Available on 1 November 2017

Norman Simms

Jews in an Illusion of Paradise

Volume Two

FALLING OUT OF PLACE

AND INTO HISTORY

These further six chapters of Jews in an Illusion of Paradise  now focus on individual exemplary figures and clusters of poets, dramatists, critics, journalists, art historians—Jews whose achievements were once celebrated but now are almost all but forgotten, not because of changes in aesthetic taste or style but because of social, political and other ideological issues.  We continue to examine the clash between their conscious and unconscious self-presentation as Jews into a culture that wilfully or inadvertently misunderstood or rejected this aspect of “otherness” the men and women represented from the mid-nineteenth to the mid-twentieth centuries.  Whereas the first volume concentrated on the themes, images and rhetorical motifs of this awkward status of Jewish intellectuals and artists, here the ambiguous personalities and repressed anxieties of the exemplary figures are stressed.  For millennia Jews were considered part, out of normal history, passive victims of persecution; then suddenly, with Emancipation, they fell into history and out of their mythical place in the scheme of things.   Everything seemed to crumble into dust and ashes.

Cambridge Scholars Publishing

Lady Stephenson Library, Newcastle upon Tyne, NE6 2PA, UK

Copyright © 2017 by Norman Simms