The example of Joyce’s artistic self-consciousness and his sense of a mythic renewal through language gives insight into the process through which Agnon created himself as a modern Jewish writer, linking significant markers in his own life to Jewish history and community. Among European modernists, Joyce offers a portrait of the artist who becomes his own father, an act of self-creation that also links him to his people. Like Joyce, Agnon saw himself as one whose life and art could shape new identities out of old traditions.
Born in eastern Europe in 1888, Shmuel Yosef Agnon died in Jerusalem in 1970. He offers us a life and an art that are emblematic of the century to which he was witness. If we think of him as a Jewish writer, it should be in the sense of a confrontation with history that encompasses destruction and rebirth, from the stirrings of national consciousness to the extermination of European Jewry and the establishment of the state of Israel.
In Agnon’s account of himself, personal biography intertwines with national narrative through recurring themes of destruction, rebirth, and renewal. Most striking in this life story is his designation of the Ninth of Av as his date of birth. The Ninth of Av is a date deeply embedded in the history and eschatology of the Jewish people, as the date of the destruction of the first and second Temples in Jerusalem.
Its significance is reiterated in the collective memory of the Jewish people as the date of catastrophes throughout history. At the same time, we find the traditional belief that the Ninth of Av is the date on which the Messiah will be born. Agnon’s choice thus carries the meanings of both destruction and redemption. The Ninth of Av holds an essential tension that comes to define the figure of the writer and to constitute a major theme in his work.
Introduction
Along with the Ninth of Av, Agnon cited the Jewish holiday of Lag B’Omer as the date of his initial aliyah to the Land of Israel. (The term aliyah literally means “ascent,” in the sense of “going up” to the Land of Israel.) In the Jewish calendar, Lag B’Omer marks the date of Bar Kochba’s rebellion against Roman occupation of the ancient Land of Israel. A minor festival associated with a struggle for liberation, it is accompanied by a turn to the outdoors that marks the spring season in which it occurs. Evoking the spirit of that day, Agnon was fond of recalling one of his earliest Hebrew publications, “A Little Hero,” a poem that pictures a small boy as the savior of his people on the occasion of Lag B’Omer.
In a similar association of life events with the history of a people, Agnon dated his second return to the Land of Israel in 1924 with a reference to the Torah portion of that week, Lech lecha (“Go forth”; Genesis 12:1–17:27). That portion of the Genesis narrative opens with God’s commandment to Abraham to leave his birthplace and his family for the land that God would show him. Agnon thus intertwines his personal journey with the ancestral narrative. In letters and autobiographical statements, Agnon returned to such evocative coincidences, weaving them into a narrative frame for the life of a writer who lives out the story of his people.
The historical accuracy of these dates is less the issue than the function they serve as markers in a life story. Agnon may have constructed a biographical myth, but he also held onto the original documents, going back to 1908, that allow comparisons of the writer’s story to the historical record. Why do both? This is Agnon the modernist, who offers us access to the making of a life as well as to the life that is made. He engages in the narrative construction of a myth while leaving traces of the materials out of which it is fashioned. We see him as the mythmaker, and he acknowledges his own artifice with a wink and a nod that invite us into his workshop.
Out of that workshop came embellishments to the portrait of the writer as a youth who revered his father. In a ceremonial letter to the municipality of Tel Aviv, Agnon observes that “I was born in the city of Buczacz in eastern Galicia to my father Rabbi Shalom Mordecai ha-Levi Czaczkes, of blessed memory, on the Ninth of Av.” In the Jewish calendar, the year is signified by the letters of the Hebrew alphabet, each of which has a numerical equivalent. The notation of a date thus offers Agnon the opportunity for recombinations of letters that become the source of new meanings. With inveterate playfulness, he takes the Hebrew letters that designate the year in which he was born, t-r-m-h, and rearranges them to form the phrase “Zion will be merciful” (“Zion t-r-h-m”). Never losing the opportunity to heighten the personal with bits of exegetical play, Agnon fashions the public face of the writer out of bits and pieces, artfully constructing significance out of odds and ends of tradition.[1]
There is a considerable element of irony in Agnon’s designation of dates and coincidences. He may draw upon biblical phrases or rabbinic exegesis in order to enlarge the horizon of meaning by linking the individual to the nation, but his relationship to his sources is never simple. Wordplays and historical associations work to inflate and deflate the figure of the writer, by connecting him to religious themes and simultaneously exposing his pretension. On occasion, Agnon takes these associations to a playful excess that suggests an element of self-mockery, as when he notes that he wrote his first poem on Lag B’Omer, made his first aliyah on Lag B’Omer, married his wife on Lag B’Omer, received the Swedish translation of one of his novellas on that day, was notified of the award of an honorary doctorate on Lag B’Omer, and so on. At such moments as this, Agnon jokingly exposes his game, even as he continues to play it.
Agnon’s ongoing self-portrait connects the writer not only to the history of the people, but crafts a special relationship to Hebrew as the holy tongue, the language of Creation. Agnon’s choice of Hebrew, after early experiments with Yiddish and Hebrew, links him with others of his generation who turned to Hebrew as a potent resource in the enterprise of national renewal. But while Agnon’s writing draws upon the riches of language and makes us feel keenly the centrality of Hebrew to a worldview centered on Scripture, the relationship of the writer to that universe involves an intricate combination of reverence and subversion, piety and irony.
Introduction
The very name “Agnon” is a fabrication, a central instance of the interpretive play that identifies the writer’s art. It is a name that the writer, who was born Shmuel Yosef Czaczkes, invented by adapting the title of “Agunot,” the first story he published in Palestine in 1908. To fashion both the title and his own name, Agnon used the Hebrew noun agunah, a term in Jewish law that designates a woman who is not free to marry because her husband has disappeared or left without divorcing her. The agunah is an indeterminate figure, at once connected to the community and separate from it. Interestingly, the story “Agunot” itself contains no agunah in the technical sense of the term. We must realize, then, the boldness of Agnon’s imagination in taking a legal term and spiritualizing it, shaping it into a metaphor for the modern condition. Fertile with meaning, the name suggests an image of the artist as a soul without anchor. Thus, at an early point in his career, the writer arrived at a title and a name that express the longing for completeness amid the awareness of isolation and distance.
Picturing himself as one who maintains a connection to what he has lost, Agnon paints a portrait of the writer as a figure on the margins of tradition. In this passage from “The Sense of Smell,” written in the 1930s, he maps out a mythic universe in which Torah — Jewish Scripture — occupies the center, while he defines himself by his distance from that language of plenitude and presence: