From one of our most preeminent writers, a tale that captures the shifting meanings of the past and how our experience colors those meanings, now alongside four previously uncollected stories
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.
Included alongside this wondrous tale, touched by unsettling irony and with the elusive flavor of a Kafka parable, are four additional stories in Cynthia Ozick's brilliant, distinctive voice, weaving myth and mania, history and illusion:
The Coast of New Zealand
,
The Bloodline of the Alkanas
Sin
, and
A Hebrew Sibyl
.