Memoirs of a Man's Maiden Years N. O. Body. Translated by Deborah
Simon. Preface by Sander L. Gilman. Afterword by Hermann Simon
"This is a very interesting and beautifully written memoir by
somebody who would have been called a hermaphrodite in the
nineteenth century. The work gives a fascinating picture of the
childhood experiences of the anonymous author and is full of
sensitive and often moving observations on the plights of sexual
ambiguity in childhood. The style, apparently so simple and
relatively dispassionate, is extremely effective in pulling the
reader into the story."--Chandak Sengoopta "I was born a boy,
raised as a girl. . . . One may raise a healthy boy in as womanish
a manner as one wishes, and a female creature in as mannish; never
will this cause their senses to remain forever reversed." So writes
the pseudonymous N. O. Body, born in 1884 with ambiguous genitalia
and assigned a female identity in early infancy. Brought up as a
girl, "she" nevertheless asserted stereotypical male behavior from
early on. In the end, it was a passionate love affair with a
married woman that brought matters to a head. Desperately confused,
suicidally depressed, and in consultation with Magnus Hirschfeld,
one of the most eminent and controversial sexologists of the day,
"she" decided to become "he." Originally published in 1907 and now
available for the first time in English, "Memoirs of a Man's Maiden
Years" describes a childhood and youth in Kaiser Wilhelm's Germany
that is shaped by bourgeois attitudes and stifled by convention. It
is, at the same time, a book startlingly charged with sexuality.
Yet, however frank the memoirist may be about matters physical or
emotional, Hermann Simon reveals in his afterword the full extent
of the lengths to which N. O. Body went to hide not just his true
name but a second secret, his Jewish identity. And here, Sander L.
Gilman suggests in his brilliant preface, may lie the crucial hint
to solving the real riddle of the ambiguously gendered N. O. Body.
N. O. Body was the pseudonym of Karl M. Baer, the director of the
Berlin B'nai B'rith until his emigration from Germany in 1938. He
died in Israel in 1956. Sander L. Gilman is Distinguished Professor
of the Arts and Sciences at Emory University. He is the author or
editor of more than seventy books, including "Jewish Self-Hatred"
and "Smoke: A Global History of Smoking" (coedited with Zhou Xun).
Dr. Hermann Simon is the director of the Neue Synagoge
Berlin-Centrum Judaicum Foundation and is the coauthor and coeditor
of "Jews in Berlin." Deborah Simon is a teacher of English and
translation studies at Humboldt University, Berlin. 2005 160 pages
5 1/2 x 8 1/2 ISBN 978-0-8122-2061-2 Paper $21.95s 14.50 World
Rights Biography, Women's/Gender Studies Short copy: The first
translation into English of a startling 1907 memoir of a writer who
was born a boy, was raised as a girl, and who lived as a man. Who
was the real N.O. Body, and why did he go to such lengths to hide
not just his name but his Jewish identity?
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