Showing results by author "Cynthia Ozick" in Literature & Fiction

At once fiercely immediate and complex in their implications, “The Shawl” and “Rosa” succeed in imagining the unimaginable: the horror of the Holocaust and the emptiness of its aftermath. They were written in 1977 but were first published in the early 1980s in The New Yorker. Both “The Shawl” and “Rosa” won first prize in the O. Henry Prize Stories and were chosen for Best American Short Stories.

The collapse of her brief marriage has stalled Bea Nightingale's life, leaving her middle-aged, alone, and teaching in an impoverished borough of 1950s New York. A plea from her estranged brother gives Bea the excuse to escape lassitude by leaving for Paris to retrieve a nephew she barely knows, but the siren call of Europe threatens to deafen Bea to the dangers of entangling herself in the lives of her brother's family.

In 1949, Lloyd Wilkinson Petrie has returned as a trustee to live in the long-defunct boarding school that he had attended as a child. There he is preparing a memoir. He writes, with faltering recall, of the subtle anti-Semitism that pervaded the school's ethos and of his fascination with the Egyptian archaeological adventures of his distant cousin, Sir William Matthew Flinders Petrie. Memories return, too, of the passions of a boyhood friendship with named Ben-Zion Elefantin, a mystifying older pupil who claims descent from Egypt's Elephantine Island.