Puttermesser: Her Work History, Her Ancestry, Her Afterlife
Puttermesser was 34, a woman, and a lawyer. Immediately after law school, she entered the firm of Midland, Reid & Cockleberry, a blueblood Wall Street …
View Article“The Shawl”
Fiction by Cynthia Ozick: “Every morning Rosa had to conceal Magda under the shawl against a wall of the barracks.”
View ArticleThe Laughter of Akiva
Reuben Karpov is the unmarried, English-born headmaster of a Jewish school on Long Island. Karpov has designed a Dual Curriculum for the school - students …
View ArticleRosa
Rosa Lublin, 58 and a survivor of a Nazi concentration camp, smashed up her secondhand store in Brooklyn. At the suggestion of her 49-year-old unmarried …
View ArticleAt Fumicaro
Frank Castle, a 35-year-old Catholic journalist, left N.Y. on an Italian liner and went to the Villa Garibaldi, in Fumicaro, Italy. He was attending a …
View ArticleSHOLEM ALEICHEM'S REVOLUTION
A CRITIC AT LARGE about the literary works of Sholem Aleichem's revolutionary use of Yiddish as the language for his writing & about Yiddish itself... …
View ArticleT.S. ELIOT AT 101
A CRITIC AT LARGE about the poet T.S. Eliot, who once was a commanding literary figure whose formulations were revered. It's impossible nowadays to …
View ArticlePuttermesser Paired
Ruth Puttermesser, fifty-plus, lawyer, rationalist, and ex-public official, takes a year off to live on her savings and think through her fate. It comes to…
View ArticleALFRED CHESTER'S WIG
REFLECTIONS about the author and critic Alfred Chester, and his relationship with the writer. She competed with him in an NYU composition class in 1946, …
View ArticleRUSHDIE IN THE LOUVRE
LIFE AND LETTERS about seeing Salman Rushdie in the Louvre. Writer compares Dreyfus to Rushdie. Dreyfus was charged with betraying France. Millions were …
View ArticleSave My Child!
Ruth Puttermesser, a New Yorker in her sixties, was now as old as her father was when he had fled the brutish Russia of the czars, leaving behind parents, …
View ArticleA DRUGSTORE EDEN
PERSONAL HISTORY about Cynthia Ozick's upbringing in Pelham Bay in the Bronx, as the daughter of drugstore owners during the end of the Depression and …
View ArticleDOSTOYEVSKY'S UNABOMBER
A CRITIC AT LARGE about Dostoyevsky's "Crime and Punishment" and the philosophical resemblance between its antihero, Raskolnikov, and the Unabomber. …
View ArticleLOVESICKNESS
PERSONAL HISTORY about writer's experiences with unrequited love... Writer tells about falling in love with a philosopher who had a dauntingly fierce …
View ArticleThe Misuse of Anne Frank’s Diary
Cynthia Ozick writes that Anne Frank’s words—as preserved in the posthumously published “The Diary of a Young Girl,” which made Frank one of the most widely known victims of the Holocaust—have been...
View ArticleNo Taste for Accounting
PERSONAL HISTORY about the author’s disastrous summer job at a New York accounting firm. She was twenty-two years old and had just come back from Ohio …
View ArticleActors
Aging bit actor Matt Sorley gets the lead in a modernized version of King Lear and discovers in himself a new voice, but his performance is heckled by an …
View ArticleHas Starr humiliated us all?
Talk story about President Clinton and the Monica Lewinsky scandal.
View ArticleThe Impossibility of Being Kafka
a critic at large about translating Franz Kafka... Franz Kafka is the twentieth century’s valedictory ghost.... Cumulatively, Kafka’s work is an …
View ArticleThe Synthetic Sublime
A CRITIC AT LARGE about the neighborhoods and architecture of New York City.
View ArticleThe Buried Life
A CRITIC AT LARGE about Lionel Trilling at Columbia University... Writer describes a ten minute interview with him half a century ago... His ridicule, …
View ArticleHow Helen Keller Learned to Write
Cynthia Ozick writes that, with the immeasurable help of her teacher, Annie Sullivan, who was able to divine her student’s "peculiar" needs, Helen Keller forged a path from deaf-blind darkness to...
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