Originally posted on Schlemiel Theory:
In the United States and Europe, the advent of the train and long distance travel prompted many artists, storytellers, and thinkers to turn the train into a metaphor. Sometimes the images are exciting and feed utopian visions and cause happiness, other times they feed sadness at the loss of what…
Motl the Cantor’s Son is Sholem Aleichem’s last novel. Though unfinished,it is substantial. It tells the story of Motl – the orphan of a Cantor who died back in Europe (in fact, on the same day as the Baal Shem Tov was said to have tied – the second day of Shavuot) – and his […]
In the United States and Europe, the advent of the train and long distance travel prompted many artists, storytellers, and thinkers to turn the train into a metaphor. Sometimes the images are exciting and feed utopian visions and cause happiness, other times they feed sadness at the loss of what was and cynicism. Think for […]
There is nothing worse than betrayal. But there are different degrees of betrayal. Some forms are worse than others. The worst violation of trust occurs when the person who is the betrayer is a close friend or a relative. The stakes are especially high when the entrusted party is approached by a family member or […]
Charles Baudelaire, in his essay “Some Foreign Caricatures,” distinguishes between a “historical” and an “artistic” caricaturist. Writing on Goya, who took the horrors of the Spanish Insurrection and the war with Napoleonic France, Baudelaire notes that Goya opened up the field of caricature by introducing “fantasy” into the comic. And, in contrast to the categories […]
Dan Miron is one of the greatest living critics of Yiddish and Jewish-American literature today. His books on these bodies of literature have won him critical claim. What interests me most is how Miron would approach a schlemiel like Motl (the main character of Sholem Aleichem’s Motl the Cantor’s Son: Writings of an Orphan Boy. […]
Citing the traditional joke about the schlemiel who spills the soup on the schlimazel, Ruth Wisse, in The Schlemiel as Modern Hero, argues that the schlimazel “happens upon mischance” and “has a penchant for lucklessness”(14). But “the unhappy circumstances remain outside him”(14). In other words, the schlimazel’s comedy is situational. The schlemiel, however, is different […]
On Erev Yom Kippur (the Eve of Yom Kippur), it makes sense – at least for me – to ask how Sholem Aleichem, perhaps the most well-known and celebrated of all writers on the schlemiel – approaches Yom Kippur by way of fiction. With this in mind, I thought of one piece that has Yom […]
In Isidore Goldstick’s 1948 translation of Sholem Aleichem’s Inside Kasrilevke there is a lot of American slang. Instead of being resentful, I found it to be rather fun imagining the driver of a tram in Kasrilevke speaking to his conductor Yossel in the following manner about tobacco or rather “tabacky”: ‘Let’s have some tabacky, Yossel,’ […]
In a “Five Books” interview, the Jewish-American writer Allegra Goodman was asked what five books in Jewish fiction she would suggest people read. Each book, for Goodman, would provide readers with one sense of the Jewish experience. One of the books she chose was Sholem Aleichem’s Inside Kasrilevke (the contents of which are the stories […]
Schlemiel Theory 