It has kind of a surface silliness that serves to convey an intriguing strangeness about the man.
Thanks! It's based on Leo Rosten’s definition of a shlimazel in The Joys of Yinglish (1989) and a passage I remembered for years from a children’s book about Jewish holidays, Sadie Rose Weilerstein’s Ten and a Kid (1961), which similarly defines the luckless:
Father was certain that all would go well.
"Our luck will be as golden as your curls," he would say to three-year-old Goldie, lifting her high into the air.
But after a year he felt less sure.
One evening he said to Momme, "Gittel, my luck is like Ibn Ezra's."
"Who was Ibn Ezra?" Momme asked.
"One of the Spanish Hebrew poets," Father explained. "A great poet—but without luck! Once he said, 'If I manufactured coffins, nobody would die.'"
Father paused.
"Gittel, if I keep on making candles, women will stop kindling Sabbath lights!"
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Thanks! It's based on Leo Rosten’s definition of a shlimazel in The Joys of Yinglish (1989) and a passage I remembered for years from a children’s book about Jewish holidays, Sadie Rose Weilerstein’s Ten and a Kid (1961), which similarly defines the luckless:
Father was certain that all would go well.
"Our luck will be as golden as your curls," he would say to three-year-old Goldie, lifting her high into the air.
But after a year he felt less sure.
One evening he said to Momme, "Gittel, my luck is like Ibn Ezra's."
"Who was Ibn Ezra?" Momme asked.
"One of the Spanish Hebrew poets," Father explained. "A great poet—but without luck! Once he said, 'If I manufactured coffins, nobody would die.'"
Father paused.
"Gittel, if I keep on making candles, women will stop kindling Sabbath lights!"
(Yay, The Tick.)