The wisdom of Gimpel the Fool - one of the world's great short stories

Started reading Isaac Bashevis Singer stories in the first of three volumes of his collected stories in the Library of America edition - last night read Gimpel the Fool, thought I'd read a few stories but stopped right there. Sometimes a story is so great and so moving and so original that you just want to hold off and leave it alone, let it stand by itself in your memory for a while and not crowd the space with other thoughts and images (similarly, when I finish reading a novel I never start another one on the same day or night). So Gimpel stood alone (spent rest of night watching dreadful Red Sox game). This short story, about 10 pages tops, encompasses not only a whole life but in a sense a whole view of the world and the afterlife; readers will note that it begins with an image of birth (the first teasing trick the villagers play in Gimpel is telling him the rabbi's wife delivered a baby) and ends in death (and beyond), with Gimpel now an old man living near a graveyard and pondering, almost welcoming, his death and an afterlife - with some striking images - "the worms are hungry." The story on the surface level is just so incredibly sad, with the poor narrator the object of lifelong teasing (at best) by the many of mean spirit in his village - really, it's bullying on the highest order, extreme cruelty - everyone in the village, with the exception of the rabbi, telling Gimpel lies ranging from the incidental (it's customary to kiss the wall after visiting the rabbi - he does so - everyone laughs) to the heartbreaking (the dead have risen and your parents are calling for you - he runs out of his bakery, to howls of laughter). This simple man does not have the strength or intelligence or even the desire to fight back - if all in the village insist something is so, who is he to dispute that? Eventually, the villagers arrange a marriage to a real harridan who rebuffs G throughout their marriage - he catches he with other men twice, but is willing to believe her insistence that he must have been dreaming or hallucinating. It's easier for him to just go along. What's really heartbreaking is how much he loves the children she bears - convinced because she says so that they're his. On some level of course he knows their not - but his love for them overpowers his reason. At last, widowed, he leaves the village, but without shame or bitterness - he travels around living hand to mouth as an old man and realizes, true or illusion, what's the difference? Almost anything you can imagine has happened somewhere, sometime. It's all true, or potentially true. In this sense, he is much like a storyteller or an artist - the illusions that they imagine become a part of reality - and even like a god: in the end, he surmises that our whole life is an illusion and that the reality lies somewhere beyond death and those hungry worms.