When Shlemiel Went to Warsaw

When Shlemiel Went to Warsaw (Yiddish: ווען שלימואל איז געגאנגען קיין ווארשע) is a short story by Isaac Bashevis Singer from his cycle about the Fools of Chełm.^[1]

The 1968 book When Shlemiel Went to Warsaw and Other Stories was a 1969 Newbery Honor book.^[2] The book contains eight stories: "Shrewd Todie and Lyzer the Miser"; "Tsirtsur and Peziza" (original 1967 title: A mayse vegn shretelekh un grilen); "Rabbi Leib and the Witch Cunegunde" (Yiddish title: R. Leyb Sore's un di makhsheyfe Kunegunde, 1967); "The Elders of Chelm and Genendel's Key"; "Shlemiel, the Businessman"; "Utzel and His Daughter Poverty"; "Menaseh's Dream" (Yiddih title: Der plats, 1967), and "When Shlemiel went to Warsaw".

On his journey from Chelm to Warsaw Shlemiel decides to take a nap by the roadside. To know where to go when he wakes up, he points his boots in the direction of Warsaw. A passer-by turns the boots in the opposite direction, and when Shlemiel is up and on the go, he arrives to a town with striking similarities to his own hometown of Chelm, together with his home, wife (whose husband's name is Shlemiel), and children. But of course it cannot be his Chelm, but rather a second Chelm. When he is going to continue his journey, the city elders persuade him to stay until the "other" Shlemiel returns, to take care of the "other" family. Clearly, the other Shlemiel never returns...^[3]

The key points of the plot resemble the story of a rabbi, who sets out in a wagon from Chelm to a nearby city, but while he was asleep, the wagon driver drives around for a while and then deposits the rabbi back in Chelm. The early print of this story may be found in the 1887 book Der Khelemer khokhlem by an obscure writer Herts Bik. Only a single copy of the book is known, in the National Library of Jerusalem.^[4]

Singer combined this story with others from his Chelm cycle into the play Shlemiel the First, which was adapted into a musical with the same title by Robert Brustein in 1994 (before that he produced the original Singer's play in 1974^[5]). ^[3]

The Real Shlemiel is a French-German-Israeli-Hungarian animated film loosely based on this and other Singer's stories.

Village of Idiots is a 1999 Canadian short animated comedy

Jelena Sitar Cvetko created the puppet performance "When Shlemiel went to Warsaw" ("Kako je Šlemil šel v Varšavo"), Puppet Theatre Maribor, Slovenia,^[6][7] for which she earned the award for the best direction at the 2014 International Puppetry Festival (Međunarodni festival lutkarstva).^[8] It was also awarded at the Polish Eurofest and Serbian The Golden Spark (Zlatna Iskra)^[9]