A Book that Was Lost

Introduction

Many storytellers have arisen to tell the story of East European Jewry, but the achievement of S.Y. Agnon remains singular. His canvas is wider, his erudition vaster, his humor wittier, his irony subtler. Above all, like any great writer, his art transcends the limits of its ostensible subject. To be sure, Agnon’s writing is inseparably entwined with the very particular culture of Polish Jewry and its continuation in the Land of Israel. At the same time, however, his art explores the universal questions that preoccupy great writing in all modern cultures: the fragmentary and fallen nature of human experience after the collapse of community and faith, and, as a counterbalance, the turn toward writing with its mythic possibilities and its linguistic and textual playfulness.

Perhaps the best way to comprehend Agnon is to invoke the examples of two modern masters in the English language whose lives were roughly contemporaneous with his: James Joyce and William Faulkner. Both writers are ultimately concerned with the experience of aloneness in the cosmos and with efforts to overcome that state; yet their exploration of these ultimate issues is undertaken entirely through the particular and unfamiliar — and often exotic and arcane — materials of their national and regional cultures. In truth, the mores and speech habits of the American South and the geography and politics of Dublin at the turn of the century lie far beyond the competence of most of us. Yet we read Faulkner’s Absalom! Absalom! and Joyce’s Ulysses because it is only in such works of radical parochialness that we find the great themes of human fate and the quest for renewal most vividly portrayed. Agnon’s art partakes in this same mysterious dependence of the universal upon the particular.

Introduction

The immense achievements of writers such as Faulkner, Joyce, and Agnon are self-evident. So are the difficulties. If the way to the universal is through the particular, still one cannot be expected to glimpse the greatness if the path is strewn with opaque symbols and foreign references. In Agnon’s case, the issue is not merely one of translation. Even the contemporary Israeli reader, fluent in Hebrew, is likely to miss key allusions to classical texts and to find the account of some ritual practices baffling, in much the same way that the contemporary English reader of Ulysses is likely to miss important allusions from Greek mythology and Irish politics.

How then does a reader of these supposedly great works get at their greatness? To begin with, one has a right to expect some help. Few would embark upon a reading of Ulysses without a reader’s guide in hand or at least an edition with some annotation. Yet once we have plugged up some of the holes in our knowledge, we expect the larger message to become luminous. Lacking mastery of the culture in which a great work is embedded, we accept a certain level of unfamiliarity as inevitable, and we rely upon a common vocabulary of human emotions to get our bearings. But if we are given some help and the greatness still fails to shine through, then we must conclude that the work in question is too rooted in its time and place, and cannot transcend those boundaries to speak to readers either from other cultures or at least located at a cultural remove.

It is our conviction — and that of many longtime readers of Agnon in both the original and translation — that Agnon belongs in the company of the great modern writers and that, given some help, general readers who are not rooted in the culture about which he writes can find pleasure and illumination in his works. One of the purposes of this volume is to provide that crucial margin of help. Although the approach is not in itself revolutionary, it does represent a genuine departure from previous efforts to present Agnon in English. The assistance offered the reader is of two kinds. The first is presented through the glossary of recurrent terms from Jewish life and the notes to particular references in each of the stories, as well as through the general and section introductions. This explanatory material aims to supply the essential “cultural literacy” necessary for a good grasp of the stories. We have sought to avoid weighing down the stories with needless erudition. This moderate and selective level of annotation is intended to be of use both to the general reader, who wants central cultural allusions glossed, and to a reader more familiar with Jewish culture, who would welcome having specific textual references supplied.

The second kind of assistance has to do with the fact that this is a collection of short stories. Agnon wrote novels and novellas as well as short stories, but it is in the latter genre that he most characteristically distinguished himself, and it makes abundant sense that a new effort to present Agnon in English should begin here. The challenge is that Agnon wrote hundreds of short stories over seven decades in a wide variety of styles. To compile an anthology that is simply “The Best of…” would not help the reader find an orientation within the epic Agnon world. Our goal has therefore been, in accordance with a principle of overall excellence, to find a plan of organization that would deliver the best of Agnon in meaningful categories.

In searching for this shape, we let ourselves be guided by Agnon’s own preoccupation with autobiographical self-invention. Throughout his long career, Agnon fashioned and refashioned the myth of himself as a writer. He told the story of his upbringing in Galicia, his journey to the Land of Israel, his extended sojourn in Germany, and his return to Jerusalem in many different versions, placing the persona of the writer at times at the center of the story and at times at the margins as a kind of ironic scaffolding. We have therefore chosen to organize the volume along a rough autobiographical-geographical axis, while making some exceptions for themes that profit from being taken separately. The introductions that preface the six sections of the volume establish a context for each grouping of stories and present some background as to how the texts have been read by previous readers.

Introduction

When it was his turn to be presented, Mr. Agnon jumped to his feet and enthusiastically shook the King’s hand as he received the prize. Then, instead of the usual single bow to the King, he kept on bowing until he got back to his chair. He was obviously a very happy and flustered man. When he learned in October in Jerusalem that he had won the Nobel Prize, Mr. Agnon said that going to Stockholm would give him special pleasure “because there is a special benediction one says before a king and I have never met a king before.” Tonight at the banquet, as the King looked on, Mr. Agnon, speaking in Hebrew, recited the blessing, “Blessed art Thou, O Lord our God, King of the universe, who has given of His glory to flesh and blood.” The Israeli author said that “some see in my books the influences of authors whose names, in my ignorance, I have not even heard, while others see the influences of poets whose names I have heard but whose writing I have never read.” The true sources of his inspiration, he went on, were, first and foremost, the sacred scriptures and, after that, the teachings of the medieval Jewish sages, and the spectacle of nature, and the animals of the earth.

— The New York Times, December 11, 1966

The sight of the little round man in the black tails, white tie, and large velvet skullcap receiving an international prize from the king of Sweden was remarkable on a number of counts. Though a sophisticated participant in modern culture, Agnon presented himself as a pious and naive representative of the lost world of East European Jewry who is ignorant of European literature and has been instructed only by the Bible and the spectacle of God’s Creation. No scene could provide a more powerful instance of the writer’s ability to fashion and refashion his artistic persona. Agnon’s construction of an autobiographical myth of the artist, with its deliberate blurring of the boundaries between life and art, is a key to understanding his work.

Over the years, Agnon shaped the narrative of his own beginnings to produce an image of the artist as a figure at once solitary and part of a community, both a rebel and a redeemer. He may not have left us a formal autobiography, but through his letters and public statements we do have evidence of his engagement in a remarkable process, carried out over most of a lifetime, that amounts to the fashioning of a public name and history of the writer.

The example of Joyce’s artistic self-consciousness and his sense of a mythic renewal through language gives insight into the process through which Agnon created himself as a modern Jewish writer, linking significant markers in his own life to Jewish history and community. Among European modernists, Joyce offers a portrait of the artist who becomes his own father, an act of self-creation that also links him to his people. Like Joyce, Agnon saw himself as one whose life and art could shape new identities out of old traditions.

Born in eastern Europe in 1888, Shmuel Yosef Agnon died in Jerusalem in 1970. He offers us a life and an art that are emblematic of the century to which he was witness. If we think of him as a Jewish writer, it should be in the sense of a confrontation with history that encompasses destruction and rebirth, from the stirrings of national consciousness to the extermination of European Jewry and the establishment of the state of Israel.

In Agnon’s account of himself, personal biography intertwines with national narrative through recurring themes of destruction, rebirth, and renewal. Most striking in this life story is his designation of the Ninth of Av as his date of birth. The Ninth of Av is a date deeply embedded in the history and eschatology of the Jewish people, as the date of the destruction of the first and second Temples in Jerusalem.

Its significance is reiterated in the collective memory of the Jewish people as the date of catastrophes throughout history. At the same time, we find the traditional belief that the Ninth of Av is the date on which the Messiah will be born. Agnon’s choice thus carries the meanings of both destruction and redemption. The Ninth of Av holds an essential tension that comes to define the figure of the writer and to constitute a major theme in his work.

Introduction

Along with the Ninth of Av, Agnon cited the Jewish holiday of Lag B’Omer as the date of his initial aliyah to the Land of Israel. (The term aliyah literally means “ascent,” in the sense of “going up” to the Land of Israel.) In the Jewish calendar, Lag B’Omer marks the date of Bar Kochba’s rebellion against Roman occupation of the ancient Land of Israel. A minor festival associated with a struggle for liberation, it is accompanied by a turn to the outdoors that marks the spring season in which it occurs. Evoking the spirit of that day, Agnon was fond of recalling one of his earliest Hebrew publications, “A Little Hero,” a poem that pictures a small boy as the savior of his people on the occasion of Lag B’Omer.

In a similar association of life events with the history of a people, Agnon dated his second return to the Land of Israel in 1924 with a reference to the Torah portion of that week, Lech lecha (“Go forth”; Genesis 12:1–17:27). That portion of the Genesis narrative opens with God’s commandment to Abraham to leave his birthplace and his family for the land that God would show him. Agnon thus intertwines his personal journey with the ancestral narrative. In letters and autobiographical statements, Agnon returned to such evocative coincidences, weaving them into a narrative frame for the life of a writer who lives out the story of his people.

The historical accuracy of these dates is less the issue than the function they serve as markers in a life story. Agnon may have constructed a biographical myth, but he also held onto the original documents, going back to 1908, that allow comparisons of the writer’s story to the historical record. Why do both? This is Agnon the modernist, who offers us access to the making of a life as well as to the life that is made. He engages in the narrative construction of a myth while leaving traces of the materials out of which it is fashioned. We see him as the mythmaker, and he acknowledges his own artifice with a wink and a nod that invite us into his workshop.

Out of that workshop came embellishments to the portrait of the writer as a youth who revered his father. In a ceremonial letter to the municipality of Tel Aviv, Agnon observes that “I was born in the city of Buczacz in eastern Galicia to my father Rabbi Shalom Mordecai ha-Levi Czaczkes, of blessed memory, on the Ninth of Av.” In the Jewish calendar, the year is signified by the letters of the Hebrew alphabet, each of which has a numerical equivalent. The notation of a date thus offers Agnon the opportunity for recombinations of letters that become the source of new meanings. With inveterate playfulness, he takes the Hebrew letters that designate the year in which he was born, t-r-m-h, and rearranges them to form the phrase “Zion will be merciful” (“Zion t-r-h-m”). Never losing the opportunity to heighten the personal with bits of exegetical play, Agnon fashions the public face of the writer out of bits and pieces, artfully constructing significance out of odds and ends of tradition.[1]

There is a considerable element of irony in Agnon’s designation of dates and coincidences. He may draw upon biblical phrases or rabbinic exegesis in order to enlarge the horizon of meaning by linking the individual to the nation, but his relationship to his sources is never simple. Wordplays and historical associations work to inflate and deflate the figure of the writer, by connecting him to religious themes and simultaneously exposing his pretension. On occasion, Agnon takes these associations to a playful excess that suggests an element of self-mockery, as when he notes that he wrote his first poem on Lag B’Omer, made his first aliyah on Lag B’Omer, married his wife on Lag B’Omer, received the Swedish translation of one of his novellas on that day, was notified of the award of an honorary doctorate on Lag B’Omer, and so on. At such moments as this, Agnon jokingly exposes his game, even as he continues to play it.

Agnon’s ongoing self-portrait connects the writer not only to the history of the people, but crafts a special relationship to Hebrew as the holy tongue, the language of Creation. Agnon’s choice of Hebrew, after early experiments with Yiddish and Hebrew, links him with others of his generation who turned to Hebrew as a potent resource in the enterprise of national renewal. But while Agnon’s writing draws upon the riches of language and makes us feel keenly the centrality of Hebrew to a worldview centered on Scripture, the relationship of the writer to that universe involves an intricate combination of reverence and subversion, piety and irony.

Introduction

The very name “Agnon” is a fabrication, a central instance of the interpretive play that identifies the writer’s art. It is a name that the writer, who was born Shmuel Yosef Czaczkes, invented by adapting the title of “Agunot,” the first story he published in Palestine in 1908. To fashion both the title and his own name, Agnon used the Hebrew noun agunah, a term in Jewish law that designates a woman who is not free to marry because her husband has disappeared or left without divorcing her. The agunah is an indeterminate figure, at once connected to the community and separate from it. Interestingly, the story “Agunot” itself contains no agunah in the technical sense of the term. We must realize, then, the boldness of Agnon’s imagination in taking a legal term and spiritualizing it, shaping it into a metaphor for the modern condition. Fertile with meaning, the name suggests an image of the artist as a soul without anchor. Thus, at an early point in his career, the writer arrived at a title and a name that express the longing for completeness amid the awareness of isolation and distance.

Picturing himself as one who maintains a connection to what he has lost, Agnon paints a portrait of the writer as a figure on the margins of tradition. In this passage from “The Sense of Smell,” written in the 1930s, he maps out a mythic universe in which Torah — Jewish Scripture — occupies the center, while he defines himself by his distance from that language of plenitude and presence:

For love of our language and affection for the holy, I darken my countenance with constant study of Torah and starve myself over the words of our sages. These I store up in my belly so that they together will be present to my lips. If the Temple were still standing, I would be up there on the platform among my singing brothers, reciting each day the song that the Levites sang in the Temple. But since the Temple remains destroyed and we have no priests at service or Levites at song, instead I study Torah, the Prophets and the Writings, Mishnah, laws and legends, supplementary treatises and fine points of Torah and the works of the scribes. When I look at their words and see that of all the delights we possessed in ancient times there remains only this memory, my heart fills up with grief. That grief makes my heart tremble, and it is out of that trembling that I write stories, like one exiled from his father’s palace who makes himself a little hut and sits there telling of the glory of his father’s house.

Positioning himself as one who writes in the aftermath of destruction, Agnon subordinates himself to the priestly poets who are his predecessors and effaces his own individuality. Paradoxically, the effect of this denigration is to secure for the writer an affiliation to tradition: we have here a mythic portrayal of the writer as one who longs for return and restoration. What disappears from this picture is, of course, his more worldly or modernist face.

In the study of his house in Talpiyot, just outside of Jerusalem, Agnon preferred to write while standing at a lectern, a relic of an eastern European talmudic academy. He was fond of gesturing to the scores of volumes of Jewish learning to be found on the shelves lining the walls, noting in passing the presence of a modest shelf of twentieth-century literary works. This arrangement of books suggests an architecture of the imagination in which secular influences play a distinctly minor role. Indeed we might compare this denial of his own modernism to Agnon’s public comments after accepting the Nobel Prize: he acknowledges sacred texts as the sources of his inspiration and disavows the influence of writers whose names he claims never to have heard. In both instances, we see the persona of the writer at play. Agnon, whose works display a range of literary experimentation that links him to the major modernists of our century, chose to minimize that affiliation and to present instead the image of the writer who subordinates himself to traditional texts. In so doing, he sought to fit his public image to a simpler notion of membership in a community unified by its history.

That mask was also real. Agnon devoted a large portion of his energies to insuring the survival of cultural documents of European communities that were ultimately destroyed. Indeed, even before the threat of the destruction of European Jewry became apparent, Agnon had come to play a major role as a collector of Jewish books and manuscripts and compiled several anthologies of Jewish lore. He was an important figure in Mekitze Nirdamim (Those Who Awaken the Sleeping), a group devoted to the retrieval, preservation, and dissemination of old Jewish manuscripts.

Introduction

The cultural influences and traditions into which the writer was born all eventually found their way into an art that is encyclopedic in its references to Jewish life and texts.[2] Shmuel Yosef Czaczkes, son of Shalom Mordecai ha-Levi Czaczkes and his wife, Esther Farb, was born in 1888 in Buczacz, a town of some 12,000 inhabitants located in eastern Galicia, then part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. Family lineage and traditions on both sides exposed him to a variety of currents in nineteenth-century Jewish life. From his mother’s side, Agnon inherited ties to the Mitnagdim, the rationalist opponents of Hasidism, while his father’s lineage included hasidic connections. Thus within his family he experienced the major currents of life in eastern Europe, from the joyous pietism of hasidic traditions to the rigorous intellectual commitments of the rationalists. With his father, who traded in furs, the boy Shmuel Yosef frequented a kloyz, a hasidic house of prayer, that belonged to followers of the Chortkover rebbe, the leader of a sizable community of Hasidim. It was also through his father that he first studied rabbinic texts.

By his own description, Agnon received a traditional education, studying in the traditional one-room Jewish school, the heder, then privately with a teacher and with his father, learning Bible, Talmud, and literature of the Haskalah (the Jewish Enlightenment). The family library was stocked not only with the Talmud and its commentaries but also with the works of Maimonides and the Galician maskilim, the eighteenth-and nineteenth-century proponents of Jewish enlightenment. It was in this library and other local collections that as an adolescent Agnon freely educated himself. The comfortable circumstances of his family allowed him the leisure to do so. But the absence of more formal schooling was in fact a general trait of Galician-Jewish culture.

In a somewhat nontraditional departure, Agnon studied German with a tutor and gained access to European literature in German translation. Thus we see that a certain sophistication attaches to the young writer’s early education. Nevertheless, his reminiscences tend to dwell on the traditions of Jewish learning in the town of Buczacz, traditions that he associates, most particularly, with his father. Marking an idealization of the father that recurs through his work, the son, in later years, painted a portrait of his father as a figure of radiant piety: “My father, my teacher, Rabbi Shalom Mordecai son of Zvi Aryeh ha-Levi, was a man of wondrous learning. Expert he was in the Mishnah and in early and late commentators. And as learned as he was in the Mishnah and its commentaries, so too was he expert in secular learning…. I was not worthy of acquiring even the slightest bit of his knowledge [Torah] or of his qualities. But he taught me love of Torah and of those who study it.” [3] In a portrait that is already embellished with the touch of myth, the son underscores his own deficiencies through comparison with a father whose learning participates in the plenitude of the Torah.

This juxtaposition of son to father, lack to wholeness, present to past, enters into the writer’s depiction of his birthplace, the town that he left as a young man. Destroyed in the Holocaust, the town of Buczacz retains in his imagination the accumulated richness of centuries of Jewish life in eastern Europe. Sefer Buczacz (The Book of Buczacz) is the memorial book of the town to which Agnon contributed. It belongs to a genre that was created in response to the Holocaust by the surviving members of communities that were obliterated. Along with histories, photographs, anecdotal memorabilia, The Book of Buczacz sketches a portrait of the writer as a young boy of twelve, cataloguing the books on the shelves of the town’s house of study, its Beit Midrash. The Beit Midrash functioned as a center for the study of classical Jewish texts and thus can be understood as a central structure in the maintenance of Jewish life.

Introduction

Sefer Buczacz incorporates its native son into the town’s tradition of study and commentary: “Wondrous was that old Beit Midrash — it was not just any Beit Midrash, but the capital of the Mitnagdim, a center for those antagonists of Kabbalah and Hasidism…. In this Beit Midrash Sh. Y. Agnon spent his time and nourished his spirit. Until the destruction his notes and comments could be found in the margins of pages of the books that he studied.”[4] In this scene, the youthful figure of the writer-to-be takes an active role in continuing the traditions of study and commentary that distinguished the town, an enterprise of learning that found its physical and spiritual center in the Beit Midrash.

Compiled after the destruction, Sefer Buczacz is unambivalent in its attention to the history, the setting, and the lives of the inhabitants of Buczacz. By contrast, Agnon’s maturation as a writer undoubtedly involved a resolution of his relationship to traditional Jewish texts and the communal structures that house them. That resolution produced an ironic stance, where the writing constantly plays out themes of rebellion and reconciliation. The disjunctions in Agnon’s art are all the more sharply felt in light of the traditions that the writer draws upon so eloquently. Nowhere can this be better seen than in the quasi-autobiographical A Guest for the Night. This novel takes note of the writer’s youthful rebellion as its first-person narrator describes his early preference for writing poetry rather than studying traditional texts in the Beit Midrash. That bit of personal history is then integrated into the narrator’s account of his return for a yearlong stay during which he devotes himself to efforts to revive the dying town and to undo his own early rebellion through a newfound dedication to the study of old texts.

Agnon builds this major novel around the Beit Midrash, which serves as the organizing structure for the efforts of its narrator to bring about a restoration that is both personal and communal. The key to the Beit Midrash provides a symbol for the lost potency of the town and its inhabitants. Nevertheless, the narrator’s efforts to reverse that loss and to bring about a renewal of the town are treated with a wry combination of seriousness and irony. Agnon uses the novel to acknowledge the traditions of learning and piety that the Beit Midrash represents, but also to mark the futility of attempting to preserve them in eastern Europe. Written in the 1930s, A Guest for the Night is set in the period immediately following World War i. In a sense, it can be said to straddle history by recording the devastation of the period immediately following World War i, while in retrospect conveying a sense of the greater destruction that was yet to come.

For Agnon the writer, the ultimate destruction of the town in the Holocaust became the occasion for its recreation in art. Nowhere is this more apparent than in the posthumously published volume Ir Umeloah (A City and the Fullness Thereof).[5] Agnon arrived at the commitment to produce his own ongoing Book of Buczacz, a work of epic proportions that came eventually to include legends, folktales, family sagas, and grotesque renditions of popular culture. While this compendium has not yet been translated into English, the present anthology breaks new ground with its inclusion of “Pisces,” “Buczacz,” and “The Tale of the Menorah,” all from A City and the Fullness Thereof.

At the turn of the century, Buczacz found itself responding to the rumblings of Jewish nationalism. Zionist congresses from 1897 on captured the imagination of the young Czaczkes. He would have been part of communal responses to the 1903 massacre in Kishinev, the death of Theodor Herzl in 1904, and the 1906 riots in Bialystok. A development of some importance occurred in the spring of 1906, when Elazar Rokeah came to Buczacz to publish Der Yidisher Veker; a Jewish weekly, and took on the young Czaczkes as his assistant. Rokeah’s hiring must have given a significant boost to the youth’s literary ambitions. We have evidence through these early years in Galicia of numerous pieces in Hebrew and Yiddish published by the young writer. The Israeli critic Gershon Shaked has analyzed Agnon’s maturation through the development of a more complex and ironic relationship to his early romantic tendencies.[6] In later years, Agnon distanced himself from his early romantic effusions, even occasionally inserting an early poem into a novel where it serves to demonstrate a character’s youthful enthusiasm and naiveté.

Introduction

The first manifest break in the writer’s life took place in 1907, when Agnon left Buczacz for Palestine at the age of nineteen. Along the way, he passed through Lemberg and Vienna, where he encountered important figures in Jewish public affairs, such as the Hebrew writer Asher Barash and the Hebraist and educator Eliezer Meir Lifschütz. But while his visits with these men and others seem to have yielded opportunities for employment and study, Agnon appears to have kept his gaze fixed on the goal of reaching Palestine.

Indeed he appears to have sustained his resolve in the face of the astonishment of Galician Zionists, who were unaccustomed to actual decisions to emigrate to Palestine. For an insight into the period, we might consider Agnon’s account of the aliyah of Yitzhak Kummer in the as-yet-untranslated novel Temol Shilshom (Only Yesterday): this youthful idealist sets sail for Palestine filled with expectations of fraternal solidarity. But despite his fervent echoing of the refrain Kol Yisrael haverim (“All Israel are friends”), he is set back by encounters with self-important Zionist functionaries in Europe and Palestine.

During his first sojourn in Palestine, from 1907 to 1913, Agnon encountered the pioneers of the Second Aliyah, who had come to work the land. While he never joined them in their physical labors, he came to know the land intimately over the years. In this first period, Jaffa was his preferred milieu, and he found work as a tutor, as secretary to the editor of a literary journal in which he published his first story, and as secretary to a variety of groups involved in Jewish settlement. The novella “Betrothed” gives us something of the cultural mix of Jaffa in those years. In Jaffa, he extended his readings in European literature and, in a striking break with his background, abandoned Orthodox dress and practice. He also spent time in Jerusalem, where he drank in the lore of the city’s neighborhoods.

These years bear evidence as to the impact of relationships with influential older men. In particular, the writer Yosef Hayim Brenner played an important role in the publication of Agnon’s early stories in Palestine. Agnon looked up to Brenner as a man of uncompromising integrity. In later years, he described their first meeting in Lemberg, where he stopped on his way to Palestine and sought an introduction to the older writer whose work he so admired.[7] Noting the brilliance of Brenner that shone from the pages of contemporary journals, Agnon describes Brenner’s utterly unassuming figure and mocks his own youthful expectations of the impressive figure of an author. As thoroughly secular a writer as Brenner came to figure for Agnon as the type of uncompromising authenticity.

It was during this first Jaffa period that Czaczkes first adopted the pen name Agnon. During these years, several long stories found serial publication in the Hebrew-language newspaper Hapo’el Hatzair. Despite these indicators of early success, however, the young writer apparently failed to find firm footing in the Land of Israel, and his abrupt departure for Berlin in 1913 remains something of a mystery. This is the second break in Agnon’s development. Unlike the departure from Buczacz for the Land of Israel, this departure appears to be surrounded by confusion, rather than any clear sense of direction.

From 1913 to 1924 Agnon lived in Germany, and these years constitute the writer’s major European period. Living in Berlin, with interludes in Munich, Leipzig, and a small town near Brückenau, Agnon absorbed a variety of cultural influences — secular and Jewish — that stayed with him, however he may later have chosen to represent his relationship to them. Gershom G. Scholem, the great scholar of Jewish mysticism, recalled his impression of the young Agnon in Berlin, “in the reading room of the library of the Jewish Community Council where he tirelessly leafed through the Hebrew card catalogue. Later I asked him what he had so intensively searched for there. ‘Books that I have not read yet,’ he replied with a guileless and yet ironic gleam in his eyes.” [8]

Introduction

In the fall of 1913, Agnon attended the Eleventh Zionist Congress in Vienna. Shortly after, he was called home because of the death of his father, but he arrived one day too late for the funeral. Whatever the circumstances, this delay suggests an ambivalence never to be fully overcome, an ambivalence that is as much a part of his character as the unqualified reverence for his father that he expressed elsewhere. Looked at retrospectively, in light of the proliferation in his fiction of themes of lateness and delay in fulfilling important obligations, Agnon’s failure to arrive on time for his father’s funeral takes on dramatic resonance. Literary reverberations of this theme can be felt in the stories that comprise the last section of this anthology; there you will find stories that vary from the dreamlike to the realistic but convey nevertheless a sense of lapses or losses that can never be made good.

The years of World War i saw the arrival in western Europe of large masses of refugees from eastern Europe. These “Ostjuden,” or eastern Jews, met with ambivalence and hostility from some German Jews and were romanticized as “authentic” Jews by others, among them Martin Buber. Here we must try to imagine Agnon’s double perspective: he was and was not one of the Ostjuden, given the acculturation to the West he had undergone. In a study of Agnon’s German affiliations, the Israeli critic Dan Miron points out that Agnon’s early years in Galicia brought him closer to Jewish-German influences than to contemporary developments in Russian Hebrew culture, so that he can be regarded as something of a liaison between the two segments of a divided Ashkenazic Jewry. [9]

Scholem describes the Agnon of this period as an extraordinarily sensitive young man, for whom the German Jews were an endless source of fascination. From our vantage point of the present, it seems clear that the differences between eastern and western Jews allowed for a cross-cultural fertilization that enriched immeasurably the scholarship of Scholem and the fiction of Agnon. The stories that Agnon set in Germany give us some indication of the cultural mix of this period. Those that we have selected for the “Germany” section of this anthology provide a sampling of Agnon’s range, from haunting evocations of medieval Jewish communities to quite modern psychological dramas of divorce and postwar devastation.

Scholem shows us Agnon as a young writer who appeared to inhabit an imaginative universe of his own making: “Every conversation with him quickly turned into one or more narratives, stories about great rabbis and simple Jews whose intonation he captured enchantingly. The same magic could be found even in his colorful but completely incorrect German.” [10] Over the many years of their relationship, from Berlin to Jerusalem, Scholem and Agnon would engage in bouts of scholarly banter, each outdoing the other in producing bits of exotic lore from actual or invented sources. Thus Scholem tells us that Agnon persisted in claiming that “Agnon” could not be considered his real name, since it was only an invention, with no roots in the holy books. In a bit of scholarly play, Agnon claimed that the name “Czaczkes” could be found among the mystical names of angels in the Book of Raziel, an ancient Hebrew book of angelology.

In Scholem’s eyes, Agnon appears as something of an aesthete, an Ostjude who enjoyed friendships with German intellectuals. The young writer found himself developing his art amid a linguistic mélange of Yiddish, Hebrew, German, and Russian and an array of ideologies from socialism to Zionism, Jewish mysticism, and Continental philosophy. Here we see also the Agnon who would frequent the Frankfurt dealers in secondhand Hebrew books, and indeed it was a shared interest in old Jewish books that brought Agnon together with the older German-Jewish businessman and bibliophile Salman Schocken. Agnon and Schocken first met toward the end of 1915, when both were attending philosophy lectures in Berlin. Schocken drew on Agnon’s bibliographic knowledge, while Agnon benefited from Schocken’s familiarity with German and European literature. This remarkable relationship has been documented through the recent Hebrew publication of the correspondence between the two men.[11]

Introduction

The relationship took shape at a time when Agnon’s status as an Austrian citizen subjected him to the possibility of induction into the German army. At one point, in 1916, Agnon sought to fail his physical examination by consuming quantities of pills and coffee, and smoking incessantly. Not only did he succeed in flunking the physical, he made himself quite sick and ended up spending four months in the Jewish hospital near the town of Brückenau. During this time, Salman Schocken kept Agnon supplied with reading materials. Providing us with evidence of the scope of his literary interests, Agnon writes to Schocken that he has read Zola’s essay on Flaubert in one breath, not because it was so beautiful, but because it was on Flaubert and anything on Flaubert “goes straight to my heart.” He goes on to ask Schocken to send him the medieval Chanson de Roland, along with Jakob Burckhardt’s writings on the Renaissance.

The relationship between Agnon and Schocken grew in importance for both, as the older man commissioned the younger writer to search for Judaica and rare manuscripts. Indeed, part of the uniqueness of Agnon’s position in modern Hebrew literature must be understood through his relationship with Salman Schocken and the Schocken publishing house. Schocken became aware early on of the writer’s talents and supported his development with a yearly stipend and a commitment to publish his work, although Schocken had not yet opened his publishing company. The publication agreement that Agnon signed with Schocken allowed the writer to devote himself completely to his art. The mutually enriching interaction of the young writer and the older patron and collector of Judaica offers an opportunity to study the mingling of East European, German-Jewish, and Zionist elements in the early decades of this century.

In 1920 Agnon married Esther Marx, the daughter of a German-Jewish family prominent in Jewish scholarship and Zionist activities. Together with his wife, Agnon established a home in Homburg. Esther gave birth to a son and a daughter during these years. (Agnon’s daughter, Emuna Yaron, is responsible for the publication of a major portion of her father’s work in the years since his death.) While living in Homburg, Agnon participated in Franz Rosenzweig’s Lehrhaus, a center for adult Jewish studies. Rosenzweig, who had briefly contemplated conversion to Christianity, turned instead to an exploration of Jewish learning and committed himself to developing the Lehrhaus, a place for European Jewish intellectuals to seek a deeper understanding of Judaism. During these years, Agnon also collaborated with Martin Buber on a collection of hasidic stories that was never published. (A volume of stories of the founder of Hasidism, the Baal Shem Tov, that draws on that collaborative work was published posthumously in 1987.)[12] Agnon also spent a great deal of time with Hebrew writers such as the poet Hayim Nahman Bialik and the Zionist theorist Ahad Ha’am, as well as the publisher Y.H. Ravnitzky. Bialik and Ravnitzky had collaborated on the mammoth project Sefer Ha-Aggadah (The Book of Legends), an anthology of rabbinic lore.[13] Agnon thus encountered the full spectrum of Jewish life in Germany, from assimilationist trends to the search for a more authentic Judaism through study of classical texts. In retrospect, it is possible to discern the contribution of all these currents to his art.

At the same time, stark themes of loss and destruction find their roots in Agnon’s experience during these years. In 1924, he suffered a devastating loss when his home in Homburg was destroyed in a fire that consumed all of his books, along with the manuscript of an unpublished autobiographical novel. This fire registered as one of the decisive losses in his life, and its impact can be felt throughout his work in themes of destruction and loss.

Agnon moved back to Eretz Yisrael in 1924 and his family followed him soon after. His letters to his wife during this time express his concern with establishing a home for his family, a concern that appears to coincide with the decision to extend the name Agnon to his personal as well as public life. Through his letters to his friend and publisher, Salman Schocken, over an eight-month period, we can follow the gradual shifts in his signature from Sh. Y. Czaczkes to simply Sh. Y. and finally to Sh. Y. Agnon. In the letters that date from this time, Agnon expressed his pleasure at resuming his walks through the Old City of Jerusalem and at the recognition he received. Perhaps most important, he looked forward to Schocken’s publication of a complete edition of his works. It was in 1931 that the first four volumes of The Collected Works of S.Y. Agnon appeared in Hebrew, inaugurating Schocken Verlag, the publishing house in Berlin. Cumulatively, the developments of these years may be considered to be something of an inauguration, heralded by the name shift that extends the domain of Agnon to personal as well as professional life, as if to assimilate the writer to his story.

Introduction

Following his return to Eretz Yisrael, Agnon returned to Orthodox ways. We can surmise a consolidation in the identity of the writer: he has arrived at a sense of himself. There are signs of this settling in to be discerned in his mythologized account of his relationship to the Land of Israel. During a series of conversations that were later published, Agnon told the young writer David Canaani that God had punished him with the loss of the home he established in Germany because he had abandoned the Land of Israel.[14]

Agnon was to lose his home once again, and the historical resonance of this twice-repeated loss with the destruction of the Temple was significant to him. The year 1929 saw widespread Arab uprisings against Jewish settlement, and Agnon suffered yet again the loss of his home and library, this time in Talpiyot. The story titled “The Sign,” which can be found in the closing section of this anthology, conveys the multiple significances of loss and rebuilding. After this second destruction, he built a new house for his family in Talpiyot and this was where he lived to the end of his life. Today, the house is open to the public: visitors can stand in the writer’s study and examine the titles on his shelves.

With the passing of years, Agnon became the writer of Jerusalem. A sign on his street in Talpiyot, Rehov Klausner, warned visitors to be quiet because of their proximity to a WRITER AT WORK. The city occupies the central place in the map of Agnon’s imagination, as in Jewish tradition, however much his writing may play with ambiguities and paradoxes in the relation of the individual to sacred space. For Agnon, the establishment of a home in Talpiyot acquired significance in terms of the relationship of the neighborhood to the city of Jerusalem. From the roof of Agnon’s Talpiyot home, one used to be able to see the Old City. The location expresses something of the identity of the artist, whose vision is sustained by Jerusalem and yet who situates himself just outside its gates.

The awarding of the Nobel Prize to Agnon was rightly taken by many, especially in Israel, as a belated recognition of the achievements of Hebrew literature and the legitimacy of Israeli culture. As a modern literature, Hebrew had been producing impressive writing for two hundred years; and, since the turn of the twentieth century, a series of great modern writers had emerged (Hayim Nahman Bialik, Yosef Hayim Brenner, Uri Zvi Greenberg, and Natan Alterman, among others) who in no way suffered in comparison to the best artists in European languages. Yet it took the annihilation of the very subject matter of Agnon’s epic art — the social and spiritual life of East European Jewry — to prompt international recognition of Hebrew.

Two decades before the Holocaust destroyed the European centers of Jewish culture, the scene of Hebrew writing had already largely shifted to the new Jewish settlement in Palestine, and thereafter it became fused with the fortunes of the state of Israel. Agnon, who settled permanently in Palestine in the 1920s, should be counted in every sense as an Israeli writer, yet not a typical one. His use of traditional Jewish sources, his appropriation of traditional Jewish storytelling techniques, his preoccupation with East European themes — all these choices set him apart from most of Israeli writing at the time, which was realistic in mode and devoted to the depiction of the secular actualities of the new society.

Introduction

Such is the uniqueness of Agnon. There is no figure in modern Jewish culture in any language whose work is as suffused with the texts and symbols of classical Jewish learning and as steeped in the customs of a thousand years of Jewish life in eastern Europe. Yet at the same time, the genius of Agnon’s achievement was unleashed only by the rise of modern Hebrew literature. To be sure, European romanticism and modernism contributed to his work. But in order to understand where Agnon came from and to grasp the cultural matrix that made his writing unique, one must first turn to the specific conditions of time and place. The time was a particular moment in the emergence of the new Hebrew literature after the first challenges of modernity to Judaism had exhausted themselves. The place was the Jewish community of Galicia, the southeastern provinces of Poland that were ruled before World War i by Austria-Hungary.

The origins of modern Hebrew literature entailed a two-phased assault against traditional Jewish culture. In the first phase, which was called the Haskalah and took place between approximately 1780 and 1880, the ideals of the Enlightenment in western Europe were domesticated within the sphere of Hebrew literature and culture, first in Germany and then in eastern Europe. The social program of the Haskalah called for Jews to cease being merchants and shopkeepers and to enter more “productive” occupations. The educational program sought to introduce the study of arithmetic, world history, and western languages into the exclusively religious curriculum of Jewish schools. The religious program sought to rid Judaism of superstitious beliefs and practices and to emphasize the foundations of reason in the Jewish creed. The literary program sought to confer prestige on the classical lineage of Hebrew over Yiddish and opened Hebrew writing to the novel, the lyric poem, the essay, and other western genres. Yet despite these multiple challenges to traditional Judaism, the world view of the Haskalah remained essentially hopeful: divine reason remained the underpinning of a world that would progress from folly to enlightenment.

This optimism could not be sustained by the events that overtook Jewish life in eastern Europe in the late nineteenth century. The pauperization of the Jewish masses, the widespread pogroms of 1881, the virulent anti-Semitic policies of the tsarist regime — these and other related causes prompted Jews to take measures ranging from emigration to the West to the more ideological forms of political awareness embodied in socialism, communism, and Zionism. Zionism broke with the Haskalah over the possibility of the Jews’ acceptance into European society in exchange for the modernization of their culture. The Jews could realize their national identity, Zionism argued, only in a land of their own and in a language of their own. Zionism broke with religious tradition by rejecting transcendental messianism in favor of a this-worldly politics of self-redemption.

Beneath the political and communal turmoil of these years, an even graver ordeal was being enacted in the spiritual lives of a generation of young people. For many, the coherent world of the Torah, within which the experience of the individual had been securely inscribed for the thousand years of Jewish settlement in the cities and hamlets of eastern Europe, broke down in the last decades of the nineteenth century. The daily intimacy with holy texts, the deep texture of study and interpretation, the rhythm of sacred and profane time, the dense patterning of ritual gestures and symbols, the assured authority of teachers and sages — all these strands in the weave of tradition loosened in the course of a single generation. For some young people, the rejection of the religious tradition was the dialectical by-product of a principled espousal of a new faith in one of the revolutionary ideologies of the age. For others, the failure of Judaism had less to do with the adoption of new secular faiths than with a process of internal decline. In the face of modernity, the very plausibility of the religious tradition had suddenly collapsed, its authority neutralized and its relevance rendered mute. The world of the Torah had ceased to speak to them.

The crisis of these young people is one of the major themes of Hebrew literature at the turn of the century. The enormity of their loss was experienced on several levels. For the characters in the fictional world of Mordecai Ze’ev Feierberg, for example, the collapse of the tradition is experienced as nothing less than a catastrophe; in the sudden absence of the tradition that had both oppressed and nurtured them, they feel orphaned and hollowed out. For the characters in the fiction of Y.H. Brenner and U.N. Gnessin, the loss of faith is taken for granted as an inevitable rite of passage; the source of their suffering is the ensuing void with its coils of self-consciousness and its temptations to bad faith. For the fictional figures of M.Y. Berdichevsky, the void is invaded by the humiliations of erotic obsession. Taken together, these characters and their creators are members of a generation that was born too late for religious tradition to remain intact and too early for the new order of Jewish national life to delineate itself.

Introduction

To be sure, the force of experience engendered extraordinary aesthetic gains. The depiction of life in the immediate aftermath of faith in all its existential extremity led these writers to abandon the decorative language and convention-bound techniques of their Haskalah predecessors and to fashion a Hebrew prose far more capable of representing the complexities of modern consciousness and experience. Yet for all these achievements, the loss of the past remained enormous. Thousands of years of Jewish cultural creativity had been rendered irrelevant, compromised, contaminated, and utterly unavailable to the reconstruction of the fractured modern Jewish mind.

Against this background, the significance of the precise moment at which Agnon entered the scene of modern Hebrew literature comes into view. Born in 1888, Agnon began publishing in Hebrew and Yiddish periodicals while still a teenager. Though not much younger than the other Hebrew writers just mentioned (he was twenty-three years younger than Berdichevsky and only seven years younger than Brenner), this was a sufficient interval in these revolutionary times to make a difference. The small-mindedness and intolerance of the insular Jewish society of the shtetl, the brutalizing medievalism of the heder, the repressive and superstitious religion of the fathers, the self-deluded rationalism of the Enlighteners — all the abuses of the old order had already been systematically laid out; the burden of critique had been discharged. For the majority of Hebrew writers, this settled the score with the past and enabled Hebrew writing to proceed to engage the troubling and hopeful realities of the twentieth century. For Agnon’s genius, it had the effect of clearing a path to the past and making possible an ambitious examination of the present through the reappropriation of classical Jewish culture.

The area of Galicia in which Buczacz lay was part of the kingdom of Poland until Poland’s partition in 1772; from that time until World War i, Galicia was an eastern province of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. That the great majority of Polish Jewry to the north came under the rule of the Russian tsars while Galicia was governed by the Hapsburgs is a fact of paramount importance. While life under the Hapsburgs was not easy for the Jews, it compared favorably to the grinding poverty and official anti-Semitism of the tsarist government. The Jews of Galicia were spared the kind of pogroms that were visited upon Russian Jewry in 1881 and 1903–5. The Austro-Hungarian administration was also less autocratic than the Russian imperial regime; on the provincial level, socialist and republican movements were allowed to play a role in local politics. When it came to language and culture, Galicia was particularly polyglot. The Jews spoke Yiddish and read Hebrew, the landowners Polish, the peasants Ukrainian, the government German. German was the language of culture, and many Jewish women, even from religious families — Agnon’s mother included — read modern German literature.

In Jewish culture, Galicia had been the scene of great controversies. Earlier in the nineteenth century it had been a center of westernization and a home to such Haskalah writers as Nachman Krochmal, Yosef Perl, Yitzhak Erter, and S.Y. Rapoport; some of the fiercest battles between the Hasidim and their opponents took place here. But by the end of the century, when Agnon was growing up, these conflicts had been domesticated into a diverse and tolerant religious culture. Galicia lacked the great yeshivot (the talmudic academies) of Lithuania to the north in which young minds were either inducted into the rigors of rabbinic erudition or provoked by rabbinic authority into rebellion against the world of tradition. Galicia also proved fertile ground for the Zionist ideal. Even before Theodor Herzl created a mass movement, Buczacz boasted several proto-Zionist organizations and the Zionist cause enjoyed much support among the middle-class religious families of the city. Agnon’s departure, at the age of nineteen, to settle in Palestine can be understood at one and the same time as fulfilling a widely held ideal and leaving behind his provincial origins through a sanctioned escape route.

Introduction

Agnon did escape. He turned first to the heady milieu of young pioneers and cosmopolitan émigrés in Jaffa and then to Germany, where he gained intimate knowledge of the streams of modern European culture. Agnon never experienced the extremes of negation that characterized the spiritual world of his Russian counterparts. He was a modern man whose modernity could not be expunged, but the world of classical Jewish culture, in all its dimensions and manifestations, remained for him animated and animating in a way it did not for other modern Jewish writers in Hebrew or in any other language. Agnon’s relationship to that heritage had little to do with nostalgia, and he was expert at dissecting the ways in which a man might use religion for self-serving purposes. For Agnon, the past exists for the sake of the present, and its stories and symbols exist for the sake of what they offer to the construction of a fuller Jewish self-understanding in the modern world.

New York, 1995

Alan Mintz

Anne Golomb Hoffman

[1] This letter can be found in the autobiographical collection Me’atzmi el atzmi [From Myself to Myself] (Tel Aviv: Schocken Publishing House Ltd., 1976), p. 9.

[2] For historical and biographical data, the editors are indebted to Arnold Band’s Nostalgia and Nightmare: A Study in the Fiction of S.Y. Agnon (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1968).

[3]Me’atzmi, pp. 25–26.

[4] Israel Cohen, ed. Sefer Buczacz (Tel Aviv: Am Oved, 1968), p. 95; Avinoam Barshai, ed. Haromanim shel Shai Agnon (Tel Aviv: Everyman’s University, 1988), pp. 16–17.

[5] Tel Aviv: Schocken Publishing House Ltd., 1973.

[6] Gershon Shaked, Shmuel Yosef Agnon: A Revolutionary Traditionalist (New York: New York University Press, 1989).

[7] See his reminiscence in Me’atzmi, pp. 111–12.

[8] Gershom G. Scholem, From Berlin to Jerusalem: Memories of My Youth (New York: Schocken Books, 1980), p. 91.

[9] Dan Miron, “German Jews in Agnon’s Work,” Leo Baeck Institute Yearbook 23 (1978): 265–80.

[10] 10. Scholem, From Berlin to Jerusalem, pp. 92–93.

[11]Shai Agnon — Sh. Z. Schocken: Hilufe Igarot 1916–1959, Emuna Yaron, ed. (Tel Aviv: Schocken Publishing House Ltd., 1991).

[12]Sippure Habesht, Emuna and Hayyim Yaron, eds. (Tel Aviv: Schocken Publishing House Ltd., 1987).

[13]The Book of Legends/Sefer Ha-Aggadah, Hayim Nahman Bialik and Yehoshua Hana Ravnitzky, eds., trans. by William G. Braude (New York: Schocken Books, 1992).

[14] As cited in David Canaani, Shai Agnon be’al-peh (Israel: Hakibbutz Hameuchad, 1971).