A New Triumph for Idiosyncrasy

By Patricia Blake

THE CANNIBAL GALAXY by Cynthia Ozick; Knopf; 162 pages; $11.95

The Cannibal Galaxy, Cynthia Ozick's first full-scale novel in 17 years, comes as a welcome reminder of her commanding powers as a storyteller. Her previous book, Art and Ardor, a collection of essays published last spring, revealed her to be one of the most vigorously intellectual of contemporary American authors. Still, no other fiction writer except Isaac Bashevis Singer has succeeded so brilliantly in harnessing what Ozick has called "the steeds of myth and mysticism" in the Jewish tradition. The wonder is that her style has remained as disciplined and supple as it was in her first novel, Trust (1966). Clearly, Ozick continues to meet Henry James' description of the artist as someone who builds "with the blocks quarried in the deeps of his imagination and on his personal premises."

The premise of Ozick's new novel is the uneasy condition of the Jewish heritage in the prevailing Gentile culture, a subject that can be fully viewed only in the shadow cast by the Holocaust. The book's governing metaphor is the cannibal galaxy--in astronomy, one of the vast colonies of stars that devour smaller galaxies. The cannibal stands for Europe, devouring its Jewish citizens. Such out-of-the-way images spring naturally from Ozick's prodigious erudition. This novel, like her earlier short stories and novellas (The Pagan Rabbi, Levitation, Bloodshed), is dense with metaphor, often drawn from the rich Jewish resources at her command: the Hebrew Bible, the Midrashim, or Jewish homilies, and the mystic texts of the Kabbalah. At the same time, as The Cannibal Galaxy demonstrates, she navigates the currents of other world cultures with the surehandedness of a true lover of ideas.

Ozick's protagonist, Joseph Brill, is a survivor of Nazi-occupied France. The son of a Parisian fishmonger, Brill was infatuated early with French culture ("the nuances of Verlaine maddened him with idolatrous joy"). In 1942, when French police rounded up Paris' Jews, the adolescent escaped to the basement of a convent school. There, harbored by nuns, Brill dreamed of founding a Jewish school that would join "the civilization that invented the telescope with the civilization that invented conscience."

Cast up in America after the war, Brill founded his school on the shore of one of the Great Lakes. The institution boasted a dual curriculum: "the Priceless Legacy of Scripture and Commentaries," and social studies and French. As Brill puts it, "The waters of Shiloh springing from the head of Western Civilization." But the experiment flops. Hopelessly inept as a pedagogue and judge of children, Brill blames his school's failure on its students, whom he dismisses as "commoners, weeds, the children of plumbers." Given such contempt, he fails to recognize genius when it comes his way. Beulah Lilt, who sits immobile | and mute in the classroom, is destined to become a great artist. Poor Beulah! i A quiet, tiny child, self-immured, she seems to suffer from "an unremitting bewilderment," much like the young Cynthia Ozick, as she recalls herself. In the novel, Ozick has reserved some of her most luminous prose to endow this girl-child with tender life. Though bursting with irony and wit, The Cannibal Galaxy takes on a fearful seriousness when Ozick cites this fragment from the Talmud: "The world rests on the breath of the children in the schoolhouses."

Still, most of the children who attended Brill's school are condemned to follow a path away from Jewish tradition, leaving both scholarship and conscience behind. Among them is Brill's only son, Naphtali, upon whom the father had pinned his hopes for redemption. Naphtali is headed not for the Sorbonne, where Joseph hoped he might bear "Jerusalem athwart the Louvre," but to the University of Miami, where he studies business administration.

The Cannibal Galaxy seems to suggest that it is all but impossible for Jews to break into the surrounding culture with their heritage intact. Their loss, and the world's, of such a vast and distinctive tradition would be a tragedy. As Ozick has warned, "The annihilation of idiosyncrasy assures the annihilation of culture." But we may take heart: the sense of her commanding novel is that Cynthia Ozick has prevailed, as ever more readers are attracted by the universal appeal of her Jewishness. Hers is a triumph for the idiosyncrasy that animates all art. --By Patricia Blake

"Sometimes I feel I am a cannibal galaxy unto myself," says Cynthia Ozick, in a sweet, girlish voice. She is sipping tea on the back porch of the rambling, old-fashioned house in New Rochelle, N.Y., she shares with her husband, Attorney Bernard Hallote, and her teen-age daughter Rachel. Ozick was up most of the previous night writing, engaged in what she describes as "the fight between self and self." She explains: "Ancestrally, I stem from the Mitnagged [literally opponent] tradition, which is superrational and superskeptical. That's the part of me that writes the essays and has no patience with anything mystical. The other part--the writer--doesn't know what she's doing or even why an idea has seized her. She is all embroiled in chaos and discovery. The essayist has already discovered."

Ozick can scarcely credit the notion that she is widely regarded as a formidable intellectual. "It seems like a hoax, a vast mistake," she says. Born in New York City in 1928, she was raised in the Pelham Bay section of The Bronx, a middle-class neighborhood. "At P.S. 711 was dumb, cross-eyed, and couldn't do arithmetic; I think the image of what we are when we are little kids is our image for life. Everything went wrong for me then, including the anti-Semitism of the teachers and the kids."

Last January Ozick was chosen by the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters to receive one of the Mildred and Harold Strauss Livings, an annual tax-free award of $35,000 for a minimum of five years. "When I first read the letter announcing it," she recalls, "I sat at the kitchen table bawling away and saying, 'I can't accept this.' My husband said: 'Are you mad?' It went on that way for more than a month. I wallowed in guilt. I thought: How did this happen to me? What about everybody else with the same track record? It took me six months to realize that I ought to jubilate and that it's the kindest, most remarkable thing."

The grant has made it possible for Ozick to stop lecturing, as she has done for the past twelve years, speaking on "Jewish subjects, feminist subjects, literary subjects and sometimes all three mixed together." She was never nervous, she says. "I didn't do it extemporaneously. I had my paper. And I'm nearsighted, so I couldn't see all those people out there. Sometimes I would do a dozen lectures a year. I had to prepare them, but the intellectual preparation was never as hard as finding a pair of pantyhose without holes. If you're basically dowdy, pulling yourself together for a lecture is very difficult."

Being middle-aged is not easy either.

Says Ozick: "It just seems unreal to be 55--that's for one's mother. I find it's a kind of second adolescence, though much harder. Physical changes, like having your hair turn white, must be at least the equivalent of being a little girl growing breasts. Before, you were always full of the future: some day you are going to do this. And some day is here or it's never going to be here. It's frightening, as if a needle got stuck in the record of life."

Ozick is currently translating poetry for a new Penguin edition of Yiddish verse, edited by Irving Howe and Ruth Wisse. It is a labor of love. "It's so wonderful to make another poem in English and to set yourself up in rivalry with the original. It's the only writing I find enjoyable. All other writing is so painful; I would do anything to avoid writing. That's probably why I read so much. But reading inspires and leads to hope for more writing." sb This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so viewer discretion is required.