‘Ir umelo’ah begins with a description of the town’s study houses and synagogues, their appurtenances and sacred objects and then proceeds to a consideration of the key personalities who held the offices of ḥazzan (cantor), shamash (sexton, beadle), and gabbai (treasurer); accounts of the great rabbis who held sway in Buczacz, as well as tales of anonymous piety, occupy the core of the book. Yet this plan is only a scaffolding; it represents the idealizing framework within which Agnon chooses to perform the memory of Buczacz and present his town in the largest possible way as inscribed within the world of Torah. Woven in and out of this scaffolding, however, are innumerable accounts of professional and scholarly jealousy, internecine commercial rivalries, unchecked acts of cruelty and expropriation by the wealthy, unrewarded acts of righteousness by the poor and lowly, apostasy, criminality, suicide and many other unsavory behaviors.
As conjured up by Agnon in ‘Ir umelo’ah, the vanished world of Buczacz can best be understood under the rubric of a norm and deviations from it. Agnon sets the value signature of the work, chooses the periods in the life of Buczacz in which Torah and worship are paramount, fashions a plan for the organization of the stories that foregrounds these institutions and their practitioners and uses the commentary of the volume’s ever-present narrator to articulate and reinforce this moral framework. Yet at the same time, the norm is continually flouted by power, envy and the general intractability of the human heart. ‘Ir umelo’ah is a world in which there is a single moral and spiritual norm alongside an abundance of variegated deviations from that norm. It will not come as a surprise that the deviations more often beguile the reader’s attention than does the norm, and the modal tension between the two accounts for the fascination exerted by the book and for the tensile forces that hold it together.
Holding together a work made up of more than 140 independent narrative units is not a small challenge. Of the several strategies Agnon uses in his efforts to create coherence in ‘Ir umelo’ah, the most important is the fashioning of a narrator whose voice is present in almost all the stories. Surely this narrator is one of Agnon’s greatest and most distinctive creations, and its arrival on the scene so late in the master’s career has much to tell us about the aesthetic impasses he faced and the solutions he was experimenting with in the years after the war. The narrator of ‘Ir umelo’ah is part chronicler and part impresario. As chronicler, he presents himself as an assiduous student of the history of Buczacz and the arcana of its centuries of spiritual life. He takes advantage of every chance to establish the reliability of his accounts of events in terms of both the accuracy of his information and the objectivity with which it is presented. But make no mistake: although he takes pains to get his facts correct and puncture fanciful myths and legends, this chronicler is not a historian. He is a believing Jew who, though fully aware of the modern world, remains rooted in the circle of traditional piety. He views his function as a belated extension of the pinqas, the register kept by Jewish communities in Europe in which significant events were recorded.12 At the conclusion of Hamashal vehanimshal [The Parable and Its Lesson], the story to be discussed below, the rationale for telling the lengthy tale is based on the fact that the pinqas of Buczacz was destroyed in the war along with the town’s Jews. The extraordinary incidents related in the story were recorded there around the year 1700 in the beautiful hand of the town’s scribe and in the formal eloquence of learned, biblical Hebrew.
It is now left to the belated narrator to reconstruct and retell the story as best he can and according to his own lights. He is not a communal scribe, but he does follow after the scribe, in his footsteps, as it were, in discharging the same function but using a different set of instruments. In his role as chronicler, most importantly, the narrator takes the prerogative to speak as an I that is simultaneously a We. He is himself first and foremost a man of Buczacz, flesh of the flesh of the town, although he has no historical embodiment that would locate him in actual events. He is at once absorbed into the collective conscience of the town and busily conducting the performance of memory under his own baton, a baton singularly inscribed with the proprietary pronoun I, if not with a proper name. It goes without saying, however, that by choosing to write about Buczacz in its “classic” era Agnon renounced his right to evoke personal childhood memories, as he did in such wonderful stories as “Hamitpaḥat” [The Kerchief], and, as pointed out above, to assimilate the figure of the narrator to his own autobiographical persona as he had done in Oreaḥ natah lalun [A Guest for the Night].
The narrator is also an impresario of memory who hosts or stages the voices of others, even while he remains on stage. In Hamashal vehanimshal, for example, most of the story is given over to the tale told by the old shamash. It is the narrator who sets up the frame story and describes the provocation that sets the story about the tour of Hell in motion, and it is he who returns toward the end to convey its effects on the community. But the greater duration of the story is given over to the shamash’s own account of these extraordinary happenings. This hand-off, however, is not accomplished with complete serenity. Even though the crusty and acerbic attitudes of the old man set his voice apart as uniquely his, the narrator periodically expresses anxiety lest the two voices, his and the shamash’s, be confused. Throughout ‘Ir umelo’ah the narrator is busy and in control and highly self-aware of the decisions he is making to follow up one story line over another and whether to allow himself a particular digression — which he usually does — or hew to a linear presentation of plot. The presence of the narrator is felt as constantly exerting an executive agency.
The narrator’s most conspicuous endowment is his omniscience. The narrator speaks from the present. It is, after all, the unspeakable news of the Holocaust that moves him to undertake telling the story of Buczacz. At the same time, however, the periods of the town’s history he has chosen to chronicle are not those about which he can have personal or eyewitness knowledge. ‘Ir umelo’ah focuses on a two-hundred-year span from the middle of the seventeenth century to the middle of the nineteenth. Even by using oral traditions and written records, no one could reasonably aspire to the omniscience the narrator claims for himself. This is exactly the nonrealistic, even magical, premise that Agnon lays down for the fundamental device that organizes his project. The narrator is a construct that is defined as a sapient, nonpersonal entity that has attained an exhaustive grasp of the history of Buczacz. His conscience is the repository of the pinqasim of the town for scores of generations. A man of faith loyal to the core norms of study and worship, he has no interest in history per se, that is, history in the modern, critical sense of the term.