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Going out on a limb: Joha. (Review Essay).

Article Excerpt
In a world saturated with sophisticated entertainment, it would seem we are well beyond Joha, and wouldn't need Matilda Koen-Sarano's 2003 collection of tales about this celebrated Middle Eastern-Sephardic wise fool. Think again.

Pronounced Joe Ha, with the accent on Ha, this underdog doesn't really promise big laughs. The punch lines are anticlimactic, the situations silly, the scope limited. Joha, in fact, in many of the tales, has no money, no work, no food, nothing but a donkey, or an olive he keeps chasing around the plate to get on his fork. And yet Joha is Joha; when his Turkish friend gets the olive with one deft stab, he cheerfully says, "Don't forget, if I hadn't fired it out you would never have managed to catch it."

Reading through this collection, we go from one tricky quandary to the next. When you write the number three hundred thirty-three, which three do you put first? Do you sleep with your beard under the covers or on top? At the end of the final Ne'ilah prayer, which word is it, echad or acher, and as soon as you've got the answer the two words keep going back and forth in your head, so you've got to chase the rabbi to ask him again, and again--and again. How do you get the rich man to serve you the big fish instead of the little one, when he charitably invites you to Shabbat dinner? And what do you do, when beneath a big ugly stone you find a bag of gold, and suddenly you are the rich man? If you are Joha, you keep a fancy little box with dung in it, and each day you open it to remind you of what it was like to have nothing.

Joha is the self before the self was invented. He is the self with no self, no borders or boundaries. He is the fool liberated from the terrible fear that plagues most people most of the time--the fear of looking foolish. Sent to buy sweets, he eats all but one before he gets home, and when asked how he could do that, he demonstrates by eating the last one. He lights all the matches to make sure they all work. He talks to his donkey and to the train. He stamps the behinds of...