A Simple Story

by S. Y. Agnon

  If this seems a questionable assertion, I might back it up with a story told me by the Israeli author Amos Oz. Once, when he was a young university student in Jerusalem, Oz went to pay an admirer’s call on Agnon, who was then a venerable figure in his seventies. Agnon received him graciously and chatted about his work for a while, after which he inquired—unfortunately I cannot reproduce here how Oz, an excellent mimic, imitated the antiquated East-European Hebrew that Agnon insisted on talking to the end of his life—what other Hebrew authors his visitor liked. Oz mentioned Hayyim Hazzaz, Agnon’s contemporary and chief rival for the doyenship of Hebrew literature, and was astonished to be answered, “Hazzaz? Who is that? I never heard of him.” Thinking he had not been heard properly, Oz repeated the name—only for Agnon to reiterate that it was unfamiliar, rise from his chair, go over to a bookcase, take down a heavy directory of Hebrew writers, leaf through it to the letter “H,” and show the bewildered student of literature that there was no Hazzaz in it. The conversation passed on to other things until, when Agnon left the room for a minute, Oz went to have a look at the book in question—and discovered that it was a nineteenth-century volume published before either Agnon or Hazzaz was born! Is not this episode an almost exact replica of the scene in A Simple Story in which Tsirl expresses her opinion of Kurtz and his unwanted appearance by pretending not to realize that he is there?

  I relate this story to point out not only that Agnon, the Nobel Prize laureate translated into dozens of languages, was a galitsianer himself with a penchant for pulling legs, but also that often in A Simple Story, when he appears to be laughing with us at his characters, he is at the same time laughing with his characters at us. You, my readers, he is saying, may find the people that I write about comic, and perhaps they are; but can you be sure that in finding them so you have not become comic yourselves, since your judgments of them reveal your own twentieth-century standards, which may be as ludicrous as, or even more so than, theirs? Indeed, though Agnon is a great leg puller, it is not always apparent in his work whose leg is being pulled. Take the case of the narrator of A Simple Story, with his pious homilies and ritually obeisant “God in heaven.” Are the latter really so emptily sentimental, as Hochman claims, that they “can only undercut any faith in [God’s] relevance to the ongoing business of life,” with the result that “Agnon’s irony is directed as much against the narrator as against the burgher world of the novel”? Or is it possible that it is we who are having our noses tweaked for reacting this way—that is, for no longer casually being able to see divine providence everywhere, as did our less sophisticated ancestors, so that we must impatiently dismiss any reference to it as hollow twaddle? If épater les bourgeois, shocking the conventional-minded, was one of the slogans of modernism in the arts, it is a favorite game of Agnon’s to invert the injunction and scandalize the modernist in his reader. His folksy narrators, who remind one of the stock figure of the country bumpkin in the jokes who outslicks the city slicker in the end, often do just that.

  A mock naive antimodernism is in fact Agnon’s preferred fictional stance, so much so that he sometimes doubles it backward in time, first twitting our own age with an earlier one and then teasing that with an even more distant past. (Thus, in A Simple Story, while satirizing modern medicine, the Knabenhuts and Getzel Steins who wish to change the world, or the Gildenhorns and Schleiens who actually are changing it, the narrator often implies that this world itself has deteriorated sadly from that of its forebears, who were in all respects more stalwart and serious men.) “Older is better” could be his motto, and though Agnon writes about the world of his Galician youth and childhood with a nostalgia that is unusual in modern East-European Hebrew literature, where this period of life is more often remembered with the threatening shadow of a hostile environment lying heavily over it, his work repeatedly harks back to a vaguely situated Golden Age whose loss it thematically laments. Whether this is a mere literary posture or an accurate representation of his historical beliefs is difficult to say; there can be little doubt, however, that he himself, an observant Jew all his life except for a brief period in early adulthood, was of a deeply conservative turn of mind. Politics as such never seem to have interested him much; he rarely wrote about them directly, and his sense of them could probably be summed up in the words of the first-century rabbi Hanina S’gan HaKohanim, who is quoted in The Ethics of the Fathers (3:2) as saying, “Pray for the welfare of the State, because the fear of it alone keeps each man from swallowing his neighbor alive.” Agnon’s own profound fear of anarchy was above all moral and cultural, and it is the implicit message of nearly all his work that without both the social system and the individual discipline that enable men to keep a tight rein on themselves—a system and discipline that are admirably provided by the commandments of Judaism—the human self and its relationships with the world are in perpetual danger of reverting to chaos. Indeed, modern life is for Agnon practically synonymous with chaos, and, in one form or another, his fiction is a persistent rejection of it. (Although this aspect of his writing is all but untranslatable, Agnon’s repudiation of modernity is even reflected in his Hebrew prose style, which, based on his own inventive and immensely erudite adaptation of classical rabbinic diction, stubbornly—one might almost say defiantly—refused to make any concessions to the enormous changes that took place in the Hebrew language in the course of its twentieth-century revival.)

  And because romantic love too, with its strong irrational component, is a potentially chaotic and lawless force, a pre-modern Szybusz must strive to neutralize or contain it in self-defense. (The fact that we and Agnon know what the Hurvitzes and the Ziemlichs do not, though they too have an inkling of it, namely, that Szybusz and all that it stands for are a historically doomed cause, may add another ironical dimension to the novel, but it is hardly the central issue in it.) It should be noted, though, that the enemy in Szybusz is by no means sexuality itself. Szybuszian society is not particularly puritanical, and neither, despite the rather Victorian themes of the novel, is Agnon in writing about it. On the contrary, just as the narrator of A Simple Story is not embarrassed to attribute the survival of Hirshl and Mina’s marriage in its early stages to the attractions of sex alone, so the love they finally come to feel for each other is born in a supremely sexual moment that is described with both great power and delicacy. The enemy is social disorder. The world of Szybusz would not come to an end if Hirshl married Blume, but it is a world that rests on parental authority, family alliances, and the transmission of accepted tradition, all of which would be challenged if he did. Marriage is its most sacred institution because it stands at the intersection of these factors, and the moment it ceases to be such, social stability commences to vanish. Besides which, as Boruch Meir and Tsirl know from their own experience, even if one does not marry because of love, one may still end by loving because of marriage.

  Is A Simple Story then an antiromantic comedy in which the adolescent folly of a young man’s love is nipped in the nick of time and the social order happily preserved? Not necessarily. There is nothing foolish about Hirshl’s love for Blume, nor is it described as anything but genuine, heartfelt, and pure. In fact, Hirshl can marry Blume without ultimate ruination if he insists on it—everything we know about his parents tells us that, if he were to fight for his love for her, they would acquiesce, however unhappily, in the end. Why does he not? The narrator of A Simple Story offers us no less than four different explanations, which can be taken singly or together. One is that Hirshl stumbles into his engagment to Mina through an inadvertent comedy of errors from which he is simply unable to extricate himself. Another is weakness of character: if he were not such a mother’s boy he would break off the engagement—or, what is more likely, would never allow it to take place. A third reason is the deep unconscious identification that he feels with his father: just as Boruch Meir jilted his cousin, Blume’s mother, Mirl, in order to marry Tsirl, so Hirshl, in the mysterious way that children often have of recapitul
ating their parents’ lives even as they are rebelling against them, does the same thing. And finally, we are offered the explanation of fate—or, if one wills, of Providence: Hirshl marries Mina because it has been decided in Heaven that he must, and the rest is simply the working out of the divine plan for him. Though falling in love with Blume may jeopardize that plan, it is hardly blameworthy in itself.

  Similarly, we are given our choice of reasons for Hirshl’s mental breakdown. It may be the result of a hereditary illness that has afflicted his uncle, his grandfather, and his great-great-grandfather before him. It may be brought on by a combination of emotional tension, worry, lack of sleep, physical exhaustion, and too many barbiturates. It may be the only way out of the insoluble conflict in his life between his unappeasable desire for Blume and the social and marital roles he is forced to play. And it may be the expression of a severe oedipal complex with its attendant castration fears, as a result of which Hirshl both identifies with his own masculinity, as symbolized by the rooster or cock (several times archaically referred to in the Hebrew as gever, a word whose common meaning is “man”), and is convinced that he must sacrifice or “slaughter” it. Such overdetermination is psychologically true to life; it is also one of Agnon’s typical ways of baiting his readers and forcing them to reveal their own proclivities by choosing the level of meaning that they feel most comfortable with.

  Deep within himself Hirshl is perhaps even afraid of Blume and of the desire she arouses in him, for she is not only beauty incarnate in his eyes but mystery incarnate too. Her very name, as has been pointed out, underlines this duality, Blume in Yiddish meaning “flower” and Nacht meaning “night.” She is indeed a “night flower” for Hirshl, the plucking of which depends on his venturing into unknown realms, sexual, emotional, and social, of life and self—and by the time he feels brave or desperate enough to do this on his nocturnal walks to the Mazals’ house, Blume feels compelled to reject him. Although we are left to speculate about what might have happened if she did not, or if Hirshl had proposed to her in time, there are two sets of minor characters in A Simple Story who serve as markers here. One is Akavia and Tirza Mazal, about whose marriage we know—although their history is only hinted at in the novel—that it is an essentially happy consummation of an unconventional romantic rekationship.1 (It also, however—either because they are so engrossed in each other or because they no longer fit into any accepted social mold—has removed them from the life of the town, on whose secluded outskirts they live by themselves.) The other pair is Mottshi Shaynbart and Dr. Langsam’s wife, who has killed herself, a careful reading reveals, after an unhappy love affair with him. In a word, we are given a glimpse of the two romantic variations that the plot of A Simple Story turns its back on—and whether Agnon is saying that the innocent romance may end happily like Rapunzel’s but the adulterous one must end tragically like Isolde’s, or whether he is simply reminding us that both possibilities exist, we are being told in either case that romantic love can be a gamble with one’s position in society, and even with one’s life, that Hirshl at one point, and Blume at another, are not willing to take. Does A Simple Story suggest that they should be? Or that, on the contrary, they are wise not to be? It does neither. This too is a question whose answer is left entirely up to us.

  Dr. Langsam, the only character in A Simple Story who is not only clever but wise, does not even bother to ask it. Perhaps Hirshl would have been a happier and more fully alive person with Blume than he can ever be with Mina; perhaps a romance between the cousins would have had a disastrous end, like that of the doctor’s own wife. Since as a physician he must work with what it is and not with what might have been, none of this matters very much. And what is is that, willingly or not, Hirshl has thrown in his lot with Szybusz rather than with Blume and must be helped to make his peace with the fact. To accomplish this the old doctor assumes a cunningly indirect strategy. On the one hand, by means of his seemingly aimless stories, he builds up in his patient a positive image of small-town Jewish life, thus getting him to accept that the conventional society of the Galician shtetl in which he is condemned to live has a dignity and a value of its own and that there is no need to feel shame or anger at belonging to it. On the other hand, by recreating a semblance of the maternal warmth and care that Hirshl never received as a child, he encourages a transference that frees Hirshl of the unconscious rage felt toward his parents and especially toward his mother. Like Agnon the novelist, Langsam the psychologist, with his dislike of modern ways, is not as simple as he at first appears to be; there is a great deal of sophistication in his outwardly artless methods, which succeed precisely because Hirshl fails to see them for what they are.

  The result of Dr. Langsam’s treatment, with all the painful renunciation and acceptance that it involves, is strikingly borne out in the little scene of the blind musician that occurs in the novel’s last pages. At first Hirshl is entranced by the lyric sweetness of the beggar’s music; yet quickly it becomes unbearable for him, because, although he may not be consciously aware of it, its haunting beauty reminds him of his love for Blume that is forever lost. The harshness of his voice as he urges Mina away from the scene has both rejection and grief in it, for he is saying goodbye for the last time to a part of himself that he knows will never be realized. (Indeed, a few lines further on we are told that even the piano music rotely played by Mina would be more than he could stand.) A moment later, however, he turns around and throws the beggar a large coin. This is not just a perfunctory act; it is, the narrative informs us, a generous gift and no doubt a precedent for the future. Though Hirshl will never be all that he might have been, he will be like his father an active and responsible member of a humane if often trivial society, one of whose major precepts is the giving of charity and the caring for the less fortunate. As in Dr. Langsam’s musings about “passing on” good in the world, Hirshl, having been helped by the doctor whom he has proceeded to forget, now helps someone else himself. It may not seem like much in the ultimate scale of things, but it is not such a trifle either.

  Comedy, which labors to convince us during its brief hour on stage that despite life’s many pratfalls all things turn out for the best, often concludes by gaily pairing off its characters so that everyone has someone in the end. A Simple Story is no exception to this rule. As the novel draws to its close Hirshl and Mina have each other and their new baby; the Ziemlichs have Meshulam; Yona Toyber has Getzel Stein’s hunchbacked sister; Kurtz has the Hurvitzes’ ex-maid; Dr. Knabenhut has a rich wife to support him; Arnold Ziemlich has his long-lost family in Malikrowik; and Boruch Meir is already dreaming of a Ziemlich-Hurvitz wedding, that is, of the royal marriage of cousins that has eluded him and his son. Only Getzel Stein and Blume are left out in the cold. About Getzel we hardly need worry: he is a practical and assiduous young man who undoubtedly will get over his disappointment in love and find himself a suitable partner. Blume is another story, though. A charmed mystery to us as she is to Hirshl—indeed, we hardly know her any better at the end of A Simple Story than we do at the outset—we leave her feeling uncertain what the future holds in store for her. Perhaps, having refused to surrender that bright kernel of herself that Hirshl has relinquished, she will continue to grow and will someday meet her equal, which Hirshl has proven not to be. Perhaps she will withdraw even more deeply into the protective armor of pride and self-reliance that already surrounds her. In either case, it is easy to imagine her seeking her destiny elsewhere, for, homeless as she is, the world must be her home as Szybusz is the Szybuszian’s. The novel ends with her as it began with her, and so reminds us that there is more suffering, loneliness, and possibility in life than the comic stage can accommodate. It is a tribute to the evocative powers of this not so simple story that, thinking of Blume, though we know that she exists only in its pages, we cannot help wishing her well.

  1 Tirza and Akavia’s story is told fully in the novella In the Prime of Her Life, which relates how Akavia, a middle-aged bachelor who
was in love with Tirza’s dead mother, is fallen in love with by Tirza, whose father he is old enough to be. Though the match is opposed at first not only by Tirza’s father but by Akavia too, Tirza’s love wins out in the end and she and Akavia are wed. While some critics have taken the novella’s ending to be an ironic statement on the folly of romantic emotions, which lead Tirza, psychologically over-identified with her mother, to entrap an older man in a marriage that will be bad for both, I do not share this view. It comes, I believe, from imposing a preconception of Agnon as an unvarying ironist on a story in which he is not being one.

  Annotated Bibliography of Works in English on Agnon’s A Simple Story

  In the nearly eighty years since its first publication in Hebrew, Agnon’s Sippur Pashut (A Simple Story) has been the object of sustained fascination for literary critics. Readers who would like to sample some of that body of scholarship and commentary, but are limited to material available in English, would find the following book chapters and essays to be worthwhile.

  1. Book-length studies on Agnon with chapters on A Simple Story

  Each of these books in English aims to be comprehensive in its treatment of Agnon’s stories and themes, and each includes a chapter on A Simple Story (indicated by page citations). Those interested in exploring the entire canon of literature on Agnon’s writings would do well to start with these volumes:

  • Arnold Band, Nostalgia and Nightmare: A Study in the Fiction of S.Y. Agnon (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1968), pp. 239-254 – this nearly encyclopedic volume remains the most essential book on Agnon in English.

  • Harold Fisch, S.Y. Agnon (New York: Frederick Ungar Publishing, 1975), chapter 7, pp. 85-96 – on the sources of the “simple” story’s metaphysical resonance and depth.