Two Tales: Betrothed & Edo and Enam

Afterword by Robert Alter Agnon’s Symbolic Masterpieces

When the two tales that comprise this volume were first published in translation, only months before S.Y. Agnon’s receiving the 1966 Nobel Prize in Literature, only two other volumes of his were available in English. Those works, The Bridal Canopy and In the Heart of the Seas, are so intricately layered with the lore of Jewish tradition that they surely lay outside the imaginative grasp of most American readers. With the appearance of Two Tales nearly fifty years ago, readers were able to sample the more modernist phase of Agnon’s varied yet deeply unified enterprise, coordinate products of his experiments in symbolic narrative during the 1940s and ‘50s. That this volume’s two long stories appeared at the moment that the Swedish Academy helped bring world attention to a Hebrew writer in Israel (still the only such decorated Israeli author), helped readers of Agnon in English more fully appreciate the range and variety of his canon.

My own assessment of these stories, both when they appeared and now upon reexamination a half century later, can be stated quite simply: they seem to me to be among the more remarkable short symbolic fictions written anywhere during the twentieth century. In both, the element of storytelling is finely managed, an artful leisureliness alternating with the evocative narration of tensely dramatic moments. As a result, one can be intrigued by the stories without having altogether fathomed them, but an awareness of their symbolic dimensions does a great deal to illuminate the nature of Agnon’s art, and so I would like to offer here some brief commentary on the symbolism of “Betrothed” and “Edo and Enam” in the hope it will help establish a useful perspective for thinking about these Two Tales.

The two stories appear to be striking contrasts to one another but in fact they are perfect complements — two different faces of the same profound spiritual malaise. “Betrothed,” the first of the stories, is set in Jaffa early in the twentieth century: it seems to be a more or less realistic tale (though the realism is breached at points), with seemingly romantic trappings, about two childhood friends who take a vow of eternal love in a Viennese garden and come to fulfill their pledge years later on the sands of the Mediterranean in the Land of Israel.

On the other hand, the events of “Edo and Enam,” which takes place in Jerusalem after the Second World War, call attention repeatedly, even bizarrely, to their own status as imaginative inventions: the names in the title refer to two supposed ancient cultures, in the discovery of which the lives of the principal characters are implicated; magic charms and mystic lore play central roles in the story; and, as if to remind us that the world of this tale is founded in the privacies of its author’s imagination, Agnon assigns all the characters, and even most of the places mentioned, names beginning with either ‘ayin or gimmel, the first two letters of his own last name.

In all these differences, the two stories merely offer alternative symbolic images and alternative modes of fiction for the same general phenomenon — an attempted and failed relationship with the past. In “Betrothed” it is a personal past that implies a large cultural past as well, in “Edo and Enam” a cultural past that consumes the lives of individuals.

Gideon Ginat, the enigmatic figure to whom all the main characters of “Edo and Enam” are drawn, is a scholar who has unearthed the Enamite Hymns, in which one can hear “the reverberation of a primeval song passed on from the first hour of history through endless generations.” Jacob Rechnitz, the protagonist of “Betrothed,” might appear to pursue a more prosaic line of scientific research as a marine biologist, an investigator of seaweed, but we are reminded of Ginat upon learning that Rechnitz’s passion for the plants of the sea began when he heard the surge of the ancient deep in the poetry of Homer and had a vision of the sea as the place “where the earliest ancestors of man had their dwelling.”

In both cases, moreover, the attraction of the primeval past is, in a peculiar way, erotic. The key to the enigma of prehistory reaches Ginat through the agency of a hauntingly beautiful woman named Gemulah, the only daughter of a Jewish chieftain whose people has been forgotten in a hinterland of geography and time. Jacob Rechnitz often thinks of the sea in the language of human passion: “My orchard, my vineyard, he would say lovingly,” echoing a metaphor of the Biblical Song of Songs for woman’s sexual treasure.

His relationship with Shoshanah Ehrlich, the girl to whom he had pledged himself as a child, reproduces on a personal scale his relationship with the sea. Their ceremony of betrothal had taken place by a luxuriant pond in Shoshanah’s garden and at one point Rechnitz imagines this as the source of his fascination with underwater flora. Through the distorting prism of dream memory, he sees Shoshanah emerging from the garden-pond “covered with wet seaweed like a mermaid, the water streaming from her hair.”

The garden of childhood suggests the personal Eden of earliest life we all experience and irrevocably lose. In his attachment to Shoshanah Ehrlich, Rechnitz unconsciously seeks to recapture a pristine period of simple joy in his own life, just as in his attachment to the sea he is moved by the recollection of an earlier, more vital period in the life of humankind. Ironically, he becomes a kind of captive both to his beloved sea and to his betrothed Shoshanah.

The bewitching, deceptive, and finally lethal allure of the remote past is embodied in both stories in the symbol of the moon. Gemulah is a somnambulist, or “moonstruck,” as the Hebrew, saharonit, suggests — fated whenever the full moon shines to go wandering over the rooftops, from Gabriel Gamzu, the husband of her unconsummated marriage, to Gideon Ginat, the man she strangely loves. Shoshanah Ehrlich is another kind of somnambulist, stricken with an uncanny sleeping sickness, who in a more naturalistic way also seems under the fascination of the moon. The sea with which she is linked in Rechnitz’s mind is in turn governed by the moon, and not only in the movement of its tides: when Rechnitz first conjures up its primordial presence upon reading Homer, “the moon hovered over the face of the waters, cool and sweet and terrible.”

In Genesis, we remember, it is the spirit of God that hovers over the face of the waters, but the world of both these stories is dominated by a kind of erotic lunar demiurge whose creation, unlike God’s, has bottomless abysses, dizzying confusions of heights and depths, and no eternally appointed boundary between sea and land. The charmed leaves brought back by Gemulah’s father from a mountain cave, with their cryptic lines that look for a moment like the silver strands of the moon, belong to the same ambiguous sphere as Rechnitz’s seaweed hauled up from the bottom of the Mediterranean.

Agnon makes the identification explicit in Gabriel Gamzu’s account of the leaves: “As I stood gazing, the colors…changed into the tints of seaweeds drawn from the depths, such weeds as Dr. Rechnitz drew up from the sea near Jaffa.” At the beginning of the climactic scene in “Betrothed,” the moon, in a single brief sentence, is simultaneously connected with sky and sea, frantic restlessness, poignant but maddened desire: “Up above, and under the surface of the sea, the moon raced like a frenzied girl.”

The terminus in both stories for the moon as a symbol of spellbound love is death. “I shall sing the song of the Grofit, and then we shall die,” Gemulah tells Ginat, and their relationship is indeed consummated in death. Shoshanah, who is the focal point of the terrible ennui that pursues most of the principals in “Betrothed,” longs for death, for the eternity of blissful extinction of an Egyptian mummy, just as Rechnitz associates her image with that of her dead mother, and the flowers that bind them both to the garden of their childhood with the flowers piled high on Frau Ehrlich’s hearse.

At the end of the story, when seven girls race on the beach for the prize of Jacob Rechnitz, the starting point is the Hotel Semiramis and the goal they run toward is an old Muslim cemetery. This is the course of both stories — from Semiramis, the queen who is a burning image of antiquity’s erotic splendor, to a graveyard, from eros to thanatos, love to death.

Such symbolic patterns, which are a good deal more elaborate than this brief account can indicate, are cunningly contrived by Agnon, but what serves as a fuller measure of his stature as a writer is the profound correspondence of the symbols to the distinctive spiritual conditions of modern people.

A ubiquitous emptiness gnaws at the heart of the characters in both these stories: in “Betrothed” it finds expression in a sick girl, a nightmarish parrot screaming curses in German, an old man endlessly smoking cigars and telling pointless stories; in “Edo and Enam” its chief embodiment is a universal state of homelessness, a world where everyone fears for the roof over his head and keeps moving uneasily from place to place. People in both tales are unable to be with themselves in peace and unwilling to face squarely the world they inhabit.

The late Israeli critic, and a pioneer of Agnon studies, Baruch Kurzweil (whose analysis of these stories is at some points brilliant, at others misleading, too) aptly observed that the vogue of the archaic in modern culture — certainly as Agnon sees it — is a symptom of spiritual bankruptcy, an illusory attempt at renewal which is but a step in a process of decay.

We can readily apply Kurzweil’s generalization to the erotic elements of both stories: the remotest past, appearing to possess vitality, intensity, a capacity for simple abandon — all qualities our own lives often seem to lack — beckons with the magic of female seductiveness. But because so much history intervenes between it and us, any attempt to unite with it, from Nietzsche and James George Frazer’s The Golden Bough (a comparative study of magical and religious beliefs) to the cult of archeology and the Israeli “Canaanite” movement (both fashionable forces when Agnon composed these tales in the 1940s), is a mockery of true union, a mating of flesh with ashes, distracted living spirit with unknowable spectral memory.

At one point early in “Edo and Enam,” someone half-jokingly conjectures that Dr. Ginat might well be sitting in his room writing a third part to Faust. From one point of view, this is really what Two Tales is. Faust, so given to confounding the passions of the spirit with the passions of the flesh, possesses an earthly beauty then unwittingly destroys her in the first part of Goethe’s poem, while in the second part he descends into classical antiquity to possess ideal beauty in Helen, who finally eludes him.

Agnon’s modern Fausts, in different ways, descend still lower in their quests, themselves possessed by the alien and impenetrable beauty of a primordial age whose attainment means extinction, a point where beginning and end are one. This is by no means the whole of Agnon’s vision of past and present, but it is a significant, and deeply troubling, aspect of his inner world and ours, and in these two stories he has given this haunted sense of reality the solidity of perfectly wrought language and symbol and imagined act.

Robert Alter is Emeritus Professor of Hebrew and Comparative Literature at the University of California, Berkeley. He has written extensively on modern Hebrew literature and on the Bible as well as on the European and American novel.