Schlemiel & Schlimazel

Abstract

Schlemiel & Schlimazel Veronica Esposito (bio) Coming into existence sometime in the Middle Ages, as the Jewish communities throughout Europe grappled with continual dislocation and mistreatment by the dominant culture, the notion of the schlemiel was destined for a long and interesting literary life—continuing to this day. In order to offer its translation, I will need to pair it with the Yiddish word schlimazel, as these words often go together; their most succinct English translation is commonly stated as follows: a schlemiel is somebody who tends to spill his soup, and a schlimazel is the person it lands on. Both words begin with sch, which is common in Yiddish, often indicating derision; English speakers will recognize it from the from oft-used formation such as "problems schmoblems—I'll show you real problems," or the word schmuck. Schlimazel derives from the Yiddish phrase schlim mazel, which means "rotten luck" (the mazel of course coming from the celebratory Hebrew toast mazel tov). The derivation of schlemiel is less clear, although there is agreement that the word was popularized by Adelbert von Chamisso's 1813 novella Peter Schlemihls wundersame Geschichte (The Wonderful History of Peter Schlemihl), which stars one Peter Schlemihl, who makes a deal with the devil and ends up losing his shadow. Yiddish literature scholar Ruth R. Wisse locates the schlemiel, schlimazel, and associated types as emerging from the figure of the Jewish fool, which developed in the Middle Ages as a way of mediating the encounters of Jewish people with dominant European cultures. She goes on to conjecture that the figures of the schlemiel, schlimazel, and others were likely valuable to a people living a precarious existence, without a land to call home, and subject to frequent persecution. Yiddish is believed to have originated around the tenth century, as Jewish speakers of Romance languages who were conversant in Hebrew or Aramaic for religious purposes arrived in the Rhine Valley, interacting with other Jewish people who spoke German. From this mixture of languages and culture the Yiddish language was born. Utilizing Hebrew script, the first written Yiddish is typically dated to 1272, with a blessing that someone jotted in a Hebrew prayer book. Yiddish began to develop its own literary works around the fourteenth century, and by the late nineteenth century it had emerged as a major language among Jewish people in eastern Europe, seen as a force that could hold the community together, be a source of shared cultural heritage, and help resist assimilation. It was at this point that the language began to develop a collection of writers and intellectuals working in it; the language remains a relative outlier in the sense that it has developed a rich literature in spite of not being a national language. In the early twentieth century, as Yiddish peaked in cultural significance, the number of Yiddish speakers also peaked, numbering around eleven million. That number declined precipitously during the Holocaust, and Yiddish continued to decline in the [End Page 5] decades following World War II. Today the language is spoken by around half a million people, low enough to be considered a "vulnerable" language according to UNESCO's Atlas of the World's Languages in Danger. Perhaps the best-known creator of a schlemiel character in Yiddish literature is Sholem Aleichem (whose character Tevye the dairyman would later achieve grand renown as the inspiration for Fiddler on the Roof). Aleichem, who has been called the Mark Twain of Yiddish literature, embodied the schlemiel in his character Menachem Mendel, which he developed through stories written from 1892 to 1913. Aleichem's Mendel is a prototypical character of Yiddish literature: the impoverished, luckless man whose schemes for getting rich continually fail. The Yiddish Book Center describes Mendel as "always seeking a livelihood but not seeking it where a livelihood was to be found. His exasperated wife had no luck bringing him down to earth." For all the schlemiel's ineptitude, there is a strength to this character, a persistence and a belief that he will triumph, and many have noted that this is what makes Mendel significant, transforming him from a mere failure into a hero. Aleichem died in the Bronx in 1916 where...