Cynthia Ozick’s story Envy or, Yiddish in America

"Envy": Cynthiz Ozick Meets Melanie Klein

Cynthia Ozick’s story “Envy; or, Yiddish in America” shows the corrosive effects

of envy on the life of the lonely, aging Yiddish poet Edelshtein. Edelshtein is consumed

with envy of Ostrover, a famous Yiddish novelist known from English translations of his

stories. He feels that Ostrover has both cuckolded him and bested him in literary

success. Edelshtein believes he could become as famous as Ostover if he too had a

translator into English. Without the translator, he fears his poems will die along with

him and the dying Yiddish language. The story seems to illustrate the psychological

insights of Melanie Klein about the unconscious mechanisms behind envy: “I consider

that envy is an oral-sadistic and anal-sadistic expression of destructive impulses,

operative from the beginning of life. . .” (Klein, ix). So long as Edelshtein operates out

of 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 by

Ostrover, which is really a form of internal persecution. As Klein says, “When this

occurs, the good object is felt to be lost, and with it inner security” ( 84).

“Envy,” which is included in Ozick’s 1969 collection, The Pagan Rabbi, is

reminiscent of Bellow’s Herzog (1965). Both are profound psychological anatomies,

detailed dissections of a single suffering character, a victim who is nevertheless in

many ways his own worst enemy. Both stories are delicately poised between the comic

and the tragic. Both protagonists are intellectuals who rail against the “Wasteland

outlook” and defend Jewish humanism. Herzog rejects “the commonplaces of the

Wastela...

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...at least two people”

(Klein 6). Tragedy occurs in the realm of oedipal conflict, but the envious person never

reaches that stage and thus never really grows up.

Works Cited

Bellow, Saul. Herzog. 1965; New York: Viking, 1976.

Cohen, Sarah Blacher. Cynthia Ozick’s Comic Art: From Levity to Liturgy.

Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1994.

Kauvar, Elaine M. Cynthia Ozick’s Fiction: Tradition and Invention. Bloomington:

Indiana University Press, 1993.

Klein, Melanie. Envy and Gratitude: A Study of Unconscious Sources. NY: Basic

Books, 1957.

Lowin, Joseph. Cynthia Ozick. Boston: Twayne, 1988.

Ozick, Cynthia. “Envy; or, Yiddish in America.” Jewish American Stories. Ed. Irving

Howe. New York: New American Library, 1977: 129-77.

Strandberg, Victor. Greek Mind/Jewish Soul: The Conflicted Art of Cynthia Ozick.

Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1994.