The Parable and Its Lesson: A Novella (26 page)

A reading of
The Parable and Its Lesson
in the context of the larger project of
A City in Its Fullness
shows us the difference between Holocaust literature and Jewish literature provoked by the Holocaust. By their very nature, Holocaust fiction, memoir and testimony, whether in words or video images, focus on the war years and their aftermath. Only in some cases is memory pushed back to the generation of the parents or the grandparents, and then often in the service of shaping a family idyll that is subsequently shattered. For Agnon, the spiritual power of European Jewry, now after its utter eradication, lay farther back in time, much farther than human remembrance can reach. We must therefore rely on the literary imagination and the protean powers of the story, as told in Hebrew, the historical language of the Jewish people, to enter the world that was lost.

NOTES

1
. Gershon Shaked,
Shmuel Yosef Agnon: A Revolutionary Traditionalist
(New York: New York University Press, 1989).

2
. Jerusalem: Schocken, 1973. The title is a phrase from the Hebrew Bible, but where it comes from is less simple than meets the eye. The only location where the exact phrase is found is in a stinging prophecy of condemnation against the Northern Kingdom in Amos (6:8): “My Lord swears by Himself: I loathe the Pride of Jacob, and I detest its fortresses. I will declare forfeit city and inhabitants alike [
‘ir umelo’ah
]” (JPS). The word
umelo’ah
itself is most familiar from the declarative opening line of Psalm 24, the coronation hymn sung in the synagogue when returning the Torah to the ark on holidays. There
umelo’ah
occurs in a bound phrase with
erets
: “The earth is the Lord’s and the fullness thereof” (King James). That bound phrase
erets umelo’ah
occurs another eight times in Scripture. Since Agnon’s evident purpose in this book is to elevate and sanctify the name of his town, he can hardly mean us to think about the corrupt and condemned city of Amos’ prophecy. By a barely perceptible sleight of hand, Agnon has taken the familiar ecstatic pronouncement about the earth and the fullness thereof and substituted city for earth; all the while we assume—both correctly and mistakenly—that he has simply plucked and transcribed a piece of Scripture. The point of the maneuver is to emphasize that it is a city,
his
city, that he has come to extol. Whereas the psalm famously declares that the earth and its fullness are the Lord’s, whether the same goes for the city that has been substituted for the earth is not as clear.

3
. Quoted in Edward Said,
On Late Style: Music and Literature Against the Grain
(New York: Vintage, 2006), p. 8.

4
. Arnold Band,
Nostalgia and Nightmare: A Study in the Fiction of S. Y. Agnon
(Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1968), pp. 330–366.

5
. Among the most important of these are
Beḥanuto shel mar Lublin
,
‘Ad henah
,
Kisui hadam
,
‘Ad ‘olam
,
Eido veEinam
, and
Hadom vekhise
.

6
. A select list of critical reactions to the book when it appeared includes Yehudah Friedlander, “Masekhet shivah ufreidah” [Return and Leave Taking],
Ha’aretz
, June 1, 1973; and “A City and the Fullness Thereof,”
Hebrew Book Review
(Tel Aviv), Autumn 1973, pp. 3–6; Hillel Barzel, “‘
Ir umelo’ah
: ‘uvdah uvedayah” [Ir umeloah: Fact and Invention],
Yediyot Aḥaronot
, September 26, 1973; Yaakov Rabi, “Hatorah, ha’emunah, vemirmat hatsedaqah” [Torah, Belief, and the Dishonesty of Charity], ‘
Al Hamishmar
, October 12, 1973; Yisrael Cohen, “Haḥavayah ha’arkhtipit shel ‘
Ir umelo’ah
” [The Archetypal World of ‘
Ir umelo’ah
],
Moznayim
, Vol. 28, Nos. 1–2 (Dec.–Jan. 1973–74), pp. 61–73; A. Y. Brawer, “‘
Ir umelo’ah
: ‘olam shene‘elam” [‘
Ir umelo’ah
: A World That Disappeared],
Ha’umah
, April 1974, pp. 246–253.

7
. Dan Laor,
Ḥayyei ‘Agnon
[A Life of Agnon] (Jerusalem and Tel Aviv: Schocken, 1998), p. 408.

8
. The story began as a fragment, also called “Hasiman,” which appeared in
Moznayim
(Iyyar/Sivan [May] 1944), p. 104. The full story, with its forty-two sections, appeared in S. Y. Agnon,
Ha’eish veha‘eitsim
(Jerusalem and Tel Aviv: Schocken, 1962), pp. 283–312. Translated by Arthur Green in Alan Mintz and Anne Golomb Hoffman (eds.), S. Y. Agnon:
A Book That Was Lost: Thirty-Five Stories
(New Milford, CT: Toby Press, 2008), pp. 397–429.

9
. I have argued this point in my
Ḥurban: Responses to Catastrophe in Hebrew Literature
(Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 1996).

10
. For an expansion of this theses, see chapter 2 (“Two Models in the Study of Holocaust Representation”) in my
Popular Culture and the Shaping of Holocaust Memory in America
(Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2001).

11
.
Abyss of Despair
(
Yeven metsulah
), trans. Abraham J. Mesch (New York: Bloch, 1950).

12
. The narrator as a chronicler allied with the communal register was already employed to great advantage in Hebrew literature by Micha Yosef Berdichevsky. See the story “Parah adumah” in
Kitvei Mikhah Yosef Bin-Gurion (Berdichevsky)
(Tel Aviv: Dvir, 1975), pp. 181–184.

13
. The story originally appeared in
Haaretz
on September 14, October 5, and December 5, 1958.

14
. Literally in the Hebrew: the meat was still between his teeth and undigested. The reference is to Numbers 11:33, which describes the unrestrained cravings of the Israelites for meat. A more contemporary example would be Abraham Joshua Heschel’s celebration of East European Jewish piety in his
The Earth Is the Lord’s
(New York: H. Schuman, 1950).

15
. The pedagogical passion for fashioning a mode of communication that is precisely fitted to his listeners is made the subject of an anecdote, a mashal of sorts, about a Jewish jeweler who is summoned to create gold earrings for the king’s daughter and takes special pains to adapt the ornament to the exact proportions of her ear (414).

16
. Shulamit Almog argues that Rabbi Moshe does not make practical use of his eyewitness knowledge of Aaron’s death because he realizes that matters of Jewish law must be adjudicated according to evidence and procedures that are transparent and available to all. Despite the rabbi’s intense empathy for Zlateh, he knows that supernatural disclosures that he alone—together with the shamash—have been privy to cannot meet this standard of evidence. See Shulamit Almog,
‘Ir, mishpat, sipur
[City, Law, Story] (Tel Aviv: Schocken, 2002), pp. 78–82.

17
. Joshua Shanes, “Buchach,” YIVO Encyclopedia of Eastern Europe,
http://www.yivoencyclopedia.org/article.aspx/Buchach
; Martin Rudner, “Buczacz Origins,”
http://www.ibiblio.org/yiddish/Places/Buczacz/bucz-p1.htm
.

18
. Literally, the persecutions of 5408 and 5409.

19
. Shanes, ibid.

20
. This is a rich theme in Agnon’s corpus. At the conclusion of
Oreaḥ natah lalun
[A Guest for the Night] the keys to the study house of Buczacz, which has been decimated by World War One, are transferred to Eretz Yisrael. In the opening, foundational story of
‘Ir umelo’ah
(“Buczacz,” pp.9–13), the founding of the city is framed as a way station on an ascent to Eretz Yisrael that became permanent.

21
. For a responsible overview of these issues with representative texts, see Simcha Paull Raphael,
Jewish Views of the Afterlife
(Northvale, NJ: Jason Aronson, 1994), especially chapter 6, “Visionary Tours of the Afterlife in Medieval Midrash,” pp. 163–232.

22
.
Qetsat qasheh
, “a little difficult,” is a phrase that has its origins in the Tosafists’ commentary on the Talmud; it is used when the Tosafists find glaring contradictions or problems in Rashi’s commentary. It is a classic instance of understatement. Within a religious tradition based on the presumed authority of earlier teachers, the phrase is a delicate means of noting a major issue. See “Hasiman” [The Sign], 714, for an interesting parallel.

23
. The other outstanding example of the overall narrator handing over the narration to a narrator dramatized within the story is “Ha’ish levush habadim” [The Linen Man, 84–121].

24
. David Stern,
Parables in Midrash: Narrative and Exegesis in Rabbinic Literature
(Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1991).

25
. This is wonderfully dramatized in the story “Genizah” by Devorah Baron,
Parshiyot: sipurim mequbatsim
[Collected Stories] (Jerusalem: Bialik Institute, 1951), pp. 236–245. Also note to pp.424–425, where the shamash digresses on the rabbi’s championing the mashal as a homiletic tool superior to the rhetoric of reproach (tokheḥah). It is worth noting that the narrator intervenes immediately after this remark to point out that midrash collections were scarce in the rabbi’s time, whereas today all recognize the worth of the mashal. In the story “Hamevakshim lahem rav” in
‘Ir umelo’ah
, a letter of rabbinic appointment specifies the obligation to include aggadah and meshalim in public homilies in anticipation of an inclination of scholarly rabbis to speak only of matters of halakhah.

26
. In the very first story in
‘Ir umelo’ah
, “Buczacz,” the founding of the city is presented as resulting from an arrested pilgrimage to the Land of Israel.

GLOSSARY

Agunah
Literally a “chained woman”; a woman who cannot remarry because her husband will not grant her a divorce, or because the fact of his death has not been conclusively established.

Alfasi
Isaac Alfasi, eleventh-century talmudist active in Fez, Morocco.

Ashkenaz
The Jewish communities along the Rhine Valley in the tenth to thirteenth centuries that were formidable centers of Talmud study.

Av Beit Din
The head of a rabbinic court, usually the presiding rabbi of a community.

Avodah
Worship.

Beit din
Rabbinic court.

Beit midrash
Study house.

Bimah
A raised platform in the synagogue where the Torah is read.

Dayan
Judge in a Jewish court.

Etrog
A citrus fruit essential to the observance of the Sukkot festival; it is similar but not identical to a lemon.

Gabbai
A volunteer official who oversees the finances of a synagogue and directs the allocation of honors.

Gan Eden
Paradise (lit. the Garden of Eden).

Gehinnom
The Netherworld, Hell.

Haftarah
A portion from the Prophets read after the weekly reading from the Pentateuch on Sabbath mornings.

Halakhah
Jewish law and jurisprudence.

Havdalah
A ceremony, recited Saturday after sundown, using a candle, spices and wine, that separates the Sabbath from the weekdays.

Ḥidush
An interpretation that presents a new insight on a classic text.

Hoshana Rabba
The seventh day of the autumn festival of Sukkot.

Kaddish
Prayer of praise in Aramaic; also recited by mourners.