Cabalarama

By R.Z. Sheppard

LEVITATION: FIVE FICTIONS by Cynthia Ozick Knopf; 158 pages; $11.50

Cynthia Ozick's career went public in 1966 with Trust, an intellectually ambitious, technically challenging first novel about personal and political betrayal. If the clang of metaphorical boiler plate rang in the reader's ear, so did the voice of new talent. Trust remains Ozick's only published novel. Her reputation rests mainly on collections of short fiction: The Pagan Rabbi and Other Stories and Bloodshed and Three Novellas. In these works, the author's philosophical and social overview narrowed and intensified. She could be outrageously satirical about current styles of New York life, but her more serious concerns centered on Jewish tradition and culture.

Much of Levitation presents Ozick in the role of a woman wonder-rabbi spreading paradox and fantasy. She tries too hard. Fantasy requires a softer touch and more control than are found in these stories. Some of Ozick's figurative language is spell-breaking. The phrase "suckled the Nazi boot" seems to have dropped from a punk rock lyric. A "transient mirage" that teases the "medulla oblongata" is not only overwrought but inappropriate for this part of the brain.

Ozick is more successful when she builds on realism. Lucy of the title story is a convert to Judaism who marries Feingold, a Manhattan editor obsessed with the persecution of medieval Jews. Both Feingolds have published novels, spend their evenings toiling over new books, and joke that they are "secondary-level people." Only it is not a joke. "Jews and women!" thinks Lucy. "They were both beside the point. It was necessary to put aside pity; to look to the center; to abandon selflessness; to study power."

The Feingolds have little aptitude for it. Irving Howe, Susan Sontag, Alfred Kazin, Leslie Fiedler, Norman Podhoretz, Elizabeth Hardwick, Philip Roth, Joyce Carol Gates, Norman Mailer, William Styron, Donald Barthelme, Jerzy Kosinski and Truman Capote do not come to their party. They miss quite a scene. Among the uncelebrated guests is a Holocaust survivor who literally levitates the living room with horror stories. Lucy also rises to the occasion with a Christian-pagan vision rooted in agriculture, bacchanalia and fertility symbols. The reader is left suspended with images of unreachable men locked in "the glory of their martyrdom," and of the Holocaust as multiple Crucifixions in which "every Jew was Jesus." Not since Elaine dined alone has there been a stranger tale of literary New York.

Ozick does not exercise her talents casually. An essay on aesthetics and the psychology of ghostly doubles tugs beneath the surface of Shots. From a Refugee's Notebook focuses on a Sigmund Freud who dreams of becoming a god, and then shifts to a science-fiction planet where a community of female dialecticians known as the Sewing Harem is the source of a society's rise and fall.

The author's view of community and civic ethics has roots in Talmudic law; her images of evil spring from Jewish folklore and mysticism. These influences get their longest airing in a novella with the intimidating title Puttermesser and Xanthippe. The former is a lawyer in New York's department of receipts and disbursements; the latter a female golem, an artificial being that Puttermesser fashioned from potting soil. With Xanthippe's aid, the civil ser vant becomes mayor and turns the city into a Utopia. Unfortunately, it is the nature of golems to turn against their creators. Xanthippe plays a succubus, sleeps with every man in the administration, and the city returns to chaos.

One cannot fail to be impressed by Ozick's latest collection. But it is an impression that is made by high intelligence and willful invention, and not by a captivating imagination. Too often she seems to be hectoring the reader to decipher a private cabala. Too often the magic that she calls forth arrives as commentary.

-- By R.Z. Sheppard

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