Details of the Jewish writer Cynthia Ozk

Cynthia Ozke, an American Jewish woman writer, is good at short stories, and her short stories have won many literary awards. 1970, her short story "Jealousy, or Yiddish in America" won the best American short story award of the year; In 197 1 and 1977, the collection of short stories "pagan rabbis and other stories" and "Bleeding" won the Jewish Book Association Award, while the former also won the Jewish Heritage Award in Paris, Panai, and was nominated for the National Book Award in 1972. 1975 "usurpation (other people's stories)" won the first prize of the O 'Henry Prize; 1979, launched into the collection of Pushkard Prize; 1983, Rosa won the Strauss Prize of the American Academy of Literature and Arts, 1984, the first prize of the O 'Henry Prize. In addition, she has published many excellent novellas, essays and poems. 1973 was awarded the Literature Award of the American Academy of Literature and Arts and the Literature Award of the Graduate School; 1984 Received honorary doctorates from Jewish Seminary and Hebrew Union University; 1986, she won the Michael Ray Lifetime Achievement Award for her short stories; 1987 received an honorary doctorate from his alma mater, Hunter University; 1988 was elected as a member of American Literature and Art Society.

As a sensitive and perfectionist writer, Ozk, like Saul Bellow, bernard malamud and other American Jewish writers, is concerned about the reality of the United States. She implicitly and subtly criticized the political and social chaos in the United States, and showed some social problems in the United States, such as personal value being devalued, racial discrimination and commercialization. In her novel The Biography of Putt messer (1997), she reveals that Jews will still encounter anti-Semitism after accepting the assimilation of the mainstream American culture, and at the same time, like others, they will feel that their personal value is degraded by the whole social machine. The collection of short stories "The Biography of Putt messer" contains five series of short stories about the heroine Putt messer, two of which first appeared in the collection of short stories "Lift off: Five Novels" (1982). Putmesser is a talented lawyer. In the place where she works, young American Jewish lawyers try their best to be like non-Jewish whites in dress, language and thinking, but they still can't escape polite indifference, distance and exclusion. As a female Jew, Putmesser has a particularly profound experience. She is not only aware of racial discrimination and prejudice, but also aware of gender discrimination and the smallness and helplessness of ordinary Americans. The second job, as a small civil servant in a government department, although proficient in business, brilliant and cautious, has no money to be a stepping stone, no background and no background. She can only be an unknown part of the social machine and a nobody at the bottom of the social ladder. She can only witness the power and money transactions in government departments and bosses who change like a lantern. She had to obey the blind command of these ignorant people who came and went, and was finally replaced.

In the face of the social crux of the United States, Ozk used the essence of Jewish traditional culture, and her Jewish cultural origin explained her approach. Ozk's growth and educational experience are similar to those of the second generation Jewish immigrants in the United States, such as Bellow and Malamud. Their parents are both from Russia. They were all influenced by Jewish culture when they were young, and received mainstream American culture education when they grew up. However, they can always get inspiration from their ancestors' culture after assimilation. Ozk 1928 was born in new york. Because she is in the United States, she can go to Jewish primary school at the age of five and a half, but there is still gender discrimination there, which can be said to be the source of her feminist thought. At the same time, she also accepted the education and assimilation of mainstream American culture, and entered Hunter University with excellent results when she grew up. In novels such as Herzog, Bellow once showed his nostalgia for his ancestral culture. Malamud also depicts the hero who is looking for a spiritual home in Jewish culture in novels such as Shop Assistant and Kyiv Complaint. In the Biography of Putmesser, Ozk revealed how the assimilated Putmesser found her identity in the Jewish tradition: she taught herself Hebrew, imagined an uncle Sindel, and learned Jewish history, culture and language from him, thus finding her own Jewish ancestry.

When exposing American social reality, Ozk has a distinctive feature. She clearly linked the American reality with the criticism of idolatry in Judaism, and proposed to treat the shortcomings of American secular culture with the anti-idolatry spirit in Jewish culture. She diagnosed the crux of American culture: American culture is a pagan culture and worships various idols; The traditional Jewish culture advocated by Ozk is a culture against idols. Judaism is a monotheistic religion. In the Ten Commandments, the God of Judaism explicitly forbids Jews to carve and worship idols, and warns that doing so will bring disaster and punishment. In Ozk's view, American society is addicted to pagan thoughts, which are hedonistic thoughts in ancient Greek culture, including the worship of money, the supremacy of material enjoyment and the pursuit of fame and fortune. That is, worship the god of love (sex), bacchus (hedonism), muse or Apollo (artistic and personal power). These objects of worship lead people to spiritual wasteland. This situation is actually the materialized result of Americans paying too much attention to success. From the start-up period, Americans emphasized that they should strive hard through personal struggle, and finally get material rewards or some form of recognition to prove their value. Since then, success has gradually been associated with money, fame and power, and the whole American society is pursuing and indulging in the attractive material sensory enjoyment behind success.

In the novel Trust (1966), Ozk pointed out that indulging in sensuality and being crazy about money is idolatry. Trust is the author's first novel, which took six and a half years to complete. The novel takes the heroine's search for her father as the narrative clue, and her biological father Nick is the embodiment of pagan thought, representing lewdness and hedonism. He seduced allegra, betrayed her husband William's trust and gave birth to a heroine, while Nick ran away. Ten years later, when Aligra's second husband, enoch, and his wife and daughter went to Europe to check the number of Jews killed in Nazi concentration camps, Nick seduced their young tutor, Annike. When he learned about Arigra from her, he came to blackmail. 12 years later, Nick returned to the United States, ostensibly to get his daughter back, but actually to further the Lesoil Nocks. At the same time, he seduced Mrs. Bowles and Stephanie, the girlfriend of William's son from his second wife. Nick is really an evil man. Through his daughter's mouth, Ozk linked him with pagans, Bacchus and Muses many times. Aligra, who was taught by him, was also such a heresy. She worships God and indulges in pleasure. What she cares about and is proud of is her social status, money and material enjoyment. When Nick was finally drowned and salvaged, people found that his blonde hair was dyed, and his beauty and chic were all fake from head to toe. Ozk hopes to point out through this detail that this hedonist is actually an unreal person and doomed to no good end. Corresponding to them, they are people who are looking for the essence of Jewish traditional culture like enoch, the heroine's adoptive father. In the Bible, Enoch was an upright and kind man who walked with God. Enoch in the novel has been looking for the value of life, and counting the victims of the European Holocaust touched him greatly. He finally converted to Judaism, from despair to faith, from cynicism to redemption. He is the spiritual father of the heroine.

In addition to worshipping money and indulging in pleasure, Ozk also linked idolatry with the pursuit of fame and gain in the short story "The Story of Others" (later included in 1976 "Bleeding and Three Other Short Stories") and the novel "The Messiah of Stockholm" (1987). The protagonist of The Messiah in Stockholm is a young book critic. He adored the famous writer Bruno Schulz. His fanaticism made him live an unreal life, and also made him fall into a scam, and finally he was able to get away. The short story "usurpation" tells the story of a young writer who covets the reputation of an old Jewish writer because of secular desires and asks the latter for advice. The old Jewish writer took out a silver crown, claiming that it was handed down by the famous Jewish poet Cernikov. He would be famous if he wore it, but he never used it himself. After wearing it, young people are really quick-witted, famous, respected and worshipped everywhere. In Ozk's works, the silver crown clearly symbolizes status, glory and immortality. It has become the embodiment of the writer's desire for fame and wealth and the idol he worships. It violates Jewish law and morality and is bound to be punished. Indeed, although the young writer became famous, he soon became old. This is Cernikov's inseparable ghost. The aging young man eventually died of a heart attack, while Cernikov himself pursued pagan idols and worshipped Apollo. All he got was the contempt of pagan idols and anti-Semitism. Corresponding to the story is an old Jewish writer, who is humble and confident, refuses to worship idols, sticks to Jewish tradition and follows Jewish law, so his works and himself are immortal. This old Jewish writer, as Ozick pointed out in his later prose collection Metaphor and Memory (1980), was 1966 Nobel Prize in Literature laureate Shimur Yusuf Agnon.

The works of other American Jewish writers also allegorized American reality more or less with idolatry. Bellow associated idolatry with money worship and indulgence. In the novels such as Seize the Day, Herzog and Humboldt's Gift, Bellow repeatedly criticized the pursuit of fame and wealth and the supremacy of sensory enjoyment, which were called the worship of fat god and sexy goddess respectively. After Ozk, American postmodern Jewish novelist Ronald Sukenik also discussed this issue in his collection Mosaic Man (1999). He borrowed the story of the disaster caused by Aaron's casting golden calf in the Bible, and proposed that idolatry in contemporary American society is the pursuit of fame and fortune.

However, there are many differences between Ozick's anti-idolatry view and Bellow, Sukenik and other writers. In Ozk's works, the scope of idolatry is wider: in Ozk's view, no matter what you do, it is easy to fall into the abyss of idolatry and bring infinite pain. For example, in Rosa, Ozk reveals through the experience of the heroine Rosa that over-idealizing the past life is an idolatry, and the result will be extremely painful. Rosa suffered the trauma of life. Her parents are assimilated Polish Jewish intellectuals. They live a superior life. The German Nazis destroyed her family and she herself was ravaged. She witnessed her young daughter being brutally killed by the Nazis in the concentration camp. She came to the United States after World War II and has never been able to stand up from the heavy blow. She kept recalling the beautiful past before the Nazi period, unable to extricate herself. The past is constantly revised in imagination, idealized and idolized in memory, and the girl's relic scarf is also regarded as the symbol of the past and the object of worship. As a result, she has been living in hallucinations and imagination, suffering greatly and living a life of walking dead. Finally, with the help of Polschi, a Polish Jew, he finally got rid of his obsession with the past and idolatry and devoted himself to a new life.

In the novel The Biography of Putmesser, Ozk shows that people can expect to repair the imperfect world through art, but excessive pursuit of art and perfection will also lead to idolatry, which will eventually lead to disaster. In the novel, Pute messer is dissatisfied with the shortcomings of the real society, expecting to realize the ideal country of poets and writers and establish an honest, just, upright and rational administrative system, so she creates her own idol: she creates a daughter for herself with Clay Gramm in Jewish legend. It is true that Gram in the story lived up to expectations and realized his ideal, but unfortunately, due to Gram's infinite appetite and lust, the whole utopia was finally destroyed. Putt messer praised the artistic life of George Eliot and his lover George Lewis described in his biography, idealized their life and relationship as idolatry, and finally imitated it himself, which ended in failure. Indeed, Putmesser confuses the boundaries between art and life, and this excessive pursuit of artistic beauty is dangerous. Ozk clearly put forward this idea in his collection of essays Art and Passion (1984). In her view, Nazi Germany's "final termination plan" can be understood as completely eliminating the disharmony factors in the aesthetic sense. Nazi Germany's extermination of Jews has something in common with the pursuit of perfection in art, which is also a lesson from the tragedy of the Holocaust.

In addition, there is such an anti-idolatry factor in Ozk's feminist thought. Ozk supported the early feminist movement, defended women's equal rights, and firmly believed that women should receive higher education. Besides family, they can also realize themselves in their careers and strive for political power. However, with the development of the feminist movement, some extreme feminists gradually overemphasized the "female novels" of "female writers" and thought that women's unique feelings should be tapped and an intellectual and ideological system exclusive to women should be established. Indeed, this kind of feminism nominally opposes the inequality between men and women, but in fact it is consistent with the sexism based on the different physiological characteristics of men and women. It is still an extreme separatist practice to separate specific female social groups based on their physiological characteristics. In Ozk's view, feminism is not based on the characteristics of a certain group, but should emphasize the equality as a person, a capitalized person and a universal person.

The subtle relationship between the moderate limit and idolatry expressed in Ozk's works actually contains certain dialectical thoughts, which are consistent with the thoughts of "extremes meet" and "overcorrection". Young people who worship famous writers indulge in Rosa in the past and Pute messer who pursues perfection. Ozk did not use them to criticize the younger generation in the literary world for their pursuit of literary achievements, admiration for literary celebrities, memories of good past events and pursuit of perfection. She emphasized that excessive infatuation will lead to the danger of idolatry. In the same way, when Ozk attacked the worship of the fat gods Cupid and Bacchus in American society, he was also targeted. The essence of idolatry of hedonists who pursue fame and fortune is, in the final analysis, excessive pursuit of the satisfaction of various desires. However, unlike Buddhism, Ozk's thought thinks that people's emotions and desires are the source of all evil, and advocates that everything is empty and penance is aimed at nirvana. In Ozk's view, this is the other extreme.

Ozk is not one-sided. She pays attention to the contradictory relationship and advocates seeking harmony in the conflict of opposites. In the biography of Putmesser, the ideal country or paradise created and lived by Putmesser is the harmony and satisfaction of moderate desire and rationality, moderate passion and spiritual pursuit, which obviously reflects the idealistic tendency in Ozick's thought. Ozk also pointed out that heaven is not desirable after all, because there, all desires of body and spirit can be satisfied, but there is no contrast between the limitation of death and the desire for eternity, and there is no interdependence between life and death, evil, joy and sorrow, and timely mutual transformation will make existence meaningless. Harmonious development is the true meaning of life in these contradictory conflicts. Tracing back to the source, Ozk's thought has something to do with Jewish tradition. Jewish tradition does not suppress human instinct, desire and emotion, but emphasizes the unity of spirit and body. This is somewhat similar to the Confucian idea of neutralization. Confucianism also believes that in people's emotions, desires, and even personal behavior and social relations, there must be appropriate limits for satisfying desires and expressing emotions, and different factors must be reconciled with appropriate scales, so that individuals and society can develop harmoniously.

In addition to dialectical relationship, Ozk's anti-idolatry thought also contains a warning: it is not advisable to accept idolatry culture and assimilate it. First of all, it is not a safe haven for American Jews who pursue assimilation with mainstream American culture, because they will still face racial discrimination. Secondly, all idolaters, Jews and Gentiles, will be punished. The pagan rabbi is like such a fable: the talented and respected rabbi turned his back on Jewish law and thought that the human body bound the soul; He turned to be infatuated with pagan gods, believed that the souls of various natural gods were free, looked forward to talking with them, and finally became possessed. He even believes that the soul can be free by mating with the tree god and end in death.

An outstanding artistic feature of Ozick's novels is that she borrows characters in reality, stories told by others and her own stories (or stories covered by stories) and rewrites them into her own stories to convey her own thoughts. The Messiah in Stockholm borrowed the name of the famous writer Bruno Schulz and the title of his lost novel Messiah, and compiled a synopsis of the story about the creation and destruction of idols. The short story "usurpation" begins with the narrator listening to a famous writer read his work "The Magic Crown" to the public. Here, I borrowed the scene of Malamud reading his own work "Silver Crown". By borrowing his own fame, Ozk can better show the admiration of later scholars for the literary reputation of their predecessors. At the end of his reading, an old goat showed the narrator his manuscript "The Story of a Young Man and Worship", but the narrator suddenly interrupted after finishing part of the manuscript, borrowed part of these two stories and began to tell his own story. In addition, Cernikov and Shmuel Yusuf Agnon also appear in the novel. By comparing them, this paper shows Ozick's anti-idolatry thought, from which we can see the second artistic feature of Ozick's literary creation, that is, she is good at highlighting the theme with comparative methods. In Trust, the author compares Nick, the narrator's biological father, with enoch, his adoptive father, and reveals the author's idea of using Jewish traditional culture to fight against American secular pagan culture. The third artistic feature of Ozick's novels is to incorporate absurd, exaggerated and mythical factors into his works, so that they can be displayed as a part of reality, and everything seems natural and true, which will not make readers feel weird. Just as Putt messer in the novel created Gorham, Gorham did realize her ideal of creating a perfect administration. Putmesser didn't just imagine the scene in heaven, but actually wandered in heaven, showing readers the embarrassing situation in heaven. Ozk's narrative is absurd, exaggerated, humorous and imaginative, but she can make readers not question the possibility of what she said in reality, but care about the inner essence of reality revealed by her story and the thought-provoking thoughts she expressed.

Calling Ozk an "American Jewish woman writer" can only define the writer's nationality, race and gender, but not her artistic achievements and thoughts. She inherited the traditional method of the Jewish Talmud, that is, to convey serious and profound thoughts and true meaning through rich and free imagination and humorous narration. Ozk has no narrow nationalism. Although her works involve Jewish tradition and its anti-idol spirit, her thoughts are aimed at the whole American society and contain humanistic thoughts as a universal meaning.