BY N AOMI S EIDMAN
Who’s Isaac
Bashevis
the Singer
Fool? in America
T
he first of Isaac Bashevis Singer’s works to appear in English translation, pub-
lished in 1950 by Knopf, was his novel The Family Moskat. It was Saul Bellow’s
much-admired 1953 translation of the short story “Gimpel the Fool,” though,
that truly inaugurated Bashevis’s remarkable career in English. The story, first pub-
lished in Yiddish in 1945, takes place in the shtetl of Frampol and describes the travails
of Gimpel, the town fool, whose extravagant gullibility renders him the butt of
Frampol’s jokesters. As Gimpel recounts,
When the pranksters and leg-pullers found that I was easy to fool, every one of
them tried his luck with me. “Gimpel, the czar is coming to Frampol; Gimpel,
the moon fell down in Turbeen; Gimpel, little Hodel Furpiece found a treasure
behind the bathhouse.” And I like a golem believed everyone.
Gimpel’s life takes a dramatic turn when he is persuaded by the townspeople to
marry Elka, “no chaste maiden, but they told me she was virgin pure.” Five months
later, a son is born, whom Elka swears is Gimpel’s. Although Gimpel is (justifiably) sus-
picious, he comes to love Elka and takes the child as his own. The story describes
Gimpel’s dawning awareness of his wife’s multiple infidelities and, in general, of the
cruelty of his fellow townspeople. Embittered by Elka’s deathbed confession, Gimpel
takes impulsive revenge on Frampol by urinating in the dough he is preparing as the
town baker. But he quickly repents of his action, burying the loaves and then taking
leave of Frampol for a life of harsh exile.
The story charmed the critics, with its ear – discernible in Bellow’s translation –
for idiomatic Yiddish speech and its rich but unsentimental portrait of the shtetl.
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In the American literary arena of the 1950s, Bashevis’s “nar” he denies that he is. With the publication of the
narrative world was still utterly exotic; as one reviewer put German translation of the story in 1968, entitled “Gimpel
it, Bellow’s English version of Bashevis captured “the bar- der Narr,” the difference between foolishness and sim-
baric, oriental flavor that one associates with Eastern plicity so crucial to the story’s Yiddish opening was com-
Jews.” With the appearance of Irving Howe and Eliezer pletely forgotten. Gimpel was, the title asserted, exactly
Greenberg’s Treasury of Yiddish Stories, in which “Gimpel what the townspeople considered him – a Narr.
the Fool” was featured, Sidra DeKoven Ezrahi writes, Another serious translation loss in Bellow’s version was
“1953 becomes the year that inaugurates the American less often discussed by the critics. As Janet Hadda’s biog-
attempt to reclaim a lost Jewish place and a severed Jewish raphy of Bashevis recounts, the translation also elided
story.” Sensitive critics realized that “Gimpel the Fool” was what Hadda calls “the anti-Christian references” in
not only ethnographical portraiture, it was also modernist “Gimpel the Fool.” While the translation problem of
literature. As “simple” as Gimpel is, he is also a complex tam /nar rested primarily on linguistic difficulties – as
and fully realized character, both thoroughly immersed in Norich points out, “Gimpel the Simple” would have intro-
his traditional milieu and isolated from the main currents duced an inappropriate rhyme – the issues involved in
of its community life. translating Bashevis’s references to Christianity were
All agreed that Bellow’s translation was a masterpiece,
presenting a voice in English that was both new and that
seemed, somehow, to have always been there. Bellow had
not only brought Bashevis’s Yiddish into literary English,
he had also succeeded in fashioning a Yiddish-infused
English utterly removed from the “coarse” immigrant
speech with which Yiddish had previously been associated.
DeKoven Ezrahi and other critics have suggested that
however great the debt Bashevis owed to Bellow for
introducing him to the world of English letters,
Bellow’s own subsequent style was at least as
beholden to Bashevis’s Yiddish idiom.
As with all translations, however, there
were also measurable losses: Chone
Shmeruk and Anita Norich have (sepa-
rately) drawn attention to the leveling, in
the English, of the Yiddish story’s very first
lines. While the Yiddish begins: “Ich bin
Gimpel tam. Ich halt mikh nisht far keyn
nar,” Bellow rendered the two distinct
terms “tam” and “nar” with forms
of the word “fool”: “I am Gimpel
the fool. I don’t consider myself
foolish.” Tam, of Hebrew deriva-
tion, means something like
“simple” or “innocent” (familiar as
the third of “the four sons” in the
Passover Haggadah). The German-derived
“nar,” by contrast, lacks any positive connotations
and more simply refers to a fool. Perhaps unavoidably, the
English fails to register fully the difference between the
“tam” Gimpel acknowledges as part of his name and the
rather a matter of cultural politics. Hadda describes how thing had happened to Adam and Eve. Two they
these passages were censored. As it turns out, it was not went up to bed, and four they descended.
Bellow, but Eliezer Greenberg, Bashevis’s European-born “There isn’t a woman in the world who is not the
editor and friend, who was responsible: granddaughter of Eve,” he said.
That was how it was; they argued me dumb. But
[T]he real break for Bashevis, his introduction then, who really knows how such things are?
to American readers who could appreciate him,
was the 1953 appearance, in the prestigious While the English passage ends there, the Yiddish con-
Partisan Review, of “Gimpel the Fool,” masterfully tinues with the sentence Greenberg omitted in his dicta-
translated by Saul Bellow. Although not European- tion to Bellow: “Ot zugt men dokh, az s’yoyzel hot in
born, Bellow was ideally suited to render Bashevis gantzen keyn tatn nisht gehat.” Or in my own translation:
into English for a cosmopolitan audience.… “After all, they say that Yoyzel didn’t have a father at all.”
Nonetheless, he was at first reluctant to undertake It’s worth reflecting on why Greenberg perceived the
the assignment. Approached by Eliezer Greenberg, line “they say that Yoyzel didn’t have a father at all” as an
Bellow initially declined. He was teaching at anti-Christian reference. The insult to Christians (except
Princeton University and finishing his novel, The perhaps in the “affectionate” diminutive “Yoyzel,” or
Adventures of Augie March. He simply didn’t have “Jesus’l”) seems indirect at best. But this indirection can be
the time, he told Greenberg. But Greenberg, clarified by reference to the earlier conversation in the pas-
undeterred, suggested he could come to Bellow sage between Gimpel and the schoolmaster. The school-
and read the Yiddish to him; Bellow could master cites the Talmud in a way that Gimpel hears as reaf-
translate right onto the typewriter. firming the possibility that his wife indeed gave birth very
And so it was – which allowed Greenberg to prematurely, but that the more sophisticated reader (and
exercise a bit of deception. He omitted the overt who is not more sophisticated than Gimpel?) understands
anti-Christian references contained in the as drawing an association between Elka and Eve as sexual
Yiddish original. sinners: “There isn’t a woman in the world who is not the
granddaughter of Eve.” Similarly, when Gimpel seems to
Hadda doesn’t list the anti-Christian omissions of the take at face value the proposition that Yoyzel had no father,
translation, but they are easily gleaned from a comparison the reader understands that Gimpel’s naiveté extends
of the two versions. Two are brief references to Elka, com- beyond his wife’s evasions to include even the “absurdities”
paring her first, in appearance, to a shiksa and then, in her of Christianity. The reference is anti-Christian because it
swearing, to a goy. But the third and longest reference is assumes that the reader will see in it evidence of the
most striking. Greenberg omitted an entire line, the final extremity of Gimpel’s foolishness: he is such a fool, the
one, from a scene that begins with Gimpel’s confrontation omitted line implies, that he believes the one thing that no
of his wife, who has given birth suspiciously soon after other Jew has ever swallowed – that Jesus’s mother, Mary
their wedding. In Bellow’s version: (like his wife, Elka), was a virgin!
Given his initial audience, Bashevis hardly needs to
“How can he be mine?” I argued. “He was born make any of this explicit. Yiddish speakers would be fully
seventeen weeks after the marriage.” She told me aware of the long tradition, going back to the Talmud, of a
then that he was premature. I said, “Isn’t he a little Jewish counterhistory to the Gospel accounts of Jesus’s
too premature?” She said, she had had a grand- origins. In all its various versions, Jesus is an illegitimate
mother who carried just as short a time and she child whose mother consorted with Roman soldiers,
resembled this grandmother of hers as one drop of or was tricked into sex by a neighbor, but in any case
water does another. She swore to it with such oaths conceived Jesus through the usual human channels.
that you would have believed a peasant at the fair if Greenberg’s apparently minor omission, then, does more
he had used them. To tell the plain truth, I didn’t than just skip over the anti-Christian sentiments in the
believe her; but when I talked it over next day with story; it also contributes to the erasure of the entire (often
the schoolmaster, he told me that the very same comic) tradition of Jewish attitudes toward Christianity.
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Greenberg’s censorship of the Yiddish, in his recitation unavoidable, one alluded to Christ, lowering one’s
to the American-born Bellow, is not surprising. Yiddish, as voice and looking around with circumspection; it is
well as other Jewish languages, preserves Jewish attitudes best to speak of Christ as little as possible because
toward non-Jews, Christianity, and Jesus only in coded the myth of the God-killing people dies hard.
form, in language specifically designed to be incompre-
hensible to any non-Jewish listener. An anti-Christian As modernizing Jewish communities moved away
work called Toldot Yeshu,“The History of Jesus,” circulated from Jewish languages to speak the languages of their co-
underground in Jewish communities in the medieval and territorialists and share in their cultural assumptions,
early modern period; it remained unpublished because it these linguistic artifacts of premodern Jewish discourse
was perceived, for good reason, to be a document that were largely left behind, not translated. In the English-
Yiddish, as well as other Jewish languages, preserves Jewish attitudes toward
non-Jews, Christianity, and Jesus only in coded form, in language specifically
designed to be incomprehensible to any non-Jewish listener.
could endanger the Jews if it fell into the wrong hands – speaking world American Jews shared with non-Jews,
that is, into non-Jewish hands. Such coded discourse gleeful Jewish tales about Mary’s sexual adventures could
seems to be common to Jewish communities throughout no longer be circulated in a purely a Jewish “code.” But
Christendom. In The Periodic Table, Primo Levi describes Jewish society had also, in an important sense, moved past
the language used for discussing the realm of Christianity the attitudes that underlay these anti-Christian traditions
in his own Jewish-Piedmontese dialect of Italian. As Levi and embraced a liberal, tolerant cultural politics. No
writes, “The original Hebraic form is corrupted much wonder that Greenberg (instinctively or with calculation)
more profoundly” in discussing Christianity than it is in dropped Bashevis’s mention of “Yoyzel.” Not only would
the code used in commercial settings, as by Jewish store- Bellow’s American audience probably fail to get the joke,
keepers in the presence of a Gentile customer. As Levi but for those English readers – Jewish or not – who did get
explains, there are two reasons for this obfuscation: it, the line might well be construed as tasteless or offensive.
Greenberg’s omission of the line about “Yoyzel” is in this
In the first place, secrecy was rigorously necessary way part and parcel of Jewish Americanization. The trajec-
here because their comprehension by Gentiles could tory of this cultural self-transformation is laid out clearly
have entailed the danger of being charged with sac- enough in the vagaries of “Gimpl Tam”: from Bashevis as
rilege; in the second place, the distortion in this case Yiddish writer, to Greenberg as emissary from the world of
acquires the precise aim of denying, obliterating the Eastern Europe to the New York literary scene, and finally to
sacral content of the word, and thus divesting it of Bellow in Princeton and ultimately the Nobel Committee in
all supernatural value.…A-issá is the Madonna Stockholm. It’s simply to be expected that a Jewish joke
(simply, that is, “the woman”). Completely cryptic involving Jesus was quietly deleted along the way.
and indecipherable – and that has to be foreseen – is It is also possible that Greenberg or Bellow found these
the term Odo, with which, when it was absolutely moments not so much offensive to Christian sensibilities
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as simply untranslatable. The Yiddish makes full use of the Yeshu, Gimpel is a cuckold who takes his unfaithful bride
universe of discourse Gimpel inhabits, in which the asym- into his home and accepts her bastard son as his own. And
metries of Jew and goy are fully encoded in language and it is not only Joseph who is recalled in Gimpel’s marital sit-
thought, the lehavdil loshn of traditional Ashkenaz that uation. In a recurring theme of Jewish folklore, Christians
distinguishes what is Jewish and what belongs to “them.” in general are viewed as sexually gullible, naively taken in
In the English, though, the (relatively) neutral range of the by Mary’s “virginity”; Gimpel, in this sense, is like a
words “goy” and “shiksa” is vacated – they can only be Christian, willing to believe in something as patently out-
heard as insults. And “Yoyzel,” with its combination of an rageous as a virgin birth. Because English readers failed to
see “Gimpel the Fool” as a retelling of the
Gospels in the tradition of the Toldot Yeshu,
they neatly reversed the story’s ironic thrust,
presenting Gimpel’s foolishness as archetypi-
cally Jewish, that is, “oriental,” barbaric. In
Jewish identity in a Christian Bashevis’s Yiddish version, though, Gimpel is
somehow un-Jewish, insofar as Jews are
almost by definition too clever to be taken in
world, in a variety of contexts, is by philandering women.
The excised line is (indirectly) anti-
constructed by skepticism about Christian, but it is not completely anti-
Christian. The implied analogy between
the divinity of Jesus. To be a Jew, Joseph and Gimpel, Mary and Elka, is
ambivalent, and it extends in both directions.
that is, means not to believe in The analogy renders Gimpel and Elka some-
what “Christian” (as when Elka is described as
Jesus’s resurrection. looking like a shiksa), but it also reminds us
that Joseph and Mary were, after all, Jews.
Although Elka’s infidelities are ultimately
made perfectly clear, Bashevis also encourages
us to see her from Gimpel’s perspective, and to
respect the lengths to which a man will go to
almost affectionate familiarity and barely disguised con- believe his wife and salvage his family life (including citing
tempt – the contempt for Christian notions of Jesus’s Jesus’s birth as prooftext!). Thus Gimpel’s naivete comes
divinity implied in the very Yiddishizing of Jesus through with its own near-religious justification. The passage con-
the familiar diminutive – also depends on the concerted tinues: “I began to forget my sorrow. I loved the child
workings of Yiddish grammar and Ashkenazic culture. In madly, and he loved me.” Gimpel’s foolishness, here and
these cases, there is no “faithful” translation or translitera- elsewhere, is at least partially redeemed by his capacity for
tion. Nevertheless, for an American audience the effect of love, a capacity inextricable from what could be called his
these omissions is to transform “Gimpel” into a story that willing suspension of disbelief.
is solely about Jews. That these exotic Jews might them- From this point of view, the redeemed Gimpel, as
selves have a critical perspective on non-Jews is lost at pre- foolish as a Christian, implicitly redeems the foolish, love-
cisely the moment the story becomes available to non- struck Christians, too. What is so striking, and so modern,
Jewish readers. about Bashevis’s take on the Gospel account is that while
This loss is not trivial: Bashevis’s reference to Jesus, he renders Jesus’s origins with as much skepticism as ear-
although it is only a single line, is crucial to understanding lier Jewish narratives, he finds a new hero in the story that
the story. “Gimpel the Fool” refers to the New Testament neither Jewish nor Christian sources have ever discerned:
throughout, and not only in the one line that makes these Joseph, the father of Jesus. It is he who is the hero of the
Christian allusions explicit. Like the Joseph of Toldot Gospels, not despite his status as cuckold but precisely
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because of it. Christianity, by replacing the “legal” patrilin- guided. Gimpel, from beginning to end, somehow knows
eage traceable through Joseph with a supernatural link he is being fooled, and his character is made considerably
with God, obscured not only its Jewish roots but also the less saintly by a barely suppressed rage that finally does
human heroism of its not-quite-founding father. The his- succeed in expressing itself. When Gimpel goes into “exile”
tory of the Jewish “reclamation” of Jesus in the modern at the end of the story, his leave-taking of the children per-
period is well known. What has been hidden in this trans- fectly captures the tension between his simplicity and
lation is that Bashevis participated in this history and even complexity: On the one hand, he distributes his posses-
went a step further – to reclaim Joseph, not as the foster sions among them as token of his continued paternal sup-
father of God, but precisely in the full human indignity of port; on the other hand, he abandons them and never
his role as the husband of a fallen woman. looks back. In the final analysis, it does matter that the chil-
“Gimpel the Fool” thus casts its story of skepticism and dren are not his own.
naivete, virginity and promiscuity against the drama of If “Gimpel the Fool” resolves the tension between skep-
Jewish-Christian difference, where the questions of reli- ticism and belief, it does so only at the very end of the
gious and sexual belief, of believing in God and believing story, in the realm of the imagination:
in your wife can be intimately linked. Gimpel’s famous
defense of his condition – “Today it’s your wife you don’t I wandered over the land.… I heard a great deal,
believe; tomorrow it’s God Himself you don’t take stock many lies and falsehoods, but the longer I lived the
in” – has a persuasiveness in Christianity that Gimpel more I understood that there were really no lies.
recasts as native Jewish insight. Bashevis’s conflation of Whatever doesn’t really happen is dreamed at night.
Christianity with quasi-Jewish piety is radical indeed. His … Going from place to place, eating at strange
story itself is evidence of the degree to which skepticism – tables, it often happens that I spin yarns – improb-
rather than naive belief – is marked in the Yiddish as a able things that could never have happened [in the
Jewish trait: When, at the beginning of the story, Gimpel is Yiddish “nisht geshtoygen, nisht gefloygen”] – about
informed that his mother and father have stood up from devils, magicians, windmills and the like.
the grave, he responds that although he knew the report
was “nisht geshtoygen nisht gefloygen,” he thought he might From this perspective, Gimpel’s vision of Elka as a
as well go and see for himself. “Nisht geshtoygen nisht tsadeykes (saintly woman) finds its level of truth in the
gefloygen,” of course, means “baloney!” (Bellow renders it alchemy of the dreaming mind rather than the Frampol
“I knew very well that nothing of the sort had happened.”) court of opinion. As a yarn-spinner, Gimpel also delivers a
More literally, the idiom means “neither stood nor flew” – manifesto for the modernist Yiddish writer on the
appropriately enough for denying a resurrection. In reacti- European stage, who finds his place beyond Jewish-
vating the literal meaning of this stock phrase, Gimpel also Christian oppositions, in an arena in which shtetl demons
reminds us of its derivations in the Jewish disbelief that rub shoulders with Cervantes’s windmills. In this realm,
Christ ever arose from the grave, much less “flew.” The the artist-storyteller belongs as profoundly to Christianity
ubiquity of the phrase in common Yiddish speech signals as to Judaism. If “Gimpel the Fool” makes any statement
the extent to which Jewish identity in a Christian world, in about the relationship between Christianity and Judaism,
a variety of contexts, is constructed by skepticism about religion and literature, it is that kinship makes a double
the divinity of Jesus. To be a Jew, that is, means not to claim: through the mechanics of biology and through the
believe in Jesus’s resurrection. Gimpel is part of this cul- irrational persuasions of fantasy and love. PT
ture that links skepticism with Jewish rejections of
Christian claims, but he is also different, an orphan and Naomi Seidman is associate professor of Jewish culture
eternal optimist who, although he knows better, thinks he and the director of the Richard S. Dinner Center for Jewish
has nothing to lose by hoping for the best – parents who Studies at the Graduate Theological Union in Berkeley,
rise from the grave, a wife who is faithful to him, and chil- CA. Her first book, A Marriage Made in Heaven: The
dren he can honestly call his own. Sexual Politics of Hebrew and Yiddish, appeared in 1997.
It is tempting, especially when we use a Christian lens, She is currently working on another book about the poli-
to view Gimpel as a “holy fool.” I think this reading is mis- tics of Jewish translation.
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