Fiction: Cynthia Ozick’s ‘In a Yellow Wood’

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The writer’s hefty collection of short stories and essays defies boundaries and offers a bold retrospective on her own long literary career.

By Sam Sacks

March 7, 2025 at 11:13 am ET

Cynthia Ozick in 2007. Photo: Ulf Andersen/Getty Images

“How, after all, does one dare, how can one presume?” That is Cynthia Ozick on the paralyzing challenge of saying something new about Franz Kafka. But they can be applied equally to Ms. Ozick, who in her 60-plus years of publishing has produced a body of work—novels, short stories, essays, criticism, poetry and plays—unrivaled by any living American author. Can such a monument be summarized without being cheapened?

One dares to try in part because of the mist of obscurity that has always surrounded Ms. Ozick’s output, the rift between her reputation and her readership. Perhaps no other author of her accomplishment has been so consistently taken for granted. Ms. Ozick is 96 years old and still laboring at her trade like an outsider with something to prove. Not for her are the perquisites of eminence. There have been no vague, self-indulgent late works (her 2021 novel, “Antiquities,” is as sharp and questing as anything she has written); no retirement celebrations, Festschrifts or public tributes as there were for her contemporary Philip Roth. The closest Ms. Ozick may come to a career retrospective is “In a Yellow Wood,” a heaping selection of short stories and essays that seems likely to burnish her legacy while continuing to confound all attempts at marketing her.

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In a Yellow Wood: Selected Stories and Essays

By Cynthia Ozick

Everyman's Library

712 pages

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Ms. Ozick chose the pieces for this volume herself, drawing, in nonchronological fashion, from every period of her career (the oldest work is from 1971, the most recent from 2024). In her introduction she explains her decision to include both short stories and essays, a breach of the usual firewall that separates fiction and nonfiction anthologies. The title “In a Yellow Wood” comes from Robert Frost’s “The Road Not Taken” and speaks to a professional journey that, to the confusion of her would-be audience, has led her down two discrete paths simultaneously. Her essays, most of them literary criticism, are works of steely evaluation and argument. Her stories are enterprises of invention, sorties into a great unknown. With unapologetic ambivalence, Ms. Ozick wonders, “is one traveler on two roads afflicted by writerly fever, or has it been little more than hubris and folly?”

Not the latter, surely, yet Ms. Ozick is right to observe that the esteem afforded to her as a critic has muddled the reception of her fiction. The essays included here, each written with passionate conviction, exacting standards and thrilling verbal panache, make her mastery of the form all the more apparent. She effuses about “the gargoylish and astonishing map” of the world conjured by the Polish-Jewish writer Bruno Schulz. Saul Bellow, she observes, achieved his most enduring novelistic effects when he learned to “force intellect into hiding” and rely on intuition. In “What Helen Keller Saw,” she commemorates the woman who activated so much experience in what Keller called her “mental vision.” The artist, Ms. Ozick continually asserts, must claim absolute imaginative freedom, even at the risk of being misunderstood. “Coiled in the bottommost pit of every driven writer is an impersonator—protean, volatile, restless and relentless,” she says in “Isaac Babel and the Identity Question.”

Impersonators and pretenders feature in most of her short stories, which are, in contrast with Ms. Ozick’s nonfiction, oblique, ambiguous and inflected by minor-key comedy. These are fable-like tales of artistic delusions and disappointments. “The Biographer’s Hat” concerns a hilarious scheme to sex up a literary subject’s past to make his life story more salable. Similar is “The Conversion of the Jews,” about a flailing scholar of the Inquisition who tries to access the visionary insights of religious mystics to reveal history’s secrets. (“He was after impulses, inducements, animating subterranean drives.”) “Virility” centers on a plagiarist poet—he steals from his spinster aunt—and “Sin” portrays an ancient shut-in painter who looks like “someone’s abandoned messiah.”

An obsession with art links the fiction to the essays, but because the stories are usually about Jewish lives there is a complicating wrinkle: The writer’s sanction to freely imagine runs afoul of the obedience demanded by God, who—as Ms. Ozick writes in the brilliant “Usurpation (Other People’s Stories)”—“cannot be imagined in any form, whom the very hope of imagining offends.” The characters, however fervent their aspirations, are so often presented as impostors because, in a cosmic sense, they are guilty of idolatry, having devoted themselves wholeheartedly to images of their own creation.

The irony of their predicament shows itself everywhere on the forked paths of Ms. Ozick’s writing and illuminates her own role in evading public acclaim. The most noticeable omission from “In a Yellow Wood” is “The Shawl,” a desperately sad short story about an infant’s death in a Nazi concentration camp. “The Shawl” is by far Ms. Ozick’s most well-known work and is often taught in schools. But she has come to be troubled by it, considering it (harshly, in this critic’s opinion) an instance of the kind of Holocaust kitsch that she decries in her extraordinary essay “Who Owns Anne Frank?” As she told an interviewer about using the Holocaust as a subject, “I write about it. I can’t not. But I don’t think I ought to.”

Such are the fertile contradictions of Cynthia Ozick, a self-described “fanatic” of literature who grasps better than anyone the moral perils of fanaticism, an accomplished writer who deeply distrusts the worldly authority her writing has earned her. “The power of language, it seems to me, is the only kind of power a writer is entitled to,” she once said. So this titan of literature keeps her head down, toiling away like the hapless strivers and mole-eyed bookworms of her stories, working not for recognition but to contribute something lasting to posterity, with its dreamt-of future readers who are as avid for the pleasures of art as she is. Now that is daring, that is presumption.

Appeared in the March 8, 2025, print edition as 'Both Sides Now'.