This Production of ‘Yentl’ Is Full of Evil Spirits and Dark Transgression
While Streisand didn’t take too many narrative liberties with the film, I found the original short story to be of a completely different timbre. Singer’s story is much darker and wrenching, more like a mystical Jewish folktale. At multiple points, Singer allows his characters to wonder if Anshel (Yentl’s male persona) is a demon, evil for transgressing boundaries of gender and sexuality and concealing this behavior from the people of Bechev. It gets at deeper questions of the soul, being and, unintentionally, queerness.
“Yentl — you have the soul of a man,” her father observes early in the story. When Yentl asks why she was born a woman then, he responds, “Even Heaven makes mistakes.”