The Jewish Writer?

"The term 'Jewish writer' ought to be an oxymoron."
--Cynthia Ozick

We just opened the book of Genesis onto a world created through words, so it is a good time to reflect on the nature of writing within Judaism. Now that Jewish book festivals are in full swing and book price wars have hit a new low, it's natural to give some thought to this curiosity. Among the burgeoning group of popular American authors are Jews who write, in large part, about Jewish themes but would not want to be classified as Jewish writers, among them are Norman Mailer and Cynthia Ozick.

Why? Ozick, in her essay "Tradition and (or Versus) the Jewish Writer" believes that Jewish texts are designed to be "ethically transformative;" they are there to "unriddle the Job-like vagaries of the human heart while urging it toward the moral life." That is not the chief aim of a good story, which is there to entertain, inform, question and provide a convenient escape when needed. In Ozick's words:

"To be a Jew is to be a good citizen, to be responsible, to be charitable, to respond to society's needs. To be a novelist is to be the opposite - to seize unrestraint and freedom, even demonic freedom, imagination with its reins cut loose."

You may disagree with Ozick; she is a good provocateur. But it probably helps if, in disagreeing with her, you are also a well-published novelist who can speak from experience. Perhaps Ozick explains why the anger that many Jews - or other ethnic minorities - feel when one of their own writes disparaging fiction is unfair or misplaced.

Ozick believes that every writer's subject matter is informed by the writer's life and preoccupations: "...all writers are saturated, to one degree or another, in origins, in history." Jewishness is not separate from the writer but inherent in the writer's very being. Yet, Ozick suggests, "no writer should be expected to be a moral champion or a representative of 'identity.'" If we judge writers otherwise, they will always come up short. "The aims of imaginative writers are the aims of fiction. Not of community service or communal expectation."

Writing is not the only field that suffers these delicate boundary lines when it comes to identity. We may erroneously expect that politicians who are Jewish should always have a particular stance towards Israel or a bias towards their people above other political issues. The same could be said of journalists and so on and so forth. In other words, we expect that ethnic or spiritual identity trumps professional identity and cannot be separated when, indeed, sometimes they must. That does not mean that being Jewish is an identity that is easily removed or replaced.

Leon Wieseltier, in his wonderful, small book "Against Identity," writes that: "In the modern world, the cruelest thing you can do to people is to make them ashamed of their complexity." Today, too often, we are guilty of trying too hard to reduce writers and others into easy categories. Something profound can be lost when we compromise identity in this way.

Judaism has a two thousand year history of text, of the intricate and imaginative analyses of what words mean. Being part of that conversation is undoubtedly thrilling. Ozick says, however, that "What we want from novels is not what we want from the transcendent liturgies of the synagogue." Some of us do. At least some of the time. Perhaps some of us are so struck by the masterful placement of words in a novel or the artistic way in which a story is crafted that we feel a bit closer to God through reading. And in those moments, God does not have to be in a sanctuary but is somehow released from the pages of a book whose author may not actually have had the divine in mind at all.

So what do you think? Do you agree with Cynthia Ozick or not?

Shabbat Shalom

By Erica Brown  |  October 22, 2009; 11:37 AM ET Save & Share:                 
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