Just the name Cynthia Ozick can be intimidating because of the writer’s intellectual profundity, brilliant literary command and forceful opinions. But the person proved to be funny, self-deprecating and confiding during a rare public appearance in Montreal.

Many in the capacity audience of nearly 400 at the Gelber Conference Centre, where she gave the keynote address of Jewish Book Month, left delighted and a little surprised, if not relieved, by her presentation.

Now 77, Ozick is white-haired and diminutive, yet still possesses a youthful enthusiasm and puckishness. She spoke from behind her owlish glasses about her latest novel, Heir to the Glimmering World, a title that she admits was her publisher’s choice and even she doesn’t understand.

She prefers The Bear Boy, under which the book was published in the United Kingdom, except that some think it is a children’s book, which it definitely is not, with its themes of loss, displacement and misspent lives.

She had originally wanted Lights and Watchtower, the name of a 10th-century Karaite tractate, but it was thought to evoke the death camps, and this is not a Holocaust novel.

When Mariner Books came up with Heir to a Glimmering World, “I thought, ‘what the hell does that mean, hearing ‘air’ not ‘heir,’” she said.

She still thinks the title is too long and “amorphous,” but has “invented a meaning for it, which is that everyone of us has a past we can’t escape – good or bad. It glimmers and flickers for us.”

She likes the title of the French translation best: Le Monde Vacillant, which has the double meaning of flickering and teetering, and fits the book well.

The “germ” of the story goes back to her school days at Hunter College in New York during World War II.

One of Ozick’s friends there was a recent German-Jewish refugee. Her friend’s father had been a scholar of standing in Berlin. Her friend’s mother was not Jewish and, in fact, had a brother who was a general in the German army.

“He was a bitter man, who had lost great status. They had nothing; his wife worked as a saleslady in a dress shop. He was very hostile to me as a kosher Jew,” she said.

The second inspiration was the pioneering scholar of Jewish mysticism, the “magisterial” Gershon Sholem, whom Ozick met on four occasions in Jerusalem. Like her friend’s father, he was from Germany but was not a refugee – rather he was a Zionist who chose to settle in Palestine in 1925 and became world famous there.

The central character in Heir to the Glimmering World has elements of these two men. He is a German-Jewish scholar of another esoteric and almost heretical subject, the Karaites, a medieval Jewish faction that rejected rabbinic Judaism. He is unable to adapt to a refugee life in New York, and the family struggles.

The third was the obituary of Christopher Robin Milne, son of A.A. Milne and model for the boy in Winnie the Pooh. Ozick read the obituary in the New York Times. She was struck by the younger Milne’s having “never been permitted to grow up… He had been kept in an eternal childhood by a father whom he loathed,” she said. The public also never let him forget his inner fictional child, despite his attempt to escape from a persona that had been imposed on him. He eventually died in obscurity.

Ozick grappled for a long while on how to put together these disparate characters and themes in one novel, rejecting Philip Roth’s advice to write two books. “I don’t write as fast as he can.

“Suddenly at four in the morning, I had a revelation on how to put it all together,” she said.

The Karaites, with whom the scholar is absorbed, rejected interpretation (of the Torah), while Bear Boy, as Christopher Robin becomes in the book, “suffers from excessive interpretation as embellished by his father.” As an adult, he does not want to be a “living shrine” or the money that comes with it. These very different people are brought together by happenstance and to their mutual benefit.

Heir to the Glimmering World takes place in the mid-1930s, during the Depression.

She describes the novel as “deeply Jewish,” more so than any of her previous works – which are noted for their Jewish focus.

“What is more Jewish than interpretation. Judaism has excelled at commentary, taking what is given and turning and turning it to see its many facets, making it deeper and more complex, more humane. That’s Talmud,” she said.

But Ozick does not want her themes to be apparent. “Themes should not be seen – if they show the novel is a failure. Readers should be involved with the narrative and the fate of its characters; themes are the infrastructure and shouldn’t be visible.”

Her portrayal of Karaitism, she said, has been criticized by a Yale professor as “at least 20 years out of date. I didn’t know anything from the ninth century could not be out of date,” she said good-humouredly.

In June, she spoke in Paris to a group of journalists and literary people and was “quite appalled by their ignorance of the difference between a refugee and an immigrant, something that is clear to North Americans” and puts this misunderstanding down to “French obtuseness.”

For Ozick, a refugee is someone in a “state of loss,” while an immigrant looks forward to “the opportunity for gain.”

One thing that rankled Ozick was a reference from the audience about her career.

“Career is a word a repudiate. It’s full of opportunism rather than opportunity; of consciousness of the acquisition of power rather than developing one’s powers,” she said.