often underscored in Ozick's essays: "Western Civilization" cannot sustain and actually may be antithetical to Jewish culture; as we have seen, the only Jewish literature that lasts is that which "touches on the liturgical" or the "redemptive."
Touches on
such religious groundbut does not dwell therein. For despite her distaste for the aestheticism and paganism of Western culture, Ozick also knows that
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 | | Literature, to come into being at all, must call on the imagination; imagination is in fact the flesh and blood of literature; but at the same time imagination is the very force that struggles to snuff out the redemptive corona. So a redemptive literature, a literature that interprets and decodes the world, beaten out for the sake of humanity, must wrestle with its own flesh and blood, with its own life.
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This wisdom (derived in part from Harold Bloom) forces Ozick into a paradoxical position, but fortunately, as a writer of fiction she is spared the necessity of logical consistency. Rather, the paradoxical struggle of imagination and faith that for Ozick is the unique mark of the liturgical writer provides the thematic drive for much of her best work. Thus in Edelshtein's epiphany, the "miraculous reversal" of ghetto and outside world which guarantees the purity of his Jewish imagination and his disappearance from history produces in turn a great longing for the security and creative potential of Jewish communal life. For Edelshtein, of course, the destruction of a geographical community coincides with the destruction of his linguistic community. For Ozick, the Judaism of the American Diaspora can a produce a new Yavneh, where Jews will speak and write a New Yiddish.
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Ozick's desire for a New Yiddish can be understood as a special, richly productive kind of nostalgia. Ozick longs for a shtetlcultural and linguistic if not geographicalin which the countervailing forces of imagination and redemption inhabiting the soul of the Jewish writer can most fruitfully work, one upon the other. This shtetl of the soul will afford the Jewish writer her greatest chance to secure the historicity that a figure like Edelshtein has apparently lost. Traces of this nostalgia can be seen whenever Ozick's protagonists attempt to synthesize an imaginative invention drawn from Western culture (or what Ozick in her harsher moments would call an idol) with a Jewish vision of redemption. The failure of all these attempts proves Ozick's contention that any synthesis of imagination and faith will be essentially unstable. But the saving irony is always found in the
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