Announcing the publication of Simple Gimpl: the Definitive Bilingual Edition!

From bestselling, controversial Yiddish writer and Nobel Prize–winner Isaac Bashevis Singer comes a little gem of a book about a hapless yet charmingly resilient baker who is the butt of every joke—until one day the devil shows up and invites him to take revenge. 

Singer’s folktale-like story, “Gimpl Tam,” was first published in an obscure Yiddish-language journal on March 30, 1945—about a month before the Nazi surrender. Nine years later, Saul Bellow translated the story into English, introducing Singer to an audience of American Jewish readers. Gimpl’s predicament has since come to be seen as a symbol of the diaspora. What role should a minority people play in the face of aggression?

Today, “Gimpl Tam” is one of the most influential and beloved stories in the canon of twentieth-century literature, taught in high schools and colleges, endlessly discussed, and even analyzed from a Talmudic perspective. But Bellow’s translation, which was done without Singer’s involvement, has been accused of christening the language to make it palatable for a mass readership. 

In 1991, before his death at the age of 88, Singer (whose relationship with Bellow was complicated, to say the least) sat down to write his own translation. The definitive bilingual edition of Simple Gimpl brings the Yiddish original alongside both Singer’s and Bellow’s renditions, beautiful drawings by award-winning New Yorker illustrator Liana Finck, and an essay by scholar David Stromberg, who completed and edited Singer’s translation. The volume introduces new readers to Singer’s talents as a storyteller, inspires conversation about the role of translation, especially of endangered languages like Yiddish, and confirms the value of individual integrity and the steadfastness of individuals and minority communities under duress.

Simple Gimpl is published on the occasion of the 10th anniversary of Restless Books with the generous support of David Bruce Smith and the Grateful American Foundation, Dean and Annette Cycon, and Terry Philip Segal in honor of Joseph Lieberman.    

Join us in celebrating Simple Gimpl with these in-person events! 

• Brooklyn
  On March 23rd at 7:00 p.m. EST, Brooklyn Jews and Community Bookstore present A Night with David Stromberg and Val Vinokur at Congregation Beth Elohim.
  

• Boston
  On March 27th from 7:00–8:00 p.m. EST, Harvard Bookstore presents David Stromberg and Jamaica Kincaid in conversation about the art of translation, Singer’s legacy, and much more.

Events for "The People's Tongue: Americans and the English Language" with Ilan Stavans

In 2023, Restless Books celebrates its 10th anniversary with the publication of The People's Tongue: Americans and the English Language, a riveting, one-of-a-kind anthology of the diversity, strangeness, and power of American English that features a tremendous array of letters, poems, memoirs, jeremiads, stories, songs, documents, and more from Sojourner Truth and Abraham Lincoln to Henry Roth and Zora Neale Hurston, from George Carlin and James Baldwin to Richard Rodríguez and Amy Tan, from Tony Kushner and Toni Morrison to Louise Erdrich.

The volume’s pursuit is to understand how an imperial language like English, with Germanic origins, whose spread resulted from the Norman conquest, came to be an intrinsic component of the most influential democratic experiment in the world. Edited by Restless Books publisher Ilan Stavans, an internationally renowned cultural commentator and consultant to the Oxford English Dictionary, The People’s Tongue is organized chronologically and offers an array of foundational texts that trace the development of American identity and vernacular.

We hope to see you at one of our in-person events to celebrate this incredible book! You can find registration info below as it becomes available.

2023 eventS

Feb 21, Feb 28, Mar 7: New York’s 92nd St. Y Hosts Ilan Stavans for Three Sessions (virtual)

Mar 1, 7:00 PM: Ilan Stavans at the Newport Public Library, VT (virtual) 

Mar 29: Ilan Stavans in Conversation with John McWhorter at New York’s Tenement Museum (hybrid)

Apr 4: Restless Books 10th Anniversary Celebration at the Brooklyn Public Library, NY (in-person)

Apr 11: Ilan Stavans at the New York Public Library, NY (virtual)

Apr 19: “The Sounds of English” with PEN America at the Skirball Cultural Center, Los Angeles (in-person)

May 21: American Writers Museum hosts Ilan Stavans with Carolyn Curiel and music by Paquito D’Rivera & Fareed Haque, Chicago (in-person)

June 8: Ilan Stavans in Conversation with John McWhorter at Planet Word Museum, Washington, D.C. (in-person)

Jun 17–Jul 1: “Great Books: Language and Democracy” at Amherst College, MA (in-person)

ABOUT THE EDITOR

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© Kevin Gutting

Ilan Stavans is the publisher of Restless Books and a passionate lover of dictionaries, with a collection of over three hundred now housed in his personal collection at the University of Pennsylvania. He has published an assortment of books about language, including Spanglish: The Making of a New American Language (2003), Dictionary Days: A Defining Passion (2005), Resurrecting Hebrew (2008), and How Yiddish Changed America and How America Changed Yiddish (2020). He serves as a consultant to the Oxford English Dictionary and lives in Amherst, Mass.

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