A NOTE FROM THE DIRECTOR

I was lucky, 17 years ago, to direct and choreograph Isaac Bashevis Singer’s Shlemiel the First adapted by Robert Brustein. I was amused by Chelm “fools” but intoxicated with middle-aged married Shlemiel and Tryna Ritza, fallen out of love and into habit in a mismatched alliance, but wait! Shlemiel is sent on a “foolish” journey from Chelm and “foolishly” winds up where he started out. Oh no! Oh yes! He believes he’s in another town (he’s a “shlemiel”!) like his own and here’s a house like his and two kids like his and a wife just like his, but wait! They can’t keep their hands off each other. Madly, passionately in love they do musical battle to get together and stay together with witty, beautiful lyrics by Arnold Weinstein and contagious foot-tapping Klezmer music by Hankus Netsky and Zalmen Mlotek in a tilted topsyturvy landscape by Robert Israel, but wait!Tryna needs other wives to talk to? Yes! I invent (with Mr. Brustein’s OK) Chelm wives (transformed by Cathy Zuber’s padded pinafores) in a postmodern farce with painted rocks and trees, musicians pulled on cloths and a wooden chair dance. I dedicate these performances to my friend Alice Playten.

—David Gordon

PERSPECTIVES

[The name of the chieftain] Shelumiel ben Tsurishaddai of the tribe of Shim‘on (Numbers 1:6) . . . seems to underlie the Yiddish term for a chronically hapless loser, “schlemiel.” What his parents had in mind we may venture to translate as “God is my well being” or (with New York University scholar Baruch Levine) “El is my ally.” But what their son wound up with is a name that no one would saddle a child with today. It is not only speakers of Yiddish who know the term in its mocking, pejorative sense. So do readers of 19th-century German author Adalbert von Chamisso, who gave an unlucky character the name Peter Schlemihls under the influence of the Yiddish, or of ETA Hoffmann, who employed the term in a story used by Offenbach in his opera The Tales of Hoffmann. North Americans too know the term and the comic figure it depicts so well that they became the subject of a book by literary historian Ruth Wisse, The Schlemiel as Modern Hero(University of Chicago Press, 1971). In contemporary Hebrew, to do something in Shelumielesque fashion means so inept as to be destined hopelessly to fail.

—Rabbi Peretz Rodman, The Jewish Daily Forward (2006)

Klezmer, short for “klei zemer” (musical instruments), refers to the conglomeration of Greek and Central/Eastern European music played at Jewish celebrations. A pure klezmer band has no vocalist—it just turns up the volume and swings the music faster. Unlike rock, or African-influenced music, klez is made for dancing while holding hands, or dancing with a partner. It doesn’t bounce, it flows. It swings, it cries. Traditionally, there wouldn’t even be a drummer (and, in fact, the difference between a modern “Bar Mitzvah band” and a good band of klezmorim often relies on just that distinction. Bar Mitzvah bands have drummers). Klezmorim create a motion and feel that doesn’t fit easily into 4/4, and certainly aren’t comfortable with “a one and uh two.” It’s no accident that when Jewish musicians abandoned the “old world” music and moved into the American idiom, many of them (most notably Benny Goodman) moved into jazz.

—Ari Davidow, “About the Klezmer Revival” (1986)

In this little town of fools
We don’t need to follow rules
Men are smart like mules.
We’re talking Chelm.
We’re talking Chelm where dumb is smart
Where’s stupidity’s an art.
The foolishness that we impart
Sends our IQs off the chart.
We put the horse behind the cart.
We never meet until we part.
We’re done,
It’s time to start.

—Arnold Weinstein, lyrics from Shlemiel the First

“My work should be done fast, like Shakespeare—not slow, like Chekhov.”

—Isaac Bashevis Singer, letter to Robert Brustein (1974)

In most Yiddish fiction . . . the central “character” is the collective destiny of the Jews in galut or exile; the central theme, the survival of a nation deprived of nationhood; the central ethic, the humane education of men stripped of worldly power yet sustained by the memory of chosenness and the promise of redemption. In Singer the norm of collective life is still present, but mostly in the background, as a tacit assumption; his major actions break away from the limits of the shtetl ethic, what has come to be known as Yiddishkeit, and then move either backward to the abandon of false messianism or forward to the doubt of modern sensibility.

—Irving Howe, “I.B. Singer” (1966)

Yes, I [believe in God]. I’m not, however, an observant Jew. I believe in God but not in man insofar as he claims God has revealed himself to him. If a man came to me and tells me he has been to the planet Mars, I would call him a liar, but I would not stop believing in the existence of the planet. I believe that the Higher Powers do not reveal themselves so easily; you have to search for them. Consequently, I have no faith in dogmas of any kind; they are only the work of men.

—Isaac Bashevis Singer (1963)