According to Irving Howe and Eliezer Greenberg, as Jewish folktales of Chelm grew, this town of simpletons "became a kind of mirror-in-reverse of the Yiddish world: all the strains of a highly intellectualistic culture were relaxed in these tales of incredible foolishness and innocence."
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Mandelbaum's Hoarse Savant dismisses this tradition as "the counterfeit, usurping Chelm of Yiddish folkloreso derivative ofso indebted for its humor toearly German lumpen humor." Nevertheless, as we have seen, "like the false Chelm, the echt Chelm also has its undertow of absurdity" (xvi), due to the hypertrophied textuality of diasporic Jewry. The
echt
Chelm is the wandering "place" of Jewish linguistic lore, and is as much an attitude toward discourse as a canon or bound body of specific works. Carried to an extreme and, as in
Chelmaxioms,
transformed into an absurdly complex, fanciful, arbitrary system of symbols, this crucial attitudethis masterful cultural strategythreatens to become a pedantic, encyclopedic joke. If
Chelmaxioms
does not take itself altogether seriously, it is because, despite the disclaimer of the Hoarse Savant, the poem is aware that in drawing upon the Chelm myth, it presents a reverse mirror-view of the Diaspora's essential intellectualism.
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"Exile gave Chelm to light" (7) proclaims the poet. As a comic instance of what George Steiner calls "the homeland of the text," Chelm appears to the reader/archaeologist through sifting levels of discourse. In a section of the poem invoking Schliemann and the search for Troy, the men of Chelm do some excavating of their own:
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 | | We dug from Chelm above
and found more Chelm below
as far as psalms can go
and only can conjecture
that even at the center
our findings would not alter(60)
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Since Chelm is made out of language, we can only conjecture that the further one digs, the more language one will find. The poem, which is itself a thing of words, is an instrument for uncovering more words: we go "as far as psalms can go." Actually, there is no real point in guessing about Chelm's "center"; as deconstructionists (who would feel very much at home in Chelm) never tire of pointing out, language has no center. Such is the hopeand the despairof commentary.
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