96 years old and still laboring at her trade

“How, after all, does one dare, how can one presume?” That is Cynthia Ozick on the paralyzing challenge of saying something new about Franz Kafka. But they can be applied equally to Ms. Ozick, who in her 60-plus years of publishing has produced a body of work—novels, short stories, essays, criticism, poetry and plays—unrivaled by any living American author. Can such a monument be summarized without being cheapened?

One dares to try in part because of the mist of obscurity that has always surrounded Ms. Ozick’s output, the rift between her reputation and her readership. Perhaps no other author of her accomplishment has been so consistently taken for granted. Ms. Ozick is 96 years old and still laboring at her trade like an outsider with something to prove. Not for her are the perquisites of eminence. There have been no vague, self-indulgent late works (her 2021 novel, “Antiquities,” is as sharp and questing as anything she has written); no retirement celebrations, Festschrifts or public tributes as there were for her contemporary Philip Roth. The closest Ms. Ozick may come to a career retrospective is “In a Yellow Wood,” a heaping selection of short stories and essays that seems likely to burnish her legacy while continuing to confound all attempts at marketing her. […]

The artist, Ms. Ozick continually asserts, must claim absolute imaginative freedom, even at the risk of being misunderstood. “Coiled in the bottommost pit of every driven writer is an impersonator—protean, volatile, restless and relentless,” she says in “Isaac Babel and the Identity Question.” […]

Such are the fertile contradictions of Cynthia Ozick, a self-described “fanatic” of literature who grasps better than anyone the moral perils of fanaticism, an accomplished writer who deeply distrusts the worldly authority her writing has earned her. “The power of language, it seems to me, is the only kind of power a writer is entitled to,” she once said. So this titan of literature keeps her head down, toiling away like the hapless strivers and mole-eyed bookworms of her stories, working not for recognition but to contribute something lasting to posterity, with its dreamt-of future readers who are as avid for the pleasures of art as she is. Now that is daring, that is presumption.

— Sam Sacks, excerpts from his Book Review of “In a Yellow Wood” written by Cynthia Ozick (wsj.com, March 7 , 2025)