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This unusual book will have a hard time finding the audience it deserves. The intersection of the set of potential readers with an interest in all three categories—physicists, psychoanalysts and kabbalists—must be vanishingly small while those readers interested in each group separately would no doubt be put off by the proximity of the others. But Keve has written a non-trivial book that uses extensive source material to explore his interest in the interrelationships between knowledge of the natural world as revealed by physics, knowledge of the psyche as revealed by psychoanalysis and knowledge of the soul as revealed by the Kabbalah.
A Hungarian who came to Britain in 1956, Keve has access to Hungarian sources that are unknown to most of us and also uses the German language archive materials as well as selected materials in Danish. Many of the letters used by Keve have not been published before including two very interesting letters from Ferenczi to the Hungarian physicist, Rudolph Ortvay. The result is a deeply felt historical exploration written in the form of imagined conversations with some imagined historical reconstructions of time and place. Keve calls his book a novel but it is really a work of historical imagination in the service of intellectual exploration.
A strong feature of the book that will interest many readers is the astonishing connections that Keve shows to exist between members of the central European intelligentsia across disciplines. Similar to the spaghetti junction diagram of analysts, analysands and their children drawn by Ernst Falzeder (1994), Keve casts a wider net to bring together the physicists and psychoanalysts of central Europe and their common origins in the Jewish mystic tradition of learning. Thus, while we all know that Sophie Schwab, the niece of Samuel Hammerschlag, Freud's teacher of Jewish Studies and his first entrée into the world of the Viennese intelligentsia, married the physiologist Joseph Paneth, Freud's good friend,