The Last Yiddish Schlemiel: Cynthia Ozick’s “Envy; or, Yiddish in America”

What happens to the schlemiel when the world that created him disappears? Cynthia Ozick’s “Envy; or, Yiddish in America” poses this question with extraordinary comic cruelty. Its central character, Edelshtein, is an aging Yiddish poet living in America, surrounded by a language that increasingly cannot hear him. He writes. He complains. He envies. He dreams […]