Word: brill
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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...
Ozick's protagonist, Joseph Brill, is a survivor of Nazi-occupied France. The son of a Parisian fishmonger, Brill was infatuated early with French culture ("the nuances of Verlaine maddened him with idolatrous joy"). In 1942, when French police rounded up Paris' Jews, the adolescent escaped to the basement of a convent school. There, harbored by nuns, Brill dreamed of founding a Jewish school that would join "the civilization that invented the telescope with the civilization that invented conscience...
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...
Jean (Suzanne Bertish) and Rita (Fran Brill) seem not to have come from the same womb. Jean is frumpy, asocial, infertile and separated from her husband. Rita is chic, impregnable as a rabbit, and antiseptically fastidious, except when it comes to stealing another woman's husband. Jean has tended the senile, incontinent mother for desolatingly lonely months; Rita has used the Ma Bell commercial method of reaching and touching by phone. Waves of passion rise between the two sisters like water spuming against a coastal reef, then subside in daughterly grief before the great silence: death. Suzanne Bertish...