THE PAGAN RABBI AND OTHER STORIES

A fresh and remarkable talent, evidenced in her novel Trust (1966) is here displayed in a group of short stories in which Miss Ozick softens the boundaries of irony while never scanting the ethical reference and reality that gave rise to it. In particular, most of the stories are set within the western Jewish experience; in general, however, they are tragicomedies about human unavailability, both to themselves and to each other, in an often monstrous universe. In "Yiddish in America" an aging, querulous and driven writer sublimates his own mortifications and anonymity in a ragged crusade for the continued use of the Yiddish language. Green with jealousy he attends a "Y" reading by a lionized Yiddish "mainstream America" writer, and searches the dark night for a translator to give him a voice in a present that finds him irrelevant. Two stories deal with satanic manifestations: a rabbi is trapped by a naiad; an urbane lawyer is set upon by an enormous and fleshly sea nymph. In the most moving story, "The Doctor's Wife," a kind, passively dutiful bachelor of fifty, among a family of parasitical combatants, accepts the knowledge that "accommodation becomes permanence," too late for anything but a sere autumnal haze of gentle lies. In the brief "The Butterfly and the Traffic Light," the answer to life's stops and gos may be simply to "live always at the point of beautiful change," a sardonic answer to unlovely transformation. Miss Ozick writes with the cutcrystal precision of Singer and the scouring tragic-ironic strengths of Malamud — exceptional stories all.