Cynthia Ozick (born April 17, 1928) is an American short story writer, novelist, and essayist. Biography Cynthia Ozick was born in New York City, the second of two children. She moved to the Bronx with her Belarusian-Jewish parents from Hlusk, Belarus: Celia ( Regelson) and William Ozick, proprietors of the Park View Pharmacy in the Pelham Bay neighborhood. She attended Hunter College High School in Manhattan. She earned her B.A. from New York University and went on to study at Ohio State University, where she completed an M.A. in English literature, focusing on the novels of Henry James. She appears briefly in the film Town Bloody Hall, where she asks Norman Mailer with her signature wit and incisiveness, "in Advertisements for Myself you said, quote, 'A good novelist can do without everything but the remnant of his balls'. For years and years I’ve been wondering, Mr. Mailer, when you dip your balls in ink, what color ink is it?". Ozick was married to Bernard Hallote, a lawyer, until his death in 2017. Their daughter, Rachel Hallote, is a professor of history at SUNY Purchase and head of its Jewish studies program. Ozick is the niece of the Hebraist Abraham Regelson. Yale University has acquired her literary papers. A forthcoming special issue of Studies in Jewish American Literature will examine her contributions to the art of non-fiction. Literary themes Ozick's fiction and essays are often about Jewish American life, but she also writes about politics, history, and literary criticism. In addition, she has written and translated poetry. Henry James occupies a central place in her fiction and nonfiction. The critic Adam Kirsch wrote that her "career-long agon with Henry James... reaches a kind of culmination in Foreign Bodies, her polemical rewriting of The Ambassadors." The Holocaust and its aftermath is also a dominant theme. For instance in "Who Owns Anne Frank?" she writes that the diary's true meaning has been distorted and eviscerated "by blurb and stage, by shrewdness and naiveté, by cowardice and spirituality, by forgiveness and indifference." Much of her work explores the disparaged self, the reconstruction of identity after immigration, trauma and movement from one class to another. Ozick says that writing is not a choice but "a kind of hallucinatory madness. You will do it no matter what. You can't not do it." She sees the "freedom in the delectable sense of making things up" as coexisting