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."