Critical Essay | Critical Essay by Edward Alexander

Critical Essay by Edward Alexander

SOURCE: Alexander, Edward. “The Short Stories: ‘Gimpel the Fool’.” In Isaac Bashevis Singer, pp. 143-46. Boston: Twayne Publishers, 1980.

In the following essay, Alexander examines Gimpel as a schlemiel figure and considers “Gimpel the Fool” as a commentary on the Jewish Holocaust during World War II.

“Gimpel the Fool” (in Gimpel the Fool …) is without question Singer's best-known, most frequently anthologized, and most thoroughly studied short story. When Saul Bellow's translation of it appeared in Partisan Review in 1953, the barrier of parochialism which has kept the American literary world ignorant of even the greatest of Yiddish writers in the United States was lowered long enough for Singer to make his escape from the cage of Yiddish into the outside world. But even those critics who, like the Shakespeare scholar Paul Siegel, have located Gimpel, as the wise or sainted fool, within the most pervasive archetypes of Western literature,...
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