In the following essay, Kauvar explores thematic links between Ozick's novel Trust and the stories in The Pagan Rabbi. In particular, Kauvar finds that Ozick continues "the battle between Hebraism and Hellinism, the artists' dilemma" in "The Pagan Rabbi."

Faced with divergent paths at the end of her voyage, the narrator of Trust follows neither of them; they remain on the same plane of her vision. But they are pursued in The Pagan Rabbi, Cynthia Ozick's first collection of stories. Each tale in the volume has its counterpart; each provides a different perspective, records a disparate experience. The dialectical structure of Ozick's first novel shapes not only the individual stories in The Pagan Rabbi but the structure of the volume itself. Informed by the storyteller's duplicate vision, the collection revives the themes present in Trust, often pairing them within a single tale or else matching them in...