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“... Cynthia Ozick has been described as one of America’s best writers, one of its leading women of letters, the Athena of its literary pantheon. She has won prestigious awards by the armful: she was recently nominated for the first International Man Booker Prize for career achievement, alongside Saul Bellow, Philip Roth, Gabriel García Márquez, Margaret Atwood et al ...”

“... on the subject, this time, of Marital Doubt. ‘She believed in the uses of fantasy,’ writes Cynthia Ozick of the charmingly earnest heroine of the most extended of the five inventive, flamboyant fictions collected under the title Levitation. Puttermesser (‘Butterknife’) is introduced to us in an earlier story as a City employee in New York’s ...”

“... Cynthia Ozick’s critical writing everywhere expresses a ferocious distaste for the purely aesthetic. The central idea in Art and Ardour, her collection of critical essays, concerns the conflict between the aesthetic and the moral views of literature and of life. She tells the story of a friend’s child coming across a statue of an Egyptian cat deity in a museum ...”

“... to urging upon ranks of dull apprentices the importance of keeping language lively on every page, Cynthia Ozick has conceivably allowed herself to become her own pupil, with unfortunate results. Pupillage at any stage of her career is inconceivable of Jane Bowles. Two Serious Ladies, a novel begun when she was 21, is a strangely mature and confident ...”

“... to dwindle, then at least to change its expectations for the form, and its demands of it. Cynthia Ozick’s way of engaging with these questions is to ignore them – to ignore them with a pointed, Bacchantic ferocity. She is a hierophant of literature as High Culture; and her worship of literature has in it, as well as the obvious note of ...”

“... attempt to define Islam as a theocratic uniformity. (In a rather mad piece in a recent New Yorker, Cynthia Ozick compared Rushdie to ‘a little Israel’, surrounded as he was by ravening Muslim wolves, and also remarked on the evident expansion of his waistline since the last time she saw him in public. Ms Ozick, as ...”

“... been moments when the tone grew prophetic and others when authority modulated into chutzpah. Cynthia Ozick, in a prescient essay written 17 years ago, emphasised the Gnostic-Kabbalistic element already manifest in his work, and set against it her version of a good mainstream Judaism that had no time for ‘belatedness’ nor indeed for any of the ...”

“... but old habits of deference died hard, even among his detractors. In ‘T.S. Eliot at 101’, Cynthia Ozick remembers swallowing ‘without protest’ the nasty bits of Eliot’s poems as an undergraduate and the long, slow disenchantment that followed, but manages to end on a note of wistful nostalgia for the ‘Age of Eliot’: ‘What we will ...”

“... la Karl Günther) at the temple of the hero/author. Since at least one well-known American critic (Cynthia Ozick) has referred offhandedly to Adela as a ‘proto-Nazi’, why should she not be put to dramatic use in this way? In fact, there are no marching feet in the stories; and the Adela who appears in them belongs not to the Third Reich but to the ...”

“... in the novel to shoot that plot full of holes. So far, the novel’s most thoughtful reviewers – Cynthia Ozick in the New York Times and Michael Gorra in the New York Review of Books – have taken care to talk about both the story-strands and the anxieties about story in Middle C. But they have shied away from trying to answer their own big questions ...”

“... an element of strangeness and exoticism in his work. You could call Saul Bellow, Philip Roth and Cynthia Ozick Jewish writers, but they are also American writers. Singer never attempts to present a Gentile sensibility; in this whole volume there are hardly any Gentiles and only one with more than a walk-on part. The stories fall into three main ...”

“... that Israel is illegitimate. Writers who survived don’t seem to be allowed the same licence as Cynthia Ozick or Martin Amis, who’ve imagined their Shoahs in comparative peace. The lasting legacy of Holocaust literature seems to be its utility as a template for contemporary sagas of victimisation, be they memoirs of child soldiers in Africa, or of ...”

“... to be loosed like arrows in defence of his own self-serving prejudice. By this point, writing to Cynthia Ozick, he hated ‘Fourth-Estate’ playboys, bohemians, nihilists, ‘who consume falsehoods as they do fast food’. I think he meant by this people who wrote for the Nation and hadn’t yet enjoyed his own Damascene moment on the road to ...”

“... and ‘Palestinians’ without getting into the kind of argument I once had with the novelist Cynthia Ozick, who insisted no such people existed. Finally, we had a Palestinian Authority, not a government-in-waiting but something closer to a wartime civilian administration. The debit column is far longer. My tour with Anton is now flat-out ...”

“... review of Quentin Bell’s 1972 biography, ‘Mrs Virginia Woolf – a Madwoman and Her Nurse’, Cynthia Ozick reads the Woolf marriage as the story of the Jew desperate for assimilation. Only someone that eager to belong, so ritually and historically excluded from belonging, would be willing to take on board such a burden of caring and would ...”