Alien Tongue

By Paul Gray

BLOODSHED AND THREE NOVELLAS

by CYNTHIA OZICK

178 pages. Knopf. $6.95.

In her previous works, consisting of a long novel and a widely praised collection of stories, Author Cynthia Ozick, 48, displayed an uncompromising intelligence wedded to a prancing narrative talent. In Bloodshed and Three Novellas, she skeptically examines her own gifts. What business has a Jew writing stories in an alien tongue, she wonders: "English is a Christian language. When I write English, I live in Christendom." Given the fiat of the Second Commandment against false idols, she questions a bit disingenuously whether a Jew should write stories at all.

So she perversely tells a tale against tale telling. In Usurpation (Other People's Stories) the narrator is "the sort of ignorant and acquisitive being who moons after magical tales." Soon she is buffeted by stories heard at a reading by a famous author, pressed on her in manuscript by a young aspirant, conjured out of her own imagination. Ultimately these intertwined fantasies knot themselves into a dilemma: the ghost of a Jewish poet orders her to choose between the "Creator or the creature. God or god. The Name of Names or Apollo." She chooses the Greek divinity and instantly becomes a font of Western literature. "Stories came from me then . . . none of them of my own making, all of them acquired, borrowed, given, taken, inherited, stolen, plagiarized, usurped, chronicles and sagas in vented at the beginning of the world by the offspring of giants copulating with the daughters of men." She becomes, in short, a splendid ventriloquist, and the beauty of her adopted speech almost makes her forget that the words belong to strangers to her and her people.

This problem, of course, can be demonstrated but not solved. Is a sacred truth tainted by the human artifact that bears it? Ozick clearly relishes such paradoxes. Her stories are lush evocations of stony mysteries. In Bloodshed, a middle-aged Jew visits a Hasidic community populated chiefly by survivors of the Nazi death camps. A professed rationalist, he is repelled by the religious sect, with its ancient memories of animal sacrifice, but drawn to its adherents: "Refugees, survivors. He supposed they had a certain knowledge the unscathed could not guess at." Dramatically, he learns that the Hasidim cannot be separated from their beliefs -- and that his own lack of faith has made him demonic.

Without Venom. A Mercenary describes a far different victim of the Holocaust. Stanislav Lushinski is a Polish Jew who survived both the Nazis and the Russians and now works as the U.N. representative for a small African nation. Colleagues mock him as the "P.M."(Paid Mouthpiece), but his past has put him beyond their taunts -- and, he hopes, beyond any pain other humans can cause. His cold irony makes him a perfect manipulator of international diplomacy. "Don't try to ram against the inevitable," he advises a young black assistant. "Instead, tinker with the timing." If Lushinski has a tender spot, it is his irritation at being reminded that he is Jewish. Ozick displays this trait without venom but with lacerating irony. She leaves the strong impression that nothing bad will ever again happen to Lushinski because nothing he can recognize as good will ever happen to him either.

No single piece in Bloodshed and Three Novellas quite matches Envy, an earlier tale about a Yiddish writer's comic quest for English translators and renown. But Ozick's skill at thrusting engaging characters into remarkable situations is as enviable as ever. She is self-conscious without being self-regarding. Because she mistrusts her own fluency, her stories constantly strain away from easy observations and cheap resolutions. She demands nothing less of her prose than the ineffable, yet her language does not simply point a finger at prepackaged symbols or detachable interpretations. With remarkable success, it makes a fist around the unknown.

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