"This Is A Borzoi Book" -- title page verso.

From one of our most preeminent writers, a tale that caputres 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 bigotries that pervade 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 with the elusive flavor of a Kafka parable, and weaving, in her own distinctive voice, myth and mania, history and illusion. --,From dust jacket.

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