The crisis of these young people is one of the major themes of Hebrew literature at the turn of the century. The enormity of their loss was experienced on several levels. For the characters in the fictional world of Mordecai Ze’ev Feierberg, for example, the collapse of the tradition is experienced as nothing less than a catastrophe; in the sudden absence of the tradition that had both oppressed and nurtured them, they feel orphaned and hollowed out. For the characters in the fiction of Y.H. Brenner and U.N. Gnessin, the loss of faith is taken for granted as an inevitable rite of passage; the source of their suffering is the ensuing void with its coils of self-consciousness and its temptations to bad faith. For the fictional figures of M.Y. Berdichevsky, the void is invaded by the humiliations of erotic obsession. Taken together, these characters and their creators are members of a generation that was born too late for religious tradition to remain intact and too early for the new order of Jewish national life to delineate itself.
Introduction
To be sure, the force of experience engendered extraordinary aesthetic gains. The depiction of life in the immediate aftermath of faith in all its existential extremity led these writers to abandon the decorative language and convention-bound techniques of their Haskalah predecessors and to fashion a Hebrew prose far more capable of representing the complexities of modern consciousness and experience. Yet for all these achievements, the loss of the past remained enormous. Thousands of years of Jewish cultural creativity had been rendered irrelevant, compromised, contaminated, and utterly unavailable to the reconstruction of the fractured modern Jewish mind.
Against this background, the significance of the precise moment at which Agnon entered the scene of modern Hebrew literature comes into view. Born in 1888, Agnon began publishing in Hebrew and Yiddish periodicals while still a teenager. Though not much younger than the other Hebrew writers just mentioned (he was twenty-three years younger than Berdichevsky and only seven years younger than Brenner), this was a sufficient interval in these revolutionary times to make a difference. The small-mindedness and intolerance of the insular Jewish society of the shtetl, the brutalizing medievalism of the heder, the repressive and superstitious religion of the fathers, the self-deluded rationalism of the Enlighteners — all the abuses of the old order had already been systematically laid out; the burden of critique had been discharged. For the majority of Hebrew writers, this settled the score with the past and enabled Hebrew writing to proceed to engage the troubling and hopeful realities of the twentieth century. For Agnon’s genius, it had the effect of clearing a path to the past and making possible an ambitious examination of the present through the reappropriation of classical Jewish culture.
The area of Galicia in which Buczacz lay was part of the kingdom of Poland until Poland’s partition in 1772; from that time until World War i, Galicia was an eastern province of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. That the great majority of Polish Jewry to the north came under the rule of the Russian tsars while Galicia was governed by the Hapsburgs is a fact of paramount importance. While life under the Hapsburgs was not easy for the Jews, it compared favorably to the grinding poverty and official anti-Semitism of the tsarist government. The Jews of Galicia were spared the kind of pogroms that were visited upon Russian Jewry in 1881 and 1903–5. The Austro-Hungarian administration was also less autocratic than the Russian imperial regime; on the provincial level, socialist and republican movements were allowed to play a role in local politics. When it came to language and culture, Galicia was particularly polyglot. The Jews spoke Yiddish and read Hebrew, the landowners Polish, the peasants Ukrainian, the government German. German was the language of culture, and many Jewish women, even from religious families — Agnon’s mother included — read modern German literature.
In Jewish culture, Galicia had been the scene of great controversies. Earlier in the nineteenth century it had been a center of westernization and a home to such Haskalah writers as Nachman Krochmal, Yosef Perl, Yitzhak Erter, and S.Y. Rapoport; some of the fiercest battles between the Hasidim and their opponents took place here. But by the end of the century, when Agnon was growing up, these conflicts had been domesticated into a diverse and tolerant religious culture. Galicia lacked the great yeshivot (the talmudic academies) of Lithuania to the north in which young minds were either inducted into the rigors of rabbinic erudition or provoked by rabbinic authority into rebellion against the world of tradition. Galicia also proved fertile ground for the Zionist ideal. Even before Theodor Herzl created a mass movement, Buczacz boasted several proto-Zionist organizations and the Zionist cause enjoyed much support among the middle-class religious families of the city. Agnon’s departure, at the age of nineteen, to settle in Palestine can be understood at one and the same time as fulfilling a widely held ideal and leaving behind his provincial origins through a sanctioned escape route.
Introduction
Agnon did escape. He turned first to the heady milieu of young pioneers and cosmopolitan émigrés in Jaffa and then to Germany, where he gained intimate knowledge of the streams of modern European culture. Agnon never experienced the extremes of negation that characterized the spiritual world of his Russian counterparts. He was a modern man whose modernity could not be expunged, but the world of classical Jewish culture, in all its dimensions and manifestations, remained for him animated and animating in a way it did not for other modern Jewish writers in Hebrew or in any other language. Agnon’s relationship to that heritage had little to do with nostalgia, and he was expert at dissecting the ways in which a man might use religion for self-serving purposes. For Agnon, the past exists for the sake of the present, and its stories and symbols exist for the sake of what they offer to the construction of a fuller Jewish self-understanding in the modern world.
New York, 1995
Alan Mintz
Anne Golomb Hoffman
[1] This letter can be found in the autobiographical collection Me’atzmi el atzmi [From Myself to Myself] (Tel Aviv: Schocken Publishing House Ltd., 1976), p. 9.
[2] For historical and biographical data, the editors are indebted to Arnold Band’s Nostalgia and Nightmare: A Study in the Fiction of S.Y. Agnon (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1968).
[3]Me’atzmi, pp. 25–26.
[4] Israel Cohen, ed. Sefer Buczacz (Tel Aviv: Am Oved, 1968), p. 95; Avinoam Barshai, ed. Haromanim shel Shai Agnon (Tel Aviv: Everyman’s University, 1988), pp. 16–17.
[5] Tel Aviv: Schocken Publishing House Ltd., 1973.
[6] Gershon Shaked, Shmuel Yosef Agnon: A Revolutionary Traditionalist (New York: New York University Press, 1989).
[7] See his reminiscence in Me’atzmi, pp. 111–12.
[8] Gershom G. Scholem, From Berlin to Jerusalem: Memories of My Youth (New York: Schocken Books, 1980), p. 91.