Two Tales: Betrothed & Edo and Enam (28 page)

Yaakov Saphir (1859)

132. And He is merciful / Psalms 78:38; introductory verse to the weekday evening prayer, not generally recited on the Sabbath.

132. Nebuchadnezzar / Nebuchadnezzar II (c. 634–562 BCE), king of the Babylonian Empire, responsible for the destruction of the First Temple in Jerusalem, and forced exile of the Jewish tribes.

132. The young men carried a grinding mill / Lamentations 5:13 and Midrash Eikhah Rabbati 5:14. The motif of the stones “flying on high like wings” is present in Midrash Shir HaShirim 1:4.

133. He weakened my strength on the way / Psalms 102:24.

133. From Bashan I shall bring… / Psalms 68:23.

134. Happy is the people… / Psalms 144:15.

134. The Lord will reign / Exodus 15:18.

135. Rabbi Dosa…
El Adon
/ Early liturgical poem recited as part of the Sabbath morning service, ascribed here to Rabbi Dosa, whose name appears in acrostic.

135. Rabbi Adiel, who composed the hymn, “This people which Thou didst create…” / This does not appear to be an actual hymn, but likely a reference to Adiel Amzeh, the protagonist of Agnon’s novella
Ad ‘Olam
(“Forevermore”); his last name, Amzeh (“this people”), being a reference to Isaiah 43:21.

139. Rabbi Alshikh… whether a man is judged every day / R. Moshe Alshikh (1508–93, Safed) was a prominent kabbalist and Bible commentator. The debate about daily vs. yearly judgment appears in Rosh Hashanah 16a.

140.
Concise Shulhan Arukh
/
Kitzur Shulhan Arukh
, guide to practical
halakhah
by Rabbi Shlomo Ganzfried (1804–86, Hungary).

140. Judah Halevi / Spanish Jewish physician and philosopher (c. 1075–1141), considered one of the greatest Hebrew poets, both for his religious and secular poems, many of which appear in present-day liturgy. His greatest philosophical work was
The Kuzari
.

S.D. Luzzato

140. Luzzato / Samuel David Luzzatto (1800– 65) was an Italian Jewish scholar, poet, and a member of the
Wissenschaft des Judentums
movement.

144. He who knows his place / Cf. Avot 6:6.

146. And a word was secretly brought to me… / Job 4:12.

148. Sukkah / An outdoor booth or hut for the seven-day Sukkot festival, see Leviticus 23:42.

148. The palm of a hand reached out / Cf. Ta’anit 29a, description of the metaphorical Divine hand reaching out to grab the Temple keys as it burned – a scene similarly played out on a rooftop.

150. The law of Moses and of Israel / From the traditional formula of the Jewish marriage vow.

150. The moon went her way… / Cf. Yerushalmi Rosh Hashanah 1:4 (58a).

150. Samaritan / Descendants of the sect of converts (described in Kings II 17:24), whose conversion to Judaism was questioned then subsequently rejected by Rabbinic Judaism. Fewer than 1,000 Samaritans remain in Israel today.

150. Giv’at Shaul / Neighborhood at the western entrance to Jerusalem, established in 1906.

150. Gvilan /
Gvil
is the Hebrew term for parchment.

150. Gagin / Rabbi Chaim Avraham Gagin (1787–1848) was a noted Jerusalem kabbalist who was responsible for saving the Samaritan community from a potentially fatal persecution at the hands of Ibrahim Pasha of Egypt in 1831. The dates of this Gagin cannot align with our story, but Agnon may be trying to work in some connection here.

151. Behold that which I have seen… / Ecclesiastes 5:17.

151. Behind the back of the world / Bava Batra 25a.

152. Going to the south, turning to the north, turning turning / Ecclesiastes 1:6.

155. Charity saves from death / Proverbs 10:2 and 11:4.

155. Mount of Olives / Site of an ancient Jewish cemetery to the east of the Old City of Jerusalem.

Mount of Olives funeral procession (c. 1900), with view of Old City walls

Afterword by Robert Alter

Agnon’s Symbolic Masterpieces

W
hen the two tales that comprise this volume were first published in translation, only months before S.Y. Agnon’s receiving the 1966 Nobel Prize in Literature, only two other volumes of his were available in English. Those works,
The Bridal Canopy
and
In the Heart of the Seas
, are so intricately layered with the lore of Jewish tradition that they surely lay outside the imaginative grasp of most American readers. With the appearance of
Two Tales
nearly fifty years ago, readers were able to sample the more modernist phase of Agnon’s varied yet deeply unified enterprise, coordinate products of his experiments in symbolic narrative during the 1940s and ‘50s. That this volume’s two long stories appeared at the moment that the Swedish Academy helped bring world attention to a Hebrew writer in Israel (still the only such decorated Israeli author), helped readers of Agnon in English more fully appreciate the range and variety of his canon.

My own assessment of these stories, both when they appeared and now upon reexamination a half century later, can be stated quite simply: they seem to me to be among the more remarkable short symbolic fictions written anywhere during the twentieth century. In both, the element of storytelling is finely managed, an artful leisureliness alternating with the evocative narration of tensely dramatic moments. As a result, one can be intrigued by the stories without having altogether fathomed them, but an awareness of their symbolic dimensions does a great deal to illuminate the nature of Agnon’s art, and so I would like to offer here some brief commentary on the symbolism of “Betrothed” and “Edo and Enam” in the hope it will help establish a useful perspective for thinking about these
Two Tales
.

The two stories appear to be striking contrasts to one another but in fact they are perfect complements – two different faces of the same profound spiritual malaise. “Betrothed,” the first of the stories, is set in Jaffa early in the twentieth century: it seems to be a more or less realistic tale (though the realism is breached at points), with seemingly romantic trappings, about two childhood friends who take a vow of eternal love in a Viennese garden and come to fulfill their pledge years later on the sands of the Mediterranean in the Land of Israel.

On the other hand, the events of “Edo and Enam,” which takes place in Jerusalem after the Second World War, call attention repeatedly, even bizarrely, to their own status as imaginative inventions: the names in the title refer to two supposed ancient cultures, in the discovery of which the lives of the principal characters are implicated; magic charms and mystic lore play central roles in the story; and, as if to remind us that the world of this tale is founded in the privacies of its author’s imagination, Agnon assigns all the characters, and even most of the places mentioned, names beginning with either
‘ayin
or
gimmel
, the first two letters of his own last name.

In all these differences, the two stories merely offer alternative symbolic images and alternative modes of fiction for the same general phenomenon – an attempted and failed relationship with the past. In “Betrothed” it is a personal past that implies a large cultural past as well, in “Edo and Enam” a cultural past that consumes the lives of individuals.

Gideon Ginat, the enigmatic figure to whom all the main characters of “Edo and Enam” are drawn, is a scholar who has unearthed the Enamite Hymns, in which one can hear “the reverberation of a primeval song passed on from the first hour of history through endless generations.” Jacob Rechnitz, the protagonist of “Betrothed,” might appear to pursue a more prosaic line of scientific research as a marine biologist, an investigator of seaweed, but we are reminded of Ginat upon learning that Rechnitz’s passion for the plants of the sea began when he heard the surge of the ancient deep in the poetry of Homer and had a vision of the sea as the place “where the earliest ancestors of man had their dwelling.”

In both cases, moreover, the attraction of the primeval past is, in a peculiar way, erotic. The key to the enigma of prehistory reaches Ginat through the agency of a hauntingly beautiful woman named Gemulah, the only daughter of a Jewish chieftain whose people has been forgotten in a hinterland of geography and time. Jacob Rechnitz often thinks of the sea in the language of human passion: “My orchard, my vineyard, he would say lovingly,” echoing a metaphor of the Biblical Song of Songs for woman’s sexual treasure.