Heir To The Glimmering World: A Novel

Heir To The Glimmering World: A Novel

Cynthia Ozick is an American master at the height of her powers in Heir to the Glimmering World , a grand romantic novel of desire, fame, fanaticism, and unimaginable reversals of fortune. Ozick takes us to the outskirts of the Bronx in the 1930s, as New York fills with Europe’s ousted dreamers, turned overnight into refugees. Rose Meadows unknowingly enters this world when she answers an ambiguous want ad for an "assistant" to a Herr Mitwisser, the patriarch of a large, chaotic household. Rosie, orphaned at eighteen, has been living with her distant relative Bertram, who sparks her first erotic desires. But just as he begins to return her affection, his lover, a radical socialist named Ninel (Lenin spelled backward), turns her out. And so Rosie takes refuge from love among refugees of world upheaval. Cast out from Berlin’s elite, the Mitwissers live at the whim of a mysterious benefactor, James A'Bair. Professor Mitwisser is a terrifying figure, obsessed with his arcane research. His distraught wife, Elsa, once a prominent physicist, is becoming unhinged. Their willful sixteen-year-old daughter runs the household: the exquisite, enigmatic Anneliese. Rosie's place here is uncertain, and she finds her fate hanging on the arrival of James. Inspired by the real Christopher Robin, James is the Bear Boy, the son of a famous children's author who recreated James as the fanciful subject of his books. Also a kind of refugee, James runs from his own fame, a boy adored by the world but grown into a bitter man. It is Anneliese’s fierce longing that draws James back to this troubled house, and it is Rosie who must help them all resist James’s reckless orbit. Ozick lovingly evokes these perpetual outsiders thrown together by surprising chance. The hard times they inherit still hold glimmers of past hopes and future dreams. Heir to the Glimmering World is a generous delight. Perhaps the fullest treatment yet of the European intellectual's flight from Hitler's Germany...one of Ozick's most interesting [works]. Kirkus Reviews, Starred "Audacious. . .[A] brilliant apostrophe to shattered worlds." --John Leonard The New York Times Book Review "In language aglow with fierce wit and passionate intensity. . .[Ozick's book] has all the hallmarks of a permanent work of literature." --Merle Rubin The Wall Street Journal "A novel as scintillating as this one makes the world infinitely new..." --James Marcus Newsday "A wise, quietly magical book." --James Sallis. The Washington Post Author of numerous acclaimed works of fiction and nonfiction, CYNTHIA OZICK is a recipient of the National Book Critics Circle Award and was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize, the National Book Award, and the Man Booker International Prize. Her writing has appeared in The New Republic , Harper's , and elsewhere. She lives in New York. Heir to the Glimmering World By Cynthia Ozick Mariner Books Copyright © 2005 Cynthia Ozick All right reserved. ISBN: 9780618618804 Chapter One In 1935, when I was just eighteen, I entered the household of RudolfMitwisser, the scholar of Karaism. "The scholar of Karaism"- at thattime I had no idea what that meant, or why it should be "the" instead of"a," or who Rudolf Mitwisser was. I understood only that he was the fatherof what seemed to be numerous children, and that he had comefrom Germany two years before. I knew these things from an advertisementin the Albany Star: Professor, arrived 1933 Berlin, children 3-14,requires assistant, relocate NYC. RespondMitwisser, 22 Westerley. It read like a telegram; Professor Mitwisser, I would soon learn, wasparsimonious. The ad did not mention Elsa, his wife. Possibly he hadforgotten about her. In my letter of reply I said that I would be willing to go to NewYork, though it was not clear from the notice in the Star what sort ofassistance was needed. Since the ad had included the age of a very youngchild, was it a nanny that was desired? I said I would be pleased to takeon the job of nanny. It was Elsa, not Mitwisser, who initiated the interview-though, asit turned out, she was not in charge of it. In that family she was in chargeof little enough. I rode the bus to a corner populated by a cluster of smallshabby stores-grocery, shoemaker's, dry cleaner's, and under a tatteredawning a dim coffee shop vomiting out odors of some foul stuff frying. The windows of all these establishments were impenetrably dirty. Acrossthe street a deserted gas station had long ago gone out of business: severallarge dogs scrabbled over the oil-blackened pavement and liftedtheir hind legs against the rusting pumps. The address in the ad drew me along narrow old sidewalks frontingnarrow old houses in what I had come to think of as the Albany style: partHudson Gothic, part Dutch settler. But mainly old. There were bowshapedstained-glass insets over all the doors. The lamps in the rooms behindthem, glowing violet and amber through the lead-bordered segmentsof colored pane