Where to Start with Isaac Bashevis Singer
Isaac Bashevis Singer wrote in Yiddish about a world that was vanishing, filling it with demons, con artists, lustful rabbis, and fools wiser than the people who mocked them. His stories are funny, unsettling, morally fearless, and unlike anything else in twentieth-century literature.
Start here
Gimpel the Fool
Isaac Bashevis Singer · 208 pages · 1957 · Easy
Themes: faith, folklore, Jewish life, humanity, storytelling
A collection of stories from the shtetls and cities of Eastern Europe, brimming with demons, desire, and wisdom, Gimpel the Fool introduced Singer to the English-speaking world and remains the perfect place to start.
Why Start Here
The title story, translated by Saul Bellow, which tells you something, is one of the greatest short stories of the twentieth century. Gimpel is the village fool, endlessly deceived, endlessly forgiving, and by the end of the story revealed as the one who truly understands how to live. It is a parable, a joke, a meditation on faith, and a heartbreaker, all at once.
The other stories in the collection are equally rich: tales of lust and supernatural punishment, of ghosts and marriages and the strange persistence of the old world in the modern one. Singer’s Yiddish universe is coherent and vivid and unlike anything else in world literature.
What to Expect
Short stories that read quickly but stay with you a long time. Singer’s prose (in translation) is clear and direct, with an oral storytelling quality, these are tales being told, not narrated from a distance. Moral complexity lives inside apparently simple fables. You will finish one story and immediately want to read the next.