'Romantic' exposes sad truths
"A Curable Romantic," by Joseph Skibell, is a novel of three books, each with its own story but with a common thread of cosmic love weaving its way among them.
The first book could stand alone as an impressive short novel. The story is set in the waning days of Enlightenment Vienna. It opens when, from afar, Jacob Sammelsohn spies Emma Eckstein, one of Sigmund Freud's better-known patients.
Even before he has the chance to meet her, however, Sammelsohn finds himself in the company of Freud. Though Sammelsohn is a fiction of Skibell's invention, Freud, like many other characters of the novel, hews closely to his historic personality.
Readers familiar with the real lives of these historic characters will find the novel provides an interesting, if somewhat bizarre, alternate reality. Those who are unfamiliar will learn more than they probably realize of the events and people of the time.
It is through Freud that we learn about Sammelsohn's unconsummated eternal love for a person who is, at that point, a dybbuk -- a spirit of Jewish folklore stuck between this world and the next. This dysfunctional love, which transcends time and place, provides the touchstone for a running examination of the tension between the traditional mysticism of the past and the developing rationalism of modernity.
Skibell artfully guides the reader across the wire of this tension as he preserves the rational Freud's commitment to psychoanalysis. Even as Sammelsohn accepts the painful reality of this dybbuk, Freud adheres to his historic person. He provides contorted rationalizations that reduce the obvious mystical explanation to a diagnosis that would pass muster in the world of reason.
At the end of this first book, Skibell has given the reader a whole story worthy of a concluded novel. Here, one is left to wonder how Skibell will meet, in the rest of the novel, the high expectation he has set. He does not disappoint.
The second book brings Sammelsohn to the company of Dr. L. L. Zamenhof, the inventor of Esperanto. In it, the reader is guided between the contrast of the messianic movement for brotherly love through the common"Internacia Lingvo" on one hand and the horror of the Great War on the other.
Interestingly, it is even more amid the idealism of the Esperanto movement that Skibell exposes an ugly rot within humanity. While a war is raging between great powers, it is the anti-Semitic tone of the otherwise most hopeful humanitarians that exposes the poverty of pushing for a more peaceful world.
And it is this sad realization that leads the reader naturally into the third book of the novel. Set in the Warsaw Ghetto, it is called "On The Devil's Island," thereby linking the Holocaust to the trials of Captain Alfred Dreyfus. His prosecution, more than any other event in Western Europe, had united many Jews in the view that their doom was sealed in Europe. It recalls the anti-Semitism that simmered below the surface in the earlier books of the novel and brings it to the fore.
Though by far the shortest of the three books, at about 100 pages, it is simultaneously the most desperate and spectacular. Central to this duality is the Piaseczna Rebbe, Kalonymous Kalmish Szapira. Though it is not specifically mentioned in the novel, those familiar with his work will immediately recognize that he is working with Sammelsohn to produce his opus, the "Esh Kodesh." The story here is too magnificent to describe in this lowly review to justify spoiling it for the reader.
Those who are not yet motivated to read the book should hear the author speak at Prairie Lights at 7 p.m. today. This review is really a mere glimpse of the rich text. One must hear about Sammelsohn's father, who speaks only in the exact text of the Bible, about the angelic beings that appear alongside the dybbuk early in the story as well as in the Ghetto; of Skibell's expert use of a multilingual palette that conveys much even when he offers no translation.
Citation: James Edward Johnson. "'Romantic' exposes sad truths." Iowa City Press-Citizen, 31 January 2011, http://www.press-citizen.com/print/article/20110131/OPINION01/101310331/-Romantic-exposes-sad-truths