CYNTHIA OZICK’S STORY “Levitation,” first published in 1976, deals with a pair of married writers—the husband Jewish, the wife Christian—who throw a party for their literary friends. The party turns out to be as middling as their careers—Ozick has them inviting all the literary celebrities of the hour (“Irving Howe, Susan Sontag, Alfred Kazin, Leslie Fiedler”), none of whom show up—and the star attraction turns out to be a professor who is a Holocaust survivor. The Jewish guests all congregate in the living room to hear him relate the horrors he lived through. Then, in a moment poised between satire and magical realism, the room full of Jews begins to float into the air, leaving the Gentile hostess behind:
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