The Schlemiel as Metaphor: Studies in the Yiddish and American Jewish Novel (Crosscurrents/Modern critiques) - Hardcover
The certainty that deep down we are all schlemiels is 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 the schlemiel, Sanford Pinsker uses psychological, linguistic, and anecdotal approaches, as well as his considerable skills as a spritely storyteller, to trace the schlemiel from 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, bespectacled punin (face) seems closer, and truer, to our national experience. His urban, end-of-the-century anxieties mirror albeit in exaggeration our own.
This expanded study of the schlemiel is 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 the schlemiel, Pinsker proves that Jewish humor is built upon the very foundations of the Jewish experience. Pinsker shows the evolution of the schlemiel from 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.
"synopsis" may belong to another edition of this title.
About the Author:
Sanford Pinsker is Shadek Professor of Humanities at Franklin and Marshall College. Included among his critical works are studies of Philip Roth, Joseph Heller, and Irving Howe.
"About this title" may belong to another edition of this title.
- PublisherSouthern Illinois University Press
- Publication date1971
- ISBN 10 0809304805
- ISBN 13 9780809304806
- BindingHardcover
- Edition number1
- Number of pages192
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The Schlemiel As Metaphor : Studies in the Yiddish and American Jewish Novel
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(1971)
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ISBN 13: 9780809304806
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The Schlemiel As Metaphor : Studies in the Yiddish and American Jewish Novel
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ISBN 13: 9780809304806
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The Schlemiel as Metaphor: Studies in the Yiddish and American Jewish Novel
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The Schlemiel as Metaphor: Studies in the Yiddish and American Jewish Novel
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The Schlemiel as Metaphor: Studies in the Yiddish and American Jewish Novel (Crosscurrents/Modern critiques)
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ISBN 13: 9780809304806
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The Schlemiel As Metaphor: Studies In The Yiddish and American Jewish Novel (Crosscurrents-Modern Critiques Ser.)
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(1971)
ISBN 10: 0809304805
ISBN 13: 9780809304806
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