S. Agnon - Shira

Having become so involved in Julian Weltfremdt’s books, I will be brief about those of Dr. Taglicht.

As is often the case with bachelors, Taglicht was a subtenant in the home of a gentleman who rented out one of his four rooms for the price of the entire apartment. Since he had only one room, he couldn’t collect very many books. He, too, had come to Jerusalem laden with books. The rare ones were borrowed by collectors, who never returned them, the ordinary ones were borrowed by ordinary people, who didn’t return them either. Taglicht often commented about this. “Why should I be upset? It’s enough that others are upset about this sort of thing.” Taglicht’s library is now limited to what fits on his windowsill.

According to the Gemara, books and bread were bound together when they descended from heaven. As for Taglicht, he often had to forgo his loaf to buy a book. Let me report a delightful exchange Taglicht liked to relate. “When I lived in Berlin, I often used to visit Shestov’s father, a sick old man. Once, the old man saw I was in distress. He asked me, ‘What’s the trouble?’ I told him, ‘Every month my landlady demands a rent increase.’ The old man said, ‘That’s because of all the books you collect. She sees you laden with books and thinks to herself: Such a person is not likely to move, so I might as well raise the rent. It would be costly to move, so you choose to pay more rather than leave. But a young man should first build his resources, then send a representative to acquire the books he needs — or thinks he needs.’“ Taglicht ignored the advice of the philosopher’s father. Not only did he starve himself because of his books, but in the end they were taken from him.

It’s only two or three steps from Taglicht’s house to Lemner’s. He has many bookcases filled with books. Books are stacked inside the bookcases as well as on the top of them. These books are not friendly to one another or even to themselves; that is to say, one volume of a set might be on one shelf, another on top of the bookcase, another who knows where. If a set contains a total of four or five volumes, it is doubtful that Lemner has them all. Lemner is an elegant and amiable person, and, since he is more concerned with others than with himself, he tends to wear soiled and faded clothes at home and to dress more attractively when he is out. His books’ behavior on their shelves is like his behavior at home. They are soiled and faded. Spiders spin webs on them; some have become a cemetery for flies and bugs. If he needs a book, either he can’t find it, or, being too lazy to brush off the dust and insect remains, he borrows it from the National Library. So why does he keep buying more? To occupy himself with something. Some people choose a social cause or some similar enterprise. Professor Lemner is engaged in the acquisition of books. Anyway, books are related to a professor’s occupation. If his wife hadn’t restrained him, he would have bought every book he was offered.

I might as well skip Professor Bachlam’s books. He was so busy writing his own that he didn’t have time to collect other people’s books. Nonetheless, he owned a great many volumes. If you wonder about them, look in the books he wrote and you’ll see them in his references. Surely his books also included opinions from books he had merely borrowed, but that doesn’t change anything.

I have yet to tell about the bookcases in the homes of Professor Wechsler and Professor Ernst Weltfremdt. Having begun with one of the Weltfremdts, I’ll conclude with the other. But first I’ll describe Professor Wechsler’s books. Actually, they are not really books, but folder upon folder filled with newspaper clippings about his discoveries and interviews with journalists. No professor in Jerusalem is as busy as he is, and no one keeps others as busy as he does. All of Jerusalem’s thirteen bookbinders are employed by him, making portfolios to contain the clippings that praise him and his work on amulets. Those who don’t envy Professor Wechsler regard the praise he receives as praise for the university, and praise for the university is praise for the entire community of Israel.

Now let’s have a look at Professor Weltfremdt’s books. There is no difference between Ernst Weltfremdt’s library and the libraries of most professors who marry rich women with large dowries that provide the means to buy many books in handsome bindings and construct handsome shelves for them. His bookcases have two sections: one for patrologists, the other for Hellenists, since he was first a lecturer in patristics and then in Hellenistics. In addition, on the corner shelves there are quite a few Hebrew books acquired here in Jerusalem.

I will now add a few words about other book collections in Jerusalem. A city of many scholars will have many bibliophiles. There are many scholars in Jerusalem who deprive themselves of a crust of bread in order to buy a book, whose passion for books is so great that they ignore their children and don’t bother about their education. In the former category are those who sell a book when their wives demand money for Shabbat provisions; in the latter category there are those who take no notice, even when members of their household are expiring from hunger. In the end, when they die, book dealers and collectors converge to buy from the orphans, who, not having been educated by their father, are unaware of the value of the books and sell them for a paltry sum.

Now, to get back to Herbst’s books. They are not arranged on handsome shelves, like Ernst Weltfremdt’s books, and are not as numerous as Bachlam’s and Lemner’s; nor does he have portfolios such as Wechsler’s. For the most part, they are plainly bound, resting in bookcases constructed from the crates in which they were shipped from abroad. But the grace that prevails in his library is not to be found in the library of any other scholar in Jerusalem. Henrietta’s good taste had left its imprint on the arrangement of the books, and the vaulted ceiling added charm to the room. It is easy to picture how sad Herbst was when he thought it would be necessary to move and house his books in the skimpy rooms one finds in those new neighborhoods.

I now mean to get back to the tragedy, and I will try to prove how worthwhile the tragedy was to Herbst. For years Herbst had been working out of habit, amassing notes and quotations without involving his emotions. Not so with the tragedy. Although his imagination proved inadequate, the tragedy shook the very foundations of his soul. What he had produced so far didn’t amount to very much, but he had faith in the future, that something would emerge, turning it into a tragedy. That is to say, the actions would unfold, justifying themselves, not only in terms of their own inevitability, but in terms of the intense power inherent in them from the beginning.

When a bookish person is about to create a book, he looks at other books to see how they were written. Herbst, who was reared on German poetry, went back and reread it. He was familiar with some of the poets from childhood; others, he had read as an adult. Of course, you know the power of good books: one never emerges from them empty-handed. Whenever you open such a book, you find something in it that you hadn’t noticed before. Even if you have read it many times, even if you know it by heart, when you go back to it you find a new message. Whether or not it is the one intended by the author, it is embedded in the text.

I’ll now turn to another matter. Herbst was aware that Germany was afflicted with a big dose of anti-Semitism, so that, of all the Hebrew words fixed in the tongues of German Jews, the word rishus , meaning “viciousness,” was most widespread. But he never considered the change in its meaning, for now one says rishus to warn Jews not to behave in this or that manner, so as not to provoke Germans to be vicious, that is, to behave badly toward Jews.