'The Familiar Hearts of Strangers'

“At bottom Chekhov is a writer who has flung his soul to the side of pity, and sees into the holiness and immaculate fragility of the hidden striver below.” 

In his letters to family and friends, Chekhov can be harsh, hectoring and even smutty, though seldom in the stories except in the occasional voice of a character. His documentation of human types, after all, is encyclopedic. But Cynthia Ozick gets Chekhov, unlike his original critics and lazy-minded readers today. Without being sticky-sentimental, he is forgiving of human failing, not a wrathful prophet, unlike his friend and misguided critic Tolstoy. Ozick writes in her two-page essay “A Short Note on ‘Chekhovian’” (Metaphor and Memory, 1989):

 

“Chekhov is as much a master of the observed as he is of the unobserved. And he is, besides, the source of unusual states of wisdom, astonishing psychological principles. He can transfigure latency into drama, as in ‘Ward No. Six,’ which belongs with Conrad’s ‘The Secret Sharer’ among the great expositions of self-disclosure. And this too is Chekhov: he teaches us us.”

 

As does Ozick, who turns ninety-seven today. I admit to preferring her essays to her novels and stories. She is seldom autobiographical in the banal sense. She’s brainy and passionate and never dry. Her prose is sometimes purplish (not purple), overripe, almost over-written, as in the late manner of her master, Henry James. But it’s never passive or merely utilitarian. In my 2004 review of Ozick’s novel Heir to the Glimmering World I wrote: “The crafting of such language, potent with muscle and brain, lends objective shape to the act of consciousness itself.”

 

In her title essay in Metaphor and Memory, Ozick articulates what Chekhov frequently accomplished. By creating metaphors, she writes, “We strangers can imagine the familiar hearts of strangers,” which in turn “transforms the strange into the familiar.” Which sounds like both a literary and a moral obligation.

 

I met Ozick in 1987 when she took part in a conference on literature and the Holocaust at the state University of New York at Albany. Also on the panel were the novelist Aharon Appelfeld and historian Raul Hilberg. Ozick’s girlish voice surprised me. In person as in print, she comes off as charming and tough, not a frivolous person. She was not afraid to say she would never visit Germany or buy a Volkswagen, which bothered some people sitting near me.

 

Ozick signed my copy of The Messiah of Stockholm, then recently published. Appelfeld and Hilberg also signed books for me -- a memorable day. Ozick’s demeanor and everything she said confirmed my respect for her work. In his Paris Review interview, Guy Davenport said he would read anything written by Ozick, and as usual his judgment is unassailable. She may be the only living writer whose published work I have read in its entirety.