T 1290.pdf - Pondicherry University DSpace Portal

capacity for suffering and ill-luck. With ironic self-scrutinythey are able to sense the irony in their plight. Aleichemwrote of people living in an alien society often so desperatethat the only recourse they had was to humour. The Jews feltthemselves Powerless and so they discovered the formula forconversion of disaster into triumph through lauqhter. Aleichemdlscoverd the "schlemiel" as the vehicle for this.In Malamud's novels, the "schlemielv protagonists do notposses the strength of the East European forefathers. They arealso not so much the oblects of thelr own laughter as ofothers. Unllke Aleichem's gentlles who lived outslde the Jewishpale were obiects of fear as hostile forces, Malamud's gentileprotagonists, Roy Hobbs and Frank Alplne, are as much harassedand as vulnerable as their Jewlsh counterparts, Levin, Bok,Fldelman, Lesser, Dubln and Cohn. For Malamud the 'schlemiel'isinterchangeable with the ldea of belng a Jew and to be a Jewmeans to assume a moral stance in a world full of rebuffs,absurdities and humillation. The typical Malamud protagonist isa middle-aged-man wlth an ignoble past. The characteristicproperties of hls past Ilfe are economlc deprivation, sociallsolatlon and fallures at different levels. All of them haveSuffered lndiginities in some form or the other. A11 of themare losers, unlucky , unloved and wounded by clrcumstances. Thestruggle to establish unity wlth some unacknowleged centre of