How to Be a Mentsh (and Not a Shmuck) by Wex, Michael (summer reading list txt) 📕

apartment,” and a schnook is what Baxter really is, because a schnook is a shmuck in English disguise.

As we saw a while ago, the English pronunciation of shmuck derives from a dialect form of the Standard Yiddish shmok. This dialect, typical of areas that are now parts of Poland, Ukraine, and Moldova, was only one of a number of Yiddish dialects and is hardly the only one to have contributed words to English. It isn’t even the only dialect from which English has taken words based on shmok. The standard language’s shmok form gives us the English schmo, a somewhat dated term for “jerk” that could do with a revival, and the even more obsolete shmohawk and shmohican, both of which can still be heard in old Warner Bros. cartoons: “What a shmohawk” “He’s the last of the shmohicans.”

Shmok would also have been pronounced shmook in yet a third widely spoken dialect. The vowel is close, although not quite identical, to the sound that English has in book, hook, or cook. There is no schnook in Yiddish, though; it’s an English word, a euphemism that substitutes an n for the original m in shmook in order to keep things clean. Substituting one consonant for another in order to avoid uttering a forbidden word is already familiar to us from the treatment of God’s names, and the same principle is at work with shmook and schnook.

The eleventh edition of Merriam-Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary defines schnook as “a stupid or unimportant person,” the kind of spineless, eager-to-please, kick-me-again-but-please-notice-me underling that Jack Lemmon portrays in this movie. He’s waiting for the personnel department to pay attention to him. Aside from the apartment, the only thing that distinguishes Baxter from any of the thousands of other employees in the same building is that he is the only man who takes his hat off when he gets into the elevator.

He has a crush on Fran Kubelik, one of the elevator operators, and things start to get complicated when he finds out that she has been having an affair with Mr. Sheldrake, the married head of personnel, who has given Baxter his promotion and forced Baxter to give him a key to the apartment. Although nothing at all has happened between him and Miss Kubelik (played by Shirley MacLaine), Baxter is hurt and disappointed when he realizes that she’s involved with Sheldrake (Fred Mac-Murray), and even more shocked when he comes home on Christmas night with a woman who has picked him up in a bar, only to find Miss Kubelik in his bed. Earlier in the evening, Sheldrake let her know that he wouldn’t be leaving his wife for her, and she has taken an overdose of sleeping pills.

Baxter calls the doctor in the apartment next door. The doctor, who thinks that Baxter is a compulsive womanizer over whom Miss Kubelik has tried to kill herself, has long wondered how such a nebbish can have such luck with women and how anybody can maintain such a frantic pace of drinking and carousing. He sits Baxter down once they’re sure that Miss Kubelik is going to be all right and gives him a good, if rather brief, talking-to:

DR. DREYFUSS: I don’t know what you did to that girl in there—and don’t tell me—but it was bound to happen, the way you carry on. Live now, pay later. Diner’s Club! Why don’t you grow up, Baxter? Be a mensch! You know what that means?

BUD: I’m not sure.

DR. DREYFUSS: A mansch [sic]—a human being!

Although Baxter is not supposed to be remotely Jewish, he seems to get it. Dr. Dreyfuss (played by Jack Kruschen) is definitely the Yiddish-cadenced conscience of the film, and his appeal to Baxter’s latent mentsh-hood starts to work on Baxter, who begins to realize what a shmuck he has been. In describing her affair with Sheldrake, Miss Kubelik says, “Some people take, some people get took—and they know they’re getting took, and there’s nothing they can do about it.” It’s a shmuck-eat-shmuck world out there, and Baxter finally stands up to it and acts like a mentsh, like a person with something to them: he takes back the key to his apartment, turns in his key to the executive washroom, and tells Sheldrake, “Just following doctor’s orders. I’ve decided to become a mensch. You know what that means? A human being.”

On New Year’s Eve Miss Kubelik, who was about to reconcile with Sheldrake (whose wife has thrown him out), finds out that Baxter wouldn’t give him the apartment for the night. She ditches Sheldrake and goes to the apartment. Baxter confesses his love; Miss Kubelik hands him a deck of cards and says, “Shut up and deal.”

Baxter’s feelings for Miss Kubelik give him the motivation and the courage to stop being a shmuck and to act like a human being instead of a lap dog. Baxter is alone through most of the movie; even on Christmas Eve he has nowhere to go and ends up in a bar only because Sheldrake and Miss Kubelik are using his apartment. Otherwise, he’d have been home alone. By making someone else, someone who isn’t himself, his central concern, Baxter is able to step back and see what’s been happening, not only with Miss Kubelik but also with himself.

His sole concern before falling for Miss Kubelik is advancement at work and he is smart enough to realize that lending out his apartment will do things for him that hard work alone, in a room filled with hundreds of others doing exactly what he’s doing, is not really going to get him anywhere very quickly. Yet the higher he gets at work, the more he comes under Sheldrake’s thumb; he only gets shmuckier, to the point where he’s facilitating the bad treatment of a woman he likes and with whom he shortly falls in love.

Yet as soon as he stops thinking about his career and tries to help Miss Kubelik, not because he wants her