Awaiting the Last Laugh

...Other European cultures may have had far more colorful victim-heroes??but always with a single crucial difference Till Eulenspiegel was surely a moir?¦ accomplished trickster, Don Quixote more one-track minded in pursuit of his fevered dream, Shakespeare's clowns more cunning, cowardly, parasitical and earthy, Baron Munchhausen able to spin taller tales, Punch or Pulcinello more emblematic of the foul-mouthed, wife beating common man, and Sheik??s dummschlau simplicity more adept at showing the loser to have come out on top Yet their tricks and misadventures were still those of the downtrodden insider, the member, perhaps even the spokesman, of the majority culture The Jewish schlemiel could count on sympathy and understanding only from God??and considering how little visible comfort he received from that inscrutable source, this did not make him a religious figure so much as a crushingly lonely one...

...The traditional Western protagonist is heroic insofar as he attempts to change reality," writes Dr Wise The schlemiel becomes a hero when real action is impossible Once the environment is seen as unalterable??and evil??his stance must be accepted as a stand or the possibilities of heroism' are lost to him altogether ". The prototypical schlemiel was of course never a fully rounded person, he was a stereotype composed of two or three salient qualities who seemed to us wholly alive only because his numerous counterparts in real life were themselves almost as two-dimensional As such a figure, he could function in anecdotes, parables, even short stones, but rarely m a novel, where characters must either grow or at least be more deeply revealed...

...Dr Wise may be on shakier ground when she suggests that the emergence of the schlemiel into the front ranks of the mainstream American novel, including occasional best-saleroom, may be related to the fact that most literate Americans today are themselves Luftmenschen, paper-shufflers, products of a rich and complicated society in which the man who actually makes things, the man with both feet on the ground, is largely invisible For one thing, our definition of schlemiel has become broad enough to include every man of whatever culture who somehow fails to get, hold on to, 01 protect his woman, who is vulnerable at his place of work, or who does not live up to the code of his peers Jewish writers, I think, just happened to be best at portal airing him because they were already working with an existing tradition, and sometimes could look toward a father (or a mirror) as a having, suffering model Among the better-known schlemiels m the modem American novel are most of Malamud's protagonists, Mailer's wretched Goldstein and Roth, whom he tried so hard to exorcise in his own lifestyle, Bruce Jay Friedman's Stern, who is a pure and almost passive victim, Daniel Fuchs' Max Balkan (in Homage to Blend-holt), who has the lovely, harmless, mad ambitions of a contemporary Don Quixote, Hemingway's Robert Cohn, a cold-eyed portrayal of the schlemiel-Jew as a failure to live up to the (ultimately suicidal) Hemingway ethic, Roth's Porto, who has turned his shortcomings as a man into an often brilliant comedy routine, Bellow's Herzog (I almost wrote Herzog's Bellow), a character of infinite intelligence and capacity to suffer who heroically refuses to reshuffle the rules and turn defeat into verbal or philosophic victory, and Joyce's Leopold Bloom, perhaps the most enduring of them all...

...Dr Wise is too good a scholar to take for granted that she has made a prima facie case for the schlemiel's direct ancestry of the victimized Jewish protagonist in a score of contemporary novels Specifically, it seems to me that the reason the arch-schlemiel undergoes so violent a sea-change when asked to serve as the storm center of an American novel is that American fiction??not excepting the Jewish-American variety??is grounded on the premise of man as captain of his fate, even when this fate is failure, impotence, humiliation The classic schlemiel, on the other hand, lives in a world where nothing he does or fails to do will have the slightest effect on where the lightning is going to strike, hence the possibility of failure is as irrelevant as that of success...

...Nowhere does Dr Wise sentimentalize her winsome protagonist She understands that the schlemiel syndrome was one of the techniques the power less Jew used to digest his rage and frustration and thus survive though nearly two milliamp of unrelenting hostility Unable to hold his own by the barbarous rules of society in which he lived as a permanent exile, he simply changed the rules substituting raw common sense, or even willful stupidity, for the trappings of power that kept him in his grudged place Yet she also sees that the pain threshold of East European Jews was "exceedingly high, perhaps even excessively high if pain is to serve as a warning of mortal danger " That is why Shalom Aleichem's more earnest critics "understood that humor, unlike satire, is an enemy of progress' because it purges through laughter rather than inciting to change " At the same time, this study demonstrates the real-life moral superiority of Shalom Aleichem's heroes to those no less impotent ones of Kafka "Kafka's heroes are themselves a part of the universal horror confronting them Shalom Aleichem's heroes are confronted by horror, but with a universe of meaning ". Today we can look back indulgently upon the alleged Arcadian simplicities of steal life and the equally alleged faintness of the schlemiel, blithely dedicated "to living as if good will triumph over evil and right over wrong " But at the turn of the century the Austro-Hun-gamin and Russian empires wee ripe for revolution, and young secular Zionist or Socialist Jews regarded the acceptance of the schlemiel stereotype with the same anger a militant black today feels toward Uncle Tom and his shuffling de-pendants, although it is arguable that both stereotypes nourished at a time when their pliant qualities were the only possible technique for survival (Harvey Modes observes m Laughter and Liberation that "every downtrodden group in the world uses wit as a weapon to strike back at its oppressors in creating a fantasy wherein the victors become the victims, we provide ourselves a moment to respite from our subordinated condition...

...Folklore very properly gives pride of place to the figure of the archetypical fool, jester, trickster, zany, rogue, or ne'er-do-well, the powerless man who, by cleverness or holy simplicity, registers his moral victories against a stacked deck Notable among this Mie-up of classic antiheroes, if only for the inadvertent imprint he has left on the modern American novel, is the schlemiel, that amiable distillation of largely deplorable qualities which arose from the Jews' unsettled and vulnerable existence over some 1900 years, "between engagements," as it were...

...Awaiting the Last Laugh The Schlemiel as Modern Hero By Ruth Rockies Wise Chicago 134 pp $5 45 Reviewed by Shimon Wince berg Playwright, fiction writer, decently completed 'The Samurai of Vishogrod and the Very Small Pogrom (The Notebooks of Jacob Marrakech...

...While Perutz' Boatshed Shoeing and Shalom Aleichem's Meacham Mendel were surely the finest literary expressions of the European schlemiel mentality, probably its most ambitious treatment occurred m Mendel Moocher Son??s unfinished novel, The Travels of Benjamin the Third, which relates the somewhat tedious adventures of a would-be Jewish Don Quixote ("the parody of a parody ') whose "masculinity, like that of all literary schlemiels, is undermined by his wife at home and by the aggression of the environment " Mendel (writing m Warsaw in 1913) described his piotago-nist's credo as "live on faith, go with eyes shut wherever the wad may carry you, ask no questions, harbor no complaints, and live' There is no more miserable creature on earth than a Jew who begins to think ". In her chapter, ' Holocaust Survivor," the author discusses I B Singer's Gimped the Fool, a character who may be choosing to play the fool in Older to reteam his moral sanity m the face of universal cynicism " The schlemiel's triumph, his one consolation, she indicates, is his absolute conviction that he is living in the False World (for how, otherwise, could a just and all-powerful Creator have permitted the righteous to suffer and the wicked to live at ease7), and that only m the True World, after death, will the schlemiel have the last laugh on those who thought they had crushed him underfoot...

...The name, first found in the Book of Numbers as Schlemiel been Tsur-ishaddai, probably acquired its folk-long connotations simply because, to the European Jewish ear, it sounded funny In the early 19th century it was popularized by the German writer Delbert von Chemise in his novel Pete Schlemiel Although not overtly about a Jew, this book dealt with a man who had forfeited his shadow, and with it his place in normal society, just as the Jew had no right to the very ground under his feet, having long lost the only land on which his shadow could fall by right...

...Like a parody of Job, he accepted his afflictions as having been chosen for him by the Almighty himself Thus he felt merely scorn and pity for his actual tormentors, regarding them as hardly more than faceless middlemen m a generation-old dialogue between him and his stern but probably justified Creator "Yiddish writers," as Ruth Rockies Wise points out in her slim but endlessly stimulating book, The Schlemiel as Modern Hero, "recognized the foolishness, if they did not admit the absurdity, of such faith when every circumstance of daily life provided evidence against it" "The schlemiel," she says elsewhere, "is not a hero manqu?¦, but a challenge to the whole accepted notion of heroism " That is, incidentally, why he bears no relation at all to the literary "antihero" of our Vietnam-poisoned society Both types clearly express the author's view that the protagonist, in his eccentricity or ineffectuality, is more sane than the powers oppressing or frustrating him But while we are invited to identify with the antihero, and be indulgent of his amorality or hedonism, the author of the schlep-mile story remains ambivalent, encouraging us to laugh with his strictly moral and keenly suffering hero, yet at the same time deploring him and the forces that made him what he is...

...Dr Wise concludes by interpreting the declining fortunes of the schlemiel m American literature "to mean that faith in the ability to lm-prove our world is now strong enough to vanquish skepticism" This strikes me as being almost as wrongheaded as her "on the other hand" prediction that "the natural buoyancy of the schlemiel certainly encourages our beef m his long-range survival " For better or worse, the world of the Jewish Luftmensch is dead Some of his second- and third-generation American descendants, with their driving mothers and driven fathers, their emblematic PhDs, their sexual humiliations and their lusting after Anglo-Saxon style and coolness, are of course one of the minor success stones of our time...