SOURCE: Strandberg, Victor. “Judgement.” In Greek Mind/Jewish Soul: The Conflicted Art of Cynthia Ozick, pp. 152–91. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1994.

In the following excerpt, Strandberg examines the critical reaction to several of Ozick's works, including Trust and The Pagan Rabbi.

The Critical Reckoning

Cynthia Ozick, thirty-eight years old when Trust launched her career, was fifty-five when William Scheick and Catherine Rainwater produced the first sustained effort of Ozick scholarship, a seventy-five-page segment of the summer 1983 Texas Studies in Literature and Language that included an introduction, an interview, a bibliography, and my own long essay. The first book of criticism on Ozick was Harold Bloom's Cynthia Ozick (1986), a collection of essays intended to represent “the best criticism so far available” on Ozick's fiction. It is an accurate reflection of her career, and not a reproach to Bloom's book, that twenty years after publishing Trust, such a collection would...