by Agnon, S. Y.
In addition to the hazard of mice, there was the hazard of the elements. A sweltering summer that damaged the books was followed by a snowy winter. Snow fell, covering the houses. Their upper halves were in snow accumulated from below, the lower halves in snow falling from above. All the roads were covered with snow. No earth was to be seen, and nowhere could one find solid footing. Business was at a standstill. One could not even find a crust of bread for a child. But this is not what I want to tell. I want to tell the story of the books and the snow. Roofs began to sag under the weight of snow piled on top of them, while snow piling up from below weakened the substructures. The snow was accompanied by a violent storm that uprooted trees and damaged houses. When the snow stopped falling and the storm subsided, people began to venture outside. Julian Weltfremdt went out to his yard and found that his shed was crumbling. Heavy branches had been torn from the trees, and entire trees were wrenched from their places and scattered all over the shed, as well as along the path leading to it. Here and there, the snows were melting, producing a stream of water that gushed into the yard. Melting snow dripped onto the shed from above, so the entire space was water upon water. Julian Weltfremdt didn’t hesitate. Blazing a trail through the snow, puddles, and broken branches, he arrived at his shed, only to find himself knee-deep in water. His wife was standing in front of the house, shouting, “Julian, Julian, come back before you get sick, before you catch your death of a cold.” He gave no thought to his own welfare or to her warnings. He was determined to save his books. He saved what he saved, and what he didn’t save didn’t get saved. Meanwhile, Mimi caught a cold, as well as an ear infection, from standing outside without warm clothes. But I don’t mean to tell about Mimi now; I mean to tell about books. After the destruction of the shed, Julian Weltfremdt began to console himself with the books in the house. One day he took a book off the uppermost shelf and discovered that it was damp. This was true of a second, third, and fourth book, and so on, down the row. Not only that row, but most of the books on the upper shelves of the bookcases in his house were steeped in water. He took them down and put them out to air. He assured himself, every so often, that they would recover and, just as often, plunged into despair over his books and himself – to think that they could do this to him, after all his efforts on their behalf. In the end, some of them had to be rebound. You know, of course, how bookbinders are: not only do they do an inadequate job, but they leave out pages and expect to be rewarded for their vandalism. And how was he to pay? From the paltry funds sent by his wife’s family. This is the tale of some of Julian Weltfremdt’s books and their trial by water. What about his good books, those that weren’t damaged? They escaped destruction but didn’t remain in his hands. Though they withstood the cruelty of the elements, they did not withstand human cruelty. Julian Weltfremdt didn’t find a job and was forced to sell some of his books. After selling some of his possessions when his daughter took sick because of the drafty apartment, he had to sell the remainder in order to get food for her and pay her medical bills. His relative Professor Ernst Weltfremdt often boasted that he paid for the grave and burial expenses, but the doctors’ fees and medications were paid for by Julian. Things came to such a pass that, even while he was writing his popular pamphlet (The Seventeen Primary Factors Leading Us to Unequivocally Oppose the Appointment of Master Plato of Greece to the Position of Lecturer in Philosophy at Any University, Particularly One in Germany), when he wished to refer to some of the books he called “professors’ books,” he had to quote from memory. Needless to say, he made some errors, which provided a pretext for the charge that his work was unscholarly.
Having become so involved in Julian Weltfremdt’s books, I will be brief about those of Dr. Taglicht.
As is often the case with bachelors, Taglicht was a subtenant in the home of a gentleman who rented out one of his four rooms for the price of the entire apartment. Since he had only one room, he couldn’t collect very many books. He, too, had come to Jerusalem laden with books. The rare ones were borrowed by collectors, who never returned them, the ordinary ones were borrowed by ordinary people, who didn’t return them either. Taglicht often commented about this. “Why should I be upset? It’s enough that others are upset about this sort of thing.” Taglicht’s library is now limited to what fits on his windowsill.
According to the Gemara, books and bread were bound together when they descended from heaven. As for Taglicht, he often had to forgo his loaf to buy a book. Let me report a delightful exchange Taglicht liked to relate. “When I lived in Berlin, I often used to visit Shestov’s father, a sick old man. Once, the old man saw I was in distress. He asked me, ‘What’s the trouble?’ I told him, ‘Every month my landlady demands a rent increase.’ The old man said, ‘That’s because of all the books you collect. She sees you laden with books and thinks to herself: Such a person is not likely to move, so I might as well raise the rent. It would be costly to move, so you choose to pay more rather than leave. But a young man should first build his resources, then send a representative to acquire the books he needs – or thinks he needs.’“ Taglicht ignored the advice of the philosopher’s father. Not only did he starve himself because of his books, but in the end they were taken from him.
It’s only two or three steps from Taglicht’s house to Lemner’s. He has many bookcases filled with books. Books are stacked inside the bookcases as well as on the top of them. These books are not friendly to one another or even to themselves; that is to say, one volume of a set might be on one shelf, another on top of the bookcase, another who knows where. If a set contains a total of four or five volumes, it is doubtful that Lemner has them all. Lemner is an elegant and amiable person, and, since he is more concerned with others than with himself, he tends to wear soiled and faded clothes at home and to dress more attractively when he is out. His books’ behavior on their shelves is like his behavior at home. They are soiled and faded. Spiders spin webs on them; some have become a cemetery for flies and bugs. If he needs a book, either he can’t find it, or, being too lazy to brush off the dust and insect remains, he borrows it from the National Library. So why does he keep buying more? To occupy himself with something. Some people choose a social cause or some similar enterprise. Professor Lemner is engaged in the acquisition of books. Anyway, books are related to a professor’s occupation. If his wife hadn’t restrained him, he would have bought every book he was offered.
I might as well skip Professor Bachlam’s books. He was so busy writing his own that he didn’t have time to collect other people’s books. Nonetheless, he owned a great many volumes. If you wonder about them, look in the books he wrote and you’ll see them in his references. Surely his books also included opinions from books he had merely borrowed, but that doesn’t change anything.
I have yet to tell about the bookcases in the homes of Professor Wechsler and Professor Ernst Weltfremdt. Having begun with one of the Weltfremdts, I’ll conclude with the other. But first I’ll describe Professor Wechsler’s books. Actually, they are not really books, but folder upon folder filled with newspaper clippings about his discoveries and interviews with journalists. No professor in Jerusalem is as busy as he is, and no one keeps others as busy as he does. All of Jerusalem’s thirteen bookbinders are employed by him, making portfolios to contain the clippings that praise him and his work on amulets. Those who don’t envy Professor Wechsler regard the praise he receives as praise for the university, and praise for the university is praise for the entire community of Israel.
Now let’s have a look at Professor Weltfremdt’s books. There is no difference between Ernst Weltfremdt’s library and the libraries of most professors who marry rich women with large dowries that provide the means to buy many books in handsome bindings and construct handsome shelves for them. His bookcases have two sections: one for patrologists, the other for Hellenists, since he was first a lecturer in patristics and then in Hellenistics. In addition, on the corner shelves there are quite a few Hebrew books acquired here in Jerusalem.
I will now add a few words about other book collections in Jerusalem. A city of many scholars will have many bibliophiles. There are many scholars in Jerusalem who deprive themselves of a crust of bread in order to buy a book, whose passion for books is so great that they ignore their children and don’t bother about their education. In the former category are those who sell a book when their wives demand money for Shabbat provisions; in the latter category there are those who take no notice, even when members of their household are expiring from hunger. In the end, when they die, book dealers and collectors converge to buy from the orphans, who, not having been educated by their father, are unaware of the value of the books and sell them for a paltry sum.
Now, to get back to Herbst’s books. They are not arranged on handsome shelves, like Ernst Weltfremdt’s books, and are not as numerous as Bachlam’s and Lemner’s; nor does he have portfolios such as Wechsler’s. For the most part, they are plainly bound, resting in bookcases constructed from the crates in which they were shipped from abroad. But the grace that prevails in his library is not to be found in the library of any other scholar in Jerusalem. Henrietta’s good taste had left its imprint on the arrangement of the books, and the vaulted ceiling added charm to the room. It is easy to picture how sad Herbst was when he thought it would be necessary to move and house his books in the skimpy rooms one finds in those new neighborhoods.
I now mean to get back to the tragedy, and I will try to prove how worthwhile the tragedy was to Herbst. For years Herbst had been working out of habit, amassing notes and quotations without involving his emotions. Not so with the tragedy. Although his imagination proved inadequate, the tragedy shook the very foundations of his soul. What he had produced so far didn’t amount to very much, but he had faith in the future, that something would emerge, turning it into a tragedy. That is to say, the actions would unfold, justifying themselves, not only in terms of their own inevitability, but in terms of the intense power inherent in them from the beginning.
When a bookish person is about to create a book, he looks at other books to see how they were written. Herbst, who was reared on German poetry, went back and reread it. He was familiar with some of the poets from childhood; others, he had read as an adult. Of course, you know the power of good books: one never emerges from them empty-handed. Whenever you open such a book, you find something in it that you hadn’t noticed before. Even if you have read it many times, even if you know it by heart, when you go back to it you find a new message. Whether or not it is the one intended by the author, it is embedded in the text.
I’ll now turn to another matter. Herbst was aware that Germany was afflicted with a big dose of anti-Semitism, so that, of all the Hebrew words fixed in the tongues of German Jews, the word rishus, meaning “viciousness,” was most widespread. But he never considered the change in its meaning, for now one says rishus to warn Jews not to behave in this or that manner, so as not to provoke Germans to be vicious, that is, to behave badly toward Jews.
Now back to my original subject. When Herbst went back to those books, he realized that even the finest of Germany’s lyricists did not eschew such viciousness, that they celebrated and transformed it into a virtue, giving their approval to all manner of cruelty toward Jews. In the course of this, they distorted words, twisted the straight, perverted justice. But truth is so great that it is evident even in a lie. They meant to portray the Jew as a paradigm of evil, and, as a result, all the evil charges with which they disparaged Jews were like the skin of a garlic – of no consequence compared to the evil of the Germans. Furthermore, the very words with which they disparaged Jews were used to praise Germans. It is worth mentioning here that many slanderous and vicious books were given to Herbst by Jews for his bar mitzvah. The Jewish spirit was so totally dominated by Germany that Jews didn’t realize how much hatred permeated those books. But what the Jews didn’t recognize was recognized by the Germans, who learned what they learned. Even Herbst was now learning what he hadn’t learned before, and he began to be aware of Germany’s behavior toward Jews, especially toward his family and friends, who were forced to flee and to cast about among the nations, their frenzied souls adrift between borders. They were not allowed to live in one country; they were forbidden to enter another. Between countries, they perished. Once again, I must repeat what we well know. You sit at breakfast, open the newspaper, and read about a scholar who took poison or a poet who hung himself from a tree in the woods. International figures – about whom one boasts, “I was privileged to know So-and-so” – are persecuted by border guards, only to end their lives with a bullet or by jumping from a high place and being crushed. Once in several generations, the good Lord is generous to His creatures, sending into this lowly world a rare soul who glorifies it with his deeds, only to be intercepted by some authority and destroyed. Whenever Herbst sees two or three lines in the newspaper about a scholar who committed suicide or a poet who took his own life, if it was someone he knew and corresponded with, he would take out the letters and read them, then tie them with a string and put them in a special place. There are more and more such bundles. I hope I am wrong, but there seem to be more letters from the dead who have already died than from the living who are still alive.
From the dead to the living. Herbst puts down the letters of the dead. His mind turns to those who still are hovering between the living and the dead, and from there to those who have found a temporary haven in the Land of Israel. Having failed to grasp that the doors of Germany were closed to Jews forever and ever, and that they would never return to Germany, they reassured themselves, maintaining that the ignominious regime would be overturned and the exiles would return to hear the rustle of Germany’s forests and the roar of her waters once again, delighting in the culture they had helped create. For the moment, they are here temporarily – as foreigners, strangers, guests, sojourners – until the anticipated day when Germany’s cultural elite roots out the heinous government and the exiled children come home. Many were already helped by Henrietta, and just as many are being helped by her now. Even Dr. Krautmeir, who is the busiest doctor in Jerusalem, was helped by Henrietta. If not for Henrietta, she would have been lost. She came here emptyhanded and unknown; she had never had any contact with Jews and had associated only with Germans all her life. One day, soon after she arrived, she left her hotel, pondering to herself: How long can I tolerate this? Henrietta appeared, and they recognized each other, having lived on the same street in Charlottenburg and taken the bus together regularly. Though in all those years they hadn’t talked to one another, when they met again here in the Land of Israel, they considered each other a friend. Krautmeir said to Henrietta, “We lived in Charlottenburg for almost a whole generation and never engaged in the most casual conversation, and now I consider you a childhood friend.” Henrietta invited her over, provided her with room and board in her home, and found her work with an elderly doctor who needed an assistant. Krautmeir took an apartment, paid the import tax due on her furnishings, and began adjusting to life in Jerusalem. After a while she bought the old man’s practice and, since most of the patients were by now accustomed to her, they continued to come. She acquired some new patients too: young women in trouble as a result of their involvement with British soldiers, who made contact with the lady doctor, knowing she would see them through.
As the number of immigrants grew, Henrietta could no longer deal with all of them, and already there were those who didn’t know Mrs. Herbst at all, as well as those who knew her but didn’t have the opportunity to enjoy her hospitality. Anita Brik, for example. Why do I mention Anita Brik? Because Manfred believed that, had Henrietta invited Anita Brik, Anita would have been helpful to her. Henrietta complained that work was piling up that neither she nor Firadeus had the time to do. If Anita Brik had been in the house with them, she could have been helpful to him too, copying texts. Often, he would stop in the middle and say, “I’ll copy it tomorrow”; then, “day after tomorrow.” And sometimes he would think to hi
mself: Is it really necessary for me to sit and copy? Couldn’t I just mark the passage and give it to someone else to copy for me, as many renowned and prominent scholars do? Some of them don’t even read through a text before instructing a secretary or assistant to seek out certain material, which they locate in books and copy out, presenting the finished product to their employer. It wasn’t arrogance that made Herbst think he deserved to have others do his work, but fatigue and weariness.
Remembering Anita Brik, the idea that she might be helpful to him, and that he might help her too, was appealing. Several mounds of books cluttered his desk, and he didn’t get to copy what he needed from them, so let her come and copy. Most of all, he needed help with books he sometimes borrowed from Ernst Weltfremdt. Weltfremdt was a fussy person who lent books only to those who promised to return them in three weeks, saying, “If I leave my books with you indefinitely, you’ll put off reading them from day to day and from week to week, and, in the end, you won’t even glance at them. That won’t be the case if I limit the time, forcing you to read, find, and copy what you need.” In the past, it was simple for Manfred to say, “Henrietta, invite such-and-such a young woman.” Now it is hard for him to mention any woman to Henrietta. He even hesitates to mention Lisbet Neu, Professor Neu’s relative, to Henrietta, despite all the favors Neu had done for him. He had been a student of his and become a lecturer through his efforts, and Neu would surely be consulted about his promotion. All this notwithstanding, not only does he not invite Neu’s relative to his home, but he avoids mentioning her name. That woman – that Shira – has made him tongue-tied.