‘Ir umelo’ah, I would argue, is one of the most extraordinary responses to the murder of European Jewry in modern Jewish writing, yet the very connection of the work to the Holocaust is fraught and not entirely self-evident. On the one hand, the book as a whole is dedicated — on a separate page following the title page — to a city that flourished from the time of its founding “until the arrival of the vile, defiled and depraved enemy, and the madmen who abetted them, and brought about utter annihilation.” On the other hand, neither the Nazi liquidations nor even the rehearsal for them in World War One is represented in the stories, which do not reach beyond the nineteenth century. So despite the fact the stories are occasionally punctuated with invective against the Nazis and their role in bringing about the end of Jewish Buczacz, anything related to that destruction is kept from the representational field of the work. The potential for confusion created by this paradox can be illustrated, with the reader’s indulgence, by a personal testimony. Many years ago, when I was planning the research that led to my Ḥurban: Responses to Catastrophe in Hebrew Literature, I was examining Israeli literature for reactions to the Holocaust. Of course, I looked first to Agnon as the preeminent Hebrew writer who, unlike many of his Israeli counterparts, did not turn away from the diaspora and its religious culture. Yet, apart from several unconnected stories, I saw little at the time that would dissuade me from the conclusion that the literary world of the master was fixed in its characteristic modalities in the decades before the Holocaust and that a substantial reorientation toward the catastrophe could not be expected. It is clear to me now that I was wrong. What blinded me was a narrow conception of what it means to respond to catastrophe. To qualify as such, I mistakenly believed that a work of literature must represent the horrors of destruction, as well as depicting modes of survival and reconstruction. Because Agnon had not engaged the horrors, his work could not be thought of in any substantial sense as being part of Holocaust literature.
Reading ‘Ir umelo’ah has taught me three things. First, contending with the burden of the Holocaust was exactly what Agnon was doing in the postwar decades. The crucial story “Hasiman” [The Sign], which Emunah Yaron placed at the conclusion of ‘Ir umelo’ah, is actually a consecration story that introduces the project as a whole.8 The story describes the holiday of Shavuot in the Jerusalem suburb of Talpiyot in 1943, when the narrator, a stand-in for the author, is informed about the murder of the Jews of Buczacz. Late that night in the synagogue, the narrator undergoes a mystical experience in which the great medieval poet Solomon Ibn Gabirol appears to him and composes a sacred poem to perpetuate the memory of the Jews of Buczacz. The implication is that the narrator, who is deeply connected to the tradition of liturgical poetry, will now take this burden on himself and continue the task of memorialization is his own, storytelling mode. The epic cycle of Buczacz stories that took shape in these years is a direct result of that self-imposed imperative.
Second, Agnon makes a principled choice not to traffic in atrocity and instead devote his resources to reimagining the spiritual life of Galician Jewry in its fullest vigor. In a profound sense, those spiritual achievements were decimated long before the Nazis arrived on the scene; the twin forces of secularization and the terrors of World War One and the Russian Civil War saw to that. The Holocaust was the satanic coup de grace that provided a tragic point of retrospection for taking stock of Buczacz and all it represented in the centuries of its greatness when, as the narrator so often observes in ‘Ir umelo’ah, “Buczacz was Buczacz.” This reimagining is aware of itself as a literary endeavor, an artifice that knows it cannot bring back the dead or replace them. At the same time, it makes the claim that it is within the capabilities of the literary imagination to create a simulacrum of the fullness of that lost world, and that this act of creation/re-creation, both in its process and its product, is the true response we must make to catastrophe.
Finally, Agnon’s practice in ‘Ir umelo’ah has within it the power to require us to rethink our most basic notions about Holocaust literature. It has been axiomatic for many that the chief vocation of Holocaust literature is to represent the unspeakable ordeals that were visited upon the murdered victims, the survivors and their children. Without necessarily negating this mode of representation, Agnon declines to pursue it in favor of the imaginative reconstruction of an earlier lost spiritual and cultural plenitude. His motives, I would argue, derive from a deep intuition into the demands Jewish tradition makes on the modern imagination. In addition to giving voice to grief in the form of lamentation, the classical tradition stressed over time the recouping of the relationship between God and Israel and the restoration and repurification of the image of the destroyed community.9 In a modern era, this restorative impulse works through the literary imagination and takes the form of storytelling. Agnon retells the story of Buczacz as an imperfect but holy community, a qehilah qedoshah. His approach underscores the significance of cultural frameworks in determining responses to the Holocaust.10 Putting complex matters simply, we may say that an exclusive focus on extermination, atrocity and the death-in-life of survivors presents the Holocaust as the final vitiation of Enlightenment European culture. Focusing instead on the substance of the religious-cultural civilization of the past, even if the integrity of that civilization was severely compromised by the time of its destruction, presents the Holocaust as a rupture within the internal relations of the Jewish people and its history.
But does not such an imaginative program of restitution inevitably lead to an idealization of the lost object? And does the idealization of the past serve or traduce creative survival in the future? A famous example of this kind of response is Nathan Nata Hanover’s Yeven metsulah [Abyss of Despair], a chronicle of the sufferings of Polish Jewry during the Khmelnitski massacres of 1648–49.11 After a martyrologically tinged account of the horrific ordeals suffered by the Jewish communities of Galicia and the Ukraine, Hanover concludes his work with a eulogy that mourns the greatness that was once Polish Jewry; the slaughtered communities are collectively recalled as systematically embodying the cardinal virtues of Torah, avodah and ma’asim tovim. Agnon is especially aware of Hanover’s chronicle because the consequences of the Khmelnitski massacres play so important a role in the history of Buczacz. Yet when it comes to mounting his own project of remembrance, the option of composing an idyll is one Agnon conspicuously declines. Although idealization is not absent from ‘Ir umelo’ah, it is reconfigured to serve a different purpose. Memorialization, for Agnon, is a set of critical choices and discriminations. In ‘Ir umelo’ah, it is synagogue worship and Torah study that become the signs under which Agnon will set about reimagining the history of Buczacz. It is important to keep in mind that this was only one among a number of schemata Agnon could have chosen. The past could have been recouped around Jewish-gentile relations, or the economic fortunes of the various handicrafts and trades that flourished in the town, or relations between the poor and prosperous. It may seem natural that Agnon would have chosen worship and study, but it remains a choice.