Two Scholars Who Were in Our Town and Other Novellas (2 page)

An attentive reader will notice the dual frequencies on which the story is broadcast and the contrast between the natural travel tale of the group versus the miraculous voyage of Hananiah who floats along “in the heart of the sea” atop his magical kerchief. For the full messianic symbolism of this ersatz “magic carpet” see Agnon’s short story “The Kerchief” (in
A Book That Was Lost
, Toby Press). Lask’s translation has been revised and newly annotated by this volume’s editor.

“In the Prime of Her Life”
(
Bidmi Yameha
) opens Agnon’s collection of “love” stories
Al Kapot HaMan’ul
(“At the Handles of the Lock”; cf. Song of Songs 5:5), and is in many ways the type of psychological love story favored by European realism of the time. Yet, like “
Tehilla
” (which concludes this volume) and “
Agunot
” (Agnon’s signature story, from which he drew his penname), it is a disturbed – and, in this case, disturbing – love. One wherein two souls bound or “chained” together (the root of
Agunot
and
Agnon
means “to be anchored together”) cannot actualize their love, with disastrous echoes reverberating into later generations.

Although Agnon crafted many fabulous female characters in his writing, this is a unique case of a first-person female narrator – the teenage protagonist, Tirtza Mintz of Szybucz, whose voice lends a youthful, even naïve innocence. Yet Agnon conceals from his reader the identity and gender of the narrator until we are a number of pages into the novella (consider the difficulty of doing this as artfully and seemingly effortlessly as he does given the gendered nature of Hebrew grammar!). When we do discover this fact, the reader of the Hebrew text takes note of the lyrical, Biblical Hebrew style of the story, a departure from Agnon’s typical Rabbinic mode. Presumably he does so to echo the elocution of a young girl in early twentieth-century Galicia, the setting for the story, for whom the Hebrew of the Mishnah and Talmud would have been less fluent. Gabriel Levin, in this translation, has done a masterful job of capturing the Biblical rhythms and cadences, so reminiscent of the Book of Ruth (look out for parallels in content and theme as well as style). It is precisely these lyrical weavings of text and master-text, of the modern tale with its Biblical templates, which give this tale of love lost and found its emotional and psychological depth and complexity. The degree to which the reader trusts Tizrta as a reliable narrator of her own unconventional love story will inevitably determine his or her understanding of the whole story. Staking a position in this matter becomes all the more urgent upon reaching the surprising ending and discovering the setting from which Tirtza’s account has been narrated.

Israeli novelist A.B. Yehoshua, commenting on “In the Prime of Her Life”, suggests that it exemplifies Agnon’s ability to bring to life and demonstrate for the reader the complex sub-conscious of his characters. This is what draws us in as readers, and what draws us back again in the ongoing, interpretive endeavor surrounding these stories. Amos Oz has called this novella the “bedrock of modern Hebrew literature” (the interested reader will find echoes of “In the Prime of Her Life” in Oz’s novel
My Michael
; see also chapter 11 of his autobiography,
A Tale of Love and Darkness
).

The story, first published in the journal
HaTekufah
in 1923, also serves as a prologue of sorts to Agnon’s great novel
A Simple Story
(1935; translated by Hillel Halkin, Toby Press revised edition, 2013), in which our characters exist in the liminal outskirts of that work’s plot. “In the Prime of Her Life” sets patterns of Jewish star-crossed love which Agnon expanded on in
A Simple Story
and throughout his entire collected writings.

“Tehilla”
, perhaps Agnon’s most beloved tale, explores righteousness, repentance, redemption, reward and punishment. The story is set in the Old City of Jerusalem, and, although exact dates are never explicitly stated, based on some internal evidence, and the fact that the unnamed narrator shares many biographical similarities with Agnon himself, we can establish that the action unfolds between the Fall of 1924 and Spring 1925 (see timeline appended to the story’s annotations). However, the emotional force of “Tehilla” comes through the long narrated backstory, in which the 104-year-old title character tells us her tragic life story, going back to events as early as the 1820s.

While not apparent from the first half of the novella, “Tehilla” is also a love story, although a decidedly Agnonian love story – there’s no chance for a happy ending. Like so many of his descriptions of love interrupted (again, most especially “In the Prime of Her Life”), it is a tale of a disturbance in first love which haunts subsequent generations. But in “Tehilla” that disturbance is precipitated by the lamentable hatred between Jews (in this case the historic clash between Hassidim and their opponents), leading to a century of suffering. What makes Tehilla so remarkable is her capacity to transcend this suffering. Indeed, the source of her longevity may very well be the century-long attempt to rectify past misdeeds. Tehilla embodies a type of faith all-too unfamiliar to us moderns, certain that she lives in a deterministic world yet still tasked to act as a free agent, responsible for her actions. If her story is a tragedy it is a decidedly Jewish one, and she reminds us of Nietzsche’s quip that “The Greeks blame the gods, the Jews blame themselves.”

“Tehilla” is also a love story for the Old City of Jerusalem; that Old Woman, who had been living within its walls since before any settlement had been constructed in New Jerusalem, i.e. since before 1860, is herself an embodiment of the Holy City. When Agnon describes her in 1950 (in lines which are among the most famous in all of Hebrew literature) as “Righteous she was, and wise she was, and gracious and humble too: for kindness and mercy were the light of her eyes, and every wrinkle in her face told of blessing and peace” – he was very likely describing the Old City, its inhabitants, society and life, which had only recently been destroyed and barred to Jews with the division of Jerusalem in 1948. “Tehilla” is a lamentation for Jerusalem, as a place and as an idea, embodied in the life of one remarkable woman.

If we consider how these two themes – internecine strife amongst Jews and the loss and destruction of Jerusalem – intersect, we hear the words of the Sages being whispered to us by Agnon from between the lines of “Tehilla”: “The Holy Temple was destroyed because of baseless hatred…” (Yoma 9b).

The Hebrew story appeared first in
Me’asef Davar
(1950) and was subsequently collected in Agnon’s
Ad Henah
. Translators of Agnon are always torn between a more literal and a more lyrical rendering. This revised version of Walter Lever’s translation leans toward the latter preference, while a parallel version by I.M. Lask (which appeared in
Tehilla and Other Israeli Tales
, 1956) was more literal. For those who cannot grapple with the original Hebrew yet want a richer reading of this profound text, engaging with both translations would be an interesting experiment in understanding how translators balance the tension between the words of a text and its spirit.

The annotations, which follow each novella, are intended to aid the reader who wishes to more fully experience the profundity of Agnon’s writing which is so hard to capture in translation, namely: the manner in which he distilled the language and lore of the Mishnah, Talmud, Midrash, together with the medievalists and Hassidic masters – all recast in the form of modern literature. To explore the intertextual Agnonian matrix is to enter a world of pseudo-Midrash, one which is no mere literary device, but the “very source of his creativity, perhaps its main subject,” according to the Israeli critic Gershon Shaked. “To a greater degree than that of any other writer in modern Hebrew literature, Agnon’s work is based upon intertextual connections.”

Similarly, the notes provide some background on various Jewish rituals, phrases or concepts, which Agnon assumed his Hebrew readers would have been familiar with as a matter of course. (That this may no longer be the case, even for native Hebrew speakers, is a sad commentary on contemporary cultural literacy in the Jewish State, and presumably part of the reason why Agnon and the other Hebrew classics get whittled away each year from school curricula and chain-store bookshelves.) However, because reading Agnon in any language is meant to be first and foremost an aesthetic-literary experience, we have not inserted endnote references into the text itself.

I am grateful to Paul Pinchas Bashan, Gabriel Levin, and Rhonna Weber Rogol, the living translators of two of these four stories, for their creativity and cooperation with this project. Paul and Rhonna’s new translation of “Two Scholars Who Were in Our Town” is a particularly welcome addition to the Agnon bookshelf as it is long overdue and has been one of his most important works unavailable in English until now. Their collaboration as translators, which was initiated by Rhonna with the encouragement of Prof. Nehama Aschkenasy, of the University of Connecticut (while discussing the influence of this story on the recent Israeli film, “Footnote”), is a hopeful sign for Jewish and Hebrew high culture in the United States.

The commitment of The Toby Press to continue publishing Hebrew classics in superb English translations is the personal vision of our publisher, Mr. Matthew Miller, and the animating force behind The Toby Press S.Y. Agnon library. I thank him and my colleagues at Toby – Tani Bayer, Tomi Mager, and especially Gila Fine. Various friends and teachers have been particularly supportive, encouraging, and helpful with different aspects of my ongoing engagement with S.Y. Agnon, and I am pleased to single out Avraham and Toby Holtz, Yoel Kortick, Alan Mintz, Avi Shmidman, and especially Ariel Hirschfeld. The friendship, advice, and
havruta
of James S. Diamond
z”l
is sorely missed. My own understanding of the stories in this volume, and many others in this series, has been greatly enhanced through the phenomenal privilege of teaching regularly at the Agnon House in Jerusalem (and via
www.WebYeshiva.org
/Agnon), and I am grateful to the many students I have encountered there and online, as well as to the staff of that great institution, and to its director, Oreet Meital.

Jeffrey Saks
Editor, The S.Y. Agnon Library

The
Toby Press

Two Scholars Who
Were in Our Town

“Reb Shlomo was standing and sermonizing and his voice was like that of the humble nightingale on a summer night.”

Illustration by Avigdor Arikha for
Kelev Hutzot

1.

THREE OR FOUR GENERATIONS AGO
, when Torah was beloved by Israel and the entire glory of a man was Torah, our town was privileged to be counted among the most notable towns in the land on account of its scholars, who endowed our town with a measure of grace through the Torah that they learned. It goes without saying that Torah had already found pleasant enough accommodations among the elders of our old study house, yet the other study houses that had been built one after another
enhanced wisdom even more. And even in the marketplaces and the roads of our town study fulfilled the verse
“Wisdom calls aloud in the street, she raises her voice in the public squares.” And if people stood around in the marketplace, appearing to haggle with one another over questions of real estate and loan collection and dissolution of partnerships and financial compensation and so on, they weren’t really arguing over the monetary issues themselves, but rather about the laws pertaining to them in
Hoshen Mishpat. And even those who filled their buckets at the well, used to fill their hearts with words of Torah. Particularly noteworthy was the new
Kloyz, which from the
fifteenth of the month of Av until the seventeenth of Tammuz never once shut its lights at night. This was the very same Kloyz for which one of the rich men of the town had dedicated space in his courtyard, to ensure that the residence would continue to belong to his lineage throughout coming generations, inasmuch as any dwelling that has a holy place dedicated to Torah and prayer remains in the hands of the family, from generation to generation, for eternity. But, let us now leave aside these matters that will not reappear until the arrival of the Redeemer and tell a little something of what our elders used to tell, about two great scholars who were in our town back in the days when everyone made Torah the essence of their being, because they understood that the saying “the
joy of the Lord is our Fortress” refers to the Torah.