A Curable Romantic

“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 an unforgettable character,an unsuspecting guide to a world in transition—where the old shadows of superstition are trumped by the wild new claims of science.Jakob’s journey takes him from his small town on the outskirts of the Austro-Hungarian Empire to the cultured life of its capital, Vienna, in the 1890s, where our hero—part visionary, part schlemiel—encoutners the luminaries of his time, including the soon-to-be-renowned Dr. Freud and his most famous patient, Emma Eckstein. But his courtship with the Fräulein is fraught with neuroses (naturally) and bedeviled by the appearance of a dybbuk, an amorous ghost from Jakob’s past. Loveless, forlorn, and forced to move on, Jakob is propelled into the heart of the utopian Esperanto movement and into the arms of its loveliest patron, the beautiful Loë Bernfeld. At times, his passion for Loë runs deeper than his fervor for the language of peace and universal brotherhood, but their marriage—as well as the movement—becomes complicated, in no small part owing to the reappearance of the sex-starved and manipulative dybbuk. Pursued by his past all the way to the Warsaw Ghetto in 1940, he becomes an unlikely pawn in a battle over the true path to heaven.A Curable Romantic is a picaresque novel of exile—both personal and historical—that could spring only from the imagination of a virtuoso. Often fantastical but always grounded in tradition and history, it is a rare literary feat—an incomparable, epic comic tale, peopled with characters at once familiar and utterly original who offer a wholly new perspective on the human condition.