpret the world.” The influence of the American author Henry James appears in Ozick’s specific, deliberate attention to fiction as a forum for social and philosophical ideas. Ozick has written the novels Trust (1966), The Cannibal Galaxy (1983), The Messiah of Stockholm (1987), The Puttermesser Papers (1997), Heir to the Glimmering World (2004), Foreign Bodies (2010), and Antiquities (2021). Her short fiction has been collected in The Pagan Rabbi (1971), Bloodshed (1976), Levitation (1982), The Shawl (1989), and Dictation: A Quartet (2008).
Ozick has writen about various aspects of literature in the essays collected in Art and Ardor (1983), Metaphor and Memory (1989), What Henry James Knew (1993), Fame and Folly (1996), The Din in the Head (2006), and Critics, Monsters, Fantasies, and Other Literary Essays (2016). A collection of autobiographical essays was published as Quarrel & Quandary (2000). Ozick was born in New York City on April 17, 1928.
