ellauri152.html on line 577: Yentl
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 589: In the movie, in a scene I despise, Avigdor grabs her and shakes her violently while demanding to know why, and the rest of the conversation plays out melodramatically with yelling and tears. Yentl confesses that she loves him, he realizes he loves her too, and they kiss. Avigdor asks her to marry him, and says she could continue studying in secret. Yentl refuses because she can’t go back to studying furtively in secret, despite how much she loves him. The two part, and Avigdor returns to Badass and marries her. They live happily ever after, and the film ends with Yentl on a ship to America, implying that she will be able to study Torah as a woman there.
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 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 601: Meanwhile, the movie has Yentl entirely evade the situation by telling Badass that despite what everyone says, they don’t have to sleep together, then convincing Badass that she (Badass) doesn’t want to have sex, and—when Badass expresses interest in having sex anyway—exhausts her with Torah study so she’s too tired to think about it.
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 605: Or it would be fine if the movie didn’t play it for laughs. The movie puts Yentl in multiple awkward situations where she has to perform verbal and physical gymnastics to keep people from seeing her without clothes, that gross classic trope whereby trans characters are outed all the time in fiction. As always, the movie drags this scene out into a whole joke, that Yentl has to scramble to prevent Badass from finding out she’s a woman because Badass wants to have sex with her, a woman, isn’t that just soooooo funny? On multiple levels, I am unamused and unhappy.
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 609: It’s frustrating to catalogue the ways in which the film works to cis-normify the story. No Yentl crossdressing into the infinite future. No wrestling with her gender identity. The film’s ending throws out the story’s ambiguity and unapologetic queerness in favor of, one might charitably say, a feminist ending, or one might say uncharitably and truthfully, a cisnormative ending.
ellauri152.html on line 613: “Miss Streisand [made] Yentl, whose greatest passion was the Torah, go on a ship to America, singing at the top of her lungs. Why would she decide to go to America? Weren’t there enough yeshivas in Poland or in Lithuania where she could continue to study? Was going to America Miss Streisand’s idea of a happy ending for Yentl? What would Yentl have done in America? Worked in a sweatshop 12 hours a day where there is no time for learning? Would she try to marry a salesman in New York, move to the Bronx or to Brooklyn and rent an apartment with an ice box and a dumbwaiter? This kitsch ending summarizes all the faults of the adaptation. It was done without any kinship to Yentl’s character, her ideals, her sacrifice, her great passion for spiritual achievement. As it is, the whole splashy production has nothing but a commercial value.”
ellauri152.html on line 615: Now, here Singer is not mad at Yentl the film for cis-normifying his gender-ambiguous, interestingly queer Yentl, but rather for turning the ending into optimistic kitsch that ignores the harsh reality of what life in America was for Jewish immigrants, especially for Jewish women. And in some ways I feel like rolling my eyes at him for that. Aside from the fact that it offends his artistic vision, why shouldn’t Jewish women get a film where—suspension of disbelief!—a Jew will study Torah, loudly and proudly, as a woman? It’s a musical, not a documentary.
ellauri152.html on line 617: So I’m not of Singer’s opinion that the movie has no merit. I love Yentl’s music and emotionality (the short story is more distant), and I think I’ll always love it. But I do prefer Yeshiva Boy’s ambivalence and ambiguity to the movie’s heterosexual Hollywood polish.
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 621: This genderqueerness is the simple fact of Yentl’s character in Yeshiva Boy, but totally painted over in Yentl.
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.
ellauri152.html on line 624: In conclusion. You know the idea that if you’re nonbinary then every attraction you feel is gay? That’s Yentl the Yeshiva Boy.
ellauri152.html on line 628: I am on a crusade to make everyone aware of Yentl the Yeshiva Boy! Thank you! Also what I hate so much about that movie scene is the addition of Avigdor physical grabbing and shaking Yentl! The scene in the story is so quiet and gives Yentl dignity while explaining, while the movie has her break down confessing love for a man whose first reaction to her gender was to GRAB and SHAKE her! so inferior to just having a good old talmudic debate with your Good Pal. i feel like your comment totally sums up why The Half of It on netflix is so good.
ellauri257.html on line 556: Isaac Bashevis Singerin Saatana Gorajissa sisältää viattoman tytön, joka on olosuhteiden musertunut ja joka kantaa Kreitmanin piirteitä ja erityispiirteitä. (Esther Kreitman kärsi joko epilepsiasta tai muusta fyysisestä tai henkisestä tilasta, jolla oli samankaltaisia oireita, ja myöhemmin elämässä hänet diagnosoitiin vainoharhaiseksi.) IB itse sanoi, että hänen sisarensa oli malli hänen kuvitteelliselle Yentlilleen ., perinteistä taustaa oleva nainen, joka haluaa opiskella juutalaisia tekstejä. Hän piti Esther Kreitmania "parhaana jiddish-naiskirjailijana", jonka hän tiesi, mutta hänen kanssaan oli vaikea tulla toimeen. "Kuka voi elää tulivuoren kanssa?" (Hadda, s. 137). Ja hän omisti osan kerätyistä novelleistaan The Seance (New York, 1968) "Rakkaan sisareni muistolle".
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