A gorgeously produced bilingual edition of Nobel Prize laureate Isaac Bashevis Singers canonical storyone of the most influential of the 20th centuryabout a hapless yet charmingly resilient baker named Gimpl who resists taking revenge on the town that makes him the butt of every joke Singers original Yiddish appears alongside his own partial translation now completed and edited by writer and scholar David Stromberg and the 1953 translation by fellow Nobel laureate Saul Bellow With illustrations by Liana Finck and an afterword by David StrombergIsaac Bashevis Singers quotGimpl tamquot was published on March 30 1945 in the obscure Yiddishlanguage journal Idisher kempfer about a month before the Nazi surrender A story of bullying and the potential for revenge it tells the deathbed confession of an orphaned baker who is targeted by his own community for ridicule and practical jokes Gimpl has come to be seen as a symbol of the Jewish people in the diaspora and by synecdoche minorities in general Should they be passive in the face of aggression Or should they defend themselves What role must the individual of that minority play when the pack behaves badlyWhen Irving Howe and Eliezer Greenberg opted to include quotGimpl tamquot in their Treasury of Yiddish Tales Howe asked Saul Bellow to help with the translation It was finished in a single sitting and published in 1953 in The Partisan Review as quotGimpel the Foolquotthe version that has since been canonized as one of the...
