Yentl, Tragedy, and the Unanswerable Question

“Yentl” is my favorite short story. Sort of. Let me explain. There’s a joke that the question a reader/writer hates most is also the most frequently asked: “what’s your favorite book.” Or “what’s your favorite short story?” It’s such a personal question. The answer has everything to do with who I am deep down; who I want to be; how I’m feeling that day. Not how I say I’m feeling; how I’m really feeling. Beneath the “hey how’s it going” and “oh you know keeping busy.”

Sometimes it’s just easier to have a stock answer; an answer that’s close enough to the truth that it doesn’t feel dishonest to say in a pinch. One of my stock answers when someone asks me “what’s your favorite short story?” is “Yentl” by Isaac Bashevis Singer. Why? If we’d just met I’d say: “It’s got a little bit of everything.” But since you and I have gotten to know each other, I feel I can be more specific.

Read Around, then Return to Comfortable Favorites

First of all, there is something to reading stories from your own culture. Everyone should try to read around the world–a bit from each continent, culture, gender, sexuality, and so on. I’m not just talking about nonfiction. Reading fiction fuels the imagination in a way that nonfiction cannot; and so reading fiction from other cultures can broaden your horizons in a way that is complementary to reading nonfiction… and to talking to humans. So yeah. Read around. Learn a few things.

But there’s no shame in also coming back to the pieces that make you feel seen. “Yentl” makes me feel seen. I’m not a woman (which is one common interpretation of Yentl’s character) and I’m not trans or genderqueer(which is another). It’s more because Yentl’s plight is my plight: she loves Judaism with all her heart. And Judaism doesn’t really love her back.

Background: Yentl and the Holocaust

The background to the short story is an intriguing one. Isaac Bashevis Singer was from an Eastern European Jewish community, and came to the US before the Holocaust. That event haunted his work whether by its presence or by its absence. Many of his stories/novels take place during or after, and depict characters trying to hold onto their humanity or their sanity. Or trying to pick up the pieces from among the wreckage. But many more of his stories take place in the past and have the feel of a deeply loved and perennially retold fairy-tale.

Mind, I’m not talking about the overtly magical Singer stories, though certainly there are a few of those. The ones that feel more-or-less realistic in their setting nevertheless have the vibe of a fairy tale–”Yentl,” “Gimpel,” “Joy,” The Manor, Shosha… There is something about these pieces whereby, even though they are ostensibly historical fiction, they feel as magical-realist as… well… as Singer’s magical-realist stories.

Background: Singer’s Relationship with Past and Tradition

The magic that infuses these stories is nostalgia. But you would think that a writer whose work is so infused with nostalgia would write stories that feel more nostalgic. Meaning: stories you read to feel like you’ve come home; like you’re among friends; like you’re safe. But Singer often takes pains to create beautiful, idyllic scenes from the irretrievable past… and then sets tragedies there. As if to say: You can’t go home again, but even if you could, you wouldn’t find what you were looking for. 

Singer himself is supposed to have been quite orthodox in his outlook, which, in Judaism, tends to mean believing that the letter of the law is the spirit. And that the sages’ traditions carry the weight of law; that there are such things as male roles and female roles, for example. All of those inconveniently anti-modern ideas we’d like to believe our heroes didn’t ascribe to (and Singer is, inconveniently, one of my heroes). And yet Singer, like Flannery O’Connor (another of my favorite authors and herself a devout Catholic) does not let his religion become a rose-colored veil over his eyes. Well… Sometimes.

Background: Yentl and Singer’s Mother

And so we come to the story. Who is Yentl? In short, she is Singer’s own mother, whom the author (just kidding there’s more backstory!) describes as a learned woman but unsuited to, and unhappy in, her roles as a wife and mother. What was Singer’s mother like? I don’t mean how did Singer describe her. His descriptions bring more confusion than resolution. His biographer quotes him thus:

“They [Singer’s parents] would have been a well-mated couple if she had been the husband and he the wife. Even externally each seemed better suited for the other’s role. Father was short and round, with a soft, fine, delicate face; warm blue eyes; full rosy cheeks; a small, chiseled nose, and plump, feminine hands. If not for the great reddish-brown beard and corkscrew-like sidelocks, he would have resembled a woman. Mother, on the other hand, was tall and somewhat stooped, with large piercing, cold-grey eyes, a sharp nose, and a jutting pointed chin like a man’s.”

Is Singer seeing his parents’ dissatisfaction with their prescribed gender roles and instead seeing their dissatisfaction with their gender? Or is it his dissatisfaction with them that we see in descriptions like this? And still all of this is before we even get to the story.

Yentl: The Plot

Let’s talk about the plot a bit, though really, you should be reading this story for yourself. It’s very different from the movie.

The beginning of the story is barely the work of a few penstrokes. Yentl’s mother is already gone; upon her father’s death, Yentl sells the house, cuts her braids, puts on man’s clothing, and moves to a different town to become a Yeshiva student. She has always (like Singer’s mother) gravitated to learning rather than to cooking and cleaning. Yentl’s father, as he lay on his sick bed, defied the prevailing custom by disputing Torah with Yentl–though he made sure to draw the curtains first. The whispered reason for Yentl’s–to use the modern word–dysphoria is that, in Yentl’s world, roles are so gendered that one cannot study Torah and Talmud without being a boy. Yentl wishes to study Torah; so Yentl must become a boy named Anshel, possibly in more than just name and dress.

No sooner does Yentl set out on her journey but she meets and befriends Avigdor, and resolves to travel to his yeshiva and become his study partner. Yentl’s disappointment has hardened her, and she has conceived a dislike for women, dismissing them one and all as obsessed with trivialities–bargaining at the butcher’s block, gossiping, matchmaking–while men are studying the governing secrets of the universe. But that’s not really what we see. One of Yentl’s first days presenting as male finds her in an all-male space–a common room at an inn where a dozen or more Yeshiva boys are joking, arguing, rough-housing, discussing potential marriages. In short–they are engaged in trivialities. Only Yentl and Avigdor are sitting quietly and, drawn together by their matched personalities, they begin to take each other into confidence.

Yentl, Avigdor, and Hadass

The relationship between Yentl and Avigdor is one of the greatest friendships in literature. Yeah. I said it. Eat shit, Nick and Gatsby.  Avigdor and Yentl are both missing something; are both hurting. Yentl’s problems we already know. Avigdor’s we learn in due course: he was engaged to a woman, Hadass, in the town to which Yentl is now in the process of moving, but her family broke it off upon learning that he had a brother who took his own life; another way in which accidents of birth determine a person’s path. Avigdor has also lost a parent. As Avigdor and Yentl become better friends, Avigdor shocks Yentl–or Anshel–by telling him to marry Hadass even though Avigdor clearly still loves her; better Yentl (that is, Anshel) than a stranger.

Yentl then shocks the reader by (eventually) agreeing. She marries Hadass. They even have sex, though the story never states as much. (And the movie is even more unwilling to depict such a scandal.) And she continues to string Hadass along for the better part of a year.

Yentl: Hero, Villain, or Neither?

One of the most compelling parts of the story is how badly the characters behave, particularly our protagonist. We see Yentl perpetrate a fraud against Hadass that, on the page, reads as genuinely shocking and heartwrenching. They marry under false pretenses. The text of the short story even hints that they even have sex, though the details are vague. And Yentl lives with Hadass for months, even as Hadass becomes more in love; more devoted. Apart from all of that, we see Yentl complaining to Avigdor that his fall-back wife Peshe (with Hadass no longer an option, he settles for a woman he doesn’t like) is ugly and shrewish. Yentl laces into the poor woman. She vents all of her frustrations on Peshe, sabotaging Avigdor’s marriage in the process. Meanwhile the lies her own marriage is built on are fast unraveling.

I will add parenthetically before going on that Yentl’s crimes against Hadass are of the kind that lose their bite upon consideration. By the standards of the town, the religion, and so forth, Yentl has done something unforgivable–a form of fraud and sexual assault. But what has she done really? Married a woman who loves her. That’s it. That’s the crime. This story is the loudest and most exuberant candidate for first prize in the Stories that would be Solved by Queerness/Polyamory Contest. This modern perspective on Yentl’s supposed crime does not change the tragedy much; but neither do I find I can ignore it.

Yentl’s Mystery

And yet Yentl’s behavior towards Hadass is not the enduring mystery of the story. The explanation; the motivation underpinning those actions, though tragic, is simple: Yentl loves studying Torah more than anything else. She appears to want to be married to Avigdor; she may even, in her way, want to be married to Hadass. But more than either, she wants to study Torah and she sacrifices every other happiness to that one. And the end of the story sees her going away, presumably to another town and another  yeshiva: a little older and a little less suited to playing the role of the beardless, sweet-faced boy  (though… Barbra Streisand pulled the trick off in her 40s, so maybe there’s hope after all). 

Does Yentl want Avigdor or Hadass? Does Yentl have sexual desires at all? The story is silent on that point. Nevertheless, Yentl’s motivations are clear.

Avigdor’s Mystery

The mystery that remains a mystery is Avigdor, not Yentl. What does Avigdor know, and what does he want? What secret part of Avigdor’s heart knows that Yentl is ‘really’ a woman? (If indeed Yentl is really a woman.)

I would like to talk more about this mystery, but there’s nothing to talk about. We just don’t know what is going on inside Avigdor’s head. The movie got it right in one respect in particular: they hired Mandy Patinkin but never let him sing a note, even as Yentl (played by Barbara Streisand) sings several memorable airs. You keep expecting Mandy to sing; you keep expecting a window into his heart. But no. We know he loves Hadass. We know he hates Peshe. By the end of the story we know he loves Yentl and wants to marry her. He may have wanted that before he knew Yentl’s secret: the act of asking Yentl to marry his ex-betrothed is one of the saddest and yet most erotically charged literary moments I have ever read.

So that much we know. But what about the in-between moments? The transitions? The moments of crisis and resolution that must have taken place in the quiet of his own rented room? Nothing. Why did he marry Peshe? How did he keep from following his brother to an early grave? Nothing.

Yentl and Modern LGBTQ+-Type Labels

In another way, I suppose, Yentl too is a mystery. As with so many characters who read as queer but who predate the alphabet of labels we have access to today, Yentl’s fate or privilege is to remain under that ambiguous umbrella, the Q. Yentl leaves one marriage and turns down an offer of another because her one real love is learning; yet she very clearly loves both Hadass and Avigdor. So why am I loath to call her “asexual” or “demi-sexual” even in the privacy of my own thoughts?

Yentl begins the story “assigned female at birth” or “AFAB,” then transitions to occupying a male space, role, and so on. So why do my thoughts rebel from calling her “trans”; or even from using male or neutral pronouns? (I use “trans” to describe Yentl… just not wholeheartedly.) Partly it’s because it feels uncomfortable using modern labels on a historical character. Partly because the story never makes it clear whether Yentl’s transition is one of conviction or convenience. But I suspect the problem is ultimately mine. Labels are imperfect things. There are people who choose terms like trans or asexual for themselves but whose sense of belonging in these groups is as uncomfortable or conditional or ambiguous as Yentl’s. Labels are a starting-place; not the be-all and end-all of identity.

This much I will say: Yentl’s story is one of being put in boxes she never chose for herself. So I’m loath to do that to her, even if I suspect boxes like “trans” and “queer” would be more comfortable than the ones her society expects her to inhabit. Or maybe I over-identify with her, and I don’t know what boxes to put myself in, so I don’t know what boxes to put her in either. If I say Yentl is trans then she is something different from me because I am not trans. But if I say she is confused; bewildered; doing her best in a world with no good choices and no good labels, then she is like me because, more days than not, that’s how I would describe my own identity and state of mind.

Yentl and Jewish Outsiders

I had read the story years ago and thought it was perhaps the best short story by Singer; and thought Singer one of the best short story writers I knew of. And for a while that was that.

But then I started going out with a woman who was not born-and-raised Jewish. At the time I wanted to bring her into my religion, and so I set about helping her to learn; I’d like to say I wasn’t so ethnocentric about it. But I was. Not surprisingly the cultural education went better than the religious: food, music, and especially literature. And among the literature, especially Yentl. Yentl was my partner’s introduction into Jewish community; and my introduction out of it. Because as we read it over and over again (or more likely as I read the first page to Anuja and then Anuja went to sleep and then I kept reading) the easy answers stopped being so easy:

As I read, I told myself: “Okay Yentl represents the suffering of the minorities within Judaism… but the system is still sound.” 

And then: “Okay the system is unsound in some ways but it can still be fixed.”

Followed by: “Okay the system can’t be fixed as long as so many traditionalists are holding to racist and misogynist and homophobic doctrines but I can still find meaning in practicing Judaism my way.”

And so it went until I, like Yentl, was striking out into the countryside looking with mounting desperation for a way to continue to live my life authentically as a Jew. That was seven years ago. And all I can say by way of progress reports is: I will report when I have made progress. And I will add that chicken biryani with yogurt tastes better than I could have imagined it would.

What does the Tragedy of “Yentl” Tell Us?

Any understanding of the story must start and end with an understanding of Yentl as a character. Who is this person who is drawn with such specific characteristics that we know what foods she likes and what she thinks about when she lies awake at night; yet so universal that she has become a symbol for Jewish women, for queer Jews; in short, for all of us who do not feel as though we belong?

Yentl lives in a world where men do men’s work and women do women’s work. As near as I can tell, that world is real to Singer. But Yentl is also real to him; her tragedy is real. And that is where Singer leaves the matter. I could wish that he had the imagination to see what kinds of conclusions his propositions led to. That Yentl isn’t just a tragedy but a rebuke; an unaswerable challenge to the world and the laws he portrays as absolute, and an invitation to look beyond dogma, beyond community for answers.

Yentl’s Tragedy and “Bury your Gays”

By hanging Yentl out to dry at the end of this story, Singer is indulging in what came to be known as the “bury your gays” trope–including queer representation in the world of his fiction but failing to imagine how those queer people could actually live in the world the way the other characters are privileged to do. 

Yentl’s fate is the fate of characters in Singer’s world in general. Singer’s life, neatly bifurcated by the Holocaust, had no happy endings. It’s no great surprise that his characters get few happy endings, either, except the dignity of a good death. Yentl’s magic is the magic of Singer’s writing in general. He does not transport us back in time so that we can feel like we belong in late-19th-century Jewish society. On the contrary: his best stories tend to center on the freaks, the outcasts, the social pariahs. So that even when you travel back in time to 1880 or so–the golden age of European Jewish learning and cultural life–you still feel like you’re not able to get all the way there. If anything, being transported so far just makes the sense of longing more intense. 

So why do I love this story? Partly because the “bury your gays” trope is the first step.  By indulging in this trope, Singer is at least acknowledging the existence of queer people in his fictional world. That is the first step towards what he leaves later writers to accomplish: integration, acceptance, triumph, and normalization. And even as I criticize, I can acknowledge: anytime a writer challenges themselves, it is a thing to be celebrated. And the result is a thing to be celebrated.

“Bury your Gays” is Better than Nothing, and it Leads to Something

The “bury your gays” tragedy is often the only kind of queer representation that filters down to young readers through layers of censorship. So for many of us, the first queer representation we encounter in literature/media is the “bury your gays” trope. And so, many of us, when we find our first “bury your gays story,” are oddly thrilled to find a storyteller who is asking the right questions. Even if they are giving the wrong answers. Singer can be a kind of gateway drug to less religious but no less brilliant Jewish writers. Shalom Auslander, for example. If Singer could have seen through to the solution, he might have written a more hopeful story. But the fact that he wrote a tragedy at least shows that he was sensitive enough to see that there was a problem and honest enough to write about it.

We see this pattern throughout history. Tragedy is the storyteller’s answer to the unanswerable question. The tragic figure stands at the crossroads of two roads that cannot cross. For Hamlet, that crossroads is vengeance and justice. For so many other Shakespearean heroes, that crossroad is divine right and Machiavellian realpolitik. And for Yentl, as for Anna Karenina, that uncrossable crossroads is the love of God and the personhood, the self-determinative right, of women and queer people. It is left to other writers, or to the readers themselves, to find the next step: to remake God in our image. Or to discard Him.