Tikvah
Editors’ Pick

July 11, 2023

A New Translation of a Classic Yiddish Story Attempts to One-Up Saul Bellow

Isaac Bashevis Singer’s “Gimple the Fool.”

For much of his career, Isaac Bashevis Singer carefully supervised the translation of his works from Yiddish to English, handpicking the translators and sometimes making significant changes in acknowledgment of his two very different audiences. But Singer first came to be known to the English-speaking public thanks to a 1953 translation over which he had no say whatsoever, done by Saul Bellow with the assistance of the Yiddish poet Eliezer Greenberg, of his short story “Gimple the Fool.” Julian Levinson reviews a new, stand-alone edition of the story, with an old-new translation:

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