SOURCE: "The Jewish-American Woman as Artist: Cynthia Ozick and the Paleface Tradition," in College Literature, Vol. 20, No. 2, June, 1993, pp. 119-32.

In the following essay, Wilner discusses the thought and writing of Cynthia Ozick in terms of the American literary tradition.

A few years ago, on the fiftieth anniversary of Philip Rahv's essay, "Paleface and Redskin," Sanford Pinsker considered the current relevance of the 1939 analysis that became a touchstone critique of American literature. The nature of the literary "split personality" to which Rahv drew attention has become familiar. Simply put, it is a split between the cultivated abstractions of the intellectual and the raw, experiential mode that disdains ideas. The paleface, represented most clearly by Henry James and T. S. Eliot, "continually hankers after religious norms, tending toward a refined estrangement from reality.… At his highest level the paleface moves in an exquisite moral atmosphere, at his lowest he...