L’America come seconda Yavneh? Cynthia Ozick e la rinascenza ebraica statunitense degli anni Settanta del Novecento
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.13136/2281-4582/2017.i9.247Abstract
The present essay focuses on a new phase in the evolution of Jewish-American writing which characterized the late 1960s and the 1970s, an era in which the then-current secular, humanist outlook was gradually abandoned in favor of an engagement with particularistic aspects of Judaism, above all religious issues. As I argue, Cynthia Ozick played a leading role as a theorizer and spokesperson of this literary phenomenon. In a series of insightful essays published in the early 1970s, above all the programmatic piece “Towards a New Yiddish,” she, in fact, appealed to her fellow Jewish writers for a literary production engaging with distinctly Jewish theological paradigms and categories. Such a “tribal,” self-referential perspective was, in her view, a necessary measure to ensure the survival of the Jewish tradition in the United States, a tradition which had been constantly threatened by the pressures of secularism. Her reflections marked the beginnings of what later developed into the so-called “third act” of Jewish-American literature of the 1980s and 1990s, a rich and lively movement which refuted Irving Howe’s gloomy 1977 forecast that Jewish literature was inevitably destined to dissolve into the American literary mainstream.
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Meyer, Adam. “Putting the ‘Jewish’ Back in Jewish American Fiction. A Look at Jewish American
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Schechner, Mark. “Is This Picasso, or Is It the Jews? A Family Portrait at the End of History.” Tikkun 12 (1997): 39-42.
Statlander-Slote, Jane, e Alessandra Farkas. “Interview with Cynthia Ozick.” Roots of Passion. Essays on
Cynthia Ozick. Fort Lauderdale: LLumina Press, 2016. 86-95.
Steiner, George. "Our Homeland, The Text." Salmagundi 66 (1985): 4-25.
Strandberg, Victor. Greek Mind/Jewish Soul. The Conflicted Art of Cynthia Ozick. Madison: The University of
Winsconsin Press, 1994.
Teicholz, Tim. “The Art of Fiction.” Series (XCV) of the Paris Review 29 (1987).
Wisse, Ruth R. “American Jewish Writing. Act II.” Commentary 61 (1976): 40-45.
Bialik, Nahman Hayim e Yehoshua Hana Ravnitzky. The Book of Legends: Sefer Ha-Aggadah. Legend from the Talmud and Midrash. New York: Schocken Books, 1992.
Bloom, Harold. The Anxiety of Influence. A Theory of Poetry. New York: Oxford University Press, 1973.
---. Kabbalah and Criticism. London-New York: Continuum, 2005.
Brown, Erella. “The Ozick-Bloom Controversy: Anxiety of Influence, Usurpation as Idolatry, and the Identity of Jewish American Literature.” Studies in American Jewish Literature 11.1 (1981): 62-82.
De Biasio, Giordano. Memoria e desiderio. Narratori ebrei d’America. Torino: UTET, 1992.
Dickstein, Morris. “Ghost Stories: The New Wave of Jewish Writing.” Tikkun 12 (1987): 33-36.
Fargione, Daniela. “Cynthia Ozick. A Jewish Woman Writer and her Many Paradoxes”. Studi e Ricerche. Quaderni del Dipartimento di Scienze del Linguaggio e Letterature Moderne Comparate dell’Università degli Studi di Torino. Alessandria: Edizioni dell’Orso, 2008. 149-169.
Fiedler, Leslie. “Growing Up Post-Jewish.” Fiedler on the Roof: Essays on Literature and Jewish Identity. Boston (Mass.): David R. Godine Publisher, 1991. 117-22.
Flanzbaum, Hilene. “The Americanization of the Holocaust.” Journal of Genocide Research 1 (1999): 91-104.
Fraenkel, Jonah. “L'Aggadah.” Il mondo dello Spirito nei racconti dei maestri ebrei. Trad. it. di Ottavio Di Grazia. Roma: Edizioni Paoline, 1999.
Friedman, Thomas. “Back to Orthodoxy: The New Ethic and Ethnics in American Jewish Literature.” Contemporary Jewry 10 (1989): 67-77.
Halbertal, Moshe, e Avishai Margalit. Idolatry. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1992.
Howe, Irving. “Introduction.” Jewish American Stories. New York: Signet, 1977. 1-17.
---. “From the American Scene: The Lost Young Intellectual: A Marginal Man Twice Alienated.” Commentary 2 (1946): 361-366.
Kahn, Lothar. “American-Jewish Literature after Bellow, Malamud, and Roth.” Jewish Book Annual 45 (1987-1988): 5-18.
Kauvar, Elaine M. “An Interview with Cynthia Ozick.” Contemporary Literature 3 (1993): 358-394.
Klingestein, Susanne. “Jewish American Fiction, Act III: Eccentric Sources of Inspiration.” Studies in American Jewish Literature 18 (1999): 83-92.
Kremer, Lillian. “Post-Alienation: Recent Directions in Jewish-American Literature.” Contemporary Literature 3 (1993): 571-591.
Materassi, Mario. “Imagination Unbound: An Interview with Cynthia Ozick.” Salmagundi 94/95 (1992): 85-113.
Meyer, Adam. “Putting the ‘Jewish’ Back in Jewish American Fiction. A Look at Jewish American
Fiction since 1977 and an Allegorical Reading of Nathan Englander’s The Gilgul of Park Avenue.” Unfinalized Moments: Essays in the Development of Contemporary Jewish American Fiction. A cura di Derek Royal. West Lafayette: Purdue University Press, 2011. 153-68.
Novak, Michael. The Rise of the Unmeltable Ethnics. New York: Macmillan, 1973.
Novick, Peter. The Holocaust in American Life. New York: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2000.
Orsini, Elisabetta. “La poesia prima della poesia. Teoria dell’influenza poetica in Roland Barhes, Harold Bloom e Gilles Deleuze.” Francofonia 55 (2008): 3-20.
Ozick, Cynthia. “America. Toward Yavneh.” Judaism 19 (1970): 264-82.
---. Art & Ardor. Essays. New York: Knopf, 1983.
---. Bloodshed and Three Novellas. New York: Knopf,1976.
---. Metaphor & Memory: Essays. New York: Knopf, 1989.
---. “Puttermesser: Her Work History, Her Ancestry, Her Afterlife.” New Yorker 9 Maggio 1977: 38-44.
---. The Puttermesser Papers. New York: Knopf, 1997.
---. The Shawl. New York: Knopf, 1989.
Porro, Simona. Dalla teologia alla letteratura: il caso di Arthur A. Cohen. Alessandria: Edizioni dell’Orso, 2016.
Rosenfeld, Alvin Hirsch. “The Progress of the American Jewish Novel.” Response 7 (1973): 115-130.
---. “Cynthia Ozick: Fiction and the Jewish Idea.” Midstream 23 (1977): 76-81.
Schechner, Mark. “Is This Picasso, or Is It the Jews? A Family Portrait at the End of History.” Tikkun 12 (1997): 39-42.
Statlander-Slote, Jane, e Alessandra Farkas. “Interview with Cynthia Ozick.” Roots of Passion. Essays on
Cynthia Ozick. Fort Lauderdale: LLumina Press, 2016. 86-95.
Steiner, George. "Our Homeland, The Text." Salmagundi 66 (1985): 4-25.
Strandberg, Victor. Greek Mind/Jewish Soul. The Conflicted Art of Cynthia Ozick. Madison: The University of
Winsconsin Press, 1994.
Teicholz, Tim. “The Art of Fiction.” Series (XCV) of the Paris Review 29 (1987).
Wisse, Ruth R. “American Jewish Writing. Act II.” Commentary 61 (1976): 40-45.
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2017-06-01
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