SOURCE: Bell, Millicent. “Fiction Chronicle.” Partisan Review 65, no. 1 (winter 1998): 49–60.

In the following review, Bell discusses pieces of short fiction from several Jewish authors, including Ozick.

In 1954, this magazine published “The Magic Barrel,” which was an immediate sensation. One previous story of Bernard Malamud's had appeared in these pages and a few others elsewhere, but he was mostly known as the author of The Natural, a first novel that gave no hint of the vision and voice he had begun to use in short fiction. When, thirty years later, Robert Redford appeared on movie screens as Malamud's slugger, Roy Hobbes, the novelist was pleased that the film (although it had happy-ended his story) gave notice that he had not been merely a “Jewish writer.” He had always been interested in writing “for all men,” he said. The Natural had successfully evoked the most American of myths as expressed by...