New York Stories

by A.D. Amorosi

books

Though she's long written novels, Cynthia Ozick is first and foremost one of America's greatest literary critics and essayists. Like the Henry James she so admires, Ozick — whether writing on the audacity of Anne Frank's Holocaust tales tossed onto Broadway or her enduring adoration of Roethke and Kafka (in 2000's collection, Quarrel & Quandary) — is a moralist. As an argumentative lover of language, polemic and odd connectivity (the radical co-joining of Dostoevsky and the Unabomber), her epistemological morality plays are great, heightened dramas. So, then, there should be no surprise that in her newest book, Heir to the Glimmering World: A Novel (Houghton Mifflin), Ozick takes on a kaleidoscopic set of New Bohemians/displaced Jewish-German immigrants in 1930s Manhattan, whose lives and philosophy she engraves onto the page with the skill of a woodcarver. Ozick, herself a Zionist, tackles

Karaism, an arcane Jewish doctrine whose strict adherence to Old Testament Bible Scripture rejects Talmud-based Judaism. Certainly, Ozick has explored Judaism in previous works (The Puttermesser Papers, The Pagan Rabbi and Other Stories). But woven seamlessly through the lives of the Mitwissers (whose escape from Nazi Germany is the axis to Heir), Rose Meadows (the narrator and Bronte-obsessed orphan the family has taken in) and James A'Bair (the iconic son of a children's author who took in the Mitwissers), Karaism becomes yet another character — a cloaked part of Ozick's mix of myth and stark truth, sciences and the gods and, ultimately, the morality in between.

Cynthia Ozick reads Tue., Sept. 21, 8 p.m., $6-$12, Free Library, Central Branch, 1901 Vine St., 215-569-9700.

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