Heir to the Glimmering World

Unlike a few of the readers, I did not find the characters that far out. The basic psychologies of each character reminds me of someone or parts of someones I have known. Of course, I did not realize this until I had read the last word and the story was at its end. Glimmerings unllike many novels was easy to read as it absorbs and carries one's mind to what seems like a very distant place and different time. When it was over, it was like waking up from a dream, but the dream was your own life and now reality was entering. The placement of the story in another time and place and the interweaving of another language into the text was seamless. I also felt the details, each one whether about how the house looked, where is it was located, the Jewish history of the lost sect, all of each piece was important to the story's whole. The Professor is llke many dedicated intellectuals who strive and actually sometimes achieve some kind of esctasy in their pursuit of knowledge and for a way of knowing and then at some point realize they achieved the xenith of their work and the real quest for one reason or another is over or must be abandoned. Rosie, as he calls the main character and narrator, his Amanuensis, seems very real to me. Her youth and lack of emotional nurturance all her life minimizes her reactions to the insensitive behaviors of the family members around her and makes it possible for her to affect their behavior usually in a positive direction and elucidate the meaning beneath their strange affects. I kept wondering if the Bear Boy ever really existed which I am sure he did not. Even that character seemed a very honest depiction of how in this case undesired or undeserved fame can destroy what is natural and good. Rosie's relationship with Bertram, her not real cousin, is some kind of substitute for a father-daughter (with romantic overtones) or in part mother-daughter relationship she has been missing but it is far from perfect and like all of us she has to move on. It was hard for me to put the book down and yet I wanted to savor the flavor and experience the story completely. I was well satisfied with the ending which is so seldom true in most novels I have read. I had the feeling that the author loved all the characters despite their flaws and miseries. It made me love them too. Sharon Raphael, Ph.D. Long Beach, California

Cynthia Ozick has written a great book, and I wouldn't be at all surprised if it won the Pulitzer Prize this year. (And no, I am not related to her, nor have I ever met her!) The story is original and well-written. Some samples of Ozick's writing: When talking about displaced European professors, she says "the rest, in their broken dignity, dragging their medals and degrees, drooped toward whatever uncertain welcome they might find in institutions north or west or south" (p.58) Another example: "The snow "blew down hour after hour, as if some bloated invisible sky-bound stomach was spewing it out" (p.122). The best part is it's not great writing simply for great writing's sake -- she uses it to tell a memorable story.

Ozick's many-layered novel, set in 1935, is built on contradictions, beginning with her choice of narrator. A formidable intellectual and brilliant writer whose essays and novels have received numerous international awards, Ozick tells her story in the voice of Rose, a naïve, lonely 18-year-old of haphazard education in upstate New York. The novel has the dramatic structure of Dickens and the Brontes, the Victorian writers Rose loves, but its thematic milieu is wholly modern, exploring the clash of European intellectualism and American materialism, and the incomprehensible evil and upheaval of Nazism. "Frau Mitwisser led me into a tiny parlor so dark that it took some time before her face, small and timid as a vole's, glimmered into focus." Rose, from a future, matured vantage point, opens her narrative with this day. On her own at 18, she has answered an ad in the Albany paper for some amorphous position with this German-Jewish refugee family. Her parents are dead, her mother long ago, her father recently, and her cousin Bertram (her first, and unrequited, love) is about to abandon her for a radical communist, Ninel. Taking refuge among the family of refugees, Rose remains isolated. Professor Mitwisser is a scholar and a larger-than-life figure, at least at first: "I was conscious of a force, of a man accustomed to dictating his conditions." Mrs. Mitwisser, too, was once a woman of standing; a scientist who worked with Schrödinger, though she got no credit for his Nobel Prize, despite her contribution. Now, unhinged by events, she keeps to her bed, neglecting her children. The three boys are interchangeable hellions, the baby, Waltraut, is largely ignored, and the eldest daughter, Anneliese, is bossy and aloof. The Mitwissers were rescued by Quakers who found the professor a position teaching about an obscure Christian sect, the Charismites. But the professor's field is not the Charismites but the Karaites, an obscure, heretic Jewish sect that held to a literal interpretation of the Bible. It is some time before Rose understands that in Europe "they had esteemed him because no one knew what he knew. And here - now - he was scorned for the same reason: no one knew what he knew." In an irony that will be missed by many readers since Ozick does not allude to it even though her narrator is recalling these events years later, the Karaites were spared by Hitler who decided that their heresy made them non-Jews. Some even participated in the Holocaust. Rose, of course, has never heard of the Karaites (or the Charismites). Her first task is to box up the professor's library because a mysterious benefactor has rescued them from Albany and arranged for a move to New York so the professor can continue his scholarship at the city's library. The books are in German and Hebrew, so Rose, ignorant of both languages, boxes them in the most efficient way - by size. The professor, outraged (" `This is how an intelligent creature organizes scholarship? By ho

Rose Meadows, an orphan needing a place to live and work, answers a vaguely worded newspaper advertisement in 1935 and is hired for unspecified household work by the Mitwissers, for whom "disorder was...a rule of life." Jews who escaped Germany in 1933, they now live in Albany, New York, a place they find vastly different from the intellectual milieu of Europe. Rudolf Mitwisser, the patriarch, spends his days closeted in his study, researching an obscure group of ninth century Jewish scholars, the Karaites, who reject Talmudic interpretations of traditional Judaism in favor of direct and literal interpretation of the Old Testament. Elsa Mitwisser, formerly a physicist and colleague of Erwin Schrodinger, is distraught that her family is now dependent upon others and regarded as "parasites." Unbalanced and confined to her room, she, like her husband, ignores the responsibilities of the family and their five children. The Mitwissers have been "adopted" by James A'Bair, a young man with an independent income. As the inspiration and model for the Bear Books, a children's series written by his father, James collects substantial royalties. Believing himself to be a Karaite, James supports Mitwisser's research, provides funds for the family, and occasionally participates in their domestic life. Moving elliptically through past and present, the narrative explores the backgrounds of all the main characters, traveling forward and backward simultaneously. Focusing on character and theme, rather than plot, Ozick creates an intense world in which each person seeks the fulfillment of personal dreams, which glimmer on the horizon like fireflies, fragile hopes that may die before they come to fruition. Mitwisser, regarded as a great scholar in Europe, finds his research of little interest to Jewish scholars here. Elsa Mitwisser, envious because her colleague, Schrodinger, ended up winning the Nobel Prize, believes history has wronged her. Rose tries to give "symmetry, routine, propriety" to her life, but her past keeps intruding. James does not know who he is, apart from his identity as the "Bear Boy." It is sixteen-year-old Anneliese who seems to have the best chance of capturing the "glimmers." Ozick's smooth narrative and rich imagery bring the story to life and show the characters developing. Anneliese is "an infant bird tapping with her little beak against the shell." Rose's father "robbed dailiness of predictability, so that [her] childhood's every breath hung on a contingency." Such strange characters, presented without sentimentality, may not fully capture the reader's heart or inspire a great deal of empathy, but Ozick's quiet humor and her sense of irony make their stories important to the reader. Mary Whipple

This is a stunning example of the magic that can happen when author, style, plot and theme combine. Ozick has written a smart, thoroughly compelling and wonderfully charactered neo-Victorian (people and themes and social symbolism blend) novel of displaced persons set in 1930s New York. It's part social commentary, part the melodrama, part mystery. It's simply amazing how Ozick takes a cubist approach to the philosophy being discussed...some live it, some study it, some defy it ---- but all are some form of it! Thematically it's a novel of history and identity and the hazards and benefits of attachment as well as rejection. This is the sort of work that can give the reader (it gave this one!!!) an almost transcendant buzz and reaffirm your faith in literature. Simply incredible!