Only Yesterday (3 page)

The tragedy of Agnon’s vision lies in his perspicacity: long before the Holocaust, he saw the degeneration, ruin, and end of Jewish Eastern Europe; for him, there was no way back to the Diaspora. Yet, the

4
Amos Oz,
The Silence of Heaven: Agnon’s Fear of God,
translated by Barbara Harshav (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000).

5
S. Y. Agnon,
From Me to Me
[in Hebrew] (Tel Aviv: Schocken Publishers,

1976), p. 85.

Zionist vision he embraced was far from a secure conquest, and its champions were far from idealists. Agnon’s satirical view of the Makhersons and Makherovitches was relentless. There was no utopia in Agnon. But precisely for that anti-utopia in a utopian society, he could put the future in brackets and explore all problems of modernity in the fictional worlds of the past.

The quotations in the opening of the novel—from the Bible and from a pioneer song—are culled from Isaac’s consciousness. The narrator presents him and his mind in the third person, thus ei-ther being faithful to Kumer’s perceptions or creating an ironic distance, or both. Thus the narration is conducted on two levels in a Combined Discourse of the narrator and the hero’s focus. The narrator leads the text and the hero is the observer. The narrator appears with his Royal We, sometimes representing the Second
Aliya
or the Zionist revival and collective ideology, sometimes representing Isaac’s conscious or subconscious sensibilities, sometimes left alone with Isaac or serving as his voice, and always hovering just above him, yet shifting from reproducing his internal monologues to taking a distance and mocking him. Indeed, there is no specific person behind the “We,” but an empty slot of a grammatical first person plural, to be filled in as variously as the text allows. And the same “We” takes over the dog Balak’s consciousness in the second part of the book, interprets his innermost thoughts and observes him from the outside as well. There is no omniscient narrator here, for at every junction, the omniscience is suspended for the sake of a very focused point of observation: Isaac’s, above Isaac, or the dog Balak’s.

The fictional world of the novel is presented with very little concrete and descriptive material, but is rather reflected through Isaac’s responses to it. A constant stream of consciousness drifts through his mind, yet it is not consciousness that we are offered directly, but strings of quotations and formulaic, pious discourse. If ever there was a text so pervasively using what M. Bakhtin called “alien discourse” (what has later been renamed “intertextuality”), it is surely Agnon’s. Isaac has ready-made phrases, stories, anecdotes, and for-mulae for whatever his eyes encounter. And those are excerpted not just from the Bible and prayerbook, but from the immense Hebrew

library. But there is no distinction between religious and other sources: he uses the phrases and images of the most popular Zionist ideology (the image of the man with his plowshare) as well as official Austrian propaganda, stories of the marvels of Vienna as well as the exploits of the early pioneers in Palestine. It is not a stream of consciousness here, but a
stream of textuality:
consciousness takes a back seat to the mosaic of textual excerpts and patterns.

As witness to an apocalyptic event in Jewish history, Isaac Kumer is similar to the narrator in Kafka’s “Great Wall of China.” Kafka’s narrator is paradoxically both a simple laborer, ordered to do monotonous physical work on a national project, and a scholar of Chinese history, both within the process and above it in time. Isaac is both a simple house painter, even a simpleton who believes and understands anybody and everybody, and as learned a reader of the Hebrew library as Agnon himself. Yet all the use of traditional turns of phrases are not meant as specific allusions to specific texts, but rather serve as a stylistic layer which represents a textual culture, where the texts are preserved but their interpretations are shaken. Agnon’s Israeli reader, who does not know that library, certainly per-ceives it so. Moreover, many Hebrew phrases and words that look like quotations actually have a subtext from Agnon’s (and his character’s) first language, Yiddish. Thus, in Israeli Hebrew,
bitahon
means “security,” while in Yiddish it means quite the opposite: “you must have
bitokhn
” (the Yiddish pronunciation) means “to hope for the best” in a situation that is rationally hopeless, because the term derives from the phrase
betakh beHashem
—“trust in God” (rather than man).

In many ways,
Only Yesterday
is an abstract modern novel. From the beginning, reality is often not presented in individual situations and encounters, but in plural and in long catalogues. For it is not the external fact that constitutes the fictional world, but the sum-mary of such facts in Isaac’s mind, filled with categories and catalogues. When he leaves home, we are told: “Isaac parted from his fa-ther and his brothers and his sisters and all his other relatives and set out on the road.” But for all his guilt feelings, we are not told here the names of his brothers and sisters nor how many of them there were. Traveling on a train is most convenient for that purpose:

The train rolled on between villages and hamlets, cities and towns. Some were known for their great rabbis and others were known for their famous cemeteries. Some earned a name with the produce of their fields and the fruit of their trees, the fish in their rivers and the minerals in their mountains; and others earned fame with their poultry and livestock and other things in heaven and on earth. And yet other places have neither learning nor earning, but do have a Quarrel. Some sanctify the Name of the Holy-One-Blessed-Be-He with the Kedushah,
We shall sanctify You
, and others sanctify Him with
We shall bless You
, and they wrestle with each other and create a Quarrel. And another Quarrel, between Assimilationists and Zionists. The former want to be like all the other nations, and the latter want to be Jews, so they wrestle with each other and create a Quarrel. And yet another Quarrel, between those who want Salvation by miracle and those who want

a natural Salvation, so they wrestle with each other and create a Quarrel.

A neutral classifier summarizes his observations, takes no stand on the available options, and empties them of any concrete content. Yet between the lines, we learn about the futility of the Jewish Quarrels that devour Diaspora society and willy-nilly are introduced to the major theological issue of the book and of modern Jewish history: Is Salvation to be brought by a miracle or in the normal course of na-ture—all this in passing on a train through named or nameless towns and cities.

He arrives in the legendary capital of his Empire, Vienna, and has several hours of free time on his hands. But first he delivers a catalogue of all the remarkable places in the capital:

Isaac was all on his own and considered where he would go. Would he go to Leopoldstadt with its splendid synagogues whose beauty is unsurpassed throughout the world, or to the Prater, the joy of the whole city, or to the big house called Bunch of Grapes, or to their church that has

a clock where every single one of its numbers is more than two feet high, or to the library where the Book of Psalms is written in gold letters on red parchment, or to the Emperor’s palace, or to the Museum. Many were the things here that we heard about and now we can see them. And now we stand at the entrance of Vienna and we don’t know where we shall go or where we shall turn. Isaac stood a while, his mind flitting from place to place but his feet aren’t moving, for with so many things, his head is heavy and his feet are heavier than his head.

Even more remarkable is his hymn to the greatness of the Austrian Empire:

The train wound its way up, and wound its way down. High mountains flew by and snow lay on them, and even though Passover was already past, the snow didn’t budge. And so, Isaac sits and rides through the realm of Austria, that same Austria that rules over eighteen states, and twelve nations are subject to it. One and the same law for the Jews and for the people of the land, their well-being is our well-being, for the Emperor is a Gracious King, he protects all who take shelter with him, Jew and non-Jew alike. Her earth is lush and fertile and the produce of her land is greater than the need of her inhabitants. She is blessed with everything and knows no shortage. One land makes wheat and barley and rye and beans and lentils and oats and corn; and another land makes potatoes and fruit of the orchard. One land makes plums for confiture and Slivovitz, and another land makes hops for beer. One land makes wine and another land makes tobacco and flax, and all lands are full of livestock, animals, and birds. Some give milk and butter and cheese, and some give meat and wool and skins and feathers. One land produces horses, and another land chickens and ducks and swans, doves, and pheasants, and bees make honey and wax, and her lakes and rivers are filled with fish and her mountains with silver

and copper and tin and iron and lead for paint and salt mines, and coal and oil. And her forests make wood, and there are high mountains there, covered with eternal snow.

“Her forests make wood, and there are high mountains there, covered with eternal snow.” There are no specific names for trees, no specific places in the mountains. He does not use the realistic tech-nique of describing one of those provinces or talking to one person who may have boarded the train. We don’t even know which province produces what product. And more important, Isaac does not confront this paean with his Zionist ideology; if this Empire is so rich and Jews have equal rights in it, why is he going to that desolate Palestine?

The paucity of realistic details reflects both the relatively un-differentiated world of lower-class folklore and the Jewish Diaspora imagination, living in a fictional world of books, in a timeless Holy Land or Babylon, and not distinguishing between one tree and another or one mental situation and another. Nineteenth-century He-brew dictionaries translated the names of specific birds or trees as “a kind of bird” or “a kind of tree.” The great European fiction with its immense wealth of differentiated descriptive details of the physical world, nature, and civilization, as well as of states of mind, did not reach traditional Jewish society in Eastern Europe. The ways of re-solving this situation (aside from writing a derivative European novel) were ways of abstraction and textuality.

The great Jewish writers of the twentieth century responded to this period of transition from a medieval, traditional society, religious in its framework and codified in its forms of behavior—to the world of modern, secular Europe, with its individualism, centrality of consciousness, and historicity. It was not a move exclusive to Jew-ish society, but here it was telescoped into a very short period of one or two generations, and dramatized by both the internal textual tradition of this people and the external perils to their existence. Agnon, Sholem Aleichem, or Kafka evoked that fault line and gave it mythological forms. Sholem Aleichem knew he was not Tolstoy, that he could not describe aristocratic drawing rooms in exquisite

detail because the authentic Jewish world was the world of the small town, the so-called
shtetl,
poor in physical objects, whose inhabitants lived in an imaginary universe, a mishmash of folklore and snippets of learning. He diverted the level of concreteness from ac-tual events and their historical causes to the stream of speech of his garrulous protagonists. Even when a wave of pogroms washes over Russia, Tevye the Milkman says, “when they began talking about pogroms.” Thus Sholem Aleichem erected a fictional world in Yiddish, using the most authentic material of the Yiddish language: its associative, rambling talk, filled with proverbs, idioms, stories, and asides, and studded with shards of distorted quotations from the He-brew Library. Writing in Hebrew, Agnon mined the historical lay-ers of the written Hebrew language and created an illusion of textuality, using both phrases and anecdotes from the Library as well as syntactical patterns that imitated the traditional books. Kafka, on the other hand, lost both the talkative Yiddish and the Library of texts. In his fictional work, Kafka moved out of the Jewish domain, yet his
realia
was just as poor in concrete details. He too resorted to abstraction, used catalogues of items in plural and presented the significant discussions of the “system” (in
The Trial
) in abstract, ideological terms.

In all of them, the front narrative was trivial; the real, pro-found issues were presented not in telling examples, but in the deep background, in ideological discourse. What remains concrete on front stage is
diverted concreteness.
Tevye talks, K. moves from one corrupt abode to another, Isaac changes places and jobs, but such concrete situations serve merely as occasions for verbal speculations and evocations, raising the great questions of human existence, the “rules of the game” in God’s world, and the hierarchy of values or loss of them.

Thus, writing in Hebrew was not just a linguistic matter, but a resort to the totality of ways of seeing the world through the mountain of traces from a Borges-type of Library. That Hebrew Library en-tailed a panhistorical and transgeographical view of Jewish existence: it does not much matter where or when the characters were, the es-sential conception of the Homeland-Exile dichotomy remained eternal, until Salvation comes. There is very little here about any problems of the Ottoman administration or the Arab majority in Palestine, the Russian revolutions or technological advances, the building of Tel Aviv or the revival of Hebrew as a spoken language. Poverty in the most marginal marginality of Jerusalem under Ottoman rule also means exclusion from the technological age. Isaac’s escape from the workers of the Second
Aliya
also means escape from the age of ideology. Yet the traditional religious view did not allow for Salvation by human hands, for the Zionists’ “pushing the end”—thus, the im-passe is given, no matter what end it may take.

Furthermore, at first reading, the novel sounds like a naïve and meandering story about a naïve and drifting house painter, until it explodes with the Mad Dog (the French translation is even titled,
The Dog Balak
). From here on (at least), all rationality is thrown to the dogs. But we must leave this part to the reader.