From one of our most preeminent writers, a tale that captures the
shifting meanings of the past, and how our experience colors those
meanings.
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.
