Two Tales: Betrothed & Edo and Enam Read online

  Two Tables

  Betrothed

  Edo and Enam

  The Toby Press S.Y. Agnon Library

  Jeffrey Saks, Series Editor

  Books from this series

  A Book That Was Lost: Thirty-Five Stories

  To This Day

  Shira

  A Simple Story

  Two Scholars That Were in Our Town and Other Novellas

  Two Tales: Betrothed & Edo and Enam

  The Book of State: Agnon’s Political Satires (forthcoming)

  A Guest for the Night (forthcoming)

  The Bridal Canopy (forthcoming)

  And the Crooked Shall be Made Straight (forthcoming)

  In Mr. Lublin’s Store (forthcoming)

  Forevermore & Other Stories of the

  Old World and the New (forthcoming)

  Illustrated:

  From Foe to Friend & Other Stories by S.Y. Agnon

  A Graphic Novel by Shay Charka

  TWO TALES

  BETROTHED EDO AND ENAM

  S.Y.AGNON

  TRANSLATED FROM THE HEBREW BY

  WALTER LEVER

  NEWLY REVISED AND ANNOTATED BY

  JEFFREY SAKS

  WITH AN AFTERWORD BY

  ROBERT ALTER

  The Toby Press

  Two Tales

  by S.Y. Agnon

  Translated by Walter Lever

  Revised and Annotated by Jeffrey Saks

  © 2014 The Toby Press LLC

  These two stories are available in Agnon’s Hebrew volume

  ‘Ad Henah, part of the Collected Writings of S.Y. Agnon –

  Kol Sippurav shel Shmuel Yosef Agnon, © Schocken Publishing House Ltd

  (Jerusalem and Tel Aviv), most recent edition 1998.

  First English Edition © 1966

  Published by arrangement with Schocken Publishing House Ltd,

  an imprint of The Knopf Doubleday Publishing

  Group, a division of Random House, Inc.

  Unless otherwise noted, images accompanying annotations

  appear under Creative Commons License, CC-BY 2.0

  The Toby Press LLC

  POB 8531, New Milford, CT 06776–8531, USA

  & POB 2455, London W1A 5WY, England

  www.tobypress.com

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles or reviews.

  This is a work of fiction. The characters, incidents, and dialogues are products of the author’s imagination and are not to be construed as real. Any resemblance to actual events or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  ISBN 978-1-59264-356-1

  Typeset in Garamond by Koren Publishing Services

  Printed and bound in the United States

  Contents

  Preface

  by Jeffrey Saks

  BETROTHED

  Annotations

  EDO AND ENAM

  Annotations

  Afterword

  Agnon’s Symbolic Masterpieces

  by Robert Alter

  About the Author, Translator & Editor

  Preface

  As we near the fiftieth anniversary of the awarding of the Nobel Prize in Literature to S.Y. Agnon, Toby Press is pleased to issue this revised and newly annotated edition of Two Tales, which, when published in 1966 – the year he received the prize – was the first sampling of his “modern” stories made available in English.

  Although the product of the same period of creativity, the conjoining of the two stories in one stand-alone volume was a conceit of the English-language edition (in Hebrew they appear as part of a much larger collection, ‘Ad Henah). Nevertheless, the two stories are clearly in dialogue with one another, sharing elements of moonstruck sleepwalkers, disengaged academics, and the typically Agnonian unfulfilled love. On the other hand, the divergent tones of the two stories are remarkable when read side by side: “Betrothed” is set in a world of familiar reality (albeit with the intrusion of a surreal and indeterminate conclusion); “Edo and Enam” projects a dreamlike unreality, infused with mystery and mysticism, from beginning to end.

  “Betrothed” (the story’s title is more properly translated as “Betrothal Oath”; a promise to marry) was first published in 1943, and quickly became the subject of significant scholarly and critical debate. A childhood oath between Jacob and Shoshana, sworn at the edge of a Viennese garden pool (recall Biblical Jacob and Rachel’s well, Genesis 29), is reintroduced with force in their adult lives when they are reunited in Jaffa at the story’s outset. Set in pre-World War I Palestine, it is this reunion, after many years, and its conjuring of memories of childhood promises and pains, which drives the plot.

  Among the revisions to this edition is calling our heroine by her given name, Shoshanah. In the original translation, she had inexplicably been christened “Susan” – perhaps “Shoshanah” was considered too ethnic a name for mid-century American readers. This revision to the translation will hopefully allow the reader to sense some of the symbolism and word-play at work – Shoshanah meaning “rose” in Agnon’s most botanical of tales should not be a fact the reader can be allowed to overlook. (The precise meaning of “Shoshanah”, alternatively lily or rose depending on the layer of Hebrew one is speaking, is less important than the floral echo lent to the story.) Those familiar with Jewish liturgy will recall the line of the Purim song “Shoshanat Ya’akov tzahalah ve-samehah” – “Jacob’s rose rejoiced and was glad” – that is “The joining of Jacob and Shoshanah was a source for rejoicing and gladness” highlights the bitterness of the fact that, as Gershon Shaked has pointed out, the union of Jacob and Shoshanah does not seem to foster such joy. Or, as Dina Stern suggests in her unraveling of the story’s subterranean sources (or, in “Betrothed”, submarinal) – Shoshanah Ehrlich is the tragic incarnation of the heroine of Song of Songs: “My beloved has gone down to his garden, to the spice beds, to graze in the gardens and to gather roses. I am my beloved’s, and my beloved is mine, who grazes among the roses” (6:2–3).

  Dov Sadan pointed to “Betrothed” as proof that even Agnon’s stories that do not appear puzzling or enigmatic or deeply allegorical on the surface can still be interpreted as rich allegories – in fact they almost demand it. Nevertheless, the narrative accomplishment allows the work to function on the “revealed” level of surface reading (peshat, in the language of Biblical interpretation) while hiding a complex allegory underneath. Not for nothing did Shaked compare “Betrothed” to Oedipus, Sleeping Beauty, Hamsun’s Scandanavian provincial novels, and Roth’s Portnoy’s Complaint!

  On the other hand, “Edo and Enam” (first published in Fall 1950) is a story so enigmatic and seemingly inexplicable that it can hardly sustain a “simple reading” at all. While Arnold Band has inveighed against the unfortunate focus on its complexity, which “distracts the reader and critic from the aesthetic charm of the story,” we are still confronted with an exceedingly rich tale; rich in themes, symbols, allusions, and Agnon’s intertextualities, with an unusually heavy dose of kabbalistic resonances. (That being said, for the non-Hebrew reader, Band’s treatment of the tale is still the best available in English, for its plot summary, review of the criticism that had preceded him, exploration of themes, and overall literary analysis; see Arnold J. Band, Nostalgia and Nightmare: A Study in the Fiction of S.Y. Agnon, pp. 382–396.)

  In all cases, whether Band is correct about the degree of enigma enveloping “Edo and Enam”, we the readers still ne
ed to get at the elusive essential meaning of the story, which is set in Jerusalem of the final years of the British Mandate. The nameless narrator is house-sitting for the Greifenbachs, who have left behind their tenant Dr. Ginat, usually engrossed in his philological academic work or away conducting his research on the lost language of Edo and the Enamite Hymns. The itinerant manuscript merchant, Gamzu, is married to an exotic woman Gemulah, whom he had brought back to Jerusalem from her distant home among the lost tribe of Gad, where Ginat’s mysterious languages and hymns are still spoken and sung. It is this removal from her source that leads to Gemulah’s strange sickness. If it is a reunion that sets the plot of “Betrothed” in motion, here it is severance (of person from place, Gemulah from Gad; person from person, Gemulah from both Ginat and from Gamzu) which drives the events to their tragic end. (Through the good graces of the garrulous game of gutteral gimmel-words the reader should have a sense of the alliterative word-play Agnon is up to in this story.) It is the triangle of Gemulah-Ginat-Gamzu which becomes the focus of the tale, most of which is told through narrative conversation. If produced for the stage, the drama would look a lot like a drawing room play, set within Greifenbach’s book-lined study. We the audience would hear of the recluse Ginat and then hear the tormented Gamzu tell the tale of Gemulah. But no Noël Coward play would this be! There is nothing droll going on in Greifenbach’s drawing room, aside perhaps from Gerda’s speculation that Ginat has magically created a women for himself up in his room. More than she could know, that, too, turns out to be more tragic than comedic, as the final scene shifts out of the drawing room and up to the rooftop.

  Baruch Kurzweil identified connections between “Edo and Enam” and Agnon’s Sefer HaMa’asim story cycle, and its dreamlike or nightmarish surrealism. If “Betrothed” can be read as Agnon’s modern midrash on Song of Songs, Kurzweil is correct in identifying “Edo and Enam” as his take on Ecclesiastes – with its focus on themes of eros and death.

  Finally, when we describe these Two Tales as exemplars of Agnon’s modern stories, we mean set in the “new world” of revived Jewish life in the Land of Israel, not the Yishuv HaYashan of Jerusalem of old, nor Galicia of Reb Yudel in The Bridal Canopy. But they are modern in a more essential way as well. In the end, Jacob, like so many of the Jews of the Second Aliya, departs for America; Gemulah – in a story that portrays tensions between source and destiny (Meshulam Tochner’s hermeneutical explanation of the title) cannot survive in the new Jerusalem when taken out of her native element. These stories, authored shortly before and immediately after the establishment of the State of Israel, raise very “modern” questions about Jewish life, and like so much of Agnon’s writing, explore the connection and disconnection between “what was and what is”, “tradition and modernity”, “there and here” – and the degree to which the two sides of each of these dyads can be bridged, if at all.

  Jeffrey Saks

  Editor, The S.Y. Agnon Library

  The Toby Press

  Tisha B’Av 5774 (Agnon’s 126th birthday)

  Betrothed

  Jaffa view from Hôtel du Parc.

  I

  JAFFA IS THE DARLING OF THE WATERS: THE WAVES of the Great Sea kiss her shores, a blue sky is her daily cover, she brims with every kind of people, Jews and Ishmaelites and Christians, busy at trade, at shipping and labor. But there are others in Jaffa who take no part in any of these: teachers, for instance, and such a one was Jacob Rechnitz, something of whose story we are about to tell.

  When Jacob Rechnitz had completed his term of study and been crowned with a doctorate, he joined a group of travelers going up to the Holy Land. He saw the land and it was good, and those that dwelt within it, they were tranquil and serene. And he said to himself, If only I could earn my bread here, I should settle in this land. Jaffa was his dearest love, for she lay at the lips of the sea, and Rechnitz had always devoted himself to all that grows in the sea. He happened to visit a school, and that school needed a teacher of Latin and German. The authorities saw him, deliberated on him; they offered him a post as teacher, and he accepted.

  Now Rechnitz was a botanist by profession and expert in the natural sciences. But as the natural sciences were already in the hands of another teacher, while the post of Latin and German was vacant, it was this post that was assigned him. For sometimes it is not the position that makes the man, but the man who makes the position, though it must also be said that Rechnitz was a suitable choice.

  So Rechnitz set to work. He met his duties faithfully. He chose the right books and did not weigh his students down with tedious topics. He was never bitter with his students; never too proud with his fellow teachers, most of whom were self-taught. His students loved him, his colleagues accepted him. His students, because he treated them as friends; his colleagues, because he allowed them to treat him as one. And, too, his tall bearing and deep voice, his manners and his chestnut eyes that looked with affection on everyone, gained him the love of all. Not more than a month or two had passed before he had won a good name in the town. Not more than a month or two before he had become a favorite guest of fathers whose daughters had come to know him before the fathers themselves.

  The fever of land speculation had already passed. The money-chasers, who had sought to profit from the soil of Israel, had gone bankrupt and cleared out. Jaffa now belonged to those who knew that this land is unlike all others; she yields herself only to those honest workers who labor with her. Some engaged in trade and some in the skills of which the land had need; others lived on the funds they had brought from abroad. Nor one nor the other asked too much of life. They left the Turk to his seat of power and sought protection in the shade of the foreign consulates, which looked on them more kindly than had the lands of their birth. The dreamers awoke from their dreams, and men of deeds began to dream dreams of a spiritual center and a land of Israel belonging to Israel. From time to time they would gather and argue about the country and its community, and send reports of their proceedings to the Council of the Lovers of Zion in Odessa. And all the while, each man was father to his sons and daughters, and husband to his wife, and friend to his friends.

  Life was unexacting, very little happened. The days slipped by quietly, people were undemanding. Their needs were limited and easily satisfied. The well-to-do were content to live in small dwellings, to wear simple clothes and to eat modestly. A man would rise early in the morning, drink his glass of tea and take a few olives or some vegetables with his bread, work until lunch time and come home before dusk. By then the samovar was steaming, neighbors paid calls, tea and preserves were handed round. If some learned man were present, he would make fun of the hotel-keeper who had misunderstood a Talmudic word, and called fruit preserves “jam.” Or if a farmer were in the company, his conversation would be about the uprooting of vines and the planting of almonds, about officials and bribes. Or if a visitor from Jerusalem happened to be there, he would tell them what was going on in the City: if he were a cheerful type, he might amuse the company with a Jerusalem joke. If there were only local Jaffa folk present, they would discuss the news from abroad, even though it was already stale by the time the foreign newspapers arrived.

  Jacob Rechnitz was welcome and warmly received in every house. He appreciated people’s efforts to speak German for his benefit, and pleased them in return with the smattering of Russian he had picked up. (Russian and Yiddish were still used rather than Hebrew; as for Rechnitz, he came from central Europe, where German was the common tongue.) Like most bachelors, he was glad to be brought into company; he fell in with his hosts’ ways of thinking so completely that it seemed to him that their views were indeed his own. Every now and then he would be invited to an evening meal; and afterwards, when the head of the family settled down to reading the latest journal, whether it was Hashilo’ah in Hebrew or Razsvyet in Russian, he would take a stroll with the daughters of the house. There was always light for such walks: if there were no moon, the stars would be shining; and if there were no
stars, the girls’ eyes did well enough. Another young man would ask for no more than such a life; but as for Rechnitz, another world lay in his heart: love of the sea and of research into her plants. Even at the season when Jaffa’s hot air saps the marrow and the spirit of most men, he remained vigorous. From this same sea that brought profit to shipowners, carried vessels weighted with wares for merchants and yielded up fish for the fishermen; from these waters, Jacob Rechnitz drew forth his plants. Under the sea’s surface he had already discovered certain kinds of vegetation that no scientist had ever seen. He had written about them to his professor; and his professor, glad to have a capable scholar stationed in such a region, had published his reports in the Vienna periodical brought out by the Imperial and Royal Society for Botanical and Zoological Studies. Besides this, he urged his favorite pupil to persevere in his research, since no investigation into the marine plants off that coast had been undertaken so far.

  Rechnitz needed no urging. He belonged to the sea as a bay belongs to its shore. Each day he would go out to take whatever the sea offered him; and if the hour was right, he would hire a fishing boat. Yehia, the Yemenite Jew who served as the school’s caretaker, would haggle for him with the Arab fishermen; and off he would sail to where, as he told himself, the earliest ancestors of man had had their dwelling. Plying his net and his iron implements, drawing up specimens of seaweed not found along the beach, his heart beat like a hunter’s at the chase. Rechnitz was never seasick; no, these mysteries beneath the waters, these marvels of creation, gave him fortitude. There they grew like gardens, like thickets, like shadowed woods among the waters, their appearance varying from the yellow of sulphur to Tyrian purple to flesh tints; they were like clear pearls, like olives, like coral, like a peacock’s feathers, clinging to the reefs and the jutting rocks. “My orchard, my vineyard,” he would say lovingly. And when he came back from the sea, he would wash his specimens in fresh water, which removes the salt that puffs them out, before laying them in a flat dish. (Anyone watching him might suppose that he was preparing a salad for himself, but he would forget his food for the sake of his plants.) Then he would take them from the dish and spread them out on sheets of thick paper; their slime was enough to make them adhere. Only a few of the world’s botanists are concerned with marine plants, and of these few Rechnitz alone was at work on the seaweed off the coast of the Land of Israel, investigating its qualities and means of growth and reproduction. Most scientists can only conduct marine research intermittently, on days when they are free from university duties; but Rechnitz was out every day of the year, in sunshine and rain, by day or by night, when the sea was warmed by the sun and when it was cold, in calm or storm, when other folk slept or when they were busy with their affairs. Had his concern been with the study and classification of plants on dry land, he would have become a celebrity, been made a member of learned societies and spent his time at discussions, meetings and conferences. But since his activities were in a sphere remote from the interests of the Jewish settlement, his name was unknown in the land and his time was his own. He carried on with his investigations and collected many plants. If he found a specimen he could not identify, he would send it abroad, hoping his teachers might know more about it. So it came about that they named a certain seaweed after him, the Caulerpa Rechnitzia. It was not long before he was invited to contribute an account of the larger seaweeds for Professor Horst’s famous work Cryptogams of the Mediterranean.