Synopses & Reviews
As far as romance goes, Dr. Jakob Sammelsohn is fairly incurable. Twice married, once divorced, once widowed--all by the tender age of twelve-- he finally flees his small village and his pious, vengeful father. A lovelorn candide, young Dr. Sammelsohn wanders optimistically through history--pursued by the amorous ghost of his dead wife.
Arriving in Vienna in 1890, a chance encounter with Sigmund Freud leads our hero into the arms of Emma Eckstein, one of Freud's most famous patients. Later he romances the beautiful and wealthy Loë Bernfeld, who carries him into the world of Esperanto and the universal language movement. Finally, Dr. Sammelsohn finds himself in the Warsaw ghetto in 1940, only to become a pawn in a battle over the path to heaven.
A Curable Romantic is a novel of personal and historical exile that could spring only from the literary imagination of a virtuoso. Often fantastical yet always grounded in tradition and history, it is that rare literary feat --a truly incomparable tale, ingenuously told, peopled with characters who live on in the memory.
Review
"While the characters struggle in their humanness, God weeps overhead and angels make deals with demons ... This is a funny, poignant, thoughtful, and ultimately satisfying work by an author who stands with the best of them."
--Bruce Coburn, singer/songwriter, guitarist, Slice o Life
Review
"Brilliant . . . Astonishingly original . . .What life on earth might actually mean."
--Dara Horn, author of The World to Come
Review
"I loved the novel for its realism, for its romantic tension, and for its sentence by sentence brilliance."
--Max Apple, author of Free Agents and The Oranging of America and Other Stories
Review
"Joseph Skibell's comic intelligence embraces fifty years of European Jewish history in a brilliant tour de force that is hilarious, insightful, and inventive."
--Rodger Kamenetz, author of Burnt Books and The Jew in the Lotus
Review
"An irresistible romp about a lovelorn 19th-Century doctor who falls in with Sigmund Freud--and some dangerously attractive women."
--O MagazineReview
"
A Curable Romantic has no end of fun with its themes, notably the limits and usefulness of language . . . At the same time, it's a tale of great compassion and reverence--a remarkable, deeply felt examination of man's relationship to an ever-changing world."
--The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Review
"A high-energy, wild performance . . . The postmodern Jewish novel as mash-up of genres: Yiddish folktale, sentimental education, Freudian case history, erotic confession, utopian parable, all wrapped up in an 'alternative history' of Jewish emancipation."
--The New Republic
Synopsis
Set mostly in early 20th-century Vienna, this novel chronicles the life, times, and loves of Dr. Jakov Sammelsohn--from his early expulsion from his Hasidic family (for his crime of reading secular books) when he was 12, into a friendship with Sigmund Freud (circa 1894), into the early Esperanto movement (1895-1907), and finally through World War I and into the Warsaw ghetto.
Synopsis
I fell in love with Emma Eckstein the moment I saw her from the fourth gallery of the Carl Theater, and this was also the night I met Sigmund Freud." So goes the life, times, and loves of Dr. Jakob Sammelsohn, a fairly incurable romantic venturing optimistically through modern history. In this inventive and satiric tour de force, Joseph Skibell, award-winning author of A Blessing on the Moon, presents a picaresque novel of exile that could spring only from the imagination of a virtuoso.
About the Author
Joseph Skibell is the author of two previous novels, A Blessing on the Moon and The English Disease. He has received a Halls Fiction Fellowship, a Michener Fellowship, and a National Endowment for the Arts Literature Fellowship, among other awards. He teaches at Emory University and is the director of the Richard Ellmann Lectures in Modern Literature.