Cynthia Ozick reading from her new novel
An Interview With Cynthia Ozick
By Nan Goldberg
Heir to the Glimmering World, Cynthia Ozick’s latest novel, which has now been issued in paperback (Mariner Books, $13), is as difficult to summarize as it is exhilarating to read.
It is narrated in 1937 by Rose Meadows, an orphan on the verge of adulthood and, like almost every other character in the book, a refugee of sorts: Having been taken in and cared for by a distant cousin, Bertram, Rose is tossed out again when Bertram falls in love with a woman who doesn’t want her around. The girl accepts a live-in position with a family of recent refugees from Nazi Germany: Prof. Mittwisser, an expert on an obscure Jewish sect called the Karaites; his wife Elsa, an accomplished physicist whose terrifying escape from the Nazis apparently destroyed her sanity; and five children ranging from 3 to 16.
The Mittwissers have little money and rely for support on a total stranger whom they met as they arrived in America. He is James, called Bear Boy, because as a little boy he was the subject of his father’s world-famous illustrated children’s books – an accident of fate that has left James uncertain of his identity, very damaged – and, with the death of his parents, incredibly wealthy.
His and Rose’s involvement with the sophisticated, troubled Mittwisser family alter that family’s dynamics and destiny, and also alter Rose and James in different but fundamental ways.
Ozick is a remarkably versatile writer: of short stories such as The Shawl, (Vintage, 1990) and my favorite, Envy, or Yiddish in America in the collection The Pagan Rabbi (Knopf, 1971); novels The Messiah of Stockholm, (Knopf, 1987); and The Puttermeiser Papers, (Knopf, 1997); and essays (Fame and Folly, Knopf, 1996; and Quarrel and Quandry, (Knopf, 2000).
Born in 1928 in Manhattan, Ozick grew up in the Bronx (“Pelham Bay, which was semi-rural at the time – the end of the subway line”). For many years now, she has lived in Westchester, only a few miles from the Bronx of her childhood.
In a remarkably young, almost little-girl voice (most certainly not the voice of Edelshstein, the fierce, congenitally angry protagonist of Envy), Ozick spoke with me on the phone from her home, where, she says, she spends almost all of her time: reading and writing and hardly ever venturing out.
Probably for that reason, she was stunned when she discovered, during her book tour for Heir to the Glimmering World, that “there are actually people who have really read stuff I’ve written. I have no sense of that whatever.”
The literal truth of this was demonstrated when I mentioned that I’d listened to an audiotape reading of Envy, or Yiddish in America while driving to Bar Harbor, Maine.
“In the car!” she marveled, as if the thought of someone listening to her words had simply never before occurred to her. She seems, still, to an extraordinary degree, unaware that her work is cherished.
* * *
N.G.: Do you feel as if the book tour is a giant interruption in your life or do you think it has added something?
C.O.: I regret not having the time to write; however, I cannot regret the visions I’ve had of places that I would ordinarily not go to and the experience of meeting so many people.
It’s really revelatory. I had thought that the “signing line,” as they refer to it, would be sort of an assembly line and very superficial. But an amazing thing happened. You get a kind of epiphany with each person. It’s fleeting; You can’t have a lot of time with each person, and I know that and they know that, so when they come they come with something quintessential that they want to say – sometimes triggered by the book and sometimes, when the book hasn’t yet been read, by something else. In Chicago, a man told me about his father’s having fought in the Spanish Civil War and the documents and descriptions he left behind, and this all came bursting out because the father’s yahrzeit was just a few days ago and [the son] was full of all this.
Another person told about her elderly mother’s reading preferences. There were many stories of grandparents, many stories of parents. It’s so intimate and so condensed and so remarkable that I feel as if I’ve visited a highly populated novel by Dickens or Tolstoy because of all these protagonists – these heroes and heroines of stories. These treasures are put before you – these jewels that people put to you as they ask you to put your name in their book. It’s almost a way of handing me a present. I never expected that.
How did you become interested in the Karaites, the obscure Jewish sect that Professor Mittwisser is studying?
I wanted to think about how I could have a German-Jewish refugee professor working on something very esoteric, hidden in history, and heretical. And I was inspired by having met Gershom Sholem, the magisterial scholar in Jerusalem who left Berlin in 1925, not as a refugee but as an idealist. He was a great innovator in the stream of Jewish mysticism, and I was fascinated by his figure – literally his physical figure, because he’s a giant of a man.
But I was not so much interested in the Karaites as in the idea of this professor’s obsession with them. Because after all, this was not a scholarly tome about this sect. It was about these human beings, these refugees, and then the Bear Boy, who’s a kind of refugee from his parents.
I think you’re right. What was so wonderful about this novel was that I really felt these people. I felt first, very deeply, who they were, and it was only later on that I began to grope around for the connections between them.
As I did, by the way, when writing it. I groped around. I had these two ideas, these two characters, actually – the Bear Boy, based on Christopher Robin and Winnie the Pooh; and Professor Mitwisser – and I did not know what one had to do with the other. And then one night at about 4 a.m. I saw the connection, and recognized that it had been there all the time and I had intuited it and felt it – so yes, the people came first.
The book has that feeling – of a story that evolves, I guess like life, with these very different kinds of people randomly coming together and completely changing each other’s lives. Was that how it felt when you were writing it?
Yes. There was a point with the character Bertram in particular: There he was at the start of the novel, and then I had to drop him to go on. I knew I had to bring him back, but I had no idea how. And then when he came back, he took over. He drove the story about himself; I didn’t. It amazed me each day: I came back to my desk, and there was Bertram pushing things around that I had no control over. I had thought Bertram was kind of a sweet guy; I did not know that he was this rather monstrous controller.
Do you find when you write that you have to let go of a certain amount of control to let that happen, or does it just happen?
At the beginning, when you’re all in chaos, you just have to grit your teeth and force it, just sit down and make it happen. And making it happen is pain, but when it begins to take over, then it becomes quite easy and joyful and you just can’t wait to get back to it.
How long does that take?
It’s about halfway … and when it comes together you discover that you knew all the time but you didn’t consciously know.
I can give you a very mundane example: The copy editor [at Houghton Mifflin] noticed that at the beginning of the book Bertram is making omelets, and way at the end he’s making omelets again. And he asked me: “Did you mean to have that repetition”? I didn’t even know about that repetition; I had forgotten that he was making omelets at the beginning. And I was thrilled. I said: “Oh my God, thank you, thank you! You’ve shown me that this is a characteristic of Bertram: he makes omelets.”
I know that’s just a tiny point, omelet-making, but it applies to the larger thing. Because to have a character, in such a minor point, be consistent, be himself is an indication of the rounded reality that characters take on without the writer even knowing.
Steinbeck said, in East of Eden, that some people are monsters – born without some essential part of their humanity, just like missing a limb – but what is missing is compassion, conscience. He was actually describing sociopaths before the word was coined. In East of Eden, the character Kate is evil in that way. I’m thinking that James, Bear Boy, is a little like Kate, because James is perfectly willing to do whatever it takes to make himself feel better in the moment, even if it damages other people.
He’d been an abused child.
Yes, I know he’s a hurt person, and a damaged person. But would you characterize him as a bad person? Or Bertram: Rose says about Bertram, at the end, that his goodness is treacherous, that his obligingness, which can be turned this way and that, could have dangerous results. Would you say that Bertram is a bad person?
In novels, I’m not sure there are bad persons. In life I believe there are. But in novels, I think in order for it to be a novel, there has to be sympathy on all sides. You as the writer have to enter into every single human being in the novel. There are bad guys, for sure, because every story has a conflict and every conflict has a good guy and a bad guy. But still, you have to enter the bad guy, enter into him sympathetically and take his point of view, or he won’t be a rounded character. Bertram is a bad person, but from the writer’s point of view, the writer has to have sympathy; he’s living inside the skin of this bad person. So in order for a novel to really be what we mean when we say the word “novel,” there can’t be evil.
But in the world at large, where the accepted rules of the novel are irrelevant, that’s where I believe in evil.
Give me an example.
Suicide bombing. And maybe not so much the suicide bomber him- or herself as those who send them and spare their own children.
Can you imagine writing a book that had a suicide bomber as a character?
I would be opposed to such a book. I’ve written an essay called The Rights of History and the Rights of Imagination [included in Quarrel and Quandry] about that. There are certain things I have a red line for and I would not do, because writing fiction involves and implicates the writer in the villainy of the villain. There’s always sympathy, as I’ve been saying, and I don’t want to write fiction where I have to be sympathetic with a suicide bomber.
I haven’t read Snow, by Orhan Pamuk, but last year at the New Yorker festival I was on a panel with him and we had exactly this discussion that you and I are having now. And he said that, yes, he has bad guys, bombers, Islamic jihadists, in his book. In life he definitely opposes them, but as a fiction writer he wants to show their point of view in a sympathetic way. I thought that dangerous and I was wildly offended by it, because what he was doing was writing a novel to justify terrorism.
Your books are almost all about Jewish characters, often immigrants or refugees or their children. Were the people who came to see you during your book tour mostly Jewish?
They were very mixed, and in Portland [Oregon], where there are very few Jews, there were almost none. But the point of reading, I think, is precisely to know that which we cannot know on our own.
RECOMMENDED READING:
FICTION
THE SCORPION’S GATE, by Richard A. Clarke; Putnam, 320 pp., $24.95: Clarke, former National Coordinator for Counterterrorism, is perhaps best known for testifying to the 9/11 Commission that the White House failed to take the threat of terrorism seriously until it was too late. Clarke’s non-fiction book, Against All Enemies: Inside America’s War on Terror (Free Press, 2004), was a best-seller; now he has switched to fiction, with a geopolitical thriller set five years in the future, when a coup topples the sheiks of Saudi Arabia and the threat of total war looms.
VERONICA, by Mary Gaitskill; Pantheon, 232 pp., $23: Two women deal with aging and illness when Alison, a former fashion model trying to rebuild her life after personal and professional catastrophe, forms an unlikely friendship with Veronica, an eccentric older woman who becomes sick with AIDS.
MEMORIES OF MY MELANCHOLY WHORES, by Gabriel Garcia Marquez, translated by Edith Grossman; Knopf, 128 pp., $20: The incomparable Marquez’s first novel in a decade describes a year in the life of a 90-year-old newspaper columnist who, after a lifetime of patronizing brothels, unexpectedly falls in love with a 14-year-old virgin.
ORDINARY HEROES, by Scott Turow; Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 384 pp., $25: The super-best-selling author of legal thrillers (Presumed Innocent) writes out of the box in this novel, which combines a World War II action thriller with a poignant familial drama. It’s tricky, but he pulls it off.
NON-FICTION
THE YEAR OF MAGICAL THINKING, by Joan Didion; Knopf, 232 pp., $23.95: In December 2003, while her only daughter, Quintana, lay in a coma on life support, Joan Didion’s husband of 40 years, John Gregory Dunne, suffered a massive, fatal coronary as he was sitting down to dinner one night. Didion’s attempt to make sense of this period of her life, which “cut loose any fixed idea I ever had about death, about illness … about marriage and children and memory … about the shallowness of sanity, about life itself,” is powerful reading by one of our most thoughtful living writers.
GONE TO NEW YORK: ADVENTURES IN THE CITY, by Ian Frazier; Farrar Straus & Giroux, 224 pp., $22: In this collection of essays originally published in The New Yorker, the Atlantic, and other magazines, Frazier, born in the Midwest, celebrates three decades of residence in the metropolitan area: Brooklyn, Manhattan, and New Jersey.
GOING SANE: MAPS OF HAPPINESS, by Adam Phillips; Fourth Estate, 200 pp., $24.95: “People have usually wondered whether Hamlet was mad, not whether he was sane,” begins Phillips, a psychoanalyst. Arguing that it is difficult to live a “sane” existence without agreeing on a definition of the word, he attempts to do just that.
KATZ ON DOGS: A COMMONSENSE GUIDE TO TRAINING AND LIVING WITH DOGS, by Jon Katz; Villard, 244 pp., $24.95: Katz didn’t use to be a dog expert; he was forced to become one after adopting a “demented border collie” and making the decision to civilize him. By now, he’s written four books about co-existing with dogs, and every one of them is filled with common-sense wisdom you’ll wonder how you (and your dog) ever lived without. N.G.
