Gimpel the Fool, by Isaac Bashevis Singer

Isaac Bashevis Singer at the Wikipedia

Gimpel the Fool at the Wikipedia

Sumary

Analysis

Audiobook

Adaptation for theatre

ISAAC BASHEVIS SINGER, by Aurora Ledesma

Biography

Isaac Bashevis Singer, winner of the 1978 Nobel Prize for Literature, was one of the most admired Jewish writers of the Twentieth Century, as well as an important figure of Literature written in Yiddish, the language in which his books were published throughout his career. His writings describe Jewish life in Poland and the United States.

Isaac Bashevis Singer was born on the 11^th of November 1903 in Leoncin, Poland, and died the 24^th of July 1991 in Surfside, Florida. He was the fifth of six children, of whom only four survived. His father was a rabbi, and his mother, the daughter of the rabbi of Biigoraj. His sister Hinde Esther and his brother Israel Joshua, became writers as well and played prominent roles in his life and served as models for a number of his fictional characters. His younger brother, Moishe and his mother both died in the Holocaust.

His family moved to Warsaw, Poland, when he was four years old. Singer was also educated in a strict spiritual practice. He received a traditional Jewish education at the Warsaw Rabbinical Seminary. But singer preferred being a writer to being a rabbi. In 1925 he made his debut with the story In Old Age which he published in Warsaw. His first novel, Satan in Goray, was published in Poland before he migrated to the U.S.A in 1935.

He was married in Poland and had a son, but, when he moved to New York, he left them and, then, in 1938, he met Alma Wassermann, a German Jewish refugee, and married her.

He settled in New York, as his brother had done a year before, and worked for the Yiddish Newspaper Forvets and he also translated many books into Yiddish from Hebrew and Polish, and some books by Thomas Man from German.

Although Singer’s works were now available in their English versions, he continued to write almost exclusively in Yiddish until his death.

Singer has popular collections of short stories translated into English, one of the most popular around the world is Gimpel the Fool. His short stories are saturated with Jewish folklore, legends and mysticism.

Among his most important novels are The Family Moskat, The Magician of Lublin, Enemies, A Love Story, which have been adapted into films. The most famous story adapted to a film is Yentl with Barbra Streisand.

He also wrote My Father’s Court, an autobiographical work about his childhood in Warsaw.

 

THE STORY: GIMPEL THE FOOL

Gimpel, who has had the reputation of being a fool since his school days, is the narrator of his own story. Gimpel is an orphan who was being raised by his sickly grandfather. He lives in a town called Frampol and works as a baker. He believes everything he is told, trusting that even strange and crazy things are always possible. His neighbours convince him to marry Elka, a local prostitute, whom he believes to be a virgin, even though she already has one child and is pregnant when they marry. When Elka gives birth only four months after their marriage, she convinces Gimpel that the boy was born prematurely. Gimpel grows to love the baby and cares for Elka. One day, he discovers Elka with another man in their bed. Gimpel goes to the town rabbi to seek advice, and the rabbi tells him that he must divorce Elka and stay away from her and her two bastard children. Gimpel starts to miss Elka and the baby, and he retracts his declarations to the rabbi, believing Elka when she tells him he was simply hallucinating. Years later, Elka gets very sick, and, before dying, she confesses the truth to him: none of the ten children she had are his.

One day, a short time later, a demon visits him in a dream and persuades him to get revenge on his neighbours by putting urine in the bread dough and selling it in the bakery. However, before the bread can be sold, Gimpel buries all of it underground. Then he packs his things and leaves the town of Frampol forever. He continues travelling around the world as a beggar and storyteller for the rest of his life, determined to believe that everything is possible. At the end of the story, Gimpel says that, when he dies, he will do it so joyfully, as death and the afterlife cannot deceive anyone. 

 

QUESTIONS

Did you use to give nicknames to your schoolmates? Can you tell us about one that was original and caught?

What do you know about the Golem?

Do you think that the jokes that Gimpel’s mates played on him would be called “bullying” now?

What do you think about practical jokes played on the beginners?

What do you know about The Wisdom of the Fathers?

What is your opinion about this sentence: “Better to be a fool all your days than for one hour to be evil”?

Is it a good idea matchmaking? And what about webs or applications to meet people?

“When you’re married, the husband’s the master”. Is this machismo, or we cannot use this term for a different society or for a different time?

“You cannot pass through the life unscathed”: what is the meaning of this philosophy?

What is “bear-baiting”?

What is the meaning of this sentence in context: “No bread can ever be baked from this dough”? Can you give some examples?

How they justify that Elka delivered a boy four months after the wedding?

Did Gimpel love people, or was he only a fool?

What’s the meaning of “Shoulders are from God, but burdens too”?

The story is situated in Frampol. Where is it? And Lublin?

“He found an obscure reference in Maimonides that favoured him”. What is for you the value of tradition or classical books for science?

 

VOCABULARY

hee-hawed, lying in, all the way to (Cracow), made tracks, pranksters, yeshiva, candle-dipper, cat music, took me in (take in), fined, hand-me-down, sexton, hallah, revels, burrs, Tishe b’Av fast day, kneading trough, galore, rooked, beat it, welkin, colicky, bear down, serve, louts, loudmouths, going over, take stock in, dybbuks, leeches, cupping, bill of goods, spin yarns, outlandish, hovel, shnorrer

My First Fee, by Isaac Babel

Isaac Babel at the Wikipedia

Reading Isaac Babel

Life and stories

ISAAC Babel, by Glòria Torner

Isaac Babel is the first major Russian Jewish writer of the first part of 20^th century. He was a master of the short story, and also a playwright, a journalist and did reports and film scripts. His fame is based on his stories about the Jews in Odessa.

The author has two leitmotivs in his life:

If the world could write by itself, it would be like Tolstoy.”

“I felt that it was pointless to write worse than Tolstoy.”

BIOGRAPHY

Isaac Babel was born in the Jewish ghetto of Odessa, Ukraine, in 1894.

Babel’s childhood was relatively comfortable, though he witnessed pogroms in Southern Russia in 1905. However, his family was untouched. His father was a successful businessman who installed his family in one of the best streets in Odessa.

In his teens, Babel wanted to get into the preparatory class at the Nicholas I Odessa Commercial School, but he couldn’t. As a result, he was schooled at home by private tutors. Between 1905 and 1911, he studied the Talmud, violin, German, French, besides of Russian, Ukrainian and Yiddish.

He began writing short stories at the age of fifteen in imitation of Guy de Maupassant and Flaubert. His first stories were written in French. He entered the Kyiv Institute of Finances and Business Studies, and he graduated in 1915.  

In 1916, he moved to St. Petersburg where he met Maxim Gorky, his literary hero, who published some of Babel’s stories in his literary magazine Letopis. In 1917, he worked for a short time as a translator for the Cheka and as a reporter for Gorky’s newspaper Novaya Zhizin.

During the Russian Civil War, he returned to Odessa where he was an editor for a small publishing house, and, after the Civil War, he became a reporter for The Dawn of the Orient, a Russian newspaper published in Tbilisi. He married Yevgenia Borisovna Gronfein in 1919; their union produced a daughter, but his marriage was broken by the husband’s infidelities.

In 1923, he published The Tales of Odessa, a collection of short stories set in the Odessan ghetto. The stories describe the life of Jewish gangsters before and after the October Revolution.  He moved to Moscow and, in 1926, he published The Red Cavalry, thirty-four short stories about the brutal realities of war with horrific violence. During these years, a number of Babel’s family emigrated to Paris, including his mother, sister and, finally, his wife. In 1928, he wrote his first play, Sunset. His next play, Marya, described political corruption, prosecution of the innocent and black market in the Soviet society. This play was intended to be performed in 1935, but was cancelled and was not performed in Russia until after the dissolution of the Soviet Union.

All the short stories of Isaac Babel, The Collected Stories, filled only two small volumes and were published in 2002.

Babel was arrested by the N.K.V.D., a precursor of the K.G.B. in May 1939 at his cottage in Peredelkino, a writer’s colony. The secret police confiscated nine folders from the dacha and fifteen from his Moscow’s apartment. Under interrogation and probable torture at Lubyanka, Babel confessed a long association with Trotskyists and an engagement in anti-Soviet activity, including being recruited into a spy network. He was held in Buturka Prison, and, on January 27, 1940, he was shot on Stalin’s orders for espionage. Babel’s last words were “I’m innocent, I have never been a spy... I’m asking only for one thing, let me finish my work.”

MY FIRST FEE

This story was written in the 1920s, and it’s apparently an expansion of an earlier piece called Answer to an Inquiry. Both are variants of the same story: an adolescent boy tells a forlorn, indecent and wholly imaginary tale about himself to a tender-hearted prostitute. It went unpublished during Babel’s lifetime for sexual prudery, not appearing in print until the early 60s, when it was published in New York, first in Russian, then in an English translation.

The story begins with a long description in first person. The springtime has arrived in the town, Tiflis (Tbilisi), where the narrator (perhaps an alter ego of the author), a twenty-years-old young man, is living. He is working as a proof-reader for the printing press of the Caucasus Military.

He describes the room that he has rented from a Georgian couple and the sensual atmosphere of their neighbours. But the most important is that the narrator, who feels lonely, decides to look for love, runs out of the house and walks along the Kura River at night. Tortured by lust, he decides to solicit a prostitute, called Vera, whom he is infatuated with.

Now the story goes on, sometimes in direct dialogue in third person between the writer and the prostitute, and also with narrative and descriptive writing. Before Vera sleeps with him, she asks him for the money he has, and the writer gives her ten rubbles. They decide to go to Borzhom, and he has to accompany her as she makes her rounds and spends his money. Later, they go up to Vera’s room. There, in the prostitute’s bed, Vera prepares to get laid with the narrator, and he tells her that he has never been with a woman. Then he invents a tale.

This second story is about a boy living with an older Armenian man called Stepan Ivanovich, in Baku for four years when he was fifteen years old. Stepan Ivanovich’s friends ruined him because he gave them bronze promissory notes, and their friends cashed them and left promissory notes unbacked. Then the writer left him and decided to live with a rich church warden. He finishes the story arriving at a convincing ending with the death of his old man and his own arrival in Tbilisi now with twenty rubbles.

Returning to the first story, he spends the rest of the night making love with the thirty years old prostitute Vera, who tutors the young man in the erotic arts. Vera is moved by the other story and come to consider the narrator as a “sister” prostitute rather than a man. In the next morning, Vera insists on returning the narrator’s money. From his perspective, this money is the first fee he has earned for writing a story. Vera is his “first reader.”

At the end of the story, the author explains the relation and the meaning between the story and the title.

 

Themes

There are two stories and two different themes explained together in the story, one inside the other one, as the Russian doll called matryoshka.

1.    Babel walks up through the steps of crafting a plot. The writer who wants to be known telling a frankly sexual fiction for sex to a prostitute, perhaps a fictitious tale about his life.

2.  The loneliness of a man looking for love and sex. He “experienced a love you will never experience.” To be a writer, does one need to look for love?

Conclusion

Sometimes difficult to understand his prose, with long descriptions with sexual allusions just to explain a strange, sharp and unrealistic story. My First Fee it’s a story about how to write a story.

QUESTIONS

Tell us about the characters

The narrator

Vera

Stepan Ivanovich

Fedosya Mavrikevna

Where is Tiflis? What do you know about its country (language, religion, history…)

The narrator feels the spring in his skin. How do you feel the spring? What qualities of spring affect you the most?

What do you know about Tolstoy?

“I was a dreamer and didn’t have the knack for the thoughtless art of happiness”. That is, a dreamer cannot be happy: do you agree? Why?

Why did the narrator ask Vera is she was going to Palestine?

What is Borzhom (Borjomi)?

What information do you have about Golovin and the boyars?

“A well-thought-out story doesn’t need to resemble real life”. What is your opinion?

What do you think Vera’s preparations to get laid with the narrator were for?

What does the image “like a toad on a stone” suggest?

Where is Kherson? And Baku?

Why does he say he’s a bitch, a whore?

What is the relation between the title and the story?

 

VOCABULARY

murky, part, whisking, shrews, babbling, hanks, sapping, sultriness, burrowing, dauntless, gruelling, raiment, apish, tenner, wilted, hightail, dough, banged, lackluster, potbellied, dogged, throes, drab, took after, promissory note, auctioned, squeezed, taproom, quaked, cavorting, braying

The Last Mohican, by Bernard Malamud

Bernard Malamud at the Wikipedia: click here

Pictures of Fidelman at the Wikipedia: click here

The Last Mohican: review

The Last Mohican: analisis

The Last Mohican: critical review

Presentation, by Gemma Agell

The writer

Bernard Malamud, a New Yorker, was born in Brooklyn in 1914 and died in Manhattan in 1986. He is one of the main representatives of the Jewish literature, although he was a declared agnostic. His parents were Russian immigrants. Malamud lived his adolescence during the Great Depression and watching Charlie Chaplin’s films to have some fun and explain them to his friends. He graduated at Columbia University where he did his thesis about Thomas Hardy. It seems it was an impulsive man since in 1948, he burned his first manuscript entitled The Light Sleeper. The topics he wrote about were social issues and above all the difficulties of immigrants who arrived in America, and the hope in reaching their dreams despite their poverty. He is not considered a prolific writer since he only wrote 8 novels. In 1967, he won the Pulitzer and the National Book Awards with the novel The Fixer where he talks about anti-Semitism in the Russian Empire. He was also known for the 55 short stories collected and published after his death in the book Complete Stories. 

The story

The Last Mohican happens in Rome and has two men as protagonists. Fidelman is a middle-aged man who’s just arrived in Italy to spend a year to write a critical work about the painter and architect Giotto. He planned to stay in Rome for one week and then travel to Florence, Assisi and Padua, but this was completely disrupted by the appearance of a mysterious Jewish man. Their first meeting was when Fidelman was leaving the rail station, Susskind, keeps his eyes on him; Fidelman was good-looking and well-dressed, the perfect prey for Susskind who was looking for someone to finance their “street business”. He was a Jewish refugee from Israel who had lived in Germany and now was trying to survive in Rome cheating tourists. He offered Fidelman as a guide, to help him to find an hotel, in fact all of them were things to get some money. After this first meeting, the story tells us how a very organised man with a well-planned stay in Rome, changed completely when Susskind got into his life. In order to escape from this, Fidelman decided to go to Florence some days before expected, but his plans were broken when he arrived at the hotel room and his briefcase, and in addition the first chapter of the manuscript about Giotto, disappeared. From the beginning, he suspected of Susskind, and started a searching that supposed for him a decline, for during three months he quit the visits to the museums and got obsessed about find Susskind, even though he got up on weight and his physical aspect got worse. At the end of the story he finds Susskind but not his manuscript. 

Some things

Malamud starts with an accurate physical description of Fidelman and his outfit. It is important that the reader imagine a good-looking man but also emphasize with him, presenting him as a humble man who had worked hard to save money and even borrowed some from his sister in order to make his dream true, travel to Italy.

The reason that Fidelman decided to go to Italy was Giotto. Giotto di Bondone was a painter and architect born in Vicchio in 1267. Nowadays, we can contemplate his works at the Gallerie degli Uffici in Florence, Louvre Museum in Paris or the National Gallery in London. He contributed to the Italian Renaissance, and is known for representing emotions in paintings and also for incorporate 3-dimentional vision. By the incorporation of this changes it started a new way to express the religious art. He has remarkable paintings in churches of Assisi and Padua. The writer also wants to reflect that Fidelman is a curious person mentioning Trofimov as his alter ego: “Call me Trofimov” he said to Susskind. Trofimov was a role of the play The Cherry Orchard by Chekov where he express his ideas and represents an eternal student; Fidelman said “If there’s something to learn I want to learn it”.

The author describes the life that Fidelman dreamed at his arrival in Rome, a curious person who had planned his stay with a lot of activities: mornings at libraries searching for catalogues and archives, and after lunch and a nap to recover, he visited churches and museums during the afternoon. A perfect day for him finished with some relax, dinner with white wine and a stroll in Trastevere quarter near the Tiber. The role of Susskind is the stereotype of a person who takes profit on others, he asked for a suit, for money, and had not enough with some dollars he received from Fidelman. Susskind is a kind of survivor who lives illegally in Italy after quitting Germany; I’m not sure if he really wants to find a real job or prefers to live this way. When he begins to go after Fidelman, surely because he thinks that he is rich, he becomes almost his shadow, and Fidelman gives him some money in order “to have some peace of mind” as he said in the story. In my opinion, while the story goes on you empathize with Fidelman and his feelings to get rid of Susskind and really enjoy his stay in Rome, just until it became to an obsessive behaviour.

While reading the story you are someway transported there, he reflects the art present in Italy and especially in Rome, incorporating references of emblematic sites of the Eternal City: the Diocletian Baths, which afterwards were reconverted in a church and convent by Michelangelo. The Vatican, a paradise for art lovers, where Fidelman experienced some kind of “ecstasy” staring at its walls and absorbing all that beauty, and he also introduces a little reference to the statue of Romulo and Remus, the twins from the legend of Rome’s origin.

Malamud chose that the two main characters of the story were Jewish like him, although he was agnostic. The first time they met, Susskind calls Fidelman asking if he was Jewish, this was the link he found to explain him his own story as a refugee a connect with his solidarity.

The story had a change of direction when the briefcase with the manuscript disappears, Fidelman was another man, he didn’t enjoy any more his stay in Rome, and even he postponed his trip to Florence and the other cities. The next months he started to visit places just to find Susskind, because he suspected that he has stolen the briefcase, he didn’t answer his sister calls, his appearance was not important anymore, he put on weight. The search for Susskind had become an obsession.

The author added some irony in the narrative, mostly when he explains his dreams, for instance the one where he was in the cemetery reading the inscription; these situations always finished with the sentence: “But not Susskind”. This particular sense of humour was also used to represent in a visual way the freezing cold of the refugee’s room, he said: “this fish in the fishbowl is swimming around in Arctic Seas”. When he goes in Susskind apartment furtively and don’t find anything, he returned to the pension and had a dream where he found the briefcase, “but not the manuscript!”

Some Giotto's paintings

On the day before our departure, we decided to go as far afield as Padua where were to be found those Vices and Virtues of which Swann had given me reproductions; after walking in the glare of the sun across the garden of the Arena, I entered the Giotto chapel the entire ceiling of which and the background of the frescoes are so blue that it seems as though the radiant day has crossed the threshold with the human visitor, and has come in for a moment to stow away in the shade and coolness its pure sky, of a slightly deeper blue now that it is rid of the sun's gilding, as in those brief spells of respite that interrupt the finest days, when, without our having noticed any cloud, the sun having turned his gaze elsewhere for a moment, the azure, more exquisite still, grows deeper. In this sky, upon the blue-washed stone, angels were flying with so intense a celestial, or at least an infantile ardour, that they seemed to be birds of a peculiar species that had really existed, that must have figured in the natural history of biblical and Apostolic times, birds that never fail to fly before the saints when they walk abroad; there are always some to be seen fluttering above them, and as they are real creatures with a genuine power of flight, we see them soar upwards, describe curves, 'loop the loop' without the slightest difficulty, plunge towards the earth head downwards with the aid of wings which enable them to support themselves in positions that defy the law of gravitation, and they remind us far more of a variety of bird or of young pupils of Garros practising the vol-plané, than of the angels of the art of the Renaissance and later periods whose wings have become nothing more than emblems and whose attitude is generally the same as that of heavenly beings who are not winged. (Marcel Proust: La prisionnière)

Navicella

San Francesco dona le vesti al cavaliere povero.

TOPICS

Fidelman has a pigskin briefcase. What is the importance of this particular for the story?
What are “oxblood shoes”?
What do you know about the Diocletian Baths?
Fidelman: describe very briefly his appearance and his personality.
What is the meaning in context of “give a skeleton a couple of pounds”?
What do you know about Romulus and Remus legend?
There’s a film directed by Guy Richie (Madonna’s ex-husband) called “Lock, Stock and Two Barrels”. In the story we have the expression “lock, stock, barrel”; what does it mean? What is its origin? What is its relation with the title of the film? Have you seen it?
What is the meaning of “knickers”, in context?
Shimon Susskind: describe briefly his appearance and his personality.
What can you say about Florence, Siena, Assisi and Padua?
Who was Trofimov?
What was Fidelman’s daily routine?
There is the expression “remembrance of things unknown”. Doesn’t it remind you of a famous French literary work, a masterpiece? What’s its author and the exact title?
Fidelman said “My God, I’ve got to stop using my eyes so much” when he was looking at some ceiling. Why does he say it? What do you know about the Stendhal syndrome?
Why Susskind doesn’t go to Israel?
What is the context for the sentence: “The Italians are human people”?
What business does Susskind propose to Fidelman?
At the police station, an officer draws a line on “valore del manuscritto”. What is the meaning of this?
How did Fidelman try to recover the main ideas of his first chapter about Giotto?
Where did Fidelman look for Susskind and where did he find him?
What were Fidelman’s three different accommodations?
What was Fidelman’s daily routine after losing his work about Giotto?
They mention the Spanish painter Murillo. What do you know about him?
What was Fidelman’s real vocation?
Where did Susskind live?
What is the meaning of Fidelman’s last dream (“San Francesco dona le vesti al cavaliere povero”)?
Why did Susskind burn the chapter?
What did Fidelman earn at the end?
What is the relationship between the title and the story (remember there’s an adventures novel by James Fenimore Cooper called The Last of the Mohicans)?

VOCABULARY

shalom, schnorrer, Yiddish, constipated, mirthlessly, grant, porter (two meanings), cigar store Indian, welfare organization, gabardine, warped nerve, peddle, Joint Distribution Committee, gross, saddled, pest, Sephardim, faucet, pudgy, ghetto, goyim, painstakingly