Yentl (the Yeshiva Boy)
For those who don’t know, Yentl the Yeshiva Boy is a 1962 short story by Isaac Bashevis Singer. 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 Barbara Streisand.
Yeshiva Boy moves fluidly between referring to the main character as Yentl or Anshel depending on context, which is a great detail. 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.
I’ve seen Yentl the movie-musical several times, and of course there’s so much gender play 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, or reveling in its grudging gayness.
But reading the story is a whole new area to analyze. It’s so much less detailed in many areas (the movie has to flesh it out a lot to get it to two hours), but in other places it has glorious details that were totally excised from the movie (all the women in town have crushes on Anshel!) or completely changed in the movie. Notably, in Yeshiva Boy, Anshel finds a way to have some kind of un-described sex with Hadass, while the movie cowardly has Yentl entirely evade the situation. Yentl also has a happy ending for everyone, while in Yeshiva Boy Avigdor and Hadass are not entirely happy in their marriage, as both of them, you could argue, are still in love with Anshel/Yentl.
It’s interesting and frustrating to see the ways in which the film worked to cis-normalize the story, and yet in other ways preserved the queerness of the story and allowed new ways for it to do queer readings. For example, the film takes Yeshiva Boy’s ending, in which Anshel intends to continue dressing as a man to study in yeshivas, and turns it into Yentl heading to America to study as a woman. That’s an ending that throws out some of 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.
Isaac Bashevis Singer was not a fan of the movie. He said about its ending,
“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.”
Now, here Singer is not mad at Yentl the film for cisnormifying his gender-ambiguous, interestingly queer Yentl, but rather for making the ending optimistic kitsch that ignored the reality of what 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?
But then, as a queer Jewish woman, I agree that the ending of Yentl is supremely disappointing, especially compared to the unapologetic ending of Yeshiva Boy. “I’ll live out my time as I am,” Anshel says—and Anshel is the name she is referred to in this passage, even while also referred to as a woman and with she/her pronouns. (Yeshiva Boy often engages in this mixing of gender signifiers.) 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.
This genderqueerness is the simple fact of Yentl’s character in Yeshiva Boy, but totally painted over in Yentl.
Yet in other ways, because of the nature of telling a story through actors’ subjective body language and voice rather than objective words on a page, I think Yentl the movie is possible to read as Yentl genuinely being in love with Hadass, rather than Yentl the Yeshiva Boy, which is more insistent that Anshel does not have those feelings. And that’s a lot of fun.
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.
