Limning The Cannibal Galaxy: Cynthia Ozick's Moral Imagination

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The Cannibal Galaxy, an elaboration of Ozick's previously published story "The Laughter of Akiva" (New Yorker, November 10, 1980), tells of Frenchman Joseph Brill, whose experience as a refugee from the Nazis resolves him to open a school in America based on a "dual curriculum" that allies traditional Jewish studies with the intellectual legacy of the European Enlightenment. The necessity for struggle is conveyed through the portrayal of Brill, the limited omniscient narrator, and of Hester Lilt, the enigmatic and intellectual mother of the least promising child in Brill's school. Brill's motto, ad astra, is a sad joke: he has given up both his early infatuation with literature and his ambition to be a great astronomer in order to be merely ordinary. In the end, his dreams of leaving a great legacy have come to nothing: his generations of pupils, with the exception of Beulah Lilt, are undistinguished; at the age of seventy-six he is forced to retire; the school he had founded with swelling idealism is stripped of its name and its motto, both redolent of formative experiences in his youth. Brill's vision of a children's Sorbonne "dense with Hebrew melodies, a Sorbonne grown out of an exiled Eden,"(8) is exposed (early to the reader, much later to Brill) as a retreat from ambition, a failure of the will dressed out as a dream of fruitful union that turns out to be an impossible compromise whose only issue is stifling mediocrity. Brill's own spiritual and intellectual potential is never realized because, as Hester bluntly tells him, he "stopped too soon." Seeing his options as "the heights or nothing," he has chosen nothing, yet continues to cultivate the illusion that his little pedagogical fiefdom is aspiring to great spiritual and intellectual heights. Sadly, he projects his own affliction onto the children, assuming like the teacher Gorshak and the school psychologist Glypost that he can "predict and command the future" (46) based on feeble, early signs, which are always inadequate. Hence his pity, mixed with contempt, for what he perceives as the emptiness of Beulah, whom he sees, in his blindness, as impossibly dull despite her brilliant mother. As both man and teacher Brill lives a truncated existence.

It is through the "cannibal" metaphor of the title that the reader is urged to integrate the triple persona of the author as rabbi, feminist, and artist. The "rabbi" is concerned with the annihilation of Judaism by post-Enlightenment culture. When Joseph is spurned as a "Dreyfus" after rejecting the homosexual advances of a classmate (Claude), he finds himself socially and intellectually isolated. Disillusioned to find that even the greatest Enlightenment thinkers, such as Voltaire, were tainted by anti-Semitism, he seeks solace from his religious teacher, Rabbi Pult, who offers instead of comfort a bitter irony: "`Joseph, the Enlightenment engendered a new slogan: There is no God, and the Jews killed him. Joseph, this is the legacy of your Enlightenment'" (16). This irony--"the joke of the Enlightenment"--is bred in the gap between the illusion cultivated by European Jews that an enlightened and civilized Europe is willing to accept them as "men abroad and Jews at home"(9) and the reality of an ineradicable anti-Semitism. As a French Jew, Brill wants to see himself as heir to a double heritage, but the melding of these traditions--what Ozick has elsewhere referred to as "the fusion of secular aesthetic culture with Jewish sensibility"--is only a dream. The rift between the two traditions is long and deep, possibly irreconcilable. Rabbi Pult's library, as rich and concentrated as "a dipper of ocean water" yet has "not a single volume in French" (23). And the Louvre, for all its classical treasures, yet fails even to acknowledge the existence of a different strain of ancient culture: "It was as if there had never been a Hebrew people, no Abraham or Joseph or Moses. Not a trace of holy Israel" (131).