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Episode Summary

The written work of Yiddish humorist, novelist, and Nobel Prize laureate Isaac Bashevis Singer resonates today, as it did during his lifetime in the 20th century. His 1945 classic Simple Gimpl, now translated by Dr. David Stromberg, offers a sage tale of morality and Jewish tradition. Host Dr. Melinda Lewis joins Stromberg to discuss Bashevis Singer’s emigration from Poland to New York City in the pre-World War II era; both writers’ connection with the work of Fyodor Dostoevsky, Albert Camus, and Saul Bellow; and Bashevis Singer’s prolific work alongside translators to keep the Yiddish language alive in newspapers and publishing houses for audiences in the United States and abroad.

Featured Guest  David Stromberg, PhD (Writer and Essayist; Translator, Simple Gimpl: The Definitive Bilingual Edition)

Host and Producer  Melinda Lewis, PhD (Director of Strategy, Pennoni Honors College)

Dean  Paula Marantz Cohen, PhD

Executive Producer  Erica Levi Zelinger (Director, Marketing & Media)

Producer  Brian Kantorek (Associate Director, Marketing & Media)

Research and Script  Melinda Lewis, PhD

Audio Engineering and Editing  Brian Kantorek

Original Theme Music  Brian Kantorek

Production Assistance  Noah Levine

Social Media Outreach  Ka’Neisha Davis and Olivier Jacques

Graphic Design  Estelle Guillot

Logo Design  Michal Anderson

Additional Voiceover  Malia Lewis

Recorded March 9, 2023 in 157 Bentley Hall, Pennoni Honors College, Drexel University. Pop, the Question is a production of Marketing & Media in Pennoni Honors College at Drexel University. The views expressed in this podcast are not necessarily those of Drexel University or Pennoni Honors College.

To learn more about David Stromberg and Isaac Bashevis Singer, visit davidstromberg.com.

Copyright © 2023 Drexel University

TRANSCRIPT

Melinda Lewis:

Welcome to Pop, the Question, a podcast that exists at the intersection of pop culture and academia. We sit down and talk about our favorite stuff through the lenses of what we do and who we are. From Pennoni Honors College at Drexel University, Dr. Melinda Lewis here, I'm your host.

Today is very special because I'm here with David Stromberg, a writer, translator, and literary scholar who has released Simple Gimpel: The Definitive Bilingual Edition of Isaac Bashevis Singer's canonical story.

Hey, David. Thanks for being here.

David Stromberg:

Well, I'm very happy to be here.

Melinda Lewis:

Can you sum up Simple Gimpel in one, maybe two sentences?

David Stromberg:

Sure. Simple Gimpel is the story of an orphan and a baker, who is essentially married off to a sex worker in this little town with a Jewish community in Poland, in a shtetl, and is made the butt of every joke in the village, from childhood through adulthood.

He believes that his wife is faithful, even though she keeps having kids that couldn't have possibly come from him. Eventually, he has to face the truth when she dies, and then he's visited by the evil spirit and tempted to take revenge on the town. The question is, will he or will he not?

Melinda Lewis:

I was wondering if you could talk a little bit about where we start with Bashevis Singer and put him in context as a writer and as a person to better understand where the story goes to your translation.

David Stromberg:

Bashevis Singer was a Yiddish author, born in Poland, left Poland in 1935, came to America on a tourist visa, ended up managing to get a resident or immigrant visa. In 1939, the war starts and just became very clear that international travel was not what it had been in 1938 even. So he's committed essentially himself to the US and started really understanding and adapting himself and analyzing the culture around him. So by the time that he wrote a Simple Gimpel: Gimpel Tom in 1945, he had been here for a decade. He had really internalized a lot of what was happening, and he was starting to formulate himself even in Yiddish as an American author.

Isaac Bashevis Singer:

When I was born, my mother asked the midwife, "Is it a boy or a girl?" The midwife said, "Neither one, it's a writer."

David Stromberg:

By the sixties, he was essentially translating himself, but he still needed the halo of being a translated author actually. So he would bring other people along to help with the syntax that was... He never got very good at. Then he would put their names down as translators. That's how he'd established himself as a kind of a translated American author from the Yiddish into the English, and slowly built his way.

Speaker 2:

He would hold the Yiddish manuscript on his lap and translate the story to the English-speaking person. And they would kind of turn his Yinglish into English where his sentence structure could be Germanic, because Yiddish has the Germanic sentence structures or idioms had to be shortened.

Isaac Bashevis Singer:

Listen to something now. Listen have what you say.

Speaker 5:

Now hear a story.

Isaac Bashevis Singer:

Now listen to something. Oh, he is...

Speaker 5:

Well, now listen to this.

Isaac Bashevis Singer:

Now listen to this. Okay.

David Stromberg:

It was published by Noonday, which was then acquired by FSG. FSG saw the potential. Roger Strauss and his wife, Dorothea Strauss, connected to Singer on a personal level. She wrote a memoir about Singer, which is not very well known, and they put a lot of effort into forwarding his career. Little by little, it grew until he got the Nobel Prize in 1978. Then he continued publishing until about 1988. Around 87, 88, there was an onset of dementia. So the last couple of years he wasn't really active, and then he died in 1991.

Isaac Bashevis Singer:

People are asking me often, why do you write in a dying language? Firstly, I like to write ghost stories, and nothing fits a ghost better than a dying language. The deader the language, the more life is the ghost. Ghosts love Yiddish, they all speak it. Secondly, I believe in resurrection. I'm sure that the Messiah will soon come and millions of Yiddish speaking corpses will rise from their graves one day. Their first question will be, is there any new Yiddish book to read?

Melinda Lewis:

How did you come across Singer's work?

David Stromberg:

Because I did math as an undergraduate, I didn't have a proper literature education, like a chronological literary education. So I confused Singer with Sholem Aleichem, for example. Now it sounds like a funny mistake, but now that I'm in the position of editor to the Trust, I have gotten requests to my email for permission to use a Sholem Aleichem story.

Melinda Lewis:

Oh, really?

David Stromberg:

I have to write back to the person and say, "I really appreciate your writing, Isaac Bashevis Singer is not Sholem Aleichem, and you can actually just use that material because it's in public domain."

Isaac Bashevis Singer:

[foreign language 00:06:01].

David Stromberg:

So I feel like there was a lot of this name around before I actually got to him. then I was living in New York and came across a used version of Gimpel the Fool actually, the original translation of Simple Gimpel, and expected to be engaging with something that was this old-fashioned thing, like Sholem Aleichem, these kind of old shtetl stories, interesting and humorous and critical in their particular way, but not as modern. Then I started reading it and I think it took a little time to put things together, because I was mostly in shock. I was like, okay, these are not the themes that I would expect from the person I thought this person was. So who was this person? That's how I discovered.

Melinda Lewis:

How old were you when that, do you remember?

David Stromberg:

I guess I must've been 26, 27.

Melinda Lewis:

Wow.

David Stromberg:

I had no intention at that time of doing a PhD though. One of my teachers from Cal Arts later said to me, "You need a PhD the way you need a driver's license. You just need to do it. And that's that." I was, I said, "Okay." I was working in publishing, which has always been my second profession. And so like I said, I came to it feeling like I should have read this a long time ago. The same with Dostoevsky, actually. I read them both around the same time. I ended up writing my PhD on both of them, the influence of Dostoevsky and specifically his narrative techniques on Albert Camus and on Bashevis Singer.

Melinda Lewis:

So like a fun driver's license.

David Stromberg:

Totally. Very light. Very light.

Melinda Lewis:

Yeah, just go in like a regular Tuesday to get your picture taken.

David Stromberg:

Exactly.

Melinda Lewis:

Yeah, I will be honest with you, I have never read Dostoevsky.

David Stromberg:

When people say that, the usual answer is, oh, that's really great because you have so much waiting for you and you're so, et cetera. I would just say, go. Okay, go right, go read something.

Singer wasn't, in my opinion, a very good critic of other people's work. He had a somewhat old-fashioned aesthetic taste. He had a very modern aesthetic sense. He could create works that were extremely modern in the sense that they undermine genres and deploy genres, meaning he specifically would use genres in ways that undermine them at the same time. But his taste was very old-fashioned. He didn't like abstract painting. Things that for me are probably today would be considered old-fashioned actually, they didn't do it for him.

Isaac Bashevis Singer:

I was brought up in a home where the supernatural was really our daily life. We all believed in spirit in angels and the demons and the devils. I was born almost with a terrible fear of these higher powers, both a great curiosity and a great fear. Now at the time in my old age, I still have this feeling, that I'm surrounded with powers, of which I have no inkling really. I don't know what they are.

Melinda Lewis:

I find that so interesting.

David Stromberg:

I don't know. He lived in New York. He believed in form and in depiction and in portrayal. He did not believe in psychologizing, for example. He talks about this. He talks about Dostoevsky, for example. He says, Dostoevsky doesn't psychologize his characters. His characters speak, and that way they reveal themselves, but it's the character psychologizing. It's not Dostoevsky psychologizing. He really internalized that. Bashevis Singer really internalized that lesson and really stuck to it. So in that environment, Singer, basically, even though in Yiddish, he was functioning as a public intellectual, writing cultural criticism, writing essays, writing theater reviews, in English, he was increasingly focusing himself into the role of the storyteller. The old-fashioned storyteller from the old country, which culminated with his release of Gimpel the Fool, as a collection.

Isaac Bashevis Singer:

I went to the Rabbi to get some advice. He said, it is written better to be a fool all your days than for one hour to be evil. You're not a fool. They are the fools, for he who causes his neighbor to feel shame loses paradise himself.

David Stromberg:

So what I said earlier that the mistake I made between Sholem Aleichem and Bashevis Singer was, in a way, a sleight of hand by Singer to put himself forward with this image. Even though in reality, he had this whole other approach, this whole other body of work that didn't really find a place in American culture at the time. His larger mission was to bring a particular kind of spiritual life and energy and drive into American culture through literary fiction.

Melinda Lewis:

How does Simple Gimpel do that?

David Stromberg:

Essentially, he does it in three ways. One, he picks up the folklore-like storytelling of Rebbe Nachman, who himself wrote a story, let's call it The Tale of as Sage and a Simpleton. He adapts one of the early sentences from that into this story. So the link is very direct, and Rebbe Nachman was creating these stories in order to get across to people who are not necessarily interested in the more traditional Talmudic form of storytelling or Talmudic form of teaching, and were more connected to, let's say, European folktales. So he's taking all this Torah and Kabbalah, et cetera, and putting it into these fairytale slash folktale stories.

Isaac Bashevis Singer:

I am Gimpel the Fool. I don't think myself a fool, on the contrary, but that's what folks call me.

David Stromberg:

At the same time, he is learning about, reading about, and responding to the crisis in American Judaism at the time, which is essentially that Jews in America are experiencing Jewishness in a negative sense. So it's stopping them from going to college. It's stopping them from finding a summer home. It's stopping them from getting a job, but they're not getting all of the positive parts of Judaism. So the ideals, the principles, the rituals, the ceremonies, the tradition, et cetera. So they're kind of saying, well, why do I need this Judaism? If all it does is make it hard for me to do the things that I want or need to do, but it doesn't give me any kind of spiritual energy, then what do I need it for? He sees that... These are things that I'm quoting, things that he writes and says, and he identifies it as a need, which of course is not only a Jewish need, and he understands that, and that's why the material flows so well into the English later, because it was an American spiritual need, but he accessed it through what he knew, which was the Jewish community.

So that's the second part. The third part, we could call it the human drama. So there's the question of loyalty, faith. Also, you're dealing both with Gimpel and Elca who becomes his wife, people who are on the margins of society. She's a sex worker, he's an orphan, she's also an orphan. There was a tradition in small Jewish communities to bring together and marry the people on the margins and pay for their weddings, so that they could be included into the community. So this story picks up on that as well.

Then there's of course the personal drama of she cheats on him, he doesn't want to accept it, and he doesn't want to accept it. Then he decides that living a lie is better than living the truth, because at least it's a life of some sort. So he's doing all of this in real time and creating this modern myth.

Speaker 7:

Hey, it's your mom. I have a question about that podcast you do. Are you on the Instagram or the Twitter or the Facebook? If I have an idea for a podcast, how do I get in touch with you? Love you, bye.

Melinda Lewis:

Sup mom? Yeah, so you can find us on all those things actually, Twitter, Instagram, Facebook. Just go to PopQuestpod on any one of those and follow. If you want to send us ideas, you can either go over to our website and leave us a message at PopQpodcast, or you can get us directly at popq@drexel.edu. You can actually find us on iTunes, Spotify, Stitcher. I can help set it up when I get home, but then you have to promise me to rate and review. All right, love you, bye.

How does it circulate at the time that he's writing?

David Stromberg:

So that's very interesting. This is published in March 1945. The camps are being liberated. The Soviets liberated around January. The allies are around that time, around early spring and here's Singer singing, writing this story, and he's publishing it in a Yiddish journal called [inaudible 00:15:17], which is the Jewish fighter. Of course, fighter for socialism, the progressive fighter, in a Passover supplement. Because the other part of Tom, right, Gimpel Tom, is the original story, the Simple Child. So there's the four children in Passover that are described, one of which is the Simple Child. So it's coming out in this completely unknown Yiddish journal in a holiday supplement where it would've been buried basically, if Irving Howe and well, more Eliezer Greenberg, who was working with Irving Howe to edit a treasury of Yiddish tales hadn't decided to include it in that.

Melinda Lewis:

It's amazing what happenstance can do.

David Stromberg:

Totally.

Melinda Lewis:

In the sense that somebody saw this, it could have easily been ignored and yet becomes a thing.

David Stromberg:

Yeah, I think that for me, that was also a big lesson as a writer.

Melinda Lewis:

Where does Saul Bellow come into it? Is he talking about finding Simple Gimpel and his adaptation?

David Stromberg:

Saul Bellow was basically not interested in this.

Melinda Lewis:

Oh, no!

David Stromberg:

He didn't really want to do it, but Eliezer Greenberg was very insistent. What Bellow said was essentially that he was too busy to do this. So Eliezer Greenberg said, well, I'll come to you and I'll read the story out loud and you'll just type up the translation. He says, "Fine." so he comes over, he reads it out, he types it up. According to Howe, he then goes into the other room, polishes it up, comes back, that's the version that they have, they all drink a schnapps. from their perspective, they've invented Isaac Bashevis Singer, right?

Melinda Lewis:

Of course.

David Stromberg:

Thanks to them, the story exists.

Speaker 8:

L'Chaim.

David Stromberg:

But Singer invented Simple Gimpel for them, but he did it so well... The magic trick worked so well that they thought they had invented it.

Melinda Lewis:

Is he able to react to this invention of himself?

David Stromberg:

It's complicated. That's why I'm saying it's not like he said, "Oh, this is what I'm going to do." So it kind of happened and then he saw that it did well, and that not just that he succeeded with it, but there was a strong reaction, a positive emotional reaction to that, and that people had something invested in him playing that role for them. So suddenly he started taking on that role a little more, a little more. Of course, he couldn't complain about what they did for him, because they really did put him on the map from an American perspective. It's just that they, and people who read the story didn't understand how much of his own deliberate intentionality went into that.

That probably brought him to the attention of Cecil Hemley, who was then the publisher of Noonday. He was interested in Singer. This is after Family Moscot came out in 1950 and basically flopped, and it was a Knapf who published it. Then Cecil Hemley came along with Noonday, published this shorter novel called Satan and Garai, kind of connected to the Kabbalah, connected to possession, exorcism, and then Gimpel The Fool in 1957, 2 years after that. That was kind of a reinvention, because suddenly he became a short form author, as opposed to being someone who published an epic novel about Jews in Warsaw.

Melinda Lewis:

So when you as a translator are sitting down to do this book, how do you begin, with understanding all of this context and then the responsibility of moving back and forth between Bellow's and Singer's version?

David Stromberg:

The beginning point is really a long-standing criticism of Bellow's translation. It's been made many times by scholars and discussed by scholars, and that is the first line.

Melinda Lewis:

That's a pretty bold... Oh, Bellow, come on.

David Stromberg:

So in the original Yiddish, I'll do it kind of in a combination of Yiddish and English, he would say, "I am Gimpel Tom. I don't consider myself a nar." Now, nar is a fool. Tom is a simpleton. Bellow translated it, "I'm Gimpel the Fool. I don't consider myself a fool." So he totally erased the entire tension of the first two sentences. Now, I mentioned that this had been picked up from Rebbe Nachman. In Rebbe Nachman, it's in third person, and the narrator says there was a Tom character, a simpleton character, and he does it in different words. He used it in more Slavic words, but he explains, it's not that he was a nar, it's not that he was a fool, but he was simple-minded, essentially. But of course, Singer took that and put it in the first person. So the minute that you can say about yourself, I'm Simple Gimpel, I don't think I'm a fool, you've actually created wisdom, because you have the self-critical element, you have the self-reflexive element, and that already is interesting.

Melinda Lewis:

There's already kind of addressing the obvious, right? The next question, which also highlights the repetition and an understanding of what the follow-up is.

David Stromberg:

Exactly. so now tell us why that's the case, right? The whole story is explaining those two first sentences. But I did use what I knew about Dostoevsky and Singer's connection to Dostoevsky to create a version that I called Gimpel the Idiot. I'm Gimpel the Idiot. I don't consider myself a fool. So we've reintroduced the tension without doing something as silly as calling him Simple Gimpel. Then, I don't know, maybe that year or the next, this was all around 2015. I was in New York, and then I ended up on a fellowship at YIVO, at the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research.

I found this journal, a double issue of a journal called Yiddish published out of Queens College. I'm looking through it and I see, oh, there's a play adaptation or a play script, a partial play script of Gimpel Tom called Simple Gimpel. The editorial note says, this was made by Bashevis Singer. I said, "Well, that's interesting." then I start reading it. Now, having translated it, I'm looking at the lines and I'm saying, oh, this is not an adaptation. This is a translation of the story. He took the story, translated it himself, and then put it in dialogue play for him.

Melinda Lewis:

Oh, interesting.

Speaker 9:

In much of world literature, the fool is considered to be of divine origin. Can you comment on that?

Isaac Bashevis Singer:

I would say that there is a Gimpel in every human being. There is also a fool in every saint. The saint really believes that what he is, he can make all of humanity like him, and this is his foolishness. But without this naivety, without his foolishness, humanity wouldn't have reached the little which it has reached until now. In this respect, I am one of these fools.

David Stromberg:

It wasn't complete, but it was about 60%. Now, in my translation, I'd made mine first, but after I made mine, I compared it to the Bellow. I tried to understand why'd he make certain choices. Why do I make different choices? Can I make the same choices? But you realize it's not just about the particular choices, it's the gestalt of the whole thing.

Once I found the Singer translation, there was no question that this was the one that was going to be the new one, because it was the old one. It was actually Singer's own translation, or at least 60% of it. I then started piecing them together. So I would transcribe the Singer one, then I would get to the end of what seemed to make sense, and I would put in, like Legos sort of, put in my translation. Then when I came to one of those sentences, I saw that I had translated it one to one to Singer's translation. So once that came together, I felt like, okay, this is a solid thing. Then I took it to my Rebbe professor, David Roskis, who knows the Bellow translation by heart probably, and said, "What have I done?"

Melinda Lewis:

Was the hardest part of the translation the confidence?

David Stromberg:

I would always say the hardest part was the ambiguity around what's going to happen to this and how can I keep it alive? I think that was really the question for me. How can I keep the energy alive, the tension alive? How can I get across that fire? So I found the Singer version. There was still a question, why should David Stromberg translate a new version of Gimpel the Fool, when Saul Bellow translated it perfectly fine and even greatly fine. Where the differences are is about tone, it's about irony, it's about rhythm. I found later in another archive, someone who in his later years interviewed Bellow about his translation, and he said, well, I was writing The Adventures of Augie March at the time, so I just used that voice. So I didn't know ahead of time, and I was so nervous about it that... We were visiting my wife's aunt and uncle in Vermont for Thanksgiving in 2015.

I was mentioning this and talking to them about the fact that I was trying to translate this story. Her cousin who was visiting as well said, "Well, you know, Saul Bellow is buried here." I said, "Can we go to his grave, so I can ask for his permission to publish my translation?" At that time, it was still only my translation, and I went and we found the grave, and I kind of said to the spirit of Saul Bellow, I said, "Look, it's not to replace, it's to add. It's to be next to. Please give me permission to publish this." The irony of the whole thing is that when we then brought it to Restless, it was their idea to include the Saul Bellow translation. I felt like it was Saul Bellow coming back and saying, "Okay, you can publish yours, but with mine. You said next to."

Saul Bellow:

I would say God-like or divine, divinely inspired reaction to the strange fact that one is a human being who has appeared suddenly from where he doesn't really know, for how long he doesn't really know either. Although he tends to take the world for granted and is not surprised by all of these wonderful, miraculous things that surround him, he has to pretend not to be surprised because at heart he is surprised, astonished, and delighted.

David Stromberg:

Because I'm also a writer, and because my writing is so different from Singer's, it was always driven by what I feel is like literary activism. I want this thing to be out. English is the language that I write in, and I want to be able to turn this into that. It's also part of how I read it. I understand it in a different way and in a deeper way if I translate it. So I think I was driven by a desire to put my skills and my sensibility at Singer's service, to bring it closer to what he had originally had. When I found that translation, it was clear that that's what I would do, because it was just serving the same purpose, which was to bring it back as close as possible to his voice.

Isaac Bashevis Singer:

I don't want to tell people what kind of a message I have. I'd rather tell them there is no message what I'm writing. You read a story and you create your own message. I don't have to do everything for you.

Melinda Lewis:

What do you think would've happened if you hadn't found that version?

David Stromberg:

That's another good question.

Melinda Lewis:

Again, it's happenstance.

David Stromberg:

Totally happenstance.

Melinda Lewis:

This is another example of something that just flipping through, finding this thing and making these realizations that end up transforming your life for several years.

David Stromberg:

I don't know what would've happened. I probably would've had to have established myself more as a writer and editor of Singer's work before someone would allow the possibility of putting a different translation out there instead of Bellow's. So I think that it would've taken longer. I think it would've ultimately taken longer to bring the story out in a different form.

Isaac Bashevis Singer:

Of course, in my age, there's more to look back than to look forward to. Still, I'm looking forward to, because tomorrow I intend to sit down and write another story. The story itself may look back, but I'm looking forward to the story.

Melinda Lewis:

I have a bajillion other questions, but there's only so much time on this earth.

David Stromberg:

Agreed. I think the main thing is to make the questions we did ask count.

Melinda Lewis:

Yeah, I love that. Thank you so much for talking with me about Singer.

David Stromberg:

Thank you. It's a real treat.

Melinda Lewis:

It's truly my pleasure.

Pop, the Question was researched and hosted by Dr. Melinda Lewis. Our theme music and episodes are produced by Brian Kantorek, with additional audio production by Noah Levine. All of this was done under the directorship of Erica Levi Zelinger, the deanship of Dr. Paula Marantz Cohen and the Pennoni Honors College at Drexel University.

Speaker 11:

I know it's important. I do. I honestly do. But we talking about practice, man. What are we talking about? Practice. We talking about practice, man.