BOOKS
483
So credibly does Ozick create an atmosphere of deception that
the individual who previewed
The Messiah of Stockholm
for
Publishers
Weekry
decided that Schulz must be her invention . Let it be said at
once, therefore , that Schulz did in fact live and die; a Polish Jew, he
was murdered by the Nazis on the street in his Galician village in
1942. Schulz had worked on a long-thought-lost last manuscript, a
novel titled
The Messiah ;
that , too, is fact. Lars is sure
The Messiah
will turn up, sure he is meant to bring it forth. He gathers an ally in
the proprietress of a rare book shop, devotes hours to the study of
Polish, and waits. It's a Jamesian situation, a conjunction of
"The Beast in the Jungle" and "The Aspern Papers," and Ozick
follows it ultimately to a Jamesian conclusion. In the end, illusions
are smashed, but not without a fight and not without an acute pang
of anguish and more than a few lingering doubts .
But having established a setting plausible enough to serve a
satirical novel of manners , Ozick gives the plot a magical turn of the
screw . A manuscript appears, brought by a young woman who
claims to be Schulz's daughter, Adela. The tale of the manuscript's
survival has the strangeness of folklore about it. And Schulz's
Messiah
itself is the more wondrous for appearing to be an extrapola–
tion from Schulz's own published writing that yet closely resembles
the quintessential Ozick dreamscape: a deserted village full of idol
shops, rather like the one in which the patriarch Abraham's father
toiled. According to one commentary upon
Genesis,
Abraham
smashed the idols one day in his father's absence , then claimed the
idols did it themselves; his father is incredulous at this explanation,
and that clinches Abraham's case .
If
they are incapable of doing such
a thing, why worship them? The idols in Schulz's alleged
Messiah,
however, are unattended by Abraham or, indeed, by any other
human agent. Taking matters into their own hands, lacking human
sacrifices, they demolish each other until the Messiah descends,
releasing a bird with a bit of straw in its beak. One touch of the straw
and each of the idols in turn dissolves.
To divulge too many more particulars of Ozick's plot would be
unpardonable. Suffice it to say that a hoax manuscript turns into
something quite different, and rather more chastening, when it is
burned; that the loss of an illusion can mean , as it does for Lars , that
the promise of brilliance will mature into mediocrity; and that the
book's last words - "he grieved" - reverberate in the reader's mind
with the same power as , say, the word "expired" has at the end of
Bernard Malamud's "The Silver Crown," a story Ozick is known to
