Talk:John Simon (critic)

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[edit] WWII?

Dropped this para:

Simon was a teenager during World War II, and must have been privy to many horrific things. The city of Subotica lost 7,000 citizens between 1941 and 1944 (including 4,000 Jewish deportees) to the Nazis and Fascists, and more recently became home to Serb refugees from the 1991-1995 breakup of Yugoslavia. Possibly, Simon's acerbic, even vicious, prose can be traced to those times from which many never fully recovered.

In Paradigms Lost Simon wrote that he was in private school in England during the early part of WWII, and in Reverse Angle he mentions that he was in US Army Air Force basic training in Wichita Falls by 1944. This would tend to disprove that he personally witnessed the full range of gruesome depradations committed by the various factions in Yugoslavia during the war. Ellsworth 22:58, 17 November 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Ethnicity

In fact the article, which calls John Simon a "Serbian-American" altogether leaves out a crucial piece of information concerning Mr Simon's actual ethnicity.

Subotitza, a city in the Banat, was in Austro-Hungarian Hungary until 1919, in Yugoslavia (not yet called Yugoslavia) thereafter. It found itself in independent Serbia over 50 years after Ivan Simon had left. How is he then a "Serbian- American"? Is he an ethnic Serbian? What is his mother tongue? What is his religious heritage?

He was never, it is certain, a "Serbian" citizen. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 208.251.171.11 (talk) 15:20, 30 September 2007 (UTC)

You're right, in 1925, that country was called "the Kingdom of the Serbs, Croats and Slovenes". But - in a number of his essays he has self-identified as a Serbian, and has stated that Serbian is his mother tongue. See Paradigms Lost. Religiously speaking, I'm not sure of his background, but in a film review I've read he describes himself as a "nonbeliever". Ellsworth 21:45, 12 October 2007 (UTC)

Thanks, Ellsworth. That's informative.

From hearing him talk, I would have thought John Simon's mother tongue to have been German. Nor is 'Simon' a Serbian-sounding name. But, since you've read Paradigms Lost, I of course accept your contention.Tantris