Word: brill
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Understandably, Brill's anger crystallizes into bitterness when Nazi soldiers seize and kill his family. Even among the nuns who shelter him while orphaned, Brill senses fear and resentment...
...Brill's brief stay with the nuns--and subsequent months of hiding in the hayloft of a barn--reinforce rather than erode his convictions and faith in the human mind. Brill determines to bear witness to the atrocities of the Nazi's in an individual way: by fusing the tenets of his childhood rabbi with the teachings of his university...
THIS DESIRE to unite his "two minds" and escape the horror of his past leads Brill to America. There, with the aid of a rich benefactress, he founds a primary school devoted to "the fusion of scholarly Europe and burnished Jerusalem...astronomers and God-praises uniting in a majestic dream of peace." However, his impatience and frustration with the mediocrity of both students and teachers soon causes his sense of alienation to resurface. Not until Hester Lilt, a renowned academic, enrolls her daughter Beulah in the school does Brill begin to show a genuine interest in the progress...
...Brill's fascination with Beulah--in truth a fascination with her mother--reveals his true nature. Although Brill thinks he and Hester are bonded by a mutual appreciation for scholarly achievement, he eventually discovers how truly different they are. Brill's fixation with himself and his own aspirations not only denigrate the quality of his supposedly noble goals, but also leave him feeling painfully along. Consequently, it is unclear how much of Brill's fascination with Hester is intellectual and how much stems from his desire to be loved. By contrast, Hester's willingness to sacrifice her goals...
UNFORTUNATELY, the bitterness Brill subconsciously inherits from his childhood remains with him as a dominant--if not guiding--force. It is this undercurrent of anger--against the Nazis who slaughtered his family, his students who are hindered by mediocrity and, most important, at his own failure to excel--that gives the novel its emotional force. By bottling up the tension throughout the novel, Ozick heightens the impact of the climax, and makes Brill's epiphany about himself and the nature of his goals all the more painful...