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Ozick can scarcely credit the notion that she is widely regarded as a formidable intellectual. "It seems like a hoax, a vast mistake," she says. Born in New York City in 1928, she was raised in the Pelham Bay section of The Bronx, a middle-class neighborhood. "At P.S. 711 was dumb, cross-eyed, and couldn't do arithmetic; I think the image of what we are when we are little kids is our image for life. Everything went wrong for me then, including the anti-Semitism of the teachers and the kids."
Last January Ozick was chosen by the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters to receive one of the Mildred and Harold Strauss Livings, an annual tax-free award of $35,000 for a minimum of five years. "When I first read the letter announcing it," she recalls, "I sat at the kitchen table bawling away and saying, 'I can't accept this.' My husband said: 'Are you mad?' It went on that way for more than a month. I wallowed in guilt. I thought: How did this happen to me? What about everybody else with the same track record? It took me six months to realize that I ought to jubilate and that it's the kindest, most remarkable thing."
The grant has made it possible for Ozick to stop lecturing, as she has done for the past twelve years, speaking on "Jewish subjects, feminist subjects, literary subjects and sometimes all three mixed together." She was never nervous, she says. "I didn't do it extemporaneously. I had my paper. And I'm nearsighted, so I couldn't see all those people out there. Sometimes I would do a dozen lectures a year. I had to prepare them, but the intellectual preparation was never as hard as finding a pair of pantyhose without holes. If you're basically dowdy, pulling yourself together for a lecture is very difficult."
Being middle-aged is not easy either.
Says Ozick: "It just seems unreal to be 55—that's for one's mother. I find it's a kind of second adolescence, though much harder. Physical changes, like having your hair turn white, must be at least the equivalent of being a little girl growing breasts. Before, you were always full of the future: some day you are going to do this. And some day is here or it's never going to be here. It's frightening, as if a needle got stuck in the record of life."
Ozick is currently translating poetry for a new Penguin edition of Yiddish verse, edited by Irving Howe and Ruth Wisse. It is a labor of love. "It's so wonderful to make another poem in English and to set yourself up in rivalry with the original. It's the only writing I find enjoyable. All other writing is so painful; I would do anything to avoid writing. That's probably why I read so much. But reading inspires and leads to hope for more writing." ∙