I’m going to go out on a limb here and say that the schlemiel character is usually located on the edge of the world. Her place is something people overlook. S/he stands at the limit. Whether it is Mendel Mocher Sforim’s Sendrl, Sholem Aleichem’s Motl or Menachem Mendel, I.B. Singer’s Gimpel, Saul Bellow’s Moses Herzog, […]
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 […]
Books give me ideas. I love to be between one book and another. It’s like being between one place and another. I’m always walking – it seems – from one idea to another. I like to retrace my steps because I might stumble – like a schlemiel – across something. Wandering around New York […]
Near the middle of V, the main character of Thomas Pynchon’s first novel, Benny Profane, enters into a dialogue with a character named Mafia. Profane, throughout the novel, is dubbed a schlemiel by the narrator (Pynchon spells it “schlemihl”). And as the novel unfolds we see how that is the case. Mafia is astonished that he […]
How can a schlemiel be a prophetic figure? One could argue, by way of the Talmud (Baba Batra 12B) that after prophesy ended it went to fools. But how could one argue that a prophet is a schlemiel which is – as is suggested in an interview with I.B. Singer and in many other places […]
Ten years after Seth Rogen appeared in Judd Apatow’s Knocked Up (2007) as a stoner schlemiel, Seth Rogen has made this character into his biggest selling point. Here is a list of movies where we see the schlemiel-stoner character: Superbad (2007), Pineapple Express (2008), Zack and Miri Make a Porno (2008), Funny People (2009), This […]
Writing on Snow White, the Freudian thinker and Holocaust survivor Bruno Bettelheim argues that the “fairy story permits the child to comprehend that not only is he jealous of his parent, but that the parent may have parallel feelings”(195, The Uses of Enchantment). It can “help to bridge the gap between parent and child” and […]
Language can take us places. It can create an opportunity for us to leave ourselves and go somewhere we have never been. But the only way for that kind of displacement to happen is for us to identify with the text and its movements. However, not all texts will do. A good writer has an […]
It goes without saying that the question of man’s relationship to apes has created major historical challenges and changes over the last three centuries. Although it is the case that the material culture must be deeply examined to understand these challenges and shifts, it is the act of imagining an ape with human features […]
Goodness is an important aspect of the schlemiel’s character. In The Schlemiel as Modern Hero, Ruth Wisse argues that the schlemiel is a simpleton who clings to goodness and humility; and in the incarnation of the schlemiel we find in secular writers, such as I.B. Singer, Wisse tells us that the trace of the religious […]
Schlemiel Theory 