Irving Howe initiated his letters to Ruth Wisse about Sholem Aleichem by staking his main claim that, based on his own experience of Sholem Aleichem’s stories, he must go against the grain and state that they, like all stories of the Schlemiel (from Chelm to Hershel Ostropolier), have “their undercurrents of darkness.” Throughout Howe’s letter, […]
In their epistolary introduction on Sholem Aleichem, Irving Howe sets the tone for his declaration of Jewishness by noting that he has an “uneasy feeling” that he has discovered a Sholem Aleichem that has “seldom been encountered.” Howe says what no-one wants to hear; namely, that Sholem Aleichem “turns out to be imagining, beneath the […]
Do we laugh through tears or do we cry through laughter? The answer to this question or perhaps the question itself are, for Irving Howe, the crux of Jewish identity. For Howe, the few Jews who really “scrutinize” themselves, the Jews who “dare to know” (so to speak), will come to this very question. Howe […]
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 […]
Larry David’s opening monologue for SNL – which included a joke about picking up girls in Concentration Camps – was contested by many on Twitter and elsewhere. The harshest criticism came from Thane Rosenbaum in his piece for the Los Angeles Journal entitled “Larry David Goes One Cringe Too Far.” Reading some of these articles […]
Laughter is an ambiguous thing. It can either exclude one or include the other. And, in relation to time, one might think it relates solely to the present moment. Laughter is all about the new. Henri Bergson associated it with progress and “Creative Evolution.” And Leo Strauss argued that laughter was the key element of […]
The schlemiel is a moral figure. In Yiddish literature, there are many examples of the schlemiel’s generosity and kindness to others. However, even though the schlemiel is kind he or she is often laughed at. Think, for example, of the famous schlemiel joke about the schlemiel, the schlimazel, and the nudnik. The schlemiel is the […]
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 […]
The relationship of boredom to art, entertainment, and modernity is a topic of interest to great thinkers and writers such as Soren Kierkegaard, Charles Baudelaire, and Walter Benjamin. For all of them, boredom is something that is born out of modernity. In many ways it is something that passes on from the aristocracy to the […]
As Irving Howe has pointed out, the relationship of laughter to tears is a running theme in the work of Yiddish literature. For Howe, laughter doesn’t efface the tears of historical suffering. To be sure, for Howe, all the laughter we find in Sholem Aleichem’s stories – for instance – is marred by historical and […]
Schlemiel Theory 