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sinned against than sinning, or simply a local instance of a universal
phenomenon-namely, a will to power that has little to do with the
making of art and everything to do with becoming a famous artist?
The Cannibal Galaxy
is a richly textured exploration of the mish–
mash that Jewish pedagogy (however well-meaning) can become in an
age of small minds and large gestures toward assimilation. As such, the
novel is a sustained exercise in satire, one that began its imaginative life
as a
New Yorker
story ("The Laughter of Akiva,"
J
980)
and then found
itself generating even more controversy than that which surrounded
"Envy." Soon after "The Laughter of Akiva" was published, Ozick got
an unexpected-and surely unwelcome-introduction to our legal sys–
tem as it currently operates when somebody feels that he or she has been
libeled. In the case at hand, a real-life person saw himself reflected in the
unflattering character of Joseph Brill and he was, as they say, not
amused. So the offended party sued.
If
the scenario that subsequently
unfolded were not so grim from Ozick's perspective-at once financially
costly and emotionally draining-it might have been nearly as funny as
the story itself. But being dragged through the courts was clearly no
laughing matter. Nonetheless, Ozick's critics could not help but feel the
heavy hand of unintended irony as the sad business of legal action
against a Jewish-American writer played itself out. They could easily
imagine this happening to the Philip Roth who had been hammered in
the Jewish press and from synagogue pulpits ever since the days of
Goodbye, Columbus
(1959)
and
Portnoy 's Complaint
(l969),
but to
Ozick? Unthinkable! After all, hadn't she, almost single-handedly,
moved Jewish-American literature from the easy indulgences of ethnic–
ity to something deeper, more profound, more authentically Jewish?
What these assumptions omit, however, is virtually everything that
gives Ozick's fiction its remarkable aesthetic punch. True enough, one
cannot ignore the allusions that gave "The Laughter of Akiva"-and,
later,
The Call11ilJal Galaxy-their
richly complicated texture of ideas.
In this sense, Ozick remains true to her upbringing as a literary mod–
ernist. But what radiates at the very core of her fictions about the hap–
less Joseph Brill are the ways that brilliance is often overlooked by
conventional teachers, whether they happen to work in
yeshivas,
Jewish
day schools, or, indeed, anywhere else. Edward Alexander's book about
Irving Howe
(lmiJlg Howe: Socialist, Critic, Jew)
makes it clear that he
was a collector of lost causes: democratic socialism, secular Jewishness,
and finally what once proudly passed as humanistic criticism. About
Ozick, one might say that she is also a collector of sorts, albeit of those
moments in her life when she was ignored, underappreciated, jilted, or
