Simple Gimpl

Isaac Bashevis Singer (1904–1991) was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1978. An immigrant from Poland, he arrived in New York following the steps of his older brother, Israel Joshua Singer. He wrote essays, stories, and other writings for the Forverts, at times under pseudonym. Saul Bellow translated his story “Gimpel the Fool,” which heralded his talent for a young generation of American Jewish readers. For years Singer published his stories in The New Yorker, where he developed a distinct style. His numerous books include Satan in Goray (1935), Gimpel the Fool and Other Stories (1957), The Magician of Lublin (1960), The Slave (1962), The Spinoza of Market Street (1963), A Friend of Kafka and Other Stories (1970), Enemies, a Love Story (1972), Old Love (1979), and Shadows on the Hudson (1997). His work has been translated into dozens of languages.Saul Bellow (1915 - 2005) was born of Russian Jewish parents in Lachine, Quebec, and was raised in Chicago. He received his bachelor’s degree from Northwestern University in 1937. His novel The Adventures of Augie March won the National Book Award for fiction in 1954. His further awards include the Pulitzer Prize for Humboldt’s Gift (1975); the International Literary Prize for Herzog, for which he became the first American recipient; and the Croix de Chevalier des Arts et Lettres, the highest literary distinction awarded by France to non-citizens. In 1976, Bellow was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature.Liana Finck is a regular contributor to The New Yorker, The Awl, and Catapult. She is a recipient of a Fulbright Fellowship, a New York Foundation for the Arts Fellowship, and a Six Points Fellowship for Emerging Jewish Artists. She has had artist residencies with the MacDowell Colony, Yaddo, the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council, and Tablet magazine. Her first book, A Bintel Brief, was published in 2014.David Stromberg, a writer, translator, and literary scholar, is editor for the Isaac Bashevis Singer Literary Trust. His books include Baddies, Idiot Love and the Elements of Intimacy, and A Short Inquiry into the End of the World. He is the editor of Old Truths and New Clichés: Essays by Isaac Bashevis Singer (Princeton, 2022).

• Editor’s Note Ilan StavansGimpel the Fool Isaac Bashevis Singer Translated from the Yiddish by Saul BellowSimple Gimpl Isaac Bashevis Singer Translated from the Yiddish by Isaac Bashevis Singer and David StrombergAfterword David Strombergגימפּל תּם יצחק באַשעװיס זינגערAbout the Author, Translators, and Illustrator

Praise for Isaac Bashevis Singer:“Singer’s stories have plots that unravel not because they are old-fashioned—they are mostly originals and have few recognizable modes other than their own—but because they contain the whole human world of affliction, error, quagmire, pain, calamity, catastrophe, woe: things happen; life is an ambush, a snare; one’s fate can never be predicted. His driven, mercurial processions of predicaments and transmogrifications are limitless, a cornucopia of invention.” —Cynthia Ozick“[Singer] is a spellbinder as clever as Scheherazade; he arrests the reader at once, transports him to a far place and a far, improbable time and does not let him go until the end.” —Jean Stafford, The New Republic“A peerless storyteller, Singer restores the sheer enchantment with story, with outcome, with what-happens-next that has been denied most readers since their adolescence.” —David Boroff, Saturday Review“Singer is a genius. He has total command of his imagined world.” —Irving Howe, The New Republic“Extraordinarily beautiful… It's the integrity of the human imagination that Singer conveys so beautifully.” —Alfred Kazin, The New Leader"[Singer’s]... impassioned narrative art… with roots in a Polish-Jewish cultural tradition, brings universal human conditions to life." —The Nobel Prize Committee, 1978