How to Be a Mentsh (and Not a Shmuck)

by Wex, Michael

  The prototype, the classic example, is found in a Yiddish short story written in 1894 by Y. L. Peretz, one of the central figures in the creation of modern Yiddish literature. Bontshe Shvayg—Silent Bontshe—the character for whom the story is named, lives a life more humble than anything that Uriah Heep (not to mention Mott the Hoople) would ever have pretended to. A porter by profession, he was mistreated as a child, abused as an adult: cheated, robbed, cuckolded, and mocked, yet Bontshe, alone of all his tribe, never once complained, never once cried out, not even, the story tells us, when the knife slipped at his circumcision.

  After his death, the heavenly powers decide to reward him for his years of patient suffering. He’s admitted straightaway into Paradise and told that he can have whatever he wants, anything at all; if he really wants, he can have everything. It’s the least they can give him for a lifetime of nothing.

  Bontshe can hardly believe his good luck. Although Peretz never describes what goes on in his head, readers for over a century have been seduced by their own visions of gold, silver, dancing girls, and tables laden with the most exquisite food and the rarest of wines. It’s unlikely that Bontshe shares their vision; he thinks for a minute, then turns to the judge of the heavenly court and confidently reels off the whole of his wish list: a hot roll with butter for breakfast every morning.

  Peretz’s story was hugely controversial in its day, primarily because Bontshe was seen as a symbol of the Jewish people and Bontshe, it should be clear, is a shmuck. Suffering has made him stupid; he has internalized his tormentors’ image of him so completely that he is literally incapable of imagining any other kind of life (or afterlife) for himself. Henoch of Alexander, a mid-nineteenth-century Polish Hasidic leader, once said, “The real exile of Israel in Egypt was that they had learned to endure it,” that is, they started to think like slaves, to look at themselves in the same way as their Egyptian owners did; they lost sight of what they could be and were happy to struggle to remain the slaves that they already were.

  Henoch’s teacher, Menachem Mendel of Kotzk, the last and most imposing of the classical Hasidic leaders, illustrated this kind of shmuckery in a parable:

  There was once a prince who behaved so badly that his father, the king, drove him from the palace and had him exiled to the farthest reaches of the kingdom. With no other means of earning a living, the prince hired himself out to a craftsman as an apprentice, for which he was given his food but nothing else. He went around barefoot and in tatters.

  One day, the king was thinking about his son. He summoned a friend and said, “Go, find out where the prince is.” Once the friend had found the prince, he asked, “What would you like me to ask your father, the king, on your behalf?”

  The prince replied, “He sent me into exile. The least he could do is send me something to wear and a pair of shoes.”

  The king’s friend said, “Idiot! You were supposed to say, ‘Ask my father to take me back.’ Then you would have had everything.”

  The prince and Charlie Brown, Bontshe and someone who lends money without witnesses, are the type of minor-league shmuck known in Yiddish by the name of shmendrik. In a language known for its versatility in insult, shmendrik is among the most versatile of insults. The shmendrik embodies the kind of metaphysical cluelessness about one’s own nature and that of the surrounding world that leads the British to describe the same sort of person as “a tit in a trance.” Yiddish rarely mentions the titmouse, which often hangs upside down in order to feed, but the idea of going about something in the completely wrong manner without any apparent consciousness of the fact that the rest of the world—those who succeed at whatever activity the shmendrik is failing at—does things differently, lends an aptness to the comparison.

  A shmendrik is anybody from Bob Dylan’s Mr. Jones in “Ballad of a Thin Man,” who knows that something is happening here, but “don’t know what it is,” to Rupert Pupkin, the hapless asshole played by Robert De Niro in The King of Comedy. At the end of the movie, Pupkin, a thirty-one-year-old messenger and completely talentless aspiring comic who lives with his mother, explains why he has kidnapped talk-show host Jerry Langford and demanded a spot on Langford’s show as ransom for Langford’s safe return. In the movie’s best-known line, Pupkin gives such perfect voice to the painful mixture of impotence and delusion that characterizes the shmendrik that you almost feel sorry for him: “Better to be king for a night,” he says, “than shmuck for a lifetime.” If only it were really possible.

  The shmendrik has a bumbling quality, an incompetence that is almost endearing, as long as it isn’t directed at you. He or she differs from the nebbish, a seeming milquetoast of a person for whom you feel immediately sorry, not only in that being a nebbish is more a matter of appearance than actual attainment or ability (think of nebbish as the specifically Jewish forerunner of the more pluralistic nerd), but also, and more importantly, because the shmendrik, like the paranoiac, bases his or her life on a delusion, generally one of ability. Where the nebbish might do something very well, but wear a misbuttoned shirt while doing it, the shmendrik can be immaculately tailored, but never stops walking into walls. It is significant that shmendrik is also used by women to refer to a penis (I mean the real thing) for which they feel no warmth and by which they are not impressed. “A whole night of Viagra and he still couldn’t get the shmendrik to stand up long enough to do it,” or, “Go ahead. If that’s all you want, put the shmendrik in and get it over with.”

  A shmendrik is a certain breed of shmuck, limply ineffectual and unconscious of this limitation. Like Charlie Brown, the shmendrik considers himself on top of things, and just knows that this time, things are going to be different. He suffers from delusions of understanding, illusions that things are now under control. The Federal Emergency Management Agency’s response to Hurricane Katrina and the Buffalo snowstorm of 2006, along with its faked California press conference in 2007, are textbook examples of what it means to be a shmendrik.

  The shmendrik is as harmless a shmuck as you’re ever going to find, and we can class all sorts of day-to-day nudniks—tedious pests—under its rubric. If you’re not dressed as a pirate or B-movie hooker right now, while reading this sentence; if you mention your tedious personal hobbyhorse—whether it’s the Kennedy assassination, brewed condiments, or Engelbert Hump-erdinck’s superiority to Tom Jones—only on your blog and not in live conversation; if you’ve refused to allow someone who has cheated you once an opportunity to do so again, then you probably aren’t a shmendrik. Or not much of one, at least.

  Before we go on to describe the more active kinds of shmuck, though, it is probably a good idea to take a more detailed look at what a shmuck is not.

  TWO

  What’s a Mentsh?

  I

  LIKE shmuck, mentsh is a Yiddish word. Fundamentally, it means “person, human being,” and applies to everyone on earth. So, for instance, you could say that John iz a mentsh on a gal, a good-natured guy, or Mary iz a mentsh on a gal, a good-natured gal. Every human being is some sort of mentsh: John is a mentsh, Mary is a mentsh, even little Tommy, busy pulling the tail of their dog, Farfel, is a mentsh. Farfel is an innocent victim who deserves our pity, but he is an animal, not a mentsh.

  In this sense, we are all mentshn. Regardless of our capacities, attitudes, or deportment, we are all human beings, just as Warner Bros.’ Porky, E. B. White’s Wilbur, and Arnold Ziffle are pigs. It’s strictly a matter of biology. But the Yiddish way of thinking has never been content to leave biology alone—just look what psychoanalysis managed to do to humping—and it long ago extended the meaning of mentsh well beyond “featherless, rational biped” to “featherless, rational biped who knows how to behave like a featherless, rational biped.” As they say in Yiddish, “A mentsh iz a mentsh vayl er iz a mentsh”—a mentsh is a mentsh because he’s a mentsh.

  Extending mentsh’s field of meaning from biological classification to moral attainment is a uniquely Yiddish development, without any parallel in
the German from which the word mentsh derives. Only in Yiddish does mentsh mean “decent, respectable, upstanding person; honest, honorable person; man or woman of integrity; person of moral substance.” If my mother had said, “Sei ein mensch, be a mensch,” to me in German (an event about as likely as her coming home with a honey-glazed ham in her brand-new Volkswagen), it would have meant, “Michael, my son, stop being a tortoise.”

  Since we’re going to be speaking about a meaning that doesn’t exist in German, I’ve decided to avoid the more familiar, but totally German spelling, mensch, which carries none of the meanings that we’re going to look at in this book, and instead spell mentsh according to the standard Yiddish transliteration system developed by the YIVO Institute of Jewish Research.

  If there is some record that indicates even approximately when Yiddish first took mentsh beyond its narrowly taxonomic German usage, it isn’t immediately accessible. Alexander Harkavy’s 1910 Yiddish-English dictionary defines mentsh as only “1) man; 2) employee, servant,” although his 1928 Yiddish-English-Hebrew Dictionary expands this to “human being, man; person; servant, employee.” Uriel Weinreich’s Modern English-Yiddish/Yiddish-English Dictionary, first published in 1968, adds one more meaning to Harkavy’s second list: “responsible/mature person.” To say, though, that the meaning of “responsible/mature person” must therefore have developed sometime between 1928 and 1968 would be as absurd as to claim that mentsh began to mean “human being” only between 1910 and 1928.

  Harkavy and Weinreich were both first-rate scholars to whom everybody working in Yiddish owes an incalculable debt, but there is only so much that anybody can cram into a one-volume dictionary. There is a multivolume, comprehensive dictionary of Yiddish, but it is “comprehensive” only in the way that a “big fucking deal” is large and sexually active: Der Groyser Verterbukh fun der Yidisher Shprakh (The Great Dictionary of the Yiddish Language) has actually managed to improve on Dorothy Parker’s description of Katharine Hepburn’s acting style as running “the gamut of emotions from A to B.”

  As most readers probably know already, Yiddish is written in the Hebrew alphabet, which has twenty-two letters, beginning with aleph. Mentsh starts with mem, the thirteenth letter, and is not found in The Great Dictionary, which begins with aleph and ends with aleph. The Great Dictionary covers the alphabet from A to A. Material for the remaining letters was assembled a long time ago and has been lying in a sort of lexicographical limbo ever since, neither published nor discarded, as inaccessible to the public as if the editors’ mothers had tossed it all out with the editors’ old comic books.

  There are competing stories about how this came to pass. The version that seems to keep lawyers from the door is that it was strictly a matter of money. It ran out in 1961 or 1980-something, and despite the growing academic interest in Yiddish, the chairs that have sprung up at various universities, and Aaron Lansky’s remarkable success in establishing and raising funds for the National Yiddish Book Center in Amherst, Massachusetts, the dictionary has been unable to find enough donors to fund a monument of scholarship that would make everybody’s work in the field easier, deeper, and more accurate.

  The one that rings true poetically, whether it really happened or not, also helps to remind us of the undeniable fact that Yiddish-speaking Jews can violate the principles outlined in this book as well as anybody else: a bitter argument over the use of the silent aleph in spelling certain words led to a period of prolonged inactivity, which led in turn to a loss of funding.

  Whatever really happened, the materials are not in the public domain and access to them is severely restricted. So the only glimmer of hope for dealing with twenty-one twenty-seconds of the Yiddish alphabet resides in the fact that Yiddish makes frequent use of prefixes, so many of which begin with aleph that it has been estimated that the four volumes devoted to that letter contain about a third of all the material that was supposed to have been published. So even though the Verterbukh never gets as far as mentsh, it contains such verbs as oysmentshlen, avekmentshlen, oysmentshen, and oyfmentshlen, all of which describe different stages in the process of turning a raw hunk of humanity into a mentsh, and can therefore give us a fairly clear idea of the basic outlines of mentsh-hood.

  The type of person who emerges could be described as kosher. Kosher here does not mean that she is necessarily Jewish or devoted to Jewish ritual law, forget about readily edible by Jews; the basic meaning of kosher is “proper, fit for, appropriate, worthy.” A kosher person, then, is someone whose conduct is fitting, proper, appropriate; someone who knows how to behave in human society and can get herself through life without treading on other people’s feet. Just remember that kosher in Latin would be decens—from which we get the English decent. A kosher person is a decent person, a person of integrity who can hold her head up in society because she has nothing to be ashamed of.

  Being a mentsh involves more than refraining from shameful behavior, though; you don’t get any awards for not committing murder or neglecting to rob a bank, and plenty of otherwise decent people accepted segregation or South African apartheid as the natural course of life, without ever trying to do anything about them. Merely holding yourself back from doing the wrong things is not enough. A mentsh has to do the right things, and must understand the difference between right and wrong in order to do so: right and wrong in an absolute sense and right and wrong in a given situation, especially one in which all possible actions might be equally moral but some could still be very wrong.

  A mentsh also needs to be self-sufficient, able to provide for himself in normal circumstances without having to rely on the kindness of others. He stands on his own two feet, knows the limits of individual effort, and—if circumstances should demand it—ain’t too proud to beg:

  Having been told of a man who died of starvation, a certain tzaddik [Hasidic leader] responded, “No, he died of pride because he was unwilling to ask others for food.”

  “Who is wise?” asks the Talmud. “He who foresees the outcome of his actions” (Tomid 32a). A mentsh understands the necessity of doing the right thing at the right time.

  A mentsh, then, is a person who knows how to live with others as well as with herself, a person fit for human society. A friend will tell a friend just as easily as a parent tells a child, “Zay a mentsh, be a mentsh” that is, do what you know you’re supposed to do. Don’t sit paralyzed by indecision; don’t feel sorry for yourself because that two-hour visit to your aunt in the hospital is going to overlap with the season finale of your favorite TV show and you’re so deprived that you don’t even have TiVo; go visit that neighbor you don’t like whose husband just died. To be a mentsh is to do what you know to be your human duty, even when the obligation is at odds with your own preferences.

  II

  TO KNOW WHAT your duty is, though, you already have to be a mentsh; and the first thing that you’ll notice about any mentsh is that he is not a kid. There’s a well-known Yiddish proverb that holds that a parent’s duty is to make mentshn out of children—to turn undeveloped raw material into men and women who can turn around and do the same thing in their turn.

  A child might do the right thing, but it isn’t considered capable of doing so for the right reasons until it has reached a certain age:

  “A poor but wise boy is better than an old and foolish king” (Ecclesiastes 4:13). “A poor but wise boy”—this is the inclination to do good.

  Why is it called a boy?

  It only joins itself to a person at the age of thirteen.

  Why is he called poor?

  Not everyone listens to him.

  And why is he called wise?

  Because he teaches human beings the proper path.

  “An old and foolish king”—this is the evil urge.

  Why is he called a king?

  Everybody listens to him.

  Why is he called old?

  He stays with a person from birth to death.

  Why is he called foolish?

 
He teaches human beings the paths of evil.

  And why is he described as not knowing how to take counsel? Because he does not know how much sorrow and suffering he brings upon himself and therefore takes no precautions against them.

  (ECCLESIASTES RABBO 4:9)

  No wonder Yiddish-speaking parents never compliment their children; the little devil on the kid’s left shoulder has yet to be balanced by a preachy little angel on the right: a kid who isn’t following direct adult orders can only do the right thing by virtue of prior adult instruction or by accident. Jewish tradition looks at childhood as something to be got through, like boot camp or a lengthy dental appointment. Youth is a liability—just ask any kid—a forced layover on the path to adulthood and responsibility. While twelve-hour school days and slapstick notions of discipline certainly contributed to this desire to graduate into maturity, the same impulse can be seen today—better, can be heard—in any Hasidic community, where little boys do their best to mimic the singing and gestures, not of their fathers, but of their grandfathers and the other old guys at shul.

  The traditional Jewish view of childhood is that we’re born stupid and have to be nudged along into mentsh-hood. Twenty-four hours after a boy turns thirteen (twelve years and a day for girls), childhood comes to a sudden end. Not that anyone has ever considered a thirteen-year-old kid anything other than a pisher who’d best keep to his place, but now that he is old enough to count for a minyan, the traditional quorum of ten men needed for communal prayer, he is as much a full-fledged citizen as any unmarried person can be, and he damned well better act like one: “If a boy is Bar Mitzvah and still likes to play, people make fun of him and tell him that he is supposed to be a mentsh. And girls the same thing.” Traditional Jewish society would react with undisguised horror to our notion of an inner child: “What, we’re born with two assholes now?”