Welcome to Things Worth Remembering, our weekly column in which writers share a poem or a paragraph that all of us should commit to heart. This week, Joseph Epstein writes about being captivated by Isaac Bashevis Singer’s “Gimpel the Fool”—a story that dares to bring God into literature.
I was 16, a junior in high school, in 1953 when Isaac Bashevis Singer’s story “Gimpel the Fool” was published, in an admirable translation from the Yiddish by Saul Bellow, in Partisan Review. The publication of that story in English, 18 years after he had emigrated from Poland to New York, is said to have opened new worlds for Singer, widening his audience, turning him into a writer of international stature.
I am not sure precisely the day or month when I first read the story, but I know it also opened new worlds for me. I was blown away by it as pure storytelling, by its manner, its details, its elevation. Unlike nearly all his contemporaries, Singer had found a way to write about God, to praise him, to argue with him, to bring him into literature.
