When Shlemiel Went to Warsaw and Other Stories by Isaac Bashevis Singer

First published: 1968; illustrated

Subjects: Family, friendship, poverty, and religion

Type of work: Short fiction

Recommended Ages: 10-15

Form and Content

In his preface to this collection of eight stories, Isaac Bashevis Singer explains that some are folktales with which his mother entertained him as a boy. In When Shlemiel Went to Warsaw and Other Stories, he has retold these tales, re-creating them in “plot, detail and perspective.” The remaining stories, from his “own imagination,” include “Tsirtsur and Peziza,” “Rabbi Leib and the Witch Cunegunde,” and “Menaseh’s Dream.”

Whether derivative or original, each story re-creates life in shtetls, the villages or small towns that were home to millions of Eastern European Jews prior to World War II. Margot Zemach’s illustrations, notes critic Eric A. Kimmel, “capture the humor and sighs” of shtetl folk. Singer wrote the stories initially in Yiddish, the language of the shtetl, then translated them into English with his editor, Elizabeth Shub.

The title story takes place in Chelm, the legendary village of fools, and features Shlemiel, the quintessential Chelmite. When Shlemiel sets off to visit the great city of Warsaw, he loses his way and ends up back in Chelm. Perplexed over Warsaw’s resemblance to his own village, he is convinced that he has discovered a Chelm Two. Chelm is also the setting for “Shlemiel the Businessman” and “The Elders of Chelm and Genendel’s Key.” In the former, Shlemiel, in his efforts to sell a goat, repeatedly becomes the target of swindlers. In the latter, a wife’s attempt to keep her husband from speaking nonsense at community council meetings is thwarted by the foolishness of his fellow elders. In each story, Singer skillfully builds the humor by compounding misunderstandings.

“Shrewd Todie and Lyzer the Miser” is a pointedly moral, if farcical, tale. The desperately poor Todie approaches the town miser for a loan. When he is refused, he borrows a silver spoon and deceives the miser into believing that it has given birth to a teaspoon. Lyzer agrees to lend Todie not only spoons but also candlesticks. When Todie fails to return the candlesticks, claiming that they died, Lyzer drags him before the rabbi. It is Lyzer whom the rabbi admonishes, for accepting nonsense in an effort to bring profit.

“Utzel and His Daughter Poverty” is a more serious fable about the triumph of a man’s love for his daughter over the laziness that has impoverished them. The powers of good also overcome the seductions of evil in “Rabbi Leib and the Witch Cunegunde,” about a witch courting a saintly rabbi.

“Tsirtsur and Peziza” tells a sweet-natured tale of friendship between an orphaned imp and a cricket. An orphan is also the protagonist of “Menaseh’s Dream.” Menaseh’s only possession is a storybook called Alone in the Wild Forest—which is also the title of a children’s book that Singer would publish two years after When Shlemiel Went to Warsaw and Other Stories. Losing himself in a forest, Menaseh falls asleep and dreams of a castle inhabited by his parents and other relatives. Each room contains something of his life; in the seventh, he discovers a girl with long golden braids and other strangers who, it is explained, are people in his future. When Menaseh awakes, before him stands the golden-haired girl, who is giving him her hand to help him up. The story closes with “little people” singing a song heard “only by those who know that everything lives and nothing in time is ever lost.”

Critical Context

When Shlemiel Went to Warsaw and Other Stories was Isaac Bashevis Singer’s second collection of stories and fourth book for children. It appeared on the Horn Book honor list and was an American Library Association Notable Book. Reviewers praised its period flavor, as well as its humor and insight into human nature. As The New York Times declared, “In this book children are getting what they deserve—some of the most imaginative stories that have been available in recent years.”

According to Singer, the “same spirit, the same interest in the supernatural,” is in all his tales, for adults and for young people. “No matter how young they are,” he stated, “children are deeply concerned with so-called eternal questions.” Singer, who would receive the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1978, considered children “the best readers of genuine literature.” That it is “rooted” in folklore “alone makes children’s literature so important,” he claimed, adding that without folklore, “literature must decline and wither away.”

The resemblance of the wise men of Chelm in Singer’s stories to the wise men of Gotham in British lore has been critically noted. Additionally, folk literature the world over has its schlemiels, or typically foolish characters. As Singer himself observed, “The more a writer is rooted in his environment the more he is understood by all people.” As multiculturalism became a significant trend in the United States toward the latter half of the twentieth century, When Shlemiel Went to Warsaw and Other Stories was joined by more books for children featuring folktales from around the world.