“…Ozick, however fierce her identification as a Jew, is admirable in her freedom from identitarian parti pris”

Ozick the channeler of the literary past may seem remote from our present literary debates, dominated as they are by issues of representation, but her work offers a liberating model of engagement with identity. Her commitment to Judaism sharpens her powers of discrimination and inoculates her against the dubious allure of the universal. In a marvelously indignant essay on Anne Frank, she protests the diarist’s assimilation by mainstream culture, the way in which she has been “infantilized, Americanized, homogenized, sentimentalized; falsified, kitschified and, in fact, blatantly and arrogantly denied.” Sapped of quiddity, she has become “an all-American girl.”

But Ozick, however fierce her identification as a Jew, is admirable in her freedom from identitarian parti pris. T.S. Eliot’s rank anti-Semitism does not blind her to his poetic virtues; she praises Tolstoy’s early novel “The Cossacks” despite its whitewashing of genocidal Cossack violence against Jews (Ozick’s ancestors among them). Above all, she resists the idea that writers are, or ought to be, representatives of a certain group, for it is then that “imagination flies out the door, and with it the freedom and volatility and irresponsibility that imagination both confers and commands.”

Giles Harvey, “The Fanatic”, The New York Times Magazine (26 June 2016), 57.