S. Agnon - A Book that Was Lost

The young boys took the eagle that had been removed from the menorah and brought it to one of the metalworkers to make into dreidels for Hanukkah, for they had heard that their forefathers had made dreidels for themselves from brass. But the metalworker did not make dreidels for them, because it is very difficult to make dreidels from brass. But he did make them dice, which children also play with on Hanukkah.

And all the days of the uprising, the menorah stood there with the eagle cut off.

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Eventually the uprising was put down and Austria returned to ruling over the country. Now, though, its rulers cast a wary eye upon every matter, large and small, in enforcing the law of the land and its ordinances.

It was then that the synagogue treasurers hastened to make for themselves an eagle with two heads, which they set on the menorah in place of the eagle that had been cut off and discarded.

The eagle stood there between the six branches of the menorah, its one head turned to the three branches to the right, and its second head toward the three branches to the left. All the years until the Great War broke out, until Austria and Russia became enemies, the eagle stood there on the menorah, and the menorah stood on the holy reading table, the table on which the Torah was read.

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As conditions in the war grew more difficult, it became harder for the soldiers to find weapons to shoot. So they took metal utensils, large and fine utensils, and they melted them down in order to make out of them weapons with which to destroy the country. These soldiers came as well to the Great Synagogue in Buczacz. They took the brass basin in which every man who entered the sanctuary washed his hands. They took the brass pitcher that the Levites used to pour water over the hands of the priests before they went up before the congregation on holidays to bless them with the priestly blessing. They took every utensil made of brass and lead. They took the charity box that was made of gold, the box in which people made secret contributions to charity. And the officers also fixed their eyes upon the great menorah. A certain metalworker was with them. For they had brought a metalworker in order to take the utensils from the synagogue and melt them down into weapons.

But just as they were about to seize the menorah, the sound of Russian tanks was heard. The Austrian forces immediately fled for their lives, and left behind all they had taken.

But the metalworker, the one who had come with the army officers when they came to take the brass utensils — he did not flee.

He took the menorah and hid it in a place that only he knew. No one else knew its place. And no one gave a thought to the menorah, for all anyone cared about was saving his own life from the Great War and from the heavy shellfire that fell continuously through the war until its conclusion.

Then the war ended, and the land of Poland that had been fought over came under Polish rule. And the town of Buczacz was also given over to Poland.

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A number of the former inhabitants of Buczacz returned to the town. Many villagers from around Buczacz also settled in the town, for their houses had been stolen by their neighbors with whom they had fought on behalf of their homeland. They all came to worship in the Great Synagogue for, of all the prayer houses, the Great Synagogue alone survived the war.

And so it happened, when they could not find a single lamp to light up the house of worship at night, that they took some stones from the place, they bored holes in them, and then they set the stones on the lectern in order to place candles in them to make light for themselves when they stood in prayer before the Lord. Later, they made for themselves menorot out of tin and wood, because they were very poor. For they had been unable to recover anything of all they had owned. Whatever the war had spared the enemy had taken; and whatever the enemy had spared, the Poles took. So it was not within their means to make for themselves menorot from brass or from lead as they once had.

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One man, who had been born in Buczacz, came home after being a captive in Russia. And it happened that, when he came to the Great Synagogue on Friday night and saw the menorot of tin and wood that were without any beauty, he remembered how he happened to be in the trenches with a metalworker, and how that metalworker had told him that, when the Russians advanced upon Buczacz, he had hidden the town’s great menorah to keep it from falling into the Russians’ hands. But before the metalworker was able to tell him where he had hidden the menorah, a cannon hit the trench and the two never saw each other again. And now, when the man saw the synagogue, he remembered the metalworker and the trench that the cannon had blown up. For if the cannon had not blown up the trench, he would now have known the place where the metalworker had hidden the menorah.

The next morning, on the Sabbath day, the man was called to the Torah, for it was the first Sabbath since he had returned to his hometown. The Torah reading for that Sabbath was the portion called Terumah , which begins with Exodus 25. As the Torah reader read aloud the section in Scripture describing the making of the menorah that was used in the tabernacle, he came to the verse “Note well, and follow the patterns for them that are being shown you on the mountain” (Exodus 25:31). At that instant the man knew that the menorah was hidden on a mountain!

The town of Buczacz is surrounded by mountains; it sits on a mountaintop itself. And the man had no idea which mountain it was that held the menorah.

The man began to wander the mountains. There was not a mountain of all the mountains around Buczacz that he did not search. The man did not reveal to anyone that he was searching after the menorah, for he feared the riffraff that had joined the town and that, if they heard about the menorah, they would take it away. Every day the man went in search of the menorah, through cold and heat, until summer and winter had both passed. But he still had not found the menorah.

Now the days of cold, the winter season, returned, and the man did not return from his daily labors in the mountains. At the end of several days, after wandering in the mountains, he said to himself: Let me return home and no longer search after the menorah. For I am not able to find it.

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And it came to pass that, as the man was returning home, another man was standing on the road, a man crippled in his legs and missing an arm. The two of them stood there. They looked at each other in astonishment and exclaimed, “Blessed be He who resurrects the dead!”

Then the man who had been searching after the menorah said, “I told myself that you were blown up in the trench, and now I see you are alive!”

The metalworker said to him, “I too thought you were among the dead. Blessed be the Lord who has saved us from the Russian cannons and who has left us alive after the horrible Great War.”

The man who had been searching for the menorah asked him, “Didn’t you tell me that when the Russians first came to Buczacz you hid the great menorah? Well, where did you hide it?”

The metalworker replied, “That is why I have come.”

“Where is it?” the other asked.

“It is hidden in the ground beneath my house,” he answered.

“Where is your house?”

“It is destroyed,” the metalworker said. “It no longer exists. But the place is still there. It is beneath a pile of snow. If I only had a shovel in my hand, I could already have cleared away the snow and the earth beneath it and dug the menorah out.”

The two of them went off. They brought a shovel and worked there all day and all night and all the next day, for a huge amount of snow covered the mountains, until, finally, they had cleared the snow and the earth, and they found the menorah.