Do Polish people especially those around Chelm know about the towns comic reputation? If so what do they think about it and the upcoming animated tv special?

4 comments

1. Example story:

   The Ox Ate My Sermon

   The maggid [preacher] of Chelm was returning home from a neighboring village where he had just preached a sermon. On the way he was overtaken by a farmer whose wagon was piled high with hay.

   “May I offer you a ride?” asked the peasant courteously.

   “Thank you,” replied the maggid, climbing aboard the wagon. It was a warm, sunny day and soon the preacher fell fast asleep. But when he arrived in Chelm he could not find his notebook, in which he kept his themes and parables.

   “I must have lost it in the hay!” cried the maggid, greatly distressed. “Now some cow or goat or ass will eat it and become familiar with all my best sermons!”

   The next evening, at the synagogue, he strode to the

   [pulpit] and glared at the congregation.

   “Fellow citizens of Chelm,” he proclaimed, “I have lost my notebook in a load of fodder. I want you to know that if some dumb ox or ass ever comes to this town to preach, the sermon will be mine, not his!”

2. https://www.timesofisrael.com/the-serious-history-of-a-comical-town/

   The story of the Chelm fables, von Bernuth says, begins in 1597. It begins not, as one might assume, with Jews in Poland, but with Christians in Germany.

   That year, an unknown German author published a collection of tales about a fictional town where wise men behaved foolishly. Those stories became famous as the Schildburg tales, named for the fictional village where they were said to have taken place.

   Some of these stories will be familiar to those raised on tales of Chelm. In one, for example, the village elders try to shovel sunlight into sacks to illuminate the town hall, which they have built without windows. In another, to combat an infestation of mice they buy a creature they are convinced is a special “mouse-hound” — it is, in fact, a cat — and then, terrified by the animal, rid themselves of it by torching the entire town.

   …
   In the first Yiddish edition and in those that followed, the town was still called Schildburg. The characters were still Christians who ate pork and went to the bathhouse on Saturday.

   In the 1800s, von Bernuth has found, the modern-minded Jewish intellectuals known as the maskilim picked up on a later version of the same stories and began telling them in a Jewish context. For them, the foolish village elders, with their pretensions of sagacity, reflected an archaic rabbinic establishment opposed to their own new ways of thinking.

   …

   The reason Chelm was selected for the starring role is still not entirely clear. Von Bernuth believes that storytellers probably just needed a kind of eastern European Everytown, and Chelm fit.

   By the turn of the 20th century, Chelm stories were spreading. They were parables, occasionally bawdy ones, for adults, not entertainment for children. The first large collection was published in 1917, including versions of the original German stories and new additions.

   By the turn of the 20th century, what originated with a collection of German stories in 1597 had become the literary canon known as Chelm. (photo credit: Illustration from F. Halperin’s, ‘Khakhme Khelm,’ Warsaw, 1926.)

   In the 1920s, the Yiddish writer Menachem Kipnis wrote a series of humorous articles in the Warsaw newspaper Haynt in which he identified himself as a journalist reporting from Chelm. These dispatches were so popular that a mother from the real Chelm is said to have written the paper begging it to stop printing them — she was afraid she would never be able to marry off her daughter.

3. Lol, I was born in Chełm, lived in a near village for almost 20 years and wasn’t aware of any of this till today 🙂

4. I had in my parents house books with Jewish jokes by Horacy Safrin so I heard about it. I don’t think this Chelm thing is widely known.
   For polish people Wąchock is comic town.

   https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Horacy_Safrin