66 our God stands firm forever Isaiah 40:8.
66 gives tongue to knowledge Proverbs 16:21.
66 to the local maskilim The maskilim (lit. enlightened ones, sing. maskil) referred to here are the literati in the Jewish community of that time who had some notion of secular ideas and books beyond classical Jewish sources. They antedate and anticipate their namesakes of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, who formally espoused the values of the Enlightenment (Haskalah in Hebrew). See above, note to page 8 (Aron began…).
66 and knowing Me Jeremiah 9:23.
66 who seeks after God Psalms 14:2 and 53:3.
68 my Rock and my Redeemer Psalm 19:15.
ESSAY ON THE PARABLE AND ITS LESSON [HAMASHAL VEHANIMSHAL]
ALAN MINTZ
THE WORK OF MEMORY
Within the panoply of modern Jewish writing, Shmuel Yosef Agnon remains today an exceptional presence. At the center of the grand narrative of Jewish literature in our age is the movement outward from the world of the fathers. Whether the goal is full participation in American culture or the building of a new Jewish society in Palestine, the movement outward presupposes a break with the metaphysics of traditional Jewish belief and practice. That break can be figured as a clear-eyed ideological rejection or as a vertiginous loss of moorings, or as a sloughing off of a used-up identity. Whatever the case, the claims of Jewish law and the textual and theological world on which it is founded are stilled and suspended. The possibility of return continues to exist, and from time to time there appears a Rosenzweig who, out of the depths of acculturation, discovers the mystique of a Judaism he never knew. In relation to all these varied trajectories, Agnon’s exceptionality becomes clearer. Born into the world of tradition, Agnon found a way to participate in high European modernism without abandoning the rich textual world of Jewish faith. He even used this traditional world as a vehicle for realizing the ends of modernism at the same time as he used modernism as an instrument for illuminating fissures within the classical edifice of Judaism. Agnon thus performed the paradox of being a “revolutionary traditionalist,” in the formulation of Gershon Shaked.1 Comprehending this singular accomplishment has become one of the great challenges of modern Jewish literary studies.
During the last fifteen years of his life (he died in 1970), Agnon became increasingly preoccupied with writing an epic cycle of stories about Buczacz, the town in Galicia in which he was raised and that he left at the age of nineteen to settle in Palestine. The stories were gathered and edited by his daughter Emunah Yaron, according to her father’s guidelines, in 1973 in a volume called ‘Ir umelo’ah, A City in Its Fullness.2 It is from this story cycle that The Parable and Its Lesson is drawn. The stories of ‘Ir umelo’ah give strong evidence for the existence of a late style in Agnon. I am using late style (spätstil) in the sense in which Theodor Adorno used the term to describe the late sonatas of Beethoven as works that constitute a “moment when the artist who is fully in command of his medium nevertheless abandons communication with the established social order of which he is part and achieves a contradictory, alienated relationship with it.”3 Edward Said adopts Adorno’s notion and uses it less as a precise term than as an evocative concept for illuminating the regressive freedom from constraints that writers and composers might allow themselves in the last stages of their careers. In a similarly evocative and nontechnical sense, the idea of late style helps us attend to the departures enacted in Agnon’s cycle of Buczacz stories. In Agnon’s case, the late breakthrough manifests itself as an act of renunciation. One of Agnon’s greatest achievements in the major phase of his career was an ironic self-dramatizing mode of narration that Arnold Band called the “dramatized ego.”4 The narrator of these important stories — as well as of the novel Oreaḥ natah lalun [A Guest for the Night] — is a figure very much like Agnon himself: a grandiose but weak-willed middle-aged writer with worldly interests as well as a loyalty to religious observance and Jewish learning, a kind of Jewish version of the homme moyen sensuel. Agnon used this persona to great advantage; but when it came to chronicling the long history of Buczacz he needed a narrative stance that, at least on the face of things, was objective, reliable and impersonal. And so he undertook the construction of the narrator of ‘Ir umelo’ah, who is a fascinating and formidable and new figure, but one whose creation meant putting away and giving up the authorial strategies relied on for so long.
Now, one might have expected a thunderous reception for a major book published three years after the death of a major author, especially if the author was the only Hebrew writer to have been awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature, as Agnon was in 1966, together with Nelly Sachs. Yet the response in Israel’s vibrant literary community was decidedly scant and muted; the book was hardly noticed, and those who wrote about it tended to be older critics who were already possessed of a long-term devotion to Agnon’s work. There are several factors that might account for this surprising failure to connect to an audience. To begin with, the stories in ‘Ir umelo’ah, all of which have to do with the lives of Galician Jews in the pre-modern period, describe a world that must have seemed remote, antiquated and irrelevant in the decades of intense state building after the War of Independence. Within the Zionist consensus about the untenable nature of Jewish life in exile, there had always been room for literary depictions that exposed the inner moral taint and political vulnerability of diaspora life. Even though the Buczacz stories convey no small measure of those failings, they nevertheless present a picture of a vital semi-autonomous and centuries-old religious communal culture; and this image could not have comported well with the attitudes and judgments of David Ben-Gurion’s statism and the society it shaped. During these years Ben-Gurion was busy building a state, while Agnon was building a city.
A second factor was the implied judgment that within Agnon’s overall artistic career ‘Ir umelo’ah represented a regression. Agnon had acceded to the status of a great European modernist with the publication of the parabolic stories of Sefer hama’ayinasim [Book of Deeds] and Temol shilshom [Only Yesterday, 1945], a novel of the Second Aliyah with its brilliantly surreal passages written in the voice of a supposedly mad dog named Balak. For readers who esteemed Agnon for these achievements, the Buczacz stories seemed a throwback to a more naïve and less accomplished artist who had become sentimental in old age and renounced the ironic lens through which his best work was filtered. The decline and decimation of Buczacz had already been critically analyzed in the great pre-war novel Oreaḥ natah lalun [A Guest for the Night, 1939], and now, after the Holocaust completed the work of destruction, it was felt that Agnon was producing something very different: a yizker bukh, a memorial volume suffused with nostalgia and mourning for a lost world. Finally, the unique qualities of ‘Ir umelo’ah were obscured within the plethora of titles published within the years following the author’s death.5 This posthumous Agnon corpus, whose volumes in their original editions are distinguished by their black dust jackets and white bindings, amounts to fourteen titles, some of which appeared in close succession. Among the lot are thematic anthologies of classical sources, collections of correspondence and gatherings of public statements and occasional speeches, as well as fiction.6 The most sensational of these publications was the appearance in 1971 of the novel Shira, a tale of marital infidelity set among German émigré scholars in Jerusalem of the 1930s. Chapters of the novel published in 1948 had whetted the appetite of an eager readership, but out of a scruple of discretion, Agnon had made provision for the appearance of the whole novel only after his death, and the estimation of the stir it would cause was not off the mark.7 When ‘Ir umelo’ah appeared two years later, fragmentary epic of a vanished world that it is, there was little critical oxygen remaining.