∎ Descargar Heir To The Glimmering World Pa Cythia Ozick 0046442618809 Books

Heir To The Glimmering World Pa Cythia Ozick 0046442618809 Books

Download As PDF : Heir To The Glimmering World Pa Cythia Ozick 0046442618809 Books

Heir To The Glimmering World Pa Cythia Ozick 0046442618809 Books

Cynthia Ozick's 2004 novel "Heir to the Glimmering World" is known as "The Bear Boy" in the United Kingdom. It is fitting that this complex difficult novel will take two, or perhaps more, appropriate titles. "The Bear Boy" refers to one of the many principal characters in the book, James A'Bair. As a child, James had been the subject of a successful series of children's book written by his father. James inherits a fortune when his father dies. We wanders aimmlessly over the world before ultimately becoming the benefactor of the Mitwisser family at the heart of the novel. The title "Heir to the Glimmering World" is both more poetic and more difficult to explain. The heir is the young woman narrator, Rose Meadows, 19, of the story. The "glimmering world" could be one of several lost worlds described in the story: the world of the Karaites, discussed below, or the world of Germany and scholarship before WW II.

The story is set primarily in depression-era New York in 1933 -- 1935. The book is told with great allusiveness in form and content to British novels, including "Sense and Sensibility", "Middlemarch", "Jane Eyre" and "Hard Times." The early stages of Ozick's novel take place in Albany and upstate New York while the larger portion of the book is set in a relatively remote section of the Bronx. The novel tells loosely interreleated stories of refuges, outcasts, and rebels.

The narrator, Rose, is a quiet, bookish girl whose mother died when she was 3 and whose father, a teacher and a gambler, dies when Rose is 18 after he has put the girl in the care of a distant relation, Bertram, 36. Bertram is divorced, a pharmacist, and involved with radical politics. He is in love with an even more radical woman, named Ninel, who is not committed to him. Ninel essentially forces Rose out of her home with Bertram, and at age 18 Rose drops out of a teacher's college which bores her to answer a strange ad placed by a Professor Mitwisser. Mitwisser is a student of religious history who has been forced to flee Germany. His wife, Elsa was a research physicist and the colleague of Erwin Schrodinger. The couple have five children. Elsa is despondent and appears mad. Their eldest daughter, Anneliese, runs much of the household. In Albany, Mitwisser has been teaching at a small college by the kndness of the Quakers. He is a renowned scholar of the heretical Jewish sect known as the Karaites. The governor's of the school mistake him as a student of Christian Charismatics. There is little interest in Mitwisser's passion for the Karaites in the United States. The family moves to New York City to allow Mitwiser to study and write. They are supported by the mysterious James, "The Bear Boy."

The Mitwissers have difficulty, to say the least, with their new home in America. In Germany the family was wealthy and respected for intellect and knowledge while in the United States they are spurned. There is a sense of high culture -- or "bildung" in German which the family, especially Elsa finds lacking in the United States. Professor Mitwisser wants his children and family to adopt and adjust, to learn and use English, and to drop German and German culture. The narrator Rose, too, is a refuge and an outcast of a different sort as is the wealthy, dissolute, wandering James who has somehow adopted the Mitwisser family and is their apparent benefactor.

Rose has an ambiguous role in the family as a companion to Elsa, a nanny to the children, and a scribe or "amanuensis" for Mitwisser. Although the Mitwisser family is not religious, Mitwisser is the greatest scholar of the Karaites. The Karaites are a Jewish sect originating in the early Middle Ages. The Karaites broke away from mainline traditional Judaism because they refused to accept the authority of the Jewish Oral Law --, the Mishnah and the Gemmorah which comprise the Talmud. Instead, the Karaites accepted the authority only of the 24 books of the Old Testament. Traditional Judaism rejected the Karaites as heretics and the sect became marginalized and obscure. Many of the leaders of the sect wrote voluminously and provocatively. Mitwisser, in this novel, is their scholar. As Rose comes to describe the Karaites as she learns about them from Mitwisser:

"They are dissidents; therefore they are haters. But they are also lovers, and what they love is purity, and what they hate is impurity. And what they consider to be impurity is the intellect's explorations; and yet they are themselves known for intellect." (p.73)

Professor Mitwisser loves the Karaites for their independence, their heresy, their obscurity, and their religious passion and feeling. His love, alas, is at the expense of much else in life, including his wife and children. Professor Mitwisser is pursuing threads regarding an earlier leader of the sect who, Mitwisser believes, travelled to India where he studied and became enamored of the Bhagavad-Gita. Ultimately Mitsisser's research program is dashed. Rose and Ozick in particular take a much more distanced position from the Karaites than does Mitwisser.

Elsa has a madness that derives from the wife in Jane Eyre. But she also sees certain things clearly. A physicist, she was also the lover of Schroedinger. She undergoes significant changes during the course of the book.

The book has the feel of a difficult coming of age story as Rose, who narrates the story from a distance, ulltimately uses what she has learned from living with the Mitwissers to begin her own independent life.

Ozick has written a cerebral, thoughtful story of refugees, outcasts, and the life of the mind and its limitations. There is a skeptical tone towards political messianism and radicalism, in the person of Ninel and in Bertram's early life, and towards religious freethought and heresy, as exemplified by the Karaites. The author also turns a skeptical eye towards what she sees as the thoughtless, materialist character of American life. Some of the threads of the story do not come together well, and there is a sense of coolness and detachment towards the characters. This a challenging but rewarding novel.

Robin Friedman


Tags : Heir To The Glimmering World Pa [Cythia Ozick] on Amazon.com. *FREE* shipping on qualifying offers. <DIV>Cynthia Ozick is an American master at the height of her powers in <I>Heir to the Glimmering World</I>,Cythia Ozick,Heir To The Glimmering World Pa,Mariner,0618618805,Benefactors,Bronx (New York, N.Y.),Children of authors,Domestic fiction,Historical fiction,Inheritance and succession,Jewish families,Jewish fiction,Nannies,Orphans,Refugees, Jewish,Rich people,American Novel And Short Story,FICTION Literary,Fiction,Fiction - General,Literary,Modern & contemporary fiction (post c 1945)

Heir To The Glimmering World Pa Cythia Ozick 0046442618809 Books Reviews

Well-written story of a young woman who becomes secretary and companion to a German immigrant family during WWII.
Some depressing themes but includes good allegory and the dark humor of wartime.
Heir to the Glimmering World by Cynthia Ozick is a strange, yet entirely realistic and believable novel. It's the story of Rosie, a poor teenage orphan who lands in the household of the Mitwissers, refugees from Hitler's Germany, as an amanuensis who becomes more of a family servant than a secretary. Told primarily from Rosie's point of view, it is of course the story of this family as well Professor Mitwisser, an out-of-touch philosopher who lives entirely in some remote and obscure corner of history; his wife Elsa, the madwoman in the attic; their eldest daughter Anneliese, three sons, and the unfortunately named baby Waltrout. Into their lives comes a mysterious benefactor, heir to an endless stream of money earned by his father from The Bear Boy, a series of world-famous children's books.

I can't say Heir is a page-turner, but it's compelling enough, and Ozick's writing is flawless. While I doubt the book is strictly autobiographical, I'd bet my typing fingers Ozick based it on her own early experiences as a secretary, having held quite a few equally oddball positions myself.

The best thing about this novel, though, is the ending it's been many years since I've read a book that so completely satisfied me in the end. Some readers will no doubt think it a bit too tidy, but I'm of the camp that eschews inconclusive denouements. It doesn't take a prophet to know that every story like life goes on--but I appreciate a book and an author that can deliver the goods in the final pages. Well done, Ms. Ozick!
This is a book full of mirrors, darkness, and, as the title indicates, glimmers. There are three families the destitute Mitwisser family, refugees from Nazi Germany; the Meadows family, one of whom, Rose, the novel’s main narrator, comes to live with the Mitwissers as secretary and companion; and the A’Bair family, whose child, James, is transformed by his father into The Bear Boy, the subject of a series of wildly popular and lucrative children’s books. James also lives with the Mitwissers, although his appearances are sporadic, and it is his inheritance that keeps the Mitwisser family in food and shelter.

Even though the fathers of these families are wildly different, they are all, in their own ways absent. Professor Mitwisser is lost in his scholarly pursuit of an ancient and obscure Jewish sect. Rose’s father is a self-absorbed drunk, thief and gambler, as down on his luck as the professor, while James A’Bair, Sr. relates to his young son only as a commercial product. They are funhouse mirror distortions of what a father should be.

The mothers are missing, too. Elsa Mitwisser, a well-known scientist before she was driven out of Germany, is mentally unstable, her mind wrenched out of focus by the traumas of the flight from Germany. Rose’s mother died when she was a child. James A’Bair’s mother colludes in the father’s project to turn their child into cash.

And the children are orphans. Rose and James, although young have no living parents, while the five Mitwisser children run wild, with only the inconstant supervision of the oldest sister. Others, including Rose, her cousin Bertram, and James, take on the maternal role in interesting ways.

But it would be misleading to dwell too much on these parallels, since this is really a novel about the aloneness of human beings and their chasing after glimmers---books, money, security, love---to bring happiness to their lives. The book turns on the paradoxes of the ones who draw the glimmers into something more substantial and the ones who do not. Might it be better not to chase after glimmers at all?

M. Feldman
Cynthia Ozick's 2004 novel "Heir to the Glimmering World" is known as "The Bear Boy" in the United Kingdom. It is fitting that this complex difficult novel will take two, or perhaps more, appropriate titles. "The Bear Boy" refers to one of the many principal characters in the book, James A'Bair. As a child, James had been the subject of a successful series of children's book written by his father. James inherits a fortune when his father dies. We wanders aimmlessly over the world before ultimately becoming the benefactor of the Mitwisser family at the heart of the novel. The title "Heir to the Glimmering World" is both more poetic and more difficult to explain. The heir is the young woman narrator, Rose Meadows, 19, of the story. The "glimmering world" could be one of several lost worlds described in the story the world of the Karaites, discussed below, or the world of Germany and scholarship before WW II.

The story is set primarily in depression-era New York in 1933 -- 1935. The book is told with great allusiveness in form and content to British novels, including "Sense and Sensibility", "Middlemarch", "Jane Eyre" and "Hard Times." The early stages of Ozick's novel take place in Albany and upstate New York while the larger portion of the book is set in a relatively remote section of the Bronx. The novel tells loosely interreleated stories of refuges, outcasts, and rebels.

The narrator, Rose, is a quiet, bookish girl whose mother died when she was 3 and whose father, a teacher and a gambler, dies when Rose is 18 after he has put the girl in the care of a distant relation, Bertram, 36. Bertram is divorced, a pharmacist, and involved with radical politics. He is in love with an even more radical woman, named Ninel, who is not committed to him. Ninel essentially forces Rose out of her home with Bertram, and at age 18 Rose drops out of a teacher's college which bores her to answer a strange ad placed by a Professor Mitwisser. Mitwisser is a student of religious history who has been forced to flee Germany. His wife, Elsa was a research physicist and the colleague of Erwin Schrodinger. The couple have five children. Elsa is despondent and appears mad. Their eldest daughter, Anneliese, runs much of the household. In Albany, Mitwisser has been teaching at a small college by the kndness of the Quakers. He is a renowned scholar of the heretical Jewish sect known as the Karaites. The governor's of the school mistake him as a student of Christian Charismatics. There is little interest in Mitwisser's passion for the Karaites in the United States. The family moves to New York City to allow Mitwiser to study and write. They are supported by the mysterious James, "The Bear Boy."

The Mitwissers have difficulty, to say the least, with their new home in America. In Germany the family was wealthy and respected for intellect and knowledge while in the United States they are spurned. There is a sense of high culture -- or "bildung" in German which the family, especially Elsa finds lacking in the United States. Professor Mitwisser wants his children and family to adopt and adjust, to learn and use English, and to drop German and German culture. The narrator Rose, too, is a refuge and an outcast of a different sort as is the wealthy, dissolute, wandering James who has somehow adopted the Mitwisser family and is their apparent benefactor.

Rose has an ambiguous role in the family as a companion to Elsa, a nanny to the children, and a scribe or "amanuensis" for Mitwisser. Although the Mitwisser family is not religious, Mitwisser is the greatest scholar of the Karaites. The Karaites are a Jewish sect originating in the early Middle Ages. The Karaites broke away from mainline traditional Judaism because they refused to accept the authority of the Jewish Oral Law --, the Mishnah and the Gemmorah which comprise the Talmud. Instead, the Karaites accepted the authority only of the 24 books of the Old Testament. Traditional Judaism rejected the Karaites as heretics and the sect became marginalized and obscure. Many of the leaders of the sect wrote voluminously and provocatively. Mitwisser, in this novel, is their scholar. As Rose comes to describe the Karaites as she learns about them from Mitwisser

"They are dissidents; therefore they are haters. But they are also lovers, and what they love is purity, and what they hate is impurity. And what they consider to be impurity is the intellect's explorations; and yet they are themselves known for intellect." (p.73)

Professor Mitwisser loves the Karaites for their independence, their heresy, their obscurity, and their religious passion and feeling. His love, alas, is at the expense of much else in life, including his wife and children. Professor Mitwisser is pursuing threads regarding an earlier leader of the sect who, Mitwisser believes, travelled to India where he studied and became enamored of the Bhagavad-Gita. Ultimately Mitsisser's research program is dashed. Rose and Ozick in particular take a much more distanced position from the Karaites than does Mitwisser.

Elsa has a madness that derives from the wife in Jane Eyre. But she also sees certain things clearly. A physicist, she was also the lover of Schroedinger. She undergoes significant changes during the course of the book.

The book has the feel of a difficult coming of age story as Rose, who narrates the story from a distance, ulltimately uses what she has learned from living with the Mitwissers to begin her own independent life.

Ozick has written a cerebral, thoughtful story of refugees, outcasts, and the life of the mind and its limitations. There is a skeptical tone towards political messianism and radicalism, in the person of Ninel and in Bertram's early life, and towards religious freethought and heresy, as exemplified by the Karaites. The author also turns a skeptical eye towards what she sees as the thoughtless, materialist character of American life. Some of the threads of the story do not come together well, and there is a sense of coolness and detachment towards the characters. This a challenging but rewarding novel.

Robin Friedman