ABSTRACT
In Foreign Bodies, the protagonists are mainly Jews and their relatives, including their non-Jewish children. Foreign Bodies, unlike Henry James' Parisian novel, is a tale of three cities—Paris, New York, and Los Angeles—and takes place in 1952, seven years after Germany's Third Reich had murdered many millions of people, including most of European Jewry. Marvin Nachtigall is imperious and boorish and aggressively assimilated into "America, his newfound land", but has the laudable instinct to want his son "out of Europe, out of the bloody dirt of that place, and back home in America where he belongs". Marvin's first ambassador is his divorced, graying schoolteacher sister Bea Nightingale. Perhaps, in reinterpreting James' international theme in such a way as to excoriate post-Holocaust Europe and even sympathize with vulgar Marvin's effort to save his son from it, Cynthia Ozick remembered another classic utterance about "refinement", from a literature whose very existence James could never imagine.
