Cynthia Ozick

Cynthia Ozick (1928–2024) was an American novelist, short story writer, and essayist. Her work is known for intellectual rigor and for engaging Jewish identity, history, and moral questions. She gained wide recognition for the short story “The Shawl” (1980), a stark meditation on the Holocaust and its aftermath. Ozick also wrote the linked novella collection *The Puttermesser Papers* (1997), centered on the lawyer Ruth Puttermesser and blending realism with fantasy and satire. Across fiction and criticism, she explored the claims of art, memory, and ethics, often in sharply argued, allusive prose.