Heir To The Glimmering World

Perhaps the fullest treatment yet of the European intellectual's flight from Hitler's Germany...one of Ozick's most interesting [works].Kirkus Reviews, Starred"Audacious. . .[A] brilliant apostrophe to shattered worlds." --John Leonard The New York Times Book Review"In language aglow with fierce wit and passionate intensity. . .[Ozick's book] has all the hallmarks of a permanent work of literature." --Merle Rubin The Wall Street Journal"A novel as scintillating as this one makes the world infinitely new..." --James Marcus Newsday"A wise, quietly magical book." --James Sallis.The Washington Post — Author of numerous acclaimed works of fiction and nonfiction, CYNTHIA OZICK is a recipient of the National Book Critics Circle Award and was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize, the National Book Award, and the Man Booker International Prize. Her writing has appeared in The New Republic , Harper's , and elsewhere. She lives in New York. Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved. Heir to the Glimmering World By Cynthia Ozick Mariner Books Copyright © 2005 Cynthia OzickAll right reserved. ISBN: 9780618618804 Chapter One In 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 ofassistance 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 ?dgety 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 andinstantly 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, "Frdulein! You there! Come back!" The dark figure of a giant stood in the unlit doorway. Those aliensyllables -"Frdulein," 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. Continues... Excerpted from Heir to the Glimmering World by Cynthia Ozick Copyright © 2005 by Cynthia Ozick. Excerpted by permission. All rights reserved. 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