Cynthia Ozick

Cynthia Ozick is an American writer born in New York City in 1928 to Russian Jewish immigrant parents. She earned a bachelor's degree from New York University and a master's degree from Ohio State University, and her distinctions include a 1982 Guggenheim Fellowship and a Strauss Living award from the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters. Her fiction, including the story collections The Pagan Rabbi and Levitation: Five Fictions and the novel The Puttermesser Papers, is dense with literary allusion and moral argument, returning repeatedly to Jewish American identity, history and the long shadow of the Holocaust. Ozick is also a prolific essayist and literary critic, known for a formal, allusive prose style and an unflinching engagement with questions of memory and moral responsibility.