How does a Jewish family, from a comfortable, intellectual milieu in Berlin, fleeing the Holocaust to settle in North America, cope with displacement, loss of money and status, the reinvention of self?

Cynthia Ozick’s voluminous new novel sprawls across the gaps between the New World and the Old, between memory and forgetting, between the horrors of recent history and the hopes of the present. Sometimes it seems easier, in order to survive, to deny discontinuities rather than to explore them, to let the overwhelming new present blot out the bloody, pain-filled past. When necessary, traumatised victims of history can summon amnesia like a thick, muffling veil. The language of this novel works similarly, swirling confusingly, circling repetitively around details and observations. Like a patient on the couch hovering obsessively over a taboo subject, Rose, the bewildered young narrator of much of the book, produces reams of babble yet cannot, for many pages, tell the reader much about what is really going on. Listening carefully to her longwinded descriptions, we begin to piece together a story involving fragments of other stories. Just as the Manhattan coastline swims out of the fog and becomes visible to the boatload of arriving travellers, we begin to witness the determining features of a life take on their own dramatic profile.

The novel, offering portraits of powerful, charismatic men and the hapless women who adore them, comes dense with literary allusion. Rose, a devotee of Jane Eyre and other tales of adventurous childhood, flees a hopeless love affair with her cousin Bertram. An orphan as solitary and determined as any in Charlotte Brontë, Rose answers an advertisement and becomes not so much a governess as amanuensis to Herr Mittwisser, the eccentric, larger-than-life patriarch of an unruly household newly arrived in the Bronx. Mittwisser, passionately concerned with questions to do with the reception, transmittal and meaning of literature, spends his days ensconced in his study, thinking and writing about the Torah, the sacred scripture of the Jews, and its interpretation, fought over by scholars.

Frau Mittwisser, erstwhile scientist reduced to inept housekeeper and nightie-clad invalid, acts out Brontë’s madwoman in the attic, wringing her hands and lengthily bewailing her fate. Since both parents neglect their children, Anneliese, the fairytale eldest daughter, steps in to run things and boss Rose about. Tensions rise when events better confined within a children’s story start to become real. The family’s mysterious benefactor, James A’Bair, made rich by having been the model for a bestselling children’s book, the eponymous Bear Boy, arrives to widen existing rifts and sow increased disorder.

Some of this disorder seems due to the narrative perspective, suddenly, two thirds through the novel, switchbacking between first and third person, and to its technique. Rose, wanting to convert her impressions into facts, overemploys the verb to be. She cannot trust herself simply to record dialogue: laboriously she keeps explaining to the reader what she thinks it all means.

Ozick does not seem fully in charge of her turbulent and intractable material, but perhaps that demonstrates her greatness and integrity. Whose narrative can control the shattering events of the 20th century? History is the one which gets away. In the end, Rose does too.

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