The Yiddish word schlemiel, meaning a bumbler or ne’er-do-well, is one of many that made their way into English dictionaries and can be found in newspapers and magazines without explanation. But long before Thomas Pynchon used the word in the opening of his novel V, Adelbert von Chamisso, a Christian, had introduced the word to a non-Jewish audience, as C.D. Rose writes:
Peter Schlemihl, by Adelbert von Chamisso, was first published in Germany in 1813. The titular Peter is indeed a hapless lad, tempted into making a bargain with a strange “man in gray . . . who looks like a bit of thread blown from a tailor’s needle.” He offers Peter endless gold in exchange for—what? Merely his shadow.
Of course, it doesn’t work out well. Peter soon finds that despite his bottomless wealth, without a shadow he is shunned from all kinds of society, polite and otherwise.
Chamisso acknowledges no source for his protagonist’s name, and while it certainly is Yiddish (though more commonly spelled schlemiel), its origins are debated—some claim it’s from the Hebrew term shelo mo’il, meaning “useless,” and others that it’s derived from the name Shelumiel, an Israelite chieftain [mentioned in the book of Numbers]. One thing is clear: the word hardly appears in print until the year Chamisso published his book. Thereafter it became extremely common, almost certainly spread by the novel’s success.
Chamisso was born in France in 1781, yet his family, threatened by the Revolution, was soon after forced to flee. They eventually settled in Berlin, where the young Adelbert grew up among an artistic set. He later joined the Prussian army and found himself going to war against his native France. He was taken prisoner and remained in France, working his way into Madame de Staël’s literary circle. He spent much of his life like this, neither here nor there, without a real home or nation. . . . In the second part of the novel, Peter travels the world with the help of magical seven-league boots, much as Chamisso later joined a Russian scientific expedition, circumnavigating the globe. Peter never finds a home, as he has no shadow. While the Yiddish schlemiel is irredeemably unlucky, pursued by misfortune yet also responsible for his own chumpishness, Chamisso’s Schlemihl is a permanent exile.
Read more on Paris Review: https://www.theparisreview.org/blog/2018/04/17/schlemihls-and-water-sprites/