SOURCE: Krupnick, Mark. “Cynthia Ozick as the Jewish T. S. Eliot.” Soundings 74, nos. 3–4 (fall–winter 1991): 351–68.

In the following essay, Krupnick compares Ozick's works to the writings of T. S. Eliot.

I want to start with my title: “Cynthia Ozick as the Jewish T. S. Eliot.” I have been asked whether I ought to have said: “Cynthia Ozick as a Jewish Eliot.” And no doubt I should have, for Ozick exemplifies only one of many versions of T. S. Eliot among American Jewish writers of the past half-century. There has been for example, the Eliot of Lionel Trilling, the leading literary figure in his circle of New York intellectuals in the 1940s. And we have had the art critic Clement Greenberg and his Eliotic Trotskyism, notably in his famous essay “Avant-Garde and Kitsch.” And after Trilling and Greenberg there came the poet Delmore Schwartz and his idea of Eliot...