Otto Cone

Otto Cone, the father of Alleluia Cone, is an art historian and biographer of Picabia whose life is shaped by a tension between reinvention and the past he tries to escape. A Polish Jewish émigré and survivor of a wartime prison camp, he embraces Englishness, changes his family’s name, and distrusts any claim that the world forms a seamless whole. His ideas return to Alleluia in an impossible Himalayan vision; his death, by contrast, leaves her with questions that neither she nor her mother can resolve.

Identity and Worldview

Otto is introduced through Alleluia’s memory as a man who treated the supposed unity of the world as a dangerous fiction. He argued that incompatible forms of life and history could occupy the same place and time without adding up to a stable, harmonious order. The contrast between happiness and catastrophe, or between the ordinary and the monstrous, was not something he believed could be reconciled by an appealing theory of continuity. His outlook gives Alleluia a language for confronting the ice city she glimpses while descending from Everest: the vision does not fit ordinary geography, but neither does it make the world less real in its contradictions.

That conviction is bound to Otto’s experience as a Polish émigré and survivor of a wartime prison camp. The camp’s name is never spoken during Alleluia’s childhood. Alicja Cone later explains that Otto wanted life to proceed as though the camp had not existed; he also turned away from Polish literature because he regarded the language as irretrievably contaminated by history. His rejection of the past was therefore not simple forgetfulness. It was an effort to prevent inherited historical violence from defining his present, an effort that sat uneasily beside his insistence that history’s contradictions could not be erased.

Reinvention and Family Life

Otto made Englishness a deliberate performance. He Anglicized his wife’s name and reduced Alleluia’s name to Allie, while changing his own surname from Cohen to Cone. He took pride in calling himself English, despite speaking with a thick East European accent, and presented himself as a member of the English gentry. His Jewish family celebrated Christmas at his insistence, as a gesture of respect toward their host nation. Yet his chosen identity did not eliminate the instability he feared: he kept the heavy curtains drawn, as though the view outside might disclose a world inconsistent with the familiar streets of Moscow Road.

His manner could make the performance comic and uncomfortable. At a family Christmas gathering, he entered dressed in a pantomime caricature of a Chinese figure and declared himself Mao, announcing that Father Christmas was dead and there would be no presents. The episode shows his anti-communism turning into theatrical provocation, and the joke spoiled, for Alicja, the English holiday ritual he had wanted the family to adopt. Alicja remembered him as a good man, but also as someone frequently appalling. After his death she abandoned the polished style she had cultivated for his ideal of integration, returned to the Cohen name and Jewish observances, and described the change as a relief from imitation.

Fatherhood and the Past He Bequeaths

Otto’s ambitions for his daughters were distinct. He called Alleluia his priceless treasure and imagined a future for her as a concert pianist or, alternatively, a muse. In contrast, he dismissed Elena Cone as having desires where she ought to have thoughts. His judgment reveals both his investment in Alleluia and his tendency to impose a preferred intellectual or artistic destiny on his children. Alleluia ultimately turns away from the path her father had chosen for her and toward the physical undertaking of climbing mountains.

His home gathered together the objects and ideas through which he performed his intellectual life: books, Picabia-related material, a stuffed monkey he described as an early version of a famous painting, mechanical devices, and a first edition of Jarry’s Ubu Roi. The study’s dense collection stands beside his attempt to keep the outside world screened off. These details make his household less a settled refuge than a carefully assembled environment in which European history, art, English manners, and deliberately outrageous humor coexist.

Death and Narrative Significance

Otto died in his seventies after jumping into an empty lift shaft. The account gives the action and its outcome but does not settle the question of why he did it. Alicja, who would discuss many subjects openly, refused to explain his death. Alleluia’s first response was anger, and she pressed her mother with the possibility that a survivor might, decades later, complete what the monsters had failed to do. The novel leaves that question open rather than turning survival into a guarantee of recovery or a death into a simple verdict on a life.

Alleluia carries this unresolved inheritance into the Everest episode. At twenty-seven thousand feet, after seeing the transient city of ice, she remembers Otto’s account of a world where incompatible realities remain side by side. Later, his warning about the modern city’s clashing worlds also echoes against the serious flaws in her relationship with Gibreel Farishta. Otto thus functions less as an authority who explains the uncanny than as the source of a framework that refuses easy explanation. His efforts to become English, suppress the past, and protect his family from dissonance never produce a final reconciliation; the contradictions he described persist in the lives of those who remember him.