His first published work in Israel, “Agunot,” derives its name from the Hebrew word agunah, describing the condition of a woman who cannot get divorced because the whereabouts of her husband are unknown. She is thus “chained,” as the word literally means; legally, and in some sense spiritually, she floats unmoored in a world that no longer has a traditional place for her. Agnon, especially once he moved to Palestine, saw himself inhabiting a similar condition.
Without realizing all this it’s easy to let Agnon terrify you since he seems to carry on his back the entire weight of unbroken tradition. But Agnon was himself a living embodiment of many of the contradictions of Jewish life.
Still, the world often took him as he presented himself at the Nobel ceremony in 1966, a stooped man with his head traditionally covered, reciting before the King of Sweden the blessing one is commanded to say on standing before a king, and claiming in his speech that people see in his work the influence of “authors whose names, in my ignorance, I have not even heard.”
It’s been instructive for me to discover how uncomfortable Agnon seems to have made other Jewish writers. There is the famous story Saul Bellow tells in his introduction to “Great Jewish Short Stories” about his meeting in Jerusalem with Agnon. Agnon was very keen to know if Bellow has been translated into Hebrew because only then, Agnon explained, would Bellow be safe, preserved in the only tongue that ultimately matters. Bellow appears to be laughing along with Agnon but in fact his revenge is swift. In the same volume, introducing Agnon’s story “The Kerchief,” Bellow says of Agnon: “Entirely immersed in Hebrew and Yiddish literature, he apparently has little interest in Western literary traditions.” Bellow wrote this in 1963, just three years before Agnon received the Nobel Prize — and 13 years before he himself was awarded it. The falseness of this comment is staggering, especially from Bellow, who surely knew better. Even if Bellow had not read Agnon’s correspondence, in which he asks his patron Zalman Schocken for a copy of The Song of Roland and rhapsodizes about Flaubert, a brief sampling of Agnon’s works brings its western literary elements home, however braided through with Jewish sources.
It is as if Bellow — who after all wrote To Jerusalem and Back—needed to persuade himself that Agnon’s world and his own could not really overlap. That it was well and good that the goat, and even the dream of the goat, was dead. Bellow’s American security somehow depended on it.
A Reader’s Preface
The same thing happened when I was talking once to Alfred Kazin, the great American Jewish literary critic and author of the landmark study of American literature, On Native Grounds. In passing, Kazin mentioned to me that his daughter was living in Israel.
“Well,” I said, “she’s really on native ground!”
Kazin flew into a rage. For him — and he was born in 1915, the same year as Bellow — the idea that native ground might not be where his own feet rested, and where his immigrant parents had toiled to belong, was too threatening, too anxiety provoking.
Even Isaac Bashevis Singer was made uncomfortable by Agnon — though perhaps it makes sense that a Yiddish writer would squirm a little at the prospect of a modern Hebrew one. I.B. Singer’s son, Israel Zamir, tells a story in his memoir about going with his father to the 92nd Street Y to hear Agnon speak. It was 1967, the eve of the Six Day War. After Agnon’s reading, Singer remarked to his son: “Too bad there aren’t any translators so his books could be distributed widely.”
It’s one thing for the Nobel committee, in its citation to Agnon, to offer the unwittingly insulting observation that Agnon’s work “has gradually penetrated linguistic barriers which, in this case, are particularly obstructive.” It’s another thing for the two other Jewish literary giants, all headed for the Nobel Prize, to feel a similar sense of obstruction and impossibility.
But these questions of language, like questions of national identity, are intimately bound up with Agnon’s work, and he would hardly have been surprised by them. And my fascination with them, and Agnon, only grew stronger as I myself became a writer and wondered about the role of Jewish identity not merely in my life but in my writing life. In America, the pattern of Jewish writing established by critics like Kazin and novelists like Bellow was one of sailing out into the open culture of America from a Jewish immigrant origin that receded forever behind you. But a younger Jewish generation of writers has recognized that the journey back to Jewish identity, or at least to Jewish consciousness, is an equally heroic journey.
And for this journey Agnon also has a contribution to make.
Consider a novel like A Guest for the Night in which an Agnon-like character returns to his Galician town from the Land of Israel in the vain hope of making contact with some living element of Diaspora culture. Reading A Guest for the Night in college, I realized that for Agnon it was a sorrow not only that those in the Diaspora had no shortcut to the Land of Israel, but that those in the Land of Israel had no shortcut to the Diaspora. The Holocaust — or in the case of A Guest for the Night, published in 1939, the First World War — made the reverse journey impossible. But that doesn’t mean it wasn’t a dream for Agnon. Although at the end of A Guest for the Night the narrator returns to Palestine with the key to the Beit Midrash in his suitcase, that doesn’t mean that Agnon didn’t dream of opening that lost Diaspora door as much as he dreamed of passing through a modern Zionist gate.
More and more I’ve been moved to think about what a lonely figure Agnon seems. And how true he is to his self-invented name — an agunah, someone neither in one world or the other. But in a way, that might make him more accessible to the inhabitants of different worlds, not less, even if we have to work together to interpret him, and to repossess him.
We should no longer be asking whether it is in the Diaspora or Israel that the key resides. Israel exists. European Jewry is gone forever but American Jewry isn’t going anywhere soon.
We should be trying to open up that cave again. It is perhaps more urgent than ever that we follow Agnon’s goat — in both directions.
I’ve passed through many phases in my thoughts about Agnon but am perhaps thrown back most often on my earliest experience of him. If Agnon taught me that all simple stories are in reality complex, he also teaches, as all great writers do, that no matter how complex a story is, it also endures at a level of simplicity. Searching for my European-born father, who is no longer alive, and for my Israeli relatives — who are very much alive but who nevertheless elude me at times in mysterious ways — I return to that simple childhood fable about the goat. I feel more than ever that primal longing to belong, to stand in a place where all my worlds are joined.
A Reader’s Preface
And I feel that, much as Agnon lives in a world beyond my grasp, I need him more than ever.
Jonathan Rosen, 2008
Introduction
Many storytellers have arisen to tell the story of East European Jewry, but the achievement of S.Y. Agnon remains singular. His canvas is wider, his erudition vaster, his humor wittier, his irony subtler. Above all, like any great writer, his art transcends the limits of its ostensible subject. To be sure, Agnon’s writing is inseparably entwined with the very particular culture of Polish Jewry and its continuation in the Land of Israel. At the same time, however, his art explores the universal questions that preoccupy great writing in all modern cultures: the fragmentary and fallen nature of human experience after the collapse of community and faith, and, as a counterbalance, the turn toward writing with its mythic possibilities and its linguistic and textual playfulness.