How the Wise Men Got to Chelm

The Life and Times of a Yiddish Folk Tradition

Ruth von Bernuth

• Publisher: NYU Press
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781479886654
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Jewish Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

How the Wise Men Got to Chelmis the first in-depth study of Chelm literature and its relationship to its literary precursors. When God created the world, so it is said, he sent out an angel with a bag of foolish souls with instructions to distribute them equally all over the world—one fool per town. But the angel’s bag broke and all the souls spilled out onto the same spot. They built a settlement where they landed: the town is known as Chelm.
The collected tales of these fools, or “wise men,” of Chelm constitute the best-known folktale tradition of the Jews of eastern Europe. This tradition includes a sprawling repertoire of stories about the alleged intellectual limitations of the members of this old and important Jewish community. Chelm did not make its debut in the role of the foolish shtetl par excellence until late in the nineteenth century. Since then, however, the town has led a double life—as a real city in eastern Poland and as an imaginary place onto which questions of Jewish identity, community, and history have been projected. By placing literary Chelm and its “foolish” antecedents in a broader historical context, it shows how they have functioned for over three hundred years as models of society, somewhere between utopia and dystopia. These imaginary foolish towns have enabled writers both to entertain and highlight a variety of societal problems, a function that literary Chelm continues to fulfill in Jewish literature to this day.

1

How the Wise Men Got to Gotham

The Fools of Chelm Take Manhattan

“A man journeyed to Chelm,” Woody Allen says in the opening words of his “Hassidic Tales, with a Guide to Their Interpretation by the Noted Scholar,” published in the New Yorker in June 1970, “in order to seek the advice of Rabbi Ben Kaddish, the holiest of all ninth-century rabbis and perhaps the greatest noodge of the medieval era.”1 How much Jewish cultural literacy does the author of this sentence implicitly expect of the New Yorker’s readership? Clearly, readers should be acquainted with a large enough set of American English Yiddishisms to know that the Slavic-derived word noodge means “a bore.”2 But, equally clearly, it is presumed that such a reader, circa 1970, could be expected to understand that a journey to Chelm would result in an encounter with folly.

Sure enough, craziness ensues. The traveler’s purpose is to ask the rabbi of Chelm where he can find peace. In response, the rabbi asks the man to turn around and proceeds to “smash him in the back of the head with a candlestick,” then chuckles while “adjusting his yarmulke.”3 Then comes the “interpretation of the noted scholar,” which explains nothing at all. It only baffles the reader further by explaining that the rabbi was preoccupied with, among other things, a paternity case. In any event, according to the commentator, the man’s question is “meaningless,” and “so is the man who journeys to Chelm to ask it. Not that he was so far away from Chelm to begin with, but why shouldn’t he stay where he is?”4

Allen’s premise is that his audience will grasp that to be “not far from Chelm” is to be mentally not far removed from the fictitious wise men of the imaginary place in which all (Jewish) fools live. In this piece, written in part as a parody of Martin Buber’s Tales of the Hasidim, Allen uses the fictitious foolish town of Chelm to set the frame for his tales illustrating the silliness of the mystical mind-set.5

A generation later, Chelm was invoked again in Nathan Englander’s story “The Tumblers” (1999). Attributes of literary Chelm are also silently transferred to Trachimbrod (Ukrainian: Trokhymbrid, about one hundred miles east of Chelm), another real place made, Chelm-like, to double as an imaginary one in Jonathan Safran Foer’s Everything Is Illuminated (2002). Numerous other American Jewish writers of recent decades have produced imaginative work wholly or partly inspired by the Chelm theme, but these have often been aimed at more limited audiences.6 Notable among these works are Jenny Tango’s 1991 feminist graphic novel Women of Chelm; Judith Katz’s lesbian novel Running Fiercely toward a High Thin Sound (1992), set in New Chelm; and Keynemsdorf (2010), a literary novel in Yiddish by the Russian American Boris Sandler.7

Sandler’s novel returns us to the linguistic medium in which Chelm became big in America and in which New York became the source of most new Chelm literature. As early as the 1920s, while Chelm was still a favorite topic for Yiddish authors in Europe, a parallel body of work from writers newly arrived from Russian Poland and Galicia started to form a corpus that expanded greatly after the Holocaust, while at the same time European production came to a halt.

Among the major contributors to Chelm literature in America were three writers who were close friends: Aaron Zeitlin (Arn Tseytlin, 1898–1973), Yekhiel Yeshaye Trunk (1887–1961), and Isaac Bashevis Singer (Yitskhok Bashevis, 1902–1991).8 The three met in the famous Fareyn fun yidishe literatn un zhurnalistn in Varshe (Association of Jewish Writers and Journalists in Warsaw) at 13 Tłomackie Street, during the period when Menakhem Kipnis (1878–1942) was “the person in charge” of the club, as Trunk remarked in his condescending description of him.9

It was Kipnis, more than anyone else, who had popularized Chelm tales, publishing a long series of them in the Warsaw Yiddish newspaper Haynt in 1922 and 1923. Zeitlin and Singer published in Haynt as well; Trunk’s books were reviewed there; and the three of them must have come across many Chelm stories in written and oral form while in Warsaw during the very years these tales were at the height of their fame.10 All three writers came to New York in the late 1930s or early 1940s, but each contributed to the body of Chelm literature with a different agenda, at a different time, and in a different genre.

Zeitlin’s play Khelemer khakhomim (The wise men of Chelm) was performed in 1933, six years before he arrived in the city. Trunk wrote his novel of Chelm, published in 1951, while the impact of the Holocaust was still sinking in. And Singer’s first Chelm story, printed in Forverts in 1965, at the height of the Cold War, led to a series of political satires in Yiddish that he published in that newspaper, pieces that later, depoliticized, served as the basis for his children’s literature.

These three writers exemplify the ways in which Chelm has been treated in an American climate: as a device enabling writers to explore religious questions, examine Jewish history, and discuss American and world politics. This continuing Chelm tradition also illustrates how multilingualism helped shape American culture over an extended period of time.

Teacher on the Roof: Chelm on the Stage

When Maurice Schwartz (1889–1960), founder-actor-manager of New York’s Yiddish Art Theater, asked Aaron Zeitlin to come from Warsaw to collaborate on a production of his play Esterke un Kazimir der groyse (Esterke and Casimir the Great) in 1939, neither man knew that this invitation would save the life of the playwright, who arrived in the U.S. just before Germany invaded Poland. The Yiddish Art Theater, which opened its doors in 1918, was the most prominent of the companies performing in Yiddish in New York after World War One.11 Despite constant financial struggles, it maintained its commitment to the agenda of Yiddish “art theater” as articulated in Schwartz’s high-minded manifesto, which appeared in Forverts in 1918 and insisted that the theater “must always be sort of a holy place, where a festive and artistic atmosphere should reign.”12

In addition, this manifesto insisted that “the author should also have something to say about the play,” so it is not surprising that Zeitlin had been invited to visit.13 Nor was he unknown to the patrons and devotees of the Yiddish Art Theater on Second Avenue. His piece Khelemer khakhomim, which was based on a more sophisticated earlier version, Di Khelemer komediye (The Chelm comedy), had been given its premiere there on October 16, 1933.14

At that time, Zeitlin was still living in Warsaw. Part of a family of writers and thinkers (his father was the Hebrew and Yiddish author Hillel Zeitlin), Aaron Zeitlin wrote poetry and prose in both Yiddish and Hebrew and was the founder and chair of the Warsaw Yiddish PEN club.15 In 1932, he launched Globus, a journal that during its two years of life aspired to publish the most ambitious Yiddish literary writing worldwide. A fellow participant in the enterprise was Isaac Bashevis Singer, who, while serving as secretary of the editorial board, became a close friend of Zeitlin.

When Zeitlin’s Wise Men of Chelm opened in New York, the play was warmly received by the Yiddish and English press alike. The New York Times admired its “genial lunacy,” which, it suggested, “should shrink the distance between Broadway and Second Avenue.”16 The Times was seconded by Edith J. R. Isaacs from Theatre Arts Monthly, who included it in her Broadway review, stating that the play was “worth the world’s attention” with “an Oriental folk quality that is amazing.”17 The Forverts published a detailed synopsis in Yiddish, along with a review by the paper’s legendary editor, Abraham Cahan, expressing his admiration for both the play and the production.18 The Wise Men of Chelm was nevertheless yet another financial flop for the Yiddish Art Theater, which had to shorten its 1933–1934 New York season and start touring the provinces a few weeks earlier than planned, but Zeitlin’s “charming fable” was remembered as the “one artistic success” of the year.19

In the first act of the play, the Angel of Death becomes fed up with his uniquely depressing job. In the next act, he has nevertheless just carried off ten “Broder singers”—eastern European Jewish itinerant entertainers who performed in taverns and public spaces—and brought them back to the heavenly court. At his request, the group’s violinist, Getzele from Chelm, performs a tune, one that he used to play for his fiancée, Temerel, while he was still alive.

Charmed, the angel decides to go down to earth, marry Temerel, and make humankind immortal by discontinuing his work. The angel heads for Chelm disguised as a certain Azriel Deutsch, ostensibly a rich merchant from German-speaking Danzig. The name Deutsch connotes daytsh, the Yiddish equivalent—literally “a German” but used also to mean a modern Jew, one who dressed in German, that is, western European, style.20

Before Azriel arrives on the scene, the audience is treated to dramatizations of a few famous Chelm stories, including the episode of the wagoner with the extralong log, which, lying sideways across his wagon, prevents him from passing down a narrow street. The rabbi of Chelm, Yoysef Loksh (Yosef Noodle), played by Maurice Schwartz himself, comes up with the obvious solution and orders that the houses be torn down—on both sides of the street.

When the outsider Azriel Deutsch arrives with the news that there will be no more death, the announcement is welcomed with joy by the Chelmites but not by the hobgoblin Yekum Purkan, who has been sent down from heaven to get the Angel of Death back to work. Yekum Purkan takes on the form of a yokel and tries to put forward counterarguments but with no success, his appearance making less of an impression than that of the affluent German Jew. Thus, Azriel marries Temerel in the presence of the whole town.

Right after the wedding, the assembled crowd wants to sanctify the new moon, an occasion for a reworking of one of the oldest and best known of Chelm tales. When, in this version, the Chelmites discover that the moon, the reflection of which they had captured in a barrel of wine, has “escaped,” Yekum Purkan, with his otherworldly powers, produces another moon for the rabbi to hold up during the desired blessing. The rabbi lets go of it, however, and off it flies.

Nevertheless, Yekum Purkan is appointed superintendent of the ritual bath. The newlyweds Azriel Deutsch and Temerel move into a new home, but they can find no peace. Every night, hobgoblins and imps, roused by Yekum Purkan, Azriel’s adversary, make a tremendous racket outside the couple’s home—and not only hobgoblins and imps but also desperate beggars no longer receiving from mourners the alms on which they have always depended, since nobody dies and there are no mourners. Women, too, come to demonstrate, incited by Yekum Purkan to feel unfulfilled now that nobody dies and the male impulse to procreate has correspondingly vanished.

Finally, everyone is persuaded to demand that immortality should be abolished. The Angel of Death, saddened by what he recognizes as “the incorrigible folly of mankind,” regretfully agrees to resume his duties.21 He returns to heaven, taking Temerel with him. Tried for desertion, he is acquitted through an oversight, but Temerel is sent back to Chelm to be united with Getzele’s brother, Yossele, her rightful partner according to the biblical law of levirate marriage, according to which the brother of a deceased married but childless man is obliged to marry his widow.

Zeitlin’s play is unique in the Chelm literature, which was and remains generally devoid both of love stories and of heavenly interventions, let alone stories of a populous spirit world, aside from the angel with the bag of foolish souls in the mythical account of Chelm’s foundation. In contrast, the cosmos that Zeitlin creates around Chelm is filled with angels and fairies. Interviewed by the Literarishe bleter in 1933, he described his play as an encounter of a worldly Chelmishness with the supernatural world—“folksy-fantastic, playful-grotesque, with transitions from the comical to the uncanny and vice versa.”22 It matches the mood of a letter he wrote to the Yiddishist literary critic Shmuel Niger (1883–1955) in 1934, stating that the “heavenly world” was “the only reality” and was “found not only in heaven but also in the mundane world.”23

There is clearly a point of contact here with the neo-Hasidism to which the playwright’s illustrious father, Hillel Zeitlin,...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Note on Orthography and Transliteration
• Introduction
• 1. How the Wise Men Got to Gotham: The Fools of Chelm Take Manhattan
• 2. How Foolish Is Jewish Culture? Fools, Jews, and the Carnivalesque Culture of Early Modernity
• 3. Through the Land of Foolish Culture: From Laleburg to Schildburg
• 4. Gentile Fools Speaking Yiddish: The Schildbürgerbuch for Jewish Readers
• 5. The Enlightenment Goes East: How Democritus of Abdera Got to Galicia
• 6. The Geography of Folly: The Folklorists and the Invention of Chelm
• 7. Chelm Tales after World War One in German and Yiddish: “Our Schilda” and “Our Chelm Correspondent”
• Epilogue: The Once and Future Chelm
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index
• About the Author