schnorrer

THE exact opposite of schnorrer is mensh, meaning a man of honour, a real gent - and when it comes to menshes I always think of Jimmy Savile.

"In contrast, a hundred meters sprinter who moves his legs only a few times per second moves like a snail," Frank Schnorrer describes.

Jewish life in 18th Century London is the subject of The King of the Schnorrers (1894) which is a rollicking and really funny story of Manasseh Buena Barzillai Azevedo da Costa, a Portguese beggar who pits his wits against a philanthropist, another schnorrer, and the elders (the Mahamad) of the Bevis Marks Sephardi synagogue in London.

As Michael Billig remarks, referring to Freud's analyses of "Jewish schnorrer (beggar) jokes.

blessed with naches, for being such a schnorrer my wife hides her purse

Far less equivocal was Pound's statement, in a 1937 article in the British Union Quarterly (the official publication of the British Union of Fascists), that the "schnorrer press" spreads "vagueness in communication."This statement is an ominous development from the literary anti-Semitism ...

Imagine: a dark room in a comedy club in Vienna and here is this bearded comic rattling off his favorite schnorrer, schadchen, and schliemiel jokes.

To the best of our knowledge, there's no such Yiddish word, and "schnorrer"--the closest word that might fit--means "moocher," which doesn't make a lot of sense in context, and also isn't a very nice thing to say about the recently departed.

But one thing boggles even now my min& The teddy bear her grandson left behind Unrecognized, old Ursus theodore Was tossed among the presents that this schnorrer Reused A birthday?

In one case, Margolies relayed, an "applicant could not even say the shema, a sentence which even the most ignorant Jew, and assuredly one who belongs to the so-called 'schnorrer' class ought to be able to repeat.

There were some strong pieces, most notably "Brothers," the story of Moisheh the Schnorrer, who scrimps and saves to bring his family from Russia to America, only to be betrayed by his "highfallutin" cultured newcomer brother, and a satire called "An Immigrant Among the Editors," which includes a wonderful lampoon of such contemporary intellectual journals as Free Masses and The New Republic.

(Richie had two uncles named Mo--one of them a failed actor who lived off his relatives, and the other a prosperous businessman who had once been accused of embezzlement--and to keep them straight the family called them Uncle Mo the Schnorrer and Uncle Mo the Gonif.)

One chapter is devoted to a particularly adept schnorrer who advises Behar to visit Adath Israel (an orthodox shul supported by the Lubavitchers) on the day Mr.

From this debris the artiste had constructed life-sized simulacra of Moshe Day-an and Golda and of representative figures too--a rich man in an astrakhan; a rabbi; a bent schnorrer who might have walked out of Helene's Belgian childhood: give the man a coin, Lenya.