SOURCE: Hennings, Thomas. “Singer's ‘Gimpel the Fool’ and The Book of Hosea.” Journal of Narrative Technique 13, no. 1 (winter 1983): 11-19.

In the following essay, Hennings views “Gimpel the Fool” as a modern rendition of The Book of Hosea.

The most popular of I. B. Singer's short stories, “Gimpel the Fool” tells about a man who endures the derision of his neighbors for marrying, divorcing, and remarrying an adulterous wife. Shortly after Singer wrote the story in Yiddish for the Jewish Daily Forward, Saul Bellow published a translation in The Partisan Review and brought it to the attention of the American public. Since then it has been frequently anthologized, hailed as “the capstone of [Singer's] achievement,” and studied diligently by scholars who like to explain its disturbing epistemological themes or its Yiddish literary conventions, the most important of which defines Gimpel's character type, the stock figure of dos kleine menshele...