Gimpel the Fool & Other Stories

Gimpel the Fool

and Other Stories

Isaac Bashevis Singer

First published in 1957 by Noonday Press, Isaac Bashevis Singer's first collection of stories, Gimpel the Fool, is a landmark work that has attracted international acclaim. The title story follows the exploits of Gimpel, an ingenuous baker who is universally deceived but who declines to retaliate against his tormentors. Gimpel and the protagonists of the other stories all inhabit the distinctive pre-World War II shtetls of Poland and, beyond that, the larger world created by Singer's unforgettable prose.

"These stories are a unique blend of lyric mysticism and earthy realism in characters that are universal human symbols of the worldly and the supernatural. Fantasy is Singer's surest guide to truth in literature." —Anzia Yezierska, The New York Times Review of Books
"Extraordinarily beautiful... It's the integrity of the human imagination that Singer conveys so beautifully." - Alfred Kazin, The New Leader
"Singer is a genius. He has total command of his imagined world." —Irving Howe, The New Republic
"A peerless storyteller, Singer restores the sheer enchantment with story, with outcome, with what-happens-next that has been denied most readers since their adolescence." —David Boroff, Saturday Review

About the Author

Isaac Bashevis Singer (1902-1991) was a Yiddish-language novelist and storyteller who chronicled Jewish life in Eastern Europe and America with humor, mysticism, and moral depth. Born in Poland to a rabbinic family, he emigrated to New York in 1935 and wrote for the Forverts (Jewish Daily Forward) for decades. His novels, memoirs, and short stories give voice to the shtetl, the Hasidic court, and the world lost to the Holocaust. His characters, whether rabbis, skeptics, dybbuks, or ordinary people wrestling with faith and desire, embody the tensions between tradition and modernity at the heart of Jewish experience.

Singer received the 1978 Nobel Prize in Literature for his “impassioned narrative art which, with roots in a Polish-Jewish cultural tradition, brings universal human conditions to life.” He won two National Book Awards (1970 and 1974) and Newbery Honors in 1968 and 1969. His Jewish literary honors include the Louis Lamed Prize (1950 and 1956) and Israel’s S.Y. Agnon Gold Medal (1975). The Jewish Book Council selected his novel The Slave for its Harry and Ethel Daroff Memorial Fiction Award, the council’s top prize for English-language fiction of Jewish interest, in recognition of 1962 publications. A master of the short story, he is remembered for classics such as “Gimpel the Fool,” translated into English by Saul Bellow.

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