Cynthia Ozick is keenly alert to the sometimes uneasy tension in
literature between reality and fiction, history and
imagination, and she doesn’t shy away in the least from bringing moral
judgments to bear in discussing this tension.
Politics alone do not account for her fervid interest in these
subjects. In her “Forethoughts,” Ozick lays out her view
of the essay’s purpose, a discussion she further elaborates in
“She: Portrait of the Essay as a Young Body.”

If there is information in an essay, it is by-the-by, and if
there is an opinion in it, you need not trust it for the long
run. A genuine essay has no educational, polemical, or
sociopolitical use.

It is difficult to imagine an essay without information or opinions, and
certainly Ozick avoids neither.
Why insist opinions don’t matter in the
long run when in the long run it is generally opinions we remember
best?
But she wishes to transcend mere
topicality through rigorous moral inquiry.
In “The Rights of
History and the Rights of the Imagination,” Ozick challenges
William Styron on moral grounds for choosing a Catholic Auschwitz
survivor as his central character
in Sophie’s Choice.
She grants that there is some justification for the work being
referred to as a “Holocaust novel,” at least in its “well-researched historical
sections dealing with the final solution in Poland.”
But
Ozick finds Styron’s information about Polish Christians in
Auschwitz far less substantive, “in fact, nearly absent.”
Styron places Sophie at the novel’s