Pagan Rabbi and Other Stories, The.
Ozick, Cynthia. The Pagan Rabbi and Other Stories. New York: Knopf, 1971.
8vo.; brown cloth, extremities bumped; black dust-jacket, lightly worn with one chip.
First edition of Ozick’s first collection of short stories, preceded by her first novel, the stylistically ambitious Trust (1966). A major association copy, inscribed: For Professor Lionel Trilling from Cynthia Ozick with good wishes, and with the renewed conviction that is a teleological universe we live in! April 1972.
A serious literary figure, with consistently lofty aspirations, Cynthia Ozick (b. 1928) is most distinctively marked by her effort to reconcile her orthodox Judaism with modernist aesthetics in her works. Ozick’s work typically reflects Jewish concerns: her characters struggle between the pagan and the holy, between nature and art or Judaism. The Pagan Rabbi and Other Stories focuses on the experience of dislocated Jewish immigrants, with an emphasis on loss: of the Yiddish languages, of the past, and of religion.
A major copy of an uncommon book, linking Ozick to one of the pioneering exponents of the New Criticism, and a frontier-forging New York Jewish intellectual. At an early point in his career at Columbia—which would last over four decades—Trilling nearly lost his position due to the anti-Semitic leanings of his colleagues.
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