Cynthia Shoshana Ozick, American short story writer, novelist, and essayist (b. April 17, 1928_

Cynthia Ozick was born in New York City, the second of two children. She moved to the Bronx with her Russian-born parents, Celia and William Ozick, proprietors of the Park View Pharmacy in the Pelham Bay neighborhood. As a girl, Ozick helped to deliver prescriptions. Growing up in the Bronx, she remembers stones thrown at her and being called a Christ-killer as she ran past the two churches in her neighborhood. In school she was publicly shamed for refusing to sing Christmas carols. She attended Hunter College High School in Manhattan. She earned her B.A. from New York University and went on to study at Ohio State University, where she completed an M.A. in English literature, focusing on the novels of Henry James.

Giles Harvey in the NEw York Times Sunday magazine, states that "she has written some of the strangest, most intellectually daring and morally intelligent fiction of recent times, including The Shawl (1989) and The Puttermesser Papers (1997).  She has also written essay after essay on subjects ranging from the Book of Job and Gershom Scholem to Helen Keller and Susan Sontag.  Her newest book is Critics, Monsters, Fanatic's, and Other Literary Essays.

Harvey further states that "Certainly it Is impossible to understand Ozick's pessimism, and its reliance to our current moment, without appreciating the essential Jewishness of her critique.  To be a Jew, her work insists, is to recognize the tenuousness of cultural transmission.  All the World Wants the Jews Dead is the searing title of her 1974 essay, and the Jews . . . have not made it this far by taking continuity for granted.  The extraordinary dynamism of Ozick's thinking and writing derives from the conviction tat thinking and writing, the study of certain sacred texts, are not merely ends in themselves , but matters of survival."