The Many Faces of Cynthia Ozick

May 15, 1997

The Atlantic Online, an online forum of Atlantic Monthly, a literary publication

Just as you wrote about Paris before you had been there,
your story "The Shawl," a Holocaust story, is as convincing
as if you were a Holocaust survivor yourself. What do you
think of the relationship between what one can write about
and what one has experienced? Has the Jewish tradition of
memory and remembering informed your outlook?

I don't agree with the sentiment "write what you know." That
recommends circumscription. I think one should write what
onedoesn't know. The world is bigger and wider and more complex
than our small subjective selves. One should prod, goad the
imagination. That's what it's there for.

All the same, I'm against writing Holocaust fiction: that is, imagining
those atrocities. Here we are, fifty years after the Holocaust, and the
number of documents and survivor reminiscences -- organized by
very sensitive programs such as The Fortunoff oral history efforts at
Yale and Steven Spielberg's oral-history program -- keep coming in
torrents. Each year throws up more and more studies. It seems to
me that if each one of us, each human being alive on the planet
right now, were to spend the next five thousand years absorbing
and assimilating the documents, it still wouldn't be enough. I'm
definitely on the side of sticking with the documents and am morally
and emotionally opposed to the mythopoeticization of those events
in any form or genre. And yet, for some reason, I keep writing
Holocaust fiction. It is something that has happened to me; I can't
help it. If I had been there and not here I would be dead, which is
something I can never forget. I think back on the four years I was in
high school -- I was extraordinarily happy, just coming into the
exaltations of literature -- and then I think about what was going on
across the water, with very confused feelings.
When "The Shawl" was first published in The New Yorker(May 26,
1980), I received two letters, both quite penetrating in shocking
ways. The first was from a psychiatrist who said he dealt with many
Holocaust survivors. He said he was certain that I was such a
survivor because only a survivor could write such a story. I was
shocked by the utter confidence of his assumption; he knew nothing
about imagination. The second was a very angry letter from a
Holocaust survivor. She found my use of imagination utterly out of
place and considered it both emotionally and morally disruptive. I
sided with the survivor and thought the psychiatrist foolish. I finally
assauged the survivor by convincing her that I was not an enemy of
her unreplicatable experience.

As for the Jewish tradition of memory informing my outlook --

absolutely, yes. History is the ground of our being, and together with
imagination, that is what makes writing. Writing without history has
been epidemic for some time now. It's a very strange American
amnesiac development to put all experience in the present tense,
without memory, or history, or a past. What is "the past"? One damn
thing after another. What is history? Judgment and interpretation.