A Book That Was Lost And Other Stories - Review

Studies in Short Fiction, Summer, 1997 by Mark Bernheim

A BOOK THAT WAS LOST AND OTHER STORIES by S. Y. Agnon. Edited with introductions by Alan Mintz and Anne Golomb Hoffman. New York: Schocken Books, 1995. 436 pages. $27.50.

In modern Jewish literature, S.Y. Agnon has long occupied a particular place. Undeniably the great Hebrew language craftsman of the century, this 1966 Nobel Laureate has been relatively inaccessible in the English-speaking world. Two other Nobel winners--I.B. Singer and Saul Bellow--are far more widely read and viewed as the voice of Yiddish literature on the one hand and explorer of besieged cultural values on the other. But Agnon, born Shmuel Yosef Czaczkes in 1888 in Galician Buczacz, then part of Austria-Hungary, and dead in 1970, may find his awaited audience in English more easily thanks to this handsome 1995 anthology bringing us twenty-five of his stories, many not previously translated, gathered from Agnon's long and varied lives in Poland, Palestine, Germany, and Israel.

Much credit should go to Professors Alan Mintz and Anne Golomb Hoffman; these Agnon scholars give us not an ordinary "Selected Stories of ..." but rather an engrossing tool for gaining serious understanding of Agnon's scope and achievement. The book divides into seven principal parts, plus a thorough Glossary of Terms used from Hebrew, extensive notes when needed for each story, and an excellent "Bibliographic Note" on previous Agnon translations, critical studies having already appeared, and sources for the Hebrew originals.

The seven parts are coherently structured for the reader: the editors choose to follow Agnon's migrations and relate them to each story. Before actually beginning to chart the author from Galicia to Palestine to World War I Germany, back to Palestine and eventually to Israel through the stories selected, Mintz and Hoffman present the rightly-famous early "signature" sketch "Agunot" (1908) from which Agnon later invented his own pseudonym. The term is well known to represent in Orthodox Judaism an abandoned wife who has lost all rights and must remain undivorced by the husband who will not free her, as is traditionally required. For Agnon, forever the outsider positioned among east European Orthodoxy, early Zionism, German assimilationism, and eventual Israeli identity as the literary lion of Jerusalem and greatest Hebrew writer of his day, this "Agunot" fits perfectly into his multidimensional self.

But note: the long introduction by both editors is, I found, a bit disjointed. One senses the two scholars jockeying for position and credibility, as the introduction stops and starts several times annoyingly, beginning with an analogy to Joyce and Faulkner (at least we are spared the familiar comparisons with Borges and Kafka for the most part) that is dropped much too soon to be really stimulating later on when the reader comes to the stories themselves. They are on safer ground with a historical overview of Agnon's connections with Gershom Scholem and Salman Schocken, and their interesting comments on Agnon's reluctance to deal with the Holocaust significantly in his fiction. Choosing the life histories of his vanished Polish culture rather than the death agonies of its inhabitants, they suggest, was his only solution to affirm life.

The editors' divisions propel us seamlessly from Tales of Childhood, to the Artist in the Land of Israel, to the Ancestral World, to Buczacz: from The Epic Life of One Town, to Stories of Germany, to The Search for Meaning. Mintz and Hoffman have selected and combined convincingly, in each chapter justifying the inclusion of each story with a brief gloss on the position it holds in Agnon's universe. Brief parables stand alongside longer works that even stretch occasionally to novella length.

My favorite? In the "Buczacz" chapter of tales from Galicia (and surely the reader will sense the voice of I.B. Singer and his Krochmalna Street characters from the childhood stories) we find the previously untranslated gem simply called "Pisces." I wanted ten times its forty-five pages: poignant and haunting, comically sardonic at points, "Pisces" follows the bizarre intersecting fates of a huge fish about to be devoured by one gross Fishl Karp, the town glutton and usurer whose voraciousness for this prize catch he has bought ultimately leads them both to ruin. Serious biblical allusions and themes stand alongside visually memorable mythic scenes, archetypes, and folklore. The novella runs along superbly on these various legs; if one reads nothing else, heaven forbid, by Agnon, this tale would assure great appreciation.

As for the title story, "A Book That Was Lost," the editors locate it roughly one-third of the way through the anthology, in the Palestine section. It too has tremendous resonance, telling of a precious rabbinical commentary that has been in transit--seemingly forever--from Galicia to the Holy Land. As Mintz and Hoffman relate,

   Not so much a story of the writer as a story of the writer's devotion to
   the town, "A Book That Was Lost" uses its narrative frame to construct a
   home for the lost book, the book that never makes it to the new national
   library of the Jewish people.... The story is as much a record of what has
   been destroyed or lost over the years as it is of Zionist achievement....
   It becomes the mission of the writer to record loss ... and thus to make a
   place for a traditional text in a new society, even if that "place"
   consists of the notation of its absence.