• Hartford Public Library, Hartford, USA
  
  
  

Cynthia Ozick is an American master at the height of her powers in Heir to the Glimmering World, a grand romantic novel of desire, fame, fanaticism, and unimaginable reversals of fortune. Ozick takes us to the outskirts of the Bronx in the 1930s, as New York fills with Europe's ousted dreamers, turned overnight into refugees.

Rose Meadows unknowingly enters this world when she answers an ambiguous want ad for an "assistant" to a Herr Mitwisser, the patriarch of a large, chaotic household. Rose, orphaned at eighteen, has been living with her distant relative Bertram, who sparks her first erotic desires. But just as he begins to return her affection, his lover, a radical socialist named Ninel, turns her out.

And so Rosie takes refuge from love among refugees of world upheaval. Cast out from Berlin's elite, the Mitwissers live at the whim of a mysterious benefactor, James A'Bair. Inspired by the real Christopher Robin, James is the Bear Boy, the son of a famous children's author who recreated James as the fanciful subject of his books. Also a kind of refugee, James runs from his own fame, a boy adored by the world but grown into a bitter man.

Ozick lovingly evokes these perpetual outsiders thrown together by surprising chance. The hard times they inherit hold glimmers of past hopes and future dreams. Heir to the Glimmering World is a generous delight.

Cynthia Ozick is the author of more than a dozen acclaimed works of fiction and non-fiction. She was a finalist for the National Book Award for her previous novel, The Puttermesser Papers, which was named one of the tope ten books of 1997 by the New York Times Book Review, Publishers Weekly, and the Los Angeles Times Book Review. Her most recent essay collection, Quarrel & Quandary, won the 2001 National Book Critics Circle Award. Ozick lives in the New York City area.