Solipsism and Sociality

N ONE EDITION of Isaac Bashevis Singer's story "Gimpel the Fool," the concluding paragraph carries the line: "At the door of the hotel where I lie, there stands the plank on which the dead are taken away."' Lying on his "bed of straw," his shrouds in his sack, ready to greet his Maker at the door of the hotel, Gimpel, turned itinerant beggar-a shnorrer-awaits death. In the opening paragraph of the story, Gimpel tells us that he "was no weakling. If I slapped someone he'd see all the way to Cracow." It would seem that when he left his village of Frampol to go "into the world" and after having "wandered over the land," Gimpel ended up in Cracow, for where else, apart from cities such as Lublin or Warsaw, would one find a hotel? An inn would be remarkable enough. Inevitably the question arises: By what strange set of circumstances does it happen that a shnorrer ends his life in a hotel? Yet it is Gimpel himself who says: "... the longer I lived the more I understood that there were really no lies. Whatever doesn't happen is dreamed at night. It happens to one if it doesn't happen to another, tomorrow if not today, or a century hence if not next year. What difference can it make? Often I heard tales of which I said, 'Now this is a thing that cannot happen.' But before a year had elapsed I heard that it actually had come to pass somewhere."'2 We are left with a typical transformation in the alchemistry of Singer's universe: Gimpel leaves his world in order to enter the world and ends by returning to his station in the world he repudiated. Everything is possible. There are Jews everywhere, even shnorrers in hotels. The alternative, simpler explanation is not altogether free of Singerian demons: the typographical error which turned Gimpel's hovel into a hotel may have been generated by an imp, by the resentful or embittered typesetter carrying on a last skir