The text is built on a series of ambivalences: Exile as a homeland versus the national Homeland as an exile; Jaffa versus Jerusalem; the liberated Sonya versus the Orthodox Shifra; subconscious drifting versus the dominant ideology of the collective Will, and so on. Actions and events “happen” to him, though usually he intended the opposite; and the motivations for those actions are always overde-termined, leaving the reader puzzled about which system of values is decisive.
But after several clues, planted yet unnoticed by the reader, there comes the powerful twist and the novel soars to Surrealist-Kafkaesque dimensions. Isaac playfully drips paint on a stray dog, writing “Crazy Dog” on his back in Hebrew. The dog Balak takes over the story: wherever he appears, he wreaks havoc, creates panic, and gets pelted with stones. Shifra’s father is terrifi into a stroke, and Balak has to fl into exile, to non-Jewish neighborhoods, where the Hebrew inscription on his back is illegible, and thus the dog becomes the embodiment of Exile. On the other hand, running around the city, he
serves as the reader’s guide to the precise geography and history of the neighborhoods and housings of Jews from various countries in early twentieth-century Jerusalem. The exuberant descriptions of Balak’s predicament are among the most powerful chapters in the novel; the dog has been interpreted as an allegory of Jewish Exile, as Isaac’s erotic projection, as the embodiment of the irrational, demonic force that subverts all Enlightenment rationality, as a guide to Jerusalem, and as a satire of its outlandish Orthodox society, as a Kafkaesque parable and a Surrealist vision; and he is probably all of those combined. Persecuted without understanding why, Balak really does go mad, and eventually bites his patron Isaac, who dies of the venom.
It was impossible for Isaac to stay in the fossilized religious world of Eastern Europe, which had come to a dead end and was abandoned by his peers; but, filled to the brim with a universe of codified discourse, it became impossible for him to live a normal, secular life. In the end, the improbable and irrational return to the outer reaches of Orthodox society was an anti-utopian move, a dead end, destined to fail, too.
In his tongue-in-cheek, “naïve” voice, Agnon takes on the great themes of Modernity in European literature from the most marginal margin possible. The Jews seemed absurd and alien in Christian Europe; they were further marginalized when they procreated and multiplied, according to the biblical commandment, and filled up hundreds of small towns that had been passed over by modern capitalism. The Zionists who called for an exit from Exile were actually marginal in Jewish society; and the “realizing” Zionist, who in fact carries out their ideals, was a mock-hero even in their own eyes. From the petit-bourgeois decency of Austro-Hungary, which had granted the Jews equal rights, and their beloved Kaiser Franz-Josef, Isaac went to that backward country, the decadent, despotic, and corrupt Ottoman Empire, and to its most marginal province, Palestine, where the Jews were doubly marginalized: by the Turkish governors and by the Arab majority.
The pioneers of the Second
Aliya
landed in this situation, with their Socialist and Tolstoyan ideals of settling the land. They were marginal to the religious Jewish society in Eastern Europe,
which they fled, and were ostracized or feared by both the Orthodox Old Yishuv in Jerusalem and by the first wave of settlers in Palestine, the farmers of the First
Aliya.
Furthermore, the Second
Aliya
itself consisted of a few hundred Socialist-Zionist ideologically motivated bachelors, coming from the revolutionary ferment and anti-Semitic pogroms in Russia; while Isaac was a fuzzy-minded general Zionist, a Galician Jew, alien to their ideological fervor and erotic liberties. He drifted to the Orthodox society in Jerusalem, a “medieval” fossil, stuck away in a backward province of a decaying empire, a society with little productive labor (the ideal of his youth), living in poverty on the alms of the Distribution (given by the “societies” of their hometowns), and guarding the graves of ancient Jewish glory and the texts attached to those bare stones. The Old Yishuv was excluded from the new revival of the Land of Israel and excluded itself from the spoken Hebrew language and modern Hebrew literature. And Isaac was an alien intruder among them, too. It is hard to imagine a more exclusionary exile from all exiles.
Yet in all this historical specificity, some of the major themes of the twentieth century reverberate throughout the novel. They are not formulated in any ideological or philosophical manner, but are constantly evoked by this “naïve” witness and textual juggler. In a century that celebrated the Will and the will to power (Herzl’s re-sounding slogan: “If you will it, it is no dream”), Isaac is constantly led astray by encounters and circumstances, always turning up in the opposite place from where he set out to be, and it is impossible to as-certain whether it is predestination, God’s hand in the world, or blind and accidental fate that conducts this absurd existence. As Professor Boaz Arpali of TelAviv University put it, “The truths suppressed by the hero, the decisions he flees, the internal forces he shuns, knowingly or unknowingly or refusing to know, gather momentum in his soul throughout his life, and break out in the end, destroying both his soul and his life.”
2
2
Boaz Arpaly,
Masternovel: Five Essays on
Temol Shilshom
by S. Y. Agnon
[in Hebrew], Literature, Meaning, Culture 23 (Tel Aviv: The Porter Institute for Poetics and Semiotics, Tel Aviv University, Hakibbutz Hameuchad Publishers, 1998).
The first sentence of the novel begins in the name of a collective “us,” quoting the official Zionist line as an accepted fact, namely, that it was the fellows of the Second
Aliya
who brought our Salvation, our redemption from Exile. Indeed, in Hebrew,
Geula,
Salvation, is the opposite of
Gola,
Exile, locked in an interdependent binary opposition. It is the basic religious terminology, describing the timeless Jewish condition as Exile from their Homeland, to be re-deemed when Messiah comes; yet here the language was secularized and transferred to the historical and political views of Zionism, which believed it could be a human task, performed in our generation: “Like all our brethren of the Second
Aliya,
the bearers of our Salvation, Isaac Kumer left his country and his homeland and his town and ascended to the Land of Israel to build it from its destruction and to be rebuilt by it.” Etymologically, the word “homeland” (
moledet
) means “the land of your birth” and is used in Modern Hebrew literature as “fatherland” in the European sense. Thus, Tshernikhovsky’s famous poem “
HaAdam eyno ela
,” which takes part in a dialogue between the national Homeland and every Hebrew writer’s private homeland, like Tshernikhovsky’s own very concrete birthplace in the southern Ukraine, begins: “A man is no more than a little plot of land / A man is no more than a pattern of the land-scape of his homeland.” And that is the homeland Isaac Kumer abandoned for the sake of the abstract “Homeland” of the Jewish nation. He did it, as the popular song of the pioneers proclaimed:
Anu banu artsa livnot ulhibanot ba
—“Us,
3
we came to the Land to build it and to be rebuilt by it.” The notion was that, as the Land was neglected and desolate, so were the Jews in Exile; the pioneers going to the Land to work its soil would rebuild their own “Diaspora mentality” by rebuilding the land; they would create a New Man and a New Jew, not hovering in the air and living on air, as modern Jewish literature described him, but physically productive, with a straight back and mind, with roots in the soil.
3
In Hebrew,
banu
(“we came”) includes the past as well as the first-person plural; hence
anu
(“we”or “us”) is redundant and betrays the Russian or Yiddish thinking of its authors.
The centerpiece of this sentence is a verbatim quotation from God’s commandment to Abram (before he became Yahve’s Abraham), sending him out to the Promised Land. This is how Isaac, the naïve and wholesome Zionist, understood the biblical phrase: as an injunction to go to the Land on God’s mission. Yet what a terri-ble price to pay! As the King James Bible translated it: “Get thee out of thy country, and from thy kindred, and from thy father’s house, unto a land that I will shew thee” (Genesis 12:1). The double root
Lekh-lekho
(“Get going! Get out of here!”), with its drastic, harsh ring in the East European context, sounded as an expulsion, and in Jew-ish Diaspora semiotics (as opposed to religious dogma), the Torah portion, “Lekh-lekho,” became a synonym for expulsion. The last chapter of Sholem Aleichem’s
Tevye the Milkman
is called
Lekh-Lekho
(“Get Thee Out”) and describes the expulsion of the Jews from all Russian villages, even though they were born there. Quoting literally from the Bible and providing his own contemporary translation, as was the customary way of teaching Torah, Tevye tells Sholem Aleichem (in the original, the words in boldface are in He-brew, their translations are in Yiddish): “What weekly portion are you reading now? Leviticus? With us, it is a different chapter: the chapter of
Lekh-lekho.
”
Get thee out
—they told me—you must get out of here, Tevye,
from thy country
—from your own land,
and from your homeland
—from your village, where you were born and lived all the years of your life,
unto a land that I will shew thee
—wherever your eyes may carry you! . . .”
Agnon’s contemporary Marc Chagall used the same biblical text in his painting, “The Red Jew” (1915). One scholar in Jerusalem used the Zionist intepretation and read it as Chagall’s autobiograph-ical message: Chagall returned from Paris to his homeland Russia in 1914. But Chagall read the Bible through Sholem Aleichem and Yiddish folk semiotics, where “The chapter of
lekh-lekho
” means simply expulsion from your home. Indeed, in 1915, hundreds of thousands of Jews were expelled “within 24 hours” from their hometowns and many thousands came to Chagall’s Vitebsk. There is no trace of Russian Zionism or Chagall’s homecoming here: an Eternal Jew, his face as white as death, is about to get up and leave his town behind.
This was the duality of interpretation faced by Agnon: the overtly Zionist and optimistic ideology was subverted by a Diaspora reading. And interestingly enough, Agnon changed only one item: instead of “get thee out . . . from thy father’s home” (a sense of guilt that haunts him throughout the book), he says: “from his town,” the decaying town that was Agnon’s emblematic representative of Exile. As the language of the Bible betrays, Abraham was expelled to the Promised Land, and in many ways, so was Isaac Kumer.
And here is a link to the hero’s name. Agnon’s admired poet Bialik began his poem on the Kishinev pogrom of 1903 with:
kum lekh-lekho el ir ha-hareygo,
which in Hebrew means: “get up go thee to the city of slaughter.” Why get up? And why is a conjunction missing between the two verbs (I Chronicles 22:16 says: “arise therefore,
and
be doing”)? As the Hebrew critic Dov Sadan argued,
kum
here is in Yiddish (Bialik’s daily language): “come, let us go,” using the same biblical phrase,
lekh-lekho,
but this time he is told to come and see the city of slaughter. Agnon’s protagonist is called Kumer, the one who came—to fulfi the commandment
lekh-lekho,
go thee to the Promised Land. Instead of Bialik’s
kum lekh-lekho,
he heard
Kumer lekh-lekho.
But where did he go—to the Promised Land or to Bialik’s devastation? In an important respect, the book is a sacrifice of Isaac, performed by himself. When the book was published in 1945, before the establish—
ment of the State of Israel, in a patriotic Zionist atmosphere, the opening sentence would have been taken seriously, at face value. It requires a long journey through the novel to discover that the opposite is true. The heroes of the collective myth, the laborers of the Sec-ond
Aliya
, are exposed as disillusioned and embittered remnants of an ideal, though Agnon does pay them reverent lip service. On the contrary, Agnon shows wherever he can that the Orthodox Old Yishuv also expanded beyond the physical and symbolic walls of the Old City. He set out to write the great epic of the Second
Aliya
, but wrote a novel about the escape from it. As Dostoevsky intended to write in
The Brothers Karamazov
“The Life of a Great Sinner,” but didn’t get to it and wrote a long antinovel that is a mere preamble to what should (and probably couldn’t) have been written, so Agnon ended his book with a formulaic closure:
Completed are the deeds of Isaac The deeds of our other comrades, the men and the women,
Will come in the book,
A Parcel of Land.
Which, of course, he never wrote.
Amos Oz, in his rich and sensitive writer’s book about an admired writer,
4
makes it clear that Agnon’s mode lies in overdetermi-nation: every move, activity, or event is explained by so many motivations that none makes sense. He uncovers the ironies and contradictory subtexts behind the ostensibly naïve façade of Agnon’s style and argument. And he correctly places it all in the perspective of Agnon’s Exile/Fatherland dilemma. Thus, the introductory essay begins with a quotation from Agnon about himself, and Oz’s striking interpretation:
Because of that historical catastrophe when Titus the Roman Emperor destroyed Jerusalem and Israel was exiled from its land, I was born in one of the cities of Exile. But all the time I imagined myself as having been born in Jerusalem.
5
Those words, as all readers of Agnon know, are true. But, strangely enough, their opposite is also true. Had Agnon chosen to say: “Because of that historical catastrophe when East European Jewry fell apart, I became a Hebrew writer in Jerusalem. But I always saw myself as one who was born in one of the cities of Galicia and destined to be a rabbi there”—those words would also be true and right on target.