Finally, it looks like my new book is going to press.  The notices are popping up on all sorts of online book sellers.

  

What I have noticed, looking through the book after a pretty long break, is that it is much more pertinent to what is going on in the world today than I imagined while doing the research and writing over the past five or six years.  The book explicitly sets out to examine the nature of the illusions that many prominent Jews—mostly well-known authors, actors, artists, journalists and scholars—believed they were safe in the France of the mid to late nineteenth century or even early decades of the twentieth elsewhere in Europe; but each one discovered—or was subjected to forces they did not expect or understand that proved their fame ephemeral and their own happiness an illusion.  Through recorded dreams, private anecdotes, inadvertently mentioned conversations and other seemingly trivial and irrelevant comments and remarks by their contemporaries, the nature of their inner lives is brought to the fore so that we can discuss them, see analogies, follow patterns, and knock open enigmas.

Cambridge Scholars Publishing

Published February 1st 2017

Jews in an Illusion of Paradise Dust and Ashes

Volume One

 Comedians and Catastrophes

by Norman Simms

The focus of this volume is on essential themes, images and generic patterns, beginning with a Talmudic legend about four scholars. They, by means of daring mystical interpretations of Scripture, entered a Paradise, representing different means of imaginative reading, perception, memory and application of the law. One of them died, one went mad, another became a heretic and the other came back as a traditional exegete and teacher. Based on that legend, this book examines a small group of late 19th and early 20th century European Jewish intellectuals and artists in the light of their dreams, writings, and moments of crisis. These men and women, comedians in both the sense of stage actors and clowns or witty performers, believed they had entered a new secular and tolerant society, but discovered that there was no escape from their Jewish heritage and way of seeing the world. This monograph looks into the imperfect mirror of cultural experience, discovers a hazy world of illusions, dreams and nightmares on the other side of the looking glass, and sometimes constructs a midrashic conceit of the comical and grotesque screen between them.  

By careful readings of a variety of texts--recorded dreams, partly heard conversations, letters and journals, comments by contemporaries--the book attempts to being to the  surface of analytical discussion the inner life and imaginary experiences of the key players; and several apparently superficial metaphors (acrobats, mirrors, adventures under the sea) used in passing are plumbed for their significance and shown to form patterns of allusion and thus keys to our understanding of their deeply conflicted personalities.

Volume One looks at the basic themes of these processes of disillusionment and self-deception, while Volume Two examines a half dozen major examples of such personalities, such as Arthur Meyer, Aby Warburg, Bernard Berenson ,Sarah Bernhardt and a handful of others.

Hardback

ISBN-13:978-1-4438-1730-1

ISBN-10:1-4438-1730-9

Date of Publication:01/02/2017

Pages / Size:410 / A5

Price:£63.99