The Artist in the Land of Israel
With the model of the world-creating language of Torah before him, Agnon enacts the attempt and failure to attain the linguistic level of the sacred. Each story includes a brief moment of participation that appears to lift language beyond itself, but these are moments that cannot be sustained. The two stories offer tales of the writer that occupy a middle ground between the early stories of Hemdat, the artist as youth (“Hill of Sand”), and the stories that comprise The Book of Deeds, in which nothing happens but the act of telling itself.
“On One Stone,” written in 1934, mimics a passage in The Book of Praises of the Baal Shem Tov, a compilation of stories of the Baal Shem Tov, the eighteenth-century holy man around whose life and works Hasidism developed. The Baal Shem Tov is a luminous figure in hasidic tradition, a wonder-worker whose miraculous deeds are told and retold by his followers. In the source passage in The Book of Praises, the Baal Shem Tov speaks directly to a stone, so that it opens up and he can place his writings in it. Without ever explicitly referring to the Baal Shem Tov, Agnon’s story invokes this act of enclosure in a variety of ways that remind us of the story of the Baal Shem Tov as well as of other stories of wonder-working rabbis.
The first-person narrator of “On One Stone” is a writer, but he opens his story by referring to the days in which he devoted himself to writing about the wonder-working rabbi Adam Baal Shem, a predecessor of the Baal Shem Tov, who used the holy writings in his possession to bring about the redemption of souls in Israel. The narrator tells us how Rabbi Adam Baal Shem went to the forest and sealed his writings in a rock when the time for his death drew near. Emphasizing all the while the profound gap that separates him from the level of Rabbi Adam Baal Shem, the narrator of our story “inadvertently” reenacts a latter-day version of the moment at which the rabbi gave up his writings to a rock. Concerned about finding himself beyond the Sabbath boundary of the town, the narrator goes in search of the writings he had left lying out in the open upon a stone, only to see them swallowed up by that stone before his very eyes. What follows is a scene of radiant wonder that mimics a mystical moment in which word and world are fused. For that brief moment, it is as if the narrator gains access to the language of Creation.
In “On One Stone,” the speaker describes what could almost be considered a wish: were he able to read the writings of Rabbi Adam Baal Shem that were hidden in the rock, he would be able to “join together” worlds out of them. The story thus implies levels of linguistic activity, in order of descending strength, but on the model of a world-creating use of language. “The Sense of Smell,” written in 1937, enters this mythology of writing by building on the traditional belief that language is prior even to Creation. “The Sense of Smell” is a story in which the persona of the author figures as speaker. He refers to himself as the mehabber, meaning “author,” or more literally, “composer,” in the sense of “joiner of words.” And it is that very activity of joining words that the story brings up for question, since it is a dispute over proper linguistic usage that provides the stimulus for the mock-heroic text. In actuality, the story constitutes an engaging response to an annoying incident in which Agnon was rebuked for incorrect word usage by a member of the National Committee on Language. Agnon uses this story to enact a particularly literary form of revenge.
“The Sense of Smell” draws to an end with a two-sentence paragraph that acclaims the greatness of the holy tongue. Ultimately, it is Hebrew — the language of Creation — that joins together sages of the past and the figure of the writer in a fantasy that establishes the community of those who are devoted to the holy tongue. A Tzaddik (righteous man) leaves paradise, identified here as “the Academy on High” or a heavenly yeshivah, in order to come to the aid of the writer and to vindicate his use of the phrase that had brought Agnon under attack. In this linguistic fantasy, Agnon’s reference to the Academy on High not only suggests the timeless community of those who devote themselves to Torah, but it replaces the authority of the Committee on Language, established in 1900, with that of a much higher body.
Conflict is muted in these stories, as the figure of the writer effaces his own individuality in an effort to draw nearer to traditional uses of language. In each story, the writer achieves a moment of self-transcendence: the abrasive tensions of the present dissolve as he enters into moments of alliance with legendary sages and their writings.
The Artist in the Land of Israel
“A Book That Was Lost” shifts the focus from the writer’s own work to tell the story of his efforts to send a text of rabbinic commentary from Buczacz to Jerusalem. The story takes in the years from the writer’s eastern European youth to his maturity in Jerusalem and places that time span within a larger compass of rabbinic commentaries, beginning with the Shulhan Arukh, the sixteenth-century code of laws written by Joseph Caro, and moving on to the seventeenth-century Magen Avraham, the commentary of a Polish rabbi on a section of the Shulhan Arukh. This is a story that charts its course via references to the public dialogue of rabbis, conducted over centuries through their written works. The Magen Avraham was considered to be a difficult and elusive work, and scholars were helped by the eventual appearance of Rabbi Samuel Kolin’s commentary on it, Mahazit Hashekel. Agnon’s story sketches out this extended network of rabbinic texts and adds its own account of the modest Rabbi Shmaria, a rabbinical judge of Buczacz, who refrained from publishing his commentary when he came upon Mahazit Hashekel and felt it superseded his own work.
Drawing the larger scope of history into a personal frame, Agnon depicts himself as a young man who happens to stumble upon the commentary of Rabbi Shmaria in the attic of the Great Synagogue in Buczacz. Agnon uses this glimpse of his youth to touch upon the history of Buczacz and to affirm the ongoing life of the works of its sages, which survived even the predations of Tartar invasions in the seventeenth century. It becomes, then, the mission of the youth to insure the survival of Rabbi Shmaria’s commentary, first by ascertaining the originality of its contents and, second, by sending it to a newly founded library in Jerusalem.
Not so much a story of the writer as a story of the writer’s devotion to the town, “A Book That Was Lost” uses its narrative frame to construct a home for the lost book, the book that never makes it to the new national library of the Jewish people. Along the way, the story pays tribute to Joseph Chasanowitsch, a Russian doctor who was not able to settle in Palestine himself but whose collection established the basis for the Jewish National and University Library in Jerusalem. Thus the narrative draws together threads of history to link Buczacz to the Land of Israel. But while it appears to organize itself around the Zionist shift from Europe to Palestine, a shift that includes the writer’s own journey from Buczacz to Jerusalem, the story is as much a record of what has been lost or destroyed over the years as it is of Zionist achievement. With the account of the writer’s arrival in Jerusalem on the Ninth of Av, the day of mourning the destruction of the Temple, the story draws to a close by incorporating a reminder of loss into the narrative of Zionist renewal. It becomes the mission of the writer to record loss — to continue to look for the book of Rabbi Shmaria of Buczacz — and thus to make a place for a traditional text in a new society, even if that “place” consists of the notation of its absence.