S. Agnon - A Book that Was Lost

“The Sense of Smell” draws to an end with a two-sentence paragraph that acclaims the greatness of the holy tongue. Ultimately, it is Hebrew — the language of Creation — that joins together sages of the past and the figure of the writer in a fantasy that establishes the community of those who are devoted to the holy tongue. A Tzaddik (righteous man) leaves paradise, identified here as “the Academy on High” or a heavenly yeshivah, in order to come to the aid of the writer and to vindicate his use of the phrase that had brought Agnon under attack. In this linguistic fantasy, Agnon’s reference to the Academy on High not only suggests the timeless community of those who devote themselves to Torah, but it replaces the authority of the Committee on Language, established in 1900, with that of a much higher body.

Conflict is muted in these stories, as the figure of the writer effaces his own individuality in an effort to draw nearer to traditional uses of language. In each story, the writer achieves a moment of self-transcendence: the abrasive tensions of the present dissolve as he enters into moments of alliance with legendary sages and their writings.

The Artist in the Land of Israel

“A Book That Was Lost” shifts the focus from the writer’s own work to tell the story of his efforts to send a text of rabbinic commentary from Buczacz to Jerusalem. The story takes in the years from the writer’s eastern European youth to his maturity in Jerusalem and places that time span within a larger compass of rabbinic commentaries, beginning with the Shulhan Arukh, the sixteenth-century code of laws written by Joseph Caro, and moving on to the seventeenth-century Magen Avraham, the commentary of a Polish rabbi on a section of the Shulhan Arukh. This is a story that charts its course via references to the public dialogue of rabbis, conducted over centuries through their written works. The Magen Avraham was considered to be a difficult and elusive work, and scholars were helped by the eventual appearance of Rabbi Samuel Kolin’s commentary on it, Mahazit Hashekel. Agnon’s story sketches out this extended network of rabbinic texts and adds its own account of the modest Rabbi Shmaria, a rabbinical judge of Buczacz, who refrained from publishing his commentary when he came upon Mahazit Hashekel and felt it superseded his own work.

Drawing the larger scope of history into a personal frame, Agnon depicts himself as a young man who happens to stumble upon the commentary of Rabbi Shmaria in the attic of the Great Synagogue in Buczacz. Agnon uses this glimpse of his youth to touch upon the history of Buczacz and to affirm the ongoing life of the works of its sages, which survived even the predations of Tartar invasions in the seventeenth century. It becomes, then, the mission of the youth to insure the survival of Rabbi Shmaria’s commentary, first by ascertaining the originality of its contents and, second, by sending it to a newly founded library in Jerusalem.

Not so much a story of the writer as a story of the writer’s devotion to the town, “A Book That Was Lost” uses its narrative frame to construct a home for the lost book, the book that never makes it to the new national library of the Jewish people. Along the way, the story pays tribute to Joseph Chasanowitsch, a Russian doctor who was not able to settle in Palestine himself but whose collection established the basis for the Jewish National and University Library in Jerusalem. Thus the narrative draws together threads of history to link Buczacz to the Land of Israel. But while it appears to organize itself around the Zionist shift from Europe to Palestine, a shift that includes the writer’s own journey from Buczacz to Jerusalem, the story is as much a record of what has been lost or destroyed over the years as it is of Zionist achievement. With the account of the writer’s arrival in Jerusalem on the Ninth of Av, the day of mourning the destruction of the Temple, the story draws to a close by incorporating a reminder of loss into the narrative of Zionist renewal. It becomes the mission of the writer to record loss — to continue to look for the book of Rabbi Shmaria of Buczacz — and thus to make a place for a traditional text in a new society, even if that “place” consists of the notation of its absence.

In the major novel A Guest for the Night , the first-person narrator leaves his eastern European hometown, taking with him the key to the town’s Beit Midrash and citing the belief that in the future all houses of study will move to the Land of Israel. He resigns himself to waiting for that day. In “A Book That Was Lost,” the writer depicts himself at the other end, waiting in the Land of Israel for the book that he sent from Buczacz to arrive.

This section of tales of the artist in the Land of Israel closes with “From Lodging to Lodging,” a story that follows the moves of its first-person narrator from one residence to another as he claims to seek greater comfort and fresher air. In an expressionistic enactment of conflicts between illness and health, passivity and activity, death and life, “From Lodging to Lodging” moves through a variety of settings in the Land of Israel. From the noise and bustle of Tel Aviv to the seashore and from there to a rural setting, the narrator finds himself restless and ill at ease. His discomforts in each new setting suggest an inability to settle into anyone address or identification.

In the fourth section, then, when the narrator finds himself in a house on a hill that is described with the biblical imagery of the Zionist return to the land, his response acknowledges the fulfillment of that return and yet distances himself from complete identification: “I was glad that a man in the Land of Israel had all this, and I had my doubts that this place was for me.” The couple who live in this house recount stories that are the counterpart of the setting: of their own emigration to the Land of Israel and of their daughter, who willingly sacrifices comfort for the physical hardships of kibbutz life. The fulfillment in a relationship to the land that they express is something Agnon’s fiction tends to acknowledge, but from a distance. In novels as well as short stories, Agnon acknowledges the need for community while positioning his protagonists as solitary figures. The daughter’s commitment to collective life in “From Lodging to Lodging” finds its counterpart in several novels: in A Guest for the Night, we find the description of young Zionists who prepare themselves for aliyah to the Land of Israel by working on a farm in eastern Europe, and in the posthumously published novel Shira we have the involvement of the protagonist’s daughter and her family in a collective farm.

The Artist in the Land of Israel

In the logic of this particular story, the room to which the narrator returns suggests acceptance of a part of himself that he had sought to escape. The narrator returns to find the sickly child of his landlady on the doorstep, eager as ever to poke his dirty fingers into the narrator’s eyes, in search of his own reflection there. It was the intrusive presence of this child that caused the narrator to go in search of quieter surroundings in the first place. His return to a reluctant involvement with the child thus evolves into an emblem of identity by suggesting acceptance of an aspect of himself he has hitherto sought to escape.

Through these stories of the artist, we encounter shifting identifications and transient affiliations, all of which comprise facets of the artist’s identity. Whether by detaching the writer from the community of his peers or linking him to those who preserve tradition, these stories offer insight into the structures that define Agnon’s fictional world. The stories position the writer on the margins, never wholly inside or outside of a traditional Jewish world view.