Between Athens and Jerusalem

...It is an interesting tale, but a trifle when set against "The Pagan Rabbi," which for all its fancy is tragedy at root, an imaginative episode in the centuries-old conflict between Athens and Jerusalem...

...Ironically, the trouble with "Envy" is that it is by far the finest thing the author has written...

...a seductive dryad named Iripomonoeia proves to be the cause of the pious Rabbi Kornfeld's apostasy and suicide...

...The Butterfly and the Traffic Light" (1961), the earliest story in The Pagan Rabbi, is written in this same overblown manner but is, fortunately, only 10 pages long...

...Her language is tight, though not spare...

...It so dominates the six other pieces in The Pagan Rabbi and Other Stories that, although Miss Ozick's craft has steadily improved, they seem weak in comparison...

...In all, a vicious antime-morial to the Holocaust, an abomination...

...Reviewed by Peter Glassgold Editor, New Directions THE PUBLICATION of Cynthia Ozick's "Envy...

...Take, for example, the opening lines of the title piece: "When I heard that Isaac Kornfeld, a man of piety and brains, had hanged himself in the public park, I put a token in the stile and journeyed out to see the tree...

...While Collier postulates nasty imps and devils, though...

...Miss Ozick's work is most effective when it grows out of the tension created by the cultural polarity of gentile and Jew...

...Of course, it is unfair to expect the elements of a collection to be of uniform quality...

...The Yiddishists' fury was sadly misdirected: Miss Ozick is surely not accountable for the eclipse of their tongue, and if she is unsentimental, she is not unkind...

...It was, incidentally, included in Houghton Mifflin's The Best American Short Stories 1970...

...Two other stories?The Suitcase" and "The Doctor's Wife"—are conventional but affecting studies of melancholy, middle age and familial discord...

...This motif is tangential to Trust, where the narrator's Jewish stepfather is conceived in temperamental opposition to her carefree pantheist father, and explicit in "Envy," where the poet Edelshtein requires a translator to come to terms with the world of the goyim...

...With the exception of two previously unpublished pieces, the rest of the stories date from 1966 on, and in them Miss Ozick evinces what she sorely lacked before: control...

...But at its core there is a strong narrative of a young woman who, learning that she is illegitimate, determines to seek out her real father...

...Her first book, Trust (1966...

...or Yiddish in America" in the November 1969 issue of Commentary engendered, predictably, a barrage of letters to the editor from outraged Yiddishists who felt the novella was a callous insult to a dying language...

...Even the output of such disparate masters of short fiction as Borges, Hemingway and I. B. Singer sinks occasionally to mediocrity: We either shrug it off or, accepting it, speak seriously of their development...

...Miss Ozick frustrates its telling, meandering from one irrelevant observation to another, presenting several images where one would have sufficed and elaborating on each in offensively extravagant prose...

...Miss Ozick should be accorded this same consideration, for she gives indication of becoming a writer of remarkable power and originality...

...Edelshtein, an aging poet who can't find a single translator for his work, was labeled a disgraceful fabrication...

...his rival, the famous Yankel Ostrover, who reads his stories at the 92nd Street ymha and publishes them in the New Yorker and Playboy, was seen as a slanderous caricature only half disguised...

...Also in the supernatural vein is "The Dock-Witch," a story of an ageless temptress, semidivine, who haunts the world's harbors and so depletes her lovers' energies that they become less than shadows, wafer-thin and without reflection...

...In "Virility" the situation is somewhat altered: Edmund Gate (born Elia Gatoff), an ambitious immigrant, deliberately turns his back on his native Yiddish and achieves undeserved, though brief, literary fame...

...is an immense novel, boring and overwritten...

...Quite unexpectedly, what follows from this arresting, low-key opening is a fantasy every bit as charming—and chilling—as those of the British fabulist John Collier...

...her words are carefully chosen for their effect...

...My own reaction was altogether different then, and rereading the story now in the author's latest collection, it remains for me an outstanding work...

...Miss Ozick invokes Nature as the agent of destruction...