by Isaac Bashevis Singer

Isaac Bashevis Singer, the son of Pinchas Mendel Singer and Bathsheba Zylberman, was born in 1904 in the Polish village of Leoncin. His father, an impoverished Hasidic Rabbi, proudly claimed to be a descendant of Rabbi Israel Ben Eliezer, the founder of Eastern European Hasidism. His mother was the offspring of an austere anti-Hasidic rabbi, whose approach to the study of traditional Jewish law and contempt for Hasidic mysticism foredoomed the marriage. The Hasidic's love of folklore, miracles, and marvels clashed with traditional Jewry's faith in the wisdom of painstaking study and scholarship. These two strains of mystical and traditional Judaism appear in "Yentl, the Yeshiva Boy" as well as many other short stories by Singer that dramatize the tension between the rational and the inscrutable.

Events in History at the Time the Short Story Takes Place

A tradition...