The Wisdom of Fools

The Wise Men of Helm.
by Solomon Simon.
Translated from the Yiddish “Di Helden fun Chelm,” by Ben Bengal and David Simon. New York, Behrman House, 1945. 135 pp. $2.50.

Who are the wise men of Helm? People call them fools, and laugh at their simplicity. Their gullibility seems bottomless, and their capacity for the absurd is almost fatal. They believe the scoundrels in Warsaw who tell them that fires can be put out by pounding a huge drum. The Helmites exchange their gold for feathers so that it will be easier to carry home. And then it seems even easier to let the feathers float back on their own to Helm. The Helmites build their water mill on the top of a mountain, and wonder why it doesn’t work. Their night-watchman lets thieves carry off the goods from the shops because he doesn’t want to wake the shopkeepers. After all, why was he hired? A man must do his job well. Gimpel, the “leading citizen,” town hero and tyrant because he is never barren of ideas, plans to capture the moon in a barrel of borsht. Think of the riches that will come of such monopoly!

But even though, on a dark night, the moon has escaped, and the borsht is left to run red rivers through the square, the Helmites never stop thinking and they never give up. There must be other ways of getting herring into the empty barrels and stomachs. Do the Helmites ever blame themselves for anything which has gone wrong? No! “It’s just that foolish things are always happening to us.”

Though these things may sometimes seem foolish beyond belief, the Helmites are not so very different from you and from me. Some of the Helmites grow rich, and the poor resent their fine clothes and good seats in the synagogue. There is a town philosopher, Pinya, who can think for four days and four nights of nothing very much, and who insists at the end that he must have still more time to think. They have their private underdog, Berel the Beadle, who pipes a thin protest of commonsense logic against Gimpel’s genius. Yet even Berel is important to the wiser men of Helm, for he is there to prove how futile such complaints as his can be. For we learn, at the end of these Helm legends which Dr. Simon has now retold, that a long time ago, when the whole town was destitute of money and ideas, they hit upon the best scheme of all. A Helmite is never without some idea. They went out into the world, and made Helmites of us all.

And so, when we laugh so comfortably at these simpletons, who carried all the logs to the top of the mountain again because they discovered it is easier to roll them than to carry them down, we are forced to remember that the story-tellers smile, and with reason, at our logic. For this is where the brilliance of the Helmites is really to be found. Behind their simple smiles and their ludicrous reasoning is the ironic self-possession which transforms all good Jewish jokes into something more than a clever punch line. The story of the Helmites becomes the parable of all Jews living in a world that is stupid and powerful. Their intelligence is materially fruitless, and their ingenuity brings no herring for their potatoes.

But they can always defend themselves because the imaginative vitality of their ironic humor does not need such commonplace nourishment. The imagination that turned Jewish intelligence inside-out so that it looked and behaved like fools from Helm, could mock the real fools endlessly. Having used the satiric possibilities of stupidity with such shrewd self-knowledge, the creators of Helm escaped its real weakness through the strength of their myth. Duped, cheated, betrayed, impoverished through no fault of their own, the Helmites are often destitute, but they are never discouraged and—more important—never dull. All the tragedy and humiliation in their world can be made into the stuff of mockery—and understanding. The Helmites can never be discouraged because they never disbelieve themselves. Perhaps gold is only feathers. Their foolishness is always their own creation and their own responsibility, and in knowing this the wise men of Helm are indeed wise.