Gimpel the Fool

Gimpel the Fool is a Yiddish short story by the Polish-American writer Isaac Bashevis Singer, published in 1953 and translated into English that same year by Saul Bellow; it later gave its title to a 1957 English-language collection of Singer's stories. The story is narrated by Gimpel, a simple village bread baker who becomes the target of his townspeople's constant ridicule and practical jokes, and whose wife Elka repeatedly betrays him, yet who chooses again and again to believe what he is told rather than assume the worst of others. The narrative turns on a moment of temptation in which the devil urges Gimpel to take revenge on the town by contaminating his bread, a course he ultimately refuses, and the scholar David Roskies has read the story as a modernist reworking of an earlier tale by the Hasidic master Nachman of Bratslav, with Gimpel's stubborn faith in others read as a form of holy foolishness.