From Publishers Weekly
Ozick's previous novel, The Puttermesser Papers, revolved around one quirky hero; this time around, Ozick incubates several. Characters, not plot, drive this Depression-era tale, and Ozick eviscerates each one through her narrator, Rose Meadows, a resolute 18-year-old orphan. Virtually abandoned, Rose wanders into a job with the Mitwisser family, German refugees in New York City. Filling gaping holes in their household, she becomes a research assistant to the father, a professor stubbornly engaged in German and Hebrew arcana; a nurse to his oft-deranged, sequestered wife; and nanny to their five children. As she penetrates the fog surrounding their history, Rose limns their roiling inner lives with exasperated perception. Mrs. Mitwisser especially chafes against the family's precarious, degrading status as "parasites," erratically supported by the unbalanced millionaire son and heir of an author of popular children's books who is fascinated by Mr. Mitwisser's research. With her trademark lyrical prose, gentle humor and vivid imagery, Ozick paints a textured portrait of outsiders rendered powerless, retreating into tightly coiled existences of scholarly rapture, guarded brazenness and even calculated lunacy—all as a means of refuting the bleakness of a harsh, chaotic world. Erudite exposition is packed into the book, so that character study and discourse occasionally grind the plot to a halt. Edifying and evocative, if often daunting, this is a concentrated slice of eccentric life. Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.


From The Washington Post's Book World/washingtonpost.com
For all our elaborate theorizing, all our insistence upon theme and relevance, the artist remains at heart chiefly a compulsive pattern-maker. Publicity material accompanying Cynthia Ozick's latest novel suggests that it's in part an homage to the great 19th-century writers. And it is, both in the sense that all art builds on what went before and, more specifically, in that the narrative is a kind of latticework into which each slat sooner or later gets interwoven. Characters and incidents left behind in early pages circle back onstage, taking on narrative gravity; personal conflicts skip, as in cascading mirrors, from character to character. Set during the Depression, in "an obscure little village in a remote corner of the sparse and weedy northeast Bronx," Heir to the Glimmering World tells the story of an immigrant family and the young woman, Rose Meadows, who becomes the household's "hidden engine of survival." Cast out of the relative's house where she had been living, Rose, our 18-year-old narrator, has arrived among the Mitwissers almost by accident and with no clear knowledge of her duties after answering an advertisement for "an assistant." The Mitwissers in turn were plucked from Hitler's Germany and brought to the United States by a group who mistook the object of Herr Professor Mitwisser's scholarship, the Karaites ("a speck, a dot, a desiccated rumor on the underside of history"), for another sect, the Charismites. He had already forfeited his lofty position in the homeland, as had his wife, an experimental physicist; for weeks before their departure the family lived in a hired car, ever on the move.Here is the professor in the new land, the door of his study barely serving to keep chaos out: "At times he would stagger up like some large prehistoric form and claw at a volume in the wall; his eyes narrowed over the open pages as before a grassy veld concealing some living morsel of a creature about to be snapped up." There are five children, a more than slightly mad wife, and a mysterious, initially absent benefactor. Into this house where everything is "makeshift, provisional, resentful" comes Rose. "I had been brought up to cynicism. I was not easily inspired or moved," she tells us early on, while hinting at disillusions to come. And elsewhere she remarks of the father whose life is a tissue of deceit and who sent her off to live with cousin Bertram: "Most of all I thought of his lies. His lies took aim but had no point . . . enacted on a tiny stage for a tiny audience."From her observation of the Mitwissers, Rose will learn compassion. From the family also, but particularly from its capricious benefactor, James, she will learn a great deal about lies, about the shifting features of truth and all the small stages across which our lives strut and fret.Wealthy and wayward beyond imagining (and based on the actual Christopher Robin), James is "the Bear Boy," once a model for his father's world-beloved series of children's books. His father even dressed him in the Bear Boy's smock and rouged his knees to look like the Bear Boy's, and in every shell of a life into which James has moved since -- vagrant, actor for a traveling theater group, tutor to the Mitwisser children, benefactor, lover of the eldest Mitwisser, Anneliese -- he has gone on being "an impersonator, the Bear Boy in yet another outfit." Yet it is James who finally puts an end to the family's personal and collective tempests, just as cousin Bertram, who earlier cast Rose out of his apartment, becomes in the end her emancipator: "Mother Nature herself had no power to change a river's course, but Bertram could convert downstream to upstream, Anneliese the fallen to Anneliese the wife, mad Mrs. Mitwisser to mundanely triumphant Elsa. And me he had released. I was freed."Valéry said that a work of art should always teach us that we have not seen what we see. That is a part of what young Rose Meadows comes to know as she emerges from the Mitwissers' life into her own. Living as we all do among unwise folk, nonetheless she also has lived for a time, and lived vividly, in a wise, quietly magical book. As have we readers. Reviewed by James Sallis Copyright 2004, The Washington Post Co. All Rights Reserved.


From Bookmarks Magazine
Heir revisits many of Ozick’s trademark themes, which stem from her own heritage: European versus American culture, scholarly pursuits, cultural and class conflict, and exile, both real and imagined. As befitting an author of great intellectual range, Ozick exhibits extraordinary knowledge about her subjects, from Victorian literature and religious mysticism to Depression-era New York. Heir, a captivating, polished story about three sets of lives, resembles in its compassionate questioning of life the Jewish debates she invokes. It also, in its Victorian leanings, explores how modern misfits deal with issues of family, employment, love, and wealth—19th-century quandaries that somehow never disappeared. It’s a brilliant, witty novel, more streamlined than older Victorian formulas like Middlemarch. Heir is also less didactic and more accessible than some of Ozick’s other works.Characters rather than plot drive Heir, but not all reviewers agree that the people measure up. Is James a strength or weakness? Does Rose grow as a person? Critics agree, however, that Elsa steals the show. The narrative technique also raises issues. Ozick alternates between Rose’s voice and James’s omniscient flashbacks. Yet, some see little relation between their two stories (outside of Rose’s coincidental ownership of a Bear Boy book) and the Mitwissers—perhaps playing into the theme of cultural clash. Finally, does Heircome together at the end or falter into convenient coincidences? Questions aside, Heir illuminates with great humor and humanity how psychologically or physically displaced people navigate through difficult times. If nothing exactly “glimmers,” maybe that’s the point.Copyright © 2004 Phillips & Nelson Media, Inc.


From Booklist
Ozick sets in motion a kaleidoscopic array of complex entanglements in her much anticipated new novel, a work of scintillating intelligence and supple imagination that, like The Puttermesser Papers (1997), draws on sacred and literary traditions to create a tale at once compassionate and brightly satirical, otherworldly and down to earth. It's 1933 and the Mitwissers, a prominent Jewish German family, have escaped the Nazis and found a dubious yet irresistible champion in peripatetic and dissolute James Philip A'Bair, who is intrigued by Professor Rudolph Mitwisser's obsession with Karaism, a renegade eighth-century Baghdad-based Jewish doctrine rejecting rabbinical interpretations in favor of a strict focus on scripture. Known as the Bear Boy, James is the reluctant heir to a great fortune amassed by his father, a children's author who, like A. A. Milne and his character Christopher Robin, used his son as a model for what became a beloved icon. James sets the Mitwissers up in a rangy old house in the Bronx, where Rose Meadows, a pragmatic 18-year-old orphan steeped in Charlotte Bronte and Jane Austen, serves as caretaker, nanny, typist, confidante, and discerning witness to a strange and compelling world. Gruff and preoccupied, Rudolph is fascinating, but his physicist wife, Elsa, gravely depressed yet all-knowing, steals the show. There are also three wild boys, a regal teenage daughter, and a neglected baby girl. Money and affection are scarce, but secrets, chaos, and angst abound. As her captivating characters struggle to come to terms with their raided past, Ozick brilliantly dramatizes the conflict between theology and science, various modes of mythmaking and survival, and "the hot drive to dissent, to subvert, to fly from what all men accept!" Donna Seaman
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved


Review
"A wise, quietly magical book." --James Sallis.


Book Description
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.


Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
Chapter 1In 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 of assistance 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 panes, shut me out. I thought of underground creatureskept from the light. It was November, getting on to an early dusk.Frau Mitwisser led me into a tiny parlor so dark that it took sometime before her face, small and timid as a vole"s, glimmered into focus."Forgive me," she began, "Rudi wishes not the waste of electricity. Wehave not so much money. We cannot pay much. Food and a bed and notso many dollars." She stopped; her eyelids looked swollen. "The tutorfor my sons, it was you see . . . charity. Also the beds, the linens—"She was all apology: the slope of her shoulders, her fidgety handstwittering around her mouth, or reaching into the air for a phantomrope to haul her out of sight. Helplessly but somehow also slyly, she wasreversing our mutual obligation—she appealing for my sympathy, Iwith the power to withhold it. It was hard to take in those pursed umlautssprinkled through her vowels, and the throaty burr of her voice waslanced by pricks so sharp that I pulled back a little. She saw this and instantly begged my pardon."Forgive me," she said again. "It gives much difficulty with my accent.At my age to change the language is not so simple. You will seewith my husband the very great difference. In his youth for four years hestudies at Cambridge University in England, he becomes like an Englishman.You will see. But I . . . I do not have the — wie nennt mandas?—the idiom."Her last word was shattered by an enormous thud above our heads.I looked up: was the ceiling about to fall in on us? A second thud. Athird."The big ones," Frau Mitwisser said. "They make a game, to jumpfrom the top of the . . . Kleiderschrank, how you call this? I tell them everyday no, but anyhow they jump."This gave me a chance to restore us to business. "And the littlerones?" I asked. "Do you need help with them?"In the dimness I glimpsed her bewilderment; it was as if she wasbegging for eclipse."No, no, we go to New York so Rudi is close to the big library. Hereis for him so little. The committee, it is so very kind that they give us thishouse, and also they make possible the work at the College, but now it isenough, Rudi must go to New York."A gargantuan crash overhead: a drizzle of plaster dust landed on mysleeve."Forgive me," Frau Mitwisser said. "Better I go upstairs now, nichtwahr?"She hurried out and left me alone in the dark. I buttoned up mycoat; the interview, it seemed, was over. I had understood almost nothing.If they didn"t want a nanny here, what did they want? And if theyhad had a tutor, what had become of the tutor? Had they paid too littleto keep him? On an angry impulse I switched on a lamp; the pale bulbcast a stingy yellow stain on a threadbare rug. From the condition of thesofa and an armchair, much abused, I gathered that "the big ones" wereaccustomed to assaulting the furniture downstairs as well as upstairs—or else what I was seeing was thrift-shop impoverishment. A woolenshawl covered a battered little side-table, and propped on it, in a flower-embossed heavy silver frame that contradicted all its surroundings, was aphotograph—hand-tinted, gravely posed, redolent of some incomprehensibleforeignness—of a dark-haired young woman in a high collarseated next to a very large plant. The plant"s leaves were spear-shaped,serrated, and painted what must once have been a natural enough green,faded to the color of mud. The plant grew out of a great stone urn, onwhich the face and wings of a cherub were carved in relief.I turned off the lamp and headed for the front door with its stained-glassinset, and was almost at the sidewalk (by now it was fully night)when I heard someone call, "Fräulein! You there! Come back!"The dark figure of a giant stood in the unlit doorway. Those aliensyllables —"Fräulein," yelled into the street like that—put me off. AlreadyI disliked the foreignness of this house: Elsa Mitwisser"s difficultand resentful English, the elitist solemnity of the silver frame and itsphoto, the makeshift hand-me-down sitting room. These were refugees;everything about them was bound to be makeshift, provisional, resentful.I would have gone home then and there, if there had been a home togo to, but it was clear that my cousin Bertram was no longer happy tohave me. I was a sort of refugee myself.(Some weeks later, when I dared to say this to Anneliese—"I sometimesfeel like a refugee myself"—she shot me a look of purest contempt.)Like a dog that has been whistled for, I followed him back into thehouse."Now we have light," he said, in a voice so authoritatively godlikethat it might just as well have boomed "Let there be light" at the beginningof the world. He fingered the lamp. Once again the faint yellowstain appeared on the rug and seeped through the room. "To dispel theblackness, yes? Our circumstances have also been black. They are not soeaseful. You have already seen my nervous Elsa. So that is why she leavesit to me to finish the talk."He was as far from resembling an Englishman as I could imagine.In spite of the readier flow of language (a hundred times readier than hiswife"s), he was German—densely, irrevocably German. My letter was inhis hands: very large hands, with big flattened thumbs and coarse nails,strangely humped and striated—more a machinist"s hands than ascholar"s. In the niggardly light (twenty-five watts, I speculated) heseemed less gargantuan than the immense form in the doorway that hadcalled me back from the street. But I was conscious of a force, of a manaccustomed to dictating his conditions."My first requirement," Mitwisser said, "is your freedom to leavethis place.""I can do that," I said. "I"d like to.""It is what I would like that is at issue. And what I would like is acertain engagement with—I will not say ideas. But you must be able tounderstand what I ask of you.""I"ve done most of a year of college.""Less than Gymnasium. What is this nonsense you write here abouta nanny? How is this responsive?""Well, your ad mentioned children, so I thought—""You thought mistakenly. You should know that my work has to doprecisely with opposition to the arrogance of received interpretation.Received interpretation is often enough simply error. Why should I notspeak everywhere of my children? There is no context or relation inwhich they do not have a part. That is why your obligations will on occasioninclude them—but your primary duty is to me. And you will trynot to disturb my poor wife."It seemed, then, that I was hired—though I still did not know forwhat.And it was not until a long time afterward that Anneliese confidedthat there had been (even in that period of crisis unemployment) noother applicants.Copyright © 2004 by Cynthia Ozick. Reprinted by permission of Houghton Mifflin Company.

FROM THE PUBLISHER

"Cynthia 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.

FROM THE CRITICS

James Sallis - The Washington Post

Val￯﾿ﾽry said that a work of art should always teach us that we have not seen what we see. That is a part of what young Rose Meadows comes to know as she emerges from the Mitwissers' life into her own. Living as we all do among unwise folk, nonetheless she also has lived for a time, and lived vividly, in a wise, quietly magical book. As have we readers.

John Leonard - The New York Times

In her typically audacious new novel, Heir to the Glimmering World, Cynthia Ozick braids at least three and probably four ghostly glimmers and ''phantom eels'' of thought into a single luminous lariat -- or maybe a hangman's noose. Anything goes when she's making things up. While the Second Commandment on graven images presides over her fiercely prescriptive essays (four idol-smashing volumes of them since ''Art & Ardor'' in 1983), Ozick's fiction is shamanistic, almost wanton (five completely different novels, three dazzling collections of stories plus a Shawl since 1966). However much she always insists on ''a certain corona of moral purpose'' for fiction that wants to be better than journalism, she can't help dancing in the air like Feingold in Levitation, like Chagall with the cows, or Flannery O'Connor.

The New Yorker

In 1933, the Mitwissers, a family of German Jews, arrive in America after a narrow and eccentric escape from Berlin. (Forced to hide for a week before they could flee, they circled the city in a rented limousine, wearing their finest clothes and assuming a regal air at hotels where they slipped in to use the bathroom.) After landing somewhat haphazardly in New York, they place an ad for help in a local paper. The only applicant for the job is an eighteen-year-old orphan, Rose Meadows, who narrates the story, and who observes the Mitwissers with the dry neutrality of an invisible servant. Her duties are vaguely defined—part nanny, part secretary—and her salary comes intermittently, the family’s sole source of income being the whimsy of a troubled benefactor. Ozick portrays this ramshackle household to dazzling effect, as it adjusts to its many states of exile—from a sense of security, from cherished ideas, and from the consolations of each other.

Publishers Weekly

Ozick's previous novel, The Puttermesser Papers, revolved around one quirky hero; this time around, Ozick incubates several. Characters, not plot, drive this Depression-era tale, and Ozick eviscerates each one through her narrator, Rose Meadows, a resolute 18-year-old orphan. Virtually abandoned, Rose wanders into a job with the Mitwisser family, German refugees in New York City. Filling gaping holes in their household, she becomes a research assistant to the father, a professor stubbornly engaged in German and Hebrew arcana; a nurse to his oft-deranged, sequestered wife; and nanny to their five children. As she penetrates the fog surrounding their history, Rose limns their roiling inner lives with exasperated perception. Mrs. Mitwisser especially chafes against the family's precarious, degrading status as "parasites," erratically supported by the unbalanced millionaire son and heir of an author of popular children's books who is fascinated by Mr. Mitwisser's research. With her trademark lyrical prose, gentle humor and vivid imagery, Ozick paints a textured portrait of outsiders rendered powerless, retreating into tightly coiled existences of scholarly rapture, guarded brazenness and even calculated lunacy all as a means of refuting the bleakness of a harsh, chaotic world. Erudite exposition is packed into the book, so that character study and discourse occasionally grind the plot to a halt. Edifying and evocative, if often daunting, this is a concentrated slice of eccentric life. Agent, Melanie Jackson. (Sept. 1) Forecast: This is Ozick's first book for Houghton Mifflin, and the publisher is backing it with a seven-city author tour. Despite its rigors, it may be an easier sell than The Puttermesser Papers; the family drama makes it more accessible. Foreign rights sold in Brazil, France, Italy, Norway and Spain. Copyright 2004 Reed Business Information.

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