Cynthia Ozick clearly recalls cowering in the family kitchen as a small child while the anti-Semitic vitriol of Father Coughlin oozed out of the family radio.
Ozick, one of America’s foremost novelists and essayists, is no longer cowering, but, once again, her kitchen has been transformed into a place of fear and agony.
“This is a shock — twice in my lifetime! I was listening to NPR [on the kitchen radio] and I heard a commentator from Le Monde of all places say that if Jews don’t like it here [in France], they are free to leave.
“What an astounding comment from a French intellectual!”
The violence in Israel and the recent anti-Jewish incidents throughout Europe and the rest of the world, says Ozick, “are all I think about these days. I’m completely consumed by it. It is exhausting.”
Ozick, author of “The Pagan Rabbi and Other Stories” (1971), “The Shawl” (1987) and “The Puttermesser Papers” (1997) among other renowned books, is also consumed with dread regarding her Tuesday appearance in San Francisco. She will be interviewed onstage at the Herbst Theatre as part of the series, City Arts & Lectures on Art and Politics.
“I speculate there will be some Israel hostility I will have to deal with,” says the Bronx-born author in a phone interview from her Westchester County home. “I know I will be very nervous and have a bellyache. I hate to go on platforms, period. It happens more and more as I get older. I used to be intrepid!”
While Ozick’s ability to participate in a lecture on the arts is unquestionable, her status as a political speaker is murkier. Simply put, Ozick insists she isn’t a political person. She just has one interest that “looks political”: a fierce advocacy for the survival of the state of Israel.
Her outspoken and impassioned defense of Israel isn’t politics, she claims. It’s “life or death.”
“The life or death of Israel is the main agenda for Jews everywhere in the world at this moment. If there were no Israel, what do you think would happen to us? To me, to you, your friends and family? I won’t ima-gine it. I refuse to imagine it.
“The survival and flourishing of Israel — that, to me, is not in the realm of politics. That is in the realm of historical imperative.
“It’s 1933 again, but this time, the Jews have guns.”
Besides the Mideast violence, the wave of anti-Israel and anti-Jewish activities in Europe is also weighing heavily on Ozick’s mind.
A Parisian married couple she is close with — a novelist and an orchestra conductor — have told her the level of hatred for Jews is enough that they are ready to leave for Israel.
“Out of the frying pan and into the fire,” says Ozick, with anger and disgust evident in her high-pitched, youthful voice. Speaking of anti-Jewish activity in Europe, she adds, “There was quiet, stunned quiet, in the wake of the Shoah for a while. It wore off and they’re at it again.
“When I read about France, the [population] figure given for Jews is 600,000 to 700,000. Why are there so few Jews? I think it’s forgotten that they killed them all.”
Unlike so many Jews worldwide agonizingly waiting for the inevitable news bulletin reporting the next exploding Israeli bus or shooting rampage, Ozick possesses a special refuge from the terrors of everyday life — the rich world of her mind.
The world of fiction is “a place of complete freedom, bliss. You can be anything, say anything, do anything. It’s a childlike place where you can make-believe,” she says. “It’s also a dark place because some make-believe is demonic, and every novel or short story involves conflict, and with conflict there’s always a villain.
“The writer enters into the mind of a villain, and that is a scary and dark place where one can play with evil.”
Ozick, who has also written plays and poetry, has consistently mined Jewish issues in her work. Though a prolific essayist, she relishes the sense of the unknown that comes with fiction.
“When you sit down to write, there’s a sense of a swirl, the inchoate chaos before it gels. With an essay, you know something. If I’m going to write about Kafka, at least I know that much,” she explains.
“When I approach fiction, it’s chaos and discovery, and it may begin with meditation, a sight, a smell. It comes from intuition and the essay comes from intellect.”
Yet while her fiction is a refuge from the world, it is not a shelter. The author recalls, just after the outbreak of the intifada, sitting around a table with three fellow writers and enjoying a crackling literary discussion.
“It was exactly where I wanted to be and who I wanted to be with,” she recalls. “But the intifada had just begun. I was so torn, because I sat there in a state of envy, thinking [that these fellow writers] can have this moment just as I have it, but they don’t have the other. They are not suffering as I was suffering. It was a double feeling of bliss and hurt and envy.”
That, lamented Ozick “is how I am purely an American writer and purely a Jew.”