Books: Not-so-wise men

An exploration of the tradition and whimsy behind the classic tales from Chelm.

By GLENN C. ALTSCHULER
The town of of Chelm (photo credit: Wikimedia Commons)
The town of of Chelm
(photo credit: Wikimedia Commons)
In “A Shameless Fish,” Isaac Bashevis Singer tells the story of a rabbi in Chelm, Poland, who has been given a fine carp by Mendel the fisherman as a token of gratitude for lifting a curse from him. When the rabbi bends down to inspect the gift, the carp slaps him in the face.
Although the rabbi is unperturbed, Groynem Oks, the lay leader of the Jewish community, insists that the impertinent fish be tried, convicted and punished. After seven days and nights of deliberation, the wise men of Chelm hand down a sentence of death by drowning. When the fish swims away, apparently unscathed, Oks proclaims that justice – a ban of excommunication – has been done: Why else would the fish flee to other waters? Singer adapted his story from a repertoire of well-known and beloved folk tales set in a shtetl of fools.
In How the Wise Men Got to Chelm: The Life and Times of a Yiddish Folk Tradition, Ruth von Bernuth, a professor of Germanic and Slavic languages and literatures and the director of the Center for Jewish Studies at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, explains why Chelm (which had a population of 3,637, 71% of them Jews, in 1860), has occupied a dual role for Jews as a real and imagined place since the end of the 19th century. Along the way, she provides a comprehensive (and occasionally pedantic) survey of all the collections of Chelm stories and their predecessors published since 1700, shows how the tales explored Jewish identity, community and history, and delivers a few punch lines.
Von Bernuth indicates that Chelm stories borrowed themes and details from “fool stories” in German culture, many of them set in Schildburg (a “Utopia” somewhere beyond Misnopotamia) and in Abdera in Thrace, that were designed to let readers see themselves as they are, as the first step to wisdom. To that end, they featured carnivalesque symbols (fools’ caps, bells and hobbyhorses), processions and stock characters.
And they mocked the ignorance and smugness of the inhabitants of small towns.
The Jewish tales, she suggests, originated in an Enlightenment-inspired desire to lampoon irrational beliefs and behavior that often targeted “unworldly” hassidic rebbes and their followers.
Born in Vilna, Ayzik Meyer Dik, a committed maskil who loathed hassidim, was the first author to write about fools in Chelm. Dik’s satirical stories took aim at the “logic” of Jewish life, religious practices and Talmudic reasoning.
In one of the stories, to be eligible to remarry, a rabbi’s wife must identify a headless corpse as her husband, but neither she, the synagogue’s Talmud scholars, nor the shammes can be sure, because he never removed his prayer shawl from his head. The attendant at the bathhouse is no help, because the cloud of steam obscured his view. After a careful review of the deceased man’s writings, however, the rabbinical court decrees that he never did have a head.
Between the start of the 20th century and the Russian Revolution, von Bernuth writes, “the Chelm story concept went, as it were, viral in the Jewish oral culture of Poland and the Pale”; stories appeared routinely in Yiddish; and began to be serialized in newspapers and magazines in the United States, including Forverts.
In the 1920s, singer, musicologist, folklorist and journalist Menahem Kipnis began to publish Chelm stories in Haynt, a Yiddish daily in Poland, in what proved to be a turning point in their emergence as “a full-fledged popular phenomenon.”
And after World War II, more and more Chelm books were written in English (for children and adults), prompting a critic in Commentary to praise them “as a parable of all Jews living in a world that is stupid and powerful. Their intelligence is materially fruitless, and their ingenuity brings no herring for their potatoes.”
For 150 years, von Bernuth reminds us, writers have been telling and retelling Chelm stories. And von Bernuth may well be right that as long as Chelm stories “serve both as a meaningful model for some aspect of the evolving world and a cause for laughter,” there is “little reason to doubt” that they will continue to attract their fair share of adherents.
That said, perceptions about Jews – and the collective self of Jews – have changed substantially in a century and a half. Chelm may no longer be a setting with which 21st-century Jews can readily connect. And, alas, the number of us willing to work hard – or at all – to attain self-knowledge, insight and wisdom appears to be dwindling.
Glenn C. Altschuler is the Thomas and Dorothy Litwin professor of American studies at Cornell University.