S. Agnon - A Book that Was Lost

I said: ‘And thou shalt see the good of Jerusalem,’ the Scripture said. A Jew ought to see the good of Jerusalem and not its evil.” And I went on: “Perhaps you have heard from the old men of Jerusalem how many troubles our fathers found in the Land of Israel, for the land was in ruins at that time, and they were plagued by diseases; when they got out of one trouble, along came another, worse than the first. But they paid no heed to their troubles; they were happy to live in the land and gave praise and thanks to the Creator of all the worlds for choosing us out of all the nations and giving us the Land of Israel.”

He took the cigar out of his mouth and said, “Those people had God in their hearts.”

I said to him in a whisper, “God exists now too.”

“But not within us,” he said.

I said to him: “A certain hasidic master was asked where the Holy One, blessed be He, dwells. He told them: Wherever He is allowed to enter, there He dwells.”

6

In these days I visited some of the new neighborhoods at whose dedication ceremonies I had rejoiced. Most of the little houses were rickety; their builders no longer lived in them, for they had built them with loans and could not pay, so the banks had sold their houses to others. The same thing happened to the purchasers: they borrowed from the banks — borrowed from one bank and paid to another, so they had to go to the moneylenders — and anyone who falls into their hands never recovers. But so long as they paid the interest they were allowed to stay.

One day I found myself in a certain neighborhood in Jerusalem which Mr. Gedaliah Klein had an affection for, because he had helped some of its people with a loan at one or two per cent less than the banks usually take.

I walked about in the neighborhood. A row of houses on one side and a row of houses on the other, with a kind of road winding between, producing weeds and growing thorns, and a broken-down car sunk in the ground. Some of the houses are unpainted; others have their walls calcimined to look like slabs of marble. Some are on the point of collapse; the builders did not want to invest their money in deepening the foundations, for if they had sunk deeper foundations they would not have had enough to build the houses. The soil of Jerusalem, which was accustomed to sanctuaries, does not like the light houses, so it undermines them until they collapse. Another thing this soil does is to grow bushes and trees inside the houses. Usually, bushes and trees that are planted need care; here they flourish and grow of themselves, and break up the floor and the walls. And why does the soil not make the gardens grow around the houses? Because if the people of the neighborhood plow and hoe and water to grow a little greenery, their bad neighbors come along and loose their goats on them. From the Talmud we learn that the wicked Titus laid waste our land, but the evidence of our eyes teaches us that the goats are laying it waste, and it is still far from clear which did more damage.

I walk about in the neighborhood. Peace and quiet everywhere; not a living soul but goats and cats and dogs. Those who have work in town have gone to town, and those who have nothing to do have gone to look for work. And there are some people who have despaired of work, so they stay at home and recite psalms, or study Mishnah or Midrash. As for the women, some of them have kinds of shops in towns and some have gone to buy vegetables in the market, for the two shopkeepers in the neighborhood have nothing to sell and are going around the town to plead with their creditors. And where are the children? Those who have shoes for their feet have gone to town to study, and those who have no shoes are playing with their brothers at home, for the rainy days have come, and if their clothes are tattered and they have no shoes they cannot play outside.

I walk through the neighborhood, in the length of it and in the breadth of it, looking at the rickety windows with their slackly hanging shutters. On one house at the top of the neighborhood hangs a tin sign bearing the name of a certain benefactor after whom the street is named. The rains and winds of two or three winters have obliterated the name of the man who has taken to himself the name of a street in Jerusalem, and left him no name, but only a buckled sign.

As I walked through the neighborhood the silence was broken by the arrival of a bus full of people. They stretched their limbs as they got off, some to collect taxes and some to collect charity, and some to examine the houses to see which were fit to be security for loans. As they found no one, they started to pester me. As I could tell them nothing, they insulted me. If Mr. Gedaliah Klein were alive and I were walking with him, no one would dare to speak to me like that.

The driver went into one of the houses to rest awhile from the fatigue of the journey, for part of the way from the main road to the neighborhood is covered with holes and pitfalls, and part with spikes and stones; the bus is also rickety, and unless the driver lent it some of his strength it would not go more than a yard or two. Since the visitors wanted to leave and could not find him, they went in to have a look at the synagogue.

The synagogue is a fine building outside and inside. Pious women in America donated the money to build it, but they left one place unfinished, for in the course of construction a great deal of money was wasted to no purpose, and when the donors were asked to make up the difference they could not do it, for America was short of money at the time. So one corner was left uncompleted, but if you do not look in that direction you do not see what is missing.

The synagogue rises higher than any of the houses in the neighborhood — a fine building outside and inside. The floor is made of large stones, and the ceiling is white as the whitewash of the Temple. The walls are straight, and there are twelve windows in them, like the number of the gates of prayer in the Heavens. Our father Jacob, on whom be peace, produced twelve tribes, and the Holy One, blessed be He, correspondingly opened twelve windows in the firmament to receive the prayers of each tribe. But the seed of the tribes were fruitful and split up into Sephardim and Ashkenazim, Perushim and Hasidim — and the Hasidim, too, are split up according to their rabbis, each group praying in a different style. But the Heavens are still intact and no new gates are opened in them, and every worshipper wants the prayers to be recited in his own style, so that there is great confusion, and quarrels break out.

At last the driver came out, sat down in the bus, hooted and blared and hooted again. The travelers pushed their way in. The driver hooted and blared, started up the bus, and set off for town. Again the neighborhood was silent, and were it not for the thick, heavy smell of burnt gasoline which defiled the air there would be no sign that human beings had been here.

I saw a man sitting beside his house and reading the Book of Legends . I went up to him and talked to him, praising the late Mr. Gedaliah Klein, without whom there would be no one living here. The man put down the Book of Legends , sighed and smiled, and said, “It’s a hopeless mess. Half my house is a wreck and the other half a ruin — and the whole of it is mortgaged. If it were sold to pay the debt, not even a small part of the debt would be settled, and if it remains in my hands — where will I get the money to repair it? And so far I’ve only been talking about myself. The others are in the same predicament, and there’s another difficulty: we’re far from town, where the people work, and to get to town we need the bus. The bus isn’t always there, and the money’s not there either. So we go on foot, but you cannot be sure you will get there safely. In times of peace our bad neighbors threaten your money, and in times of stress they threaten your life.”