Nobody’s Fool
Simple Gimpl bills itself as “The Definitive Bilingual Edition” of Isaac Bashevis Singer’s signature short story.
By Julian Levinson
The story, originally “Gimpl tam” in Yiddish, is familiar to English readers as “Gimpel the Fool,” the title Saul Bellow used for his famous 1953 translation. The new, definitive edition contains Singer’s original Yiddish text together with Bellow’s version, alongside a new translation by David Stromberg
remarkably, Singer himself. As Stromberg explains in the afterword, in 2006 he came upon a journal containing a dramatization of the story that Singer had produced in English in the YIVO archives. The play contained about 60 percent of the original story, and eventually, Stromberg realized that he could use Singer’s text as the basis for a new and more faithful translation of “Gimpl tam.” It is not clear precisely which parts of the new translation belong to Singer and which to Stromberg, but the results read smoothly, without any obvious seams.
Originally written in 1945, Singer’s story takes the reader back to a prewar shtetl called Frampol, home of the gullible Gimpl, who is deceived by everyone, especially his faithless wife. Eventually, the Spirit of Evil appears before Gimpl and tempts him to punish the townsfolk for their mistreatment of him. When his deceased wife visits him in a dream and warns Gimpl of the agonies awaiting the sinful, Gimpl abandons his plan for revenge and leaves Frampol and its malignancies. He becomes a wandering storyteller, spinning yarns for all he meets.