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, age Yiddish poet Edelshtein. Edelshtein is consumedwith envy of Ostrover, a famous Yiddish novelist known from English translations of hisstories. He feels that Ostrover has some(prenominal) 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 go forth extend along withhim and the dying Yiddish language. The story seems to illustrate the psychologicalinsights of Melanie Klein about the unconscious(p) mechanisms behind envy I considerthat envy is an oral-sadistic and anal-sadistic expression of ruinous 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 inhering persecution. As Klein says, When thisoccurs, the good object is felt to be lost, and with it inner gage ( 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 case-by-case suffering character, a victim who is nevertheless inmany shipway his own worst enemy. Both stories are delicately poised mingled with the comicand the tragic. Both protagonists are intellectuals who rail against the Wastelandoutlook and sustain Jewish humanism. Herzog rejects the commonplaces of theWastela... ...at least two people(Klein 6). Tragedy occurs in the solid ground of oedipal conflict, but the envious person neverreaches that stage and thus never really grows up.Works CitedBellow, Saul. Herzog. 1965 New York Viking, 1976.Cohen, Sarah Blacher. Cynthi a Ozicks Comic Art From Levity to Liturgy.Bloomington inch University Press, 1994.Kauvar, Elaine M. Cynthia Ozicks Fiction Tradition and Invention. BloomingtonIndiana University Press, 1993.Klein, Melanie. Envy and Gratitude A consider 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 nous The Conflicted Art of Cynthia Ozick.Madison University of Wisconsin Press, 1994.