By J. Barry Gurdin in San Francisco, California
A friend of mine, Henry Srebrnik, a Professor of Political Science at the University of Prince Edward Island, recently had a friend of his, Harry Koza, comment on one of his forwards that the Canadian Jewish Minister of Parliament, Anthony Housefather, is a “Shmendrik” who may as well have Shmendrik tattooed across his forehead.”
I had a vague recollection in my memory that this was not a flattering Yiddish term, but I didn’t recall its exact meaning, so I asked my wife who attended a Jewish school in Communist Poland where she studied Yiddish to translate this word into English. She replied, “hapless.” I wanted to check her response with another friend of mine who was born in a DP (Displaced Persons) camp in Ukraine after World War II whose native language is Yiddish. She looked it up in her dictionary of Yiddish slang and replied that the first definition was “nincompoop.”
Moreover, Harry’s buddy, Isaac, whose native language is also Yiddish, once told him that “the difference between a schlemiel and a shmendrik is that the schlemiel was the clumsy waiter who spilled the soup, and the shmendrik was the guy on whose lap the soup was spilled.” At the time none of my informants nor I knew that Shmendrik was the name of a character in the operetta, Shmendrik, oder di komishe chaseneh (Schmendrik, or The Comical Wedding) by Avrom Goldfaden, later made into “The Wise Men of Chelm” in the 1999 Canadian animated comedy, The Village of Idiots.
One night I had a dream that The Forward had a contest to submit an entry of a new word that their column of Yiddish-Word-of-the-Day, had not yet introduced, so I submitted my entry of “Shmendrik” to The Forward’s contest, along with a ditty to illustrate its meaning. It was to be sung to the tune of Dreydel, Dreydel, Dreydel:
I knew a little Shmendrik
He thought he was so bright,
Despite the vicious hatred, he thought it was all right,
Oh Shmendrik , Shmendrik, Shmendrik
You thought you were so bright,
Despite the vicious hatred, you thought it was all right.
I dedicate my real dream to the 33% of New York Jewish voters who voted for Mayor Zohran Mamdani; to California State Senator Scott Wiener who recently accused Israel of genocide; and to California Governor Gavin Newsom who obliquely referred to Israel as an apartheid state.
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Joseph Barry Gurdin, Ph.D., has taught the social sciences and English on the college and university levels in the USA, Canada, and Sweden.