Word: brill
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Occasionally, however, some make a noble effort to link these two strands of thought. Such is the case of Joseph Brill, the protagonist of Cynthia Ozick's latest novel. The Cannibal Galaxy. In large part, the success of the novel hinges on Ozick's ability to underscore the sense of anguish within her characters by sophisticated understatement. While Brill experiences travesties of monumental impact, he internalizes much of his anguish, ironically heightening its impact on the reader. More important, Brill's determination to carry out what he regards as his mission in the face of these obstacles endows him with...
...Brill's determination to unite religious and secular knowledge, a goal spawned during his unusually eventful childhood in France, is the guiding theme of the novel. Brill is the archetypal child prodigy, spending more time learning Taahnit from his rabbi and making telescopic observations than running in the street playing stickball. The young Brill's diligence naturally leads him to--among other places--the Sorbonne, where, like the prototypical Harvard student, he learns to "think big," Perhaps too big for his own good...
...glimpses that Ozick gives us of the motivated and intellectually curious Brill though are carefully balanced by equally strong--and painful--images of the young man as an outcast, both as an alienated intellectual and a Jew in a strongly anti-Semitic country. The homosexual advances of a close avant garde friend, combined with the prejudice and hostility he repeatedly encounters, heighten his sense of disillusionment...
Cast up in America after the war, Brill founded his school on the shore of one of the Great Lakes. The institution boasted a dual curriculum: "the Priceless Legacy of Scripture and Commentaries," and social studies and French. As Brill puts it, "The waters of Shiloh springing from the head of Western Civilization." But the experiment flops. Hopelessly inept as a pedagogue and judge of children, Brill blames his school's failure on its students, whom he dismisses as "commoners, weeds, the children of plumbers." Given such contempt, he fails to recognize genius when it comes his way. Beulah...
Still, most of the children who attended Brill's school are condemned to follow a path away from Jewish tradition, leaving both scholarship and conscience behind. Among them is Brill's only son, Naphtali, upon whom the father had pinned his hopes for redemption. Naphtali is headed not for the Sorbonne, where Joseph hoped he might bear "Jerusalem athwart the Louvre," but to the University of Miami, where he studies business administration...