Isaac Bashevis Singer'
GIMPEL THE FOOL
I
am
Gimpel the fool. I don't think myself a fool. On the
contrary. But that's what folks call me. They gave me the name
while I was still in school. I had seven names in all: imbecile, donkey,
flax-head, dope, glump, ninny and fool. The last name stuck. What
did my foolishness consist of? I was easy to take
in.
They said,
"Gimpel, you know the rabbi'S" wife has been brought to childbed?"
So I skipped school. Well, it turned out to be a lie. How was I
supposed to know? She hadn't had a big belly. But I never looked
at her belly. Was that really so foolish? The gang laughed and hee–
hawed, stomped and danced and chanted a good-night prayer. And
instead of the raisins they give when a woman's lying in, they stuffed
my hand full of goat turds. I was no weakling.
If
I slapped someone
he'd see all the way to Cracow. But I'm really not a slugger by na–
ture. I think to myself, "Let it pass." So they take advantage of me.
I was coming home from school and heard a dog barking. I'm
not afraid of dogs, but of course I never want to start up with them.
One of them may be mad, and if he bites there's not a Tartar in the
world who can help you. So I made tracks. Then I looked around
and saw the whole market place wild with laughter. It was no dog
at all but Wolf-Leib the thief. How was I supposed to know it was
he? It sounded like a howling bitch.
When the pranksters and leg-pullers found that I was easy to
fool, every one of them tried his luck with me. "Gimpel, the Czar
1 Isaac Bashevis Singer is one of the leading figures among living Yiddish
writers. Born in Poland in 1904, he came to the United States in 1935. Hi.
massive social novel,
The Family Moskat,
which describes the life of Warsaw
Jewry, was translated into English in 1950. He has written many stories, some
of which are collected in a Yiddish volume called
Satan
in
Goroy.
''Gimpel the Fool" will appear in
A Treasury of Yiddish LiteratuTI,
edited
by
Irving Howe and Eliezer Greenberg, to be published by the Viking
Preas
in 1954.
