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A Judaism of Ethics in a Post-Holocaust World: The Interplay of Literature and Theology in Cynthia Ozick's Messiah of Stockholm

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  19 August 2021

Claire E. Sufrin
Claire E. Sufrin*
Affiliation:
Northwestern UniversityEvanston, IL, USA
*
c-sufrin@northwestern.edu
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Abstract

This article suggests that bringing Jewish literature and Jewish thought into conversation can deepen our understanding of each. As an illustration of this interdisciplinary methodology, I offer a reading of Cynthia Ozick's 1987 Messiah of Stockholm. I claim that Ozick has embedded an argument about the relationship of post-Holocaust Jewry to the past into the literary features of her novel. Her argument draws in particular upon Leo Baeck's account of Judaism as focused on the present and future in contrast to the worshipful approach to the past characteristic of other religions. At the same time, I offer a more nuanced take on the fear of idolatry so often noted in analyses of Ozick's work and situate that fear in relationship to the literary theories of her predecessor Bruno Schulz, who plays a key role in the novel, and her contemporary Harold Bloom.

Type
Research Article
Information
AJS Review , Volume 45 , Issue 2 , November 2021 , pp. 411 - 430
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Copyright
Copyright © Association for Jewish Studies 2021

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Footnotes

I thank my colleagues Dustin Atlas, Chaya Halberstam, Sarah Imhoff, Gary Saul Morson, Rachel Rafael Neis, and Alexandra Zirkle, as well as the journal's two anonymous reviewers, for their critiques of earlier versions of this paper. I also thank participants at the 2016 Midwestern Inter-University Workshop in Jewish Studies, organized by Erik Dreff, and at a 2018 workshop in constructive Jewish theology, convened by Sam Fleischhacker, for their comments on earlier presentations of this research. I also received helpful feedback at the Association for Jewish Studies Annual Meeting in 2017. I am grateful for research assistance provided by Sarah Friedman, whose work was supported by a Northwestern University Undergraduate Research Grant.

References

1. Powers, Peter Kerry, “Disruptive Memories: Cynthia Ozick, Assimilation, and the Invented Past,” MELUS 20, no. 3 (1995): 79CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

2. Emily Miller Budick, The Subject of Holocaust Fiction (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2015), 138.

3. Franco, Dean J., “Rereading Cynthia Ozick: Pluralism, Postmodernism, and the Multicultural Encounter,” Contemporary Literature 49, no. 1 (2008): 56CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Cf. Victor H. Strandberg, Greek Mind/Jewish Soul: The Conflicted Art of Cynthia Ozick (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1994).

4. Michael Greenstein holds that in Ozick's earlier novels “the very forcefulness of their pilpulistic or dialectical arguments tends to overwhelm the aggadic or imaginative nature of her stories.” He argues that the Cannibal Galaxy (1983) and Messiah of Stockholm represent a shift in Ozick's style toward greater subtlety and nuance. Greenstein, Michael, “The Muse and the Messiah: Cynthia Ozick's Aesthetics,” Studies in American Jewish Literature 8, no. 1 (1989): 50Google Scholar.

5. Leo Baeck, “Romantic Religion,” in Judaism and Christianity, trans. Walter Kaufmann (Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society of America, 1958), 240.

6. Cynthia Ozick, “A Youthful Intoxication,” New York Times Book Review, December 10, 2006.

7. Walter Kaufmann, “Leo Baeck: A Biographical Introduction,” in Baeck, Judaism and Christianity, 15.

8. Although Baeck's essay presents an analysis of the historical development of Christian theology, it does not hold up particularly well as a work of history. Writing about Baeck and interlocutors such as Adolf von Harnack, Samuel Sandmel notes, “from both the Christian and the Jewish side, there emerged in German, what might be described as two related but different levels of assertion. One level was related to what the facts, or supposed facts, were. But a second level was the philosophical implications of these facts or supposed facts.” Sandmel, Samuel, “Leo Baeck on Christianity,” Leo Baeck Memorial Lecture 19 (1975): 6Google Scholar. Michael Meyer and others emphasize that Baeck wrote in defense of Jews and Judaism, and this colors his scholarship. Meyer, Michael A., “The Thought of Leo Baeck: A Religious Philosophy for a Time of Adversity,” Modern Judaism 19, no. 2 (1999): 107–17CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Ozick seems to accept Baeck's account of the differences between Judaism and Christianity as historically accurate.

9. The mythic quality of Schulz's biography is further enhanced by the attention given to him by some of the most important Jewish writers of the last few decades. Not only Ozick, but David Grossman, Nicole Krauss, Jonathan Safran Foer, and others have brought Schulz into their work. For a sense of Schulz's enduring appeal for contemporary Jewish writers, see David Grossman, “The Age of Genius,” The New Yorker, June 8, 2009. Examples of the critical treatment of this phenomenon include Naomi Sokoloff, “Reinventing Bruno Schulz: Cynthia Ozick's The Messiah of Stockholm and David Grossman's See Under: Love,” AJS Review 13, no. 1/2 (1988): 171–99; Arich-Gerz, Bruno, “Bruno Schulz's Literary Adoptees: Jewishness and Literary Father-Child Relationships in Cynthia Ozick's and David Grossmann's Fiction,” European Judaism 42, no. 1 (2009): 76–89CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Codde, Phillippe, “Keeping History at Bay: Absent Presences in Three Recent Jewish American Novels,” MFS Modern Fiction Studies 57, no. 4 (2011): 673–93CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Kayles, N. Katherine, “Combining Close and Distant Reading: Jonathan Safran Foer's Tree of Codes and the Aesthetic of Bookishness,” PMLA 128, no. 1 (2013): 226–31Google Scholar; Gwyer, Kirstin, “‘You Think Your Writing Belongs to You?’: Intertextuality in Contemporary Jewish Post-Holocaust Literature,” Humanities 7, no. 20 (2018): 1–18CrossRefGoogle Scholar. In the last decade or so, Schulz's own work has also been the focus of a great deal of scholarly attention, including the publication of a new translation of his stories into English in 2018. Bruno Schulz, Collected Stories, ed. Madeline G. Levine (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2018).

10. Blonski, Jan, “On the Jewish Sources of Bruno Schulz,” trans. Steinlauf, Michael C., Cross Currents: A Yearbook of Central European Culture 12 (1993): 59Google Scholar.

11. Cynthia Ozick, “The Phantasmagoria of Bruno Schulz,” in Art & Ardor (New York: Knopf, 1983), 227.

12. Baeck, “Romantic Religion,” 243.

13. Cynthia Ozick, “Innovation and Redemption: What Literature Means,” in Art & Ardor, 245.

14. Alternatively, Elaine Kauvar suggests reading the name Baruch in reference to the scribe by that name in the biblical book of Jeremiah. In Jeremiah 36, the scribe carries the prophet's message of rebuke to the Temple and then to the king. When the king burns the scribe's scroll, Jeremiah has him write it again, an image of resurrection. Kauvar concludes that “to name himself Lazarus Baruch is to fancy himself the scribe who will resurrect the prophet Bruno Schulz.” Elaine Kauvar, Cynthia Ozick's Fiction: Tradition and Invention (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1993), 206–7.

15. Cynthia Ozick, The Messiah of Stockholm (New York: Vintage Books, 1988), 110. Emphasis, found in the original, indicates direct quotation from Schulz. Sarah Blacher Cohen finds other examples of intertextuality in Messiah of Stockholm, in particular the work of Henry James and Isaac Bashevis Singer. See Sarah Blacher Cohen, Cynthia Ozick's Comic Art: From Levity to Liturgy (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1994), 138.

16. Bruno Schulz, “The Book,” in Sanatorium under the Sign of the Hourglass, trans. Celina Wieniewska, Writers from the Other Europe (New York: Penguin, 1979), 3.

17. Shallcross compares the three acts of Schulz's story to the three stages of Lurianic cosmology: ẓimẓum, the withdrawal of the Godhead; shevirat kelim, the breaking of the vessels that had once held divine energy; and tikkun, repair or redemption. Bozena Shallcross, “Fragments of a Broken Mirror: Bruno Schulz's Retextualization of the Kabbalah,” East European Politics and Societies 11, no. 2 (1997): 277.

18. Bruno Schulz, “The Mythologizing of Reality,” in Letters and Drawings of Bruno Schulz with Selected Prose, ed. Jerzy Ficowski, trans. Walter Arndt and Victoria Nelson (New York: Harper & Row, 1988), 115–16. For an account of Schulz's theories of myth in the context of debates among Jewish writers about literature, see Karen Underhill, “Bruno Schulz's Galician Diasporism: On the 1937 Essay ‘E. M. Lilien’ and Rokhl Korn's Review of Cinnamon Shops,” Jewish Social Studies 24, no. 1 (2018): 2. On similar dynamics in modernist Hebrew and Yiddish literature, cf. Allison Schachter, Diasporic Modernisms: Hebrew and Yiddish Literature in the Twentieth Century (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014), 10.

19. Ozick, Messiah, 110. For a different reading of this passage, which likens the cuneiform of this messiah entering the fictional Drohobycz to the “two archaically shaped letters” that made up the logo of the Nazi SS that occupied the actual Drohobycz, see Klingenstein, Susanne, “Visits to Germany in Recent Jewish-American Writing,” Contemporary Literature 34, no. 3 (1993): 542–43CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

20. Ozick, Messiah, 111.

21. Sanford Pinsker writes that “in a 19 May 1987 letter Ozick tells me ‘those idols in Drohobycz are all Nazis’” echoing the connection between Romantic religion and Nazism suggested by Baeck's work, as noted above. Pinsker, Sanford, “Jewish-American Literature's Lost-and-Found Department: How Philip Roth and Cynthia Ozick Reimagine Their Significant Dead,” Modern Fiction Studies 35, no. 2 (1989): 234CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

22. In a very different assessment of Ozick and Bloom, Norman Finkelstein prioritizes Bloom's definition of Judaism and uses that as a means of evaluating Ozick; my approach is not exactly the opposite though close to it. Norman Finkelstein, The Ritual of New Creation: Jewish Tradition and Contemporary Literature (Albany: SUNY Press, 1992), 43. Steven B. Katz reads Messiah of Stockholm similarly, arguing that the novel may be read as an illustration of Bloom's reading of Scholem. Katz, Steven B., “The Epistemology of the Kabbalah: Toward a Jewish Philosophy of Rhetoric,” Rhetoric Society Quarterly 25 (1995): 107–22CrossRefGoogle Scholar. In a review of Messiah of Stockholm, Bloom too reads the book according to his theory of influence, as when he writes, “Lars is Ms. Ozick's surrogate, an emblem for her own maturation as an artist as she becomes a true daughter of Schulz, whose Jewishness, like Kafka's, is fascinatingly implicit in his writing.” Elsewhere in the review, he names W. H. Auden, T. S. Eliot, and Bernard Malamud as Ozick's other “literary fathers.” Harold Bloom, “The Book of the Father,” New York Times Book Review, March 22, 1987. All of these miss the importance of rationality and ethics to Ozick's understanding of Judaism.

23. Harold Bloom, Kabbalah and Criticism (New York: The Seabury Press, 1975), 64.

24. Cynthia Ozick, “Literature as Idol: Harold Bloom,” in Art & Ardor, 184.

25. Baeck, “Romantic Religion,” 218.

26. Ibid.

27. Karen L. King, What Is Gnosticism? (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2005), 2. For a recent attempt to argue that Gnosticism does have a well-defined content, see April D. De Conick, The Gnostic New Age: How a Countercultural Spirituality Revolutionized Religion from Antiquity to Today (New York: Columbia University Press, 2016).

28. This phenomenon is not limited to Christian contexts. Michael Brenner argues that among nineteenth- and twentieth-century German Jewish scholars of Jewish studies who were themselves invested in the Jewish community and its future, “whoever looked for a historical battlefield to fight contemporary wars was well served by scholarly discussion concerning the relationship between Judaism and Gnosticism.” That is, scholarly disagreements about the relationship between Gnosticism and Judaism in this period often reflected disagreements about developments in communal or religious Jewish life. Brenner contrasts Heinreich Graetz's view of Gnosticism as antithetical to Judaism with Moritz Friedländer's view of Gnosticism as having had an early and positive influence on Judaism. Baeck's view is closer to the former. Michael Brenner, “Gnosis and History: Polemics of German-Jewish Identity from Graetz to Scholem,” New German Critique, no. 77 (1999): 46. Cf. Benjamin Lazier, God Interrupted: Heresy and the European Imagination between the World Wars (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2008).

29. Ozick, “Literature as Idol,” 188–89. Emphasis in the original. For a broader discussion of idolatry, see Moshe Halbertal and Avishai Margalit, Idolatry, trans. Naomi Goldblum (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2008).

30. Ozick, Messiah, 128.

31. Ozick, “Literature as Idol,” 198.

32. Cynthia Ozick, “The Fourth Sparrow: The Magisterial Reach of Gershom Scholem,” in Art and Ardor, 144.

33. Ozick, “A Youthful Intoxication.”

34. On the evil inclination, see Ishay Rosen-Zvi, Demonic Desires: “Yetzer Hara” and the Problem of Evil in Late Antiquity (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2011).

35. Ozick, “Innovation and Redemption,” 247.

36. Ibid., 247–48.

37. At first read, the ending of the book is unsatisfying. Having journeyed with Lars through his obsession with Schulz and then his realization that he is being used by the Eklunds to promote their own appropriation of Schulz, it is disappointing to learn that the reward for his efforts is an utterly boring, normal life. Sarah Blacher Cohen, who considers Messiah of Stockholm to be a work of satire, reads this ending as further mocking of Lars. But I choose instead to see Lars as triumphant in his acceptance of reality. Cohen, Ozick's Comic Art, 145.

38. Ozick, “Innovation and Redemption,” 245–46.

39. Ozick, Messiah, 143.

40. Ibid., 144. Cf. Victor Strandberg's reading of this image as preserving idolatry or at least the possibility of it: “The paradox inheres in the figure dressed in the garb of Orthodox Judaism using the brief span that remains of his doomed life to assure the future life of a heretically blasphemous pagan text. The parable is the deep human need for imaginative art that necessitates the paradox.” While I believe that the box holding the manuscript goes with the man to die, Strandberg believes the man will ensure the box's survival before he is killed. Strandberg, Greek Mind/Jewish Soul, 138.

41. Cynthia Ozick, “Who Owns Anne Frank?,” in Quarrel & Quandary (New York: Knopf, 2011), 77–78.

42. Frank is also “resurrected” as a character by Philip Roth in the Ghost Writer and by Shalom Auslander in Hope: A Tragedy (and appears in other ways in other novels). Sanford Pinsker comments that those who would believe Roth's claim that Anne Frank is alive in New England would also likely believe that the Messiah manuscript was written by Bruno Schulz. Philip Roth, The Ghost Writer (New York: Macmillan, 1979); Shalom Auslander, Hope: A Tragedy (New York: Penguin, 2012); Pinsker, “Jewish-American Literature's Lost-and-Found Department,” 233. For other analyses of Anne Frank as a literary character in contemporary literature, see Sara R. Horowitz, “Literary Afterlives of Anne Frank,” in Anne Frank Unbound: Media, Imagination, Memory, ed. Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett and Jeffrey Shandler (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2012), 215–53; Rachael McLennan, Representations of Anne Frank in American Literature: In Different Rooms (New York: Routledge, 2017).

43. In addition to the critique of Raphael I present here, Ozick's argument may also be helpful in thinking critically about the role that belief in God among victims of the Nazis plays in Eliezer Berkovits's post-Holocaust theology. Eliezer Berkovits, Faith after the Holocaust (New York: Ktav, 1973); With God in Hell: Judaism in the Ghettos and Deathcamps (New York: Hebrew Publishing Company, 1979).

44. Raphael, Melissa, “When God Beheld God: Notes towards a Jewish Feminist Theology of the Holocaust,” Feminist Theology 7, no. 21 (May 1, 1999): 54CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Raphael's claim that the divine Shekhinah was wounded as the women were wounded echoes images of God-as-suffering that we find elsewhere in theological reflection about the Holocaust. Perhaps the most cited example of this is a passage from Elie Wiesel's Night in which a young boy slowly suffocates while hanging from the gallows. Watching his suffering, someone asks, “Where is God now?” Elie, the protagonist, responds: “‘Where is He?' Here He is—He is hanging here on this gallows.” Elie Wiesel, Night (New York: Bantam, 1982), 62.

45. Raphael, “When God Beheld God,” 67.

46. Ibid., 78. On the embrace of Shekhinah by some Jewish feminists alluded to here by Raphael, see Devine, Luke, “How the Shekhinah Became the God(dess) of Jewish Feminism,” Feminist Theology 23, no. 1 (2014): 71–91CrossRefGoogle Scholar.