S. Agnon - A Book that Was Lost

The longing for the Land of Israel is used as an effective marker of dubious piety in the grotesque story “Paths of Righteousness, or The Vinegar Maker.” The subject of the title is a poor old man who has suffered greatly in his life and whose only reason for living is to put aside some of the meager proceeds from his labors so that he can end his life in Zion. Once again we are in the reverential atmosphere of innumerable tales in Jewish literature about the righteous poor whose simple faith is extolled. Yet two themes in the story urge us toward a more ironic reading of the old man’s situation. The first is his trade as a vinegar maker. Vinegar is the acidic reduction of wine, and in fact the rabbinic phrase for the unworthy son of a good family ( hometz ben yayin ), which is invoked later in the story, literally means wine that has become vinegar. The old man’s life in exile has been eaten away by suffering to the point where it is nothing, and it is only this nothing that would be taken to the Land of Israel. The hallowed ideal of going to the Holy Land to die comes under scrutiny here as a macabre offering of the dead to the Land of the Living.

The second theme concerns the representation of Jesus, who is referred to euphemistically in this story, as in traditional Jewish literature, as “that man” ( oto ish ). The old man is so pathetically ignorant of the Polish-Christian society in which he lives that he has no notion that the charity box in which he places his savings belongs to the church. When he is apprehended trying to redeem his deposits, his imprisonment cannot even arouse indignation over gentile persecution among his coreligionists because his behavior was based on such dim stupidity. His dying vision of being embraced and then dropped by the Christian savior is an ironic and delusional extension of his ignorance and spiritual isolation.

The Ancestral World

“The Lady and the Peddler” also uses strongly marked conventions to set up readers’ expectations, but in this case the conventions are distinctly non-Jewish. Agnon uses the familiar framework of the vampire story in which to set a fable summing up the historical experience of the Jews in European culture. The story was published during the Holocaust, and the prototypical names of the characters (Helen as the woman who launched the Trojan War and Joseph as Jacob’s son who winds up in Egypt) identify them as allegorical counters for their respective civilizations. The easy recognizability of the vampire story and its conventions serves Agnon well by enabling him to create a classic case of dramatic irony. While the true motives of the lady’s hospitality are obvious to the reader, the peddler remains doggedly innocent of her designs.

The story is hardly an ecumenical meditation on Jewish-gentile relations. Yet given the years during which it was written, the generalization of European society as predatory and homicidal is not surprising. It is the representation of the Jew here that is ferociously critical: his abject gratitude for being taken in out of the cold, his eagerness to forget God’s commandments, his self-flattering need to believe that he is being loved for his own sake, his steadfast determination to learn nothing from his experience. This is a bleak and unsparing indictment, and it might have made the story into a grim allegorical tract were it not for the leavening of black humor. Within the grisly and campy conventions of the vampire story, the lady’s tongue-in-cheek derision and the peddler’s witless complacency make the message of the text all the more chilling.

Dedicated To My Wife, Esther

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This is the story of Raphael the Scribe. Raphael was a righteous and blameless man who copied Torah scrolls, tefillin, and mezuzot in holiness and purity. And any man in the household of Israel who was childless, Mercy deliver us, or whose wife had died, Mercy deliver us, would come to Raphael the Scribe and say, “You know, Reb Raphael my brother, what are we and what are our lives? I had indeed hoped that my sons and my sons’ sons would come to you to have you write tefillin for them; but now, alas, I am alone, and my wife, for whom I had thought I would wait long days and years in the upper world, has died and has left me to my sorrows. Perhaps, Reb Raphael my brother, you can undertake to write a Torah scroll under the good guidance of God’s hand, and I will compensate you for it. Let us not be lost both in this world and the next, my dear Reb Raphael. Perhaps God will be gracious unto me and the work of your hands will be found acceptable.” And Raphael then would sit and write a Torah scroll to give the man and his wife a name and remembrance in the household of Israel.

What may this be likened to? To a man who travels far from his own city, to a place where he is not known, and the watchmen who guard that city find him and ask, “Who are you and where do you live?” If the man is wealthy and a property owner, then as soon as he says I am So-and-so, the son of Thus-and-so, from such-and-such a place, they check the record books and documents, and find out how much he had given to the king’s treasury, how much in property taxes he had paid, and they welcome him immediately, saying, “Come in, you blessed of God, the entire land is before you, dwell wherever you wish.” But if the traveler is an ordinary man, and has neither property nor wealth, then he shows them a document written and signed by officials of his own city, which states that So-and-so is a resident of our city. Then he is permitted to remain and they do not hurry him out.

Likewise, when a man comes to the next world, and the evil angels meet him and ask, “Who are you and where are you from?”; if in his earthly life he had been an upright and blameless man, and left behind him good deeds, or sons busy with Torah and commandments, then these certainly serve as his good advocates. But if he had had none of these, then he is lost. However, when Jews come to the synagogue to pray and take a Torah scroll out of the ark and read from it, if the scroll was written as a memorial for the ascent of this man’s soul, then it is immediately known on high that he had been So-and-so, a resident of such-and-such a place, and that is his identification. They then say to him, Enter and rest in peace.

Raphael the Scribe sat and wrote, and his wife, most blessed among women, the pious Miriam, stayed home and made life pleasant for him in a fine house with fine utensils which she scrubbed and cleaned and purified, so that her husband would do his work in a clean and pure atmosphere. She delighted him with delicate foods and savory beverages, and for Sabbaths and holidays, and sometimes even for the New Moon, she would buy a goose, cook the meat in a pot, or roast it; and Raphael would prepare the quills for writing Torah scrolls, tefillin, and mezuzot. He sat at the Torah and at God’s service in holiness and purity, wielding the scribe’s pen and fashioning crowns for his Creator.

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Before we begin telling part of the story itself, let us tell about his way in his holy work. This was his way in holiness:

At midnight he would rise, seat himself on the floor, place ashes on his head, and weep for the destruction of Jerusalem, for the death of the righteous, the burning of the Temple, the length of the exile, the exile of the Shekhinah, the suffering under enslavement, and all sorts of hard and cruel decrees that are inflicted on the people of Israel day in and day out, and for our just Messiah, who is held in iron chains because of the sins of our generation. After that he would study the Path of Life and the Book of Splendor until the morning light, thus tying together what is proper for the night with what is proper for the day.