| New in Telos Insights
by Artur Abramovych
L-R: Woody Allen from publicity still for Take the Money and Run (1969) via Wikimedia Commons; Benjamin Netanyahu photograph by the Israel Defense Forces (1967) via Wikimedia Commons
The resolute Israeli preemptive strike against the nuclear program of the Islamic Republic of Iran, symbolically named “Rising Lion” (Hebrew: Am keLavi: “A nation like a lion”), has shown to the world that the Jews are not to be trifled with and that they will take their own defense into their own hands, if necessary, even when facing enormous resistance. The “Muscle Jew” conjured up by the Zionist Max Nordau, a close advisor to Theodor Herzl, and now incarnated by the right-wing conservative Benjamin Netanyahu, seems to have completely displaced, or at least banished to the margins of insignificance, that old type of Jew so ardently yearned for by left-wingers: the spiritualized and multilingual, yet defenseless and cowering, ghetto Jew with his notorious klezmer music and his lovable neuroses, the so-called schlemiel.
This schlemiel is one of the archetypes of Eastern Jewish literature. He is the clumsy, unlucky fellow who gets into one mess after another, yet cuts an extremely comic figure in the process. Even the best scholars have failed to answer the question of the etymological origin of the name. In his late poem Jehuda ben Halevi, Heine lamented that “it has remained unknown, / Like the holy Nile’s springs, / where its origin is,” and then tells his own version: A certain Schlemiel was the one who, during the Exodus from Egypt, was mistakenly slain by an enraged bigot because he had been mistaken for an immoral fellow. Another, far more plausible etymological explanation is that in the rabbinic exegetical text Bereshit Raba, the tribe of Simon is portrayed as particularly poor, and the name of their tribal chieftain, Schlemiel, thus developed into a synonym for the poor wretch and unlucky person par excellence. In any case, the schlemiel curiously first found his way into German literature (in Adelbert von Chamisso’s Peter Schlemihl (1813), who sells his shadow to the devil), while in the Eastern Jewish sphere he was initially transmitted orally. The arguably most famous, though not the most prototypical, literary expression of this type appeared much later, in the main character of Sholem Aleichem’s Tevye the Milkman (1895–1916), the desperately poor Job from the Russian Empire, punished by life with seven daughters, but also a clever bungler who never loses his sense of humor even in the face of financial hardship and persecution (or at times, persecution mania). This schlemiel became world famous via Broadway through the musical adaptation Fiddler on the Roof (1964).
American Jewish literature would later follow in the footsteps of Yiddish literature. But completely unnoticed by researchers—with the exception of American-Jewish philologist Menachem Feuer of the University of Waterloo (Canada)—the Eastern Jewish type of schlemiel from the Tsarist Empire was by no means directly transported to the Western Hemisphere, but rather first to Central Europe, and as early as 1900: Aron Ettore Schmitz, better known by his pseudonym Italo Svevo (1861–1928), was a fully assimilated Trieste Jew who even converted to Catholicism and whose works do not explicitly feature Jewishness. Svevo researchers concluded several decades ago that the first pseudonym he used, Ettore Samigli, represents an Italianized form of schlemiel. What they missed, however, was that it was Svevo who, especially with his last novel, La coscienza di Zeno (1923), translated this Eastern Jewish type into the Western context. His narrator, the amiably awkward Zeno, from the multiethnic trading city that was still part of the Habsburg monarchy, no longer has financial difficulties; on the contrary, he is a rich stockbroker, bored by life and bourgeois conventions; sexual frustration replaces financial worries here. Incredibly funny stories happen to him, too, which he, an incorrigible neurotic, tells his psychoanalyst; the novel consists of these reports to the doctor for the insane.
Continue reading at Telos Insights. |
academiccompositionab
Empowerment Equalizer
SSaragian
Antony Sammeroff
Ann Sterzinger
Rodney
RJ
busterjames
cainusmaxus
Craig FitzGerald
David Heleniak
Caity & Dan Greene
keirmartland
Keith Preston
Bill the Butcher
ljp711
MRDA
Jack Donovan
Rachel Haywire
comrade hermit
Michael
Vince
Regan
robertstark2014
Noonan
S E Pearson
Rachel Haywire
Nexus X Humectress
