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April 2007

Jewish Word

"Shmendrick"

A Nincompoop By Any Other Name

A classic Yiddish anecdote: A shmendrick is being knocked around by his domineering wife. In desperation he crawls under the bed.

“Come out of there!” screeches his wife.

“Not me,” the cowering shmendrick replies. “I’ll show you who wears the pants in this family!”

The shmendrick is the nincompoop of Yiddish lore, a pipsqueak. A synonym for a hopelessly neurotic bumbler, this brand of shmendrick has become an archetype of American entertainment—think Jerry Lewis in The Bellboy, or Woody Allen in… well, most anything before 1998.

But the roots of this character lie in another form of entertainment: Yiddish theater. More specifically, the word can be traced back to the work of Abraham Goldfaden, a 19th-century poet and songwriter with a preternatural talent for verse.

In the fall of 1876, Goldfaden assembled a cast of hack performers who, in a dank Romanian wine cellar performed—on a stage made out of wooden boards perched atop beer kegs—the very first Yiddish play. The show, in which most of the dialogue was improvised, was later characterized by Goldfaden as a “nonsensical hodgepodge.” The run lasted exactly two performances.

Undeterred, Goldfaden carried on. On the advice of a friend, he began toying with the idea of Judaizing Vladutzul Momei (Mama’s Boy), a farce comedy that was the rage of Bucharest that season. The story, such as it was, had been constructed around the wild gestures and crazy antics of a petulant, hapless little antihero named Shmendrick. Goldfaden’s production was an instant hit. The actors staged four performances a week to foot-stomping crowds. According to one Romanian journalist, hundreds of people were turned away from the box office every night, many not Jews.

In his memoir, A Life on the Stage, the legendary actor Jacob Adler recalled the frenzied excitement that accompanied the unrivaled success of Shmendrick:

“Contractors and middlemen from Romania came back with shmendrick on their lips. People blessed each other with shmendrick, cursed each other with shmendrick. The word could be stretched in every direction, it was so broad, so elastic. It was at once a term of affection and a term of derision. Women said to each other, ‘Have you seen my shmendrick?’ adding, ‘And where is your shmendrick?’ A sneeze was a shmendrick. A ruble was a shmendrick. One merchant said to the other, ‘Here are the goods—where are the shmendricks?’”

Shmendrick meant so many things that, in a way, it didn’t really mean anything. To this day the word maintains a certain malleability (this is particularly acute when it comes to its spelling in English: shmendrek, shmendrick, schmendrik). This protean quality is perhaps best illustrated by the apparent use of shmendrick as slang for “penis,” although the great Yiddishologist Leo Rosten cautioned that this usage is rarely employed by men, but rather by “vulgar women [who] may deploy it to deride the diminutive.”

“What the shmendrick does is he emphasizes the irrelevant,” the renowned Israeli political cartoonist Yaakov Kirschen says. “This is the key attribute of a shmendrick.” And Kirschen, the creator of the Dry Bones comic strip, should know; he is something of a shmendrick connoisseur. As part of his long-standing effort to combat anti-Semitism with humor, Kirschen founded the Shmendrick Awards, which honor “those who have most distinguished themselves by their seemingly unwitting support of anti-Semitism.”

In 1880, Goldfaden brought Shmendrick to Moscow, where it opened to exuberant reviews and houses packed with Jews and Russians. Sadly, this success coincided with a rising tide of anti-Semitism in czarist Russia. Shmendrick became an epithet that Russians hurled at Jews on the street, a development that made Goldfaden cringe.

Over the course of the past century, shmendrick has lost whatever spiteful connotations it once carried. In contemporary parlance it is most often used as a term of dismissive—though sometimes affectionate—derision. Indeed, as a pejorative it ranks quite low on the crowded hierarchy of Yiddish insults: shlemiel (a fool) and shlimazl (chronically unlucky) and shlepper (a jerk) and shmegegge (a petty person) and, perhaps most grievously and famously, shmuck. The mamaloshen’s ability to capture the nuance of human ineptitude shows no sign of disappearing from the linguistic landscape.

An old joke helps to clarify what confusion exists among these insults. In a restaurant, a waiter carrying a bowl of soup trips, and the soup splashes on a diner. The waiter who dropped the soup is a shlemiel. The diner who was sitting at his table and through no fault of his own gets the soup dumped on him is a shlimazl. And the guy at the next table who leans over and says, “Excuse me, what kind of soup is that?” is a shmendrick.
—Evan R. Goldstein