An extract from A Writer At Work, published in Commentary in 1983	by Jeffrey Miller
A Writer At Work For Cynthia Ozick
Every writer dreams of publishing a story in The Monocle, and the Mouse was no exception. She was called the Mouse by two editors and a literary agent who had discovered that common to them were certain visits by the young woman during the second week of April 1979. She had sent cards first, of course, a watercolor of an applecart in an open field, announcing in longhand her intended visit to New York, and despite mildly discouraging replies, arrived, politely insistent, manuscripts in hand, a tiny, bony thing in pleated gray tweed that reached her gray-stockinged calves -- a literary mouse not only in appearance, but because, as the editors knew from reading her fiction (which they never bought), she was an expositor of one theme only, a clutcher of one topic, which she would occasionally nibble at and worry (jealously, nervously, as her cover letters betrayed... viz., The Role of Women in Jewish-American Literature. "SJF, lonely, literary," as her favorite weekly New York tabloid might capsulize it. The Mouse's name was Claudia Bemel. She told the editors that she just wanted to meet the people with whom she had been corresponding all these years. To the agent she brought a story she wanted to sell, preferably to The Monocle, preferably -- since she was an occasional contributor to a Toronto women's quarterly and therefore arguably a published author -- without his levying a reading fee. A self-proclaimed soft touch, the agent capitulated, saying that he would read the story, but for anything else, they would see. The story was called "Logos" and was about a Jewish law professor who had made a religion of the so-called Socratic method of teaching. His pedantic delight was to lay a proposition at the feet of a student only to pull it out from under him, assiduously to meet any question with a question of his own, to deflect all challenge back at its proponent. In thirty-three years of teaching, not once had the professor answered a question. This dedication made him unpopular not only with many students, but also with his colleagues, who took his old methods as a derogation of their more modern expository ones, an implication that they were lazy and lax. Many said that he was the most arrogant man in the profession. Like his classical role-model, he was compelled into an early retirement and an untimely death. On the subject of her professor's arrogance, the Mouse had written into the story a joke that was then current, saying that it was the professor's favorite. Q. What are the three things that prove Jesus was Jewish? A. He lived at home until he was thirty, went into his father's business, and his mother thought he was God. On reading this, Farb-Rothman, the agent, laughed, but it touched a nerve: He himself had lived alone with his mother from the time his father died, when he was twelve, until she herself passed away when he was thirty-seven. He had never married. The joke amused the professor, the Mouse wrote, for two reasons: All his adult life he refused to affirm or deny the existence of any god, Jewish, Christian, or otherwise. Two, he subscribed to the view that Jewish women were all latent Mrs. Portnoys -- smotherers, manipulators; to his bed he took only shiksehs. Yet when he died the professor discovered to his surprise that the soul survived the body. Uncharacteristically, he felt fear: What if there were in fact a God Whom he had not embraced. But his fears were overcome for a time by the realization that he could spend all eternity in discourse with history's greatest legal minds. First, he approached Moses. But, as everybody knows, in the world to come Moses speaks Yiddish on weekdays, and Hebrew on the Sabbath -- the professor could speak neither, lousy Jew that he was. Disappointed, he wondered what kind of afterlife this was in which linguistic distinctions were maintained. He tried again, Confucius this time. But like Moses, the great philosopher could not make out what the professor wanted. So, the professor cast despairingly about for a friendlier face and at last recognized, from his famous satyr's aspect, his very mentor. His heart leapt. But the professor, though learned, had no Greek. As he turned abjectly from Socrates, suddenly it dawned on him that this was to be his punishment for not accepting God as the foundation of human order -- hadn't Socrates pleaded as much at his trial? For him, Heaven was to be a Gehenna. For eternity, he was to live among the great and virtuous as an untouchable, estranged from the family of God. He wandered miserably about the Ether, his face repulsive with tears and mucus, like a lost child. But his weeping abated when he noticed a bright golden glow he knew to be God. He approached in the ecstatic hope that God was giving him this final chance, that He was as merciful as He was said to be. Squinting, the professor extended his arms to embrace the glow, and God's form revealed itself to him. God was an old woman in long, rustling skirts, naked from the waist up. In some features She reminded the somewhat disgusted Farb-Rothman of Golda Meir. She had gigantically fat breasts, the Mouse wrote, which were as firm and nurturing as those of a young mother. The law professor was stunned, but God smiled at him and said, "Only your mind is surprised, my little darling, not your heart"; and She gathered the professor into Her expansive bosom.
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