These are tales of initiation, and the two included here, “The Kerchief” and “Two Pairs,” deal with the moment that epitomizes the passage from childhood to adulthood in the Jewish life cycle: the bar mitzvah. Yet readers will find in Agnon’s stories little that reminds us of the lavish celebrations common to America. In the pious society of Eastern Europe, the bar mitzvah was less an occasion for festivity than a solemn marking of the boy’s arrival at the adult responsibilities and prerogatives entailed in full observance of the commandments.
Agnon does something special in his fiction with the bar mitzvah that is a sign of his modernity. While the spiritual seriousness of the moment is taken for granted, the emphasis is shifted from the initiation into ritual obligation to the psychological and existential experience of leaving childhood behind and encountering the unredeemed reality of the world.
Tales of Childhood
“The Kerchief” is Agnon’s bar-mitzvah story par excellence. It was originally written on the occasion of the thirteenth birthday of Gershom Schocken, the son of Agnon’s patron Salman Schocken. The story contains thirteen sections, and the first presentation edition was printed in thirteen copies with thirteen lines to the page.
“The Kerchief” indeed celebrates the successful transition from childhood to adulthood, yet at the same time the story makes it clear that the safe negotiation of the passage can by no means be taken for granted. The story operates along two thematic tracks that come together in the climactic scene. One track reflects the idealization of the Jewish family as symbolized by the gifts brought back by the father from the trade fair. The kerchief given to the mother, which she wears only on Sabbaths and holidays, represents the sanctity of the family felt in a heightened way on these special days. It is this structure of wholeness and integrity anchored in the tradition that gives the narrator a sense of being that cannot be effaced in later life.
The other track is linked to loss and the unredeemed state of the world. The time the father is away at the fair is likened to the days of semi-mourning preceding the Ninth of Av, the fast day that commemorates the destruction of the Jerusalem Temples (and which also happens to be the date Agnon took as his birthday). The Messiah, who will restore this loss, is the subject of the boy’s nighttime fantasies as he lies in his father’s bed during his absence. In the boy’s imagination, the messianic era is grasped as a time when his father will no longer travel away from home and children like him will be freed from school to play in the Temple courtyards. The Messiah himself is imagined, according to talmudic legend, as disguised among the company of repulsive beggars. Though they be reviled and abused by most, the narrator imagines himself honoring and revering the beggars, “since among them were those who had dwelt together with the Messiah.”
When the narrator encounters a real beggar on the day of his bar mitzvah, there is nothing redemptive about the sad and disgusting creature who stands before him. The man has been spurned by the townsfolk in violation of the high Jewish precepts of charity and hospitality. It is a marker of the boy’s innocence that — until this point — he cannot recognize this hypocrisy; he resists admitting the existence of a reality that does not comport with his conviction of the holiness of the community in which he lives. Yet alone, face to face with the beggar, the boy meets the challenge presented to him: he loosens the precious silk kerchief that his mother had tied around his neck that day and hands it to the beggar, who winds it around his running sores.
The handing over of the kerchief does not mean the narrator rejects the family sanctity it symbolizes. The loving gaze of the mother upon his return home bare-necked only redoubles the sense that he has acted upon rather than betrayed the values of his family. What the boy has managed to do on this day of his coming of age is to acknowledge the existence of suffering and evil in the world and to accept some responsibility toward it. His gesture brings with it no dramatic transformation, but the act is real in a way entirely at odds with his childlike reveries of messianic deliverance.
The themes of family and unredemption are fused in the Hebrew text by the word bayit. Bayit means “home,” “house,” as well as the family that dwells in it; bayit also refers to the Jerusalem Temples, which served, while they stood, as the earthly seat of God’s dwelling among the people of Israel. With the loss of the national home for the spirit, the family becomes the custodian of the spirit and the workshop within which individuals are prepared for engaging in the unfinished work of redemption.
The acceptance of loss achieved by the narrator of “The Kerchief” on the day of his bar mitzvah is not attained by the narrator of the next story, “Two Pairs,” until much later in life. Both are bar mitzvah stories, and both feature an autobiographical narrator, but in “Two Pairs” it is the weight of retrospective wisdom that is most acutely felt. The adult narrator recalls the pair of tefillin written by a famous scribe that was given to him on his bar mitzvah and which was destroyed much later in the fire that consumed the narrator’s home. He reconciles himself to the newly written pair he has to purchase as he tells the story of the beloved first pair and its meaning to him.
Tales of Childhood
Tefillin, or phylacteries, are a pair of small black boxes with leather straps; one box is wound around the arm and the other placed on the forehead. They contain pieces of parchment on which verses from the Bible are written in calligraphy by a scribe. The origin of this practice lies in the interpretation of Deuteronomy 11, which is quoted in the story: “Bind them [the words of the Torah] as a sign on your arm and let them be a band between your eyes.” In its original meaning, the verse was probably a figurative exhortation to be ever mindful of the words of the Torah. The rabbis gave a hyper-literal interpretation to the verse and took the signs to be bound on the arm and head as actual inscriptions to be contained in boxes and held in place with black straps. (Tefillin also play a crucial role in the story “Pisces” in this volume.) Tefillin and the tallit — the fringed prayer shawl — are worn in prayer only by adult males, and together they represent the most visible signs of the commandments acceded to by a boy at the time of his bar mitzvah.
In “Two Pairs,” the tefillin as a symbol function on two very different dimensions. On one level, they serve as a naive religious fetish. The narrator is deeply attached to his tefillin and proud to own them; he loves to touch them and feels comforted by wearing them in times of trouble. On a deeper level, however, the tefillin are associated with the rabbi Elimelech, the scribe who had written them in an earlier age of spiritual plenitude. Like the kerchief, Elimelech’s tefillin are associated with the wholeness of the family because of the scribe’s power. Like the kerchief, which is never soiled, so the script inside the tefillin remains unfaded after many decades of use.
If the Hebrew word bayit gives unity to “The Kerchief,” so the word sofer, which means at once a ritual scribe and a writer of modern literature, suggests the importance of the figure of Elimelech. As can be seen from a number of stories in this volume, especially “The Tale of the Scribe,” Agnon was preoccupied with scribes and their work, and even compiled an anthology of information and legends about them. His identification with scribes is unmistakable, as is his desire to see his literary enterprise as a continuation of theirs. So when the special tefillin written by Elimelech are lost in the fire, the calamity is painful but not devastating, because the spirit of sacred inscription lives in the figure of the writer who is telling the story of his growing up.