ellauri152.html on line 583: The most basic information is this: “Yentl the Yeshiva Boy” is a short story by Isaac Bashevis Singer, the famous Polish-American Jewish writer, published in 1962. It follows Yentl, a Jewish girl from a Polish shtetl who loves Torah-study, as she disguises herself as a man named Anshel in order to study at a yeshiva. Yentl (1983) is the movie-musical adaptation of the story, directed by and starring Barbra Streisand. In many ways it is a fairly faithful adaptation of the story’s events, but it has a different tone and a different ending.
ellauri152.html on line 585: Yeshiva Boy moves fluidly between referring to the main character as Yentl or Anshel depending on context, which is a great detail. There are times when she’s referred to as Anshel for long stretches of time, and the same for Yentl. The movie, not having third person narration, is a different beast. I take my cue from the story and use both names, depending on the context of what I’m talking about—for example, if Yentl is definitely seen as Yentl by the story in that moment, or as Anshel, or ambiguously as both. That’s a very subjective choice to make each time you write her name! But that question, the fact that you have to ask it of yourself and the fact that it’s not always clear, is to me a crucial part of Yentl’s character.
ellauri152.html on line 587: The plot goes like this: Yentl has secretly studied Torah under her father’s tutelage. She has no interest in marriage, so when he dies, she disguises herself as Anshel and travels to a yeshiva. Along the way she meets a fellow student named Avigdor. They strike up a friendship and Yentl accompanies him to his yeshiva in Bechev, where they become study partners. Avigdor is in love with a girl named Badass, whom he wishes to marry. However, when Badass’s family learns a dark secret about Avigdor’s family, they won’t let him marry her. In desperation, Avigdor begs Anshel to marry Badass in his stead. Yentl initially resists, but eventually gives in and asks for Badass’s hand in order to retain Avigdor’s goodwill. After Anshel and Badass are married, Badass comes to look on her husband with love, but Yentl become more and more upset about the situation. Unable to go on any longer, Yentl asks Avigdor to join her on a business trip. Once they are at an inn in another city, Yentl tells him that she’s a woman. He laughs and doesn’t believe her, so she undresses momentarily. He is shocked. This is where the two versions split.
ellauri152.html on line 591: In the story, Avigdor just trembles and sits down, and Yentl calmly explains. He then asks what she is going to do now, and she says she will go to a different yeshiva and start over. Avigdor half says they could get married, but doesn’t finish the sentence. Yentl rebuffs him, saying it wouldn’t be good, and explains, “I’m neither one nor the other.” She tells him to go back to Badass instead. Avigdor has strange feelings, trying to reconcile who Anshel is, who Yentl is. But they spend the night in companionable debate, discussing Yentl’s marriage to Badass and whether she legally needs to divorce her, as well as why Yentl crossdressed. Avigdor brings up marriage again, but Yentl refuses even stronger.
ellauri152.html on line 593: The story ends with the townspeople of Bechev wondering about Anshel’s disappearance and why he divorced Badass so suddenly, but none of them guess the truth. Badass is heartbroken but eventually recovers enough to marry Avigdor, though she cries even at their wedding. They name their first child Anshel.
ellauri152.html on line 595: I’ve seen Yentl the movie-musical several times, and there’s so much to unpack there, you could watch it a hundred times and have something new to talk about each time—whether it’s in the vein of despairing over the unnecessary heterosexuality of it all (even Wikipedia notes how aggressively the film erases as much queerness as it can!), or reveling in its grudging gayness (because even if Streisand decided she was playing a straight cis woman, the author is dead and it’s so easy to see Anshel and Avigdor on screen, both men, falling in love with each other).
ellauri152.html on line 597: But when I finally read the story for the first time… a new world opened up. Oh, it’s so gay in so many ways! It’s less detailed than the movie in many areas, but in other places it has glorious details that were totally excised from the movie. In the story, all the women in town have crushes on Anshel! And whether you read Anshel as a woman, a man, or a nonbinary person has a huge effect on your perception of that detail!
ellauri152.html on line 599: And then there are the things totally changed for the movie. Notably, in Yeshiva Boy, Anshel has some kind of un-described sex with Badass to consummate their marriage, without anyone finding out she was not assigned male at birth.
ellauri152.html on line 600: Anshel had found a way to deflower the bride. Badass in her innocence was unaware that things weren’t quite as they should have been.
ellauri152.html on line 603: And, oh f-ck, there is so much to talk about in this section. The importance of consent here, when Yentl lets Badass know she doesn’t need to do anything she doesn’t want to, both according to her husband and according to Jewish law—that’s good, that’s meaningful. Then we even get recognition that feminism doesn’t just mean validating women who don’t want sex, but also validating women who do want sex! Badass starts to have feelings for Anshel and proposes sleeping together herself, on her own terms. The movie is not always kind to Badass—in many ways she is a stereotype for Yentl to play off of—but this is a place where Yentl‘s feminism succeeds: Badass wants to have sex, and that’s fine.
ellauri152.html on line 607: Movie Avigdor is shitty and Yentl and Badass should just stay married, but of course they do not. Yentl leaves, Avigdor and Badass marry, a happy ending for everyone. Meanwhile at the end of Yeshiva Boy, Avigdor and Badass are not entirely happy in their marriage, as both of them are still partly inlove with Anshel/Yentl. Not very Hollywood, but very queer.
ellauri152.html on line 619: The ending of Yentl is just supremely disappointing compared to the unapologetic ending of Yeshiva Boy. “I’ll live out my time as I am,” Anshel says in the story—and Anshel is the name she is referred to as in this passage, even while also referred to as a woman and with she/her pronouns. Yentl the Yeshiva Boy often engages in this mixing of gender signifiers—it’s in the very title, which pairs the traditionally feminine name “Yentl” with the clashing term “boy,” letting them jostle each other to create dissonance and ambiguity. The terms not matching is their meaning. This is how Anshel is. A woman with a man’s soul, a man with she/her pronouns, a person with two names. It’s not couched in easily understandable modern terms, but no one who has heard of these modern terms would read Yentl as a cis woman playing dress up. It’s different than that. Queerer than that.
ellauri152.html on line 622: And yet in other ways, the film can’t help preserving the queerness of the story despite itself. Barbra Streisand can add a song about how Yentl is just jealous of Badass for being a conventionally feminine woman whom Avigdor loves, but she can’t stop me from putting my grubby little bi hands all over her film, pointing at Yentl’s tortured gaze aimed at Badass, and saying “GAY.” And she certainly didn’t no-homo the interactions between Anshel and Avigdor very well, because they are in fact very yes-homo, and I will point and say “GAY” at that too.
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