In this article, I examine Cynthia Ozick's 1987 novel The Messiah of Stockholm in light of her writings about Judaism and Jewish thought and with attention to the question of how Jews should relate to the Jewish past, including the Holocaust. I argue that Ozick rejects the notion that we might try to redeem the loss of Nazi victims by bringing victims’ dreams to fruition in our own lives. Instead, the ethical attitude is one of mournful resignation to their deaths coupled with concern for the living. My argument is based on a close reading of Ozick's use of a short story embedded within the larger narrative frame of her novel together with consideration of her embrace of Leo Baeck's portrayal of Judaism as the classical religion of ethics. My argument that Baeck is the key for understanding Messiah of Stockholm is strengthened by consideration of Ozick's review of Bruno Schulz's short stories as well as her rejection of Harold Bloom's promotion of Gnosticism as a Jewish literary theory and her appreciation of Gershom Scholem's account of Jewish mysticism. Altogether, I intend for this article to serve as a model of a new and distinctly interdisciplinary way to read both Jewish thought and Jewish literature.

In certain ways, my analysis complements existing work on Ozick. In particular, scholars often understand Ozick's books to be engaging in a polemics about the literary arts and/or Judaism and Jewishness. Peter Kerry Powers suggests that Ozick's chief concern is Jewish memory and, more specifically, a concern that her Jewish contemporaries do not produce an “aesthetics of memory rooted in Jewish tradition.” To do otherwise is an “an idolatry by which they eschew that which is historically Jewish in favor of the ephemera of Jewish ethnicity.”Footnote ¹ But Powers's own references to Jewish memory, Jewish history, and Jewish tradition remain vague, and it is not entirely clear what either he or Ozick mean by them. Furthermore, Messiah of Stockholm's link to this paradigm is weak, for within this novel most ties to the Jewish past prove to be fraudulent. That is not to say, however, that the novel is not about the relationship of past and present. Contra Powers, I will show that Ozick is arguing for importance of the present over a certain kind of attachment to the past, at least in regard to the Holocaust. That is, the tension in the novel is not between Ozick's thick Jewishness and her contemporaries’ thin Jewishness but between two ways of relating to the Jewish past.

Emily Miller Budick suggests that Messiah of Stockholm is an example of Ozick joining her fellow Jewish writers in a very specific mode of negotiating between the Jewish present and Jewish history, using their work as a means of resurrecting Jewish literary artists murdered in the Holocaust. She makes a theological claim as well: when contemporary Jewish authors turn to resurrection of lost artists as a motif, their works become “reminiscent of Christianity in order to reverse or undo the consequence of Christianity's efforts to obliterate the Jewish world,”Footnote ² suggesting that in addition to bringing back an earlier moment of Jewish literary genius, Ozick and her peers seek to subvert the most important image of Christianity by Judaizing it. But whether or not this paradigm works for the other writers Budick has in mind, it does not work for Messiah of Stockholm. The resurrection of Schulz entertained by the novel is forcefully rejected, not celebrated, and as I shall argue below, I believe that Ozick's Judaism does not allow for engagement with Christian symbols, even for subversive purposes. At question again is the meaning of Jewishness for Ozick.

In other readings of her work, Ozick is understood to be advocating for a Jewish (or Hebraic) world view in contrast to the non-Jewish (or Hellenist) world view of other writers. While the latter is friendlier to the arts, its engagement in sensuality and emotion risks danger, chaos, and lawlessness. As Dean Franco summarizes, “In Ozick's intellectual world-view, the spontaneous, ahistorical, creative, aesthetic impulse—which is also chauvinistic, bigoted, anti-Semitic, soulless, and pagan—is Hellenistic. Memory, tradition, covenant, empathy, and ethics are Hebraic.”Footnote ³ Franco's description draws closer here to the reading I will present (though he himself questions the Hebraism versus Hellenism paradigm). I argue, however, that the primary conflict is not between the Hebraic and the Hellenic but between two modes or emphases within Judaism, the rational and ethical on the one hand and the Romantic and mystical on the other. The plot of Messiah of Stockholm presents an argument that rational and ethical Judaism is the truest way of life. My claim that this is Ozick's argument is strengthened by her praise for Baeck and her arguments against Bloom's attempt to articulate a Jewish literary theory rooted in Kabbalah, both found among her many essays. Nevertheless, I show that she does acknowledge an undercurrent of Romanticism in Judaism in ways that Baeck does not.

More broadly, I intend for my analysis of Ozick to model one way in which literature and religious thought might be brought into conversation for the sake of deepening our understanding of each. Ozick is both a novelist and an essayist, and some of her essays address Judaism. These essays make it easier for me to claim that Ozick cares about Judaism and thus that we can find Jewish thought in her novels.Footnote ⁴ Ultimately, however, I do not think that the sort of conversation I seek to model here can only be used for Jewish novelists who also write essays about Judaism. The method relies instead upon three foundational assumptions. First, I assume that writers can embed arguments in their novels using literary devices (though not every author does so and not every book has a relevant argument contained within it). In the case of Ozick, the relevant devices are the plot of Messiah of Stockholm and the embedding of a different story within that plot. Second, I assume that engagement with Jewish thought can be expressed in a range of genres. This claim is easily supported historically—classical rabbinic theology was encoded within the stories of the Aggadah—but it is my hope that (re)-turning to literature as a source of Jewish thought may provide a fruitful means of expanding the canon of modern Jewish thought into the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. Third, I am assuming that one need not be trained as a theologian, or a rabbi, or a philosopher to engage with Jewish thought in a meaningful way. At the same time, deeper familiarity with Jewish thought allows us to think about Judaism in a broader way than literary scholars often do. In short, Jewish thought encompasses much more than reflections about God, and Jewish practice can be an intellectual rather than a ritual engagement. When we recognize that Jewish thinkers are concerned with themes such as ethics, history, memory, obligation, and more, we more easily find areas of overlapping interest with Jewish writers in other genres.

In terms of methodology, this article relies upon a hybrid of literary and philosophical analysis and seeks to contribute a new perspective to the fields of Jewish literature and Jewish thought. I begin with Ozick's presentation of Baeck's idea of rational religion, before turning to Messiah of Stockholm. From there, the article is structured along the path of the novel's plot, with discussions of Baeck, Bloom, Scholem, and Schulz woven in at relevant moments, all in an effort to draw Ozick's argument out of the novel and to demonstrate its significance for the study of Jewish thought and the study of literary theory. Within the field of Jewish thought, my reading of Messiah of Stockholm becomes a meditation on the relationship of post-Holocaust Jewry to the past that draws in particular upon Baeck's account of Judaism as focused on the present and future in contrast to the worshipful approach to the past that characterizes Romantic religions, whether Christianity (in his account) or paganism (in Ozick's). Within the field of Jewish literature, my article offers a more nuanced take on the fear of idolatry so often noted in analysis of Ozick's work, situates that fear in relationship to the literary theories of both her predecessor Schulz and her contemporary Bloom, and considers the entire matter as an argument about the nature of Judaism and Jewish thought.

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In a 2006 essay, Ozick recalls the first time she read Baeck's 1938 essay “Romantic Religion.” Baeck was a liberal German Jewish rabbi, scholar, and theologian; born in 1873, he quickly became a leading Jewish thinker during his lifetime. In “Romantic Religion,” he describes ethics as the defining characteristic of Judaism. Christianity he deems Romantic, by which he means overly emotional and passive and insufficiently rational or ethical: “Those with a romantic faith … dwell beyond the direction and the demands of reason—beyond its logic and also beyond ethics.… Veracity and justice as active virtues no longer have any place in romanticism.”Footnote ⁵ More than fifty years after she first read the essay, Ozick describes how, since her late teens, she had seen herself as an antinomian mystic and monist, deep under the influence of Romantic poetry. Reading Baeck convinced her that infatuation with Spirit is infatuation with the Self, leading ultimately to a Dionysian solipsism. Ozick writes that Baeck's piece, which left her “dazzled and undone,” “with its emphasis on humane conduct over the perils of the loosened imagination, remains an essay to live by.” Despite her new attraction to the rational and ethical, she has not experienced a full conversion, however, for she also adds, “It is not an essay to write stories by; stories crave the wilderness of untethered feeling.”Footnote ⁶ And Ozick is a writer of stories.

Ozick almost certainly read “Romantic Religion” in the 1958 volume Judaism and Christianity, a collection of Baeck's essays defending Judaism, translated into English. In his introduction, the translator Walter Kaufmann notes that while an earlier version of “Romantic Religion” had been published in 1922, when the 1938 version appeared, it was quickly suppressed by the Nazis.Footnote ⁷ Indeed, although Baeck's focus in “Romantic Religion” is an account of how Paul, Luther, Kant and other major Christian figures nurtured the faith's Romantic tendencies, it is not hard to see how his condemnation of Romanticism might extend to the toxic nationalism of Nazism.Footnote ⁸

Ozick's reading of the essay and all the more so her engagement with the binary of Romantic and rational religion of course happens in a post-Holocaust world. She is not resisting Nazism but living in the shadow of its legacy, namely, the murder of six million Jews. In particular, her novel argues that Jews—and perhaps everyone—must grieve for the Jewish world destroyed by the Nazis with a grief that is sober and measured, but not destabilizing. Most important, one must mourn the past without trying to recreate or resurrect it, which would be idolatrous and inherently not Jewish. If Baeck is the influence providing Ozick with her basic contention that Judaism is the religion of ethics, Harold Bloom is her most immediate contemporary conversation partner. The argument between Ozick and Bloom is not focused on Judaism versus Christianity but rather on Judaism versus Gnosticism or, more specifically, the question of Gnosticism's place within Judaism, if it has one at all.

As its title suggests, Ozick's novel takes place in Stockholm, where the central character Lars Andemning is a book reviewer for one of the daily newspapers. Published on the least important day of the week, Lars's reviews focus on obscure eastern European writers, and he has few readers. The time is not long after the Second World War; the city is filled with refugees and other reminders of the recent carnage, including constant references to smoke in the air suggestive of the crematoria not so far away. Having been adopted as a young child after he was whisked out of harm's way in Poland, now twice divorced, estranged from his daughter and largely alone in the world, Lars believes himself to be the son of Polish Jewish writer Bruno Schulz.

While the fictional Lars is the novel's hero, the real-life Schulz is the focal point around which the novel revolves.Footnote ⁹ Schulz was born in 1892 in the small Galician town of Drohobycz, then part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. He was a high school teacher, an artist, and a writer. He was not religious and for a time considered renouncing his Jewish heritage in order to marry a Christian woman. (This plan did not come to fruition, and he never married.)Footnote ¹⁰ He was killed in cold blood on the streets of his town by a Gestapo officer in 1942. Schulz wrote two books of short stories in Polish: Cinnamon Shops (1934) and Sanatorium under the Sign of the Hourglass (1936). They appeared in English translation in the 1960s, part of the Writers from the Other Europe series edited by Philip Roth. For this series, Cinnamon Shops was retitled Street of Crocodiles, the name by which it continues to be most widely known in English. In a New York Times review of Street of Crocodiles, Ozick writes that

Ozick's review captures the strangeness of Schulz's work, playing on the word “novel.” In comparing his work to a modern film composed of clips, she creates the sense of something that has been cut apart and put back together in such a way that entirely unconnected images seem to flow smoothly from one to the next: seamless yet full of seams. This is how the reader moves through the pages of Schulz's book, unsure whether it is a collection of stories or chapters of a single narrative.

Ozick's observations about Schulz's style go beyond this comment on his splicing of imagery; by the end of this passage from the review, she is comparing his work to rites of pagan animism. That there is a danger of animism lurking in Schulz's work is underscored by the word “passive,” which Ozick uses to characterize the reader who encounters Schulz's vivid imagery. The word points us back to Baeck, for whom passivity is symptomatic of Romantic religion. In the scheme of Romantic religion, “you are absolutely dependent, you are nothing by virtue of your deeds or achievements; whatever you are or become, you are only through the destiny of faith, you become only by virtue of a miracle.”Footnote ¹² By using the word “passive,” Ozick thus contrasts Schulz's short stories with the active, rational, and ethical religiosity that is Baeck's conception of Judaism. She pushes further, when, at the end of her review, Ozick suggests an examination of Schulz's work to ask “how it measures up for truth-telling.” Does it teach something true about the world in which the reader lives? I would suggest further that Ozick is after a particular sort of truth, one that gives literature a purpose greater than aesthetics. As she writes elsewhere, “Of the stories and novels that mean to be literature, one expects a certain corona of moral purpose: not outright in the grain of the fiction itself, but in the form of a faintly incandescent envelope around it.”Footnote ¹³

Measuring up Schulz, I argue, is exactly what Ozick is doing in The Messiah of Stockholm. There, Lars finds inspiration for his reviews in an apparition of his father's eye; when he is not reading or writing for the paper, he is trying continually to feel closer to his father. He has renamed himself Lazarus Baruch, using Lars as a Swedish version. The name Lazarus recalls the man brought back from the dead by Jesus in the New Testament. The Hebrew name Baruch means blessed; together, the names might mean “the blessed man raised from the dead.”Footnote ¹⁴ Lars does not imagine or even fantasize that his father will ever appear, alive, in Stockholm. But as he walks past the Swedish Academy, he dreams of seeing his father receive the Nobel Prize in Literature, an award given only to living authors. Continuing rumors suggest Schulz left behind the manuscript of a novel, The Messiah, and Lars imagines finding this manuscript and pronouncing its arrival in the city. This would be to claim his true inheritance as Schulz's son, and he fantasizes that the Academy might bend its rules. A Nobel would mark Schulz's literary resurrection.

With Lars, I suggest, Ozick illustrates Baeck's conception of Romantic religion. Lars passively makes his way through the world. His isolation and his lack of connection to his ex-wives, his daughter, and his coworkers suggest that he lacks an ethics, or any sense of duty to care about or for others. His friendship with bookstore owner Heidi Eklund is the one relationship he is able to nurture and maintain, though it too is centered on Schulz: Heidi is willing to entertain the possibility that Schulz was indeed Lars's father, and she procures Schulz ephemera from eastern Europe for them to study and debate.

At the climax of The Messiah of Stockholm, Schulz's long-lost manuscript appears in the hands of a woman named Adela, who also claims that Schulz is her father. (Her name is taken from Schulz's short stories, as Lars notes immediately.) The “siblings” meet with Heidi and her previously absent husband Dr. Eklund in the bookstore. In the back room, Lars reads the Messiah manuscript, which appears within The Messiah of Stockholm via a narration of Lars's act of reading it. This embedded story ultimately fractures Messiah of Stockholm's larger frame narrative, playing an essential role in the development of Ozick's argument.

The story of The Messiah is set in Schulz's hometown of Drohobycz, but the town no longer has human residents. In their place, there now live only idols. Accustomed to being worshipped, the idols are at first lost without humans. They eventually begin worshipping one another, collectively sacrificing the smaller idols to the larger idols, a mode of worship that will ultimately destroy their community. It is at this moment that the messiah appears. As he reads, Lars compares this redeemer to imagery found elsewhere in Schulz's literary corpus. Ozick signals this by weaving text from “The Book,” the opening story of Sanatorium under the Sign of Hourglass, into Lars's reading of The Messiah, with phrases lifted from Schulz's story appearing in italics: “More than anything else, the Messiah (Lars noted) resembled a book—The Book, in fact, that in one of the tales in Sanatorium pod Klepsydra [Sanatorium under the Sign of the Hourglass] had been likened to a huge cabbage rose: the petals, one by one, eyelid under eyelid, all blind, velvety, and dreamy. This Book had also been set forth as a postulate; and again as the authentic Book, the holy original, however degraded and humiliated at present.”Footnote ¹⁵ Ozick's citation of Schulz's text here has at least two levels of significance for our understanding of the novel. First, echoes of an image found in Schulz's writings are a clue as to the manuscript's authenticity. Surely Schulz's later work would be linked in some way to his earlier known work? Or perhaps these similarities are the result of a forger using Schulz's known works as inspiration for a new and inauthentic work? This question is key to the plot of Messiah of Stockholm's larger frame story. The second level of significance points beyond the novel to a larger conversation about the nature of literature, a conversation in which Schulz participated in the early twentieth century and in which Ozick is participating in the late twentieth century.

Schulz's short story “The Book,” which opens Sanatorium under the Sign of the Hourglass, sheds light on both of these levels of significance. As the story begins, the narrator describes a book that his father owns and with which they are both deeply engaged. In the middle of the story, the book is lost and though the narrator searches for it, he cannot find it. Trying to help him, his family members bring him different texts but he rejects each one, including the Bible. His father tells him, “As a matter of fact, there are many books. The Book is a myth in which we believe when we are young, but which we cease to take seriously as we get older.”Footnote ¹⁶ Finally, in the story's conclusion, the narrator finds the book. Entirely different now from how it was, it is filled with tales of miraculous hair tonics. Further, it has been in his home all along; the family's maid has been using its pages to wrap his father's lunch. As Bozena Shallcross notes, when the book is found “the primal harmony is lost, only to be partly regained and reflected in textual fragments.”Footnote ¹⁷ The original text is not gone; rather, it is found in pieces scattered about in the midst of the mundane.

Though it flirts with the possibility that myth is childish and false, “The Book” ultimately illustrates Schulz's understanding of primordial myth as the source of all literature, as expressed in his essay, “The Mythologizing of Reality”: “As we manipulate everyday words, we forget that they are fragments of lost but eternal stories, that we are building our houses with broken pieces of sculptures and ruined statues of gods as the barbarians did. Even the soberest of our notions and categories are remote derivatives of myths and ancient oral epics. Not one scrap of an idea of ours does not originate in myth, isn't transformed, mutilated, denatured mythology.”Footnote ¹⁸ Schulz posits the existence of a hidden myth, fragments of which are unknowingly reproduced by later writers in their own creative endeavors. “The Book” illustrates this theory. That the narrator has direct access to the original myth as a child signifies the primordial nature of the myth. In growing up, the narrator loses access to the original. When he finds it, he discovers both that it is accessible through bits of profane writing and images and also that most people are unable to see it even when it is right in front of them.

Ozick's citation of “The Book” in The Messiah of Stockholm functions as an illustration of Schulz's theory of myth. In this scheme, “The Book” plays the role of the original, holy book. The Messiah plays the role of the later, profane book through which the original peeks through in the form of direct quotations. But the plot of The Messiah undermines Schulz's theory when Lars observes that the messiah who appears in Schulz's lost text is utterly mundane and powerless:

Schulz's messiah is a messy, unordered book written in ideograms portraying the idols that surround it. Lars understands it to be proposing a path toward redemption; the ideograms make clear that the postulate it proposes is idolatry. As the narrative continues, the messiah implodes and with it, its redemptive potential. Idolatry does not redeem. In short, by having the messiah of Schulz's purported manuscript prove to be powerless, Ozick rejects Schulz's theory of an original and holy myth animating later art.

As the messiah collapses, it releases a bird, carrying a strand of hay in its mouth. This strand of hay hearkens back to a character mentioned earlier in the Messiah manuscript, an old man named Moses the Righteous One who slept in the synagogue's cellar. Moses the Righteous: the name links the old man to the biblical Moses, symbol and source of Jewish teaching and law. In pointing to the synagogue bed of Moses the Righteous, the piece of straw that survives the demise of the idolatrous messiah is a symbol of Judaism. The Messiah ends as

Carried by the bird and defeating the idols, the straw becomes more than a symbol of Judaism in general. It is a symbol of Judaism's survival as idolatry collapses. Rational, ethical religion triumphs over the worst tendencies of Romantic religion.Footnote ²¹ Furthermore, though the small bird with its strand of hay is reminiscent of the dove with an olive branch that symbolizes the end of the flood in Genesis 8 and the rebuilding Noah and his family will undertake when they emerge from their ark, the straw in the beak of this bird keeps it firmly within the realm of the everyday.

Ozick's depiction of the downfall of Schulz's messiah and with it his theory of literature as the fragmentary grasping at primordial myth resonates beyond the pages of Messiah of Stockholm to Ozick's own moment. Reading the novel as a treatise against idolatrous views of literature takes on further nuance when placed within the context of Ozick's opposition to the theorist Harold Bloom and his use of Jewish mysticism as a means of understanding literature, especially poetry.Footnote ²² In The Anxiety of Influence (1973), Bloom claims that the work of modern poets is by definition the citation and rewriting of the work of earlier, greater poets. A modern poet is never fully original, though she hopes and struggles to overthrow the earlier poets to create something truly new. In Kabbalah and Criticism (1975), Bloom argues that this theory is anticipated by the Gnostic strains within Kabbalah, particularly as articulated in sixteenth-century Safed by Moses Cordevero and Isaac Luria and then analyzed by the twentieth-century scholar Gershom Scholem. Not unlike Schulz's theory of myth, Bloom's theory and the sources he references overlap in emphasizing lateness. While the Kabbalists join the Gnostics in attempting to compensate for living after God's creation of the world, modern poets attempt to compensate for living after the great poetic geniuses of earlier times. All forms of interpretation—whether reading a poem or writing one's own—twist an original poem into something else, something at least somewhat different from what the author of the original poem intended and yet closely tied to it: a new iteration of old creation. In this vein, Bloom comments that “all reading, and all writing, constitute a kind of defensive warfare, that reading is mis-writing and writing is mis-reading. This formulation is Gnostic because for the Gnostic the unknown God is every precursor and the demiurge of misprision is every ephebe. Yet every new poet tries to see his precursor as the demiurge, and seeks to look beyond him to the unknown God, while knowing secretly that to be a strong poet is to be a demiurge.”Footnote ²³ Within a Gnostic scheme, the purely spiritual (the unknowable God) and the material (created by the demiurge, a different heavenly being) exist in constant tension, the spiritual linked with goodness and the material with evil. In trying to outdo the earlier poets, each new poet (the ephebe) strives for Spirit—to be God—and yet remains imprisoned in the material world of the demiurge. For Bloom, this Gnostic paradigm for understanding the world becomes a framework for understanding the relationship between classical poets and modern poets. The former become gods while the latter strive to be like them. But each new modern poem is but a misinterpretation of the original poetry, and modern poets remain trapped in the material world of the demiurge.

In her criticism, Ozick argues that Bloom's use of Gnostic motifs portrays human creativity as an act of idolatry. If they do—as Bloom suggests—worship the classical poets, then modern poets make their predecessors into idols. Or perhaps it is Bloom himself who has turned the classical poets into idols, simply by portraying the modern poet as the worshipper who wants but cannot attain godly status. In her own terms, Bloom's theory is

Ozick's appreciation of Baeck's understanding of Judaism helps us to unpack her distaste for Bloom's Gnosticism. In his work, Baeck portrays Gnosticism as a paganism that threatened the ethical integrity of ancient Judaism and lingers dangerously in Romantic religion. Thus, rather than making Bloom's literary theory Jewish, his revival of Gnosticism via Kabbalah as a literary theory renews the power of a certain sort of anti-Judaism. This finds further support in Baeck's description of Romanticism as “always [feeling] as if it had been born belatedly”;Footnote ²⁵ it “repudiates any step-by-step progression, the goal is already given and perfected.”Footnote ²⁶

Consideration not of Gnosticism per se but of how the term has been deployed historically is further helpful in understanding what is at stake for Ozick in her criticism of Bloom. In Kabbalah and Criticism, Bloom presents Gnosticism as a past movement that was largely stable and defined. But Karen King notes that Gnosticism is “a term invented in the early modern period to aid in defining the boundaries of normative Christianity.”Footnote ²⁷ That is, Gnosticism has long functioned as something of a catch-all category. Once used by Christian heresiologists to group together wide swaths of non-Christians in the early centuries of Christianity, as King amply demonstrates, whether historians of the period have sought to define it in genealogical, typological, or other terms, it has been resistant to a single straightforward definition.Footnote ²⁸

When Ozick attaches the term “Gnostic” to Bloom and his theories she means it to serve broadly as a synonym for paganism, pantheism, and idolatry, that is, the not-Jewish. Ozick is particularly concerned with the way in which Bloom presents authentic or original poets as being worthy of adoration to the point of becoming godlike, that is, making them and their work into idols to be worshipped. In an essay on Bloom, she makes this point by misquoting Bloom himself, rewriting a definition of a poem from Kabbalah and Criticism as the definition of an idol, simply by substituting the word “idol” where Bloom originally wrote the word “poem.” Thus, idols are more than objects; indeed, “an idol can be, and usually is, remarkably made, wonderfully persuasive in its parts, and in its parts often enough wonderfully true. An idol can have, above all, a psychological realism that is especially persuasive and seductive. And beyond this, an idol can be seen to work.” Second, an idol is presumed to preexist the worshipper. It might be linked with ancestors or other precursors, regardless of its actual date of creation. Third, an idol is transhistorical, remaining the same across time and place. Fourth, an idol “can root out human pity.”Footnote ²⁹

In Messiah of Stockholm, Lars's relationship to Schulz illustrates Bloom's theory of literature. Until he reads the Messiah manuscript, Lars idolizes Schulz in the way that, according to Bloom, a modern poet idolizes the classical poets. In Lars's mind, Schulz is wonderful in his parts, whether his stories, his sketches, or Lars's vision of his eye, which inspires Lars's book reviews. Schulz stands in an ancestral position relative to Lars, who knows nothing of where he actually came from. Schulz—killed in cold blood for the crime of Jewishness—is powerless to shape even his own legacy. Because of his death in real life, he can never be recognized with a Nobel Prize, as Lars believes he deserves, putting him outside of history. And, finally, Lars's obsession with Schulz keeps him distant from other people, unable to trust, understand, or care for them. Schulz as idol isolates Lars, robs him of his pity, and nearly his humanity. Ozick's novel abounds with additional religious imagery, all of it linked in some way with literature: Lars's editor accuses him of writing his reviews theologically; the Swedish Academy is compared to a cathedral; and Heidi compares Lars to a priest. When he finally catches on to her deception, Lars tells Heidi, “You want to be in competition with God, that's the thing,”Footnote ³⁰ hearkening toward Bloom's understanding of the artist in Gnostic terms.

That the Jewish Bloom claims Kabbalah as a Jewish source for his literary theory offends Ozick because his theory is to her mind the very opposite of Judaism. In her essay “Literature as Idol,” she cites the Bible, pointing toward the commandment against idolatry (Exodus 20:3–6):

Ozick's assessment of Bloom in light of the biblical prohibition against idolatry is both specific and general. First and more specifically, Bloom's embrace of idolatry is a direct violation of that prohibition. Second and more generally, Ozick portrays the prohibition against idolatry as indicative of a larger Jewish value: separation from the mainstream, a different and particular path while idolatry is the path of the many. But beyond the content of the Second Commandment, I would argue that there is something else at work here. Ozick might well have cited Baeck or Maimonides or another Jewish rationalist. But she purposefully chooses a source that is more ancient than Kabbalah. That is, she rejects Bloom's embrace of the belated and reasserts the primacy of an ancient, original text whose anti-idolatry message cannot be superseded by a misreading.

And yet, as black and white as Ozick's criticism of Bloom seems in the passage from “Literature as Idol” quoted above, the full picture is more complicated. Elsewhere, Ozick writes about Gershom Scholem admiringly in a way that suggests she not only understands his studies of mysticism but accepts his claim that Kabbalah must be viewed as a legitimate part of the Jewish tradition. Ozick is also aware that even as Scholem defends Kabbalah, he always understands it in relationship with the more mainstream rational elements of the tradition. In an appreciation of Scholem's work, Ozick writes that his “magisterial historical intuition, his capacity to enter and overwhelm several philosophical traditions at once, above all his reclamation of Kabbalah, empowered intellectual-rationalist Judaism to reharness the steeds of myth and mysticism, and to refresh the religious imagination at many wells and springs along the way.”Footnote ³² Ozick's description of rational Judaism as harnessing myth and mysticism to “refresh the religious imagination” suggests one way of understanding how it is that she can adopt Baeck's rational Judaism so wholeheartedly and yet be a novelist when, as she puts it, “stories crave the wilderness of untethered feeling.”Footnote ³³ We might even say that in Messiah of Stockholm she has harnessed myth and mysticism in the form of Schulz for the sake of rationalism's triumph in the book's final chapters.

Ozick's recognition of mysticism as part of the Jewish tradition may influence her critique of Bloom when she writes that Judaism acknowledges the pull of evil. The sources that Bloom needs, she suggests, are not Gnostic but rabbinic. She points specifically to the rabbinic notion of yeẓer ha-raʿ, the evil inclination.Footnote ³⁴ This inclination stands opposite the yeẓer ha-tov, the good inclination, and every person must negotiate between them. The hope, of course, is that one will strengthen the latter and weaken the former so as to become a good person. Yet the rabbis also grant that the yeẓer ha-raʿ is necessary and one should never strive to eliminate it entirely, as they link the yeẓer ha-raʿ to sexual desire and, as Ozick emphasizes, to creativity: “In Hebrew, just as there is t'shuva, the energy of creative renewal and turning, so there is the yetzer ha-ra, the Evil Impulse—so steeped in the dark brilliance of the visionary that it is said to be the source of the creative faculty. Imagination is more than make-believe, more than the power to invent. It is also the power to penetrate evil, to take on evil, to become evil, and in that guise it is the most frightening human faculty.”Footnote ³⁵ In rabbinic sources, the yeẓer ha-raʿ struggles against the yeẓer ha-tov, the inclination toward the good. Because she is interested in the yeẓer ha-raʿ as a source of creativity, however, Ozick sets it against the redemptive potential of literature, what she calls its “corona.” She describes the dialectic between creativity and its evil potential on the one hand and the redemptive potential on the other hand as a battle:

What does it mean, according to Ozick, for a novel to have redemptive potential? It illustrates the possibility of teshuvah, which she understands not as repentance or return so much as the possibility for remaking one's self. There is risk in the reality that a writer can create an evil character, but that is outweighed by the potential of leading that character down a path toward becoming better. The ending of The Messiah of Stockholm offers an illustration. Lars's first action after reading the Messiah manuscript is to burn it, thus destroying the false messiah and with it his hope of Schulz's resurrection. In formalist terms, the embedded story (the Messiah text) has shattered the novel's frame story (Lars's relationship with and devotion to Schulz). Lars is redeemed of his obsession with Schulz: the central narrative of The Messiah of Stockholm has been overturned and cannot continue.

On the next page of Ozick's book, a new chapter begins. Seven months have passed. Lars has turned his life around. Whereas earlier in the book, he is described as being “foetus-like” in appearance, he now looks his actual age. He no longer reviews obscure eastern European writers, and he has gained immensely in popularity, with enough readers that his editor has given him a second day in the paper and a raise. He has, in short, succeeded in the mundane task of being good at his job, making a decent living, and behaving in line with societal norms. He is rooted in reality, firm in his view that the Messiah manuscript he read was forged, and firm in his view that Schulz cannot be resurrected. But he is not exemplary in any way; neither is it apparent that he is a follower of Judaism or any other ethical system.Footnote ³⁷ This reflects Ozick's argument that the redemptive corona of literature is realized in work that illustrates the potential for change rather than anything particularly virtuous: “Redemption means fluidity; the notion that people and things are subject to willed alteration; the sense of possibility; of turning away from, or turning toward; of deliverance; the sense that we act for ourselves rather than are acted upon; the sense that we are responsible, that there is no deus ex machina other than the character we have ourselves fashioned; above all, that we can surprise ourselves.”Footnote ³⁸

As I have noted already, in Ozick's essay on Baeck, she admits that Romanticism, whether or not understood specifically as Christianity, with its tales of death, resurrection, faith, and grace, makes for good storytelling, while rationalism makes for a morally good life. Little wonder, then, that The Messiah of Stockholm has just one final chapter after the Messiah manuscript is destroyed: there's no more story to be told when one is firmly within the rational and ethical sphere. And yet, that final chapter gives new meaning to Lars's entire story. The chapter opens with a reiteration of the smoke imagery from earlier in the text. Despite the change in him, “what went on troubling him was the smell—that smell of something roasting—all through Stockholm. It was a plague in every corner of the city, no matter how cleanly the bright wind came.”Footnote ³⁹ For Lars, the smell gives rise to grief, but it is a grief that is very specific. He does not grieve for anything that has happened to him in the course of the novel or for the loss of his connection to Schulz. Rather, Lars now grieves for the actual Bruno Schulz, portrayed now as “the man in the long black coat, hurrying with a metal garter box squeezed under his arm, hurrying and hurrying toward the chimneys.”Footnote ⁴⁰ Being firmly planted in reality forces Lars to face the fact of Schulz's death, and with it, the six million Jews murdered by the Nazis. This is where Ozick leaves her reader. Art, by entertaining the possibility that what was lost could all come back, offers an escape from reality. In Bloom's terms, as the ephebe attempts to renew God's creation, the reader can be enticed to imagine it is possible in this way to return to what once was. Schulz himself, in his writing, offered an unstable but enticing portrait of reality that easily gives way to fantasy. In her review, Ozick calls his work a “phantasmagoria,” planting the word in a context that gives the word a positive valence. But in Messiah of Stockholm, Ozick denies the possibility of an actual way out of reality or that literary fantasies can teach us about actual life. With Lars, we face reality, we grieve, and we live by the ethical commandments of Baeck's classical religion.

Because both the Holocaust and idolatry are central concerns for Ozick in many of her essays and other works of fiction, my reading of Messiah of Stockholm may have implications far beyond the novel. All too frequently, readers of Ozick's work identify her as a champion of Judaism and ethics but then treat these terms as stable or static. In my reading of Messiah of Stockholm, Ozick's engagement with Baeck, Schulz, Bloom, and Scholem adds texture to the meaning of these terms and reveals them to be more dynamic for Ozick than they often appear. Beyond Messiah of Stockholm itself, my reading has immediate implications for our understanding of a particular strand of Ozick's nonfiction writing about the Holocaust, namely, her concern to prevent the suffering of Holocaust victims from being made into art. When such suffering is aestheticized, she claims, the true horror of it disappears. A version of this argument appears in her musing that perhaps Anne Frank's diary should have been burned after the Frank family was betrayed and sent to Auschwitz. In reality, of course, the diary was saved and later edited and published, making Anne one of the Nazis' most well-known and widely read victims. But the diary does not—cannot—include her deportation and her murder. Without an account of these events, Ozick claims, the story lacks the framework it needs to be meaningful on its own terms. After her diary is rewritten as a play, performed on Broadway, Anne can even be alive. As Ozick puts it, “A story may not be said to be a story if the end is missing. And because the end is missing, the story of Anne Frank in the fifty years since The Diary of a Young Girl was first published has been bowdlerized, distorted, transmuted, traduced, reduced; it has been infantilized, Americanized, homogenized, sentimentalized; falsified, kitschified, and, in fact, blatantly and arrogantly denied.… A deeply truth-telling work has been turned into an instrument of partial truth, surrogate truth, or antitruth.”Footnote ⁴¹ In other words, the sheer popularity of Frank's diary is a distortion of Anne's life and her death. Ozick accuses not only the playwrights involved with the adaptation but also every editor and translator who worked on any edition of the diary of distorting the truth of her existence by denying her demise. If the fictional Lars's attempts to resurrect Schulz—whose violent death Lars never denies—through literature represents an unethical attitude toward the dead, all the more so the resurrection of Frank on the page and onstage.Footnote ⁴²

My reading of Ozick is also an invitation to reconsider the place of Holocaust victims in Jewish theology. Melissa Raphael's feminist post-Holocaust theology offers one example where this reconsideration might be valuable.Footnote ⁴³ In her article, “When God Beheld God: Notes Towards a Jewish Feminist Theology of the Holocaust,” Raphael begins with historical evidence that Jewish women's Holocaust experiences were shaped both by their religion and by their gender. This was the case both in terms of how they were treated by the Nazis and how they responded to their imprisonment. Next, she argues that female Jews’ gendered response to their suffering has theological implications, suggesting that mutual care groups formed by some female prisoners but not by male prisoners drew God into the camps in the form of the Shekhinah, the feminine sefirah within the kabbalistic scheme of divine emanations. As she explains, “By means of mutual care, these women summoned Shekhinah (the traditional female image of the holy presence of God) into the very abyss of profanity. Because women are made in the image of God, Shekhinah suffered in the suffering of women. So that what has been called the ‘gender wounding’ of Jewish women in the death and concentration camps was also a wounding of God. But conversely, that mutual care by which women restored the divine image to each other also restored God to God.”Footnote ⁴⁴ Raphael sees the recognition of this feminine presence of God in the camps as repairing the patriarchal nature of earlier theology.

Thus, Raphael argues, only a feminist theology based in women's experiences can fully realize the lessons Auschwitz has to offer earlier theologies: “Patriarchal theological discourse on the Holocaust may fail to signal redemption when it is predicated upon a model of God whose will and character shares significant elements of the alienated patriarchal world view of its perpetrators. It does not and cannot mount a significant moral critique on the world that produced and inherited Auschwitz because it enjoys discursive and religious privileges within that world.”Footnote ⁴⁵ A final piece of Raphael's argument is thus that female mutual care groups are a part of, if not a basis for, a broader feminist project of redeeming Jewish theology from its patriarchal past. That is, feminist Holocaust theology has redemptive potential because it emerges from the Holocaust and because it is feminist.

Seeking to further disrupt the patriarchal privileging of discursive argumentation, Raphael ends her article by articulating her theological claims in a short story, its form loosely based on the model of tales told by the hasidic Rebbe Naḥman of Bratslav and its imagery drawn from the Lurianic concepts of shevirah and tikkun. The Shekhinah becomes a princess who flees the palace to join women suffering in the City of Death, where she collects the small sparks of light that their acts of care produce. After the war, “some of the daughters and granddaughters of the dead had begun to call to [Shekhinah] and to one another. She smiled when she heard their new teachings and knew that they needed her as she needed them.”Footnote ⁴⁶ Raphael intends this story to illustrate of the redemptive power of what happened in the camps. Just as women in the camps drew Shekhinah to them in their care for one another, contemporary Jewish women can seek Shekhinah's presence in their love for one another. But we must also ask: How it is that the dead have daughters and granddaughters? My reading of Ozick suggests this claim of kinship between contemporary Jewish feminists seeking Shekhinah and women victims of the Nazis is an unethical mode of remembrance. In other words, the argument embedded in Ozick's novel suggests that Raphael's use of the experiences of female victims of the Nazis as a theological path to the Shekhinah risks becoming worship of these women. The more ethical move for post-Holocaust Jews—whether feminist or not—is to mourn for them but to find theological resources within the contemporary world. What might Raphael's theology look like if it did not seek such literal continuity between the experience of women victims and today's Jewish feminists?