by S. Y. Agnon
Boruch Meir liked German Jews. In fact, ever since his first visit to the spa in Karlsbad, Boruch Meir had liked Germans in general.
Tsirl sat in silence, hardly eating. A great change had come over her, and she had ceased to be a passionate gourmand. It would have upset Bertha had she seen that Hirshl’s mother was not touching her food, but her eyes were on her guest from Germany. Hirshl too, though looking smart in his dress clothes, seemed far from joyful. Yet great joy awaited him. God in heaven was preparing it Himself. It was plain for all to see that Mina was about to give her family another son or daughter.
Tsirl’s eyes narrowed. Not that she had anything against foreigners. But why all the fuss over this one? When it came right down to it, he was the son of a man who was buried in an unknown grave.
It could not be denied, however, that Arnold Ziemlich’s visit had the merit of reuniting Hirshl, Mina, Boruch Meir, Tsirl, Gedalia, and Bertha in Malikrowik. Only Yona Toyber was missing—and when it came right down to it, he would have been superfluous, for Hirshl and Mina were married already and had no further need of a matchmaker until Meshulam grew up. And to keep him from growing up all alone, they were giving him a new brother or sister.
Meshulam’s brother was born with a smile on his face. He was a perfectly formed child. Mina soon got over her confinement and made an ideal mother. She and Hirshl found a thousand different things to love in the baby and called him by a thousand different names. A day did not pass without a new one being given him. Some of these names made sense and some did not. He had so many of them that the one he was born with was forgotten.
A thousand times a day Hirshl and Mina came to the baby’s cradle to admire him. “Look, he just smiled!” “Did you hear him sneeze?” “What a darling nose he has.” “He blew a kiss, look.” “I swear, he understands everything!” “The pillow is crushing his ear.”
The baby lay in the cradle, showing off for them, while his older brother grew up an hour’s walk away. Gedalia and Bertha did everything for Meshulam as though he were their own child. Still, he was not indulged like his brother, for Mina’s parents were no longer young and had forgotten how to talk to a small boy. Not that Meshulam was badly off. His little brother had it better, though.
“Mina,” Hirshl asked her as they were standing by the baby’s cradle, “what are you thinking about?”
“About his brother,” said Mina.
“It’s good that he’s with your parents.”
“Yes,” Mina said. “I think so too.”
“But for a different reason than I do,” said Hirshl.
“Why, what reason is that?”
“That love can’t be divided.”
“I thought,” said Mina, “that it’s the nature of love to always have room for one more.”
Hirshl looked down and said, “No, that’s not so. Love comes to us only when no one stands between it and us.”
God in heaven knew that he was thinking only of the baby.
Hirshl and Mina’s story is over, but Blume’s is not. Everything that happened to Blume Nacht would fill another book. And were we to write about Getzel Stein too, who was mentioned here only in passing, and about all the other characters in our simple story, much ink would be spilled and many quills broken before we were done.
God in heaven knows when that will be.
Afterword by Hillel Halkin
How simple is A Simple Story? Or, to ask the same thing differently: How ironic is its title? How we read it depends on our answer to this question.
For on the face of it, the story is a simple one—or rather, a simple one with a twist, since it differs in one important respect from other simple stories that it resembles. That is, in its opening chapters Agnon’s novel appears to have all the makings of a conventional romance: boy meets girl, boy and girl fall in love, boy and girl’s love meets an obstacle. As experienced readers, we know that the story can now go one of two ways. In the first of these, which might be called the “Rapunzel variation,” the lovers are cruelly separated, yet after many trials demanding great steadfastness on their part they are happily reunited. Such is the stuff of fairy tales, stage comedies, Hollywood movies, fictional potboilers, women’s comic books, and not a few serious novels from Pamela to Lady Chatterley’s Lover. The second variation might be named after Tristram and Isolde and ends as shatteringly as the first ends triumphantly: here the separation of the lovers proves insuperable and concludes with final heartbreak and often death. We encounter it in mythology (as in the story of Orpheus), in dramatic tragedy (Romeo and Juliet), and once again, starting with The Sorrows of Young Werther, in more than one modern novel.
Now, until we are fairly near the end of A Simple Story Agnon does nothing to disabuse us of our illusion that it will turn out to be yet another tale of victorious or tragic romantic love. In fact, stringing us along, he does everything to encourage this belief. At first we are inclined to think the novel will follow the Rapunzel variation: most likely Hirshl will elope with Blume before his planned wedding with Mina, and the rest of the story will relate the lovers’ struggle to overcome the hardship and opprobrium to which this exposes them. By the middle of the book, once Hirshl and Mina are unhappily married, we have begun to suspect that the Tristram and Isolde variation is being brought into play: either Hirshl will leave Mina and run away with Blume, in which case the disgrace may prove so great that it drags them both down with it, or else—a possibility that looms larger as Blume rejects Hirshl’s advances and Hirshl teeters on the edge of madness and plunges into it—he will lose his sanity forever, or even his life, because he cannot take such a step. The one thing that we are not prepared for—the one thing indeed that must not happen in a romance, because it violates every canon of romantic love—is that Hirshl, the pining lover, will be restored to full health, forget about Blume, his true love, and live happily ever after with Mina, the woman forced on him by his parents. Though Agnon makes us laugh often in A Simple Story, which has some marvelously funny passages, the last laugh, it must be conceded, is his—and it comes at our expense.
In a word, much to our surprise, A Simple Story turns out to be an anti-romance. A careful rereading of it makes one wonder whether, in writing it, Agnon was not surprised by this too. Though we have no way of knowing how it was originally conceived, not only is there a curious shrinking of Blume’s role in the course of the book, prompting its author to bid us adieu with the implied promise—one that he never kept—to write a sequel about her, there is also, coinciding with her vanishing, a perceptible shift from the romantic, almost sentimental tone of the novel’s beginning to the comic (though by no means untender) one of its middle and end. Each of these registers had been used before by Agnon in a novel set in Szybusz, the town that serves as the locale for several of his books: the romantic-sentimental in In the Prime of Her Life (1923), which tells the story of Akavia and Tirza Mazal, who appear again as minor characters in A Simple Story, and the comic-burlesque in the as yet untranslated social satire Young and Old Together (1920). In A Simple Story, published in 1935, when he was at the height of his creative powers, Agnon begins on the former note and then veers increasingly toward the latter, though it is one of the strengths of the novel that the two are played off against each other until the very end. Certainly, though, the more the story progresses, the more broadly humorous it becomes.
Indeed, whether A Simple Story changes course because Blume fades into the background or whether she fades into the background because Agnon wished to change course, it is evidently her disappearance that released his great comic talents, for she is one of two characters in this many-charactered book who is not at least a partly comic figure. The other is Dr. Langsam, the old neurologist who cures Hirshl of his madness, and he and Blume represent the two poles between which Szybusz exists. Blume is all Innocence; though far from naive (she is much less so in fact than Hirshl, having received her share of hard blows in her life and having learned the lesson of each), she mysterio
usly retains a charmed virginality, as though she really were the princess in the fairy tale to whom she is more than once compared. Langsam, on the other hand, is the embodiment of Experience; he cannot be treated ironically because he is a master ironist himself, although a most compassionate one. But the people of Szybusz are neither innocent nor experienced. They are too worldly-wise to be the first and too narrow-minded to be the second, and, well aware of the hypocrisies of others but largely unconscious of their own, they are easily poked fun at. A Simple Story makes the most of the opportunity.
Yet is the world of Szybusz merely a comic one? Once again we have reached a crossroads in our reading of the novel. For if the life of the town has nothing serious to recommend it, then Hirshl’s reconciliation with it as expressed by his final accommodation to his arranged marriage is a pitiful surrender, a sacrifice of his manhood on the altar of a ludicrous social respectability. This would be one kind of anti-romance, in which the fault lies not with romantic love but with the cowardly failure to assert it. Suppose, however, that the values of Szybuszian society are ultimately meant to be taken by us as positive, and that the comedy of A Simple Story, while aimed at its characters’ foibles, comes to point out to us their real virtues as well? We would then have a different story, one whose moral might be that the rejection of romantic love in favor of social convention, though exacting a heavy price, is part of putting one’s adolescence behind one and becoming, rather than failing to become, a man. One way or another, before we can make up our minds about Hirshl we must make up our minds about Szybusz.
The town of Buczacz, in which Agnon was born in 1888 (in his fiction he playfully changed its name to Szybusz, the word shibush in Hebrew meaning “error” or “muddle”), was situated at the extreme eastern end of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, about one hundred miles east of Stanislaw (Stanislawow) and two hundred southeast of the provincial capital of Lemberg, today the Ukrainian city of Lvov. The region of Galicia to which it belonged had been annexed by Austria-Hungary in the first partition of Poland in 1772 and was inhabited by peoples speaking four different languages—German, Polish, Ukrainian, and Yiddish. In eastern Galicia the Germans were the least numerous of these elements and consisted mainly of the imperial bureaucrats entrusted with administering the area. The Poles and the Ukrainians, who had a long history of national enmity between them, were the two largest groups, the Ukrainians comprising the peasantry, whereas the Poles were concentrated in the towns and cities, like the Jews. Indeed, although the Jews constituted perhaps a tenth of the population of Galicia as a whole, they were a far higher percentage—in some places even a majority—of its urban inhabitants. Small shopkeepers, artisans, and petty traders, their economic situation was none too good, especially in the far east of the province, which was among the empire’s most remote and backward corners.
Yet if they were often poor and commonly despised by their Polish and Ukrainian neighbors, the Jews of Galicia were considerably better off than their millions of brethren in Czarist Russia and Poland, whose Eastern-European Jewish culture they shared. Indeed, in the same years of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries that saw the Jews of the Russian Empire subjected to ever worsening pogroms, residential restrictions, and a host of other anti-Semitic acts and policies, Galician Jewry was enjoying an unprecedented epoch of security and equality under the lengthy and benevolent reign of the Kaiser Franz Josef. Such had not always been the case. Although as far back as 1782 the emperor Josef II had issued a Toleration Act removing a number of disabilities imposed on them, the Jews of Galicia were still the frequent victims of government discrimination in the first half of the nineteenth century. Beginning with the accession of Franz Josef in 1848, however, conditions improved steadily, especially after 1868, when the last anti-Jewish legislation was repealed and a series of sweeping constitutional reforms was instituted in the empire as a whole. From now on Jews paid no special taxes, could live and travel where they pleased, were free to engage in any business or profession, had the right to educate their children in their own schools, and could even vote and stand for office in local and municipal elections. Above all, they could live without the fear of violence or persecution, feeling safe in the confidence that they were protected from hostile or arbitrary forces by a powerful, enlightened, and law-abiding regime.
It was perhaps this fundamental sense of security, so at variance with the Eastern-European Jewish experience elsewhere, that provoked the Jews of Russia and Poland into their use of the term a galitsianer yid, “a Galician Jew,” to denote a person rather smugly self-satisfied with himself and his condition. The expression suggests more than just that, though, for a genuine galitsianer must have other qualities too: a highly practical turn of mind, commercial craftiness, a gift for haggling and outsmarting, native intelligence coupled with a profound lack of intellectual curiosity, religiosity without deep religious feelings, and, not least of all, a sly sense of humor that is not averse to taking pleasure in the misfortunes of others. Like all ethnic stereotypes—and there was not a region of Eastern Europe whose Jews did not have their sobriquets, not always complimentary, for other Jews—that of the galitsianer contained much exaggeration; like all such stereotypes too, however, it contained a measure of truth. Thus, while sharing the deep respect for religious learning that was universal among Eastern-European Jewry, the Jews of Galicia were far removed from the great centers of Talmudic study in Lithuania and from the highly intellectual approach to religion and its texts that prevailed there; swept in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries by the Hasidic revival (indeed the Baal Shem Tov, the founder of Hasidism, began his career in Galicia), their long-entrenched Hasidic dynasties inculcated a conservative pietism less theologically daring and emotionally soulful than that practiced in parts of Poland or Russia; scarcely touched by the cultural influence of such Jewishly sophisticated large cities as Warsaw or Vilna to the north, or Odessa to the east, their highly mercantilized life also lacked the almost peasantlike rusticity that could be found among the Jews of the even more remote Carpathian Mountains to the south; while at the same time, though they inhabited a provincial backwater, their Austrian citizenship and the liberal monarchy of Franz Josef gave them a superior sense of being more Western and advanced than their co-religionists living under Czarist rule. In a word, though ultimately not very different from the other Jews of Eastern Europe, they formed a distinct subculture of their own.
This subculture is that of Szybusz, and not a few of the characters in A Simple Story, above all Hirshl’s parents, Boruch Meir and Tsirl, are galitsianers to the core. Shrewd but simple, careful to render to both God and Caesar, liking a good laugh yet laughable themselves, they are pillars of their community and its ideal types. Indeed, honest, hardworking, and financially successful on the one hand, yet tolerant, sociable, and mindful of their public obligations on the other, they came close to realizing the ideal of European bourgeois society, of which the Jewish community of Szybusz—admixed in whose indigenous value system is not a little of the Austrian Gemütlichkeit—is a poor but undeniable cousin. Despite the pervasive small-town Jewishness of Hirshl’s environment, therefore, the collision between him and the world of his parents is more than just a parochial one pitting a quaint religious tradition with its anachronistic custom of matchmaking against a young man who has fallen in love with the wrong person. On the contrary: it is part of the same conflict between bourgeois civilization and Eros that plays such a prominent role in the novels of Mann, Proust, and other modern European writers, and—with a suitable change of scenery—it would be as credible in the Vienna or Paris of the early 1900s as it is in the Szybusz of those years. (Although no dates are mentioned in A Simple Story, several historical references in the novel, especially one to the Russo-Japanese War, establish that the story takes place in the first decade of the twentieth century.)
Nor should we be too quick to assume, as some of Agnon’s critics have been, that Agnon’s sympathies in this co
nflict are essentially on the side of Eros. Granted, the world that Hirshl makes his peace with has little room in it for strong passion; true too, it is often shallow, petty, grasping, and two-faced; yet to say of it, as does the critic Baruch Hochman, in his excellent study The Fiction of S.Y. Agnon, that it is “a milieu which has been shown to be inimical to every value of youth, life, love, or for that matter, authentic tradition,” so that, in settling for an existence like his parents’, Hirshl is in for a “dreadful” future, involves, I believe, a misreading of A Simple Story that comes from projecting our own modernist—that is to say, anti-bourgeois—biases onto it. Indeed, the fact of the matter is that, if we set our cultural prejudices aside and read the book as it is written, not only does Agnon clearly like the characters he has created, he writes about them with a buoyancy and affection that compel us to like them too. They may not be our ideals; however great their limitations, though, we can hardly deny them their attractive qualities. They are generally quick-witted and good-natured; they are, though often insensitive, rarely deliberately unkind; they have an admirable sense of social and family solidarity; and, far from being “inimical to life,” they enjoy its simple pleasures with great gusto. Even the most potentially disagreeable of them are by no means negatively portrayed. Thus, for example, Mina, after striking us at first as an empty-headed shtetl debutante, turns out to be a young woman of considerable mettle and resourcefulness, while Tsirl, who—clever, enterprising, amiable, lively, selfish, complacent, controlling, and sometimes cruel—embodies all the good and bad that can be found in Szybuszian society, probably has as much of Agnon himself in her as any other character in the novel.