Welcome to the Tikva podcast on Great Jewish Essays and Ideas.

I'm your host, Eric Cohen.

Our subject today is a classic essay by the author, critic, and intellectual, Cynthia Ozik.

It's really a conflation of three essays called Innovation and Redemption, What Literature Means.

I'm very pleased to be joined by our friend Ruth Weiss for a long time, a professor at Harvard University, one of the real deans of Jewish and Yiddish literature, and now a distinguished senior fellow at the Tikva Fund.

Ruth, always great to have you.

Thanks. I love being here.

So let's start with Cynthia Ozik. Why is she such an important thinker, author, critic, and intellectual? Who

is she and what has her influence been? Well, just to situate her a little, she was born in

New York in 1928, raised in the Bronx, attended Hunter College High School in Manhattan and then NYU,

and spent a short time in Ohio getting a master's degree in literature with a thesis on

Henry James, who was a tremendous influence on her, at least at the beginning. And then

she became a full-time writer.

So her parents ran a drugstore,

but as she explains, her mother's brother,

Abraham Regelson, was a Hebrew writer and poet,

an American Hebrew writer and poet,

a very good poet, who moved to Israel in 1949.

So the idea of becoming a writer in that family was already, you know, something taken for granted.

She didn't have to make the case for it. There was already a model there.

She worked very hard as a writer. She was not an immediate hit.

She worked for a long time on one novel, Trust, which didn't make a big smash, and I don't

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