In the year 1970, the American writer Cynthia Ozik published an essay, based on a speech she had delivered that same year in Israel.

In it, Ozik trained her attention on Jewish literature, and was making the case that it would

succeed to the extent that it did not abstract from, but indeed embraced and conveyed the richness

of the particularism of the Jewish experience.

And of course, her prescription was not relevant to Jewish literature alone, but remains

wise counsel for Jewish ethics,

Jewish religious observance, and the Jewish obligations and sensibilities that mediate

how we American Jews belong to our own civic order. In a famous metaphor, she wrote that if we

blow into the narrow end of the shofar, we will be heard far.

But if we choose to be mankind, rather than Jewish, and blow into the wider part,

we will not be heard at all. For us, America will have been in vain.

The Jewish people's relation to the grand democratic culture in which America's Jews are situated,

preoccupied Cynthia Ozik some five decades ago, and in her most recent novel, Antiquities,

it preoccupies her still.

Welcome to the Tikva podcast. I'm your host, Jonathan Silver.

My guest today is an American legend, whose novels,

stories, and essays have been decorated with all manner of prizes and awards. But in addition to being

an American writer of the very highest distinction, Cynthia Ozik is for us, for America's Jews, one of the 20th century literary figures

who most insisted that Jewish fiction mustn't elide or suppress serious religious ideas. Instead,

she emphasized them so as to emphasize the integrity and honor of Jewish particularism through the medium of

fiction. I say the 20th century, but of course two decades into the 21st century, she's still

producing breathtaking fiction. In a few moments, we'll together summarize some of the plot

...