The Cannibal Galaxy, Cynthia Ozick's first full-scale novel in 17 years, comes as a welcome reminder of her commanding powers as a storyteller. Her previous book, Art and Ardor, a collection of essays published last spring, revealed her to be one of the most vigorously intellectual of contemporary American authors. Still, no other fiction writer except Isaac Bashevis Singer has succeeded so brilliantly in harnessing what Ozick has called "the steeds of myth and mysticism" in the Jewish tradition. The wonder is that her style has remained as disciplined and supple as it was in her first novel, Trust….

The premise of Ozick's new novel is the uneasy condition of the Jewish heritage in the prevailing Gentile culture, a subject that can be fully viewed only in the shadow cast by the Holocaust. The book's governing metaphor is the cannibal galaxy—in astronomy, one of the vast colonies of...