Schlemiel As Metaphor Studies in Yiddish and American Jewish Fiction

The certainty that deep down we are allschlemielsis perhaps what makes America love an inept ball team or a Woody Allen who unburdens his neurotic heart in public. In this unique, revised history of theschlemiel,Sanford Pinsker uses psychological, linguistic, and anecdotal approaches, as well as his considerable skills as a spritely storyteller, to trace theschlemielfrom his beginnings in the Old Testament through his appearance in the nineteenth-century literature of Mendele Mocher Seforim and Sholom Aleichem to his final development as the beautiful loser in the works of Isaac Bashevis Singer, Bernard Malamud, Saul Bellow, Philip Roth, and Woody Allen. Horatio Alger might have once been a good emblem of the American sensibility, but today Woody Allen's anxious, bespectacledpunin(face) seems closer, and truer, to our national experience. His urban, end-of-the-century anxieties mirroralbeit in exaggerationour own. This expanded study of theschlemielis especially relevant now, when scholarship of Yiddish and American Jewish literature is on the increase. By sketching the family tree of that durable anti-hero theschlemiel,Pinsker proves that Jewish humor is built upon the very foundations of the Jewish experience. Pinsker shows the evolution of theschlemielfrom the comic butt of Yiddish jokes to a literary figure that speaks to the heart of our modern problems, and he demonstrates the way that Yiddish humor provides a sorely needed correction, a way of pulling down the vanities we all live by.Pinsker, Sanford is the author of 'Schlemiel As Metaphor Studies in Yiddish and American Jewish Fiction' with ISBN 9780809315819 and ISBN 0809315815.