The last time I read a full length book by Cynthia Ozick, it was more than thirty years ago. It was a collection of her short stories (The Pagan Rabbi ?) which had one really memorable story - the rest of the book is a blur. The story, "Yiddish In America" ended with one of the characters screaming with outrage, lamenting the death of Yiddish. Only much later did I learn that the two young American writers of Yiddish portrayed in that story were slyly modeled on poet Jacob Glatstein and Isaac Bashevis Singer. Since then I have read an occasional essay by Ozick and not very much else. I had immensely enjoyed "Yiddish In America" and on the strength of that memory alone, I recently decided to read her 2004 novel, "Heir To The Glimmering World".
Cynthia Ozick is a Jewish writer who writes about the Jewish experience. This book too is about a Jewish family in America, refugees from Germany. But their story is not so much about their Jewishness as it is about their Germanness. The Mitwisser family, headed by Rudolph and Elsa Mitwisser leave or rather are made to leave Germany with their five young children in 1935, a few years before Hitler unleashes his full fury on Europe. They are a scholarly couple - he an expert of the obscure Jewish heretic sect, the Karaites and she a brilliant experimental physicist and colleague of Erwin Schroedinger of the famous Schroedinger's equation of quantum mechanics. The escape from Germany is facilitated by a quirk of religious nomenclature. An American Quaker group mistakes Rudi Mitwisser's Jewish Karaites for the Christian Charismites and brings the family to Albany, NY where it is hoped he will continue his research unmolested by the Nazis. Once here, the mistake is discovered and the Quakers do their best to keep the wolf from the Mitwisser door through charity and hand me downs although they can no longer offer an academic stipend to the professor. The Mitwissers' uncertain fate becomes a matter of some consternation and embarrassment for both the hosts and the recipients ("parasites" according to Mrs. Mitwisser).
The refugee family's path soon crosses with that of the young orphan Rose Meadows, who is hired by the Mitwisser family as an assistant to the husband. Rose is a resolute young daughter of an irresolute father who has the mercy to die early in the story and leave her to fend for herself. Poor but reasonably educated and self sufficient, Rose's role within the family takes several twists and turns. She ends up acting in turn as a nanny to the Mitwisser children, a nurse and confidante to the increasingly sick mother as well as the occasional typist and transcriber for the father. But most of all, Rose is the observer of the family's transformation from proud and frightened refugees to well heeled but conflicted Americans.
"Heir To The Glimmering World" is an interesting story with several twists of fate and turns of human nature. From the beginning to the end of the book, most of the major players undergo several upheavals of character as well as hierarchy. The changes have a lot to do with money, for which they become dependent on the whims of a wealthy young man who takes a fancy to them because he sees in the Mitwissers, a family of misfits like himself. The "heirlooms" in Ozick's book have to do with many metaphorical bequests as well as real money.
Ozick's story is full of the strange and the unusual, but fortunately, she keeps her flights of fancy within check and there is not a "golem" in sight. The Mitwisser family drama involves mainly the Mitwisser couple, their beautiful and solemn eldest daughter Anneliese and their unlikely young benefactor, James the Bear Boy. James is a lot like A.A. Milne's Christopher Robin (Christopher Milne in real life) of Winnie the Pooh fame. Rose's own life, although entangled with her employers, has its separate storyline. Motherless from a young age, she is brought up by a negligent father who teaches high school math and lives his life by lies, deception and a loaded dice. She has a mild mannered cousin, a pharmacist named Bertram who comes to play a crucial role within the Mitwisser family in an unexpected way. And among all these slightly odd characters and the vicissicitude of their fortunes, pop in and out others, who are even more strange. Like the fiery feminist communist radical Ninel (Lenin spelt backwards) and Dr. Tandoori, who used to be an eminent Indian philosopher in Bombay of the "Nastik" (atheist) school but who for some inexplicable reason, becomes a tailor in the Bronx.
Then there are the heirs. The most obvious one is James the Bear Boy, who owns fabulous wealth but is discomfited by it because of his unhappy and reluctant role in its acquisition. He wants to shed it although it gives him capricious power over others. Mrs Mitwisser, whose brilliant mind weaves in and out of insanity, should have been an heir to the Schroedinger fame but is denied due to her gender, her motherhood and not to a small measure, her Jewishness. But perhaps she does triumphantly retain a bit of Schroedinger's legacy in her life after experimental physics is no longer available to her. The paternity of one of her three sons, the beautiful Heinz, is an enigma to the readers and also Professor Mitwisser, who loves Heinz the best but cannot look him in the eye. Rudi Mitwisser, himself an heir to the vast wealth of the obscure history and scholarship of the ancient Karaites, strives and fails to bring them back to life (like "fireflies") and make them a part of mainstream conversation in Judaism. Rose and Bertram too inherit small and big fortunes. But in the end, it is a new born baby, an heir in the true legal sense, who restores the focus of the family both physically and emotionally at a time when it comes precariously close to tragic fragmentation.
I enjoyed "Heir To The Glimmering World", but not as much as I had relished the rascally "Yiddish in America".
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