The damage done by Aaron’s apostasy extends beyond the theological questions it raises. By turning Zlateh into an agunah, Aaron’s disappearance prevents the fifteen-year-old girl from marrying for the rest of her life. This is a devastating blow to the rabbi because of his affection for her as the lone survivor of his family and his empathic sorrow over the barren life that lies before her. Indeed, he is nearly unhinged by the news. He neglects his communal duties, stops giving his regular public lessons on Maimonides and Alfasi and becomes wholly obsessed with the futile quest for a legal loophole that would release Zlateh from her bonds (10–11). The man who hews to a strict regimen of reticence now finds himself, again futilely, chatting for hours over brandy and cakes with gentile peasants in hope of extracting scraps of information about Aaron’s whereabouts. What precipitates this breakdown is not only heartbreak over his poor relative’s plight but the disappointment of a broader hope: “Our Master saw in Aaron and Zlateh his aspirations for a new generation that would serve God righteously in place of their parents murdered by the enemy” (8). The rabbi sees in the young couple the seeds of a recovery that would recoup horrendous losses and reestablish the chain of Torah learning. Aaron’s desertion therefore signals not just a private sorrow but the prospect of a sliding back into the morass of communal breakdown and disintegration. It is another example of how the trauma of 1648, rather than being contained by the passing years, extends its baleful effects like time-released capsules.
The effort at containment is palpable in the shamash’s account of Aaron’s fate. The shamash first tells us about the student’s religious crisis in Chapter 2, at the point when his disappearance is first discovered, and then again in greater length in Chapter 7, when he is encountered in Gehinnom. In both instances, the affecting and disturbing tale is thickly overlaid with the shamash’s stern moralizing. Only when the rabbi and the shamash first come across Aaron’s shade is the young man allowed to speak in his own voice. In its mixture of pathos and fatefulness, it is a moment that seems taken directly from Dante’s Inferno.
At this Aaron let out a wail and began crying loudly and bitterly. “They never let me! They never let me go to her! They buried me in their cemetery, a Gentile cemetery with a cross on my grave!… They cut me off from Jews, and I couldn’t even go into a Jewish home. When I wanted to leave my grave to visit my wife in a dream and tell her that I was dead and that she was free to remarry, the cross would bar my way, and I could not get to her. Rebbe, Gehinnom is terrible, but the torment of knowing that I left my wife to be an agunah is much, much worse.” (22)
Aaron’s remorse comes too late; his responsibility for a grievous wrong cannot be evaded. At the same time, however, he never meant to injure Zlateh, and his own plight is terrible and visited on him for eternity. Yet the shamash is quick to intervene and prevent Aaron from continuing to tell his story in his own words. He explains to his listeners that he will now proceed to narrate Aaron’s story in the third person, assuring them that none of the substance of the situation will be lost in converting from one mode to the other (22–23). He further assures the listeners that the shift is merely a technical matter necessitated by the fact he could not retrieve the young man’s exact words because of the profound mortification he (the shamash) was experiencing when he heard them.
The shamash’s quick appropriation of Aaron’s voice answers another need as well. It shuts down the source of pathos that radiates from the young man’s situation. Left to tell his own story in his own words, Aaron would reprise and amplify the soul-rending theological emergency that impelled him to take the heedless steps that delivered him to his present fate. The shamash therefore initiates deliberate measures to take over Aaron’s story and reframe it in such a way as to minimize the effects of the corrosive doubt consuming the life of the young scholar. He does so by making Aaron’s fate into a moral exemplum for the dangers of intellectual inquiry (ḥaqirah), which, rather than leading to true knowledge, places the seeker deeper and deeper into the clutches of the qelipot (literally, husks), seductive demonic forces that imperil the soul of the believer. This theological schema makes the shamash very much of his time and place and reflects the penetration of Lurianic Kabbalah into the scholarly circles of Polish Jewry, especially through the writings of Rabbi Isaiah Horowitz (c. 1565–1630), the author of the Shenei luḥot habrit, which itself was first published in 1648. Aaron is portrayed as a rationalist whose desperate search for reasons for God’s apparent abandonment of His people, for which he learns Latin and immerses himself in “alien” wisdom, leads him down a slippery slope to apostasy and death. In that portrayal, the harrowing pathos of Aaron’s individual fate, in all its troubling implications, is exchanged for a pitiable case study in a transgression against norms held jointly by the shamash and his pious listeners.
It is worth pausing for a moment to consider how unlikely it would be to find Aaron’s story, even as filtered by the shamash, in any text from the period in which our story is set. The explicit wrestling with the problem of theodicy provoked by national catastrophe has a distinctly modern tang to it, as do other features of the story, especially its consciousness of its multiple narrative planes. Indeed, in the final pages of the story, the narrator — that is, the overarching narrator who allows the shamash to recount many of the events — makes direct reference to the Holocaust, in which the communal register recording these events was destroyed. In fact, throughout ‘Ir umelo’ah20 references to the murder of European Jewry are common, although the events of that period are not represented. This means that Agnon’s narrator, in this story as in others, writes about earlier times out of an awareness of what has taken place in his own; and in a profound sense his very motive for telling these stories is fueled by that catastrophic loss. It is therefore not farfetched to say that at some level 1648 is viewed through 1939–1945, and vice versa. 1648 is presented as a kind of rehearsal for the Holocaust, while at the same time the sort of theological crisis Aaron suffers is retrojected from the modern period to seventeenth-century Galicia. The parallel can be taken even further. The Khmelnitski massacres, even though causing vast collective devastation, did not bring about the horrible totality of the Final Solution. Buczacz survived, albeit in the traumatized state described in our story, and with time Galician Jewry rebuilt its communities and institutions and flourished. Now, this would seem to be where the parallel breaks down, were it not for the fact that there is an offshoot of European Jewry that not only survived but flourished: the Yishuv and the state of Israel. And so there emerges a different kind of parallel, one between Buczacz and Israel. The whole of ‘Ir umelo’ah can be taken as a project in which one is substituted for the other, although it is never wholly clear at any given moment precisely which for which.