Customer Reviews

When Shlemiel Went to Warsaw: and Other Stories

5 star:		(2)
4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

This book is dazzling, regardless of whether you like Jewish stories or not. The stories appear to be entirely artless yet they are carefully and brilliantly crafted. My son, who is eight, was as enchanted by them as I was. Highly recommended.

This is a great book to read if you like reading Jewish stories. It was an easy book to read , except for some of the yiddish words which I did not always understand. I would recommend this book to anyone.

The funniest translated story in English is in this book. It's "Shrewd Todie and Lyzer the Miser," and it's about silver candlesticks that die after the birth of silver spoons. . .

When Shlemiel went to Warsaw and Zlateh the Goat are both collections of short stories awarded a Newbery Honor in 1969 and 1967 respectively. They were written by Isaac Bashevis Singer, a Jewish author well known for his short stories, who received the 1978 Nobel Prize in Literature.

These two collections included several stories that I really enjoyed and many that I didn't much like. Several stories in each book took place in the city of Chelm and mentioned the 7 City Elders (described by the author as fools). One of the residents of that city is Shlemiel, who appears in several stories and is also, undeniably, a fool. Although I like to think I have a sense of humor, and I enjoy a good taste of the ridiculous every now and again, sometimes, it's just a little too much. The two collections contained just a few too many stories dealing with the utter foolishness of these people for me to truly enjoy the reading. To give a quick example, a short story from Zlateh the Goat entitled The Snow in Chelm begins like this:

Chelm was a village of fools, fools young and old. One night someone spied the moon reflected in a barrel of water. The people of Chelm imagined it had fallen in. They sealed the barrel so that the moon would not escape. When the barrel was opened in the morning and the moon wasn't there, the villagers decided it had been stolen. They sent for the police, and when the thief couldn't be found, the fools of Chelm cried and moaned.

For some, I'm sure these stories would be very enjoyable and amusing tales. However, reading story after story involving more and more absurdities became just a little too much for me. Between the two books, almost half the stories dealt in some way with the preposterous happenings of the residents of Chelm.

However, I generally found the stories that did not mention Shlemiel or the Elders (and people) of Chelm to be very entertaining, and often delightful. I especially enjoyed the stories, Rabbi Leib & the Witch Cunegunde, and Shrewd Todie & Lyzer the Miser and the message of Utzel & His Daughter Poverty from Warsaw. My favorites from Zlateh were the stories Fool's Paradise, and Zlateh the Goat. These stories are all clever and well written, often with a warm moral, subtly teaching the reader ways to improve and become better without beating you over the head with the moral.

For the most part, I enjoyed reading these stories. It's always nice to get a new look at a culture I know very little about. In the foreward to Warsaw, Singer mentions that while each are retold using his own language and ideas, several of the stories within came from legends and stories told by his mother and grandmother. I love the different folk tales from various cultures, so that was fun. I did enjoy reading these short stories, and am glad I picked them up.

This book is a compilation of 8 short stories, some based on traditional Jewish tales.
I'd give this book a 1 star rating out of five. Some of the stories are mildly interesting, but most of them are too old( take place in Middle Ages or before) for my liking. There isn't much description either, so you can't envision the picture in your mind the author wants you to. Some of the stories do not have a plot and those that do have unusual endings or don't provide a solution to the problem encountered in the story. I really cannot his book even got a slight chance at possibly maybe being a Newberry Medal nominee.