Susanne Klingenstein.

Shofar: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Jewish Studies, Vol. 26, No. 2, Winter 2008, pp. 97-108.

Cynthia Ozick's novel Heir to the Glimmering World caps the revision of her concept of art. In her early novels and essays, Ozick's views resembled the Romantics who considered art both sublimely uplifting and utterly destructive. Ozick associated art with idolatry and its destructive power with Moloch's penchant for destroying his worshippers. Since the early 1980s Ozick has been rethinking these views. In Heir to the Glimmering World she completes her revision. She now associates art with the civilizing discipline of Jewish laws that surround and constrain the Divine. Art is interpretation, not representation, of the Absolute. Heir to the Glimmering World is a novel of ideas that condemns the search for absolute authenticity and self-actualization, for pure art, as suicidally misguided.

Miriam Sivan.

Literature and Theology; 19 (1) Mar 2005, pp.47-59 2005

When Ruth Puttermesser in "Puttermesser and Xanthippe" fashions a golem in the middle of the night, she is giving tangible form to a number of her longings. She is unconsciously hoping to redeem herself and, by extension, her home New York City from the plight of loneliness and squalor which seems so ubiquitous. The salvatory influences in the creation of her golem are linked: the mother persona contains both the passion of the id and that of the redeemer. Yet, true to tradition, the golem attempts to undo her maker. Puttermesser knows that she has transgressed the boundaries of authorial power and that while she revelled in her role as mother redeemer, she, and by extension her city, has suffered beyond the point when creativity has become decay and power has become corruptive. (Original abstract)

Matthew J. Reisz.

Independent; 22 Apr 2005, Arts & Books Review 2005, pp. 20-21.

Meets novelist Cynthia Ozick, once the best kept secret in American fiction and now a high profile contender for the first Man Booker International Prize. (Original abstract - amended)

Wendy Zierler.

Holocaust and Genocide Studies, Vol. 18, No. 1, Spring 2004, pp. 46-67.

What is to be gained by drawing literary comparisons between the African Diaspora experience of slavery and the Jewish experience of the Holocaust? Can such comparisons be made without distorting the historical record? This article critiques the juxtaposition of tragedy found in The Pawnbrokeróboth the novel and the film versionóand offers a reading of Cynthia Ozick's The Shawl as a polemical response to The Pawnbroker. Two Holocaust-related novels by the West Indian writer Caryl Phillips are then examined as models of how a literary text can enact a 'facing' of black and Jewish experience through the postmodern technique of narrative fragmentation and juxtaposition.

Mark Krupnick.

Soundings: An Interdisciplinary Journal, Vol. 74, no. 3-4, Fall 1991, pp. 351-368.