Mr Skibell thinks his writing is funnier and more profound than it really is. Tedious is the first word that comes to my mind, with contrived being a very close second. ( )

(Warning, this review has spoilers.)

This book started off slow and dry and almost unreadable, but got better, and better, so that by the end I found it so stunning in its entirety that I hardly remember how pained I was at first. I can see now how a slow start was justified, because -- given that Freud is one of the main characters -- it's suitable that the key event of the protagonist's life remains hidden from the reader the same way the protagonist avoids it himself. Morevoer, when the key event of his life is revealed, you see that the man you understood to be a worthless nebbish actually has pretty strong survival skills and a decent moral compass, which is an eye-opener. He's not isolated because he's a nebbish -- he's isolated because he's -- a rebel -- or an outcast? -- who hasn't yet made a new life.

Nevertheless, I don't see how the book would have been harmed by the deletion of the marriage to Hindele. Ita could have been the boy's initial punishment. In addition to shortening the first section I think that would have made a stronger story. I also would have deleted the recounting of his parents' courtship, and one of the two Eckstein seduction/nosebleed scenes.

So what did I like so much about this book? I think it's the way the protoganist's character is slowly revealed, so you don't understand the meaning of his life until you are close to its end. Dr. Sammelsohn seems like such a nebbishy twit, at first, but he's an old man telling a story, so perhaps he exaggerates his own deficiencies? Perhaps he's deliberately engaging in a certain type of self-deprecating storytelling? After all, why would Loe have fallen in love with him if he didn't have something to give? Why would men such as Dr. Zamenhof and Reb Kalonymous trust him? He overlooks the many heroic episodes of his life and completely avoids what must have been the worst -- the time from age 13 to the start of the book.

As an old man, he chooses to tell his life story as if everything was determined by what his father did to him at age 13 -- and surely it was -- but perhaps not because his father's action literally let loose a dybbuk. Perhaps, in the tradition of folk tales (or psychoanalysis?) he invents a dybbuk as the manifestation of the impact his father's actions had upon his life? Maybe I'm just making excuses for sloppy writing, but it certainly seems to me that he wouldn't have found out about Ita's suicide in a telegram a decade later signed individually by each of his seven sisters. Isn't it more likely that this is how he chooses to tell the story a lifetime later? He spends his life haunted by Ita's suicide and so keeps looking for her in the people he meets? (But not, after all, in the people he loves the best?) As the story of his life continues -- as he gets closer to recent times, he seems less and less of a caricature, and more and more an unusually strong and giving person; yet like many older people he dwells with self-indulgent nostalgia on the details of his early life. As an old man, he's starving to death in the Warsaw Ghetto of WWII, and yet mentions his efforts to support the resistance only because they lead him to run into someone who makes him think of Ita.

I read this book directly after finishing The Invisible Bridge, and it was a relief to be reminded that some of the people killed in the Holocaust lived full lives before those dark times: the Holocaust ended their lives but didn't define them. Dr. Sammelsohn's life ran from Freud to Esperanto through WWI to the Warsaw Ghetto. Like The Invisible Bridge, this book shows the Jewish society that existed before the Holocaust, but for Dr. Sammelsohn the Holocaust is just a coda to a full life.

In summary, I enjoyed this book, and I would happily read a companion novel that told the parts Dr. Sammelsohn left out (perhaps from Loe's perspective). ( )