S. Agnon - A Book that Was Lost

These stories depict periods and settings that range from medieval Jewish communities in Germany to the period immediately following the Holocaust. Agnon makes us feel the paradoxical identification of Jews with German culture and society, as well as the inevitable strangeness of Jews within a social world that never completely accepted them. Through a variety of narrative modes from the realistic to the fantastic, these stories engage us in a complex cultural fabric. It is worth taking note of their assimilated milieu, because it runs counter to the general mold of Agnon’s fiction. A number of these tales can be read as explorations of the realm of the senses and sentiments in a world emptied of sacred time, space, and meaning.

Stories of Germany

“The Doctor’s Divorce” (1941) offers us the psychological portrait of a relationship as it takes shape and then dissolves. The narrative dramatizes the mind of the doctor whose desires and jealousies involve him in fantasies of a third person, his wife’s former lover. This long story belongs to the domain of Agnon’s psychological fiction, a literary terrain that includes “In the Prime of Her Life” (1923) and “Metamorphosis” (1941). Agnon demonstrates his skill at fashioning a central character whose point of view shapes the world of the fiction, however distorted it may be by passion or jealousy. If one is to question the reliability of the protagonist’s perspective, then one must assemble clues suggestive of an alternative view of circumstances and events. Like other modernist texts, among them the stories of Joyce’s Dubliners , “The Doctor’s Divorce” requires a level of suspicious interest combined with sympathetic involvement in the dilemma of the protagonist.

Through the eyes of the narrator, the unnamed doctor, we first encounter the woman who is the object of men’s desire. Set in Vienna, this story opens with a description of the “blonde nurse who was loved by everyone.” The doctor’s account of his own response suggests that his desire is first aroused by the sight of the nurse’s devotion to the patients in the hospital: “From the moment I saw her eyes, I was just like the rest of the patients.” (His attraction is reminiscent of the infatuation of Herbst, the middle-aged protagonist of the novel Shira, with the nurse Shira; not the least of Shira’s attractions is her response to human suffering.)

The doctor’s account of his infatuation with the nurse Dinah contains within it the seeds of the tormenting jealousy that will destroy the relationship, as he demonstrates repeatedly the role that others play in his attraction to her. Critic Dan Miron notes that the doctor is from eastern Europe, while Dinah is from a well-off Viennese family, an observation that underscores the dimension of cultural difference in this narrative of jealousy and desire. We come to realize that the presence of an invisible third party, most obviously Dinah’s former lover, forms an integral part of the relationship of the doctor and his wife. “The Doctor’s Divorce” creates a psychological drama through the consciousness of its central character. We can work through the character’s thoughts and responses to reach a level of insight and understanding that the character himself never achieves.

“On the Road,” which was written in 1944, appeared as part of The Book of Deeds and it shares with the stories of that collection its focus on a first-person narrator, one who finds himself lost on the eve of a holy day and is keenly aware of his disconnection from any form of Jewish community. (The translation that appears here was abridged, with Agnon’s permission, for its original publication in Twenty-One Stories .) The story takes its narrator through a series of encounters with a group of Jews in ceremonial dress, who speak to him in archaic German and recount to him the slaughter that destroyed the surrounding Jewish communities. In the company of these Jews, the narrator visits settings that bear the signs of communal martyrdom. His experience is dreamlike: he seems simultaneously to remain asleep in the cleft of a rock and to move his limbs as he joins the ghostly company on their walk “to the house of God.” The effect is to amalgamate catastrophic events in the remote past and the destruction of German Jewry in the twentieth century.

Agnon’s protagonist, Samuel Joseph the son of Shalom Mordecai the Levite, joins this mysterious group of elderly Jews to complete the quorum of ten needed for public prayer. In doing so, he takes the place of one of their number, Samuel Levi, who has just died. We have here one of those instances in which Agnon sets up his own form of identity play, using the names of the living and the dead, his own and his father’s.

Ghostly confusions give way to something of the atmosphere of a folktale as the narrator steps into the community like a lost son who has found his place. The particular customs of this community have been shaped by their shared history. The narrator describes the lives of these people with a combination of affectionate understanding and anthropological observation, as he notes the variations in their liturgy that reflect the massacres they endured. When the narrator leaves the community, the Ten Days of Repentance between the New Year and the Day of Atonement have passed. Through his journey real or imagined — he has absorbed the lived experience of a community.

“On the Road” ends with the narrator’s concluding note of thanks to the Almighty who has “restored me to my place” in the Land of Israel. The concept of “my place” now includes within it the history of the community that vanished into the mist as he left it. That history displaces the emphasis from the narrator to the ghostly communities of Germany’s past. The story evokes their traditions and beliefs with an exquisite clarity, all the more haunting in light of events in Germany at the time of the story’s composition in the 1940s.

Stories of Germany

Studded with German names for people and places, “Between Two Towns” (1946) offers the reader poignant social comedy in a symmetrically constructed tale of two Jewish communities in neighboring towns in Germany. Here Agnon crafts a story of family separation in time of war, conveying to us the patriotism of Germany’s Jews in World War i, as well as the strength of their communal practices. Never questioning their place in the larger society, these characters go through their daily lives. The narrator of the story takes a delicately pious tone as he notes that God has granted the residents of Katzenau “a resting place among the nations from which to serve Him and to earn a livelihood, be it meager or ample.” Yes, the narrator acknowledges, in the past there may have been “countless edicts, attacks, murders, expulsions,” but that time has passed and now “Israel is no longer despised because of matters of faith.” The narrator’s wish to believe that good times have arrived at last supplies a poignant irony that makes us aware of the limited horizon of the world of this story.

Agnon has created for us a third-person narrator who is totally absorbed in the daily lives of the inhabitants of the two towns named Katzenau and who is blissfully ignorant of any Final Solution to come in the lives of German Jewry. It is we as readers who cannot escape the burden of a historical consciousness that casts a shadow over the world of the fiction. “Between Two Towns” bears comparison in this respect to the as-yet-untranslated novella “Ad Hena” (Until Now). Both are set in the Germany of World War i and, in both, the horizon of the narrative is limited to the vision of the characters themselves. This limitation of vision jars us; we cannot help but supply the larger historical perspective that the narrative so resolutely excludes. The effect is to heighten our sense of a terrible gap between the complacency and innocence of German Jews and their ultimate fate.