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Book Reviews 107 In sum, The Dead Sea Scroll Deception raises some important questions concerning the publication of the Scrolls, but its solutions demonstrate that the book is aptly titled. Anyone desiring a serious account of scholarship and issues pertaining to the Dead Sea Scrolls is advised to use this volume with care. Marvin A. Sweeney Department of Religious Studies University of Miami Understanding Cynthia Ozick, by Lawrence S. Friedman. Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1991. Understanding Contemporary American Literature Series, Matthew J. Broccoli, Editor. 182 pp. $29.95. Cynthia Ozick, in her late 30's when she launched her career with a huge novel titled Trust, had to wait until her late 50s to receive serious critical attention. Beginning with a 75-page segment of Texas Studies in Literature and Language devoted to her work in 1983 (thanks to editors William Scheick and Catherine Rainwater), large-scale criticism continued with two book-length collections of essays: Harold Bloom's Cynthia Ozick (1986), a Chelsea House production; and the Fall 1987 number of Studies in American Jewish Literature, wholly given over to Ozick by its editor, Daniel Walden. In 1987 Sanford Pinsker brought out the first one-author book on Ozick, The Uncompromising Fictions ofCynthia Ozick, which was followed in 1988 by Joseph Lowin's Cynthia Ozick, in 1989 by Vera Emuma Kielsky's Inevitable E:xiles, and in 1991 by Lawrence S. Friedman's Understanding Cynthia Ozick. With a big book by Elaine M. Kauvar due from the Indiana University Press in the spring of 1993, it appears that Ms. Ozick's day of literary judgment is coming round at last, in her third decade of high productivity. Given the belatedness of this critical flowering, it is reasonable that Lawrence Friedman's Understanding Cynthia Ozick bears a foundational purpose, as defined by the general editor Matthew Broccoli's statement about the whole series, Understanding Contemporary American Literature : "[it] has been planned as a series of guides or companions for students as well as good nonacademic readers." For this book, however, Broccoli's modesty ofpurpose is misleading. Understanding Cynthia Ozick is a highly sophisticated book which grounds its insights in a judicious melding ofOzick's biography, essays, and fiction. Arranged in six chapters, the book begins with an analysis of the writer's central intellectual 108 SHOFAR Fall 1993 Vol. 12, No. 1 concerns and affinities, notably the quandaries of Jewish identity in contemporary America. Friedman sharpens Ozick's distinctiveness in this regard by measuring her work, in passing, against Saul Bellow, Philip Roth, and the heritage of Freudianism. Using the perspective afforded by this intellectual overview, the next five chapters trace the thrust of Ozick's fiction chronologically from Trust· (1966) through The Messiah of Stockholm (1987). In general, these analyses of specific books are exemplary criticismastute , learned, and cogently written. Although he unavoidably restates some insights elucidated by earlier critics, Friedman makes some excellent original observations-as, for example, when he compares the final sentence of "Bloodshed" ("Then you are as bloody as anyone") to Stephen Crane's classic novella: "in this case the blood shed by Jews throughout a tragic history ... becomes the red badge ofJewish identity" (p. 106). So, too, Friedman sees the shadow of Philip Roth's Amy Bellette (the girl who thought she was Anne Frank) behind lars Andemening's supposition that he was the son of Bruno Schulz (p. 160). He expatiates in new ways on the connections between Ozick's Adela in The Messiah of Stockholm and the Adela of Bruno Schulz's two published books (pp. 164-5), and he detects the presence of Jerzy Kosinski not only in "A Mercenary" but in The Shawl (p. 118). His discussion of the golem-making tradition likewise offers new inSights (pp. 135-6), as does his analogy between Freudian psychology (in "Freud's Room") and idolatry (p. 3). Friedman is probably at his best in discussing one of Ozick's most controversial, cryptic tales, "Usurpation." The main limitation of Friedman's study was imposed by its relative brevity: 182 pages cannot do justice to the whole Ozick oeuvre, which includes three novels, four volumes of novellas/short stories, and some fifty formidably...

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