The Parable and Its Lesson: A Novella (2 page)

But for a true classic, there is an additional high hurdle: translatability. When the nuances and the echoes and puns and the rhythm are shorn from the work, does it still excite us? In Agnon’s case the record is mixed. The translators who have sought to preserve the special strangeness of Agnon’s Hebrew have been less successful than those who have been willing to sacrifice a great deal in order to create a simulacrum that works as literature in English. It of course makes a great deal of difference what kind of Agnon is being translated. He wrote continuously for more than sixty years, and he wrote in different genres. For example, his first novel,
Hakhnasat kalah
[The Bridal Canopy, 1931] concerns the peregrinations of a poor Hasid in search of a dowry for his daughters among the townlets of Galicia in the early nineteenth century. This sprawling comic narrative is heavy with biblical allusions and parodies of religious practices and anecdotes about rabbinic sages. Putting such a work into English—it was done, unevenly, by I. M. Lask in 1967—throws up a very different set of problems than works written in a mode closer to European realism, such as Agnon’s second novel,
Sipur pashut
[A Simple Story, 1935], translated, superbly, by Hillel Halkin in 1985. Set in Agnon’s hometown of Buczacz in the years before World War One, the novel follows the psychological breakdown and recovery of the son of an established merchant family. Although here too there are allusions and submerged subtexts, the object of representation is a much more familiar bourgeois world in which religious learning plays little role.

For the present occasion, we have gone to the difficult end of the Agnon spectrum and chosen to translate a work that poses steep challenges and, because it is a riveting work of art, offers steep rewards as well. First published in
Haaretz
in 1958,
The Parable and Its Lesson
is not well known even to aficionados of Agnon in Israel. Set in the late seventeenth century, it is an account of the journey taken by a rabbi and his shamash, his assistant, into Gehinnom, the Underworld, for the purpose of freeing a teenage bride from the bonds of widowhood. The scenes of horrible and peculiar torments they witness there are gruesome in themselves; worse still are the received notions of sin and punishment that they seem to overturn. The journey to Gehinnom is described as part of the testimony that the shamash gives in his own defense at a trial that takes place fifty-four years after the events. The story shows us Buczacz at two removes: in the immediate aftermath of the Khmelnitski massacres, the community struggles to reconstitute itself and mourn its losses, and then a half-century later when the now-prosperous community is on the verge of a disturbing complacency.

This is a truly exciting piece of literature that is unparalleled in the rest of modern Jewish writing. It is also difficult, difficult in Hebrew, and in translation all the more so. This difficulty comes in several specific varieties, and it has been our aim in this edition to account for them and compensate for them in various ways. First, we have provided a glossary of Hebrew terms for readers who are not familiar with traditional Jewish life. We have retained a number of Hebrew terms in the translation—and naturalized them by not italicizing them—because there are simply no adequate English equivalents. A chief example is the main character of the story. To call the shamash, the assistant who accompanies the rabbi on the journey to Gehinnom, a sexton or a beadle is awkward and foreign to the historical context.

Second, we have provided an extensive set of notes that explain biblical allusions, references to the rabbinic literature and medieval compositions, theological concepts from Kabbalah, abstruse ritual practices and relevant historical events. We have chosen not to interfere with the flow of the text by placing endnote or footnote numbers next to the terms that are explained in the notes; rather, we have placed the notes at the end and marked them according to the pages on which appear the terms they explain. They are there, in other words, for those who want them. There are different kinds of readers. For some, the story can be read with pleasure and understanding without recourse to much of the information in the notes; and this is not because that information is already known but because it is not truly necessary to take in the story. Other readers feel intrigued or provoked by unfamiliar references, and they wish to have that gap filled in even if it means an interruption in the flow of reading.

Finally, there are difficulties that have little to do with translation or cultural literacy. These are perplexing interpretive problems that are inherent in the story. Why does the shamash wait a half century to tell his story? What practical purpose is served by the rabbi’s descent into Gehinnom? Why does the story devote so much attention to the ceremonies commemorating the dead of 1648? Why did Agnon name the story
The Parable and Its Lesson
when the parable in question contributes little to our enlightenment? Hence the usefulness of the interpretative essay that accompanies the story. The essay first describes how Agnon embarked on the massive cycle of the Buczacz stories as a unique response to the murder of European Jewry and how he developed a set of narrative techniques for this project that required a departure from how he wrote in the past. The essay then enters the thicket of interpretive difficulties in the story itself and proposes ways of reading that attempt to make sense of Agnon’s narrative choices. In sum, it is our wager that even a difficult Agnon text—so long as it is a superb Agnon text, as we believe this one to be—can be enjoyed in translation provided the necessary interpretive resources. We hope that reading this one Buczacz tale will stimulate interest in the larger project of which it is a part.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Ariel Hirschfeld and Jeffrey Saks were always available for us to draw on their erudition and good judgment. I am grateful to David Stern and Raymond Scheindlin for their encouragement and their help in solving knotty problems.

James S. Diamond was killed in a traffic accident shortly after the manuscript of this book was submitted. His death is a grave loss, and he will be greatly missed
.

THE PARABLE AND ITS LESSON

S. Y. AGNON

TRANSLATED AND ANNOTATED BY JAMES S. DIAMOND

AMONG THE LINE OF RABBIS
who ruled in our town was the illustrious and godly Rabbi Moshe, a rabbi who, in his lifetime, journeyed to Gehinnom in order to free an agunah. Two purposes motivate me to record this story. One is to tell of the greatness of that saintly rabbi. The other, as I have already noted, is to admonish those among us, old and young alike, who permit themselves to talk during the prayer service and the Torah reading. In Buczacz no one talks during the service and the reading of the Torah. That is the long-standing local custom. But every city has someone who hails from somewhere else, and so it happened that there was in Buczacz just such a man who was unaware of the local custom and chatted while the Torah was being read. This story is about him. It is a story from which we will come to learn what the punishment is for those who conduct conversations during the prayers and the Torah reading. To be sure, some things related here will not square with those who maintain that Buczacz was unaffected by the Khmelnitski pogroms. I leave it to the One who reconciles all matters to settle this one too.

1

There was in our old beit midrash an elderly shamash named Reb Yeruham ben Tanhum. Some insist that his name was Reb Tanhum ben Yeruham and that the Great Synagogue was where he served. Then there are those who claim that this name belongs not to the shamash but to the man who got involved with the him. I, who know only the names of the men who served as shamash in the ten generations before I left my hometown, cannot make this determination. I can only tell the story. Besides, the name itself is immaterial to what follows, even though it is known that a person’s essence, not to mention the incarnations through which his soul passes, can be discerned in his name. Let me, then, put aside what I cannot explain and relate what I do know.

A wealthy man from the upper crust of our town took as his son-in-law a learned young man from a prominent family. The boy was skilled at advancing all kinds of novel interpretations of our holy texts, even when their meanings were already transparent. In fact, sometimes, in his encounter with a text, he would pronounce his own interpretation before he had even digested its plain sense. I refer here not to the nature of his insights but to the fact that his eagerness to propose them overrode any capacity he had for self-restraint. That is the gist of this tale, and the details now follow.

One Sabbath, while the Torah was being read, he was sitting in his regular seat against the eastern wall of the synagogue, a prestigious place that his father-in-law bought for him from an old man who had emigrated to the Land of Israel. A Bible with commentaries was in his hands. The reader was chanting from the scroll and the entire congregation was sitting in rapt attention listening to the words of the Torah, when the young man had a brilliant new ḥidush on that week’s Torah portion or on one of its commentaries. He raised his talit over his eyes, leaned over to the man sitting next to him, and shared his ḥidush with him. The latter looked at him dumbfounded, stunned that someone dared to talk during the Torah reading. As if the words of a mere mortal were superior to those of the living God.

Do not wonder at that man’s astonishment, because in our town there was absolutely no talking during the service and certainly not during the Torah reading. From the moment the Torah scroll was opened until the reading of the weekly portion was concluded everyone strained to listen and concentrated so as to catch every word that issued from God Himself. The elders of that time, going by what they had heard from their fathers, and their fathers from their fathers, said that their forebears would never interrupt the Torah reading even to congratulate the person who had just been called up to the Torah. Three times a year, however, on Passover, Shavuot, and Sukkot, after the Yizkor memorial service, the senior member of the congregation would take the Torah scroll in his arms and one by one everyone would come up and tell him his name, his father’s name, and the amount he would contribute. The elder would bless that person and his household and there would be no mention of money. Contributions were brought after the festival. In later times, when expenses increased, they started doing this on every Sabbath, but again, money was never mentioned in the presence of the Torah scroll. Then later, when the number of donors who wanted their charitable intentions made public increased, every penny that had been pledged or contributed would be announced. And then even later, when expenses for nonessential items increased, like the fees for cantors who showed off their vocal talents and turned the prayers into ridiculous performances, all prior restraints were removed, and they would stop between sections of the Torah reading to bless both the one who was called up and the person he instructed the gabbai to bless. Soon they began to exceed the regular number of seven people called up to the Torah, until the Torah readings were sliced up like olives. Eventually things reached the point where there was not only jealousy and enmity among the honorees but insult and invective.

So there sits our young scholar during the Torah reading when he gets this new insight into the Torah portion. He leans over to the man sitting next to him and regales him with his discovery. The shamash sees this and throws him a look of rebuke. When this is ignored the shamash gives him a wrathful look. When the talking does not stop he thumps his middle finger with a “Nu! Nu!” When this has no effect the shamash thumps his finger again in order to silence him. When this has no effect he steps down from the bimah, walks over to the eastern wall, grabs the young man by the arm and ushers him out of the synagogue.

The town was in an uproar. Never in the whole history of Buczacz had anyone embarrassed another person in such a holy place, much less ejected him from it. Certainly no lowly shamash had ever done that to a Torah scholar, especially one from a prestigious family and the son-in-law of a local grandee to boot. And even though everyone knew that the shamash had acted for the sake of Heaven, the consensus was to fine him and even to dismiss him from his position.