11
The day of perfection has not yet arrived in this world, so I went and bought new tefillin. Once again I did not buy a pair made out of a single piece of leather. In fact, I bought the first pair that I saw. My wife took some cloth that had not been consumed by the fire and made from it a kind of tefillin bag, not of silk this time, and with no silver lettering. No cakes and wine were offered in honor of the day; a piece of bread was sufficient. True, I did wear new clothes, but that was because all of my old clothes had burned in the fire.
When I came to the synagogue and put on my tefillin, my friends did not look on with disapproval, nor did they bombard me with words. On the contrary, they sympathized with one whose house had burned and who did not have a roof over his head. Pay no mind to his new clothes, his old ones all burned; even his tefillin burned and that’s why he’s wearing new ones. I folded my tallit over my head so as not to hear their comments. When I got to the prayer that tells of God opening His hand and satisfying all living beings, I raised my hands to feel my tefillin. I was reminded of how I used to touch my old tefillin, and I thought to myself that those old ones were like a charm that let me live peacefully, and the new ones were to make sure that no one would envy me. I took a breath and sighed. This too is for the best.
The Artist in the Land of Israel
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If Agnon can be said to have invented himself as a modern Jewish writer, then these stories define that identity. From a tale of the would-be writer as a young man in Jaffa to stories that contrast the figure of the writer to his peers and his predecessors, we see a variety of narrative self-portraits. These are “self-portraits” only in the broadest sense: they give narrative form to the writer’s understanding of himself, his community, his art, and the Jewish past. These portraits are often heavily shaded by irony: the writer mocks his presumption in even designating himself with the title sofer, the Hebrew term for “writer,” which also refers to the scribes responsible for the transcription of Scripture. How can he take on this title, he asks, when he does not devote himself to the full-time study of traditional texts? In the range of these stories, we gain access to a variety of personae of the writer, with the result that our portrait of the artist resists reduction to any one component.
In “Hill of Sand,” a story set in Jaffa in the years of the Second Aliyah, we encounter the writer as a young man unable to write, to love, to work. (“Hill of Sand” went through a number of revisions, dating from the early story “Tishre,” a tale of unrequited love, written in 1911 in Jaffa, and culminating in the 1931 text of “Hill of Sand” which is the basis for this version.) Agnon lets us feel the atmosphere of the period from the perspective of the youthful Hemdat, who witnesses the founding of Tel Aviv from afar, but does not engage in physical labor or join in the enterprise of Jewish settlement. Themes of ambivalence are signalled by Hemdat’s repugnance for the physical side of life. He is drawn to Yael Hayyut, whose last name, derived from the Hebrew word for “life,” suggests a vitality, a life force, that Hemdat longs to share.
The Artist in the Land of Israel
Nor is Hemdat able to resolve an artistic identity for himself. He cites the stories of Rabbi Nahman of Bratslav and thus directs our attention to an important influence on Agnon’s literary development: Rabbi Nahman (1772–1810) told dark tales of enigmatic beauty, which were recorded by his followers. On a more satirical note, Hemdat expresses his scorn for the poet Pizmoni (whose name means “rhymester”), a self-proclaimed leading light of Hebrew literature. Hemdat may lie in bed thinking of translating the nineteenth-century Scandinavian writer Jens Peter Jacobsen, another important influence on Agnon, but he is unable to put pen to paper. This portrait of the artist as a young man uses irony to sketch conflict and indecision, and to draw the contrast between the youth’s vaulting ambitions and his inability to realize them.
“Knots upon Knots” gives us the writer at a later stage in his life, ill at ease in a series of encounters with a variety of individuals and groups, each of which has some connection to books and to writing. “Even I was invited to the craftsmen’s convention,” the opening line of the story announces, but the story that follows describes the failures of the protagonist to enter into any form of community. Indeed, he manages to offend and alienate all those he approaches, suggesting a singularly ambivalent relationship to his vocation. In contrast, the figure of the bookbinder, who stores all the narrator’s unwanted articles and binds his books, suggests a level of integration and a kind of spiritual harmony in his careful preparation of the workroom and the hints that he is about to engage in prayer.
“Knots upon Knots” engages in some historical playfulness underscoring its ironies. The narrator meets in succession two leaders of rival schools of thought and distances himself from each with awkwardly offensive behavior. The interactions of the narrator with these two characters take on an intriguing complexity when we realize that they carry the surnames of two great eighteenth-century rabbis, Eibeschütz and Emden. These two prominent rabbis engaged in a drawn-out feud that split German Jewry. The split began when Jacob Emden accused Jonathan Eibeschütz of being a covert follower of Sabbatai Zvi, leader of the messianic movement that swept seventeenth-century Jewry and continued even after its leader’s apostasy. That Agnon calls one character Eibeschütz and the other Emden, and gives to each one of his own names — Samuel and Joseph — suggests that the conflicts that energize this story are as much internal as they are external.
“Knots upon Knots” is one of the stories included in the Hebrew collection Sefer Hama’asim, which can be translated as both The Book of Deeds and The Book of Tales. Ma’asim is the Hebrew word for “deeds”; the Yiddish mayses refers to tales. Agnon’s title capitalizes on the coincidence. These stories, written largely in the 1930s and 1940s, offer dreamlike scenes of encounters with suggestive figures who either lead the protagonist astray or rebuke him for unspecified lapses. During this period Agnon was sometimes in the habit of transcribing his own dreams and developing stories out of them. “Knots upon Knots” takes its place in this fictional category, demonstrating his capacity to craft a perfectly balanced structure out of suggestive pairs of oppositions.
A pair of stories from the 1930s, “On One Stone” and “The Sense of Smell,” offer delicate portraits of the writer’s relationship to Jewish traditions of writing. It should be noted that “On One Stone” is actually set in eastern Europe. It is in this section, along with “The Sense of Smell,” because both stories highlight the writer’s relationship to mystical traditions of writing. These stories approach the mythical as they position the figure of the writer in relation to wonder-working rabbis of the past and to a conception of writing as magical in its capacity to create worlds. This belief in the special potency of the Hebrew language goes back very far in Jewish tradition. At the beginning of Bereshit Rabbah, the midrash on the Book of Genesis, we find the belief that God looked into the Torah to find the blueprint for Creation. This conception of the special powers of the very letters in which the Torah was written held enormous appeal for Agnon, whose writing plays out a variety of positions in relation to the holy tongue.