Ozick’s Excavations
Beth Kissileff
Cynthia Ozick. Photo Credit: Fred R. Conrad/ NYTimes/ Redux
Beth Kissileff is the author of the novel Questioning Return (2016) and is co-editor of Bound in the Bond of Life: Pittsburgh Writers Reflect on the Tree of Life Tragedy (2020). Her writing has appeared in the Atlantic, the New York Times, Tablet, and elsewhere.
BOOKS
Antiquities
By Cynthia Ozick
Alfred A. Knopf, 179 pages, $21
“If I write it down, I keep it; if I write it down, I know it is real. Indeed, events do not achieve reality until they are written down. Otherwise, who can prove that what happened, happened?” Cynthia Ozick’s diary entry for Slate in 1996 could just as well serve as the epigraph to her slim new novel, Antiquities.
The imperative to write pervades Ozick’s body of work. Yet entwined with this need to attain reality by writing things down is the specter of unreality, of ghostliness, which hangs over Antiquities. In one of her essays, Ozick writes “the ghosts at their writing tables sit alone and write and write and write as if the necessary transparency of their souls depended upon it.”
Antiquities, her twelfth book of fiction (in addition to six essay collections), is narrated in gorgeous and absorbing prose by a man excavating his suppressed thoughts in writing. Ozick’s narrator, Lloyd Wilkinson Petrie, is writing a memoir about his student days at the Temple Academy for Boys in Westchester, New York. The academy has long since become the Temple House, a retirement home for the last seven of the school’s trustees. The trustees wish “to produce an album of remembrance, a collection of small memoirs meant to stand out from the welter of the past – seven chapters of, if I may borrow an old catchphrase, emotion recollected in tranquility.” Having been expelled from Temple House, “the old mausoleum in the woods,” Petrie is living on E. 76th Street in Manhattan in a building which used to be called “Winthrop Court.”
As always with Ozick, names carry meaning. “Temple” is both the name of a cousin of Henry James (Ozick’s paragon in all matters literary) as well as a metaphor. A move from a Temple Academy to a House comments on the Jewish move after the destruction of the Second Temple from a physical space of worship to a focus on the text in the rabbinic academy at Yavneh. Petrie’s place of exile bears a number associated with the founding of America, 1776, and with the name of John Winthrop, who enjoined those journeying with him to America to create a “city on a hill.”
Petrie, whose name comes from the Greek word for “rock,” is the son of a lawyer who took part in a dig his distant cousin, a renowned archaeologist, had supervised in Egypt. In order to find new life in exile, Petrie has much to excavate—both physically and spiritually. As he opens his memoir, Petrie sets forth a number of the rules he and the other six trustees must follow. The memoirs must be about “an explicit happening,” must “concern childhood only,” and must “reflect accurately the atmosphere and principles of the Academy at the time in which the incident to be recounted had occurred.” Above all, the memoir writers must be “personally indebted to that past.” The exodus from Egypt, alluded to a few times, leads Petrie to reflect on what Egypt and its antiquities mean for him and his family, past and future.
One of the most dramatic incidents for Petrie, though it occurred before his birth, is his father’s literal exodus for Egypt in order to dig at the Great Pyramid of Giza. The supervisor of the dig is the real-life figure Flinders Petrie, discoverer of the Merneptah stele, long thought to be the first mention of “Israel” in Egypt. Flinders Petrie is buried in the Protestant Cemetery on Mount Zion in Jerusalem; his head was donated to the Royal College of Surgeons in London. This is our first hint that the Petrie family draws from Jewish sources to create its own bifurcated identities.
Lloyd Wilkinson Petrie, like his distant cousin, is split between mind and body, between what he says and what he feels. Petrie, a former Yale Law Review editor from a distinguished and wealthy family, confesses that his secretary, Miss Margaret Stimmer, in whose “sweet bed” he was “never a stranger,” was one of the two loves of his life.
“If I write it down, I know it’s real.”
The other was a Jewish classmate at the Temple Academy, sent there by the Elijah Foundation, a hint to the revelatory nature of his message. The classmate, Ben-Zion Elefantin, puts on tefillin and exists only on “bread and milk and hard-boiled eggs.” He tells Petrie that he descends from a family of Jews who established a temple on Elephantine, an island in the Nile. “Despite Deuteronomy’s dictum that any place of worship other than the Temple in Jerusalem is disallowed,” Ozick said in an interview, the temple at Elephantine “not only co-existed with the temple in Jerusalem, there was also an abundance of communication between the two. Papyri letters went back and forth—some of which can be seen today in the Brooklyn Museum.” What then can this scion of the disallowed mean to Petrie?
Before long, the physical selves of Petrie and Elefantin, ages ten and twelve respectively, encounter one another.
I seemed to be breathing his breath… and it was as if my skin or his own, might at any moment catch fire. He spoke with a rhythmic rapidity, almost as if he were reciting, half by rote, some time-encrusted liturgical saga. It had no beginning, it promised no end, it was all fantastical middle, a hallucinatory mixture of languages and implausible histories. And what was I pressed body to body to make of it?
The adumbrations of the account of creation in Genesis, with its animating breath, are inescapable. Perhaps Elefantin, described as an “apparition” as well as a “fabrication or delusion,” is a kind of golem, a creature made by another for a particular purpose. In Ozick’s story “Puttermesser and Xanthippe,” Ruth Puttermesser fashions a body out of “reddish powder.” Here Petrie describes the tint of his classmate’s hair as putting him “in mind of my father’s description of the red earth of his days with Cousin William: deeper and denser and more otherworldly than any commonplace Celtic red.”
Despite their physical proximity, Petrie fails miserably at his attempt to befriend the otherwise friendless Elefantin. Petrie offends him by giving him a stork-shaped beaker with an emerald that his father had brought back from Egypt. Elefantin’s response to Petrie’s well-intentioned generosity is twofold: first, the bird is an ibis not a stork; and second “what is such a vessel to me?” Elefantin explains that the Egyptian idol represents an abomination. In her fictions and essays alike, Ozick has defined a Jew as someone who “shuns idols.”
“I have been loyal to Ben-Zion Elefantin,” Petrie protests. “How unfair that he is disloyal to me.” If Petrie imagines himself a Boswell transcribing the experiences of Elefantin, the young red-haired man himself “imagined himself to be Dreyfus.” In fact, Petrie narrates that Dreyfus once visited their school as a guest speaker. All the students, save Elefantin, exited the auditorium in twos and threes, ignoring the visitor’s “tale of lie and libel and deceit.” Just as Dreyfus had felt himself a loyal citizen of France, Elefantin had put his faith in his friendship with Petrie. The gift of an abomination is the great betrayal of this connection.
Throughout his diary Petrie expresses anti-Semitic sentiments, even as he acknowledges his own roots in Jewish ideas, texts, and even names. He refers to the Petrie line of “Old Testament appellations: we were once a sober crew of Abrahams and Nathans and Samuels, all of them proper Christians.” As students of history know, the Dreyfus affair prefigured the harm and disloyalty that would come to Jews in Europe from the descendants of Protestants using those names.
“Where now is Ben-Zion Elefantin?” Petrie asks in a 1949 diary entry. “Did he in fact exist? Today he is no more than an illusion and perhaps he was an illusion then.” Having had life breathed into him by this apparition, Petrie creates a new home in his writing. By the novel’s end he does engage with real Jews, including a Jewish refugee from Nazi Germany. These contacts hold out the possibility of understanding between Petrie and Jew. Like Cynthia Ozick herself, Petrie forges new lines of connection between Western literary texts and the Jewish tradition—even in its exiled and imperfect form.
This article appears in Sources, Fall 2021
