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113 A Tale Told About Idiots: The Chelm Story and Holocaust Representation Alexis Wilson Lo, and behold, the whole world is like Chelm. —from Yiddish folklore In his short story, “The Tumblers,” Nathan Englander1 unites two seemingly incompatible genres: a Chelm story and a Holocaust story. Chelm—from Yiddish folklore in Eastern Europe—is a mythical town of fools, about which many comic stories and jokes have been told. Similar to England’s Gotham, Italy’s Cuneo , and Germany’s Schildburg, Chelm is a fictional city inhabited by the simpletons of the Jewish world. What happens, then, when the Holocaust invades this legendary town of Chelm? The answer is a wedding of the unimaginable to the imaginary, a process that allows the telling of a phenomenon that is difficult, if not nearly impossible, to represent. By merging history with folklore, Englander creates a unique vantage point for registering responses to the unfathomable. There are several different creation myths regarding Chelm. In Sholem Aleichem’s account of its origins, the angel responsible for distributing souls all over the earth accidentally runs into a tree and spills the entire bag of fools into the city of Chelm. In another version, the angel is carrying a bagful of foolish souls back to heaven for repair when she gets lost in a storm and spills the bag into Chelm. In yet another version, God simply says, “Let there be Chelm,” and there is Chelm.2 Although Chelm was the name of an actual city forty miles east of Lublin, Poland, there is no apparent connection between the real city and the archetypal home of the half-witted—though endearing— fools. Nevertheless, Chelm has survived as one of the most famous cities in Jewish history. Chelmites 114 alexIS wIlSon such as Motke Fool, Dopey Lekisch, Feivel Bonehead, Gronam Ox, and Schlemiel make up just some of the community’s inhabitants, who—as one can tell by their names—are continually doing foolish things or having foolish things done to them. Typically, Chelm is a self-contained, timeless, alternate universe—by and large untouched by the “real world.” Chelmites, themselves, are unable to distinguish illusion from reality. A popular tale of the town illustrates this well: When a citizen of Chelm asks his rabbi, “Which is more important, the sun or the moon?” the rabbi responds, “What a silly question! The moon of course! It shines at night when we really need it. Who needs the sun to shine when it is already broad daylight?”3 Such logic is the norm in Chelm. According to Ruth Wisse, “Stories of Chelm . . . usually follow a single pattern—when a problem must be solved, the Chelmites come up with a formula that is theoretically correct , but practically absurd.”4 In another such tale, a farmer offers a ride to a peddler from Chelm who is carrying a heavy bundle on his shoulder. The peddler gets into the wagon and sits beside the farmer, but he keeps his bundle on his shoulders. “Why don’t you put your bundle down?” asks the farmer. “It’s nice enough your horse is shlepping me,” responds the peddler. “Do I have to add my bundle to his burden?”5 On the one hand, Chelmites are unable to penetrate beyond the surface of appearances; on the other hand, however, in many cases, Chelm logic allows them to do things that would, in reality, be impossible. In Sholem Aleichem’s “A Tale of Chelm,”6 for example, Rabbi David—the wisest man in all of Chelm—comes up with an ingenious solution to help the poor. He declares that, from now on, every poor man will eat cream and every rich man will drink sour milk, instead of the other way around. As, from now on, cream will be called sour milk, and sour milk will be called cream. Anticipating poststructuralist thought, Chelmites—“reader[s] of sublime simplicity”7 —play with the instability of words, as well as draw attention to the possibilities and the limits of language. This is shown, as well, in another part of Aleichem’s story, when the rabbi is sent by his wife to buy a chicken from a farmer. When the farmer brags about his chickens because of how fat they are, the man decides he might as well just buy fat since that is better than chicken. When he is told that the fat he wants to buy is like oil, he decides to just buy oil. Finally...

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