New Perspectives on the Shnorrer, the Nebbish, and the Schlemiel

Session Submission Type: Panel Session

Abstract

Jewish humor is and has been an important part of Jewish life for centuries. Although a lot has been said about Jewish humor, much of this reflection is done in popular books. Academia, it seems, has fallen behind. While there has been reflection on comedy by such great scholars as Sarah Blacher Cohen, Sander Gilman, Sidrah DeKoven Ezrahi, Ruth Wisse, and even Hannah Arendt, their readings call for revision. We need to, as the word suggests, look over these theories and their object again. In our Jewish humor panel, we will look at three comedic characters in Jewish humor: the nebbish, the schlemiel, and the shnorrer. Ashley Passmore’s paper looks into the historical moment the Yiddish shnorrer enters into modern German culture by way of comparative reading of Karl Emil Franzos’ Der Pojaz: Eine Geschichte aus dem Osten (1904) and the book it draws on Sh. Y. Abramovitsh’s classic Yiddish novel Masoes Binyomin hashlishsi (1878). Passmore argues that instead of reiterating a negative view of Yiddish letters, Franzos’s rereading of the shnorrer in Abromovitsch is actually a critique of the narrowness of German letters at the time. In effect, it did something unorthodox: it called for a Yiddish model for German-Jewish letters. Jennifer Caplan’s paper looks over the treatment of the nebbish in American culture and scholarship and offers a new view of the character in terms of what has not been addressed; namely, why the nebbish has often been depicted as a male. In addition to addressing this gap, Caplan’s paper opens up the “nebbish spectrum” by providing examples of possible women nebbishes and asking whether or how they fit in to the already existing spectrum. Caplan’s challenge is to the already existing category of the nebbish and suggests that the it be reframed. Menachem Feuer’s paper addresses the claim, made by Ruth Wisse in her opus The Schlemiel as Modern Hero, that the schlemiel is “essentially…existential.” Wisse, a Yiddish folklorist scholar, doesn’t explain the meaning of this description. However, the mere suggestion that the schlemiel is an existential character presents us with an opportunity to query into how the schlemiel is “existential,” to rethink the current scholarship in the field, and how to read the schlemiel, today. Do existential characterizations of the schlemiel matter anymore? The reading of the schlemiel as an existential character also provides us with a way or re-reading Wisse and Hannah Arendt who both claim that the schlemiel, for historical reasons, has a limited life span. And, given this claim about existentiality, that would imply that Jewish existentiality also has a limited life-span. On this count they were wrong and the talk explains how and why. The main point of this panel and its new readings is to revise and introduce new, much needed readings of these characters. The more we look into these characters, the better we can understand how different forms of Jewishness were and are reflected in and through comedy.

Sub Unit

• Modern Jewish Literature and Culture

Chair

• Jonathan Freedman, University of Michigan

Individual Presentations

• The Nebbish Spectrum - Jennifer Caplan, Syracuse University

• The Artful Dodge: the Yiddish Shnorrer in German Literature - Ashley Passmore, Texas A&M

• The Essentially-Existential Schlemiel - Menachem Feuer, York University