In the midst of Prince Myshkin’s epileptic fit, everything becomes double. And this doubleness brings out Dostoevsky’s approach to the fool-as-mystic. If one is to understand what is at stake with the fool, one must, for Dostoevsky understand the tension of opposites: namely, the struggle between good and evil. This struggle occasions and weights down […]
When it came to the fool Fyodor Dostoevsky, it seems, was of two minds. After fleeing from Russia and the outpouring of his first novel, Crime and Punishment, Dostoevsky set out for Basil, Switzerland. Dostoeveky decided that, after writing a novel that was full of depth, complexity, bleakness, and evil, he wanted to write a […]
We can have little doubt that most Yiddish writers read The Idiot by Fyodor Dostoevsky. And it is odd that, up until now, few schlemiel theorists have looked into the parallels between Dostoevsky’s Prince Myshkin (“the idiot”) and the schlemiel (which we find in writers like Mendel Mocher Sforim, I.L. Peretz, and Sholem Aleichem). The […]
Shalom Auslander’s short story, “Somebody Up There Likes You” (in his Beware of God short story collection) opens up a comical side to negative theology and literally turns it inside out. This fictional foray into two realities, one of a schlemiel character (Bloom) who thinks he is saved by God, contrasted with the portrayal of […]
I love seeing new faces whether they are real or, as in reading a novel, virtual. What interests me most – in both reading faces and reading literature – is when glances are exchanged. When someone or something looks at you how do you look back? And what happens when the person you’re looking at, […]
The experience of injustice can send one into deep reflection over the meaning and purpose of one’s life. And, depending on how meaningful the self-reflection is, such introspection may spur a will to change. This is especially the case if the subject of injustice feels as if he or she has been betrayed and – […]
When it comes to Jewish humor, self-mockery is not new. Sanford Pinsker argues that Ibn Ezra, the 12th century Rabbi and Torah commentator, used self-mockery to epitomize the comedic state of exile (in general) and the schlemiel (in particular). Self-mockery is found in the classic joke about the schlemiel, the schlimazel, and the nudnik. One […]
Duplicity and complexity were of great concern to Hannah Arendt, Walter Benjamin, and Gershom Scholem. In her book on Rahel Varnhagen, Arendt takes aim at Jean-Jacques Rousseau as encouraging duplicity. She saw, in his work, a conflict between the private life and the public life. His confessions maintained this division and complexity. This came in […]
Many great thinkers and writers of the 20th century were interested in children and in the experience of becoming childlike. One need only think of Freud and his obsession with the child’s development. Walter Benjamin wrote of childhood throughout his career, Kafka wrote of characters who had child-like sensibilities, nearly every story by Robert Walser […]
In Jean-Claude Carriere’s book, The Secret Language of Film he points out how films were “born silent” and continue to “love silence.” But he makes a major distinction. He argues that, in its beginnings, silent film “wildly gesticulated.” But “over the past sixty years” since its inception, we have something different; namely, the “present inscrutability […]
Schlemiel Theory 