31 pages • 1 hour read
Isaac Bashevis Singer, Transl. Saul BellowGimpel the Fool
Fiction | Short Story | Adult | Published in 1953A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Background
Authorial Context: Isaac Bashevis Singer
Isaac Bashevis Singer was born in 1903, in Leoncin, Poland, a Jewish settlement called a shtetl (a pre-World War II Eastern European village) on the outskirts of Warsaw. His parents were both descended from long rabbinical lines, but they came from oppositional factions in the Orthodox Jewish community. As a result, Isaac, his older brother Israel Joshua, and their sister Hinde Esther (Kreytman) grew up in an atmosphere of constant discourse and dialectic discussions. Singer’s work reflects the topics his family taught him to explore: the struggles between tradition and enlightenment, the old and the new, illusion and deception, and the occult and the grotesque. His stories are invariably told with a rich mix of irony, wit, wisdom, and deep insight into the human condition.
Though Singer attended rabbinical seminary, he chose to follow in his brother Israel’s footsteps and pursued a career in journalism and fiction writing. Their sister, Hinde, also chose writing as her career. Israel Singer gained a reputation for his clever stories, which captured the panorama of Yiddish and Polish culture in the pre-World War II period, and he had already begun to work as a correspondent for Forverts, a Yiddish-language New York Jewish publication (the Daily Forward) which invited him to emigrate from Poland in 1934. In 1935, as it became clearer that the Nazis would bring their massive pogrom to Poland, Israel invited Singer, who was by then writing stories in Yiddish, to join him at the Forward and to resettle in New York.
Once settled in the United States, Singer began writing and translating news stories and short fiction for this publication. Because he wrote in Yiddish, his work was not initially well-known outside the Jewish community, who lauded him for the astute and colorful way he captured life in the vanishing world of Eastern European Jewry throughout the diaspora. In his stories, he chronicled the breakups of large Jewish families in the wake of secularism, assimilation, pogroms, and the Holocaust, and he reported about that world with clever humor that underscored his sense of irony. The anecdotes and plots that comprise his work are punctuated by the legends and myths of his people, and the stories are both personal and universal.
In 1953, prominent American author Saul Bellow’s translation of “Gimpel the Fool” was published in the Partisan Review, a literary magazine, and the word spread that Singer was a noteworthy talent. His work began to circulate broadly, and he went on to receive many literary awards, including the 1978 Nobel Prize in Literature. Until his death in 1991, he worked for the Daily Forward and published novels, short stories, and memoirs, many of them translated by his nephew Maurice Carr, which are read, studied, and revered worldwide.
Ideological Context: Zeitgeist and Jewish Belonging
The world from which Isaac Bashevis Singer emerged was embroiled in a variety of conflicts. The Orthodox Jewish communities were divided over ideas about the treatment of women, education, and the extent to which Jews should remain sequestered from the secular world. In his parents’ home, the struggles between old and new were rife. At the same time, the outside world pressed ever more aggressively into the world that Eastern European Jews felt so protective over, and world politics made it increasingly difficult for them to maintain their seclusion or safety.
Austrian writer Stefan Zweig famously predicted that the end of the Hapsburg Empire would be catastrophic for Jews because various ethnicities within the empire would become their own countries, resulting in nationalism. As Zweig predicted, nationalism and xenophobia empowered a Europe-wide effort to discriminate against and expel Jews. Seeking refuge and enlightenment, many younger members of various Orthodox sects left the shtetls and sought to assimilate into the emerging nations.
This political context informs the shtetl in “Gimpel the Fool.” Gimpel suffers from the very narrow-minded attitudes of his fellow villagers. He is, by nature of his refusal to have his attitudes dictated by society, an outlier. He suffers for his insistence on seeing the world more innocently and eventually, he is forced to leave to follow the path of Faith, Honor, and Integrity that he has forged for himself. No matter how he tries to be a member of his community, he cannot free himself from ridicule, disapproval, judgment, and derision. He makes himself happy, but he is unable to find acceptance and respect until after he abandons everyone and everything in his home village and goes out to live in the world beyond their enclave.
Sociohistorical Context: Women’s Gender Roles in Orthodox Judaism
Singer’s childhood was fraught with domestic strife. Singer’s father and mother were children of Orthodox rabbis from opposing factions. His mother’s father was from a sect of Misnagdic rabbis who opposed Hasidism, and his father’s father was Hasidic. The Singer children were raised within the closely-guarded strictures of Hasidism, but even before the match between the parents was arranged, the families were at odds with one another over women’s roles in the community.
It is unclear why the two rabbis decided their children should marry. His mother, Bathsheba, who had wanted to study and pursue a career in letters, wrote about her opposition to the arrangement in her diary. When she was finally coerced into accepting, she burned her diary and vowed to put aside her intellectual pursuits to be the simple, obedient wife Orthodoxy demanded her to be. The Singers fought frequently, and Bathsheba was a brutal parent to all her children, especially her daughter, Hinde Esther.
When Hinde Esther was born, Bathsheba sent her to live with a wet nurse, who left the baby lying in a dusty bed covered in cobwebs for most of her first two years. When Hinde Esther returned to the family home around the age of three, Bathsheba refused to nurture the girl or to show her any affection. Hinde Esther, like her mother, was intellectually gifted and already writing stories by the time her parents arranged her marriage. She, like her mother, fought for release from the contract, but she was forced into a miserable marriage.
For Isaac Bashevis Singer, the lesson was confusing. As a young man, before he left Poland, he was something of a womanizer. He settled down for a time at age 25 with his first (common law) wife, Runia Shapira, and their son, Israel. When Runia was jailed in 1935 for Zionist activities, Singer abandoned both her and the child and went to America by himself. However, as he began to write, his stories mirrored a deep empathy for the plight of Orthodox women and a growing sympathy for the trauma they experienced as a result.
Gimpel the Fool’s relationship with his wife Elka is an example of the way Singer shows compassion. The villagers think they have fooled him into believing that Elka is a virgin, but Gimpel knows the truth about her and is not deterred, reflecting, “I realized I was about to be rooked, but what did I have to lose?” (996). As he learns more of the truth, he becomes more deeply attached to her and does not judge her. He accepts her children as his own despite his understanding that he is not their biological father.
Gimpel’s sense of fulfillment through this unconventional relationship with an impious woman subverts societal expectations of women in the Orthodox community. While Elka is not elevated in the story, she is the only person who is entirely honest with Gimpel in the end. After her death, she appears to him as a saintly figure in dreams and urges him to stay true to himself. She consoles him and weeps for him while he struggles in his final years. In this aspect of the story, Singer complicates the Orthodox feminine ideal, asserting that unfaithful or unorthodox women can still be good at heart and care for others.
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