S. Agnon - A Book that Was Lost

As we spoke we came to the new house. The green hill rose among its stately trees, and lovely flowers put forth their fragrance from every side. The porter stopped and looked around. It was obvious that never in his life had he seen such a pleasant place.

Silently we walked up the grassy steps. A breeze blew in from the garden, and with it every good smell. Small birds were flying swiftly through the air, and fish were swimming below them in the pool, chasing the birds’ shadows.

The landlord came out, gave me a warm welcome, and said to the porter, “Bring up the baggage.”

Suddenly my heart sank, and I looked at the doorstep of the house. I was clean and scrubbed, and shadows of flowers were playing upon it. But that child was not there and did not climb all over me and did not hang on to me and did not stretch his arms to me. Silently the shadows of the flowers waved upon the doorstep; there was no child there at all. The porter stared at me. Was he waiting for me to tell him to take the baggage elsewhere? The lady of the house came out, affectionately nodded her head to me, and said, “Your room is ready.”

I bowed to her and I said something. Or perhaps I said nothing, and I retraced my steps. The porter trailed after me, my baggage on his shoulder.

9

I walked until I came to my first quarters. Truly, this porter be remembered for blessing, for he kept his silence and did not disturb my thoughts. Was he thinking about the peace to come in the days of the Messiah, or did his heart warn him not to disturb a man who returns to the place he has fled?

The child was lying on the doorstep, soiled with sores. His eyelashes were stuck together, covered with some sort of green pus. It would surprise me if eyes like that could see anything.

But he saw me. And when he saw me he stretched his slender fingers and called out, “Oinkle,” which is to say, “Uncle.” His voice was strained, like that of a cricket whose wings were weak.

I took him in my arms and rocked him up and down, north and south. He hugged my neck and clung to me with all his might. He was lighter than a chick, and his body was very warm. He seemed to be feverish.

For a long time I held him in my arms, and he kicked at my stomach with both of his feet in inexpressible joy. Two or three times I stared at him, to remind him that his reflection was still in my eyes. But he did not stick his hands into my eyes, since during the eight days of our separation his eyes had closed from sobbing so much and he could not see his reflection.

The landlord came out. “Have you come back to us, sir?” And he looked upon himself with great importance. I embraced the child again and said nothing. Finally I put him down, and I paid the porter for his trouble. The child stretched his arms to me and said, “Oinkle, moo.” I took him into my arms again. He put his head against my neck and dozed off.

I went into the house and I set him on his bed as his lips whispered, “Moo, moo, oinkle, moo,” which is to say, “More, more, uncle, more.”

The child’s mother came in. She put down her bag and curled her lips. “So, you have returned to us, sir. Had we known we would have tidied up the room a bit.” I nodded to her and went up to my room. There was so much dust there that the real dirt could not be seen.

I took off my clothes and stretched out on my bed. The buses roared in front of my window and sellers of soda poured and shouted. But all of these sounds gradually died away, except for an echo of the child’s voice ringing in my ears. I made my ear into a funnel so that I could hear more.

Agnon’s writing first came to the attention of western Jewry during the period of World War i, when the author was living in Germany. His work was embraced as an authentic recreation of the inner spiritual life of Polish Jewry and compared to the achievement of the German Romantics in retelling the legends of their national culture. Such powerful critics as Dov Sadan and Baruch Kurzweil would later demonstrate the sophistication of the subversions that lay beneath the pious surface of the text. Yet the earlier, more naive response to the stories remains an important clue to the process whereby one typically reads an Agnon story. If it is set in the ancestral world of eastern Europe and its mode of telling is traditional — this accounts for much though certainly not all of Agnon’s oeuvre — then our attention is naturally drawn first to the conventions of pious storytelling. These include quotations (or pseudoquotations) from sacred texts, interpolated parables and anecdotes, and the use of such traditional expressions as “of blessed memory,” “Mercy deliver us!” and the like. The narrator’s measured tones and balanced sentences add to this effect, as does the subject matter itself: the world of scribes, sages, and the righteous and believing poor.

The Ancestral World

Yet a second, deeper reading usually reveals the behavior described in the stories to be more often than not at odds with the idealized code implied by the traditional mode of storytelling. Often the failure derives from the limitations of human nature or from the suffering that is man’s lot or from the evil that is at large in the world. Sometimes the criticism is even directed back at the code itself, and God’s expectations of man are implicitly found wanting. Whatever the case, a full appreciation of Agnon’s art hinges on savoring the gap between the normative expectations spun by the reverent way in which the story is told and the more troubling events that are enacted within that framework.

The best and most subtle example of this paradox is “The Tale of the Scribe.” The office of the scribe was an object of boundless fascination and veneration for Agnon. He compiled an anthology of legends and lore about scribes, and clearly identified his vocation with theirs. That relation is evident in the loving description of Raphael the Scribe, his devotion to his calling, and the daily round of his spiritual exercises. The sadness in the picture of his life is the barrenness of his pious and modest wife Miriam. She dies of sorrow at an early age, and Raphael copies out a Torah scroll in memory of her soul and the souls of his unborn children.

Now, on the surface of things, the tragic dimension of the story would appear to result from God’s inscrutable will or, in a naturalistic framework, from the equally unfathomable accidents of biology. On closer inspection, however, the reasons for Miriam’s childlessness lie closer to home. Raphael has abandoned himself so totally to the regimen of purity and sanctity required by his calling that he has left no room in their house for sexual desire and its fulfillment. Each month Miriam returns from the ritual bath purified and available to her husband for the kind of marital relations that are not only permitted but encouraged by Jewish law. Although they are drawn toward each other, their union never takes place. They catch a glimpse of scriptural verses embroidered on a wall hanging, and they are reminded of the fullness of God’s presence in the world. They part from each other silently and return to their separate spiritual endeavors. In “The Tale of the Scribe” the problem is not the failure of human beings to live up to divine expectations, but rather a quality of excess at the heart of the tradition itself — at least within the ascetic mystical tendencies of Ashkenazic Jewry. This is a piety that, by sublimating the life force, sows the seeds of its own destruction.

In the case of “That Tzaddik’s Etrog” and “Fable of the Goat,” the burden rests more squarely on human weakness, and the gap between the pious conventions and the wayward outcomes is more explicit. In the former, the Tzaddik’s quest for a beautiful etrog is revealed to be simply a higher form of spiritual selfishness. The old man’s indulgence in grief in the second story clearly represents a generation that could not part with its sorrows in order to seize the opportunity for redemption in the Land of Israel.