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From the Author
The Book of Splendor is a love story. It is my unabashed love affair
with the great city of Prague, my grudging affection for the irascible, mad
Emperor Rudolph II, and my great admiration for Rabbi Judah Ben Lowe.
Rochel, the orphaned seamstress, is both my new baby child and my ancestral
mother. Is there a greater love?
I was fortunate enough to be in Prague while teaching at a writing
conference in the glorious summer of 1995, again when I attended a
conference on alchemy (yes, alchemy), and a third time to snoop around,
checking streets, poking my head into open doorways. It was amazing to be in
a picture-perfect city hundreds and hundreds of years old with gold leaf on
the buildings, a castle, an astronomical clock, towers, ramparts, and a
great bridge over the Vlatava River. It is a city with ghosts and legends,
puppets, green absinthe, and young women in short, red skirts who kiss their
boyfriends on the trolley car. It is a city that is coming alive after the
long Nazi and Soviet occupations. My grandmother's relatives lived there
until they were killed in Auschwitz. I am attached.
When I was in Prague for the alchemy conference, I was lucky enough to attend
an exhibit up at the castle (not only Rudolph's castle but also Kafka's and
Vaclav Havel's) of artifacts of the period of Rudolph II. Wow! What a treat!
I saw the emperor's vast collection of clocks encrusted with jewels. He was
obsessed with gold and time. I saw the clothes he was buried in, his
alchemical laboratory with mysterious flasks and vessels, precious toys of
the period, odd musical instruments, his pure agate bowl, his mandrake root
in the shape of a man, and his unrivaled art collection.
To read about the rabbi was to be in the company of a saint, and there are
legends galore about that amazing man, some of which I included in my book.
I have embellished freely on the golem legend, made him good-looking, smart,
personable, why not?
Rochel is pure invention, but good with the needle like my mother; and like
my grandfather, she comes from a small village near Kiev. She is in some ways
a Cinderella figure, but she goes through the oven, emerges like the phoenix
from the ashes. She stands in homage.
I read a lot for The Book of Splendor. What particularly interested
me were books about the history of opium, tulips, coffee, food, clothing,
bathrooms, architecture, fairy tales, art, money, exploration, popular
culture.
For me, writing is a process of discovery, an opportunity to live in another
world for a while, to make the acquaintance of different times, to literarily
make a circle of friends, to fall in love, to stay in love.
Discussion
Questions
1. The Book of Splendor defies category: it's part fairy tale, part
historical account, part comedy of manners, and then some. How does Frances
Sherwood's style of storytelling manage to harmonize so many different
literary genres? How do the different genres bear on one another to tell a
richer story?
2. The book is replete with historical anecdotes, meticulously researched
and lavishly detailed. Yet Sherwood uses history as an inspirational
departure point for her own fictional creations, playing liberally with
historical fact and abandoning it at will. In doing so, what does she reveal
about the interplay of fact and fiction in literature?
3. Judenstadt is brought to life in Sherwood's writing as a dank, dark
ghetto densely populated by a poor but tight-knit community of equals. In
contrast, the court of Emperor Rudolf II is described as a palace of
incomparable opulence and psychic disorder. How does Sherwood's language
capture these opposing environments?
4. In the novel's opening, Sherwood writes: "A golem is, at best, a
God-send, at worst blasphemy incarnate . . . marked by a lack of
intelligence, described frequently and without charity as a doltish slave at
his master's command." Yet Sherwood's Yossel is handsome and compassionate,
grander in thought and feeling than many of the natural-born humans in her
story. Why do you think Sherwood decided to deviate from the standards of
the myth? What possibly compelled her to rewrite this well-known myth of
Jewish culture?
5. In his love for Rochel, Yossel proves that, despite his origins, he is
not purely a monster. Though he can't articulate them verbally, what
spiritual questions does he seem to ask himself in demonstration of his
humanity?
6. Describe the relationship between Rochel and Yossel versus that between
Rochel and the tailor Zev. What are the different dimensions of love
demonstrated in Rochel's feelings for each?
7. Rochel's illegitimate birth and Christian blood make her an outsider in
Judenstadt. How else is she unlike the women of Judenstadt?
8. The myriad characters of Rudolph II's court—from Tycho Brahe to John
Dee to Kirakos—present the vast power, both political and cultural, of
the Hapsburg empire in 1601. Describe the individual members of the court
and what each represents in Sherwood's historical portrait.
9. How does Sherwood's sympathetic portrayal of Václav allow us more insight
into the character of Rudolph II, showing him to be more than the
caricature of a selfish despot?
10. Comment on the meaning of the imagery of gold throughout the novel.
11. The parallel stories of the persecution of Prague's Jewish community and
Rudolph II's insane quest for immortality stand in stark contrast to one
another, yet their collision brings about the novel's highly dramatic and
epic conclusion. What themes do these stories share in common?
12. A common spirituality unites Prague's Jewish community, and even brings
Rabbi Loew his store of magical powers. Rudolph II's court has ambitious
astronomers and alchemists, but it lacks any moral center or sense of
camaraderie. What is Sherwood suggesting here about the nature of
spirituality?
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