Polish Theatre Kiel

Gimpel is an extreme figure. He is not only a fool, as Isaac Bashevis Singer writes in his eponymous story. Since his school days he has also had other names: moron, donkey, fool, idiot, dickhead and drip. From time immemorial it was possible to tell him stories full of lies, all of which he believed. When he fled from a barking dog that didn't exist, the whole marketplace roared with laughter. The rabbi convinced him that it wasn't him but others who were fools, and finally he married a woman who pretended that her illegitimate son was her brother. But Gimpel is not really stupid. He has only a very big heart and does not want to cause trouble to those who cheat on him. He adores the child, who was born seventeen weeks after the wedding and cannot be his, loves his wife with all his soul, and every one of her secret lovers he has dismissed as a delusion. When he finally decides to divorce, during the nine months waiting period ordered by the rabbi his wife cheats on him with the journeyman from the bakery where he works. Nevertheless, he stays with her for another twenty years and the bakery that has become his property makes him a rich man. When his still young wife is lying on her deathbed all too prematurely, in order to find peace in the world beyond she confesses to him that none of her six children are his. Now his tiny, intact world collapses on him. He gives away his fortune to the children and moves out into the world, becomes a storyteller himself, lives off charity, and finally realises that the question of whether something is true or untrue only depends on the where it happens. His own life has apparently always been nothing but love. He will definitely see his beloved wife again in the afterlife: and over there, according to Singer, "even Gimpel can no longer be made a fool of“.[1]

Singer's story "Gimpel the Fool" takes place in Poland, in a place called Frampol, forty kilometers south of Lublin. The Jewish-Polish author, who was born in 1902 in Leoncin in Mazovia, emigrated to the USA in 1935 and died there in 1991. As in all his novels and stories, the background here is the life in the shtetl that has been lost forever, i.e. in the Jewish settlements in eastern Europe before the National Socialists wiped them out. But his main themes are the all too human aspects: the conflict between the mind and the body, virtue and vice, and above all between the two sexes. In 1978 Singer was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature. "Gimpel the Fool" was first published in New York in 1957. In 1968 Rohwolt published the first German edition, and in 2000 the seventh and apparently last edition of the collection of eponymous stories. Originally written in Yiddish, the German version is based on the American text, as the author wished. Singer needs no more than 19 pages in the paperback edition to give his readers a masterly description of the ups and downs of a whole life. Here readers will either recognize their own behaviour, especially their self-deception, or they will dismiss tragicomedy as a moral concept from a world long past. But can this relatively short text carry an entire theatre evening?