Antiquities

by Cynthia Ozick

From one of our most preeminent writers, a tale that captures the shifting meanings of the past and how our experience colors those meanings In Antiquities, Lloyd Wilkinson Petrie, one of the seven elderly trustees of the now-defunct (for thirty-four years) 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. From this seed emerges one of Cynthia Ozick's most wondrous tales, touched by unsettling irony and the elusive flavor of a Kafka parable, and weaving, in her own distinctive voice, myth and mania, history and illusion.

Genres: Fiction, Historical Fiction, Jewish, Novels, Contemporary, American, Novella

192 pages, Kindle Edition

First published April 13, 2021

About the author

Recipient of the first Rea Award for the Short Story (in 1976; other winners Rea honorees include Lorrie Moore, John Updike, Alice Munro), 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 in the New York Times, "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."

Reviews

[Proustitute (on hiatus) · Rating 5 out of 5]

I think incessantly of death, of oblivion, how nothing lasts, not even memory when the one who remembers is gone… 


I remember nothing. I remember everything. I believe everything. I believe nothing.



If there were ever any doubt that Ozick is a master storyteller, here’s your proof.



Do yourself a favor and skip the blurb; don’t read the synopsis. Let Petrie’s fictional monologue take you over; let yourself get to know him, his regrets, his idiosyncrasies, his losses, his attempts at connection with others. 



Imagine an interior monologue—shaped just as America shakes off the first half of the twentieth century—that is an examination of the shackles of memory, a questioning of who "owns" whose history and legacy, and a laying bare of the guilt involved in carrying your own and others' stories into the next generation.

Imagine this told with the baroque stylings of James within a Proustian project of aging, of facing both one’s mortality and the death of an age, wherein Dreyfus makes an appearance and for which fans of Bolano’s slim monologues and Marias’s own Jamesian verbosities will salivate at the mouth. 



Do yourself another favor and read this all in one gulp.

[William2 · Rating 5 out of 5]

Amusing contretemps among the elderly denizens of a defunct boarding school for boys which has now become an old age home for those who once administered the school. The year is 1949 and our narrator, Lloyd Wilkinson Petrie, is one of the dwindling trustees. Seven remain of thirty-five or so, the balance deceased. As we read Petrie’s story of his past, some of the inmates devolve into antics worthy, well, of boarding school boys. But they’re octogenarians, nonagenarians. This tale is quirky enough to serve as the basis for a Wes Anderson film. Especially when you consider Mr. Petrie’s laughable Holocaust denial—World War II was fought just to save the Jews—and his otherwise blithe anti-Semitism. This is the set up for our return to Petrie’s own school days at the academy—all future trustees must have been schooled at the academy—and his problematic friendship with one Ben-Zion Elephantin. Elephantin is a strange boy with red hair—are those sidelocks behind his ears?—and the remnants of many languages in his speech.

The novel is in some ways reminiscent of Louis Malle’s Au Revoir les Enfants. It’s as if we were able to spend more intimate time with the hidden Jew and his Gentile friend than the film affords us. And though there are no Nazis, the threat of ostracism from the school’s bully boys is real enough, and induces a terrible shame and dread among the prepubescent friends.

[John Pistelli · Rating 4 out of 5]

While I was waiting for Antiquities, Cynthia Ozick's latest book, to come in the mail, I read her second novel, The Cannibal Galaxy (1983). I'm glad I did, because the earlier work illuminates the later one, not least because both The Cannibal Galaxy and Antiquities are school stories.

The earlier novel is set somewhere in middle America, where Joseph Brill, a Jewish refugee from France, has set up a school that offers a dual curriculum of both Jewish religious instruction and the traditional western liberal arts. Inspired by the books he'd read while hiding in a convent from the Nazis during the war, especially the works of Edmond Fleg, Brill dreams of uniting "the civilization that invented the telescope side by side with the civilization that invented conscience—astronomers and God-praisers uniting in a majestic dream of peace." This syncretic ambition is challenged when the brilliant philosopher Hester Lilt enrolls her seemingly mediocre daughter Beulah in Brill's Edmond Fleg Primary School. At the novel's heart is the uneasy dance between Brill and Hester. With his growing despondency over the sameness and mediocrity of the student body, he wonders how a genius like Hester can withstand having reared a normal or even sullenly underachieving child. She insists, by contrast, that one not "stop too soon"—i.e., judge by early rather than later evidence or declare defeat before the battle is over, as she deems Brill to have done by assimilating into American mediocrity and abandoning his own intellectual aspirations even as he scorns her daughter's abilities prematurely. "Ad astra," Brill, a former astronomy student, proclaims to his charges, but he has long since ceased his studies and now vegetates after hours in front of his TV. In the novel's eponymous metaphor, Brill has escaped Europe's exterminationist attempt to cannibalize the Jews only to fall prey to America's gentler assimilationist maw.

We can read The Cannibal Galaxy, then, as the Orthodox Ozick's severe rebuke to Brill's universalist dream: a dual curriculum is no curriculum at all. The novel's earlier episodes, narrating Brill's youth, support this interpretation, especially when an adolescent Brill accompanies his cultured gentile school friend, Claude, across the Channel to hear an English author read from a manuscript in a room full of intimate men (neither the author nor the book are named in the third-person narration, which always cleaves to Brill's sometimes limited perspective). On the return trip, Brill fends off Claude's sexual advance, and Claude then crudely derogates him as "Dreyfus." Western culture is, on this view, endemically hostile to Jewish values and eventually threatening to the Jewish people. The subtext here, which will recur in Antiquities, is Ozick's 1971 review of E. M. Forster's Maurice, nastily subtitled "A Fairy Tale" when collected in Art and Ardor. There Ozick censures Forster's posthumous gay love story for what she takes to be its compensatory fantasy of subcultural private loyalties and homosexual plenitude, when, to her mind, the Hebraic Covenant enjoins communal allegiance, and even Hellenic paganism, to which Forster otherwise pledges his troth, demands progeny.

Though she commits herself to the prohibition on idols, with their misdirection of reason and sympathy toward merest matter, Ozick loves Forster, not to mention James; and she loves nature and the body, as her sensuous, impastoed prose mimesis—the equal of her also beloved Bellow's—amply proves; and she loves the monastic life of the pagan poet with his inherently idolatrous ambition to make the flesh word, in defiance of Judaism's discarnate deity and His bodiless ethic. (Even Brill, for that matter, is "unsure whether he liked" Claude's kiss.) "Dual curriculum" could be the collective title of her oeuvre; I think of her great early story, "The Pagan Rabbi"—another Forsterian variation, this time on "The Story of a Panic"—whose titular protagonist flees his study to couple with a dryad in a squalid city park. Victor Strandberg's 1994 monograph, which has helped this wayward Catholic schoolboy to better grasp the writer's theology, bears a title that is even more to the point: Greek Mind/Jewish Soul: The Conflicted Art of Cynthia Ozick.

Back to The Cannibal Galaxy: Brill, seeking a normal life in late middle age, marries his (non-intellectual) young assistant, and they a child who gives every appearance of being the prodigy he'd hoped for. Yet he lives long enough to see this son corrupted by America, becoming not a scholar or thinker but a mere money-mined business-school maven. Meanwhile, Brill discovers that he'd been wrong about Hester's ostensibly dull daughter, Beulah; she has flowered into a painter of great distinction, the Edmond Fleg Primary School's most successful student, albeit one who claims to an interviewer that she remembers nothing of her education. The novel ends with one of American fiction's finest final sentences, one that should be indited in marble on some portico:

She labored without brooding in calculated and enameled forms out of which a flaming nimbus sometimes spread.

Even the most wayward student of Ozick—I haven't read Trust, but then again, who has?—can read the ambivalence in these words: the dual curriculum's greatest and only success is, like her deviser, a major artist, i.e., a maker of idols. Ozick's only consolation is that Beulah doesn't seek to usurp the Creator—who brooded over the face of the waters in bringing forth the creation—but remands her art to its properly Greek sphere, that of calculation.

Ozick's nimbus happily still flames in her 10th decade, which brings me at last to this year's novella, Antiquities, which purports to be the midcentury memoir of the elderly retired lawyer Lloyd Wilkinson Petrie. Petrie is a former student and current trustee of the Temple Academy, a private boys' school in Westchester, named for a family related to the more eminent Jameses (as in Henry, William, and Alice) who'd once owned the land. Like the other trustees, Petrie currently lives in the old boarding school, long since closed to students; they have all agreed to produce memoirs of their time at the Academy, but only Petrie is making any effort, to the despair of his fellow elderly residents, who complain of his Remington's nightly clatter.

Petrie's diary-like account reads at first like an aleatory ramble, as Ozick cannily toys with her audience's patronizing expectations of an aged author, yet the novella is tightly organized around several motifs to which Petrie, both widowed and bereft of his secretary-mistress, helplessly recurs. First is his father's mysterious flight to join his archeologist cousin in Egypt in 1880, when the pyramids at Giza were being excavated, a flight from family and WASP respectability to a life of adventure. His father spent only a few months in Egypt, yet the objects he brought back—the "antiquities" of the title, not excavated from an archeological site but purchased in Cairo antique shops—remain in his son's possession and continue to fascinate him in old age, especially a stork-shaped jug with an inscrutable inscription on its base.

Petrie also can't help but recall a red-haired boy who was his classmate at the Temple Academy in youth, the strangely-named Ben-Zion Elefantin, with whom he formed an unlikely, intimate, and eventually abortive friendship. The intense Elefantin, who speaks in elevated, stilted, foreign tones, makes no attempt to assimilate to the school; he listens attentively to the regular scriptural readings, while his rowdy classmates jeer and make faces. Like other Jewish students of the Temple Academy, Elefantin is shunned by the dominant Christian students, yet Petrie befriends him. They play chess together, and, at the novel's center, they lay together in Elefantin's room while the boy recounts his history, a tale the elderly Petrie transcribes from memory and hides from his fellow trustees in his father's cigar box.

Elefantin claims that his parents are itinerant traders in antiquities who enrolled him in the Academy to shield him from their trade, which they are able to ply only because westerners "are hollow and have no histories of their own." The Elefantins' own history according to their son: they descend from Judean refugees who'd fled to the Elephantine Island in the Nile after their fellow exiles from Egyptian bondage began to worship "a gilded bovine of the barnyard." Because the Elephantine Jews built their temple near the island's pagan house of worship, though, other Jews ironically accused them of worshipping strange gods and wrote them out of the people's history. Elefantin protests that they kept the faith, that their incorruptible proximity to "the gods of the nations" testify to their own steadfastness in what Ozick may intend as another parable of the perils and pleasures of the dual curriculum.

Elefantin, his hair the color of Egypt's sands as described by Petrie's father ("deeper and denser and more otherworldly than any commonplace Celtic red"), is linked to the paternal archeological expedition, not on what Forster would call the "vulgar" level of the story but rather symbolically. As the boy tells Petrie his history, they literally lay entwined in a passage of intense and narratively fruitful homoeroticism that suggests a palinode for Ozick's half-century-old reproof of Forster's gay "sterility":

[H]e slid off his end of the bed and pulled me down beside him, with his face so close to mine that I could almost see my eyes in the black mirror of his own. I had never before felt the heat of his meager flesh; sitting side by side in the chapel's confining pews, our shoulders in their Academy blazers had never so much as grazed—nor had our knees in our short trousers. And now, the two of us prone on the floor amid the nubbles of dust, breathing their spores, I seemed to be breathing his breath. Our bare legs in the twist of my fall had somehow become entangled, and it was as if my skin, or his own, might at any moment catch fire.

Toward the end of the novel, as Petrie's mind and body disintegrate, he concedes, "I remember nothing. I remember everything. I believe everything. I believe nothing," while Elefantin describes himself as "an apparition." Other reviewers have interpreted the boy as a ghost or as a projection of Petrie's consciousness; since our not-quite-reliable narrator is the only source of the information that would confirm or deny any such reading, the issue is undecidable. We can place Antiquities on the same shelf with those other brief and mysterious masterpieces of others, doubles, and projective apparitions: "Bartleby, the Scrivener," "The Secret Sharer," and The Turn of the Screw.

If Antiquities is inherently ambiguous at the literal level, though, its higher meaning is clearer. Throughout his memoir, Petrie stresses his WASP bona fides, including a superficially unembarrassed genteel anti-Semitism that leads him to remark with scorn on the Temple school's being mistaken by vandals for a synagogue, to question the veracity of the first reports from the camps, and to approve the "kernel of truth" in the "commonplace disparagements" of Jews that he finds in the Academy's official history. Yet another of his Jewish classmates remembers Petrie as having refrained from the other boys' prejudices and accordingly helps him find a place to live when the trustees are finally dismissed from the Academy grounds. Through Elefantin, he comes to understand in boyhood that the Jewish scripture is, if he is a Christian, in part his own, even as his truest inheritance from his father is not caste complacencies but a yearning for otherness.

The central image of Petrie and Elefantin in an embrace, skin to skin, breathing each other's breath and staring at each other's eye-borne reflections, tells the tale: there is no Christianity, and no western civilization, without Judaism, without an encounter in that desert where conscience was invented. Like her bête noire and own disavowed secret sharer, Edward Said, Ozick indicts western civilization for smugly denying its dependence on an other than is part and parcel of itself. Petrie refers to Elefantin's voice as "uncannily ancestral." The allusion to Freud is the writer's, not the narrator's. Petrie characteristically derides Freud as "this charlatan Jew," but Ozick knows that Freud called "uncanny" whatever is intimately familiar, yet displaced or estranged.

Petrie's and Elefantin's relationship collapses in the end. Petrie shows the boy his father's prize curio, the jug fashioned like a stork. But in Elefantin's narrative he had recalled that the pagans of Elephantine Island worshipped "gods of the river, red-legged storks," whereas for the Jews, the stork was considered impure. Consequently, Elefantin judges the vessel an idol, an "abomination," in a scene set in a frigid communal shower where the boys face each other shivering and naked—a harrowing image from a writer for whom the Holocaust is never far off.

Why is stork impure among birds? Antiquities supplies no answer, because the gentile Petrie doesn't know, and the reader unschooled in Jewish tradition may not know either. We could always Google it, but Ozick conveniently supplies the answer elsewhere in her oeuvre; if we return to The Cannibal Galaxy we'll discover the reason. In the earlier novel, Hester Lilt sends Brill one of her essays, which he fails to read for almost two decades; when he finally takes it up, he notices a teaching she'd lifted from his own recollection of his childhood rabbi's lessons. The stork's problem, Hester writes, is that "she loves only her own. She hopes only for the distinction of the little one under her heart. She will not cherish the stranger's young." Applying this to Antiquities, with its narrator who trades, however ambivalently, in anti-Semitic stereotype, we may see how Ozick deftly turns the old charges back against the gentile world: she suggests again and again in Antiquities that the Christians, not the Jews, are greedy, clannish, selfish, sectarian—caring only for their own and therefore insubordinate both to the Hebrew and to the Greek testaments. A dual curriculum is only possible if both student and teacher surmount such a mentality. Lloyd Wilkinson Petrie never overcomes this barrier consciously, but he leaps it beneath his own awareness, powered by an imaginative longing for a distant relation, for a companion from afar.

[Jonathan · Rating 4 out of 5]

Subtle and complex stuff, as one would expect. Felt some similarities to Gass' Tunnel in certain respects (though not stylistically of course). Not her best but the fact that she is capable of such writing at the age of 93 is frankly amazing.

[David · Rating 4 out of 5]

It is fascinating to approach this new work from Ozick having recently re-read The Remains of the Day. There is a lot of concordance between the two, including elderly male protagonists tripped up by self-deception as they review their fading lives. Antiquities similarly takes an oblique look at pervasive anti-Semitism in the mid-twentieth century. Toward the end there are also strong echoes here of Thomas Mann's Aschenbach and his disturbing, insurmountable fascination with the stripling Tadziu.

The writing is excellent, of course, and this short work serves as a reminder that skilled authors know how to tell their stories with elegance and efficiency.

4.5 stars

[da AL · Rating 5 out of 5]

Since when do I try out an author based on their age alone? Since they’re over 90 and after a long career of accomplished publishing, they’re still at it! This finely nuanced book depicts how we can be wonderful and awful and sentimental and crude all rolled up into one.

[Stacey B · Rating 3 out of 5]

A novella written by a seasoned author at the age of 93.
Kudos to her

[Jaksen · Rating 3 out of 5]

Quick read. Strange story. Had to wait about six weeks to borrow from library; there was quite a queue for it. Anyhow...

Story of a man writing a memoir - a brief one - pertaining to his boyhood when he was at boarding school. Said school is now defunct, sort of rundown and home to seven elderly gentlemen all (supposedly) doing the same thing: writing a memoir about their time at school, after which the school will be sold, torn down whatever.

So the scenario, kind of sad. The anecdote/brief memoir this MC decides to write is about his friendship with an odd boy who turns out to be...

Well, it's not a fantasy or magical realism, though the boy is sort of....

Anyhow, very short, a few hours read. I came away not liking the MC very much, but hey, it is what it is and this author is apparently known for tales/novels like this. An unusual locale. An odd or enigmatic MC. A storyline that seems to meander but does get there - wherever 'there' is.

Three stars.

[Jesse · Rating 4 out of 5]

A real tour-de-force of style. As the main character's "simple" task of composing a short memoir begins to transmute (devolve? evolve?) into something else altogether, it's an evocative demonstration of the unexpected byways memory can sometimes take. Careful not to overplay its hand by keeping it brief, I read this with great pleasure.

"I think incessantly of death, of oblivion, how nothing lasts, not even memory when the one who remembers is gone."

[Liam Ostermann · Rating 5 out of 5]

"...This slim novel (Ozick rarely writes long) is not merely a gem but also a tiny peephole into the purpose of living in a world that outlasts us...It’s a very tiny peephole, of course—which...is all we mortals are likely to get. And in 'Antiquities', that peephole is so tiny that even a thoughtful reader might well toss the book aside, in the what’s-the-point frustration that American culture today demands of us: If someone won’t say something outrageous in 280 characters or less, why read their work at all? But the fact that our culture has trained us to pass over the profoundest of insights in favour of vanity is itself Ozick’s point. Most of us go through life this way, missing even the moments of revelation available to us. In 'Antiquities', the narrator almost does too.

"That narrator is Lloyd Petrie, a blueblood alumnus of the defunct Temple Academy for Boys in Westchester, a once-elite institution that by the novel’s 1949 setting is merely an old-age home for its dwindling Board of Trustees. These trustees are preparing a book of personal memories of Temple (the school is named for its WASPy benefactor, but the idea of remembering the Temple is as fundamental to Antiquities as it is to, well, Judaism—stay tuned), inspiring Petrie to recall a precious encounter with a schoolmate so strange that his existence altered Petrie’s relationship with history itself.

"Ozick winds toward this encounter through the roundabout reminiscences of Petrie, a man haunted by a dead father whose claim to fame was an amateur excursion to Egypt in the late 19th century, where he joined the archaeological excavations of his cousin, the British Egyptologist Sir Flinders Petrie, and returned with small relics of questionable authenticity. Here the alert reader (or the reader using Wikipedia) begins the archaeologist’s work, sifting through the detritus of Petrie’s memories to corroborate clues outside the novel’s text: Sir Flinders Petrie was, in fact, a real Egyptologsit whose signature discovery, unmentioned in this novel, was the Merneptah Stele, a 13th-century-BCE inscription that famously features the earliest Egyptian reference to the Israelties. This, along with Temple Academy’s name, is one of many clues to the hidden history Ozick and Petrie are actually excavating.

"As Petrie tells us in his deliberately arch style, “Most unfortunate was the too common suspicion that ‘Temple’ signified something unpleasantly synagogical, so that on many a Sunday morning the chapel’s windows…were discovered to have been smashed overnight. The youngest forms were regularly enlisted to sweep up the shards and stones.” Petrie’s unexamined anti-Semitism here is structural to the plot as well as to the world we live in; we readers are enlisted to sweep up such shards and stones from Petrie’s narrative, the necessary archaeological sifting work for the gradual revelation of what this vast edifice of elitism conceals.

"That anti-Semitism, which Petrie imbibes along with “the classics” and the top-down Anglicanism that defined his late-19th-century education, first draws his attention in fifth grade to a new student whose room is across from his at Temple, with the improbable name Ben-Zion Elefantin. The school’s few Jewish students are mocked and shunned by the other boys, but Ben-Zion Elefantin, with his “loam-red hair” (not coincidentally, the same color as King David’s), silent mien, complete disinterest in children’s frivolities, and “odd” habits (eating only cold vegetarian foods; failing to ever remove his cap), is shunned even by the Jews. This strands him with Petrie, a loner who plays chess against himself in his room while the other boys play football, until Elefantin enters uninvited and checkmates him. Petrie claims to be disgusted by “so freakish a boy” and is truly disgusted by how he too is suddenly ostracized for associating with Elefantin. But his attraction to this stranger is erotic in every sense. There is a brief and fairly innocent homoerotic moment between them, but the attraction really comes from how Elefantin continues to checkmate Petrie in more profound ways—most of all, in Elefantin’s reveal of his own origins, which, like Petrie’s father’s artifacts (his own patrimony, if you will), may or may not be authentic, and whose story itself is far more compelling than its odds of being true.

"Ozick’s work is deeply Jewish, which means that knowledge is required to recognize its depth.

"I won’t spoil Ozick’s revelation here but will merely provide the little-known but entirely factual historical superstructure that exists outside her book, which involves a Jewish colony on Elephantine Island at the First Cataract of the Nile, the southern border of ancient Egypt. Elephantine was a military outpost of the Persian empire in the 5th century BCE, and the Persians, searching for regime loyalists unlikely to sympathize with the locals, employed Jewish mercenary soldiers, who resided at the garrison at Elephantine with their families. One of the earliest documented Diaspora Jewish communities, and far-flung by ancient standards, Elephantine Jews apparently developed their own traditions, including building their own Temple while the Jerusalem Temple stood. This Temple was adjacent to an Egyptian shrine to a local deity, whose adherents ultimately destroyed this Jewish Temple. Elephantine’s Jewish community is remarkably well documented for the period, thanks to the early 1900s discovery (not long after the excavations of Sir Flinders Petrie) of remarkable archives of papyri and ostraca (inscribed potsherds).

"These antiquities, so to speak, leave many questions unanswered, including essential ones concerning why these Jews built their own Temple, as well as the origins of this community, which may have predated the Persian garrison. In the novel, Elefantin supplies his own answers, which involve a kind of Judaism-within-Judaism of ostracized ostraca, along with his parents’ unending quest for what Elefantin calls “the significant thing,” a “certain relic” lost somewhere in the Levant, which the novel does not otherwise identify. (Fans of Indiana Jones should feel free to guess.) But as Elefantin points out, “Though the significant thing has yet to be discovered, I have by now seen for myself who we are.”

"That answer, which Petrie only comes to understand decades later, is deeply related to the rejection of idolatry, whether in antiquity or now. This idolatry, the novel implies, does not merely mean worship of false gods, but also the worship of more-modern idols like fame (Petrie’s estranged and untalented son aspires to Hollywood success), elitism (the Temple trustees keep their defunct school’s commemorative volumes in a bank vault, preserving them for…what?), social conventions (Petrie only gradually reveals his lifelong love affair with his secretary, and he is publicly shamed for visiting her grave), class barriers (the trustees’ house servants, who spend their days fulfilling the whims of entitled old men, turn out to be highly educated Holocaust refugees), and even “antiquities” themselves (Petrie’s relationship with his father’s Egyptian items comes close to worship), with their promise of a meaningful connection to an inert past to which we owe nothing in the present.

"As Elefantin quotes his mother, explaining why Westerners covet ancient Near Eastern artifacts, “It is because they [the buyers of antiquities] are hollow and have no histories of their own.”

"This hollowness is at the core of Petrie’s haunted memories. His haute pedigree with all of its accompanying value is, by midcentury, not only out of style but revealed to have a horrifying emptiness at its core, sterile and devoid of commitment, its only legacy a broke boarding school, decades at an inherited job at the family firm, an immature son and a father revered for rummaging through ancient strangers’ relics. Petrie perceives this emptiness as he observes the Jewish boys he shunned at school taking pride in building their own families and careers despite, or perhaps because of, their social ostracism. As he nears his own life’s end, Petrie borrows meaning from Elefantin’s memory—and it is impossible to miss that this borrowed memory is exactly the kind of appropriation that Christianity and Islam enacted, founding themselves on Jewish antiquities. He wonders about that “significant thing,” concluding that it is perhaps “a mighty idea.” The reader versed in Torah will recognize that mighty idea, coded deeply into this novel’s deliberately obscuring language, revealed and not-revealed throughout and especially at the novel’s end. One finds, in the end, the significant thing, and the least important question is whether it can be “authenticated” in any material sense.

"It is, as both Petrie and Deuteronomy put it, not in the heavens. Much of this novel will seem rambling and tangential to readers unfamiliar with Ozick’s style, but part of her alchemy is how each sentence upon rereading is revealed to be essential to the puzzle, another hidden clue, although often to a world outside the text. For a book ostensibly about a childhood encounter, for instance, most of its pages are taken up with Petrie’s daily life in old age, with its losses great and small. (This is, one suspects, the novel’s most autobiographical element—that, and the fact that Ozick’s daughter is an archaeologist.) But this, too, is part of Ozick’s point, because of course Petrie himself is an artifact, as is the Temple he inhabits, along with the exercises in memory attempting to reimagine its past through many renovations and attempts to erase it.

"The apparently random details dropped throughout this book—a housemaid recites lyrics from the German Jewish poet Heinrich Heine (whose career, unmentioned here, embodied the triumphs and compromises of Jews living the half-lives of assimilation); the Temple boys snicker through a visitor’s description of the Dreyfus Affair (which, unmentioned here, was the beginning of political Zionism)—are actually clues to a mystery that readers might not even realize they are reading, when they think they are reading the ramblings of a grumpy old Gentile man.

"Ozick’s work is deeply Jewish, which means that knowledge is required to recognize its depth. It is a profoundly acquired taste, acquired through years of communal thought about the meaning of worshiping an eternal God during an ephemeral life. Petrie himself would never get it, although Elefantin would.

"Antiquities is classic Ozick, marvelous Ozick, Ozick at the height of her powers. She has of course been at the height of her powers for at least 50 years by now, but that only makes her ongoing creativity an even greater gift to those readers lucky enough to encounter it and to give it the attention it boldly demands. May she continue until 120—and I mean that literally. I’m looking forward to her next book."

[Susan Tunis · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is one of those deceptively slender novels (Novella? Novelette?) that are so much more than they appear to be. On it's surface, an elderly man, the trustee of a long ago boys school, is attempting to write a short memoir of his time there. His thoughts focus entirely on an exotic classmate who has stayed, it seems, very much on his mind.

So, you've got this old man, a not-so-reliable narrator, and the comedy and tragedy of the day to day dramas of his life. And you've got his memories of his youth, and what they say about the world he comes from, social mores--then and now--and the man he is today.

And there's so much layering in a mere 192 pages that as soon as I finished reading it, I went back to the beginning and read it again. I had to stop myself from a third reading! Because beneath the light trappings, there really is a lot of there there. And also, Ms. Ozick's prose is simply a joy to consume. The author is 93-years-old, and at that advanced age appears to be sharper than the vast majority of the human race on their very best day. (Herman Wouk was like that. Just lived forever and kept on getting better and better until the very end.)

A part of me still wants to revisit this tale, and I'm sure I will in time. But for now, I need to channel the impulse into reading deeper into Ms. Ozick's lengthy bibliography. I suspect there are many treasures to be found.

[Laurie · Rating 5 out of 5]

Only now in my 60's am I able to appreciate such stories about our relationship to our memories and our relationship to the lies we tell ourselves. Only now am I able to see that this is a large part of who we are; or who we think we are.

[Deborah · Rating 3 out of 5]

An interesting novella, a densely filled hundred pages, but I fear I’m too dense for its subtleties, at least I seem to have failed to grasp the very heart of its spiraling telling and was left scratching my head and going, “Huh?” Lloyd Petrie, an elderly gentleman, a trustee of the Temple School for Boys, a long-defunct educational institution, is living on the campus of that school with a handful of other aged trustees, all of them former pupils. There have been official histories of the school, but now they have set themselves the task of recording personal memoirs of their schooldays. The very non-linear narrative has Petrie (was there ever a more unreliable narrator?) dive into in the past as he works on his memoir, interspersed with passages of his increasing irritation with his fellow residents. His memories take him to his father’s past, to a time when he briefly abandoned his “regular” life to join a distant relative, an archeologist working on digs in Egypt, returning home with a collection of perhaps spurious antiquities, now in Petrie’s possession. His memoir centres on his fascination with an older student, the mysterious and exotic Ben-Zion Elefantin, a Jewish boy who claims descent from Egypt’s Elephantine Island, connected to Petrie’s antiquities. As Petrie navigates his memories of the past, the school’s anti-Semitism emerges clearly, which caused Ben-Zion to hold himself aloof, believing Petrie to be his friend, as indeed Petrie fervently believed it. A tale of allusion and confusion, the nature of memory, truth and deceit. Like I said, a lot packed into 100 pages.

[Robin Robertson · Rating 5 out of 5]

I will read anything Cynthia Ozick writes, whether it's a book, essay, cereal box, or a post-it note.

[Courtney Ferriter · Rating 5 out of 5]

Reread for Aging & Death in Literature course in Sept 2025 - original rating and review below still stand, although I was not as emotionally devastated by the end upon reread.

** 5 stars **

Oh how deep the human capacity for self-deception is! Lloyd Wilkinson Petrie, an aging trustee of an exclusive (now defunct) New England boys' academy where he was once a pupil, is preoccupied with writing his memoir, which will be included as part of the history of the academy. As he reflects, he puzzles over his father's adventures in Egypt and a boy he once knew at the academy with the unusual name of Ben-Zion Elefantin. Petrie's nostalgic retreats into the past prevent him from engaging with the present and recognizing the equal humanity of those around him, a characteristic that seems to have been the case all his life.

I loved this book, which emotionally devastated me at the end in a way similar to Kazuo Ishiguro's The Remains of the Day. Ultimately, Ozick knows, "we are what our memories tell us" (94), for better or worse, and like the narrator of Antiquities, sooner or later we will all be faced with the decision to "destroy what cannot be accounted for, or dispatch it all" (166).

[Anita · Rating 5 out of 5]

Cynthia Ozick . wow. In 179 teeny pages (this hardcover is smaller than a trade paperback) she manages to craft a luminous, weird little tale of ... what, exactly? Well, I'm not exactly sure. It's a memoir .. of a couple of excerpts in several lives ...

(the reason for all these ellipses is I'm trying to figure out what I just read. Which, because it's Ozick, is probably exactly what she intended)

Lloyd Wilkinson Petrie, of the illustrious Petrie family, is charged with chronicling a specific time in his life during his tenure as a boarder at Temple Academy for Boys in New York - this specific time is, of course, intertwined with his efforts to actually chronicle that past time in his present time. He is one of 7 elderly trustees who inhabit the now-defunct Academy and his present day is rife with the vagaries of Life, living amongst 6 other tiresome, privileged old men who are no better behaved than 6 year old boys, domestic retainers, absent (or nonexistent) family... and above all, the ever-growing pull of memory. As Petrie nears the end of his life, current life fights for (and usually loses) against the primacy of the past. Past loves loom large even as those memories drift towards evanescence but it's a testament to Ozick's skill that, besides Love, it's little moments, both tender and vicious, that loom just as large. Casual racism, little betrayals, arrogance born of longstanding privilege, petty hatreds... all of those hit either with a heavyweight punch or strike with the subtlety of a viper. No matter, along with the memory of love they will all twist your heart.

This is both an easy and difficult read. Ozick's narrative skill makes it easy but her elegance of phrase makes it difficult because you want to read passages over and over to savor the perfection of her writing. I spent large (mostly all) portions of the book seeing it in a golden haze - even the ugliness - but the beautiful bits are simply luminous.

(this, excerpted from Petrie's recollection of his first encounter with his new classmate, Elefantin)

"...and when I looked up from my wooden troops, I saw Ben-Zion Elefantin standing there. Without speaking a word, he hopped on the bed to face me, and began maneuvering first a knight, and then a rook, and finally a queen, and I heard him say, very quietly, indeed humbly, If you don't mind, checkmate."

Never in my entire life would I have thought a sentence with NINE commas would bring me so much joy.

There's no point in my trying to give a synopsis of this tale because those who will want to read it won't want my clumsy efforts anyway - as with most of Ozick's work it's one you have to experience for itself. I will say, though, that if you want to spend a couple of golden hours with a consummate storyteller 'Antiquities' just might be the ticket.

[cycads and ferns · Rating 3 out of 5]

...it was for the sake of foreign objects, exceedingly ancient, that persons in the West coveted and might wish to buy. And when I asked why these objects were coveted, my father replied It is for the vanity of the coveters, and my mother said It is because they are hollow and have no histories of their own.

[Lynn Wohlwend · Rating 3 out of 5]

I admit I picked this up after realizing Ozick's age, a perhaps ageist, perhaps sexist whim. What is she writing these days, and, more damnably, how is she writing?

Well, the answer is, of course, she is writing quite interesting fare. The story is the memoir of an aging Englishman, born of a time of England's best and worst. He is everything the time idolized in capitalism, and, is thus a perfectly abhorrent old man: racist, antisemitic, misogynistic, mostly incapable of love or—perhaps even more damning by the rules of this book—imagination.

And it is with this character that one circles through the first 70 or so pages of the book. I'm afraid I felt at times like saying, my goodness, get on with the story, but then Ozick does. And our odious Englishman tells the tale of only the second time in his life he felt love: when a strange young boy came to live across the hall from his boyhood dorm. Here the story takes on the whimsy of an Aira, though this is always Ozick's own, and we get the life of the fabulous and mysterious; and our Englishman has his first chance to live a different kind of life from the one that has been prescribed, one of real exploration and knowledge. A chance you already know by the book's opening he has squandered.

There are countless obscure erudite references sprinkled in this book, and I found myself intrigued and googling them up, including the much referenced Elephantine Island in Egypt. Honestly, this book wetted my interest for a great read or two on Egyptian history. But I wouldn't mind checking out Ozick's other works. Her short story The Shawl remains one of my great reads of the last century.

[Valeri · Rating 5 out of 5]

Wow, just wow. This is one of those books that leaves you with this feeling of wonderment but you can’t explain why. I finished this in 3 hours this evening, I couldn’t put it down.

[Evan · Rating 3 out of 5]

“I think of the loneliness I felt in my childhood, which returns to me now, as if all loneliness, past and present, were one.”

[L · Rating 1 out of 5]

Unfortunately really didn’t like this book. Cynthia Ozick is clearly an incredible writer, all the more impressive for writing so well at age 93. I just didn’t like the subject matter or the main character at all. Why should I spend time with a curmudgeonly old navel-gazing white man who is anti-Semitic, ungrateful, and basically hates everyone and everything? There are enough real white men like that in the world and reading is a way for me to escape that particular brand of narcissism and privilege. How disappointing to pick up a female author and to then be steeped in it instead. This was like a much shittier Sense of an Ending and Remains of the Day. It’s been done and much better and can we move on from these narrators and narratives now?
I was surprised to learn after reading that the author is Jewish herself. The main character’s anti-Semitism was dangerous to read. His love for a Jewish outsider didn’t somehow redeem him. Ben-Zion Elefantin and his heritage are essentially victims of the Jewish people, a potential cause for more anti-Semitism! Unnecessary. As far as I am aware, Jewish people didn’t seek to erase the existence of the Elephantine Jews. I’m grateful for the introduction to the Elephantine papers. They are truly fascinating. I wish she had fictionalized about them differently.

[Peter Herrmann · Rating 1 out of 5]

Reminds me of 'The Rector of Justin' (Louis Auchincloss) - but because I read that one some 50+ years ago, I can't remember enough details .... other than of an old pedantic academic recollecting the past. So, that probably does neither book justice. But, of this Ozick novella, my feeling is - after all of the narrator's revelations - 'So what?'

[Cherise Wolas · Rating 4 out of 5]

This short novel belies its density, its grappling with many themes: the writing process, aging, the oblivion of death, family mysteries, inchoate and blurred memories, unrealized loves and hidden self-truths, as well as Judaism and its corollary, anti-semitism. As Ozick turns 93 this year, certainly some of these concerns belong to her. The first-person narrator is Lloyd Wilkerson Petrie, a widowed octogenarian, a retired lawyer, the third and final generation to run his family's New York law firm - his son having decamped to California to pursue an erstwhile career in film - and as a trustee of the Temple School, a upper-class WASP boarding school for boys in Westchester, NY, Lloyd and a handful of the other elderly and likewise wealthy trustees now reside at the school, which has been turned into their personal old-age home, all living literally amidst their schoolboy memories, in rooms renovated but retaining their old names, like Lloyd's which was and still is called Fifth Form Cell. The trustees have devised a memoir project, to be appended to the school's old History project: each is to write a salient short memoir about something that especially affected them while students there. What was remains true for Lloyd today - back in his school days, despite his status as a WASP scion, he was ostracized by his equally WASP classmates for his brief and transient near-friendship with one of the rare Jews to attend the school, a thin red-haired boy named Ben-Zion Elefantin. This memoir that Lloyd attempts to write gives us details of his early life - most notably about his father who early in his marriage to Lloyd's mother ran away to Egypt; Lloyd's own early marriage; his apparent love for his now-dead secretary, and slowly, eventually, into Lloyd's quasi-friendship with Elefantin, an exotic, a descendant of those Jews exiled long ago on Elephantine Island in Egypt, on the Nile, Ben-Zion and his parents outcasts of outcast people. What has Lloyd been hiding from himself all these years - about his father and his mystery trip, a life not lived, about Lloyd's life also not lived - his love for his secretary, his adolescent attraction not spoken of with Elefantin? Written in Lloyd's formal vernacular, the lawyer trying to write prose when he is most use to legal writing, to seeing memories as depositions, the juxtaposition of the formality with the powerful feelings running underneath Lloyd's memories generates heat.

[Kai Joy · Rating 3 out of 5]

Ok I've finally made it to my final review and so now I can talk about this week in general. This has been a scrappy ass week for reading y'all. Its been a week where I've had to do what I've had to do to stay caught up on the 365. That's part of why I had to put off reviewing until today. Since I've already reached my manga quota for the month and bc of which audio books came in on Libby and just the like schedule of the week made this a weird one for sure. I'm going to try to avoid putting myself in this situation again this year unless absolutely necessary like I had to do 3 books yesterday and 3 books today and that's not a fun position to be in, on top of now having to review everything lol. I'm not woe-is-me-ing tho bc this is totally my own fault and I need to learn to do this as efficiently as possible lmao. That being said I still think I got a ton out of this week's batch of books, I mean there were some hits this week for sure. Anyway this is also an explanation/ apology for why some of the reviews are on the shorter side today lol anywayyyyy onto the review.

It was fun to be immersed in this boy's school and its social hierarchies (which kind of rich fuck are u ?) and I liked the framing device of the group memoir and how those social hierarchies persisted. Also you know I love the confluence of theology and archeology here. Ofc the culture of these elites was very grating but Ben-Zion Elefantin was a very compelling character and their homoerotic lil episode was restrained/ subtle enough to be satisfying without needing like "pay-off". I rly like where things ended with the two of them and I love BZE's commentary on the kind of people who collect these ancient artifacts. Ofc getting to learn the history of the Elephantine isle was rly fascinating. Someone said that Judaism is to Ozick what Catholocism is to O'Conner and maybe I need to read more Ozick but to me its like bitch puh-leese flannery eats this up, I don't see it. I do, however have to take into account that Ozick wrote this in her damn NINETIES like past her prime and this is definitely good enough to make me want to explore more of her work. Overall not a ton to say but a good quick read for sure.

[Cflack · Rating 4 out of 5]

An existentially unhappy old WASP (in his 80s), Petrie looks back on his life to write a brief memoir for his old boarding school. It is 1949. His wife, who he married in a “shotgun” wedding, is dead. His son lives in LA hoping to make it in the movie industry turning his back on the staid, stilted life that his parents and those before him have lived. Petrie is alone. No real friends, his fellow school trustees that he lives with show him only contempt and mockery, and seemingly his only real love was for his for secretary who is also dead but he still keeps and uses her old Remington typewriter.

You may wonder, if you know anything about Cynthia Ozick, why she would be telling this tale. She is a writer for whom Judaism, its history and people are the thread that ties much of her work, especially her fiction together. Stay the course. Ozick builds her world using subtle (and not so subtle) anti-Semitism as threads to show the world of late 19th and early 20th century America for Jews as well as showing Petrie as unhappy because looking back whether he sees it or not – I don’t believe he really sees it – he never really accomplished anything in his life.

We see the Temple School being mistaken for a synagogue and Petrie and his fellow students have to clean up after the chapel windows are mistakenly smashed. We see his contempt for his son looking to find success not in the staid legal world of New York but in the world of movies dominated by Jews. We see the hostility and envy Petrie has for Greenhill (a fellow student who was one of the few Jews) and his successful son who buys the land Temple School is on essentially kicking him out of his place to live and also providing him a new place to live, partially out of altruism but ostensibly to attract the “right” kind of clientele to his new residential building. We see in 1949, a few years after the end of WWII Petrie’s not quite believing the horrors of the holocaust.

But most importantly we see the brief but important relationship Petrie has with Ben-Zion Elafantin a Jewish student at Temple. It is both his fascination with Ben-Zion as a fellow outsider and chess player as well as his rebuking the story and collection of items Petrie was left from his father’s brief episode in Egypt working on an archeological dig with a cousin. These items are the connection Petrie has to a father who died young and who was a very absent presence.

Beautiful and nuanced storytelling.

[Kristi Lamont · Rating 2 out of 5]

Why oh why do I try to read "literary" books? I know better. My brain is not wired for such. I prefer writers who spare me the subtleties of simile and metaphor and allegory and allusion and instead slam me in the head with the baseball bat of clarity by actually saying what they mean.

A review of Antiquities by Cynthia Ozick by Diane Cole in the April 16, 2021, edition of The Washington Post said, "Ozick employs her virtuosic literary style to weave an enigmatic tale about the ephemeral nature of memory and the transience of life."

Ephemeral memory and life transience, these I will grant you. But enigmatic? More like confusing, especially in regard to the main character's relationship with a young man considered to be "other" in many respects.

I will say Ms Ozick did a great job of voicing an elderly WASP male in the late 1940s, telling both of his current life circumstances and reminiscing about certain times and aspects of his boyhood. And she used what "felt" like the correct language for such a person; I had to pause in my reading what seemed like innumerable times to look up definitions of words with which I was either completely or vaguely unfamiliar. She also dropped in a lot German. I understand why, but golly gee, that sure didn't make for easy reading, either, even knowing some basics (here's a shoutout to the legacy of Colonel John G. Cullman, whose influence lived on in my hometown's city schools at least until the 1980s, and may still, for all I know).

Plenty of people loved and will love this book, I'm just not one of them. I _might_ try reading some of her other works, but not any time soon.

Philistine that I am.

[Mark · Rating 4 out of 5]

One of those late-career pieces where a certain leisureliness arises out of deep confidence and experience. Perfect command of the prose and the voice—I don't know whether to say 'obviously' because it's Ozick or 'surprisingly' because she was 93. A lot of funny character gripes. Since the narrator is triply unreliable—there are things he won't tell us, things he won't admit to himself, and things he is altogether ignorant of—a lot goes on in the interstices. I became convinced he (a classic WASP) fears he may be Jewish: his devotion to the written word (in contrast to his peers who spend all their time talking under the trees, like Greeks); his protests he's never heard of Harry Wolfson, William Wyler, or Myrna Loy (who is not Jewish—possibly a stretch to propose he's confusing her with Mina Loy); the artful way his age and circumstances of birth are hidden from us; the description of seeing his Jewish schoolmate in the shower, which covers much of his body but elides the fact of circumcision. At one point the narrator takes umbrage at being compared to Freud, so I'm inclined to think I'm on to something.

I am not sure why the 'deathbed confession/rant' genre should produce so many winners, but it does. It's bad form to prosecute meta-critical stuff here but it's ridiculous how little fanfare this received compared to DeLillo's Silence or McCarthy's final two.

[Katie · Rating 2 out of 5]

A novella about an old man named Lloyd Petrie, writing his memoir in 1949 about his days at the Temple School for Boys. That school has become an old folks' home for the seven remaining students who are now all elderly but still living there (although the building is about to be condemned). His memoir touches on the bigotry and anti-Semitism of his school days, which become apparent when a new student named Ben-Zion starts attending school there and becomes a close (very close) friend of Lloyd's.

This book has been compared to Remains of the Day, and it does feel similar in terms of the unreliable narrator and his self-deception which is apparent to the reader. I enjoyed and appreciated that, and this book is very well-written although I ended up finding it a bit dull, personally. But it was good, rich, dense writing and I'm sure some of it went over my head.

[Karen · Rating 3 out of 5]

Hmmm. I don’t know what to say about this odd little book. It is convincingly written in an old fashioned style that gets you in the head of a lonely, elderly man who is writing a memoir (of sorts)of his lonely time at a private boys school. In the course of his musings, he espouses anti-modern and anti-Semitic views that maybe were typical of the times. (The author is Jewish, so we are uncomfortable with the thoughts expressed but not exactly offended.) I feel like I missed something, intellectually, but I don’t feel like reading it again.

[Alismcg · Rating 5 out of 5]

Interesting. Of Ozick's fiction , I'd have to say that "Antiquities" certainly moves into winning 1st Place . There, in the few pages that make up the retelling of an old man's story, the reader feels the vibration within her own soul, of those two chords that search the ear to weighing a believer's heart: truth and kindness. I love Ozick. She writes the real matter-ing when it comes time to make peace.