“Yentl, the Yeshiva Boy”

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“Yentl, the Yeshiva Boy”

THE LITERARY WORK

A short story set in Poland in the late nineteenth century; published in 1962.

SYNOPSIS

A Jewish orphan girl’s scheme to don men’s clothes and attend a yeshiva interferes with her love for a young scholar, her study partner.

Events in History at the Time the Short Story Takes Place

The Short Story in Focus

Events in History at the Time the Short Story Was Written

For More Information

Isaac Bashevis Singer, the son of Pinchas Mendel Singer and Bathsheba Zylberman, was born in 1904 in the Polish village of Leoncin. His father, an impoverished Hasidic Rabbi, proudly claimed to be a descendant of Rabbi Israel Ben Eliezer, the founder of Eastern European Hasidism. His mother was the offspring of an austere anti-Hasidic rabbi, whose approach to the study of traditional Jewish law and contempt for Hasidic mysticism foredoomed the marriage. The Hasidic’s love of folklore, miracles, and marvels clashed with traditional Jewry’s faith in the wisdom of painstaking study and scholarship. These two strains of mystical and traditional Judaism appear in “Yentl, the Yeshiva Boy” as well as many other short stories by Singer that dramatize the tension between the rational and the inscrutable.

Events in History at the Time the Short Story Takes Place

A tradition of learning

The primacy of education in Judaism has helped preserve Jewish culture throughout a history of heinous catastrophes. The Jewish scriptures are comprised of the Hebrew Bible, the Talmud, and the rabbinic codes based on the Talmud, which consists of the Mishnah and the Gemara. The Mishnah is the “oral law” said to have been communicated to Moses when he received the ten commandments on Mt. Sinai; the Gemara includes rabbinic interpretations and opinions of the oral law. Traditional education centered largely on interpreting the Talmud, which teaches by way of case histories. Jewish law would be extrapolated from these case histories, then applied to new situations in everyday life. The method depended on discussion, a reason for teaming up with another student as the characters Yentl and Avigdor do in Singer’s short story. They become study partners in Avigdor’s hometown, the shtetl, or small town, of Bechev.

Jews in Poland clustered together in shtetlach (the plural of shtetl), where they formed a majority of the population of the small towns. Young men of the shtetl won prominence neither through wealth nor through physical prowess, but through their Talmudic studies. Boys embarked on their basic education at age three, focusing on languages, arithmetic, and Jewish subjects. At thirteen those who continued entered the yeshiva, an academy where they spent years studying, debating, and reinterpreting the Jewish laws recorded in the Talmud.

The ideal boy of Jewish folklore was pale and gaunt, the telltale marks of a child who spent his days in the hermetic isolation of the study room. Mothers longed to see their boys earn distinction in the schools, and wealthy fathers sought out bright young scholars to marry their daughters. Newlyweds sometimes lived with the bride’s parents for as long as ten years so the groom could continue his study of the Talmud. The shtetl community even offered an allowance and daily meals in different houses to foster students’ scholarly aspirations.

Hasidim and Mitnagdim

Not all religious Jews became preoccupied with the study of religious law. As far back as the 1200s there arose a movement of Jews who concentrated more on the mystical aspects of the religion than on the study of Jewish law. The mystics concerned themselves with attaining an immediate connection with God. Their movement, called Cabala, ultimately faded, but influenced a movement that surfaced in the 1700s among the Jews of Eastern Europe. Founded by Israel Ben Eliezer, or the Baal Shem Tov (which means “master of the good name”), this new movement, called Hasidism, emerged partially as a reaction against the traditional Jewish intelligentsia. Hasidism stressed direct, emotional worship of God through prayer, work, or any physical activity, and initially appealed most to poorer Jews.

This focus nurtured a strong sense of joy and release in worship that contrasted with the sedate prayers of the anti-Hasidic Jews, the Mitnagdim, who opposed the new movement. (Mitnagdim is, in fact, the Yiddish word for “opponents.”) The Hasidim did not ignore the Talmud, but merely insisted that good actions meant more than strict observance of the law.

The Hasidim created a new charismatic religious leader, the zaddik, or rebbe, who, it was believed, could act as an intermediary and transmit people’s supplications to God. It was thought that every generation gave birth to a few gifted individuals, each of whom could help his set of followers communicate with God. The zaddik would win a devoted following and pass on his position of authority to his son.

Clashes between the zaddikim and traditional rabbis erupted. Because the Hasidim accepted a variety of modes of worship and emphasized the mystical aspect of everyday life, the Mitnagdim dismissed them as simple-minded and ignorant. The Mitnagdim ridiculed the assertions of self-proclaimed miracle workers among the Hasidim, but also feared the spreading enthusiasm for Hasidism and so redoubled their emphasis on meticulous study.

The feud subsided in the nineteenth century as the Mitnagdim turned their concern to opposing the Haskalah movement (or Jewish enlightenment movement), which called for the study of worldly subjects more than religious ones. This new movement was perceived as a greater threat to Judaism than Hasidism, whose followers, though unconventional in their manner of prayer, were nevertheless devout. Hasidism ultimately had an impact on mainstream Judaism. The Mitnagdim increasingly adopted the Hasidic belief in the primacy of religious intent over esoteric knowledge.

Meanwhile, the Haskalah movement, which was concerned with worldly enlightenment, gained ground and greatly affected schooling, broadening the curriculum to include such secular subjects as geography, science, and art. Outside the small shtetls, the amount of time devoted to Hebrew studies diminished in the more urban yeshivas. In Warsaw, Poland, some schools began to take steps in this direction as early as 1819, even opening two schools for girls. The story’s main character, Yentl, then, was not such an anomaly; though a maverick in the shtetl, she was living in an already changing world.

Jewish women

Traditional Jewish men recited a blessing thanking God, “who did not make me a woman” (Baker, p. 35). A contemporary prayer book adds a footnote alleging:

[T]here is no degradation of women implied in this blessing. Men thank God for the privilege which is theirs of performing all the precepts of the Torah, many of which are not incumbent upon women.
(Metsudah siddur, p. 14)

While apologists insisted that women’s roles are different but equal, others have held that women in the nineteenth and earlier centuries were excluded from the two realms most esteemed by the Jewish community: prayer in the synagogue and the study of religious law.

In traditional synagogues women sat separated from men, usually in an upper gallery and sometimes concealed behind a curtain. Women were not allowed to wear the tallith, a prayer shawl or to be a part of the minyan, the quorum of ten Jews needed to recite public prayers. They could not read aloud from the Torah because their voices were considered sexually provocative. A woman’s hair was regarded as so sexually alluring that matrons were expected to shave their heads and wear wigs in order not to attract males other than their own husbands.

Although women were not legally forbidden to study Jewish scripture, learned women were regarded with suspicion. Some Jewish scholars insisted that women, although adroit in the home and marketplace, lacked the acumen necessary for serious study. One rabbi warned “whoever teaches his daughter Torah teaches her tiflut”, meaning “nonsense” or “useless information”; the word is also sometimes translated as “immorality” (Cantor, p. 103). The fear that grave consequences would attend the admission of women into the yeshiva drove one rabbi to exclaim “let the words of the Torah be burned and not given to women” (Cantor, p. 103).

As in other European households, Jewish women assumed the usual domestic tasks. But Jewish communities could not afford to confine women to only the home. It was necessary for them to work in the marketplace to support their husbands’ studies. While the preservation of Jewish law and tradition became the ambition of young men, aside from nurturing the family, the role of women became to facilitate these pursuits.

INFERIOR OR SUPERIOR?

While women were denied certain rights and excused from certain obligations imposed on men in the traditional Jewish community, they nevertheless enjoyed a position of importance. It was a basic tenet of the shtetl that a man without a wife lives a joyless life, that he should love his wife as much as himself, and that he should respect her even more. A woman, many rabbis taught, is capable of deeper faith than a man, has a keener ability to discern truth, and is especially gentle-hearted.

Yet women had no direct influence on the interpretation of the laws that governed them. Even those laws addressing marriage, divorce, and assault were interpreted entirely by men. Wife abuse was not tolerated, since marriage was regarded as sacred and crucial in the preservation of the Jewish people. Divorce laws were strict. If a couple wanted to dissolve the marriage, only the man could petition for divorce. If a man vanished but could not be proven dead, his wife remained anchored (agunan) in the status of a “grass widow,” and was unable to remarry. In “Yentl, the Yeshiva Boy,” Yentl, a girl who impersonates a boy in order to study scripture, is coerced into marrying another girl. By sending divorce papers to her “wife,” Yentl prevents the woman from being caught in such a circumstance.

In sum, a Jewish woman in the nineteenth-century shtetl devoted herself to raising children and supporting her husband in his pursuits—she had few outlets for her own intellectual creativity. Women, in fact, suffered exclusion from the studies that were and are a cornerstone of traditional Judaism.

The Short Story in Focus

The plot

After her father’s death, a young Jewish girl, Yentl, is compelled to leave her small hometown of Yanev. Rather than rent out her father’s house or accept one of many marriage offers, she sells her home and flees Yanev disguised as a man.

As a child Yentl had enjoyed the affection of her father, who during his many bedridden years had studied Torah with her. Proud of his daughter’s keen intelligence, he lamented “Yentl, you have the soul of a man” (Singer, “Yentl, the Yeshiva Boy,” p. 8). Sometimes while her father slept, Yentl would don his clothes and regard herself in the mirror. Secretly she would even smoke his pipe. After his death, she longed to continue studying Torah at a yeshiva. Rather than resign herself to the dull lot of a housewife, she clips her braids and starts off for the Polish city of Lublin dressed as a man.

On the road to Lublin she meets Avigdor, a yeshiva boy from the town of Bechev. Yentl introduces herself as Anshel, the name of one of her uncles, and says she is looking for a quiet yeshiva. Avigdor suggests she accompany him to Bechev. On the way he tells her the tale of his first engagement.

Avigdor had been engaged to Hadass Vishkower, the daughter of the richest man in Bechev. But her father, Alter Vishkower, forbade the marriage, shattering both his daughter’s and Avigdor’s dreams. Avigdor’s friends suggested other women, but he had no interest.

Arriving in Bechev, Yentl and Avigdor agree to become study partners. Yentl finds lodging and, after a few weeks, becomes a regular guest in Alter Vishkower’s home. To Avigdor’s persistent questions about Hadass, Yentl replies “two years after she’s married, … she’ll be an old hag” (“Yentl, the Yeshiva Boy,” p. 15). Together with Avigdor, Yentl spends hours musing over the wisdom of the Torah, puffing on cigarettes, and sharing buckwheat cakes. All the while she continues the ruse of portraying herself as a young man.

One day Avigdor astonishes her. Still thinking Yentl is a young man, he requests that she marry Hadass, insisting that it would be “better than [if] a total stranger [married her]” (“Yentl, the Yeshiva Boy,” p. 16). He confesses also that his relatives are trying to marry him off to a shrewish widow for fear that no other woman will have him. Yentl tries to discourage him from the idea, but to no avail. Two days later Avigdor becomes engaged to Peshe, a merchant’s daughter.

Disturbed by Avigdor’s engagement, Yentl dares one evening to ask Hadass why she did not marry Avigdor. Hadass responds,”It wasn’t my fault. My father was against it … [he] found out a brother of his had hanged himself” (“Yentl, the Yeshiva Boy,” p. 19). (Suicide was regarded as a sin more abominable than murder by religious authorities of the era.) Days later, after realizing that she is in love with Avigdor, Yentl proposes to Hadass. Yentl’s intentions are neither honorable nor unselfish. She plans to exact a vengeance for Avigdor, while simultaneously drawing him closer, through Hadass, to herself. Hadass’s father agrees to the match.

Yentl ponders how she will deceive Hadass. They are both virgins and know little about men. But having read about sex in her studies and heard the coarse swagger of young men, Yentl feels confident she can dupe Hadass. After the wedding night, Hadass’s mother and her band invade the couple’s chamber. They emerge brandishing bloodstained sheets to prove the consummation.

While Yentl enjoys Hadass’s tender care, Avigdor suffers from Peshe’s constant nagging. Welcoming a few days respite from his wife, he eagerly accepts an invitation from Yentl to spend a few days in Lublin. Yentl promises to divulge an astonishing secret. In Lublin, she confesses she is a woman. To convince Avigdor, she undresses in front of him.

Yentl explains that even as a child she had read from the Torah with her father. Rather than abandon the joys of study for the tedium of house-keeping, she had assumed the garb of a man and fled her hometown. On the road, continued Yentl, she had met Avigdor, and followed him to Bechev. She had married Hadass only to be closer to him. Avigdor exclaims “You could have married me” (“Yentl, the Yeshiva Boy,” p. 49), but Yentl replies that she could never abandon her studies.

Yentl encourages Avigdor to divorce Peshe and marry Hadass. She assures him of Hadass’s unflagging love for him and insists that she (Yentl) will leave Bechev and send Hadass the necessary divorce papers. Both Yentl and Avigdor agree that Hadass might not survive the trauma were she to discover she had married a woman. Avigdor is eager to leave Peshe, but hesitant to marry Hadass. He insists that he would rather marry Yentl, but she declines, “No, Avigdor, it wasn’t destined to be” (“Yentl, the Yeshiva Boy,” p. 52).

THE VIRGIN BRIDE

Widespread in Jewish communities was the custom of examining the bride’s linen after the first night of marriage to find the spot of blood that would prove her virginity. Her mother would often preserve the sheet in case she needed it to uphold the family’s honor with proof in some later dispute.

Yentl disappears from Bechev and Hadass falls ill of consternation and grief. The town gossips invent a variety of explanations for Yentl’s disappearance. They are surprised that even Avigdor, Yentl’s best friend, remains silent but even more surprised when he becomes engaged to Hadass. Hadass becomes pregnant soon after the marriage, and the townspeople are again astonished to hear Avigdor name his first son Anshel.

Yentl’s liberation

When Yentl’s father laments “Yentl, you have the soul of a man” (“Yentl, the Yeshiva Boy”, p. 8), he confirms her suspicion that “she had not been created for the noodle board and the pudding dish, for chattering with silly women and pushing for a place at the butcher’s block” (“Yentl, the Yeshiva Boy,” p. 8). With Avigdor she enters the world of men, studying Torah and tasting cigarettes and strong liquor.

Yet when Avigdor comments “they’re trying to talk me into another match, but the girl doesn’t appeal to me,” Yentl reacts with surprise, “In Bechev, yeshiva boys look at women?” (“Yentl, the Yeshiva Boy,” p. 12). Yentl’s question reveals her own innocence. Although versed in the lore of the Torah, she remains naive about sex. When her period is late, she fears she “ha[s] conceived merely through desiring a man” (“Yentl, the Yeshiva Boy,” p. 22). Yentl manages to deceive Hadass only because Hadass is even more uninformed than she.

Having revealed herself to Avigdor, Yentl forsakes him for her studies. When he insists “you could have married me,” she retorts, “I wanted to study the Gemara and Commentaries with you, not darn your socks!” (“Yentl, the Yeshiva Boy,” p. 49). In the conservative shtetl she can hardly hope her ambitions will be tolerated. Rather than indulge her love for Avigdor, she must continue the perverse masquerade, a parody that mocks the liberation she seeks by causing her to deny herself another way. She must stifle her romantic desires for Avigdor. In one case or the other, society makes it impossible for Yentl to achieve complete happiness.

HOW YENTL DIVORCED HADASS

There is no other means of obtaining a divorce under Jewish law than by a husband delivering or sending his wife a bill of divorcement called a get To be effective, the get must be freely accepted by the wife. In other words, she cannot be divorced without her consent. The divorce is executed by the husband’s act of writing, signing, and delivering the bill to his wife either personally or by a representative. Afterwards the ex-husband and ex-wife are free to remarry and are forbidden to continue occupying their former home.

Sources

Singer’s mother, Bathsheba Zylberman, might have provided a model for Yentl. She too was educated by her father, who decried the fact that she hadn’t been born a man. In his memoirs, Singer’s brother, Joshua, headed the chapter about his parents’ ill-fated marriage “A tragedy, due to the fact that fate transposed genders in heaven.” He describes his mother as “tall and somewhat stooped, with large, piercing, cold-gray eyes, a sharp nose and a jutting pointed chin like a man’s” (Sinclair, p. 13). Singer’s sister, Esther, insisted that her mother “looked like a Talmudist who spends his days and nights and years in study, rather than a woman. Even the black dress and velvet jacket she had on scarcely betrayed her” (Sinclair, p. 13).

The sad childhood of Isaac’s neglected sister may also have prompted Singer to write Yentl’s story. Ignored by her mother, who had hoped for a boy she could train to study Torah, Esther Singer sought love from her less austere father. She “reflected that had she been a boy instead of a girl … she would have spent all her time in the study of the Talmud” (Sinclair, p. 19). But her Hasidic father did not nurture her interests. Hasidism, although welcoming new forms of worship, followed traditional Judaism in encouraging women to “bring … happiness into the home by ministering to [their] husband [s] and bearing [them] children” (Sinclair, p. 20). When she overheard her father proudly declare that his son Joshua would one day be a renowned Talmudist, she asked “what am I going to be one day?” He replied “Nothing, of course!” (Sinclair, p. 20). Nevertheless, Esther persevered. She wrote short stories and letters, in which Isaac Bashevis perceived “the first literary spark” in the family (Sinclair, p. 21). Esther escaped to England before World War I. She was sickly all her life and suffered paranoia, perhaps as a result of her parents’ disdain.

Events in History at the Time the Short Story Was Written

Yentl and feminism

Singer fled Poland for New York in 1935, where he supervised the translation of his stories from Yiddish into English. A reemergent feminist movement in America was gaining ground when “Yentl, the Yeshiva Boy” was published. It would formally begin in 1963 with the publication of Betty Friedan’s book The Feminine Mystique, which revealed the emotional misery suffered by women who were unfulfilled by their roles as homemakers. Because Singer’s short story articulates some of the frustrations women were suffering in the 1960s, the author’s earlier comments about women might seem surprising. Listening to political banter in the writers’ haunts in Warsaw, Poland, he had decided he “was an anti-feminist” (Kresh, The Magician of 86th Street, p. 105). Singer had been involved in many love affairs in his youth and insisted “I always felt that two girls were better than one and three were better than two” (Kresh, The Magician of 86th Street, p. 105). According to Singer, the short story “Yentl, the Yeshiva Boy” has no feminist purpose. It merely showed that “behind all the strict behavior, behind the long skirts and the rules and regulations, human nature was still there. So many things can keep a person captive because of a fear of losing one’s reputation, but our passions are still there” (Kresh, The Magician of 86th Street, p. 11).

Modern Judaism

After World War II and the Holocaust, in which 6 million Jews were exterminated by the Germans, Jewish women suffered enormous pressure to bear children. The fear that the Jewish population was dying out plagued

Holocaust survivors, who urged their daughters to marry and begin families.

Women did gain new rights during this period. In the Jewish state of Israel created after the war, the Women’s Equal Rights Law of 1951 made women’s legal status equal to men’s, guaranteeing their rights to own property and serve as a child’s guardian. Religious law has been slower to change. It still governs marriage and divorce for the Jews of Israel, a substantial number of whom hail from Poland and other areas of Eastern Europe. There was, moreover, a vestige of discrimination under this law in that it required a divorce to be given by the husband to the wife. In other words, had Yentl’s marriage dissolved in 1962, when the story was written, it still would have required the husband supplying the wife with papers to release her from the bond.

Conversely, Holocaust survivors who emigrated to the United States after World War II (as Singer had done in 1935) became subject to civil instead of religious laws in marriage as well as other areas.

The threat of assimilation prompted Jewish leaders to reconsider the question of women’s education. Whereas women in the Polish shtetlach had often lived in their fathers’ homes, sheltered from corrupting influences, in America most women had some secular education and often lived away from home. Even traditional Jews agreed that to preserve Jewish customs, women should study the Torah. This might prevent women from leaving the Jewish faith while better preparing them to raise their own children as Jews. Not until a decade after Singer wrote his story, though, would even the least conservative branch of American Jewry take a pivotal step on behalf of women. Only in 1972 did Hebrew Union College ordain the first female rabbi in the United States, Sally Priesand.

Reception

“Yentl, the Yeshiva Boy” won acclaim from critics, with one commentator describing it as a tale that “deals with problems confronting Jewish women in the late nineteenth-century Polish shtetlach, problems that have not been re-solved” (Cohen, p. 208). The story’s popularity encouraged Singer to make it into a play. One critic of the play praised the “resemblances to traditional Yiddish theater … ingenious female disguise … compelling full length rituals performed in the original Hebrew and quaint shtetl customs” (Cohen, p. 209). Singer wrote a poignant funeral scene for the play, in which Yentl, as a girl, is forbidden to recite a prayer for her father.

The story was later developed into a movie-musical, starring and directed by Barbara Streisand, which was released in 1983. Singer disparaged the film, lamenting,

I did not find artistic merit neither in the adaptation, nor in the directing [sic].… [T]here was too much singing in this movie, much too much.… It did nothing to bring out Yentl’s individuality nor to enlighten her conduct. The very opposite.
(Farrell, pp. 224-25)

He decried the happy ending, in which Yentl boards a ship to America, “singing at the top of her lungs” (Farrell, p. 226). “Why would she decide to go to America,” Singer asked. “Weren’t there enough Yeshivas in Poland or in Lithuania where she could continue to study?” (Farrell, p. 226).

In spite of Singer’s widespread popularity, the author had his detractors. Some Yiddish writers criticized him for exposing unsavory features about Polish villages. They insisted that by revealing the sexism of the shtetl he threatened the integrity of the Jewish communities, and called him “The Betrayer of Israel.”

Others responded that, by defying conventional stereotypes, Singer’s characters challenged common prejudices of his day. In America, for example, Jews were often perceived as a model minority. The average Jew was expected to be a genius, like the scientist Albert Einstein. By deflating these myths, Singer’s stories are said to have helped liberate American Jews.