Crasses et Voluptés

In my family, the schlemiel, or Jewish fool, was the one who unfailingly toppled the bowl of soup, the schlimazel the one into whose lap the soup landed; the schlemiel disseminated bad luck, the schlimazel received it, passively. But in Jewish literature, the schlemiel embodies both of these positions at once: originally an ordinary prankster, the character evolved into a paradoxical archetype who possesses agency and is also a dupe. Typically male, he symbolizes both genuine ambivalence and unrelenting endurance. He is berated for weakness and clumsiness yet exalted for inner strength. The schlemiel harbors a philosophy of life that claims self-ridicule – shame – to be a prerequisite for overcoming one’s shortcomings. Only through humility (as a kind of recuperated shame) coupled with a rare sort of guileless courage will transformation occur. Filth is turned into aspiration, misfortune into critique, failure into ingenuity.

Yiddish folk humor features these schlemiels as the fictional fools of Chelm: time and again, their solutions to problems are theoretically possible but practically absurd. In spite of recurrent failures, they live as if good will triumph over evil. Author Sholem Aleichem’s character Menachem-Mendl (living in a town quite like Chelm) is a hopeless optimist who repeatedly assumes professions for which he has no skills (speculator, author, agent, matchmaker). Through imagination and reckless enthusiasm, he wrests victory from defeat, dignity from shame. In the end, defects of all kinds – for Mendl, the Chelmites, and schlemiels in general – are alchemically transmuted into wisdom. It is a wisdom that ridicules the sterility of thought dissociated from the trials and tribulations of lived experience.

At the heart of this fool’s wisdom is also an awareness that the Jewish identity being mocked is a mere surrogate for reality itself. According to scholars Menachem Feuer and Andrew Schmitz (2008), “The schlemiel puts reality, and not his own actions, into question”. Eventually, the schlemiel became a symbol of an entire group of people in its encounter with oppressive cultures. Self-mockery was actually a condemnation of the oppressors – a secret code enveloped in irony, humor, and deflection for the sake of survival. As in the visual maneuver of a Möbius strip, inside and outside become inextricably linked; as if living on the continuous, one-sided curve of the strip, the schlemiel pointing in is pointing out.