The Parable and Its Lesson: A Novella (15 page)

A second factor was the implied judgment that within Agnon’s overall artistic career
‘Ir umelo’ah
represented a regression. Agnon had acceded to the status of a great European modernist with the publication of the parabolic stories of
Sefer hama’ayinasim
[Book of Deeds] and
Temol shilshom
[Only Yesterday, 1945], a novel of the Second Aliyah with its brilliantly surreal passages written in the voice of a supposedly mad dog named Balak. For readers who esteemed Agnon for these achievements, the Buczacz stories seemed a throwback to a more naïve and less accomplished artist who had become sentimental in old age and renounced the ironic lens through which his best work was filtered. The decline and decimation of Buczacz had already been critically analyzed in the great pre-war novel
Oreaḥ natah lalun
[A Guest for the Night, 1939], and now, after the Holocaust completed the work of destruction, it was felt that Agnon was producing something very different: a
yizker bukh
, a memorial volume suffused with nostalgia and mourning for a lost world. Finally, the unique qualities of
‘Ir umelo’ah
were obscured within the plethora of titles published within the years following the author’s death.
⁵
This posthumous Agnon corpus, whose volumes in their original editions are distinguished by their black dust jackets and white bindings, amounts to fourteen titles, some of which appeared in close succession. Among the lot are thematic anthologies of classical sources, collections of correspondence and gatherings of public statements and occasional speeches, as well as fiction.
⁶
The most sensational of these publications was the appearance in 1971 of the novel
Shira
, a tale of marital infidelity set among German émigré scholars in Jerusalem of the 1930s. Chapters of the novel published in 1948 had whetted the appetite of an eager readership, but out of a scruple of discretion, Agnon had made provision for the appearance of the whole novel only after his death, and the estimation of the stir it would cause was not off the mark.
⁷
When
‘Ir umelo’ah
appeared two years later, fragmentary epic of a vanished world that it is, there was little critical oxygen remaining.

‘Ir umelo’ah
, I would argue, is one of the most extraordinary responses to the murder of European Jewry in modern Jewish writing, yet the very connection of the work to the Holocaust is fraught and not entirely self-evident. On the one hand, the book as a whole is dedicated—on a separate page following the title page—to a city that flourished from the time of its founding “until the arrival of the vile, defiled and depraved enemy, and the madmen who abetted them, and brought about utter annihilation.” On the other hand, neither the Nazi liquidations nor even the rehearsal for them in World War One is represented in the stories, which do not reach beyond the nineteenth century. So despite the fact the stories are occasionally punctuated with invective against the Nazis and their role in bringing about the end of Jewish Buczacz, anything related to that destruction is kept from the representational field of the work. The potential for confusion created by this paradox can be illustrated, with the reader’s indulgence, by a personal testimony. Many years ago, when I was planning the research that led to my
Ḥurban: Responses to Catastrophe in Hebrew Literature
, I was examining Israeli literature for reactions to the Holocaust. Of course, I looked first to Agnon as the preeminent Hebrew writer who, unlike many of his Israeli counterparts, did not turn away from the diaspora and its religious culture. Yet, apart from several unconnected stories, I saw little at the time that would dissuade me from the conclusion that the literary world of the master was fixed in its characteristic modalities in the decades before the Holocaust and that a substantial reorientation toward the catastrophe could not be expected. It is clear to me now that I was wrong. What blinded me was a narrow conception of what it means to respond to catastrophe. To qualify as such, I mistakenly believed that a work of literature must represent the horrors of destruction, as well as depicting modes of survival and reconstruction. Because Agnon had not engaged the horrors, his work could not be thought of in any substantial sense as being part of Holocaust literature.

Reading ‘
Ir umelo’ah
has taught me three things. First, contending with the burden of the Holocaust was exactly what Agnon was doing in the postwar decades. The crucial story “Hasiman” [The Sign], which Emunah Yaron placed at the conclusion of
‘Ir umelo’ah
, is actually a consecration story that introduces the project as a whole.
⁸
The story describes the holiday of Shavuot in the Jerusalem suburb of Talpiyot in 1943, when the narrator, a stand-in for the author, is informed about the murder of the Jews of Buczacz. Late that night in the synagogue, the narrator undergoes a mystical experience in which the great medieval poet Solomon Ibn Gabirol appears to him and composes a sacred poem to perpetuate the memory of the Jews of Buczacz. The implication is that the narrator, who is deeply connected to the tradition of liturgical poetry, will now take this burden on himself and continue the task of memorialization is his own, storytelling mode. The epic cycle of Buczacz stories that took shape in these years is a direct result of that self-imposed imperative.

Second, Agnon makes a principled choice not to traffic in atrocity and instead devote his resources to reimagining the spiritual life of Galician Jewry in its fullest vigor. In a profound sense, those spiritual achievements were decimated long before the Nazis arrived on the scene; the twin forces of secularization and the terrors of World War One and the Russian Civil War saw to that. The Holocaust was the satanic coup de grace that provided a tragic point of retrospection for taking stock of Buczacz and all it represented in the centuries of its greatness when, as the narrator so often observes in
‘Ir umelo’ah
, “Buczacz was Buczacz.” This reimagining is aware of itself as a literary endeavor, an artifice that knows it cannot bring back the dead or replace them. At the same time, it makes the claim that it is within the capabilities of the literary imagination to create a simulacrum of the fullness of that lost world, and that this act of creation/re-creation, both in its process and its product, is the true response we must make to catastrophe.

Finally, Agnon’s practice in
‘Ir umelo’ah
has within it the power to require us to rethink our most basic notions about Holocaust literature. It has been axiomatic for many that the chief vocation of Holocaust literature is to represent the unspeakable ordeals that were visited upon the murdered victims, the survivors and their children. Without necessarily negating this mode of representation, Agnon declines to pursue it in favor of the imaginative reconstruction of an earlier lost spiritual and cultural plenitude. His motives, I would argue, derive from a deep intuition into the demands Jewish tradition makes on the modern imagination. In addition to giving voice to grief in the form of lamentation, the classical tradition stressed over time the recouping of the relationship between God and Israel and the restoration and repurification of the image of the destroyed community.
⁹
In a modern era, this restorative impulse works through the literary imagination and takes the form of storytelling. Agnon retells the story of Buczacz as an imperfect but holy community, a
qehilah qedoshah
. His approach underscores the significance of cultural frameworks in determining responses to the Holocaust.
¹⁰
Putting complex matters simply, we may say that an exclusive focus on extermination, atrocity and the death-in-life of survivors presents the Holocaust as the final vitiation of Enlightenment European culture. Focusing instead on the substance of the religious-cultural civilization of the past, even if the integrity of that civilization was severely compromised by the time of its destruction, presents the Holocaust as a rupture within the internal relations of the Jewish people and its history.

But does not such an imaginative program of restitution inevitably lead to an idealization of the lost object? And does the idealization of the past serve or traduce creative survival in the future? A famous example of this kind of response is Nathan Nata Hanover’s
Yeven metsulah
[Abyss of Despair], a chronicle of the sufferings of Polish Jewry during the Khmelnitski massacres of 1648–49.
¹¹
After a martyrologically tinged account of the horrific ordeals suffered by the Jewish communities of Galicia and the Ukraine, Hanover concludes his work with a eulogy that mourns the greatness that was once Polish Jewry; the slaughtered communities are collectively recalled as systematically embodying the cardinal virtues of Torah,
avodah
and
ma’asim tovim
. Agnon is especially aware of Hanover’s chronicle because the consequences of the Khmelnitski massacres play so important a role in the history of Buczacz. Yet when it comes to mounting his own project of remembrance, the option of composing an idyll is one Agnon conspicuously declines. Although idealization is not absent from
‘Ir umelo’ah
, it is reconfigured to serve a different purpose. Memorialization, for Agnon, is a set of critical choices and discriminations. In
‘Ir umelo’ah
, it is synagogue worship and Torah study that become the signs under which Agnon will set about reimagining the history of Buczacz. It is important to keep in mind that this was only one among a number of schemata Agnon could have chosen. The past could have been recouped around Jewish-gentile relations, or the economic fortunes of the various handicrafts and trades that flourished in the town, or relations between the poor and prosperous. It may seem natural that Agnon would have chosen worship and study, but it remains a choice.

‘Ir umelo’ah
begins with a description of the town’s study houses and synagogues, their appurtenances and sacred objects and then proceeds to a consideration of the key personalities who held the offices of ḥazzan (cantor), shamash (sexton, beadle), and gabbai (treasurer); accounts of the great rabbis who held sway in Buczacz, as well as tales of anonymous piety, occupy the core of the book. Yet this plan is only a scaffolding; it represents the idealizing framework within which Agnon chooses to perform the memory of Buczacz and present his town in the largest possible way as inscribed within the world of Torah. Woven in and out of this scaffolding, however, are innumerable accounts of professional and scholarly jealousy, internecine commercial rivalries, unchecked acts of cruelty and expropriation by the wealthy, unrewarded acts of righteousness by the poor and lowly, apostasy, criminality, suicide and many other unsavory behaviors.

As conjured up by Agnon in
‘Ir umelo’ah
, the vanished world of Buczacz can best be understood under the rubric of a norm and deviations from it. Agnon sets the value signature of the work, chooses the periods in the life of Buczacz in which Torah and worship are paramount, fashions a plan for the organization of the stories that foregrounds these institutions and their practitioners and uses the commentary of the volume’s ever-present narrator to articulate and reinforce this moral framework. Yet at the same time, the norm is continually flouted by power, envy and the general intractability of the human heart.
‘Ir umelo’ah
is a world in which there is a single moral and spiritual norm alongside an abundance of variegated deviations from that norm. It will not come as a surprise that the deviations more often beguile the reader’s attention than does the norm, and the modal tension between the two accounts for the fascination exerted by the book and for the tensile forces that hold it together.

Holding together a work made up of more than 140 independent narrative units is not a small challenge. Of the several strategies Agnon uses in his efforts to create coherence in
‘Ir umelo’ah
, the most important is the fashioning of a narrator whose voice is present in almost all the stories. Surely this narrator is one of Agnon’s greatest and most distinctive creations, and its arrival on the scene so late in the master’s career has much to tell us about the aesthetic impasses he faced and the solutions he was experimenting with in the years after the war. The narrator of
‘Ir umelo’ah
is part chronicler and part impresario. As chronicler, he presents himself as an assiduous student of the history of Buczacz and the arcana of its centuries of spiritual life. He takes advantage of every chance to establish the reliability of his accounts of events in terms of both the accuracy of his information and the objectivity with which it is presented. But make no mistake: although he takes pains to get his facts correct and puncture fanciful myths and legends, this chronicler is not a historian. He is a believing Jew who, though fully aware of the modern world, remains rooted in the circle of traditional piety. He views his function as a belated extension of the
pinqas
, the register kept by Jewish communities in Europe in which significant events were recorded.
¹²
At the conclusion of
Hamashal vehanimshal
[
The Parable and Its Lesson
], the story to be discussed below, the rationale for telling the lengthy tale is based on the fact that the
pinqas
of Buczacz was destroyed in the war along with the town’s Jews. The extraordinary incidents related in the story were recorded there around the year 1700 in the beautiful hand of the town’s scribe and in the formal eloquence of learned, biblical Hebrew.

It is now left to the belated narrator to reconstruct and retell the story as best he can and according to his own lights. He is not a communal scribe, but he does follow after the scribe, in his footsteps, as it were, in discharging the same function but using a different set of instruments. In his role as chronicler, most importantly, the narrator takes the prerogative to speak as an
I
that is simultaneously a
We
. He is himself first and foremost a man of Buczacz, flesh of the flesh of the town, although he has no historical embodiment that would locate him in actual events. He is at once absorbed into the collective conscience of the town
and
busily conducting the performance of memory under his own baton, a baton singularly inscribed with the proprietary pronoun
I
, if not with a proper name. It goes without saying, however, that by choosing to write about Buczacz in its “classic” era Agnon renounced his right to evoke personal childhood memories, as he did in such wonderful stories as “Hamitpaḥat” [The Kerchief], and, as pointed out above, to assimilate the figure of the narrator to his own autobiographical persona as he had done in
Oreaḥ natah lalun
[A Guest for the Night].