{"product_id":"9780809315819","title":"The Schlemiel as Metaphor: Studies in Yiddish and American Jewish Fiction","description":"\u003cp\u003eThe certainty that deep down we are all \u003ci\u003eschlemiels \u003c\/i\u003eis perhaps what makes America love an inept ball team or a Woody Allen who unburdens his neurotic heart in public.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eIn this unique, revised history of the \u003ci\u003eschlemiel, \u003c\/i\u003eSanford Pinsker uses psychological, linguistic, and anecdotal approaches, as well as his considerable skills as a spritely storyteller, to trace the \u003ci\u003eschlemiel \u003c\/i\u003efrom 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 \u003ci\u003epunin \u003c\/i\u003e(face) seems closer, and truer, to our national experience. His urban, end-of-the-century anxieties mirror—albeit in exaggeration—our own.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eThis expanded study of the \u003ci\u003eschlemiel \u003c\/i\u003eis 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 \u003ci\u003eschlemiel, \u003c\/i\u003ePinsker proves that Jewish humor is built upon the very foundations of the Jewish experience. Pinsker shows the evolution of the \u003ci\u003eschlemiel \u003c\/i\u003efrom 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.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"Southern Illinois University Press","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":47011498262768,"sku":"9780809315819","price":34.0,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0737\/7593\/9824\/files\/9780809315819_p0.gif?v=1763739580","url":"https:\/\/shop-qa.barnesandnoble.com\/products\/9780809315819","provider":"Barnes \u0026 Noble (DEV)","version":"1.0","type":"link"}