No Joke (24 page)

After an hour of standing in line at the bank, Chaim is furious. “I hate all this waiting!” he shouts to his wife.
“I'm leaving. I'm going to kill [Israel's first prime minister, David] Ben-Gurion.”

An hour later, he returns to the bank. “What happened?” asks his wife, who is still waiting in line.

“Nothing,” says the unhappy husband. “Over there the line was longer.”
⁶

Almost certainly imported from Russia, this joke tells us that Israeli joking started early and aimed right at the top. But it does not yet tell us anything about the
Jewishness
of Israeli humor.

Agnon, the country's most acclaimed writer, should have been able to calm from the start concerns over the prospects of Israeli humor. Born Shmuel Yosef Czaczkes in Buczacz, Galicia, Agnon ascended to the Land of Israel in 1909, left a few years later for a decade's stay in Germany, and returned to Jerusalem permanently in 1924. Developing an intricately playful way with fiction, he would forever tantalize his readers without actually handing over the key to his humor. His Hebraized name, taken from the title of his first published Hebrew story, “Agunot,” invoked the figure of an agunah, an abandoned wife or unconfirmed widow who by religious law cannot be released from her marriage. Yet what did this name signify? Was he, the loyal Jew, bound to a God who had deserted but never formally divorced him, or had God died (God forbid) but without due notification? Was the resulting indeterminacy to be borne as the existential human condition, or overcome through the return to Zion or some other means? No modern Jewish writer
ever drew from Jewish sources as freely or creatively as Agnon, yet as a modern artist he was always doing some mischief behind the assumed role of faithful scribe, passionate Zionist, and dignified Jew.

Shortly after the appointment of Hitler as chancellor of Germany in 1933, Agnon published
In the Heart of Seas
—a novella that perfectly demonstrates his curious amalgam of the serious and comic. The story charts the journey of a group of pious Jews from Buczacz to the Land of Israel at some unspecified time (identified by an assiduous scholar as circa 1825). Among the travelers, the author includes himself, who serves as resident storyteller to “sweeten” the trip—which may be likened to one of the roles that Agnon designed for himself within the Zionist movement. This anachronism is one of several challenges to the plain, historical-realistic level of the tale, whose characters also include Hananiah, a supernatural figure being conveyed to the homeland not in a ship but rather atop a kerchief. In brief, the voyage of a group of Jews from Europe to the Land of Israel is being accompanied by tradition (the storyteller) and faith (the name Hananiah translates as “favored by God”).

Herzl had responded to the crisis of anti-Semitism in Europe by founding the Zionist movement with the exhortation
Wenn ihr wollt, ist es kein Märchen
, “If you will it, it is no fairytale.” In full agreement with Herzl that Jews should reclaim their sovereignty instead of only continuing to imagine it, Agnon was nevertheless not prepared to slight the
Märchen
, without which the Jews would not have withstood the vicissitudes of exile. The book is Agnon's tongue-in-cheek rejoinder
to the solemnity of Herzlian Zionism, which was in danger of tossing its cultural heritage into the heart of seas. If Jews were going to return to Zion, they would have to bring along the fruits of their exile. And if the Bible and Talmud could no longer be counted on to sustain the Jewish people, the modern writer would have to create the kind of book that would.

Agnon's answer to the challenge in this multilayered work of fiction fully admits the incongruities of modern Jewish existence as he experienced them: fealty to an inscrutable God, rights to an inaccessible homeland, and proud membership in a people everywhere vilified and threatened. The same twists and inversions that characterize the best Jewish jokes constitute the very texture of the book. Hananiah recounts how Satan, in the guise of a Polish gentleman who invites the Jew into his carriage with the command
siadaj,
once tricked him into violating the Day of Atonement. Like the traditional Jew in many earlier Jewish satires, Hananiah does not understand the language of the local population and mistakes the Polish “be seated” for the holy name for God—Shaddai. Earlier Yiddish and Hebrew satirists, in mocking such misunderstandings, were deploring the preoccupation of Jews with otherworldly matters and their consequent inability to navigate the real world. But Agnon was no longer persuaded that Polish Jews
should
accommodate themselves to their Polish surroundings. Hananiah therefore punishes himself for the opposite error: being distracted from the Jewish timetable by an invitation into a nobleman's coach.

In the Heart of Seas
includes every kind of hardship and obstruction: separation from loved ones, storms at sea, sailing off course, material deprivation, and regrets and doubts that
impel divorces that then require remarriages. All this is to be expected, however, for Satan is bound to interfere with what the book declares to be the ultimate Jewish commandment:

Our men of good heart sat with their hands in their sleeves and looked out at the sea. When a man sits silent, it is assuredly a very good thing, since he is not sinning. This is particularly true when he is sitting in a ship that is going to the Land of Israel. Not only is he not sinning, but he is actually fulfilling a commandment, since he is going up to the Land of Israel; and that is a deed which is accounted as equal to the fulfillment of all the other commandments.
⁷

Agnon's childlike and contrarian “proof” for the preeminence of one commandment over all others mimics rabbinic exegesis while being based on rabbinic lore. The stiff English translation tries to capture the faux piety of the style. But the ancient rabbis would hardly have designated as supreme a commandment to sit silent on an Israel-bound ship, while the pioneering Zionists who were Agnon's first readers would have seen the idealization of such a sedentary “return to Zion” as outrageous. Agnon's hyperbolic and old-style reasoning for aliyah as the ultimate value is rather like James Joyce's use of the epic grandeur of Ulysses to parody the mundane affairs of an Irish Jew.

Jewish historical memory makes for similar shipboard comedy when the women try to account for their sense of déjà vu:

“I don't know what has come over me: for first I think that I have never seen such a lovely night, and then it
seems to me, on the contrary, I have already seen such a night, and the very things I hear now I have heard before. I know that is not so, yet I cannot be certain it is not so.”

To which her companion replied, “Perhaps we have already journeyed once before to the Land of Israel, and everything we have heard and seen here we heard and saw before on some other night.”

“In that case,” said the first, “why are we here and not in the Land of Israel?”

“My dear,” said the other, “we have already been there.”

“If we have already been there,” said the first, “how is it we are here?”
⁸

The circularity of this conversation—and there is more to it—may not approach Bud Abbott and Lou Costello's “Who's on First?” but its fun invites a less than reverential contemplation of the mysteries of exile and return.

Agnon's fable on the theme of returning to Zion recalls what his friend, the philosopher and scholar Scholem, said of another of his novels of this period: “Irony permeates the book from beginning to end.”
⁹
Once the travelers settle in Jerusalem, only the fabulous character Hananiah lives and dies in a state of holiness, while the mortals meet more and less dignified ends, including at the heel of a mule and by the hand of a disgruntled Arab. Unlike Hebrew writers who tried to strip away the older, allusive layers of their language to achieve a fresh, unburdened prose, Agnon exploited the palimpsest of modernity impressed over “tradition” or tradition impressed on modernity to create fiction almost as improbable as Jewish experience.

Agnon challenged the same assumptions of progress and worldliness that his fiction did when he appeared in Stockholm in 1966 to accept the Nobel Prize for Literature from the Swedish king:

It happened when the Swedish chargé d'affaires came and brought me the news that the Swedish Academy had bestowed the Nobel Prize upon me. Then I recited in full the blessing that is enjoined upon one who hears good tidings for himself or others: Blessed be He that is good and doeth good. “Good,” in that the good God put it into the hearts of the sages of the illustrious Academy to bestow that great and esteemed Prize upon an author who writes in the sacred tongue; “that doeth good,” in that He favored me by causing them to choose me. And now that I have come so far, I will recite one blessing more, as enjoined upon him who beholds a monarch: Blessed art Thou, O Lord, our God, King of the Universe, Who hast given of Thy glory to a king of flesh and blood. Over you, too, distinguished sages of the Academy, I say the prescribed blessing: Blessed be He, that has given of His wisdom to flesh and blood.
¹⁰

In the guise of a pious and humble Jew, Agnon got across in Hebrew (switching later to English “to save the time” of translation) that he, God's delegate, was there to bestow on the monarch more than it was in the monarch's power to grant
him
. No one could have accused him of chutzpah, yet those with understanding would have understood that Agnon was pulling rank in the name of the King of kings, using his littleness
to cast a shadow while showering respect on temporal authority as Jews had been doing for centuries.

At the other extreme of Agnon's subtle and erudite Hebrew humor was the
chizbat
, identified by the scholar Elliott Oring as the distinctive comic form of the Palmah, the underground army of the Jewish community in Palestine during the last years (1941–48) of the British Mandate. The Palmah (an acronym designating the “strike forces” of the Jewish militia) was made up of youngsters scarcely past adolescence who were charged with responsibility for protecting the country from increasingly violent Arab attacks and unsympathetic British overseers. The chizbat, from the Arabic for “to lie,” were topical tall tales or comic stories traded around a campfire for the entertainment of fellow fighters. Their apparent artlessness may confirm, for some, the notion that the sabra had no sense of humor:

Lulik, the squad commander of Ein ha-Horesh, was not a culture lover, but after the gang nagged him to death he agreed to lecture to them on the evolution of weapons. The fellows gathered in the tent and Lulik began, “The first man ate pistachio nuts. Then came the rifle.”

Or in this alternate version:

They came to one of the instructors, I don't remember his name, and said, “Listen. It's not possible that you teach only rifle, rifle, rifle. You need a little history, a little culture, a little sociology. You can't do with only rifle.
Recruits come to you and you start with rifle. Start with something from the Bible …”

He said, “O.K.”

When the recuits came he said, “In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth. Then came the rifle. Now this is the rifle.”
¹¹

This new self-mockery seems fully aware of its relation to the historically layered culture to which it is opposed—and from which it emerged.

Palmahniks took inverted pride in their distance from the Talmudic scholars and intellectuals who dominated the Jewish hierarchy in bygone days. Their job was to do what Jews, for all their sophistication, were never able to do. Hence their commanders get right to the point—whether of a joke or rifle. Putting distance between themselves and the convolutions of Yiddish humor, they specialized in the kind of aggressive deflation that typifies the humor of many another nation:

After the conquest of Eilat [in the War of Independence], Ben-Gurion arrived in the Aravah [the plain between the Dead Sea and Gulf of Aqaba] to survey the area. In every fortification they honored him with a parade, and he spoke to the soldiers. In one of the fortresses a platoon mustered for him, and Ben-Gurion, who stood on a small rise, began to prophesy: “Do you see this wilderness? There will be a forest here!”