Who's the Fool?: Isaac Bashevis Singer in America - Yiddish Book ...

BY NAOMI SEIDMANWho’stheFool?IsaacBashevisSingerin AmericaThe first of Isaac Bashevis Singer’s works to appear in English translation, publishedin 1950 by Knopf, was his novel The Family Moskat. It was Saul Bellow’smuch-admired 1953 translation of the short story “Gimpel the Fool,” though,that truly inaugurated Bashevis’s remarkable career in English. The story, first publishedin Yiddish in 1945, takes place in the shtetl of Frampol and describes the travailsof Gimpel, the town fool, whose extravagant gullibility renders him the butt ofFrampol’s jokesters. As Gimpel recounts,When the pranksters and leg-pullers found that I was easy to fool, every one ofthem 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 treasurebehind the bathhouse.” And I like a golem believed everyone.Gimpel’s life takes a dramatic turn when he is persuaded by the townspeople tomarry Elka, “no chaste maiden, but they told me she was virgin pure.” Five monthslater, a son is born, whom Elka swears is Gimpel’s. Although Gimpel is (justifiably) suspicious,he comes to love Elka and takes the child as his own. The story describesGimpel’s dawning awareness of his wife’s multiple infidelities and, in general, of thecruelty of his fellow townspeople. Embittered by Elka’s deathbed confession, Gimpeltakes impulsive revenge on Frampol by urinating in the dough he is preparing as thetown baker. But he quickly repents of his action, burying the loaves and then takingleave 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.18 SUMMER 2004

In the American literary arena of the 1950s, Bashevis’snarrative world was still utterly exotic; as one reviewer putit, Bellow’s English version of Bashevis captured “the barbaric,oriental flavor that one associates with EasternJews.” With the appearance of Irving Howe and EliezerGreenberg’s Treasury of Yiddish Stories, in which “Gimpelthe Fool” was featured, Sidra DeKoven Ezrahi writes,“1953 becomes the year that inaugurates the Americanattempt to reclaim a lost Jewish place and a severed Jewishstory.” Sensitive critics realized that “Gimpel the Fool” wasnot only ethnographical portraiture, it was also modernistliterature. As “simple” as Gimpel is, he is also a complexand fully realized character, both thoroughly immersed inhis traditional milieu and isolated from the main currentsof its community life.All agreed that Bellow’s translation was a masterpiece,presenting a voice in English that was both new and thatseemed, somehow, to have always been there. Bellow hadnot only brought Bashevis’s Yiddish into literary English,he had also succeeded in fashioning a Yiddish-infusedEnglish utterly removed from the “coarse” immigrantspeech with which Yiddish had previously been associated.DeKoven Ezrahi and other critics have suggested thathowever great the debt Bashevis owed to Bellow forintroducing him to the world of English letters,Bellow’s own subsequent style was at least asbeholden to Bashevis’s Yiddish idiom.As with all translations, however, therewere also measurable losses: ChoneShmeruk and Anita Norich have (separately)drawn attention to the leveling, inthe English, of the Yiddish story’s very firstlines. While the Yiddish begins: “Ich binGimpel tam. Ich halt mikh nisht far keynnar,” Bellow rendered the two distinctterms “tam” and “nar” with formsof the word “fool”: “I am Gimpelthe fool. I don’t consider myselffoolish.” Tam,ofHebrew derivation,means something like“simple” or “innocent” (familiar asthe third of “the four sons” in thePassover Haggadah). The German-derived“nar,” by contrast, lacks any positive connotationsand more simply refers to a fool. Perhaps unavoidably, theEnglish fails to register fully the difference between the“tam” Gimpel acknowledges as part of his name and the“nar” he denies that he is. With the publication of theGerman translation of the story in 1968, entitled “Gimpelder Narr,” the difference between foolishness and simplicityso crucial to the story’s Yiddish opening was completelyforgotten. Gimpel was, the title asserted, exactlywhat the townspeople considered him – a Narr.Another serious translation loss in Bellow’s version wasless often discussed by the critics. As Janet Hadda’s biographyof Bashevis recounts, the translation also elidedwhat Hadda calls “the anti-Christian references” in“Gimpel the Fool.” While the translation problem oftam /nar rested primarily on linguistic difficulties – asNorich points out, “Gimpel the Simple” would have introducedan inappropriate rhyme – the issues involved intranslating Bashevis’s references to Christianity were

ather a matter of cultural politics. Hadda describes howthese passages were censored. As it turns out, it was notBellow, but Eliezer Greenberg, Bashevis’s European-borneditor and friend, who was responsible:[T]he real break for Bashevis, his introductionto American readers who could appreciate him,was the 1953 appearance, in the prestigiousPartisan Review, of “Gimpel the Fool,” masterfullytranslated by Saul Bellow. Although not Europeanborn,Bellow was ideally suited to render Bashevisinto English for a cosmopolitan audience.…Nonetheless, he was at first reluctant to undertakethe assignment. Approached by Eliezer Greenberg,Bellow initially declined. He was teaching atPrinceton University and finishing his novel, TheAdventures of Augie March. He simply didn’t havethe time, he told Greenberg. But Greenberg,undeterred, suggested he could come to Bellowand read the Yiddish to him; Bellow couldtranslate right onto the typewriter.And so it was – which allowed Greenberg toexercise a bit of deception. He omitted the overtanti-Christian references contained in theYiddish original.Hadda doesn’t list the anti-Christian omissions of thetranslation, but they are easily gleaned from a comparisonof the two versions. Two are brief references to Elka, comparingher first, in appearance, to a shiksa and then, in herswearing, to a goy. But the third and longest reference ismost striking. Greenberg omitted an entire line, the finalone, from a scene that begins with Gimpel’s confrontationof his wife, who has given birth suspiciously soon aftertheir wedding. In Bellow’s version:“How can he be mine?” I argued. “He was bornseventeen weeks after the marriage.” She told methen that he was premature. I said, “Isn’t he a littletoo premature?” She said, she had had a grandmotherwho carried just as short a time and sheresembled this grandmother of hers as one drop ofwater does another. She swore to it with such oathsthat you would have believed a peasant at the fair ifhe had used them. To tell the plain truth, I didn’tbelieve her; but when I talked it over next day withthe schoolmaster, he told me that the very samething had happened to Adam and Eve. Two theywent up to bed, and four they descended.“There isn’t a woman in the world who is not thegranddaughter of Eve,” he said.That was how it was; they argued me dumb. Butthen, who really knows how such things are?While the English passage ends there, the Yiddish continueswith the sentence Greenberg omitted in his dictationto Bellow: “Ot zugt men dokh, az s’yoyzel hot ingantzen keyn tatn nisht gehat.” Or in my own translation:“After all, they say that Yoyzel didn’t have a father at all.”It’s worth reflecting on why Greenberg perceived theline “they say that Yoyzel didn’t have a father at all” as ananti-Christian reference. The insult to Christians (exceptperhaps in the “affectionate” diminutive “Yoyzel,” or“Jesus’l”) seems indirect at best. But this indirection can beclarified by reference to the earlier conversation in the passagebetween Gimpel and the schoolmaster. The schoolmastercites the Talmud in a way that Gimpel hears as reaffirmingthe possibility that his wife indeed gave birth veryprematurely, but that the more sophisticated reader (andwho is not more sophisticated than Gimpel?) understandsas drawing an association between Elka and Eve as sexualsinners: “There isn’t a woman in the world who is not thegranddaughter of Eve.” Similarly, when Gimpel seems totake at face value the proposition that Yoyzel had no father,the reader understands that Gimpel’s naiveté extendsbeyond his wife’s evasions to include even the “absurdities”of Christianity. The reference is anti-Christian because itassumes that the reader will see in it evidence of theextremity of Gimpel’s foolishness: he is such a fool, theomitted line implies, that he believes the one thing that noother Jew has ever swallowed – that Jesus’s mother, Mary(like his wife, Elka), was a virgin!Given his initial audience, Bashevis hardly needs tomake any of this explicit. Yiddish speakers would be fullyaware of the long tradition, going back to the Talmud, of aJewish counterhistory to the Gospel accounts of Jesus’sorigins. In all its various versions, Jesus is an illegitimatechild whose mother consorted with Roman soldiers,or was tricked into sex by a neighbor, but in any caseconceived Jesus through the usual human channels.Greenberg’s apparently minor omission, then, does morethan just skip over the anti-Christian sentiments in thestory; it also contributes to the erasure of the entire (oftencomic) tradition of Jewish attitudes toward Christianity.20 SUMMER 2004

as simply untranslatable. The Yiddish makes full use of theuniverse of discourse Gimpel inhabits, in which the asymmetriesof Jew and goy are fully encoded in language andthought, the lehavdil loshn of traditional Ashkenaz thatdistinguishes what is Jewish and what belongs to “them.”In the English, though, the (relatively) neutral range of thewords “goy” and “shiksa” is vacated – they can only beheard as insults. And “Yoyzel,” with its combination of anJewish identity in a Christianworld, in a variety of contexts, isconstructed by skepticism aboutthe divinity of Jesus. To be a Jew,that is, means not to believe inJesus’s resurrection.almost affectionate familiarity and barely disguised contempt– the contempt for Christian notions of Jesus’sdivinity implied in the very Yiddishizing of Jesus throughthe familiar diminutive – also depends on the concertedworkings of Yiddish grammar and Ashkenazic culture. Inthese cases, there is no “faithful” translation or transliteration.Nevertheless, for an American audience the effect ofthese omissions is to transform “Gimpel” into a story thatis solely about Jews. That these exotic Jews might themselveshave a critical perspective on non-Jews is lost at preciselythe moment the story becomes available to non-Jewish readers.This loss is not trivial: Bashevis’s reference to Jesus,although it is only a single line, is crucial to understandingthe story. “Gimpel the Fool” refers to the New Testamentthroughout, and not only in the one line that makes theseChristian allusions explicit. Like the Joseph of ToldotYeshu, Gimpel is a cuckold who takes his unfaithful brideinto his home and accepts her bastard son as his own. Andit is not only Joseph who is recalled in Gimpel’s marital situation.In a recurring theme of Jewish folklore, Christiansin general are viewed as sexually gullible, naively taken inby Mary’s “virginity”; Gimpel, in this sense, is like aChristian, willing to believe in something as patently outrageousas a virgin birth. Because English readers failed tosee “Gimpel the Fool” as a retelling of theGospels in the tradition of the Toldot Yeshu,they neatly reversed the story’s ironic thrust,presenting Gimpel’s foolishness as archetypicallyJewish, that is, “oriental,” barbaric. InBashevis’s Yiddish version, though, Gimpel issomehow un-Jewish, insofar as Jews arealmost by definition too clever to be taken inby philandering women.The excised line is (indirectly) anti-Christian, but it is not completely anti-Christian. The implied analogy betweenJoseph and Gimpel, Mary and Elka, isambivalent, and it extends in both directions.The analogy renders Gimpel and Elka somewhat“Christian” (as when Elka is described aslooking like a shiksa), but it also reminds usthat Joseph and Mary were, after all, Jews.Although Elka’s infidelities are ultimatelymade perfectly clear, Bashevis also encouragesus to see her from Gimpel’s perspective, and torespect the lengths to which a man will go tobelieve his wife and salvage his family life (including citingJesus’s birth as prooftext!). Thus Gimpel’s naivete comeswith its own near-religious justification. The passage continues:“I began to forget my sorrow. I loved the childmadly, and he loved me.” Gimpel’s foolishness, here andelsewhere, is at least partially redeemed by his capacity forlove, a capacity inextricable from what could be called hiswilling suspension of disbelief.From this point of view, the redeemed Gimpel, asfoolish as a Christian, implicitly redeems the foolish, lovestruckChristians, too. What is so striking, and so modern,about Bashevis’s take on the Gospel account is that whilehe renders Jesus’s origins with as much skepticism as earlierJewish narratives, he finds a new hero in the story thatneither Jewish nor Christian sources have ever discerned:Joseph, the father of Jesus. It is he who is the hero of theGospels, not despite his status as cuckold but precisely22 SUMMER 2004

ecause of it. Christianity, by replacing the “legal” patrilineagetraceable through Joseph with a supernatural linkwith God, obscured not only its Jewish roots but also thehuman heroism of its not-quite-founding father. The historyof the Jewish “reclamation” of Jesus in the modernperiod is well known. What has been hidden in this translationis that Bashevis participated in this history and evenwent a step further – to reclaim Joseph, not as the fosterfather of God, but precisely in the full human indignity ofhis role as the husband of a fallen woman.“Gimpel the Fool” thus casts its story of skepticism andnaivete, virginity and promiscuity against the drama ofJewish-Christian difference, where the questions of religiousand sexual belief, of believing in God and believingin your wife can be intimately linked. Gimpel’s famousdefense of his condition – “Today it’s your wife you don’tbelieve; tomorrow it’s God Himself you don’t take stockin” – has a persuasiveness in Christianity that Gimpelrecasts as native Jewish insight. Bashevis’s conflation ofChristianity with quasi-Jewish piety is radical indeed. Hisstory itself is evidence of the degree to which skepticism –rather than naive belief – is marked in the Yiddish as aJewish trait: When, at the beginning of the story, Gimpel isinformed that his mother and father have stood up fromthe grave, he responds that although he knew the reportwas “nisht geshtoygen nisht gefloygen,” he thought he mightas well go and see for himself. “Nisht geshtoygen nishtgefloygen,” of course, means “baloney!” (Bellow renders it“I knew very well that nothing of the sort had happened.”)More literally, the idiom means “neither stood nor flew” –appropriately enough for denying a resurrection. In reactivatingthe literal meaning of this stock phrase, Gimpel alsoreminds us of its derivations in the Jewish disbelief thatChrist ever arose from the grave, much less “flew.” Theubiquity of the phrase in common Yiddish speech signalsthe extent to which Jewish identity in a Christian world, ina variety of contexts, is constructed by skepticism aboutthe divinity of Jesus. To be a Jew, that is, means not tobelieve in Jesus’s resurrection. Gimpel is part of this culturethat links skepticism with Jewish rejections ofChristian claims, but he is also different, an orphan andeternal optimist who, although he knows better, thinks hehas nothing to lose by hoping for the best – parents whorise from the grave, a wife who is faithful to him, and childrenhe can honestly call his own.It is tempting, especially when we use a Christian lens,to view Gimpel as a “holy fool.” I think this reading is misguided.Gimpel, from beginning to end, somehow knowshe is being fooled, and his character is made considerablyless saintly by a barely suppressed rage that finally doessucceed in expressing itself. When Gimpel goes into “exile”at the end of the story, his leave-taking of the children perfectlycaptures the tension between his simplicity andcomplexity: On the one hand, he distributes his possessionsamong them as token of his continued paternal support;on the other hand, he abandons them and neverlooks back. In the final analysis, it does matter that the childrenare not his own.If “Gimpel the Fool” resolves the tension between skepticismand belief, it does so only at the very end of thestory, in the realm of the imagination:I wandered over the land.… I heard a great deal,many lies and falsehoods, but the longer I lived themore I understood that there were really no lies.Whatever doesn’t really happen is dreamed at night.… Going from place to place, eating at strangetables, it often happens that I spin yarns – improbablethings that could never have happened [in theYiddish “nisht geshtoygen, nisht gefloygen”] – aboutdevils, magicians, windmills and the like.From this perspective, Gimpel’s vision of Elka as atsadeykes (saintly woman) finds its level of truth in thealchemy of the dreaming mind rather than the Frampolcourt of opinion. As a yarn-spinner, Gimpel also delivers amanifesto for the modernist Yiddish writer on theEuropean stage, who finds his place beyond Jewish-Christian oppositions, in an arena in which shtetl demonsrub shoulders with Cervantes’s windmills. In this realm,the artist-storyteller belongs as profoundly to Christianityas to Judaism. If “Gimpel the Fool” makes any statementabout the relationship between Christianity and Judaism,religion and literature, it is that kinship makes a doubleclaim: through the mechanics of biology and through theirrational persuasions of fantasy and love. PTNaomi Seidman is associate professor of Jewish cultureand the director of the Richard S. Dinner Center for JewishStudies at the Graduate Theological Union in Berkeley,CA. Her first book, A Marriage Made in Heaven: TheSexual Politics of Hebrew and Yiddish, appeared in 1997.She is currently working on another book about the politicsof Jewish translation.23 PAKN TREGER