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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."