“We’ll Make Out All Right. Lili Always Does.”

(Post #5; Chapters 38-57; pp. 171-End)

I was surprised about many of the conclusions to characters’ story arcs in these final chapters of Ozick’s novel. First, Marvin’s reversal on retrieving Julian and bringing him back into the family fold. Upon discovering that Julian is married to a Jewish woman from Eastern Europe (via Bea’s letter to him belatedly disclosing it), Marvin disowns Julian and tries to pay him off to stay away.

“I’m not about to have some little old grandma with broken English creep into my family.”

“…I put an end to it, didn’t I? I finished it off, it wasn’t supposed to get into the next generation, and it never did, I stopped it right from the start.”

“…I can’t have one of those, not in my family.”

“I don’t want to see her—I don’t want to smell her—and I don’t want to see my son, the damned fool…Bucharest, where the hell is that, Romania, Bulgaria, who cares? He’s gone back three generations into the past, the boy’s digging up skeletons—”

Marvin’s racism is breathtaking. He leaves Bea with a large check for Julian (“enough to live on decently for fifteen, maybe twenty years”) and demands that she immediately mail it before his son has the chance to depart Paris for the US.

But after Marvin leaves, Bea does something altogether subversive—she burns the check. Her reasoning is illuminating:

“Money frees, yes—she might have freed Julian altogether, she might have given the son his inheritance without revealing the father’s stipulation. But money is also bondage—if Julian were tempted to take it (by whom? by Lili?) the money would always and forever burn with his father’s imperium, his father’s contempt. In the logic of her betrayal, she had released Julian from the vise of Marvin’s spite.”

Bea’s burning of the check is all the more shocking because she knows full well what dire straits Julian and Lili are in, most recently from Lili’s letter asking Bea to help her find a job as a translator in New York City because in Paris “they do not live in a good way.” The morality of Bea’s act is a perplexing question, but one that we perhaps do not judge as harshly as we otherwise might. This is because when Lili and Julian arrive in New York, they come equipped with a plan to start over again in Texas (where Lili’s former boss, Kleinman, a Polish immigrant, is resettling).

“And out there’s as decent as any other patch of earth. Better for us than most. This time it won’t be only Lili—we’ll both be…you know…outsiders. We’ll make out all right. Lili always does.”

So even had Bea retained the check and handed it over to Julian, he might have rejected it, just as he rejected Bea’s offer of a translation job opportunity for Lili in New York City. It appears that Julian and Lili have determined to make their own way in the world.

Of course, there is so much more to discuss about how the stories conclude for Bea, Leo, Iris, Margaret, and I will discuss those in my next post. Please share your thoughts on this post and the novel’s endings on Substack.