by S. Agnon
INSCRIPTION, CATASTROPHE, RETELLING
On the last page of Hamashal vehanimshal we discover that the story we have been reading is the work of a writer living in modern-day Jerusalem, a city filled with its own share of noisy synagogues. This is a disorienting discovery. Although we “know” that we have been reading a text by S. Y. Agnon, a twentieth-century Hebrew writer, the story all along has been told by a narrator close to the events in the seventeenth century, who, in turn, hands over most of the narration to an eyewitness; it is a world in which we have been fully immersed. What is the relationship between the narrator, in whose grip we have been held throughout this remarkable tale, and the writer, who pokes his head up at the very conclusion? Is the former merely a creation or a device of the latter? Our disorientation is compounded when we are informed that the story we have read is not the original story but rather a replacement for the original story that was inscribed in the pinqas of Buczacz and lost in the Holocaust. What is the relationship between the original and its replacement?
Most of what we know about the lost text revolves around the office of the scribe and his role in formulating the account of the shamash’s story that is inscribed in the communal register. The narrator is unstinting in his praise for the scribe’s work. “So the scribe wrote out the whole story in words true and wise, in the way words were used in Buczacz at the time when Buczacz was Buczacz. Some of the words were from the Torah, some from the sages, all of them had an eloquence that gives tongue to knowledge” (66). The scribe takes the events of the shamash’s tale as his raw material and submits them to a process of sublimation whereby they are recast into a more exalted style that draws directly from the language of sacred texts. The calligraphy itself is the result of the scribe’s unrelenting drive to perfection, with “each letter distinct unto itself and each one in its place on the line, like people standing for the silent devotion.” The elders of Buczacz proceed to show the scribe’s handiwork to the wise men of the day throughout Poland, who pronounce its style and grammar above reproach.
We can only imagine what that text was like, yet, having read the story before us, we can have a strong presumption about what it does not contain. In the effort to fashion an exemplary tale that foregrounds its religious message, the lost text likely eliminated most of the elements that makes the story fascinating to us as modern readers: the digressions and obiter dicta of the shamash’s narrative through which the personal and collective anxieties of the times find their unofficial expression. Eliminated too would have been many (unsolved!) mysteries large and small: How could Zlateh’s get (ritual divorce) have been given by Aaron if his death was confirmed by the visit to Gehinnom? How do the rabbi and shamash emerge from Gehinnom unscathed? Why does the shamash wait fifty-four years to tell his story? How did he come to marry Zlateh? Now, with all due respect to the perfection of the scribe’s text and with all due respect to the destruction of the holy community of Buczacz, few of us would wish to have that text restored if it meant giving up the story we have just read. As the shamash himself wisely said, there is pleasure and there is pleasure. To subsist on the pleasure of edification alone, even combined with exquisite calligraphy, is an option many of us would forgo.
Nonetheless, our knowledge of Buczacz, our understanding of the time when “Buczacz was Buczacz,” is not diminished by our having acquired it through our reading a story written by a modern author. To make the ironic point sharper, it is only through this modern act of imaginative writing that we can make a connection to the world of Buczacz. It is through the fountain pen that coyly beckons to the author on the story’s last page that the town comes alive, rather than through the quill and ink pot of the scribe. But if the means of inscription are different, Agnon gamely insists on an essential continuity, if not identity, between these two offices, both of which are represented by the word sofer. When the Hebrew language was modernized in the nineteenth century and an equivalent was sought for the new vocation of “writer,” it was decided to stick with sofer rather than invent a new term. It would be left to context alone to determine if a particular use of the word indicated the God-fearing artisan who meticulously calligraphed Torah scrolls, tefillin and mezuzot or whether it indicated the modern author of novels, short stories and feuilletons. For Agnon, the confusion fitted perfectly.
1648 AND THE HOLOCAUST
By leaving mention of the Holocaust to the last page of his story, Agnon exercised a canny circumspection. He did not want the trauma of 1648 to be backlit by the later catastrophe, or reduced to being a foreshadowing. This of course does not prevent us (belated readers of the story, saturated with Holocaust consciousness) from doing so. But the experience of reading the story should, I think, urge upon us restraint. If anything, Agnon wants us to work the relationship between the two events in reverse. We should take the horrific knowledge imprinted on us from the events of the twentieth century and use it in the service of understanding a calamity in the distant and unfamiliar seventeenth century.
I pondered the possibility that the Gehinnom of our time would make us forget the Gehinnom that the shamash saw, and the story about it, and all we can learn from that story. (68)
There is something uncanny as well about the span of time between the two events and the acts of memory that follow them. Between 1648 and the Holocaust is an arc of almost exactly three hundred years. The descent into Gehinnom takes place in the immediate aftermath of the massacres—let us say ten years later—and the shamash’s telling of the story fifty-four years later. Agnon wrote The Parable and Its Lesson in the mid-1950s—it was serialized in Haaretz in 1958—and here we are reading and interpreting it a half century or so later. What is this correspondence meant to tell us? To begin with, it sets up a correspondence between Buczacz in the aftermath of 1648 and Israel, where Agnon is writing the story in the aftermath of the murder of European Jewry. In Buczacz, although the memory of the horrific recent events permeates Jewish life, the community is struggling successfully to reconstitute itself and rehabilitate the institutions of Jewish worship and study. In Israel, although the struggle to make the young state into a secure refuge for the Jewish people is bearing fruit, remembrance of the Holocaust has been pushed to the margins, as has religious culture and practice as well. In this complex analogy, which can be developed in a number of directions, Buczacz emerges as a precursor to Israel, vulnerable to Gentile violence, yes, but autonomous and living under the sway of Torah.26 Israel, in turn, becomes the successor to Buczacz whose mission it is to perpetuate the full and autonomous living of Jewish life without dependence on the gentiles. This is a dialectic that moves forward and backward in time and transcends the received dichotomy between a decaying and moribund diaspora and a Jewish state born of revolutionary Zionism.
A reading of The Parable and Its Lesson in the context of the larger project of A City in Its Fullness shows us the difference between Holocaust literature and Jewish literature provoked by the Holocaust. By their very nature, Holocaust fiction, memoir and testimony, whether in words or video images, focus on the war years and their aftermath. Only in some cases is memory pushed back to the generation of the parents or the grandparents, and then often in the service of shaping a family idyll that is subsequently shattered. For Agnon, the spiritual power of European Jewry, now after its utter eradication, lay farther back in time, much farther than human remembrance can reach. We must therefore rely on the literary imagination and the protean powers of the story, as told in Hebrew, the historical language of the Jewish people, to enter the world that was lost.
NOTES
1. Gershon Shaked, Shmuel Yosef Agnon: A Revolutionary Traditionalist (New York: New York University Press, 1989).
2. Jerusalem: Schocken, 1973. The title is a phrase from the Hebrew Bible, but where it comes from is less simple than meets the eye. The only location where the exact phrase is found is in a stinging prophecy of condemnation against the Northern Kingdom in Amos (6:8): “My Lord swears by Himself: I loathe
the Pride of Jacob, and I detest its fortresses. I will declare forfeit city and inhabitants alike [‘ir umelo’ah]” (JPS). The word umelo’ah itself is most familiar from the declarative opening line of Psalm 24, the coronation hymn sung in the synagogue when returning the Torah to the ark on holidays. There umelo’ah occurs in a bound phrase with erets: “The earth is the Lord’s and the fullness thereof” (King James). That bound phrase erets umelo’ah occurs another eight times in Scripture. Since Agnon’s evident purpose in this book is to elevate and sanctify the name of his town, he can hardly mean us to think about the corrupt and condemned city of Amos’ prophecy. By a barely perceptible sleight of hand, Agnon has taken the familiar ecstatic pronouncement about the earth and the fullness thereof and substituted city for earth; all the while we assume—both correctly and mistakenly—that he has simply plucked and transcribed a piece of Scripture. The point of the maneuver is to emphasize that it is a city, his city, that he has come to extol. Whereas the psalm famously declares that the earth and its fullness are the Lord’s, whether the same goes for the city that has been substituted for the earth is not as clear.
3. Quoted in Edward Said, On Late Style: Music and Literature Against the Grain (New York: Vintage, 2006), p. 8.
4. Arnold Band, Nostalgia and Nightmare: A Study in the Fiction of S. Y. Agnon (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1968), pp. 330–366.
5. Among the most important of these are Beḥanuto shel mar Lublin, ‘Ad henah, Kisui hadam, ‘Ad ‘olam, Eido veEinam, and Hadom vekhise.
6. A select list of critical reactions to the book when it appeared includes Yehudah Friedlander, “Masekhet shivah ufreidah” [Return and Leave Taking], Ha’aretz, June 1, 1973; and “A City and the Fullness Thereof,” Hebrew Book Review (Tel Aviv), Autumn 1973, pp. 3–6; Hillel Barzel, “‘Ir umelo’ah: ‘uvdah uvedayah” [Ir umeloah: Fact and Invention], Yediyot Aḥaronot, September 26, 1973; Yaakov Rabi, “Hatorah, ha’emunah, vemirmat hatsedaqah” [Torah, Belief, and the Dishonesty of Charity], ‘Al Hamishmar, October 12, 1973; Yisrael Cohen, “Haḥavayah ha’arkhtipit shel ‘Ir umelo’ah” [The Archetypal World of ‘Ir umelo’ah], Moznayim, Vol. 28, Nos. 1–2 (Dec.–Jan. 1973–74), pp. 61–73; A. Y. Brawer, “‘Ir umelo’ah: ‘olam shene‘elam” [‘Ir umelo’ah: A World That Disappeared], Ha’umah, April 1974, pp. 246–253.
7. Dan Laor, Ḥayyei ‘Agnon [A Life of Agnon] (Jerusalem and Tel Aviv: Schocken, 1998), p. 408.
8. The story began as a fragment, also called “Hasiman,” which appeared in Moznayim (Iyyar/Sivan [May] 1944), p. 104. The full story, with its forty-two sections, appeared in S. Y. Agnon, Ha’eish veha‘eitsim (Jerusalem and Tel Aviv: Schocken, 1962), pp. 283–312. Translated by Arthur Green in Alan Mintz and Anne Golomb Hoffman (eds.), S. Y. Agnon: A Book That Was Lost: Thirty-Five Stories (New Milford, CT: Toby Press, 2008), pp. 397–429.
9. I have argued this point in my Ḥurban: Responses to Catastrophe in Hebrew Literature (Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 1996).
10. For an expansion of this theses, see chapter 2 (“Two Models in the Study of Holocaust Representation”) in my Popular Culture and the Shaping of Holocaust Memory in America (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2001).
11. Abyss of Despair (Yeven metsulah), trans. Abraham J. Mesch (New York: Bloch, 1950).
12. The narrator as a chronicler allied with the communal register was already employed to great advantage in Hebrew literature by Micha Yosef Berdichevsky. See the story “Parah adumah” in Kitvei Mikhah Yosef Bin-Gurion (Berdichevsky) (Tel Aviv: Dvir, 1975), pp. 181–184.
13. The story originally appeared in Haaretz on September 14, October 5, and December 5, 1958.
14. Literally in the Hebrew: the meat was still between his teeth and undigested. The reference is to Numbers 11:33, which describes the unrestrained cravings of the Israelites for meat. A more contemporary example would be Abraham Joshua Heschel’s celebration of East European Jewish piety in his The Earth Is the Lord’s (New York: H. Schuman, 1950).
15. The pedagogical passion for fashioning a mode of communication that is precisely fitted to his listeners is made the subject of an anecdote, a mashal of sorts, about a Jewish jeweler who is summoned to create gold earrings for the king’s daughter and takes special pains to adapt the ornament to the exact proportions of her ear (414).
16. Shulamit Almog argues that Rabbi Moshe does not make practical use of his eyewitness knowledge of Aaron’s death because he realizes that matters of Jewish law must be adjudicated according to evidence and procedures that are transparent and available to all. Despite the rabbi’s intense empathy for Zlateh, he knows that supernatural disclosures that he alone—together with the shamash—have been privy to cannot meet this standard of evidence. See Shulamit Almog, ‘Ir, mishpat, sipur [City, Law, Story] (Tel Aviv: Schocken, 2002), pp. 78–82.
17. Joshua Shanes, “Buchach,” YIVO Encyclopedia of Eastern Europe, http://www.yivoencyclopedia.org/article.aspx/Buchach; Martin Rudner, “Buczacz Origins,” http://www.ibiblio.org/yiddish/Places/Buczacz/bucz-p1.htm.
18. Literally, the persecutions of 5408 and 5409.
19. Shanes, ibid.
20. This is a rich theme in Agnon’s corpus. At the conclusion of Oreaḥ natah lalun [A Guest for the Night] the keys to the study house of Buczacz, which has been decimated by World War One, are transferred to Eretz Yisrael. In the opening, foundational story of ‘Ir umelo’ah (“Buczacz,” pp.9–13), the founding of the city is framed as a way station on an ascent to Eretz Yisrael that became permanent.
21. For a responsible overview of these issues with representative texts, see Simcha Paull Raphael, Jewish Views of the Afterlife (Northvale, NJ: Jason Aronson, 1994), especially chapter 6, “Visionary Tours of the Afterlife in Medieval Midrash,” pp. 163–232.
22. Qetsat qasheh, “a little difficult,” is a phrase that has its origins in the Tosafists’ commentary on the Talmud; it is used when the Tosafists find glaring contradictions or problems in Rashi’s commentary. It is a classic instance of understatement. Within a religious tradition based on the presumed authority of earlier teachers, the phrase is a delicate means of noting a major issue. See “Hasiman” [The Sign], 714, for an interesting parallel.
23. The other outstanding example of the overall narrator handing over the narration to a narrator dramatized within the story is “Ha’ish levush habadim” [The Linen Man, 84–121].
24. David Stern, Parables in Midrash: Narrative and Exegesis in Rabbinic Literature (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1991).
25. This is wonderfully dramatized in the story “Genizah” by Devorah Baron, Parshiyot: sipurim mequbatsim [Collected Stories] (Jerusalem: Bialik Institute, 1951), pp. 236–245. Also note to pp.424–425, where the shamash digresses on the rabbi’s championing the mashal as a homiletic tool superior to the rhetoric of reproach (tokheḥah). It is worth noting that the narrator intervenes immediately after this remark to point out that midrash collections were scarce in the rabbi’s time, whereas today all recognize the worth of the mashal. In the story “Hamevakshim lahem rav” in ‘Ir umelo’ah, a letter of rabbinic appointment specifies the obligation to include aggadah and meshalim in public homilies in anticipation of an inclination of scholarly rabbis to speak only of matters of halakhah.
26. In the very first story in ‘Ir umelo’ah, “Buczacz,” the founding of the city is presented as resulting from an arrested pilgrimage to the Land of Israel.
GLOSSARY
Agunah Literally a “chained woman”; a woman who cannot remarry because her husband will not grant her a divorce, or because the fact of his death has not been conclusively established.
Alfasi Isaac Alfasi, eleventh-century talmudist active in Fez, Morocco.
Ashkenaz The Jewish communities along the Rhine Valley in the tenth to thirteenth centuries that were formidable centers of Talmud study.
Av Beit Din The head of a rabbinic court, usually the presiding rabbi of a community.
Avodah Wor
ship.
Beit din Rabbinic court.
Beit midrash Study house.
Bimah A raised platform in the synagogue where the Torah is read.
Dayan Judge in a Jewish court.
Etrog A citrus fruit essential to the observance of the Sukkot festival; it is similar but not identical to a lemon.
Gabbai A volunteer official who oversees the finances of a synagogue and directs the allocation of honors.
Gan Eden Paradise (lit. the Garden of Eden).
Gehinnom The Netherworld, Hell.
Haftarah A portion from the Prophets read after the weekly reading from the Pentateuch on Sabbath mornings.
Halakhah Jewish law and jurisprudence.
Havdalah A ceremony, recited Saturday after sundown, using a candle, spices and wine, that separates the Sabbath from the weekdays.
Ḥidush An interpretation that presents a new insight on a classic text.