“The Magic Barrel” is written by Bernard Malamud and “Gimpel the Fool” is written by Issac Bashevis Singer. Both Authors are Jews and portray some similarity and parallelism in their stories. In “The Magic Barrel”, Leo Finkle, a rabbinical student acted like a fool all his life by not engaging in social life until his graduation when he hired a marriage broker to find a wife in other to win a congregation. Leo’s companions are his books and his room. Leo did not want a woman to love but he wants her to serve his chances of persuading others to believe in his leadership. Leo Finkle got this idea from his friends when they laughed him of not having any property such as marriage which can serve his advantage. Gimpel, in “Gimpel the fool” is also a fool because he does or believes in whatever he heard. He was forced to marry Elka out of his foolishness and that totally ruined his life. Gimpel worked and used all his income to take care of Elka’s bastard children and he did not act as a man any time he found something wrong with his wife. The two authors created two fools who behave almost the same but contradictory in some instances. Gimpel and Leo have no tight family relatives in the story and they behave as if they sprouted from trees. Isaac Bashevis Singer develops his characters in such a way that Gimpel is portrayed as a symbol of a stereotype. Throughout the story Gimpel gives nothing but honesty and trust to everyone. Gimpel is in turn stereotyped and plagued by his society as a senseless fool. If he indeed is a real fool, then he would lack the insight of realizing the motives behind all the people that function in his life. “I don’t think of myself as a fool ,” and “What was I to do, I believed them ” were remarks that Gimpel made that fell into his two reasons for his gullibility. The first was that “everything is possible,” and his second was “I had to believe when the whole town came down on me. This shows Gimpel knows what he was doing, just as Leo.
