- Person
- Saul Bellow
- Lived
- 1915–2005
- Field
- Literature
- From
- Canadian-American
The story
Saul Bellow grew up in an immigrant household in Chicago, the youngest child of Jewish parents from Saint Petersburg, and he never lost his ear for the languages of his childhood. In 1953, the same year his breakthrough novel The Adventures of Augie March appeared, he took on a different kind of literary task.
Isaac Bashevis Singer had left Poland for New York in 1935, fearing the growing threat from Nazi Germany. Singer had written "Gimpel the Fool" in Yiddish in the mid-1940s. He wrote mainly for the Yiddish newspaper The Jewish Daily Forward, and was little known to English-language readers. When he arrived in America, by his own account, he knew only three words of English. His older brother, Israel Joshua Singer, was also a novelist, and after Israel died in 1944 Isaac published The Family Moskat in his honour.
Bellow translated Singer's story "Gimpel the Fool" from Yiddish into English. It tells of a simple, trusting baker who is the butt of his town's jokes and deceived again and again, yet keeps his faith and goodness. The scholar David Roskies has read it as a modern reworking of a tale by the Hasidic master Nachman of Bratslav. Bellow's translation was published in May 1953 in the influential magazine Partisan Review, where Bellow himself had published his first short story.
The translation brought Singer's work before an important English-speaking readership, and the story later gave its title to Singer's first collection of short stories in English, Gimpel the Fool and Other Stories, in 1957. Singer went on to become one of the most celebrated writers of his time, winning two National Book Awards, including the 1974 fiction award for A Crown of Feathers, and the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1978, two years after Bellow himself.
The translation is a striking example of one great writer helping another, and of Bellow's continuing loyalty to the Yiddish culture of his childhood.
Why it matters
By bringing Singer's story into English, Bellow helped Yiddish literature reach a global audience and championed a future Nobel laureate.
About Saul Bellow
Chicago novelist of Augie March, Herzog and Humboldt’s Gift, winner of the 1976 Nobel Prize and the only writer to take the National Book Award for Fiction three times.
More about Saul Bellow
Sources
- Saul Bellow Wikipedia
- Gimpel the Fool Wikipedia
- Isaac Bashevis Singer Wikipedia
Another act of tikkun olam. This is part of tikkun olam, the Jewish idea of repairing the world, and every one of us can add to it.