eople’s hatred directed towards him. He comments saying that, “If I ever dared to say, ’Ah, you’re kidding!’ there was trouble. People got angry” (412). With comments such as this, Gimpel shows his need for complete happiness in his life, even if the happiness is at his personal expense.Gimpel avoids pain not only from the townspeople, but from his wife as well. His wife, Elka, is a very promiscuous woman by nature and she chooses to be unfaithful to Gimpel. However again, Gimpel chooses to evade the truth of the matter to keep from being hurt. One way he [Gimpel] shows the reader how he avoids emotional pain is when he caught Elka in bed with another man. At first, he could not accept what his wife was doing to their marriage and his reputation. However as the pain of being alone increased each day, Gimpel decides to forget the entire incident and forces himself to lie about what he saw. Gimpel says to himself, “Hallucinations do happen. And if that’s so, I’m doing her [his wife] an injustice,” proving that he twists the truth into something that he can accept (416). Gimpel’s mind works in a way that he allows himself to think that he is suffering from a kind of dementia to avoid the painful truth regarding his wife. He also avoids the embarrassment and humiliation of recognizing that the children are not his. Elka had birthed six children, none of which had been fathered by Gimpel. Gimpel knows that the children are not his, for he and his wife have never had sexual relations. Gimpel in talking about the time discrepancy between their wedding night and the birth of a child states, “In short, I waited. Not four months later she was in childbed” (413). Gimpel understands he has no biological children, but he loves her children as if they are his own. He cannot bear the hardships of reality, so he accepts whatever information is put before him...
