Introduction
Following his return to Eretz Yisrael, Agnon returned to Orthodox ways. We can surmise a consolidation in the identity of the writer: he has arrived at a sense of himself. There are signs of this settling in to be discerned in his mythologized account of his relationship to the Land of Israel. During a series of conversations that were later published, Agnon told the young writer David Canaani that God had punished him with the loss of the home he established in Germany because he had abandoned the Land of Israel.[14]
Agnon was to lose his home once again, and the historical resonance of this twice-repeated loss with the destruction of the Temple was significant to him. The year 1929 saw widespread Arab uprisings against Jewish settlement, and Agnon suffered yet again the loss of his home and library, this time in Talpiyot. The story titled “The Sign,” which can be found in the closing section of this anthology, conveys the multiple significances of loss and rebuilding. After this second destruction, he built a new house for his family in Talpiyot and this was where he lived to the end of his life. Today, the house is open to the public: visitors can stand in the writer’s study and examine the titles on his shelves.
With the passing of years, Agnon became the writer of Jerusalem. A sign on his street in Talpiyot, Rehov Klausner, warned visitors to be quiet because of their proximity to a WRITER AT WORK. The city occupies the central place in the map of Agnon’s imagination, as in Jewish tradition, however much his writing may play with ambiguities and paradoxes in the relation of the individual to sacred space. For Agnon, the establishment of a home in Talpiyot acquired significance in terms of the relationship of the neighborhood to the city of Jerusalem. From the roof of Agnon’s Talpiyot home, one used to be able to see the Old City. The location expresses something of the identity of the artist, whose vision is sustained by Jerusalem and yet who situates himself just outside its gates.
The awarding of the Nobel Prize to Agnon was rightly taken by many, especially in Israel, as a belated recognition of the achievements of Hebrew literature and the legitimacy of Israeli culture. As a modern literature, Hebrew had been producing impressive writing for two hundred years; and, since the turn of the twentieth century, a series of great modern writers had emerged (Hayim Nahman Bialik, Yosef Hayim Brenner, Uri Zvi Greenberg, and Natan Alterman, among others) who in no way suffered in comparison to the best artists in European languages. Yet it took the annihilation of the very subject matter of Agnon’s epic art — the social and spiritual life of East European Jewry — to prompt international recognition of Hebrew.
Two decades before the Holocaust destroyed the European centers of Jewish culture, the scene of Hebrew writing had already largely shifted to the new Jewish settlement in Palestine, and thereafter it became fused with the fortunes of the state of Israel. Agnon, who settled permanently in Palestine in the 1920s, should be counted in every sense as an Israeli writer, yet not a typical one. His use of traditional Jewish sources, his appropriation of traditional Jewish storytelling techniques, his preoccupation with East European themes — all these choices set him apart from most of Israeli writing at the time, which was realistic in mode and devoted to the depiction of the secular actualities of the new society.
Introduction
Such is the uniqueness of Agnon. There is no figure in modern Jewish culture in any language whose work is as suffused with the texts and symbols of classical Jewish learning and as steeped in the customs of a thousand years of Jewish life in eastern Europe. Yet at the same time, the genius of Agnon’s achievement was unleashed only by the rise of modern Hebrew literature. To be sure, European romanticism and modernism contributed to his work. But in order to understand where Agnon came from and to grasp the cultural matrix that made his writing unique, one must first turn to the specific conditions of time and place. The time was a particular moment in the emergence of the new Hebrew literature after the first challenges of modernity to Judaism had exhausted themselves. The place was the Jewish community of Galicia, the southeastern provinces of Poland that were ruled before World War i by Austria-Hungary.
The origins of modern Hebrew literature entailed a two-phased assault against traditional Jewish culture. In the first phase, which was called the Haskalah and took place between approximately 1780 and 1880, the ideals of the Enlightenment in western Europe were domesticated within the sphere of Hebrew literature and culture, first in Germany and then in eastern Europe. The social program of the Haskalah called for Jews to cease being merchants and shopkeepers and to enter more “productive” occupations. The educational program sought to introduce the study of arithmetic, world history, and western languages into the exclusively religious curriculum of Jewish schools. The religious program sought to rid Judaism of superstitious beliefs and practices and to emphasize the foundations of reason in the Jewish creed. The literary program sought to confer prestige on the classical lineage of Hebrew over Yiddish and opened Hebrew writing to the novel, the lyric poem, the essay, and other western genres. Yet despite these multiple challenges to traditional Judaism, the world view of the Haskalah remained essentially hopefuclass="underline" divine reason remained the underpinning of a world that would progress from folly to enlightenment.
This optimism could not be sustained by the events that overtook Jewish life in eastern Europe in the late nineteenth century. The pauperization of the Jewish masses, the widespread pogroms of 1881, the virulent anti-Semitic policies of the tsarist regime — these and other related causes prompted Jews to take measures ranging from emigration to the West to the more ideological forms of political awareness embodied in socialism, communism, and Zionism. Zionism broke with the Haskalah over the possibility of the Jews’ acceptance into European society in exchange for the modernization of their culture. The Jews could realize their national identity, Zionism argued, only in a land of their own and in a language of their own. Zionism broke with religious tradition by rejecting transcendental messianism in favor of a this-worldly politics of self-redemption.
Beneath the political and communal turmoil of these years, an even graver ordeal was being enacted in the spiritual lives of a generation of young people. For many, the coherent world of the Torah, within which the experience of the individual had been securely inscribed for the thousand years of Jewish settlement in the cities and hamlets of eastern Europe, broke down in the last decades of the nineteenth century. The daily intimacy with holy texts, the deep texture of study and interpretation, the rhythm of sacred and profane time, the dense patterning of ritual gestures and symbols, the assured authority of teachers and sages — all these strands in the weave of tradition loosened in the course of a single generation. For some young people, the rejection of the religious tradition was the dialectical by-product of a principled espousal of a new faith in one of the revolutionary ideologies of the age. For others, the failure of Judaism had less to do with the adoption of new secular faiths than with a process of internal decline. In the face of modernity, the very plausibility of the religious tradition had suddenly collapsed, its authority neutralized and its relevance rendered mute. The world of the Torah had ceased to speak to them.