(Ebook) Antiquities by Cynthia Ozick ISBN 9780593318829, 059331882X, B08D8L7RCX

(Ebook) Antiquities by Cynthia Ozick ISBN 9780593318829, 059331882X, B08D8L7RCX

From one of America's most preeminent writers, a tale that captures the shifting meanings of the past, in the elusive flavour of a Kafka parable, and weaving, in her own distinctive voice, myth and mania, history and illusion.

Lloyd Wilkinson Petrie, one of the seven elderly trustees of the now defunct Temple Academy for Boys, is preparing a memoir of his days at the school, intertwined with the troubling distractions of present events. As he navigates, with faltering recall, between the subtle anti-Semitism that pervaded the school's ethos and his fascination with his own family's heritage - in particular, his illustrious cousin, the renowned archaeologist Sir William Matthew Flinders Petrie - he reconstructs the passions of a childhood encounter with the oddly named Ben-Zion Elefantin, a mystifying older pupil who claims descent from Egypt's Elephantine Island. 

"Ozick has been a fervent critic of identity politics since the nineteen-seventies ... and yet few have written so well about the inconstant self-esteem of the socially marginalized ... A brisk work of some thirty thousand words, it explores her favourite subjects — envy and ambition, the moral peril of idolatry — in her favourite form... Ozick’s book about a man ensnared by history is at once a warning against the hazards of nostalgia and an invitation to take a longer view of how we got to where we are." -  Giles Harvey, The New Yorker

Cynthia Ozick:  Recipient of the first Rea Award for the Short Story (in 1976), an American Academy of Arts and Letters Mildred and Harold Strauss Living Award, and the PEN/Malamud award in 2008. Upon publication of her 1983 The Shawl, Edmund White wrote, "Miss Ozick strikes me as the best American writer to have emerged in recent years...Judaism has given to her what Catholicism gave to Flannery O'Connor."