Cynthia Ozick's new novel, "The Cannibal Galaxy" … is so rich in its tapestries it can be read variously as an incisive though ironic evaluation of the American private school system, as a commentary on the problems of assimilation increasingly faced by Jewish day schools, as a wry report on the aggressiveness of Jewish mothers asserting the educational prerogatives of their children; or as a book dealing with Jewish marginality, power and powerlessness, and generational conflict; or as a study in the "second lives" of Holocaust survivors, who have lost one family, created another, and breathe always the tragedy of the past with the hope of the future in the monomania of the present.

To drive her point home about the dangers of allowing Western culture to supplant Covenant and Commandment. Ozick has borrowed from the world of physics the concept of larger "cannibal" galaxies swallowing smaller ones whole...