The Pagan Rabbi

"I have admired Cynthia Ozick since I was young. My father introduced me to her work in the pages of The New Yorker while I was in high school. I immediately responded to her intensity and delicacy, the layered beauty of her descriptions and her extraordinary vision of Jewish history and anxiety. I was fascinated by its richness sentence by sentence, by her use of metaphor, by her learning and the way that she embraced and celebrated Jewish texts and literary texts, the way she interwove strands of tradition. These stories inspired me in my own early work writing short fiction . She embraced Judaism, but also wrote as a citizen of the world. She has said herself, “In my fiction I’m free, I can be a man, a woman, I can be anyone.” I should also say that as a young writer I wrote to her, and she wrote back and encouraged me when I was only about 17. So in an incredibly generous way she responded to my work and to my earliest published stories, which is very rare among writers. There’s a wonderful strand of immigrant literature within the tradition but as history moves on it changes, and literature reflects that experience. Mine does, and our children’s generation’s literature will look different from ours too."