Other People's Stories
Schechner, Mark
Other People's Stories Mark Schechner bloodshed and three novellas by cynthia ozick, Alfred A. Knopf, New York; 1976. 178 pp., $6.95. The usual subject of Cynthia Ozick's fiction is the...
...But because the value of precious metals has increased so dramatically in recent times, the desire for the Canadian issue of Olympic Coins has spread far beyond numismatic circles...
...This limited edition ensures and protects the value of the Collection...
...Such self-effacing humor about a real shortcoming may be graceful, but it does nothing for the harried reader of these stories who has had his own troubles following a difficult line of narrative...
...Olympic Coins have been among the valuable coinage most treasured by collectors...
...THE KETUBA is also a most thoughtful gift for engagement and wedding, anniversary or any occasion for celebration...
...they are raids on the inarticulate whose emblems are confusion and style...
...it is full of its sources...
...In "Bloodshed," Bleilip, lawyer and rationalist, makes a pilgrimage to a suburban Chassidic settlement in search of magic and wonder only to be revealed by the Rebbe as a destroyer, armed with two guns...
...The Coins are considerably larger in size.and weight than a normal commemorative coin...
...all are prone to drift into situations in which they are acted upon or act by default, or, as in the case of Bleilip in "Bloodshed," have their own hidden purposes inadvertently revealed by others...
...Buffalo) and has published several articles on contemporary Jewish writers...
...Beautifully boxed and slipcased THE KETUBA is a must for every Jewish bookshelf and every connoisseur of fine art...
...a Yiddish poet in America dedicates his career to a dead language and is unable to find the translator who can bring his work and reputation to life...
...In the best stories in The Pagan Rabbi, this amphibiousness is historical fact...
...The most exquisite Jewish book ever published in Israel THE KETUBA by David Davidovich with a foreword by Cecil Roth at a special price of only $17.95 Publisher's price $24.95 The Government of Canada Proudly Presents the Official Co-Participant Collection of Canadian Olympic Coins An unprecendented opportunity to build a private treasury of sterling Silver legal tender Olympic Coins commemorating the Games of the XXIst Olympiad and to receive official recognition as a co-sponsor of the U.S...
...but not all ideas...
...c copyright 1 972...
...The cast of characters in Ozick's new collection, Bloodshed and Three Novellas, is cut largely from the same cloth of ambiguity...
...It has positively Eskimo powers of discrimination: fifty-four words for the parts and positions of a whale's rear fin and even more for the prow of a boat...
...Lushinski's adopted African speech is even better for naming...
...cojo 76 all rights reserved Review con't._ like Malamud and Singer, make appearances in Ozick's stories, it is not to them that her writing is best compared...
...For example, the $10 Coin is 45 millimeters in diameter, significantly larger than the American silver dollar...
...When I write English, I live in Christendom...
...The only character not afflicted with such emotional duplicity is the aptly named Una Meyer of "An Education," whose singleness of purpose is really a lack of purposes altogether, as though the blessing of having her head together entailed the surrender of will entirely...
...It is little wonder that envy, usurpation, and plagiarism should be common themes of her two collections...
...English is not at all incidental to her talents...
...Yet that struggle is the source of their interest...
...a story about literary inspiration and fame, takes at least a half-dozen radical turns before coming to rest inconclusively...
...A LIMITED EDITION The Olympic Coin Programs Co-Participant Collection will be issued in a strictly limited edition of 10.000 individually numbered and registered sets in the U.S...
...coin of the realm was the Eisenhower dollar which had a silver content of 40%, as compared with each Olympic Coin's content of 92.5...
...The Coins contain a pure silver content of 92.5% — a much higher silver content than any coins now being minted by the U.S...
...Her work is highly allusive and literary...
...Toward the end of "Usurpation," a struggling and talentless young writer who has been trying to win the author's approval of his work complains to her about how difficult it is to read hers: I looked up one of your stories...
...The one called "Usurpation...
...It was," says Ozick, "an observant, measuring, meticulous language...
...These important factors may have a significant effect on the Collection's value in years to come...
...Since silver is fast disappearing among national coinages, this fact will add to the appreciation of Canadian Olympic Coins...
...one fake, the other real and loaded...
...and a Mark Schechner teaches English at S.U.N.Y...
...Ozick's lyricism may be the sign of her confusions, since these stories all have a hidden subject which plot and situation are helpless to define, and for which poetry is asked to do the talking...
...Especially since it is the largest matched set of Olympic Coins — 28 in all — issued in the entire 3,000 year history of the Olympic Games...
...rather, she is a story-writer...
...The $10 Coin weighs 750 grains and the $5 Coin is 375 grains...
...He is also AC/DC: he lives in New York with a buxom mistress but is said to be keeping an Italian boy in Geneva...
...They are helpless to become finished stories for there is too much in them of unresolved struggle...
...The usual subject of Cynthia Ozick's fiction is the amphibian, that expression of nature's ingenuity that is born in one medium and reaches maturity in another, but which, in token of its adaptability, lacks the true aquatic graces of the fish or the terrestrial savvy of the land mammal...
...Long-winded...
...Boring...
...It stank, lady...
...Even there, however, it is not clear whom Bleilip really means to shoot...
...THE HIGHEST SILVER CONTENT OF ANY RECENT NORTH AMERICAN COIN OF THE REALM Each Coin in the Co-Participant Collection comes to you in brilliant, uncirculated mint condition...
...Olympic Team...
...Something of the sources of Ozick's interest in such a language may be understood, for her fiction is on the hunt for something deep and whale-like and it needs all the words it can get to track down its fish...
...Confusion is the dominant theme of the stories in Bloodshed and Three Novellas: none of Ozick's characters have a clear sense of purpose...
...THE KETUBA—containing the fascinating tale of Jewish marriage customs and contracts through the ages—in text and art...
...In her stories, the wheels of decision are always turning and in even the best of them one can feel where she has gotten bored with what she is doing and gone on to something else...
...only those known to its experience...
...That is English, a little forced and fancy maybe, but right...
...As Ozick observes in her introduction to Bloodshed, "A language, like a people, has a history of ideas...
...These stories share with poetry a quest for unconscious meanings...
...They are no longer available except on an individual re-sale basis...
...Orders in excess of the limited quantity will be returned promptly...
...Ozick's heroes in that book are uprooted Jews whose separation from home and language is an exile from the self, a separation from the sources of self-knowledge and personal identity...
...Since history and language so easily become psychology, the amphibiousness of her characters is not just linguistic conflict or cultural ambivalence, but sexual doubt, transvestism, crisis in self-understanding, and just plain confusion...
...Suitable for framing) THE KETUBA—the only art book ever to deal with an exclusively Jewish artistic expression...
...THE KETUBA—produced in Israel with the loving care of masters in the field of book production...
...Though other Jewish story writers, Continued on page 77 A Momentous Offer To Readers Of Moment THE KETUBA—a beautiful folio of 18 tipped-in, full color, die-cut facsimiles of the most breathtaking Jewish marriage contracts ever...
...For those who are writers, like Edelstein, the Yiddish poet of "Envy," exile involves the special anguish of having to work in a strange tongue and express, in a language that is alien to their history, concepts that belong wholly to the languages that gave them birth...
...The last U.S...
...She has no instinct lor plot, no easy way with anecdote, no natural sense of the compression and release of dramatic tension, and no ear for dialogue...
...Not surprisingly, English is a Christian language...
...MEXICAN...
...GUARANTEED PRICE PROTECTION Under the terms of this official Olympic Coin Program Co-Participant Collection, the Government of Canada is officially committed to deliver the complete series of 28 Olympic Coins to you over the next two years at the original price published here, no matter how high the price of silver may climb AN EDITION THAT'S UNIQUE IN THE HISTORY OF NORTH AMERICAN COINAGE Canada has never before minted Olympic Coins or any coins with such high face values...
...the epigenetic cycle springs out of kilter and we get monsters...
...Contrivance in fiction can be made to sound natural and spontaneous — look at Bellow...
...You swipe other people's stories and you go on and on, on and on, I fell asleep over it...
...Such faults are partly mitigated by Ozick's considerable intelligence and a lyricism which is, at times, potent...
...Each Coin is encapsulated in a superbly designed transparent crytal styrene capsule...
...Ozick in these stories has a way of getting balled up in her ambiguities and giving us confusion, instead of the balanced ironies of The Pagan Rabbi...
...A VERY IMPRESSIVE PRIVATE TREASURY THESE DAYS...
...Order your copy(ies) now...
...Therefore, subscriptions will be allocated on the basis of post-mark date and time shown on the envelope in which the subscription application was received...
...it is the bone and sinew of her writing and in her hands it is a supple and versatile medium...
...She is enchanted by its power to name things: Lushinski did not know the names of flowers beyond the most staid door-yard sprigs, daisies and roses, and was hardly conscious that these heaps of petals, meat-white, a red as dark and boiling as an animal's maw, fevered oranges and mauves, the lobe-leafed mallows, all hanging downward like dyed hairy hanged heads from tall bushes at dusk, were less than animal...
...A prior collection of Ozick's stories, The Pagan Rabbi and Other Stories (1971), was populated by amphibians, their growth usually arrested in mid-metamorphosis...
...its rhetoric percolated through the genius of the language, with its strong, short Saxon verbs and its whole dictionaries of Latin and French nouns — its perfect mixture of medieval agrarian directness and enlightenment scholarship...
...Sometimes her froglike stories fail to emerge properly from the water: gills don't become lungs on schedule, nor fins feet...
...Stanislav Lushinski of "A Mercenary" is a Polish Jew who happens to be a diplomat from a small black African nation...
...The value of the silver content is further enhanced by the fact that the Coins have been struck by the Royal Canadian Mint, in limited quantity, under a special Act of Parliament as true coin of the realm — legal tender of Canada for their full face value...
...This is a limited offer of a limited edition...
...refugee poet is thought by his readers to be a prophet of masculinity in verse until revealed to be a plagiarist who has stolen all his strong lines from his Tante Rivke...
...Once this subscription limit has been reached, no more sets will be made available to the public...
...Government THE COMPLETE COLLECTION OF 28 COINS AMOUNTS TO OVER TWO AND A HALF TROY POUNDS OF PURE SILVER...
...Fourteen different $10 Coins and fourteen different $5 Coins — the first $10 and $5 Coins in Canadian history...
...To that extent Ozick is a 17th-century writer, for she shares with them the metaphysical image of human nature in perennial division: "Thus," says Thomas Browne, "is man that great and true A mphibium, whose nature is disposed to live not onely like other creatures in divers elements, but in divided and distinguished worlds...
...Ozick is an artist of contrivance who has more in common with Nabokov, another amphibian, than with the Jewish raconteurs...
...And, as if in formal imitation of their themes, the stories themselves lack clear definition...
...An Education" and "A Mercenary" can't be said to have plots at all, and "Bloodshed," as she herself warns in her preface, lacks the credentials of good Chekhovian structure...
...Jerzy Kosinski makes an appearance in "A Mercenary" — Lushinski's personal history is a steal from The Painted Bird — and "Usurpation" is a pastiche of fragments from stories by Malamud and David Stern...
...but that calls for a craft and patience that Ozick seems to lack...
...For unlike them, Ozick is not an accomplished story-teller...
...Half of it's swiped, you ought to get sued...
...A respected rabbi and scholar is discovered to be a secret pantheist, a wooer of wood nymphs...
...JAPANESE AND GERMAN HAVE LONG SINCE SOLD OUT AND BY TODAY HAVE TRIPLED IN VALUE...
...The Collection consists of seven different theme Series of four Coins each — 28 Coins in all...
...THE SPECIAL SIGNIFICANCE OF CANADIAN OLYMPIC COINS For over two thousand years...
...IT IS A STRIKING FACT THAT THE LAST THREE OLYMPIC ISSUES...
...And yet English, as she says here and elsewhere, is her language, the one in which she must constantly make do to express meanings that are foreign to its native resources...
...In "Usurpation (Other People's Stories)," the writer is featured in her own story where she seemingly is unable to choose between art and philosophy, magic and orthodoxy, Apollo and God, and doubts whether her inspiration to write is authentic and from within or a proclivity to covet other men's gifts...
...You don't know when to stop...
...Usurpation...
Vol. 1 • April 1976 • No. 9
