Last week, before New Years Eve, I decided to take my chances and Tweet a Question at the biggest Schlemiel Celebrity (other than, say, Larry David or Amy Schumer) in the USA: Seth Rogen. The question I asked Rogen is, to my mind, the ultimate schlemiel question. I framed it in a way so as […]
Today is the 100th year anniversary of Paul Celan’s birth. Celan was very fond of memory and its meaning. He was obsessed with dates. He understood how we all live through these dates and relive them in language. The Holocaust is a date that lives on and through his poetry. Language, he says, in the […]
Cynthia Ozick argued that hidden inside of John Updike’s Bech trilogy there is a theological reading of Jews. In 1965, Updike, the award-winning American WASP (White Anglo Saxon Protestant) writer – Pulitzer Prizes in 1982 and 1991, National Book Award in 1964, PEN/Malamud Award 1988, etc – addressed what one could call his Jewish question: […]
Under exile, Jews are constantly in flight. Hannah Arendt argues that Charlie Chaplin’s schlemiel exemplifies this flight. He is the innocent “suspect” who is always on the run. He marks a major change in the schlemiel character since Heinrich Heine’s “lord of dreams.” The impudence of Chaplin’s suspect is of the same kind […]
Throughout his novel by the same name, Saul Bellow’s Moses Herzog writes countless letters. But he never sends them. The letters show us what he really feels but cannot act on or things he would like to do or dreams about doing but never does. His schlemiel character comes through in his reflections on his wife’s […]
The schlemiel character is constantly expanding and contracting. But in the end she always becomes small. She always seems to be caught up in a comedy of scale. In their dreams schlemiels are, as Hannah Arendt said of Heinrich Heine’s schlemiel, “lords.” But they are, in reality, quite small. They are – as Arendt would say […]
What I love about a great novelist is his or her ability to surprise the reader. However, sometimes the surprise throws everything the reader thought about the writer into question. This is especially prescient when the main character of his or her novels is often someone we find charming, pitiable, and yet insightful. What […]
In Bernard Malamud’s A New Life, the main character S. Levin leaves New York City for a job teaching at a college in California. He envisions a new life for himself on the West Coast as an academic. Little does he know that the job he has applied for is not the same job he […]
Schlemiel Theory has published several posts on Hannah Arendt and her reading of the schlemiel in her celebrated essay “The Jew as Pariah.” As I pointed out in many of my readings, Arendt believed that the schlemiel had, for a certain time during modernity, a necessity. But, as she argues (and many critics overlook), she […]
I don’t know what’s come over me, but I’ve had a strong desire over the last day or two to watch, listen, and read Henny Youngman’s one-liners. To be sure, Henny’s nickname was the “King of the One Liners.” There’s a special kind of quality to them that is drawing me to them and I’m […]
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