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Articles by Norman Simms
Retrievals, Preservations and Speculations
Modern Art: A Personal Note Norman Simms In 1958, at the age of eighteen, during the summer before I went to university, I used to visit the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City. At first, I decided that I would sit in front of a huge painting by Jackson Pollack to see if I could see why there was such a fuss about his work.
Five Poems in the Midst Of the Second Plague Year
Someone in Paris Died: JG It happens all too often, the news of death, from some forgotten location, a person who once helped us out of a scrape, a nearly unknown name; then when it is too late to write or mourn, like kelp beyond the high tide mark, cracked and dried, a bad smell of remembrance, it invades your conscience and your consciousness. He died with family, friends and those who knew him better, longer and deeper, each of them like blades that cut into my growing sense of guilt.
Retrievals, Preservations and Speculations
Holocaust Book Review Judy Batalion. The Light of Days: Women Fighters of the Jewish Resistance, Their Untold Story. London: Virago Press, 2021. New York: William Morrow/HarperCollins, 2020. xvi + 556 + 16 plates of black and white photographs. + 1 map. Reviewed by Norman Simms This is a very well-written, powerful, important and sad book. It is about young women, usually between seventeen and thirty, who give themselves to the fight against the Nazi Holocaust with everything they have.
Retrievals, Preservations and Speculations
Space in a Time of Pandemic and Madness Norman Simms « ung abysme de science » In Rabelais’s Gargantua and Pantagruel, the father giant hopes to create a school syllabus that will turn his offspring into “an abyss of science.” By science is meant, of course, knowledge, the knowledge that comes from books and is therefore already known and memorable.
Retrievals, Preservations and Speculations
The Idea of Prehistory: A Preview of a New Book Norman Simms In a new book I am finishing about the idea of prehistory my argument turns on something that may upset professional archaeologists, anthropologists and prehistorians, namely, that the sense of prehistory is not chronological, but psychohistorical, that is, a state of mind.
Retrievals, Preservations and Speculations
Paris Impressions It was my first time in Paris. I was booked into a little hotel on the Rue de l’école de medecine. As I walked down the narrow street towards the boulevard, someone tapped me on the shoulder and I was feeling ill. Startled, I realized the question was in English and the spacer an old friend also attending the conference I had travelled to France to attend. You look dizzy, he said. Not at all, but all those interesting balconies and shutters, I am fascinated. He laughed.
Retrievals, Preservations and Speculations
The Calumny of the Crickets Here they are, the most learned silverfish in the country, swarm After swarm, through boxes of old lecture notes, offprints And printouts, even pencil-scribbled pages, Smudge-typed essays and reports: oh, the harm These creatures could have done, leaving only hints Of what they thought of all my ideas, these sages Of the insect world.
Retrievals, Preservations and Speculations
Marcus Aurelius Thank you, Marcus the Golden One, for what you said, that people who know nothing have opinions that are worthless, and you might have added, that most of them and us, are crazy. You can’t walk around the Porch these days to ponder all the great big thoughts you want to know about. Jabber and twittering of idiot birds, not bards or even men and women who share pensées who couldn’t sharpen a pencil or fill a pen with ink and never had a notebook to scribble thoughts.
Retrievals, Preservations and Speculations
Marcel Proust the Jew Norman Simms Gaby Levin in Haaretz (5 May 2022) discusses a new book and an associated exhibition on the question of how Jewish was Marcel Proust. “How Being Jewish Changed Proust’s Life” seems a strange way to entitle the review, as though he were not partly Jewish through his mother all his life. Though baptized as Catholic, this did not seem to be highly influential, nor the fact that he was a homosexual. That was what he was.
Retrievals, Preservations and Speculations
False Memory, Induced Memory and Suggested Memory: The Complexities of Determining the Truth Norman Simmd Personal Memory. Back in Boro Park, Brooklyn in the late 1940s and early 1950s, Our Gang of boys aged around eleven and twelve used to rent a locker at Washington Baths Annex on the board walk and go as often as we could. We did everything together, defined ourselves by what we did and remembered, but not everyone did the same thing.
Trapeze Artistes and kthrr Acrobats under the Big Top
Trapeze Artistes and other Acrobats under the Big Top: Zones of Dismay, Danger and Daring Norman Simms He floats through the air with the greatest of ease The daring young man on the flying trapeze His actions are graceful, all girls he does please And my love he has stolen away So sang Eddie Cantor and many a pop star of the early days of phonograph and radio.
Holocaust Book Review: Smethurst, The Freedom Circus
Sue Smethurst, The Freedom Circus: One Family’s Death-Defying Act to Escape the Nazis and Start a New Life in Australia. Sydney: Ebury House/Penguin Random House, 2020. xiv + 303 pp. + 12 colour and black and white plates. Reviewed by Norman Simms This is neither a memoir, diary or documentary history of the Holocaust, but a “novelized” reconstruction of a family history.
Disturbing Thoughts During the Plague Years
The moon is never as big or bright as it appears on screen. We are much smaller than we think we are. Spiders cast enormous webs over the landscape when the floods swamp the land. How far away they wander in the wind. We might seek to imitate their ways, if we only knew how. When the big rat finally died under the refrigerator and his stench filled the house, it took many days to breathe calmly again. Then we began to miss his midnight pitter-patter.
Holocaust Review: Matarasso: Jewish Salonika
Isaac Matarasso. Talking Until Nightfall. Remembering Jewish Salonika, 1942-44, translated by Pauline Matarasso. London: Bloomsbury Continuum, 2020. pp. 269 + 8 black and white plates + 2 maps. Reviewed by Norman Simms More than twenty years ago I started to collect books, articles, and newspaper reports about Salonika, hoping to write books especially about young children experienced the awful events of the Shoah that befell the inhabitants of that once proud Jewish city in northern Greece.
Retrievals, Preservations and Speculations
Éric Vuillard. The Order of the Day, trans. Mark Polizzetti. New York: Other Press, 2018. pp. 84 ;and London: Picador Press, 2018. pp. 129. Éric Vuillart’s L’ordre du jour (Arles: Actes Sud, 2017) won the Prix Goncourt, France’s premier literary award, and has been praised again and again in its many translations. But, one may ask, to what genre does it belong, aside from the amorphous term novel, which by now means any work of fiction?
Holocaust Book Review: Meriel Schindler, The Lost Cafe
Meriel Schindler. The Lost Cafe Schindler: One Family, Two Wars and the Search for Truth. London: Hodder & Stoughton, 2021. pp. xxiii + 408. Many black and white illustrations. Reviewed by Norman Simms This is not quite a Holocaust book because there are no vivid descriptions of concentration camps or gas chambers, though there are brief episodes in which people are beaten up and news received of murders committed.
Retrievals, Preservations and Speculations
Robert Liris, chercheur de mystères, Entretiens avec Claude Arz. Les Enchanteurs no. 2 Paris : Les Editions de l’Œil du Sphinx, 2018/2021. pp. 166. Profusely illustrated. Reviewed by Norman Simms More than a series of interviews, this book contains many brief essays and aperçus on a variety of topics that Robert Liris has been interested in throughout his life.
Holocaust Book Review: Catrine Clay, GOOD GERMANS
When trying to evaluate the historical and aesthetic value of books about the Holocaust, I have found that it is important to find a way to contextualize the language, thoughts and feelings of the people who were victimized, not only interrogate what did they know—what books had they read before they were forced into ghettos, arrested and sent to one form of concentration camp another, for slave labour or for immediate execution, what opinions did they confront in newspapers, in daily...
Retrievals, Preservations and Speculations
Kuntillet cArjud The mountain has the face of a sphinx. You can’t miss it. After all these weeks of wandering from wadi to wadi along ancient desert tracks with strange clouds on the horizon a man grows dizzy after a while when travelling like this. We were told to beware of the mirages And the pillars of fire at sunset. They said that Elijah passed through on his flight to Jezreel, and if he survived, so would we. One mountain calls itself Horeb, Another Sinai, and they are the same.
Holocaust Review: Fairweather, THE VOLUNTEER
Jack Fairweather, The Volunteer: The True Story of the Resistance Hero Who Infiltrated Auschwitz. London: W.H .Allen, 2019; pbk, Penguin, 2020.xix-504pp. Profusely illustrated with black-and-white maps, drawings and photographs. Reviewed by Norman Simms This is the story of Witold Pilecki. He was not a Jew and his story becomes one about the Holocaust only as he realizes that by 1942 the Germans had one aim in the Second World War and that was to exterminate the Jews throughout Europe.
Retrievals, Preservations and Speculations
When Herrick Harkness, the hero of Walpole’s Portrait of a Man with Red Hair, is seduced and kidnapped, mesmerized by the smooth-talking but grotesquely ugly elder Crispin and then warned that he would suffer great pain and eventually be murdered in revenge for humiliations inflicted on the older man’s hideous appearance, he steps out of the automobile that has taken him to the mysterious White Tower: “Here we are!” he cried.
Retrievals, Preservations and Speculations
Harald Jähner, Aftermath: Life in the Fallout of the Third Reich, 1945-1955, trans. Shaun Whiteside. London: W.H Allen, 2021. xvii + 382 pp. Originally as Wolfzeit (Berlin: Rowohlt, 2019). When the Nazi Regime surrendered and collapsed in 1945, Germany was a land of destruction and desolation.
Retrievals, Preservations and Speculations
Bogo de Claire I want to talk about a cat, Bogo de Claire, the one that lurked on the porch of the old house when mymother died. Its name was hers, Claire; somehow it flew back on the plane and passed through customs on either side of the border, but how? What happened then I do not remember. Died or lost, nothing comes to mind, except its name, and who among us all can share the blame? It was not used to Winnipeg winters with ice that never melted, no place to catch a mouse.
Published Works for 2021: The Second Year of the Pandemic
Holocaust Book Review of Eva Mozes Kor with Lisa Rojany Buccieri. The Twins of Auschwitz: The Inspiring True Story of a Young Girl Surviving Mengele’s Hell. (London: Monoray/Octopus, 2020) Retrievals, Preservations and Speculations (1 January 2021).
Retrievals, Preservations and Speculations
Robert Liris, Vichy Vertigo: une mémorielle damnation. Les Editions Sydney Laurent, 2021. pp. 159. Many illustrations. Reviewed by Norman Simms. Preliminary Remarks Before anything, think of Alfred Hitchcock’s film Vertigo (1958) where fear of heights sets the scene and provides the dénouement of the plot or W.G. Sebald’s Vertigo (in French Vertiges, in the original German Schwindel. Gefũhle) in which four very different lives intersect, twist through each other, and come to a dizzying climax.
Women fighters of the Jewish Holocaust resistance - book review
A new book with a tragic and fascinating perspective on the Holocaust has come to my attention. It is by Judy Batalion.and titled The Light of Days: Women Fighters of the Jewish Resistance, Their Untold Story. (London: Virago Press, 2021. New York: William Morrow/HarperCollins, 2020. xvi + 556 + 16 plates of black and white photographs. + 1 map). This is a very well-written, powerful, important and sad book.
Book Reviews
John Kampfner, Why the Germans Do it Better: Notes from a Grown-Up Country (London: Atlantic Books, 2020). Karen Hagemann, Donna Harsch, and Friederike Brühöfener, eds., Gendering Post-1945 German History: Entanglements (New York: Berghahn Books, 2019). Daniel Marwecki, Germany and Israel: Whitewashing and Statebuilding (London: C. Hurst & Co., 2020). Robert Gellately, Hitler’s True Believers: How Ordinary People Became Nazis (New York: Oxford University Press, 2020).
The Dark Soul of German Nazis
The author of this seminal book is none other than the son of Hitler’s governor of Poland and top-Nazi. Hans Frank was one of the main instigators of the Holocaust and personally responsible for Auschwitz—the camp and what went on there. Denouncing his father and all he stood for, Niklas Frank also wrote a most impressive BBC documentary My Nazi Legacy.
The Coronavirus Pandemic and Global Wages
Starting in 2020, the Coronavirus pandemic has already changed the landscape of global wages. By early June 2021, Corvid-19 was by no means finished and is still ravaging through many countries having killed “officially” about 3.6 million people globally.
Snake Oil Salesmen of Management Studies
Source: https://commons.wikimedia.org The prime objective of management studies is to legitimize a single institution: management. For that the crypto-academic field of management studies has been made part of business schools that are linked to universities further enhancing the reputation of management studies. In his book recent “Management Studies in Crisis”, Dennis Tourish argues that management studies is plagued by fraud, deception and meaningless research.
The Madness and Malady of Management Studies
More than one-hundred years ago, Henri Fayol’s highly militaristic if not authoritarian Fourteen Principles of Management – division of work, authority, discipline, unity of command, esprit de corps, etc. – moved factory administration closer to identify what management actually is. More than Fayol, it was the snake oil salesman Frederick Taylor who shaped our perception of management.
How Digital Fascism Works
Photo by Chz_mhOng/Shutterstock.com Most people have some idea about what fascism is. Fascism’s Fasci Italiani di Combattimento, the original fascism, was invented in Italy in the 1920s. One-hundred years on, however, Italy has changed and so has fascism. Mussolini’s classical version of fascism has become digital fascism. Perhaps one of the world’s foremost experts on fascism, Italian Jewish chemist, partisan, Holocaust survivor and writer Primo Levi.
Brexit anxieties
IN 2016, the former British prime minister David Cameron’s l’idée fixe of a referendum on Brexit slowly became reality. The Tory’s faithful plan was that Brexit would make Britain a strong independent trading partner with other nations. The British people were told that Brexit would strengthen the United Kingdom as global political player.
The Revival of Hating Jews as “Judeo-Bolshevism” is Spreading
Just a year ago Ellen Engelstad and Mímir Kristjánsson suggested there is a Return of Judeo-Bolshevism. Two years earlier, in 2017, Neo-Nazis in Charlottesville, Virginia (USA) shouted: “The Jews will not replace us!” They are white nationalist and Klu Klux Klan gangs who believe that Jews seek to replace the Aryan race in America—not with Jews but with blacks and non-white minorities.
Antisemitic Covid-19 Conspiracies in Germany
Antisemitism in Germany is certainly nothing new. But now this ideological virus has returned with a vengeance pairing up with the Covid-19 Coronavirus. With the impact of the Coronavirus, socially inconspicuous people seem to have turned towards delusional conspiracy fantasies in a very short time. Like it or not, they are furious, angry, eye-rolling and they are rallying in increasing numbers. Others release their conspiracy fantasies on Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube.
20th Centurys new fascism
By Thomas Klikauer and Norman Simms - posted Tuesday, 3 December 2019 Sign Up for free e-mail updates! A man with first-hand knowledge of fascism and Nazism, Primo Levi, once said that "21st century fascism will be different from the 20th century fascism we know." The three foremost places where old fascism and Nazism came to forth were Italy, Germany and Spain (a mixture of Catholicism and Fascism). Franco's dictadura franquista are a somewhat milder version of German and Italian fascism.
Family Security Matters
Kobrin echoes those people to whom she described this book as it was taking shape when they exclaimed: "What? There were Jews in Somalia??!!" It's not just that most ordinary people don't know about the Jewish presence in Somalia, but that those who claim to be experts try to deny or minimize the fact to the point of irrelevance what she has discovered. "Where is the evidence?" they cry out; and they point to the standard histories and the specialist journals where there is nothing.
Family Security Matters
A few days ago, a headline caught my attention, as it was meant to do: "After Many Years the Husband of a Woman Murdered in a Terrorist Attack Decides to Marry Again." But what I assumed-what sprang into my mind as the sense of "many years" shocked me.
Family Security Matters
I have known many who have grown up in assimilated Jewish families where a convoluted kind of subterranean self-hate flows uninterruptedly, the internalization of anti-Semitism denied. The sense of illusion pervades the psychological world of these families.
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