Cynthia Ozick’s story Envy or, Yiddish in America Essay -- Cynthia Ozi

Envy Cynthiz Ozick Meets Melanie KleinCynthia Ozicks story Envy or, Yiddish in America shows the corrosive effectsof envy on the life of the lonely, aging Yiddish poet Edelshtein. Edelshtein is consumedwith envy of Ostrover, a notable Yiddish novelist known from English translations of hisstories. He pure tones that Ostrover has both cuckolded him and bested him in literarysuccess. Edelshtein believes he could become as famous as Ostover if he too had atranslator into English. Without the translator, he fears his poems impart die along withhim and the dying Yiddish language. The story seems to illustrate the psychologicalinsights of Melanie Klein about the unconscious mind mechanisms behind envy I considerthat envy is an oral-sadistic and anal-sadistic expression of destructive impulses,operative from the beginning of life. . . (Klein, ix). So long as Edelshtein operates outof envy, he will remain caught in a vicious cycle, in an infantile, self-destructive state,thwarted in his attempts to love or to be creative. He will continue to feel persecuted byOstrover, which is really a form of internal persecution. As Klein says, When thisoccurs, the good object is felt to be lost, and with it inner security ( 84).Envy, which is included in Ozicks 1969 collection, The Pagan Rabbi, isreminiscent of Bellows Herzog (1965). Both are profound psychological anatomies,detailed dissections of a single suffering character, a victim who is heretofore inmany ways his own worst enemy. Both stories are delicately poised between the comicand the tragic. Both protagonists are intellectuals who rail against the wasteoutlook and defend Jewish humanism. Herzog rejects the commonplaces of theWastela... ...at least two people(Klein 6). Tragedy occurs in the realm of oedipal conflict, but the envious person neverreaches that stage and so never really grows up.Works CitedBellow, Saul. Herzog. 1965 New York Viking, 1976.Cohen, Sarah Blacher. Cynthia Ozicks Comic device From Levity to Liturgy.Bloomington Indiana University Press, 1994.Kauvar, Elaine M. Cynthia Ozicks Fiction Tradition and Invention. BloomingtonIndiana University Press, 1993.Klein, Melanie. Envy and Gratitude A direct of Unconscious Sources. NY BasicBooks, 1957.Lowin, Joseph. Cynthia Ozick. Boston Twayne, 1988.Ozick, Cynthia. Envy or, Yiddish in America. Jewish American Stories. Ed. IrvingHowe. New York New American Library, 1977 129-77.Strandberg, Victor. Greek Mind/Jewish Soul The Conflicted Art of Cynthia Ozick.Madison University of Wisconsin Press, 1994.