Gimpel the Fool

Gimpel the Fool, short story by Isaac Bashevis Singer, published in 1945 in Yiddish as “Gimpl tam.” A translation by Saul Bellow published in Partisan Review in 1953 introduced a large audience of English-speaking readers to Singer’s fiction. The story was later published in Singer’s collection Gimpel the Fool and Other Stories (1957). Set in a bygone era in an eastern European shtetl, the tale presents the title character, a gullible man who responds to a lifetime of betrayal, heckling, and deception with childlike acceptance and complete faith.