This year, the great American Jewish writer Cynthia Ozick saw the publication of an anthology of her short stories and essays. Reviewing the collection, titled In a Yellow Wood, Adam Kosan criticizes some of the editorial choices and provides a laudatory and incisive overview of Ozick’s oeuvre, not forgetting to mention her novels as well. (You can listen to Ozick discuss her more recent works of fiction here, here, and here.) For anyone who’s read and loved even a little of Ozick’s work, the essay rewards reading in full:

Because we tend to be anthropological in our literary histories, you will probably hear her mentioned at some point alongside other prominent American Jewish writers of the last century—Bellow, Roth, Malamud, Paley, Leonard Michaels. With them she shares a cultural provenance and inheritance within the wider America, and like them the sanguinary nearness of Old World Eastern European and Russian Jewry didn’t keep her from claiming a place as an American writer, a boldly expansive one at that. (In fact, the nearness was indispensable.)

But really she is unlike them in the scope of her engagement with Jewish religion, culture, and experience not only in but beyond America—with a theological shadow over her work not to be found over the others’—and in her unrelenting focus on, and use of, history as the raw material of her art. The combination of these two qualities, and the manner of her approach to the latter, make her unique not just among the company above but among the broadest range of American writers.

In contrast to what I’ve just said, Ozick might claim that imagination is actually the primary material of her writing, and of course ultimately that must be true—imagination for any decent writer is a given, like air: required for the most basic elements of life in a work.

First person, third, male, female, old, young, Jewish, not, she follows imagination’s unruly dictates and would seem to have no indulgence toward contemporary reservations about writing characters who don’t share with an author what is called “identity.” For the most part, Ozick pulls it off.

Yesterday, the Iranian foreign minister flew to Geneva to meet with European diplomats. President Trump, meanwhile, indicated that cease-fire negotiations might soon begin with Iran, which would presumably involve Tehran agreeing to make concessions regarding its nuclear program, while Washington pressures Israel to halt its military activities. According to Israeli media, Iran already began putting out feelers to the U.S. earlier this week. Aviram Bellaishe considers the purpose of these overtures:

The regime’s request to return to negotiations stems from the principle of deception and delay that has guided it for decades. Iran wants to extricate itself from a situation of total destruction of its nuclear facilities. It understands that to save the nuclear program, it must stop at a point that would allow it to return to it in the shortest possible time. So long as the negotiation process leads to halting strikes on its military capabilities and preventing the destruction of the nuclear program, and enables the transfer of enriched uranium to a safe location, it can simultaneously create the two tracks in which it specializes—a false facade of negotiations alongside a hidden nuclear race.