Word: schlemiels
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...Benny Profane, a schlemiel (the Yiddish word for chronic bumbler), is the novel's antihero. Shouts of triumph or yelps of protest are not for schlemiels; Benny's conversation is limited to "What?" and "Wha." The alligators come into it when he arrives in New York after a Navy hitch-the liberty scenes in Norfolk are done with loving verity-and needs a job. So he gets one shooting alligators for the city. This keeps him in beer, and more he does not need. He sleeps in the bathtub of a West Side apartment belonging to the Whole...
Stern is about being Jewish in a lawn-proud suburb of midcentury, middle-class America. But Stern is no sociological novel. Blurring fact and fantasy, it is funny and sad at the same time in the tradition of the Jewish schlemiel story and the Charlie Chaplin movie...
...entries. Gone are the gazetteer, the biographical dictionary, and 100,000 obsolete or nonlexical terms, such as the names of characters in Dickens. In are 100,000 brand-new terms, from astronaut, beatnik, boo-boo, countdown, den mother and drip-dry, to footsie, hard sell, mccarthyism, no-show, schlemiel, sit-in, wage dividend...
Perhaps the most obvious of Chukhrai's talents is his surefire sense of comedy. The poor hilarious schlemiel of a train guard, for example, might have shuffled right off one of Gogol's funniest pages. But certainly the deepest of his gifts is his vital, life-accepting sense of humor. In the film's strongest scene, a rabble of Russian soldiers, ragged and cold and hungry, roll through the night behind the battle lines like cattle stacked in a boxcar and heading for the knacker. They look at each other, they look at what life has done...
...Stormy Life of Lasik Roitschwantz, by Ilya Ehrenburg. A previously untranslated 1927 satire of revolutionary Russia by the man who is now Communism's No. 1 journalistic Pooh-Bah. This kosher Candide reincarnates the nonhero of Jewish folklore: Peter Schlemiel, the enemy of commissar...