Antiquities

Lloyd Wilkinson Petrie is one of the seven elderly trustees of the Temple Academy for Boys, a school that has been closed for thirty-four years. He is writing a memoir of his time there, and the present keeps intruding on it in troubling ways.

His memory is unreliable as he moves between two threads. One is the subtle anti-Semitism that ran through the school's culture. The other is his fascination with his own family's heritage, especially his famous cousin, the archaeologist Sir William Matthew Flinders Petrie. From there he reconstructs the intensity of a childhood encounter with Ben-Zion Elefantin, an older pupil with an unusual name and a puzzling manner, who claims descent from Egypt's Elephantine Island.

The story is by Cynthia Ozick, an American writer of fiction and essays. It is marked by unsettling irony and has something of the feel of a Kafka parable, and in her distinctive voice it blends myth and obsession, history and illusion. It explores how the meaning of the past shifts and how personal experience colors it.