SOURCE: Hennings, Thomas. “Singer's ‘Gimpel the Fool’ and The Book of Hosea.” Journal of Narrative Technique 13, no. 1 (winter 1983): 11-19.

[In the following essay, Hennings views “Gimpel the Fool” as a modern rendition of The Book of Hosea.]

The most popular of I. B. Singer's short stories, “Gimpel the Fool” tells about a man who endures the derision of his neighbors for marrying, divorcing, and remarrying an adulterous wife. Shortly after Singer wrote the story in Yiddish for the Jewish Daily Forward, Saul Bellow published a translation in The Partisan Review and brought it to the attention of the American public. Since then it has been frequently anthologized, hailed as “the capstone of [Singer's] achievement,” and studied diligently by scholars who like to explain its disturbing epistemological themes or its Yiddish literary conventions, the most important of which defines Gimpel's character type, the stock figure of dos kleine menshele, the little man or schlemeil. According to the philosophical approach, analytic and synchronic, “Gimpel the Fool” depicts modern man struggling in “the locus in nuce of the anomie which [Singer] sees as endemic to the condition of the world.”

Deliberately to underscore the theme of ethical relativism, the confused and rambling narrative of the story instructs us to cling, like Gimpel, desperately to our delusions because “what is important is not what we may believe, but that we choose to believe it—our fidelity, our heart. Men are moved by falsehoods as by truths.” If this synchronic view, as a rule, wanders through popular academic cant to rest on sentimental impressionism, then the diachronic perspective, no less sentimental, is guilty of being too narrow and short-sighted. Singer himself has repudiated his historical critics when he insists he does “not write in the tradition of the Yiddish writers' ‘little man,’ because their little man is actually a victim—a man who is the victim of anti-Semitism, the economic situation, and so on. … Gimpel was not a little man.”¹ By limiting attention solely to Yiddish literary conventions, the historical critics have forgotten that Singer's literary heritage is more than Yiddish—it is Hebraic and reaches back to Sacred Scripture.

“Gimpel the Fool” was written for an audience of immigrants whose education, simple as it may have been, nevertheless made them sensitive to Biblical allusions and informed of the basic teachings of the Talmud. In “Gimpel the Fool,” Singer offers for their edification a modern rendition of The Book of Hosea. Many in the original audience, I believe, would have apprehended that Gimpel's life is modeled exactly after that of the great prophet of love, and that in this story Singer reinvigorates the message of the prophet while he tests the truth of Sacred Scripture by the observation of reality and an appeal to experience. In the life of Gimpel, Singer celebrates the Jewish theology of love, a theology that envisions God's relationship to a faithless mankind by means of the adulterous marriage metaphor made famous in The Book of Hosea. Singer not only takes from Hosea the evaluative metaphor that gives his story its intellectual dimension, he also takes the major characterization, the four major incidents of its plot and their structure, as well as the prophet's central images and symbols.

Not a rambling narrative but a tightly knit and symmetrically structured story, “Gimpel the Fool” reaffirms the validity of a providential universe. Singer neatly divides the story into four numbered sections, each imaginatively elaborating on one of Hosea's four incidents: first, the marriage to a whore—in Hosea she is the infamous “woman of harlotry” named Gomer; second, the cuckoldry, birth of the bastards, and divorce; third, the reconciliation, remarriage, and continued adultery; and fourth, the social application of it all, that is, the moral and theological implications of the adulterous marriage for the Jewish community. As in Hosea, so in “Gimpel,” section one is deliberately balanced against three, and section two against four.

By means of dramatic symbols Hosea teaches his countrymen what they must know about God and themselves by teaching them about love. In short, God is everlasting love who desires from mankind the love known as hesed—a real willingness to be the more loving one. He is symbolized by the knowing cuckold who keeps on loving. Like Hosea's sluttish wife, Gomer, Israel, God's wife, has become a whore—an apt comparison because syncretistic idolatry then involved sexual intercourse with the temple prostitutes of Baal. Although an anguished God may become angry with his faithless wife, punish her, even divorce her, His merciful love is everlasting. Hosea predicts the Assyrian captivity as a punishment and a divorce, the parallel of his own divorce of Gomer, but in the midst of enumerating the pains of captivity Hosea suddenly promises the grand reconciliation of God and Israel, the parallel and point of Hosea's remarriage of Gomer. Israel will come to love her Husband, return to Him in the Promised Land, and live with Him forever in Paradise.²

No Yiddish writers' schlemeil, Gimpel is drawn according to the divine analogy and the prophetic identification with God, the Loving One Unloved. As a modern Hosea longing for his adulterous wife's return, Gimpel reenacts the anguish of the God of love. Confronted with overwhelming evidence of the wife's adultery, Hosea speaks in oracular poetry for God: “How shall I deal with thee, O Ephraim, shall I protect thee, O Israel? … My heart is turned within me, my repentance is stirred up. I will not execute the fierceness of my wrath” (11: 8-9). The godlike Gimpel, depicted in psychologically realistic terms to which Singer's original audience could relate, simply says,

I wanted to be angry, but that's my misfortune exactly. I don't have it in me to be really angry. In the first place—this is how my thoughts went—there's bound to be a slip sometimes. You can't live without errors. … And then since she denies it so, maybe I was only seeing things? Hallucinations do happen. … And when I got so far in my thoughts, I started to weep. I sobbed so that I wet the flour where I lay. In the morning I went to the rabbi and told him I had made a mistake.

(pp. 12-13)

Gimpel's remarks proceed from his inability to be really angry and move on to forgiveness. In between is the possibility of error, the epistemological problem exciting to philosophical critics who are attracted to Gimpel's observations that the world is once removed from reality and that there are no lies. The problems Gimpel raises are no doubt capable of taking one through the intellectual maze of a Cartesian evil genius, if one is inclined to wander in that direction, but I suspect Singer's original audience was not so inclined. Versed well enough in the prophets and the Law, they may have seen the problems as religious, and they were probably more intrigued by the legal issues, immediately treated at some length by Singer, concerning a Jew's remarrying his divorced wife. Some may have even recalled that these legal problems have been brought up in most discussions of The Book of Hosea, and that a long tradition of commentary, including that of the great Moses Maimonides, has associated Hosea's reconciliation with the famous story of Judah and Tamar (Genesis 38: 6-26), a Biblical analogue about a good man who, among other things, is honestly mistaken when accusing a woman of adultery and who later repents, withdraws his accusation, and honors the woman.

According to the long interpretative traditions of Hosea, including the entire medieval exegesis, the prophet's story about his marriage to a temple prostitute is unhistorical. Although it is a lie of allegory, it is a fictive and eternal truth given by God in a dream. It was undoubtedly in a dream of the future that Hosea predicts, in highly charged erotic terms, God's reconciliation with Israel, a consolation matched by Singer's final scenes which transcend time in an erotic dreamworld where every night Elka comes to Gimpel's bed, something she did not do in the earlier parts of the story. The symmetrical balance follows the guide of Hosea and indicates that the wife's earlier, misguided eroticism has now reached its loving perfection:

… her face is shining and her eyes are as radiant as the eyes of a saint. … When I wake I have forgotten it all [what she says]. But while the dream lasts I am comforted. She answers all my queries, and what comes out is that all is right. … Sometimes she strokes and kisses me and weeps upon my face. When I awaken I feel her lips and taste the salt of her tears.

(p. 21)

Although in Hosea (as in “Gimpel”) the reunion of husband and repentant wife occurs in a dream, the Biblical commentators explain that the dream visions of a prophet are the truest perceptions of reality because they provide an eternal perspective. Any one time we see the world, we are likely to be so blinded by particular space and time that we get a false picture of things—Israel as cheap whore or as captive nation—at best partly true because it is removed from the reality of God's eternal perspective—Israel as the perfect wife. Mindful of temporal restrictions, Gimpel reaches much the same conclusion in his famous remark about the world being once removed from reality. A doctrine of his faith shared by the original audience, it is perhaps consonant, as the philosophical critics contend, with Spinoza's concept of the higher and lower modes of being and knowing, but it derives from the spirit and the vision of the prophets.

By stressing the technique of the prophetic dream-allegory in Hosea, many commentators have dismissed the question of divorce and remarriage as moot. No one is to take literally that a Jew married a temple prostitute, named her bastards “No child of mine” and the like, and then proceeded lovingly to raise them as his own. If the allegory is not clear enough, there remains the historical fact that it was impossible for a Jew of Hosea's day to remarry his divorced wife. Such marriages became explicitly forbidden by the Talmud (Joseph Karo, ‘Even Ha’Ezer, ‘Shulan Arukh’, 11:1, 115, 6ff.). Typical of the allegorists, Moses Maimonides resolves the question of divorce and remarriage in Hosea when he explains that the story is not historical. Only Moses received the word of God face to face, as it were; the other prophets received it in a dream, and their dreams are true. Hosea dreamt he married Gomer and the truth of his vision is no less for that. So too, Gimpel, the foolish man with the prophetic vision, comes to realize “that there were really no lies. Whatever doesn't happen is dreamed at night. It happens to one if it doesn't happen to another, tomorrow if not today, or a century hence if not next year” (p. 20). Yet, of course, there have always been literalists who insist that Hosea actually married, divorced, and remarried Gomer, and therefore much controversy has always surrounded the exegesis of Hosea. It is partly to this controversy that Singer, a son of a rabbi and a rabbinical student in his youth, alludes with his playful treatment of Gimpel's request to remarry, a request that causes so much trouble for the rabbis: “I hadn't realized there could be so much erudition about a matter like this” (p. 13).

In his imaginative elaboration upon the proceedings of the divorce and remarriage, Singer alludes directly to Moses Maimonides and the central tenets of the Jewish theology of love. The “obscure reference” to Maimonides discovered by the Yanover rabbi permitting Gimpel to remarry comes, I suspect, from an important passage in The Guide of the Perplexed Life. Concerned with love, compassion, repentance and forgiveness, Maimonides cites Hosea, but he does not discuss remarrying a divorced wife, since the Law forbids such a marriage. Instead, he takes up the question of withdrawing a testimony already given in court (which is what Gimpel actually does). His appeal is to Deuteronomy 6:5 and Leviticus 19:18 when he declares that the Law demands a reversal of testimony whenever the slightest doubt exists that the former accusation is true. He recalls the prescription in the Talmud quoted almost verbatim in “Gimpel the Fool” by the Frampol rabbi that one risks the loss of Paradise by calling a neighbor a fool (Abath di Rabbi Nathan, 3, 11), and he counsels that a Jew must be extremely hesitant in making any accusations. He refers to the Talmud (Baba Mitzia, 59), where “it is prescribed for a man to suffer death rather than to insult or cause shame to a fellow man.” This observation in the Mishnah comes from the story of Judah and Tamar, which is appropriate to Gimpel's accusing Elka of adultery. Sincerely believing he has been wronged, a righteous Judah mistakenly accuses Tamar of being “a woman of harlotry,” and she is to burn at the stake. She knows the name of the guilty party (the innocent Judah himself), but she refuses to reveal it, lest she sin by publicly making it known. When learning the truth, the surprised and edified Judah immediately withdraws his testimony. Indeed, there is a good deal of learning as well as pointed and playful irony behind Gimpel's discovering he too can withdraw his testimony and in his humble yet firm conclusion: “Maimonides says it is right, and therefore it is right!” (p. 15).³

After the reconciliation, the wife's adultery continues as it does in Hosea, for as in the prophetic work the final and complete reunion takes place in the last section which depicts on the social and supernatural levels the thematic concerns of love explored in the earlier sections. Ruth Wisse has observed that in the fourth part of the story Singer drops the narrative technique he used earlier in order to present Gimpel as a mystic engaged in a contemplative monologue.⁴ She is partly correct because Singer has approximated Hosea's prophetic vision, but the last section still retains a narrative frame. It completes the theme of marriage-divorce-remarriage on a social level. When Gimpel achieves the reciprocal love of Elka, he no longer remains an outsider among the Jews. He is welcomed and honored by them. Like Hosea, Singer explores the power of love to transcend hate and anger, space and time. The last section presents alternate displays of anger and love, anger symbolically directed not at the wife but, as in Hosea, at the community which has become identified with the faithless wife's values. It shifts suddenly to reveal a transcendent love for the wife and community, who, like Gomer-Israel in Hosea, becomes the story's only dynamic character.

In describing this transcendent love, Singer retains Hosea's crucial image pattern, the major symbolic motif of bread and baking. According to many exegetes, the prominence of bakery images in The Book of Hosea is accounted for by the prophet's being a baker by profession.⁵ Hence Singer makes Gimpel a professional baker, and like the prophet, Gimpel will leave his profession to wander the countryside, telling (and, according to the little fat boy at the end, retelling) his one story, the story of his marriage, which he also tells to us.

As the most important ingredient of a meal and as the basic sustenance of life, bread symbolizes in Judaic culture not only dependence on God but also union with Him because He provides out of the abundance of His steadfast love. Representing faith and hope in God, bread is the sign of the purity of spirit, the undefiled and reciprocal love between God and the community as well as the fellowship of the Jews who come together to share a meal. Because bread is sacred in character, dietary laws insist that careful attention be paid to its purity. In Biblical times, the purest of breads, also the holiest, were not the sacred Sabbath loaves. They were the twelve cakes or showbreads of the Temple laid before the altar to represent the holiness of each of the tribes. Because bread carries such deep religious meaning for the Jews, the prophets are particularly fond of using bread and food images in their curses and blessings. As a painful reminder of infidelity, the prophets warn that the people will lose their sacred breads and will have to eat impure foods—a sure sign of their being disowned by God. Graphically to underscore how defiled the faith of the people has become, how impure their spiritual life is, the prophets may employ scatological imagery in their food metaphors. In a dramatic and highly symbolic act, to cite perhaps the best known instance, Ezekiel is commanded by God to eat human dung (Ezek. 4:12-14).

Like other prophets Hosea warns that the faithless children of Israel will be divorced from God and have to eat impure foods. His famous epithet hurled at Ephraim, “you half-baked cake,” is an ugly image describing a pancake that has turned into an oily mess. It symbolizes how bad Jewish spiritual life had become. His promise of the return of pure foods when the Jews are reconciled to God replaces his earlier contempt for the syncretistic practice of eating pagan raisin cakes before engaging the services of the temple prostitutes.

As in Hosea, so in “Gimpel the Fool,” the impure bread images and the harlotry metaphor reinforce each other as manifestations of Jewish faithlessness. In the last section of the story, when Gimpel urinates in the dough and “the Spirit of Evil himself” curses, “Let the sages of Frampol eat filth” (p. 18), we witness more than a nasty prank, a petty and vindictive way to even the score, so to speak. The scene symbolizes that the people of Frampol, like Elka, are bad Jews. The act parallels the temporary divorce from Elka, just as the Assyrian captivity had been anticipated by Hosea's divorce of Gomer. The governing allusion, however, similarly indicates the coming reconciliation. The urinating in the dough is the climactic instance of anger from a man, like God, whose loving kindness will prevail.

Soiling the dough is antithetical to Gimpel's true nature; it is a temptation from the devil to embrace atheism and nihilism, the seductive doctrines of the modern Baalim, the perverters of hesed, whose secular charms are tempting many, as some in Singer's original audience would readily attest, to forsake the values of their fathers. The soiling is opposed to all of Gimpel's previous displays of love which had been conveyed in bakery images. Although Gimpel remarks about his marriage that “no bread will ever be baked from this dough” (p. 7), his love for Elka brings out the baker in him. He expresses his love in bakery images: “In the evening I brought her a white loaf as well as a dark one, and also poppyseed rolls I baked myself. I thieved because of her and swiped everything I could lay hands on: macaroons, raisins, almonds, cakes … She ate and became fat and handsome” (p. 10). Calling attention to the parallel with Hosea, who buys his wife, Singer makes Gimpel pay for Elka, although it is “the bride and not the groom who gives a dowry” (p. 7), and, like that of the earlier baker, Gimpel's love is as one-sided, as strong, as anguished, and as enduring. It is emblematic of God's love for a faithless world, and it finds its lyric expression in Gimpel's heartfelt desire to be reconciled to his estranged wife: “I sent daily a corn or wheat loaf, or a piece of pastry, rolls or bagels, or, when I got the chance, a slab of pudding, a slice of honeycake, or wedding strudel …” (p. 14). And after the reconciliation, when he catches Elka committing adultery with the apprentice, he expresses his pain in bread imagery as the loaf of bread he brought home for her falls from his hands (p. 15).

The anger and the hatred that motivate Gimpel's urinating in the dough are alien to both God and Gimpel's character (and symbolically antithetical to the tears of love with which Gimpel had previously wet the flour). It is with the thought of Elka, his beloved, that love returns once more and forever—“My heart is turned within me. … I will not execute the fierceness of my wrath.” According to the artistic patterns of the story, by urinating in the dough Gimpel not only associates with the devil of despair, he joins in the ranks of those who had previously mocked his faith. The mockers are scatological: “instead of raisins they give when a woman's lying in, they stuffed my hands full of goat turds” (p. 3). Here is an instance of scatology as symbolic antagonist of the purity of Jewish faith, as is the later reminder in the rabbinical court when Elka's child soils its diapers and has to be removed from the presence of the Ark of the Covenant.

Those who claim “Gimpel the Fool” begins in comedy and ends in tragic pathos have misread the story. Its final scenes, like those of Hosea, bring into accord the previous antagonism of themes and images. Gimpel, the faithful Jew, is no longer alienated from the reciprocal love of his marriage bed, nor is he estranged from the community. Like Hosea he progresses from foolish baker to beloved prophet. The antagonism between old and young is gone, a leitmotif that had sounded much of the conflict in the story. It is the young of Frampol who had mocked Gimpel. The older rabbi had consoled him, while the rabbi's daughter made fun of Gimpel's willingness to obey the Law. The young, cynical rabbinical student ridiculed Gimpel's old-fashioned faith, the belief in the coming of Messiah, the resurrection from the dead, and life everlasting. The boys in the village put goat turds in his hands, his apprentice cuckolded him, and the first man he caught in bed with Elka he called a “lad.” The schoolchildren threw burrs on his wedding day, but the old granny hugged the braided sabbath loaf. Apparently she understood what Gimpel's wedding symbolized for the community, and she probably understood how much the cynical youth of Frampol needed the repentance of Tishe b'Av. At the end of the story, however, the children no longer mock the faith of their fathers. They love Gimpel; they run to him, surround him, and implore him to tell them his story. Gimpel awaits the rewards of Paradise.

Like Hosea before him, Singer deliberately chooses to disturb his readers' complacent assumptions about God, about faith, love, wisdom, and folly—and about themselves. He wants to warn them against the Baalish philosophies of nihilism and despair; he wants to edify them, to make them think and to obtain with the help of his storytelling a brief, even faint insight into that grand and eternal truth of Jewish history—the steadfast love of God and the glory of hesed. By imaginatively projecting what it would be like to be Hosea today, or in the near recent past, Singer creates a deeply religious story about a man of simple faith who, because of his faith, has a godlike capacity for love, the ideal Jew, if you will. Singer also shares with us his artistic appreciation of the beloved, of the cynical Elka, or modern Gomer, Israel, mankind, and he reminds us of the promised consolation of reconciliation. We are God's beloved and therefore must retain at least some of our original appeal no matter how corrupt we may become. “Fat and handsome” Gimpel calls Elka. She must be a zaftig, and her husband must be happy each morning after to serve her breakfast in bed, fresh rolls and bagels, golden-brown pancakes, topped of course with plenty of butter and honey. “I am Gimpel the fool. I don't think myself a fool. On the contrary.”

Notes

1. “The Art of Fiction: An Interview with Isaac Bashevis Singer,” Paris Review, 44 (Fall 1968), 67-68. For a representative sampling of the diachronic school see Irving Howe, “I. B. Singer” in Critical Views of Isaac Bashevis Singer, Irving Malin, ed. (New York: New York University Press, 1969), p. 118; Alfred Kazin, “The Saint as Schlemeil,” Contemporaries (Boston: Little, Brown, 1962), pp. 283-288; Sanford Pinsker, The Schlemeil as Metaphor (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1971), pp. 55-86; Ruth Wisse, The Schlemeil as Modern Hero (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1971), pp. 60-65. For the synchronic approach see Irving Malin, Isaac Bashevis Singer (New York: Frederick Ungar Publishing Co., 1972), pp. 70-72; Eli Katz, “Isaac Bashevis Singer and the Classical Yiddish Tradition,” a repudiation of the historical approach, in The Achievement of Isaac Bashevis Singer, Marcia Allentuck, ed. (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1969), pp. 14-25; Paul Siegal, “Gimpel and the Archetype of the Wise Fool” in The Achievement, pp. 159-173; William H. Gass, “The Shut-in” in The Achievement, pp. 1-13; Ben Siegel, Isaac Bashevis Singer (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1969), pp. 10-20; Michael Fixler, “Themes in the Fiction of Isaac Bashevis Singer” in Critical Views, pp. 68-85. Bellow's translation of “Gimpel Tam” appeared in the May 1953 issue of The Partisan Review; it was anthologized the following year in the Viking Press edition, A Treasury of Yiddish Stories, again in 1957 by Noonday Press in Gimpel the Fool and Other Stories, which was reprinted in paperback by Avon Books in 1965 and reprinted by Farrar, Straus and Giroux in 1979. My references are to the Noonday Press edition. Singer's biographer, Paul Kresh, praises the story as the “capstone” of Singer's work in Isaac Bashevis Singer: The Magician of West 86th Street (New York: Dial Press, 1979), pp. 203-204, where he informs us that the Nobel laureate regards “Gimpel the Fool” as his personal favorite and that Singer likes to call himself Gimpel. The quotations relating Singer to modern man and his delusions are from William Gass, p. 3.

2. For well-received interpretations see H. L. Ginsberg, “Hosea's Ephraim, More Fool than Knave,” Journal of Biblical Literature, 80 (1961), 339ff., and R. Gordis, “Hosea's Marriage and Message,” Hebrew Union College Annual, 25 (1954), 9-34, as well as the following commentaries: Abraham J. Heschel, The Prophets (New York and Evanston: Harper and Row, 1962), pp. 39-60; Henry McKeating, The Books of Amos, Hosea and Micah, The Cambridge Bible Commentary (Cambridge: University Press, 1971); J. Lindblom, Prophecy in Ancient Israel (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1973), pp. 165-173; Jacob B. Argus, “The Prophet in Modern Hebrew Literature” in Interpreting the Prophetic Tradition, Harry M. Orlinsky, ed. (Cincinnati: Hebrew Union College Press, 1969), pp. 45-80.

3. Moses Maimonides, The Guide of the Perplexed Life, II, 46, translated by Shlomo Pines (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1963), pp. 405-407. On the subject of the prophetic dream see Maimonides, The Teachings of Maimonides, A. Cohen, ed. (New York: KTAV Publishing House, 1968), pp. 132-137; also Yad-has Hazakah or Mishnah Torah (VI, 3-9) in Cohen, pp. 295-298. For interpretations of the symbolism and legal problems of Hosea's divorce and remarriage see H. H. Rowley, “The Marriage of Hosea,” Bulletin of the John Rylands Library, 39 (1956), 200ff.; Raphael Patai, Sex and Family in the Bible and Middle East (New York: Doubleday, 1959), 112-121; B. Davie Napier, Song of the Vineyard, A Theological Introduction to the Old Testament (New York, Evanston, and London: Harper and Row, 1962), pp. 210-215; Studies in the Early History of Judaism, III: Judaism and Christianity, Solomon Zeitlin, ed. (New York: KTAV Publishing House, 1975), pp. 339-368; Immanuel Jakobovits, “Marriage and Divorce” in The Jewish Library, 3: Woman, Leo Jung, ed. (New York and London: Soncino Press, 1970), p. 111. The Universal Jewish Encyclopedia (5, 462-463) regards the story of Hosea's marriage as a literal fact, while the Encyclopedia Judaica (8, 1010-1025) discusses at some length the problems of the autobiographical interpretation.

4. Wisse, p. 64.

5. See, for instance, the commentary to the seventh chapter of “The Book of Hosea” in The Interpreter's Bible, introduction and exegesis by John Manchine, exposition by Harold Cooke Phillips (New York: Abingdon Press, 1956), pp. 633-637). Professor Betty Ingram, my colleague, informs me that in medieval iconography Hosea was usually depicted with a loaf of bread. Representative of more recent thought on this matter, however, McKeating contends that “the old theory that Hosea himself was a baker has no evidence to support it” (p. 115). More traditional and conservative, the Encyclopedia Judaica repeats the legend that Hosea was a baker. I am much indebted to Sister Patricia O'Toole, I.H.M., who instructed me in a seminar on the prophets.