Norman Simms
Norman Toby Simms was born 4 July 1940 in Brooklyn, New York, the son of Louis Simms, a dentist and captain in the United States Army during World War II and Claire Simms (nee Herman), a former concert pianist. Norman's parents were both children of first-generation Jewish immigrants from Eastern Europe. Louis' family was from Poland and Ukraine. Claire's kin hailed from Romania and Hungary; her maternal grandfather was a Grand Rabbi of Moldavia, killed in a pogrom in 1909.
He grew up in a highly literate, cultured environment, sensitised to historic antisemitism but also aware of the contemporary plight of his people, as the horrors of the Holocaust unfolded. His parents' home was also a musical one, with Claire teaching piano in the living room and sustaining relationships with a wide group of artistic friends. Future movie star Danny Kaye was one who visited on occasion, playing the family piano.
A voracious reader, Norman was a studious and dutiful Jewish boy. He was bar mitzvahed on 6 June 1953. After passing a highly competitive entrance examination, he was accepted into the prestigious Stuyvesant High School, an institution catering for exceptional students. There he flourished, exploring an ambition to become a musician, playing trumpet in a jazz band. On one school occasion, the ensemble had the opportunity to play Carnegie Hall, as his mother had done professionally at the height of her concert career.
Norman's enrolment at Alfred University coincided with his mother having a stroke. No music was played in the Simms house thereafter and, although Norman's extracurricular activities at Alfred included playing in the university orchestra and in smaller bands for theatre productions, his intellectual focus became English literature. Editing two magazines during his undergraduate years, he wrote and published poetry and became active in the civil rights movement, organising protests, for which he was officially censured and physically assaulted.
Norman graduated with a Bachelor of Arts in 1962. The following year he attended the civil rights March on Washington. Whilst studying at Washington University in St. Louis, he met Martha Taylor Kellerman, an undergraduate from an evangelical Airforce family. On their first date he told Jewish jokes and initiated her into the joys of "Bananas Ain't Got No Bonies" , a 1947 nonsense song by Judy Canova. It was the beginning of a beautiful relationship. Norman and Martha were married in St. Louis, in a non-denominational ceremony, on 25 November 1965.
At Washington University Norman became enamoured with comparative literature, an approach which expanded his understanding of the relationship between medieval and English literature. Graduating with a Master of Arts in 1964, he began studying for a PhD. Although his thesis topic involved a new edition of the 14th century English alliterative poem "William of Palerne", in his entrance examination at Washington University he was assigned a topic involving English Romanticism. As always, he rose to the challenge.
In 1966, after entering the rigorous PhD programme and passing examinations of a fortnight's duration, whilst also working on his thesis, Norman took up a teaching position at the University of Manitoba in Winnipeg, Canada. His and Martha's first child, Meliors, was born the same year, their son David two years hence.
Norman graduated with his PhD in 1969. His talent recognised by Professor Paul Day, a scholar from New Zealand who was then on sabbatical in Canada, he was offered a job in the English department of the University of Waikato. Commencing in 1970, Norman taught and researched at Waikato until 2010, when he retired at the age of seventy.
Norman's scholarship ranged from biblical and classical sources of English literature to the medieval literature he specialised in: Chaucer, Langland, Malory, the Gawain and Pearl poets and medieval drama, as well as poets like Dante who fell outside the English canon. He published significant studies of the Gawain poet and Geoffrey Chaucer in 2002 and 2004, respectively.
Norman's writing and research interests became steadily broader and more sophisticated beyond the confines of university teaching, leading him into esoteric areas where there were no obvious local communities, touching on anthropology, archeology, psychology and the history of consciousness; Maranos, Romanian history, Jewish history and identity and the history of the Holocaust and its treatment in literature and more. Overseas sabbaticals saw him forge valuable connections with scholars in Paris, Canada and especially Romania during the Ceauşescu period, where he became the only foreigner to have given a presentation in Romanian to the folklore society in Bucharest.
Norman Simms died 26 June 2022. He is survived by his wife Martha, daughter Molly Simms (Meliors), son David Simms, daughter-in-law Penny and granddaughter Louise.[1]
Marxist
Whenever Simms felt inadequate in any intellectual field, he strove to conquer it. As a young man, feeling he knew too little about Marx and Freud, he read their every published work and every significant criticism. When diagnosed with cancer in 1985 and given but nine months to live, he chose to use that time to perfect his Yiddish and Romanian and to write three books. All three were completed, all three were published. According to Martha, the effort saved his life.
Similar determination was apparent in recent years, when the need to research and write took priority over health concerns. A three-volume study of Alfred Dreyfus, a springboard into broader discussions of Jewish identity, was his major focus, but he also found time to review Holocaust-related books and for poetic reflection.
In the words of Dov Bing, a friend and colleague of half a century, "Norman valued loyalty and he exemplified it...he was loyal to his childhood memories, to his neighbourhood, to the old country of his forbears, to the memory of the Holocaust and his people and their stories, to values of the enlightenment and humanism and to his family and his friends".[2]