Pump Up Your Book Chats With “Felice’s Worlds” Author Henry Massie

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Author Henry Massie will be touring the blogosphere with Pump Up Your Book Virtual Book Tours September 4 – 28th, 2012, with his historical biography, “Feblice’s Worlds.”

About Henry Massie

Henry Massie is the author of the historical biography, “Felice’s Worlds.”

Henry Massie is a psychiatrist, award-winning author, and pioneering researcher in the field of autism. FELICE’S WORLDS–From the Holocaust to the Halls of Modern Art, is the a memoir and biography of his mother, a brilliant and beautiful woman who participated in many of the most critical periods of the 20th Century.

Find out more about him here:

Website Address: www.booksbnimble.com

Twitter Address: @booksbnimble

Facebook Address: /booksbnimble

The Interview

Thank you for this interview, Henry, I just have a few questions for you…

1) What was the defining thing or moment that inspired you to write Felice’s Worlds?

There were two, actually three forces behind the decision to write the book. Always in the background were my mother’s tales about her adventures. Her stories begged to be told because they were meaningful, dramatic and human, but I am shy about bringing attention to myself, and telling about my mother’s life would also mean writing about her impact on me. I wouldn’t have gone forward if my wife, Bridget Connelly, hadn’t encouraged me. She knows what she is talking about because she is a folklorist by profession and felt that Felice’s life fit the pattern of stories that are passed from generation to generation and are an important form of communal knowledge. What finally tipped me into action was when an artist friend, Russ Ellis, lent me a memoir that his friend, the writer Adam Hochschild, had written about his family experiences. I read it and realized that I had an equally interesting, important story to tell.

2) How do you think you were influenced by your mother’s dedication to art throughout your life?

I learned to experience life visually, to keep my eyes open, to see life as a visual composition, and be concerned about the aesthetics of my surroundings.

3) Are you an art collector yourself? Who are the artists you most admire and which of their pieces in particular do you favor?

As a matter of fact I do collect art but I’ve taken a very different route than my mother. I favor representational and figurative art that hints at a story, work in which you can recognize the familiar but see it in a different way. My mother fell in love with abstract art because she needed something new and quintessentially American to break with the horrors of World War Two and the Holocaust. I don’t have that need. For me it is the piece of art that counts not whether the artist has a name or whether the work has monetary value.

I don’t shop for art but stumble on it. It has to make me feel good. Thus I have works by artists whom I know personally whose works appeal to me. One of my favorites is a painting by the Sonoma county, California artist Don Bishop of an old Airstream trailer alone in the woods that evokes the mood of Edward Hopper. Others are nature photographs remindful of Ansel Adams, and I hang a few of my own photographs in that vein. There also are steel assemblages from old implements, stuff that I and others have picked up at the dump or along the trail. My favorite pieces are an abstract bronze by Russ Ellis that looks like a big seahorse, called Sea Rider; a series of beautifully sculpted, relatively large figurative ceramics with a touch of affectionate humor about the human condition by my wife’s sister, Ella Connelly; and a wire sculpture by the Mexican artist Patricia Green that looks like a dove or an open palm with a little red heart resting in it, depending on how you view it.

4) You’ve chosen a career in psychiatry. Do you believe your mother’s life experiences were an influence on that choice even subconsciously?

Of course; hardly subconsciously, very consciously. My mother was an early Freudian. She had Freud’s Collected Works in her library so I was curious about them from a young age. As a sophomore in high school when I was bored because I had to stay home for three weeks with pneumonia, I pulled the Freud’s Interpretation of Dreams off the book shelf and read it start to finish. It opened up the amazing new world of the unconscious to me. I learned that I had an unconscious and everybody else did, and from then on I listened to myself and others with a third ear.

5) What was the most difficult thing you found about writing this biography from a son’s perspective?

The most difficult thing was asking myself the question from time to time during the writing whether I was too fixated on my mother, psychologically speaking, putting hour after hour, day after day for a few years into the project. I reassured myself with the thought that I was making public important history about tragic events and human accomplishments in the 20^th Century as it had been told to me and lived by an unusually bold and resilient woman. How she made an impact on people and the lessons for life she offered deserved an audience.

6) Do you have advice to offer biographers?

Yes, pick up a pen or pound a keyboard and see what emerges. Don’t censor, keep going. I would tell would-be biographers that they will learn priceless things about themselves as they become immersed in their subject. Sometimes I urge my patients to write their memoir about their family because it will bring roundness and insight to how they experience life.

About The Book

FIRST SHE ESCAPED THE HOLOCAUST AND THE POVERTY OF THE SHTETL. AFTER THAT, SHE MOVED IN MANY WORLDS. AND IN EVERY ONE SHE MADE HER MARK.

Felice Massie was a student in France, caught up in the horrors of Naziism when she was 20 years old. Cut off by the war from her family living in a small village in Poland, she shifted from one country to another attempting to find a home for herself and a means to rescue her parents, brother and sister. As the Holocaust descended on her shtetl, she arrived penniless in America. Over time she raised a family and amassed one of foremost collections of American modern art. Her boldness and resilience became a beacon of hope and inspiration for others.

Remarks:

“Henry Massie never blinks as he creates an astonishing chronicle of a life in diaspora. Only a son could capture this passionate spirit, who escaped both Adolf Hitler and Joe McCarthy.” –Patty Friedmann, author of TOO JEWISH

“Henry Massie’s FELICE’S WORLDS is a labor of love in more ways than one. A daughter of the 20th century, Felice Massie’s journey is both a personal odyssey and a window on some of the most important events in political history and the modern art world. It’s also the story of a remarkable woman who was ahead of her time in many notable ways. Although there are heartbreaks along the way, Massie also captures his mother’s sense of humor and most of all, her remarkable coming of age in Europe, Palestine and America. This is a book you’ll want to share with your friends and gift to everyone who appreciates the skills of a wonderful writing talent. Don’t miss it.” —

Roger Rapoport, author of Hillsdale: A Greek Tragedy in America’s Heartland, and journalist, the Frequent Flyer.

From the author:

I had listened to my mother’s tales all my life and wanted to share them. She was an escapee from a Polish shtetl wiped out by the Nazis, a high-school political activist in Lithuania, a university student in France who lost her first love tragically, a partisan for Arab-Jewish co-existence in Palestine who was caught in the first intifada in 1936, and a penniless arrival to America in 1937.

Yet when she died she had amassed one of the most important collections of Modern Art in the world and was a university lecturer on the subject.

In writing about her, I understood for the first time how her experience of losing loved ones to the Nazis had been passed on to her American son.

But as a psychiatrist, I was drawn to Felice’s story because it shows so much resilience in the face of terrible emotional trauma. Her life dramatizes how just keeping on through days of having nothing but a belief that “someday I will have something,” can be a powerful survival tool.

– Henry Massie

Link to book on Amazon (or where it is sold): http://www.amazon.com/Felices-Worlds-Holocaust-Modern-ebook/dp/B0079Q0HU6/ref=sr_1_1?s=digital-text&ie=UTF8&qid=1329434260&sr=1-1

If you’d like more information on “Felice’s Worlds” or if you’d like to join Henry Massie’s tour of his book which runs from Sept. 4 – 28th, 2012, please contact Deborah Previte at thebookishdame@aol.com.

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