Lectures to Specters: Ozick's Genealogies

Cynthia Ozick is often considered one of the few writers willing to identify herself specifically as a Jewish writer. Yet this characterization of Ozick obscures more than it illuminates. By attending to the understudied themes of genealogy and sexuality in Ozick's work, a more complicated picture of her relation to Jewish identity emerges. This article shows how Ozick figures the ambivalent relation of Jewish identity and literature through deviant sexualities and genealogical breakdown, through a reading of her novella "Envy; or Yiddish in America" (1969). Drawing on studies of the biological imagination in Jewish literature, post-vernacular Yiddish histories, and recent critical scholarship on identity in Jewish literary study, I read Ozick as a theorist of the entanglement, tense but generative, of literature and desire. My reading seeks not only to revise our scholarly relation to this canonical figure, but also to use genealogy to ask how literature complicates normative models of identity in Jewish studies.