Gimpel, the baker of Frampol, believes everything he is told, including lies everyone knows are lies. Isaac Bashevis Singer wrote the story in Yiddish; Saul Bellow's translation made it famous. Is Gimpel a saint or a simpleton? The story refuses to decide. Singer's prose is direct, his moral world grounded in the shtetl tradition yet facing a modernity that destroyed that tradition. Gimpel accepts his humiliation, accepts everything, and perhaps thereby escapes the traps that catch the clever. Or perhaps he is simply a fool. The story makes space for both readings.