Word: schlemiels
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...rueful Jewish hero! After Elkin and Roth and Bellow and Bruce Jay Friedman and Yahweh-knows-who! Will it never end? Apparently not. And what is most trying, this latest exemplar deserves special attention. For Bernard Malamud has invented a mixed-up little anti-hero all his own: the schlemiel-saint-eyes on heaven, feet on the banana peel. He has appeared in short stories (The Magic Barrel) and novels (A New Life, The Fixer). The Malamud man wobbles between laughter and tears. One minute he can be all suffering profile, squirming against his private cross. The next minute...
...also, the stock figure of the schlemiel supplies no answer. Like all characters programmed for one response-the sobbing laugh-he provides a pattern but finally locks his author into it. Let other Jewish American novelists take warning: even with Malamud's deeper variations, the schlemiel has begun to take on the faded look of pseudo folklore...
Together, Mia and Dustin represent a coincidence of other myths: the airborne colleen and the earthbound Jew, Peter Pan and Peter Schlemiel, the miserable winner and the happy loser. Like most myths, they contain an indissoluble grain of truth. Mia Farrow has been cowering from show-business success like a cornered rabbit. Hoffman has been swimming backward in it like a lobster. To Mia, life is colored with pastels and studded with magic stones; to Hoffman, it is a black-and-white documentary. She can skip down Manhattan's Third Avenue without creating a ripple. When Hoffman is recognized...
Pantagleize is a misfit: a tender, loving man in a brutal, frenzied world. He has a heart and a mind, but nothing turns out right. He is a schlemiel, but a grand one. Ferguson, a sometimes resident of Cambridge, subtly titillates the audience every time he appears. He swaggers, he prances, he's an imbecile...
...syndicate's head hood (Robert Ryan) elects Delicatessen Delivery Boy Caesar to his board of directors because he likes the cut of his jib. Caesar, in turn, likes the cut of his job, but though he may act like a big deal, deep down he is a little schlemiel who can't even rob a grave without losing the body. Chased by cops and robbers, Caesar is saved at the final fade-out only by dumb luck and a dumber script...