arts & entertainment
From Farmisht To Farfolen
The Diagnostic Manual of Mishegas: the true story.
S
o I'd hang out with my two alter
kocker friends, Michael (Moishe)
B. Friedman and Lloyd (Leibish)
I. Sederer, both of whom have distin-
guished themselves in the world of mental
health, and we'd kibitz about
the American Psychiatric
Association's door-stopper of a
book — the infamous "bible of
psychiatry" — The Diagnostic
and Statistical Manual of Mental
Disorders (DSM).
For all its hundreds of cat-
egories and finely tuned dis-
tinctions, Michael liked to say
(Michael is a former regional
director of the New York State
Office of Mental Health and a
founder of the Center for Policy
and Advocacy of the Mental
Health Association, the Veterans'
Mental Health Coalition and the Geriatric
Mental Health Alliance, all of New York
City), there are really only two mental disor-
ders: Mishegas major and Mishegas minor.
And then the three of us would be off
and flying — trading jokes and giving vari-
ous (so-called) mental disorders Yiddish
appellations: There was spilkes major and
spilkes minor, and tsuris, and fartoots, and
farshlepteh krenk, and — Michael's favor-
ite — "Shades of Schmuck" (where he was
eloquent about the differences between
schmuck, shlemiel, shlemazel, shmendrick,
shmeggege, yutz and putz).
Then one day at lunch, Michael said we
should turn our mishegas into a book (why
not?), with jokes that illustrate each category,
and call our book The Diagnostic Manual of
Mishegas (DMOM).
And so at meals, and by email,
and by phone, and by Jewish
telegraphy (Dixie cups linked by
long strands of dental floss), we
began trading definitions, sugges-
tions, meaningless distinctions,
jokes, puns and what seemed to
us — but what did we know? —
sublimely silly ways of potchkeing
together our nonsense.
The fact that the American
Psychiatric Association was com-
ing out with a newly revised edi-
tion of the DSM — the DSM-5 —
on May 20 of this year, put a little
fire under us.
"So what are we waiting for?" I said one
day, and I put aside a novel I'd been work-
ing on, and — with input (inputz?) from
Michael and Lloyd, I came away in a month
or so with a working draft based upon an
imaginary book by the brilliant if frequently
farmisht Dr. Sol Farblondget (M. D., Ph.D.,
P.T.A.).
We finalized a manuscript and tried to
find a publisher, but it turned out we were
too late to have a mainstream publisher
bring our book out in time to coincide with
I
Nate Bloom
16 Special to the Jewish News
411
Chamuel Redux
As I write this, former University of
Michigan grad and Ann Arbor resident
(I) Michelle Chamuel, 27, is one of the
three finalists in this season's The
Voice competition (the winner was
announced on Tuesday, June 18, after
this issue of the JN
went to press).
I think it's very
likely that Chamuel
will go on to a high-
profile, successful
career whatever the
outcome of the show.
She has an outstand-
Chamuel
ing voice and a stage
presence that is cer-
tainly not cookie-cutter.
A cousin of Chamuel's contacted
me after reading this column. She
informed me that Chamuel's father,
Jacques, an engineer, and her mother,
41)
50
June 20 • 2013
Jolie, a doctor, are both Egyptian-born
Jews who moved to the States in the
early '60s (Michelle's mother has been
seen supporting her daughter in sev-
eral episodes of The Voice).
In Egypt, Michelle's parents were
members of the Karaite Jewish commu-
nity. Karaites are now a quite small wing
of Judaism, but once their numbers
were much larger. They embrace the
Torah, but reject the Oral Law and the
Talmud. Virtually all of Egypt's 80,000
Jews, Karaite or rabbinic, were forced
to flee Egypt between 1948 and 1967.
Zeroing In On Zombies
World War Z, which opens on Friday,
June 21, is based on the 2006
novel of the same name by
Max Brooks, 41. The book was
hailed as raising the intel-
lectual level of the "zombie
genre." Brooks is the son of
Mel Brooks, 86, and the late
Anne Bancroft. Max identifies
as a Jew, and his wife, a writer,
is Jewish, too.
the publication
of the DSM-5.
"So let's self-
publish!" Lloyd
suggested (Lloyd, currently
medical director of the New York State
Office of Mental Health and medical editor
for mental health for the Huffington Post,
has served as mental health commissioner
of the New York City Department of Health
and Mental Hygiene and is the author of The
Family Guide to Mental Health Care).
And so we did, and three weeks later,
with the help of createspace, our book — at
74 pages and $10, compared to the DSM-5's
1,000 pages and $150, the bargain of the cen-
tury! — was ready to make a grand appear-
ance for the 15,000 psychiatrists attending
the annual APA Convention in San Francisco
from May 18-22, when the DSM-5 appeared.
So that's how our book, The Diagnostic
Manual of Mishegas, was born — a book
that, we trust, is a playful companion to the
DSM-5.
And for each of the sub-categories our
send-up of the APAs book analyzes —tsim-
mis, yenta, kvetch, alter kocker, shnorrer,
dementia-with-benefits, etc. — our manual,
like Leo Rosten's classic The Joys of Yiddish,
provides lighthearted anecdotes that not only
memorably illustrate the diagnostic category
but will make readers plotz with laughter.
The DMOM also should enable readers
to transform ordinary tsuris and mishegas
Brad Pitt stars as Gerry Lane, a
former U.N. investigator who travels
around the world trying to figure out
how a plague of zombies arose and
what can be done to stop them.
Israel is an important stop: In the
film, the Israeli government is the first
to take the zombie threat seriously
and moves quickly to evacuate from
the occupied areas and admit into
Israel proper any Jew or Palestinian
who is uninfected by the zombie
threat.
While in Jerusalem, and in other
places, Lane is guarded by a crack
Israeli security guard played by Israeli
actress Danielle Kertesz, 24. As the
Times of Israel recently said,
Kertesz was "plucked from
relative obscurity" to play this
role. She told an Israeli TV
station that she liked Brad,
Angelina and their kids very
much. She said: "[They were]
normal kids who asked their
dad things like, 'How many
zombies did you kill today?"'
— the glooms, blues, angsts and general
chazzerie of their lives — into transcen-
dent and easy-to-understand categories, to
turn kvetching into kvelling and guilt into
gelt, so that they will learn to live at peace
with their inner mishegas and to treasure its
precious and life-giving absurdities.
Here's a for-instance:
1.07 Farmisht
A little confused and/or befuddled. For
example, an elderly man walking along
Collins Avenue in Miami Beach stops anoth-
er elderly man. "Listen:' he asks, "was it you
or your brother who died last week?"
And there's more where that came
from ...
❑
Jay Neugeboren is the author of 20 books,
including two prize-winning novels, two prize-
winning books of nonfiction and four collections
of award-winning stories. He has been keynote
speaker nationally and internationally for numer-
ous mental health organizations, including the
U. S. Department of Health and Human Services,
and has served as a consultant to the World
Health Organization. His most recent book is The
American Sun & Wind Moving Picture Company.
The Diagnostic and Statistical
Manual of Mental Disorders
is available at amazon.com ,
barnesandnoble.com and at www.
createspace.com/4226787.
Reporting The News
In January, CNN hired Jake Tapper,
44, to host his own program, The Lead
with Jake Tapper. At first, Tapper
looked like he would follow the down-
ward ratings spiral of most other
straight-news CNN
anchors and wouldn't
be around that long.
But his ratings have
improved, and it
looks like he is now
being favored over
John King, 49, when
Atha
it comes to report-
Tapper
ing big breaking
news on the ground
(King made a howling
error while reporting on the Boston
Marathon bombing investigation).
One safe-in-his-job news anchor I
only just learned is Jewish: Jeffrey
Brown, 61, the even-keeled co-anchor
of the PBS NewsHour since 2005.
❑
Contact Nate Bloom at
middleoftheroadl@aoLcom.