Storyteller and essayist Cynthia Ozick writes about the ladle in her kitchen drawer as the image of her reading imagination. Not talking about a timid little spoon now, good enough for teacups and sweet puddings. "A ladle," as she says, "is a great guzzling inebriate, given to gargantuan draughts; a swiller of oceanic wassail; a diver into densest abysses." In the infinite well of her sensibility, that ladle is her Big Dipper that keeps on dipping.
It began for Cynthia Ozick in the Depression and the Bronx when it felt like the countryside of New York, when great writers meant Jane Austen, George Eliot, Chekhov, Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, and The Master, Henry James. The second-stage rocket of her reading life is fired by the literature of the Holocaust--in which the popular favorite, The Diary of Anne Frank--stands out, she writes, for its sentimentality and obtuseness around unredeemable truth. The readers' reader Cynthia Ozick is this hour on The Connection. (Hosted by Christopher Lydon)
