Like many a schlemiel, I have inherited my father’s story.  I have inherited his dreams and his failures.  His story is a major part of my own.  But it’s a long story with lots of twists and turns.  And one blog entry will certainly not do justice to it.  So, rest assured, I will turn back to this story in future blog entries.  As I hope to show, over a few blogs, the impetus for any consequential schlemiel story is not foolishness; it’s the clash between dreams and reality.  But, while it begins in trauma, it doesn’t end in trauma.  Which is not to say that the schlemiel’s story has gone beyond it; in fact, the schlemiel’s story, while humorous (depending on what you regard as humor), is not redemptive.

The schlemiel’s story is on-the-way to redemption, to something better, to something else.

(Note: do keep in mind that this blog is named Schlemiel Theory and that the secret of Schlemiel theory is Schlemiel practice.  Regardless, I would be dishonest if I were to say that my theoretical insights into this character had nothing to do with my relationship to my father who, as I hope to show, possessed many Schlemiel-like qualities.  He was my first schlemiel-teacher.  And while I will do my utmost to be ‘objective’, I must admit at the offset that his schlemiel-teachings, so to speak, bleed into my work.)

Ok, so here it goes:

Growing up, regardless of how much I tried to deny it, I looked at myself in terms of my father’s dreams.  And I measured them against his successes and failures.  The tension between his dreams and reality introduced me into the dynamic schlemiel-universe where the forces of dreams and actions interact, exchange, and transform reality (for the better or for the worse).

As with any Schlemiel, it all starts with a dream.  And that dream was not a Jewish dream; it was an American dream.

My dad was a boy-genius who dreamed the post-WWII dreams of America.  He grew up walking the streets of Manhattan, marveling at its skyscrapers and urban life.  He lived on the Upper West Side in a nine room flat (89^th and West End Avenue) until he went to high school.  Then, he and his family moved to the Mayflower Hotel on Central Park West.   They were moving up on the social ladder.

They had a chauffer and a chef.  They had a view that said one thing to my immigrant grandparents: We made it!  In America dreams do come true!

My father was the son of an extremely successful Leather merchant who came over from Europe to make a living.  Menachem Menkis, who I am named after, grew up above a synagogue in a small town in the mountains.   His father was the Rabbi.  And when Menkis (the name he went by) was old enough, he left for school in Vienna and for a stint in WWI.

My grandfather was a Corporal for the Austrian military.  He led a Jewish-Polish platoon and, for his service, was given many medals and honors.  He was proud of his achievements; he certainly didn’t think of himself as a schlemiel.  For as any German or Austrian knew, a schlemiel is not something you want to be.  A successful and committed soldier is, as I will show in another blog, not a schlemiel.

But this was only one success.

Menkis learned the leather business in Austria and, before coming to America, he did a lot of business in Odessa. Upon coming to America, he met my grandmother Rose (who was, at that time, his secretary).  They married, had several children, and moved their way up.

My father was the youngest son.

(Be forewarned, this may sound a little like Phillip Roth’s American Pastoral; but that’s for another post. Roth has a fair share of Schlemiels in his novels and he did, in fact, write about a Leather family and the small town I grew up in: Gloversville, NY.)

My dad, who my grandfather named Marshall (all of his children save for one had Germanic names), was a child prodigy.  He spent most of his days, after school, in the New York Public Library.  He worked hard and constantly studied.  When I was growing up, he used to tell me that he memorized the dictionary and could give me any definition (on the spot).  His obsession with New York Times crosswords and his incessant correction of my speech constantly reminded me of his grammatical passion.

He went on to become the Valedictorian of Brooklyn Science. And, after being offered fellowships to Harvard, Yale, MIT, etc he decided to go to Columbia University.  He wanted to stay in Manhattan.

He studied economics, politics, and engineering at Columbia and went on to be the  Valedictorian.   His Valedictorian speech bore his passion: to get the man on the moon.  The sciences were the way for America and my father believed he was at the crest of its wave. This was his first big dream.  And America gave him the opportunity to “live it.”

His brilliance won him the NASA Fellowship at Johns Hopkins University.  My father accepted the scholarship and went on to doctoral study in engineering and physics.  During Vietnam, he worked for the American military and designed weapons and war games.   After his service was filled, he went on to work for Lockeed-Martin while working on his doctoral thesis.

But when his father decided to retire, my father left his doctoral program at Johns Hopkins University for the Leather Business.  His dream changed.

He was offered one fourth of a multi-million dollar making leather business.  He would have to share it with his three brothers.   When he accepted, strangely enough, his brother Jack died.

Now, it was my father, his oldest brother Irwin, and his older brother Myron (Mike).

Then my grandfather passed away.

That’s when it all went downhill and that’s when my father’s dreams started crashing on the shores of reality.

My father was kicked out of the family business.  He always claimed that they had doctored the will so that they could split all of the money and assets 50/50.  (And this lead to a lifetime of dramatic law suits, which I will recount in another blog.)

I was born into this world; a world that had spun out of control.  My father was on his own.  His oldest brother cursed him.  And, as I learned, he also cursed me and my mother.  We were all damned.   We were forbidden to see his side of the family from then on.  (My grandmother, who I didn’t meet until she was on her deathbed, was forced to go along with it all.)  It didn’t (and it doesn’t) make any sense.

Against all the odds, my father managed to build his own leather business.  He had a factory in Gloversville, New York and in Buenos Aires, Argentina.   That worked…for a little while.  But then Argentina went down the tubes.

I remember, when I was six years old, when the bottom fell out.  My father grew morbid and then manic.  My grandfather (father’s mother) sent my father off to Elmhurst Hospital, which at that time, was one of the worst in the city. My father would always bring this up as he was traumatized by what he saw.  As a child, he used to recall to me the madness on the ward.  He described things to me that were shocking and inappropriate for a child’s ears.  As a child who grew up in wealthy Manhattan and in the Ivy League, my father had never seen this side of life.  It lingered with him.

My father’s mania, coupled with events that were real, such as real crime, and real threats, was a mixture of reality and fantasy.

As a child, I wasn’t sure which was which.  He always managed to use reality as evidence.  But I knew something was wrong.

As time moved on, he grew interested in Kabbalah and described the world and all events through it.  His Kabbalah was a mixture of science, physics, mathematics, and prophesy.

I was his main audience.  He would educate me.  I was to carry on his dreams and visions.  He would take me along on his Schlemiel journeys across America.  (I’ll divulge some of the details of that itinerary at another time.)   My mother was at a loss at what to do.

It took me years to figure out that what my father really was and what he wanted to teach me was how to live on air.   A schlemiel lives on dreams.  A schlemiel doesn’t see reality.  But is this so bad?  Who needs to dream when reality can become your dream?  And what happens when that dream is made out of reality?  And what happens when odd or twisted dreams actually change reality?  (To be continued…)

Aristotle starts off his most cited book, The Metaphysics, with the classic line “All men by nature desire to know.”  Oedipus also desired to know, but when he found out that he killed his father and married his mother, he cursed this desire.  The philosopher doesn’t seem to have a problem with knowledge, but Sophocles, who wrote the play Oedipus Rex, does.

The reason: knowledge of origins is beneficial to a philosopher; tragic for a believer in myth and religion.

I suppose that the knowledge of the schlemiel falls somewhere inbetween.  First of all, its good to know, in the most academic sense, “what” the schlemiel is; on the other hand, and contrary to popular wisdom about comedy, the path to understanding the schlemiel must inevitably lead through an encounter with troubling things.

Ok, so I’m going to take a brief moment to look into my personal desire to know the  schlemiel.  Perhaps it is informed by the Socratic desire to “know oneself?”

Hopefully, in the end, I won’t be like Oedipus and poke my eyes out from shame when I find out why I am a schlemiel or why I desire to know the schlemiel.

I loved watching schlemiels on TV, reading about them in books, and seeing them in this or that film.

But the schlemiel was not merely something I found in books, films, or plays.  It was part and parcel of my life.   Like a schlemiel who has a hard time catching up with what’s going on, it took me a while to find this out. The schlemiel wasn’t far from home.

The people around me: my father, mother, my father’s best friend, and my family (the half that we could visit and know and the half that wouldn’t speak to us because of a family feud over money).  My life circumstances: full of childhood trauma, my father’s madness, and an awkwardness fitting into a small town as a Jew.  These realities made the schlemiel tangible; they gave this character life and vitality.

I was in the world, but not of it.

But I was not simply a “lord of dreams” (a word used by Heinrich Heine, the famous Jewish-German poet to describe the Schlemiel).  I lived in the world of small-town America.  When a baseball was fired in my direction, I caught it.  For the son of a New York intellectual who had little to no interest in sports (save for the Yankees), I did well.  I was accepted.  However, there were other times I was not.  And this hurt.  It reminded me that something was odd.

It was in the space between being accepted and not being accepted that I started to feel like a schlemiel.  I was and was not in control of myself and my world.  And I knew it – but only obliquely.  My father, however, didn’t.  He was always a star.

I was – from time to time – the odd one out but so were people around me, only, they didn’t know it.  I did and I didn’t know.  Growing up, I couldn’t put my finger on it.

My existential position as an American Jew growing up in a small town with parents from New York City proved to me that an American schlemiel is not simply a “lord of dreams” or a being that is unable to control themselves or the world; furthermore, an American schlemiel is not simply a character who lives in denial of history and is obsessed with the present as the Disaporic moment of creativity and change.

The schlemiel, this schlemiel, needs to understand himself in terms of what set him off into imagining and acting in a world that was ironically out-of -joint.   This schlemiel is somewhere between a man and a child, somewhere between the world and worldlessness.  And this movement back and forth has taught me that the schlemiel is not simply a concept; it is a way of relating: to myself, my Jewishness, and my world.

Given that the schlemiel’s life is marred (or blessed, depending on your point of view) by some form of absent-mindedness, its fair to say that a schlemiel moment can be found either in remembering the past, almost living in the present, or falsely anticipating the future.  The schlemiel, this schlemiel, is a creature of time, trauma, memory, and thought.

As I mentioned in the first blog, the schlemiel is on a growth curve.

Who?

Me, Schlemiel: man-child

Like many a schlemiel, I have inherited my father’s story.

I am Matthew Menachem Feuer: Schlemiel ben Schlemiel: Schlemiel, “the Son of a Schlemiel.”  What will my fate be?  Will I, like Oedipus, go mad if I find out?

Perhaps what makes a schlemiel so appealing is that she doesn’t know the whole story.

So what happens when a schlemiel does what Freud would call interminable self-analysis?  Does the failure to complete this knowledge lead to me schlemiel-hood?

That said, I’ll state it flatly, so there can be no mistake:

My father’s schlemiel story is a major part of my own. I’ll share some of it in the next blog.

The past is (to some extent) prologue…

So let’s set the record straight!  I’ve been getting all of these phone calls, emails, text messages demanding that I divulge (Tweet) the secret of the schlemiel.

The who?  The what?  The Schlemiel, stupid?   Oh…he’s a Jewish fool.

If you were to ask a person on the street what a Jewish fool is, you’d get a lot of different identifications.  More or less names of movie star schlemiels: Woody Allen, Larry David, Seth Rogen, Groucho Marx, Adam Sandler, Ben Stiller, and Brad Pitt (oh, sorry, he’s not a schlemiel).  But these identifications will get us nowhere unless we decipher some common traits.  But perhaps these are local to Hollywood and not New York or Newark Schlemiels (think of Phillip Roth).  But aren’t the first schlemiels from Yiddish shtetls?

So, what’s Jewish about the schlemiel’s foolishness?  Let’s start by saying that the schlemiel’s foolishness is particular to Jews and yet it also has a few traits that are common to all of the wonderful folkloric fools and idiots we see walking through the pages of culture.

First of all, a schlemiel is inseparable from the transition from childhood to manhood.

A schlemiel is caught up in a growth curve.

S/he is somewhere between a child and a man.  S/he is timid and humble.  S/he seems to be on the fringe of manhood.  But can’t make the step.  And when s/he tries, s/he fails miserably (not from her perspective, but from ours).  S/he is the basis for our seeing the tension between good and evil.  The schlemiel shows us the margin between man and the social.

A schlemiel is naïve, trusting, and yet, here is the rub, s/he is the butt of a sick joke.

Like the Jewish God, the schlemiel seems to be “in the world, but not of it.”  The schlemiel has a strange kind of transcendence.  Its comic existence is naïve, good, yet, a travesty.  Something is right with the Jewish fool and yet something is also profoundly wrong.  But what’s wrong may or may not have to do with the character.

This mixed reality has great resonance for me.

Here’s one example.  Sholom Aliechem’s character, Motl.   In Motl: The Cantor’s Son, Motl is a schlemiel.  And from him we can learn about what kind of blindness is befitting this character.

His novel on Motl begins with Motl playing with a cow.  He imitates the sounds of the cow.  This act is the epitome of innocence and timidity.  He mimics life, but he can’t understand pain and suffering.  He is attached, like many children, to the endless play and glimmer of things-in-flux.  He, a simpleton, learns from everything by playing with it, riffing on it, fiddling with it, imitating it.

The schlemiel’s actions bespeak infancy.  (As Augustine says, infancy is associated with a state that is prior to language.  The schlemiel’s sounding off with the Cow bespeaks its close times to infancy and the mother.  His speech is not yet logic; it is play.  As Jean-Francois Lyotard says in the Inhuman, our language and thought are “indebted” to childhood, to infancy.  Motl’s deeds bespeak our debt; but we can’t pay it off as we are torn by reality and evil.  As readers, we notice that Motl doesn’t see the evil in the world.  In fact, it is the world that doesn’t recognize this debt.  And this knowledge puts the reader in a difficult place).

Motl’s innocence appears to us through the lens of juxtaposition.    As readers, we notice that he is hit with the suffering and eventual death of his father, a Cantor (a Jewish singer).  He sees his mother crying all the time at their woes and Motl’s now being an orphan.  The problem, however, is that Motl can’t understand what is happening to him while it happens.

For us, his innocence is laughable but it is truly sad.  He can’t understand suffering; we can.  However, this is not tragic: for his optimism and hope, while “stupid,” teaches us something about goodness and its bifurcation from the good.

We look at him and we yearn for goodness.   We also understand how hard it is to understand how a child, through suffering, becomes a man.  But, in a way, we don’t want him to change.

Motl is a man-child.  He can’t change because he can’t truly understand himself and his condition.  Reflecting on this, we see a rift within ourselves, a Jewish paradigm so to speak, is dwelling within Motl’s goodness and its failure to come to terms with suffering.

So, what happened to Motl?  Did he live on?  Where?

David Grossman, in his novel See: Under Love (in the first book, Momik) suggests that Motl died in Europe during the Holocaust.  Grossman’s message: We can no longer cling to man’s innocence after the Holocaust.  The schlemiel, at least in Israel, is dead.

Can we be so sure, though?   And who are “we?”

By “we” Grossman means Israelis.  Not Jewish-Americans.

The schlemiel came to the USA before the Holocaust started and it remained and retained its innocence after the Holocaust.   But what does this mean?

To answer this question, I simply looked at myself and I looked to other schlemiel theories.  After reading Motl, I thought that I must be schlemiel.  So, I figured, if I’m a schlemiel I need to understand who or what this character is, trace it roots, see how my life contradicts or demonstrates what these schlemiel theories evince.

What did I find?

I found schlemiels differed from region to region.

In his book Jewish Self-Hatred, Sander Gilman focuses on the German variety of the schlemiel.  He defines a schlemiel in terms of the Enlightenment.  Unlike Kant’s autonomous subject who has control over himself and the world, the schlemiel is a “character who has no control over the world or himself.”   Yes, he is a man-child.  And this means that he is unable to take responsibility for himself/herself because he doesn’t think or act in the proper (Enlghtened) manner.

The schlemiel lacks freedom, reason, and autonomy and, for this reason, is an outsider.  The schlemiel is not in the world and, for Gilman, was created for the sole purpose of pointing out to German-Jews looking to fit in to the German world what NOT to be.

That didn’t jibe with me.

I didn’t look negatively at the schlemiel.  My American upbringing, I thought, may have to do with this.  I saw schlemiels all over the place in my family, my community, my Jewish world.  And, hey, they were getting away with it!

Next.

The American schlemiel, in contrast to the German one, is praised for his dreaming.  Sidrah Ezrahi calls him a “cultural icon.”  But, for her, this also has a negative valance.  Even though the American schlemiel is a cultural icon, it is ultimately a figure of forgetfulness and Diaspora.  Ezrahi argues that the American schlemiel is naïve in the sense that it is constantly surprised.  Like Motl.

But this surprise is premised on forgetfulness; namely of Jewish history and the Holocaust as the end, so to speak, of Motl and the schlemiel.

Ezrahi is an American ex-patriot, writing about the schlemiel from the land that the schlemiel of old used to dream of: Israel.

Ok, so I’m not an Israeli and I don’t seem to have this perspective on this character.

Am I an American schlemiel?  Is he my icon?  And what does this mean? Am I nourished by “constant surprise” – the bread and butter of the Diasporic?  Do I do this as a substitute for “real power” – that is, a land of my own.  Ezrahi says that the schlemiel’s power – his/her incessant use and play with language (the schlemiel as creative comic dynamo) – is a substitute for a lack of power.

Must I “realize” that, as a schlemiel, I really am powerless, and that language and humor are just covering up my “lack?”

Hey, this schlemiel stuff is no longer funny!

Ok, that’s the first taste of schlemiel theory in this blog.  But what does it all mean to ME?  (That’s for blog number two!)