New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1983. dj. Hardcover first edition - Her second novel - written 17 years after the first and following 3 volumes of shorter fiction. The story of a principal of a high school in the American Midwest, a French Jew, survivor of the Holocaust, who believes that he was allowed to survive so he could teach, and yet feels that he is surrounded by mediocrity in his pupils. Edmund White describes Ozick as 'the best American writer to have emerged in recent years... Her artistic strength derives from her moral energy... Judaism has given to her what Catholicism gave to Flannery O'Connor: authority, penetration and indignation.'. ISBN: 0-394-52943-x.