1. Who is Agnon?
"Agnon" is a literary name, behind which there are many books and much writing, of diverse and different kinds. Agnon called himself by the name of his first important book, "Agunot"(1908). In other words, the writer's name is made of story materials. It is as if the writer said to us: my "self" is extant in my stories. Shmuel Yosef Czaczkas (written in Yiddish as "chatschkes") can be imagined standing, and hiding his face with a book, where "Shai Agnon" is written on the cover. You ask him who he is, and he opens the book in front of you.
Despite the fact that it is customary to refer to Agnon's "style," there is more than one Agnon. The name "Agnon" is naught but a title for incessant change – life changes and literary change. In truth, it is only from the point of view of a "slim," skimpy, literary Hebrew, that Agnon's style can be considered "uniform" or even considered as a "style" (in a singular sense). In effect, we are speaking of a writer whose style and whose world are the most diverse in Hebrew literature. Dan Meron's remarks about "The Bride's Canopy" apply to all of Agnon's work: "Agnon does not present a story […] unless he can raise meaning and anti-meaning, sense and anti-sense from within it." The wonder is that for all of the "literatures" which Agnon wrote, he produced masterpieces and Israeli literature still stands in their shadow.
2. Childhood
More than a century ago, we find him, a sixteen year old youth writing sentimental poems in Hebrew and Yiddish about his struggle with Satan: "Little boy! Sagie strength! You shall yet show wonders to your people."
A sixteen year old youth – or perhaps fifteen years old? For even regarding his date of birth, Agnon put forth a mask: while it is reasonable that he was born on the 18th of Av in 5647, August 8, 1887, Agnon insisted that he was born on Tisha B'Av 5648, August 8, 1888 – a far "better" date, since that, the day that the Temple was destroyed, according to prevalent belief, was the date the mashiach (messiah) was born.
After brief wanderings in Europe, Agnon arrived in the Land of Israel in the summer of 1908. The change of his name to "Agnon" is the sign of the birth of "our" writer. He will have other births like this in the course of his life. Not all of them will be received with understanding by his readers.
Two years after the publication of "Agunot," Agnon writes his renowned story "And the Crooked Shall Be Made Straight." The story was published in the "Hapoel Hatzair" newspaper, and in the book which Agnon's friend, the writer Y.H. Brenner financed. Brenner mortgaged his belt in order to print the book. Who knows where Brenner's belt is today? The story, however, has remained with us.
"And the Crooked Shall Be Made Straight" is a story based upon a Hassidic tale. As such, it is engraved with the stamp of the geographical and spiritual environment of Agnon's first home, in the city of Buczacz in Galicia (present day Ukraine). Agnon will never leave his city. Even when his home will be made in another place, his city will arise in his dreams and in his stories.
This is a story of "selling the soul" of a person who forfeits all that is dear to him in one moment of weak mindedness. The reader of this story is one to whom the Hassidic tale and the Hassidic language are familiar, like other ancient Jewish languages. Almost each and every sentence in this story bears the burden of ancient books. Were this story to appear on a website, many sections of it would be marked with links. For example: "The father will be happy with what comes from his loins and the mother will rejoice in the fruit of her belly, though what does she do for happiness and she was lying in sin for the opening." Even in this short sentence, three "books," three "links" are opened. As you can see if you click on the links, Agnon's sentence echoes and combines three Jewish sources: the brit mila circumcision ceremony, the Book of Ecclesiastes (2:2) and the story of Cain and Abel from the Book of Genesis (4:7). Essentially, you have to read the Agnon of "And the Crooked Shall Be Made Straight" within a library, and this library draws you into the past. This will not be so evident in all of his books, but Agnon never completely departed from this library. At times, to read an Agnon story is to be prepared to read other books as well.
"And the Crooked Shall Be Made Straight" is a sad story. An individual turns into a dead person in his life, looking at the world of the living from the world of the dead to which his foolishness led him to decline. But there already is an expression of a prominent characteristic of Agnon's stories – humor: "Rabbi Enzl was asked who are you. I am a poor man, he responded. And he said to him, where do you dine for the Sabbath? Do I know, he answered, they have designated a place for me with some Enzl Schmenzl, he said with a manner of reproof. The rabbi immediately recognized the essence of him and turned his lips like one saying oy to you and to your luck, oy to you and your table." Agnon is one of the most humorous of Israeli writers.
3. Back to Europe
In the winter of 1912, Agnon travels to Berlin. The trip turns out to be a great mistake and a great success at one and the same time: he travels directly into its grinding teeth, which are just beginning to open wide, into the First World War; but there (in 1915) he meets Shlomo Zalman Schocken, who is to become a major figure in his life. S.Z. Schocken (as well as his son, Gershom, later in his life) will be Agnon's patron, and effectively will relieve him of any residential worries, concerns for his livelihood and for publishing (through Schocken Publishers). Thus, it will become possible for the writer to dedicate his life to writing and reading.
The encounter with modern, German culture, so different from that of Galicia, will be represented in a line of stories and novels. Just as Agnon wrote "And the Crooked Shall Be Made Straight" as a Jewish writer aware of modern, western, literary culture, so he writes a story like "Other Faces," as a "German" story, that was written from the penetrating eyes of one who was a "stranger," a Jew from the European east wondering about love in a changing world.
In 1913, Agnon visits in the city of his birth, Buczacz, as well as in Prague and Vienna. In his city, he finds his father ill. He returns to the city to visit his father three months later, but is informed that his father deceased a short time beforehand (Agnon's mother had already died in 1909). Dan Laor writes: Agnon "could not then have imagined that his father's illness and his death […] provided him with his last opportunity to return and look at the city of his birth as he had known it. Within less than a year, eastern Galicia would turn into a great battlefield in the blood ridden war that would bring ruin and destruction of historic magnitude on the crowded Jewish settlement that populated this strip of land." The First World War breaks out in the summer of 1914 and Agnon finds himself detained in Germany, and even facing the threat of enlistment in a war that is not his.
One of the outstanding stories that Agnon published while in Germany is "In the Prime of Her Life." Though this story is also saturated with the language of the Jewish "library," it is completely different, and the various quotations are relatively pushed to the background and they are less imperative to understanding the story. For example, in the following quote, it is not imperative to know that the words "in the prime of her life" recall the Book of Isaiah; that the words "הקדיש את קרואיו" are supposed to remind the reader of the Book of Zephaniah; that the combination "few and wicked" is taken from a conversation between Pharaoh and Jacob in the Book of Genesis and that its conclusion alludes to the Book of Ecclesiastes: "In the prime of her life, my mother died. She was about thirty years old and a year, my mother, at her death. Few and wicked were the days and years of her life. All day she sat at home and did not leave the home. Her friends and her neighbors did not come to visit her, nor did my father הקדיש את קרואיו. Our home stood still with its sorrow, its doors were not opened to an outsider. My mother lied in her bed and her words were few." Despite the "heavy" use of quotations, this is a different tone from that of "And the Crooked Shall Be Made Straight" and stories close to it. The place of the Hassidic tale as the basis of the story is replaced by a combination of memory and imagination, and actually, an imagination that creates a personal, literary "memory," as Agnon was not by his mother's bed at the end of her days, but in the Land of Israel. Still, this story comes from life, not from the library.
4. The Return to the Land of Israel
In 1924, Agnon's home in Germany was set on fire and burned with all of the manuscripts he kept there and the library he had established. According to Dan Laor, Agnon "was inclined to interpret the tragedy as punishment for his extended stay in a foreign land," and therefore, after an absence of about thirteen years, he decided to return to the Land of Israel.
Upon his return to the Land of Israel, Agnon resumed observing mitzvot (commandments of Jewish Law). He had abandoned the mitzvot to one degree or another upon his first arrival in the Land of Israel and persisted with this during his stay in Germany (though being a free person, he did not sever his ties with rabbis and with Jewish texts). The black kippah (skullcap), familiar from many pictures only now returned to his head, when he was about thirty-seven years old. But despite his renewed religiosity, one can say that Agnon's kippah was on his head as a simple and clear response of faith. The question of the kippah, that is, the question of faith, is the basis for some of Agnon's most powerful works, such as "The Bride's Canopy" and "The Book of Deeds."
5. The Novel
The next, most striking work by Agnon is written in the genre in which, until now, he had no experience – the novel.
Agnon's first novel (and actually, according to Dan Meron, not a novel, but "a subversive parody seeking to destroy the novel [genre] ) was "The Bride's Canopy" – an adaptation of a shorter work of his by the same name. In this novel, he returns to the world of Polish Jewry, out of his familiarity with the modern genre (with which he became familiar from reading German translations of novels by Dostoevsky, Flaubert and others).
This is a story which presents a picture of Jewish community life in Galicia circa 1820, that is, in what was already the distant past at the time of the writing of the book. Its protagonist, Reb Yudil, initially appears as a simple and poor, believing Jew who "worshiped God with awe and reverence and love, and he would not to be fenced in there and buy there or for him to get a share in the world to come, but in order to make a chair for the Shkinah [God in his feminine form]. And the location of his apartment was downstairs in the gloomy, narrow and humid basement, and there was neither a bench there to sit on, nor a table to dine upon, nor a bed to sleep upon." But this simplicity of faith is not the façade of it all; Gershon Shaked described him as a "villain and a scoundrel" and Dan Meron pointed out the "alienation and cold heartedness" that Yudil exercises towards his wife and daughters and called him "a spoiled boy." Who is the "real" Yudil? Here too, the humor is attached to the grave, righteous description: "And the miser has nothing but one rooster, Rabbi Zerach is his name, named for what is written in the Psalms 112, he shined (zarach in Hebrew) in the darkness, a light for the straight and honest." It is precisely the rooster which earns the title "Rabbi" that makes the typical fairy tale human, specific. The rooster (which is an important image in this novel and not just an "ornament") even provides, by the power of its name which serves as the quote of a verse, hope for the redemption of its poor owner (we will meet Bahya which is also a "quote" in another Agnon novel, "Temol Shilshom" (Yesterday and the Day Before). Agnon loved roosters. We will encounter some of them in "A Simple Story," his next novel.
"The Bride's Canopy" marks the concreteness of the location: Poland is no longer a place – non-place, as in many of the stories of Mendele the bookseller, for example. This was to such an extent that "a certain delay was caused in the work [on "The Bride's Canopy"] since Agnon was unable to find detailed maps of eastern Galicia in Jerusalem and its libraries. This technical problem of a lack of maps, allows us to see a deep, symbolic facet: Agnon, now far from his old home, sets out to write about lost spaces. He looks out the window and does not see the place about which he is writing, but rather the distance from it. He sees his banishment. Ultimately, "The Bride's Canopy" will become a kind of map of this. It is a map that paints a distant world, and to a large degree – lost.
6. Nightmares
Shortly after the publication of "The Bride's Canopy" in his first edition of "All the Writing" (1931), Agnon publishes totally different stories (1932) – the beginning of a project by the name "The Book of Deeds." These are stories for which their model may be a dream, a fantasy and sometimes a nightmare. The concreteness of the place and time is destroyed in different ways. There are those who have seen the influence of Kafka in these stories, but Agnon denies that. Agnon withdraws from the Galician language and world, and moves into the modern world and to language much less quoted and archaic. The world is not stable, at times it flows and at times it just does not allow for rest ("From Flat to Flat"): "I removed my hand from Anderman's hand and walked by my wife. The black bridge shook under my feet and the waves of the river folded and role, rose and folded" ("To the Doctor"); "they heightened themselves from the waters of the sea and rose and deluged the soles of my feet. I jumped and alighted upon the bridge. Since I ascended the bridge, the bridge shook and began trembling"("The Candles"). This is a world that can attack, can live and can move suddenly, in order to cause damage. It is doubtful whether such a world could have been written prior to the Second World War. This is a world in which the impact of the war is still felt. It is felt first and foremost in the act of the story.
"Suddenly a voice like the voice of a bed sheet that is torn. In reality no sheet has torn, Allah one little storm cloud in the sky has ripped and since it has been torn it has incited the moon and sawed clouds, and a sweet light has lit the home and shines over father"("For Father's Home"). The light may be "sweet," and the bed sheet in the end is not torn. A small comfort, for the rip is in the heavens, in the clouds. The skies are torn and nothing is revealed beyond the tear, whose voice is heard on the earth. The deceased father illuminated by the light of the moon is a sweet and disturbing view at one and the same time – disturbing precisely because of the frozen – dead – happiness.
7. Love
In the winter of 1933, Agnon surprises again. After the dream stories, he publishes one of the pearls of his prose – the story "Other Faces." It is a psychological, "German" story about a couple after their divorce, a story with a nighttime atmosphere, laden with a strong feeling of going back in time: as it appears it is only after their divorce that the couple, Tony and Hartman, begin with the story, really becoming an intimate "couple." The opening sentence of the story is so different from the opening of "The Bride's Canopy" (the same opening in which Zerach, the rooster appears): "She was dressed in a brown dress and her brown eyes were warm and misty." As stated, there is a secular, German world in this story, with a "foreign" lens rather than a German lens aimed at it, somewhat removed, trying to understand the "modern" love, and succeeding. Agnon from Buczacz and Agnon from Berlin write this story "together."
The next novel by Agnon is "A Simple Story," but this is a totally different novel. Dan Laor writes that this is not "the Pikersky novel based on a medley of stories embedded in folklore, but an integrative novel made according to the prevalent model of the bourgeois, European novel, and particular the family novel." The wonder is that Agnon manages to mix between the traditional, Jewish world and the literary genre which is ostensibly completely foreign to him. There is already a very poignant statement in this mix: the traditional, Jewish world can no longer but be seen through eyes from the outside, eyes that have departed from it. It is not a closed world with laws of its own; it is a world about which one can think just as we think about its surroundings – thinking with the help of a novel. This very viewpoint, from the outside, is a declaration of the breach of its boundaries. This has difficult sides to it.
One of the expressions of modernity in the writing of this novel is the consideration of insanity as "symbolic behavior," possibly subsequent to the teachings of Sigmund Freud. The funny rooster in "The Bride's Canopy" changes completely: "Herschel is strewn upon his bed and feels that his hours and minutes are passing sleeplessly. He draws on his energy and closes his eyes with all his strength so that he will perhaps drowse, maybe sleep. At the same time, all of the roosters, with their cockscombs upright and their voices hanging in their mouths, and a warm scent arises from Mina's bed," and thereafter: "one is not a ruler in his moment of anger. Suddenly, he can rise and kill all of the roosters in the world;" "a rooster jumped on the table and soiled the paper, so the pious man rose and ripped the rooster in his wrath." In the end, in a very literary attack of insanity, the protagonist himself becomes a mad rooster in his own eyes.
7. Between two World Wars
In 1930, Agnon traveled to Poland and to the city of his birth for a visit. The late visit in the declining city planted seeds in his soul for the novel that would be written towards the end of that decade: "A Guest for the Night," a kind of Mahlerian symphony of beauty, terror and decline. The novel appears as a book at the beginning of World War II (September 1939), when the city of Agnon's birth is conquered by the Soviet Union (later, it will be conquered by the Germans and they will murder its Jews). It is not the innocence and the faith (even if it outwardly appears so) of "The Bride's Canopy" nor the love and private folly of "A Simple Story" that we find here, but the pain of a community, of the public. Godlessness is a genuine possibility. The main protagonist of the book is the collective Jew in eastern Europe, the Jewish place. The entrance to the city "Yom Kippur Eve After Midnight" recalls some of the stories from "The Book of Deeds" saturated with a feeling of lateness, of a great mistake, of a tremendous missed moment: "The people of the hotel received me as a guest who had not come at his time;" "in the synagogue there was no one I knew;" "after the prayer service, Psalms were not said, nor were the Song of Particularity or the Song of Honor said, rather, the synagogue was locked and each person went to his home." The prayer is almost non-prayer: a last flicker of a religious community. The writing of the story is a kind of "salvation excavation."
A somber picture arises from the excavations. Something has gone wrong with humanity. The pain is insurmountable and too massive after the First World War. "The hall was empty. Nobody was in the hall. One I know came and I do not know his name. Each day his face is different, today he had the face of a יפוני and a תתרי at the same time. Everywhere there are many like him, here with the disruption there is none like the likened one. He was tiny and skinny and his cheeks were red and his eyes black, and his moustache black and shiny and upright and hairs came out from it in this direction and that, and his years are thirty, less a year or more a year. He curled his moustache and stood like a man responding to the remarks of his friend and said, I already told you. He took a magnifying glass out from the hairs on his head and looked in it and left. What were the things at which he was aiming, and when had he spoken with me, and when had he said that to me that he is saying I already told you. I sat in the place where I was seated and I closed my eyes. Carolka came and said, the gentleman is in a state of gloom. Immediately, I shall light the lamp for him. The entire day we have not seen the gentleman." And the darkness is not just of one person. "All of the winds in the world are blowing and moving the city from its place. The sound of slamming doors, the sound of breaking windows, the sound of rattling shingles is heard from the end of the city to its end." The child who thought to stand before Satan matured and stands before human Satanic acts. From a world eroded by winds and affliction, this nonetheless, comes out in the book. It is a book in which the reality described within it will shortly cease to be.
8. Bites: The Lady and the Peddler, a dog and his victim
In the early 1940s, the years of the Holocaust, Agnon looks back and actually writes about the Land of Israel of the Second Aliyah period. He publishes the love story, "Oath of Allegiance" while the Nazis are annihilating Galician Jewry, and he writes the novel Tmol Shilshom (Only Yesterday) – perhaps his greatest masterpiece. Yet, he also thinks about the Satanic Europe in the horror story "The Lady and the Peddler"(1943) and in "לבית אבא" and "בדרך" (1941), which are sorts of echoes to "A Guest for the Night." "Heleni opened her eyes and looked [at the Jewish peddler]. While looking at him, she opened her mouth until her teeth shined […]. Her head erected and she sunk her teeth in his throat and began biting and sucking. Finally, she shoved him aside and howled, fu how cold you are, your blood is not blood but ice water."
Tmol Shilshom (Only Yesterday) was published in two installments (1945-6). This is the story of Isaac Kumer, a new immigrant, oleh hadash, to Jaffa from Agnon's city, and later, to Jerusalem. A no less important protagonist than Isaac is the dog, Belk, who begins his way as a kind of joke: Isaac who is a painter by profession, writes the words "mad dog" on the dog's skin, and this matter creates a panic in Jerusalem (the public takes the warning seriously). Thus, the joke gets totally beyond control and becomes serious, and then alarming. Finally, in the end, the joke sinks its teeth in the originator of the joke and kills him. This is a dog with a consciousness, sometimes a Jewish dog, a philosopher dog: "In the beginning when Belk was residing among the Jews and was pious in the beliefs of his fathers, he thought like all of Jerusalem that rains do not come except for the blowers of the shofar […]. From the day Belk was exiled from his place and the beliefs of his fathers were undermined;" "Belk cries out from his suffering, oy from all that I am persecuted of all the world, for whoever sees me seeks to kill me. See that I have done nothing to anyone, I have not bitten a one of them." What does the dog symbolize? The dog "symbolizes" nothing but the matter and the contrary. In other words, he is something that can not be defined. He can be a Jew, as well as the cause of death to the Jew. He is a "good" dog and a "bad" dog and other things. Maybe this is exactly what is disturbing about him. The reader finds himself liking this dog, even after he has murdered the protagonist of the story, who the reader also likes. Reading this novel is, among other things, the ability to contain the dog and its victim.
9. Shira and Tehila
Towards the end of the 1950s, during the period of the War of Independence, Agnon writes another novel, which in tone and in the type of occurrence recalls the previously mentioned story, "Other Faces," and other love stories by Agnon (such as the "The Doctor and His Divorcee"). This is Shira, a novel which in the end remained incomplete. This is a "German" and west European novel far more about the literal world of Reb Yudil from "The Bride's Canopy" taking place in 1820 than about "Shira" taking place in 1930, approximately twenty years prior to the time of its writing.
10. Secrets
Other outstanding stories from the 1950s are "Ido ve-Inam," one of several enigma stories that Agnon published in the later stage of his writing, including "Thus Far" (עד עולם?) (1954), "The Stool and Chair"(הדום וכסא? ) (published in installments from 1958) and "After the Feast" (לאחר הסעודה?) (1963). Alongside the composition of these stories, Agnon came back to the project of writing stories of his city, as a kind of chronicle of a world destroyed (Ir Umeloah – "A City and the Fullness Thereof") and other anthologies from the Jewish bookshelf (like Days of Awe). In 1966, he was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature. For many years prior to that, Agnon pondered over the possibility of his getting this prize, and without a doubt, he felt that he was deserving of the prize. This prize permanently fixed his stature as the greatest Jewish writer of the time. Aside from the clear importance of the prize, it is noteworthy that it inconvenienced Agnon, distracting him with correspondence, ceremonies and lectures.
"After the Feast" is one of the most mysterious of Agnon's stories. This is a story about the departure from a place, about departure from existence. It is not the "horizontal" wanderings from "The Bride's Canopy," but rather a vertical journey from the bottom to the top; a journey on a sign. "The great feast has come to its end," is how the book begins. The narrator leaves the feast hall and encounters an old building that sheds a shadow over the "feast house." But this building is revealed as peculiar architecture, a kind of tower in the shape of the letter "vav." The narrator begins to climb this tower. What is happening here? Truthfully, the entire occurrence is a "matter that has no words," and the climb on the letter is also a departure from the realm of the letters and the language. "It is a great danger to the human creature that it does not have wings when it is suddenly given to the atmosphere," he says upon reaching the top. "What did I see there and what did I not see there? I am permitted to tell of a little of what I have seen." In this late story, there is a kind of purified expression of the writer's position, standing singularly before latent powers, a position that is already expressed in the first poems of his youth.
Falling in love late is forbidden from a religious Jewish point of view as well as from a secular, bourgeois perspective. As he combined in "A Simple Story," for example, the European, defeated love novel and the Jewish reality, here Agnon connects the late love novel with the reality of his new Jewish "town" – the enlightened Jewish Settlement, the "German," in Jerusalem of the British Mandate period. And this is indeed a "town." In today's jargon it is a "bubble."
Most of his protagonists are university people, educated, German-Jews in Jerusalem, in a period in which Hitler had already risen to power in their homeland. This is also one of Agnon's most entertaining stories, observing the academic-German way of life in the heart of the Middle East as a somewhat peculiar matter: "My composition is found left over in scraps of paper, scraps of paper and I am left a lecturer, that is to say, one who receives a lecturer's salary and not a professor's, and not even of an associate professor;" "… as a professor למנר when he lets a Latin or Greek saying out of his mouth, swallowing it with a sneeze, so that they will not notice his mistakes;" "there are other scholarly individuals who make bountiful use of quotes from their books, in other words from their own remarks they bring evidence for their statements." The book also has some mysterious excerpts of the most beautiful things that Agnon had written, such as "the day came out of rest and joy and the night began oozing and arising from places that are seen and places that can not be seen. A muffled duskiness encompassed the world and filled the world, and within the muffled duskiness, a kind of light shined that darkened and illuminated from within itself and returned and darkened and all of the world was darkness in darkness." But the essence of the story is a love story between adults, who despite their life experience are not much different than children in love, which makes the story of their love sad by virtue of its being "too late.
In the 1950s, Agnon publishes several short pieces, including "Tehila." The difference between the physical eroticism and the betrayal of "Shira," and the totally non-sexual sanctity of "Tehila" are one example of many of Agnon's ability to be more than one man. In "Tehila" we find a sentence like "I peeped at her and contemplated, from where does one get to such submission. I thought of the first generations which were filled with good attributes. I spoke with her in the generations that passed […]. She said, that when one's days and years are extended, he gets to see many things, good and even better than them." This sentence is close to:
-"When the touch of the hour of a man to die turns his face to the wall,
he looks at the coming of his deeds upon the wall and he is terrified and dies."
- "From the wall, a man climbing and rising appeared in the coming."
S.Y. Czaczkas died in 1970, but Shai Agnon has never died: a literary name can not pass from the world as long as the books are alive. Agnon's books live among his readers, from youth in schools to professors of literature; they are alive in "simple" book reading, but they live in theatrical and film adaptations as well. In addition, Agnon lives among a certain type of readers, and they are the readers who themselves write stories. Prominent writers like A.B. Yehoshua, Amos Oz, Yaakov Shabtai, Aharon Appelfeld and Yitzchak Laor, to mention just a few names, turned in their writing to the works of Agnon as a source of inspiration, emulation, influence – and even literary confrontation. Without presuming to foresee the future, it can be assumed that the future of Agnon's work is still ahead, and that it has readers who have yet to be born