Two Tales: Betrothed & Edo and Enam Read online

  111. Gamzu / The character’s name is likely a reference to the 1st century long-suffering Rabbi Nachum Ish-Gamzu, whose response to the many calamities which befell him (including blindness, similar to our character’s loss of one eye), “gam-zu le-tovah” (“This, too, is for the best”) became him moniker (Ta’anit 21a).

  Wilhelm Gesenius

  112. Gesenius’ textbook / Wilhelm Gesenius (1786–1842), a German orientalist and Biblical critic, was the author of multiple lexicons and grammar books concerning Biblical Hebrew.

  112. Twelve pounds / The Palestinian Pound (lira) was the currency in use during the British Mandate, linked in value to the British Pound Sterling, and then maintained in the early years of the State of Israel. Adjusted for inflation to 2011, twelve lirot would have been worth about $900.

  One Palestine Pound

  113. Going to the south… / Ecclesiastes 1:6.

  114. Seven locks… seven keys / Likely based on idea of seven keys to the seven gates of the Temple courtyard; Tosefta Shekalim 2:15.

  114. Yiddal, yiddal, yiddal, vah, pah, mah / The enigmatic lyrics of Gemulah’s song have remained a mystery for critics of this story. Tochner interprets the “Yiddal” song as a acronymic hint to the concluding phrase in Song of Songs 4:16: “Awake, O north wind, and come, O south wind; blow upon my garden, that the spices thereof may flow out; let my beloved come to his garden (Yavo Dodi Le-gano) and eat his sweet fruit (Ve-yokhal Peri Megadav) – with the word for “garden” (“gano”) echoing the meaning and root of the name Dr. Ginat.

  114. Gemulah / Cf. Rosh Hashanah 26a, in which R. Akiva interprets the word “gemulah” as connoting a woman “separated from her husband”. The kabbalistic-allegorical interpretation of the story points out the resonance between Gemulah and “gemilut hessed” (lit. performance of acts of kindness) which is kabbalistically identified by Tikkunei Zohar (114b) with the Shekhinah (God’s divine presence).

  115. Dr. Rechnitz / The protagonist of Agnon’s novella “Betrothed”, which opens this volume.

  117. Hakham / Hebrew for Sage, as in a Rabbinic Sage, but here can also mean a scholar or academic.

  118. Nature of man has changed / An idea advanced by the early medieval rabbis, but evidenced already in the Talmud.

  118. All depends upon one’s star / Mo’ed Katan 28a.

  118. Our star makes us wise, or makes us rich / Shabbat 156a.

  118. Ibn Ezra / R. Abraham Ibn Ezra (Spain, 1089–1164), was a preeminent medieval Biblical commentator, philosopher, grammarian, and poet. The statement quoted here appears in the Commentary to Exodus 15:17.

  118. The Lord hath made everything for His own sake / Proverbs 16:4.

  119. Sing out to the Lord in praise / Psalms 147:7.

  119. The heavens declare the glory of God… / Psalms 19:2.

  119. This people that I have created… / Isaiah 43:21.

  119. Letters of the word “heaven” equal numerically to those of “male and female” / According to the gematriya method of assigning numerical value to each letter, heaven (shamayim) and “male and female” (zakhar u-nekevah) both equal 390.

  119. Children of Benjamin… daughters of Shiloh / As related in Judges 21, during the period following the battle in Gibeah, when the other Israelite tribes would not allow their daughters to marry sons of the tribe of Benjamin.

  119. Temple would be built / The site of the Jerusalem Temple straddles the territory of the Tribe of Benjamin.

  119. Amadia / Small, ancient Assyrian and Kurdish town in Iraqi Kurdistan. The town is built on the flat top of a mountain, formerly only accessible by a narrow stairway cut into the rock. Amadia was the birthplace of the 12th century false Messiah, David Alroy, who led a revolt against the city but was defeated and killed in the process, as related in Benjamin of Tudela’s near contemporaneous travelogue.

  Amadia

  120. The case of a person who was passing behind the synagogue / Mishnah Rosh Hashanah 3:7.

  120. And to Gad he said… / Genesis 33:20.

  120. Gad, a troop shall overcome him… / Jacob’s blessing to the tribe of Gad in Genesis 49:19.

  120. Which they took up beyond the Jordan / The tribe of Gad was settled on the eastern banks of the River Jordan (see Numbers 32:1–5).

  120. Aramaic Targum / An exegetical translation of the Bible into Aramaic by Onkelos (c. 35–120 CE). The comment appears at Genesis 49:19.

  121. Jerusalem Targum / A later translation of the Bible into Aramaic of the Land of Israel, including many interpretive and homiletic passages woven into the translation.

  121. Face of a lion… / Cf. Ezekiel 1:10 (the description of the Divine Chariot).

  121. High praises of God… two-edged sword… / Cf. Psalms 149:6.

  121. Daughters of Israel went out to dance / Cf. Mishnah Ta’anit 4:8.

  122. Kavanim / As Gamzu explains, these are “a kind of flat cake which they bake on live coals,” but commentators on the story have alternatively identified Gemulah’s kavanim with the kabbalistic notion of kavanot (mystical intentions) or with some form of pagan practice.

  123. I am looking at the vessel and not what it contains / Inversion of Mishnah Avot 4:20: “Said Rabbi Meir: Look not at the vessel, but at what it contains.”

  124. Unto three transgressions of Israel… / Amos 2:6.

  124. No man of Israel passes through this world more than two or three times… Even go through a thousand cycles of life / The discussion about the limits to the number of reincarnations of the soul is based on Tikkunei Zohar 32 (76b) and in the 16th century Sefer HaGilgulim of R. Chaim Vital (chapter 4 at 7a).

  124. He commanded it unto the thousandth generation / Psalms 105:8.

  125. Georgian Quarter at the Damascus Gate / The Damascus gate is one of the main entrances to Jerusalem’s Old City, at the northwestern side of the surrounding city walls. The Georgian Quarter, known in Hebrew as the Eshel Avraham neighborhood, lies immediately outside the gate and was founded by Jewish immigrants from the country of Georgia in the 1890s.

  Orange sellers at Damascus Gate (1944)

  125. Garmisch / A Bavarian mountain resort town in southern Germany.

  126. Minyan / A quorum of ten men necessary to recite parts of the communal prayers and public Torah reading.

  127. Gemeinschaft der Gerechten / German for: Society of Justice.

  127. Gamal Pasha / Djemal Pasha (1872–1922), Ottoman military leader during World War I.

  127. Earthquake / Major earthquake on July 11, 1927, centered in Jericho caused mass damage throughout Mandatory Palestine – including more than 130 deaths and 300 house collapses in Jerusalem alone. Agnon’s home in the center of Jerusalem was damaged, after which he relocated to the Talpiot neighborhood (then a new suburb of southern Jerusalem), where he spent the rest of his life.

  Djemal Pasha

  129. Rabbi Shmuel Rosenberg / Rosenberg (1842–1919) was a prominent anti-Zionist leader, who served as rabbi from 1884 in the town of Innsdorf (or Unsdorf), which is known today as Huncovce, northern Slovakia.

  1927 earthquake, Old City of Jerusalem

  131. Amrami / Amram was the father of Moses (Exodus 6:20).

  132. To the place where a man is summoned… / Cf. Sukkah 53a.

  132. I came once to a certain village… / The description of Gamzu’s journeys have parallels in the travelogue of Yaakov HaLevi Saphir’s Even Sappir (2 vols., 1866 and 1874), who travelled to Yemen in search of the lost tribes. (This source was identified by Michal Oron, “Kabbalistic Symbols and Motifs in Edo and Enam” [in Hebrew] in BaSeminar [1977]). Agnon’s copies of Saphir’s books are still in the collection of the Agnon House library.

  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

  When 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.

  His relationship with Shoshanah Ehrlich, the girl to whom he had pledged himself as a child, reproduces on a personal scale his relationship with the sea. Their ceremony of betrothal had taken place by a luxuriant pond in Shoshanah’s garden and at one point
Rechnitz imagines this as the source of his fascination with underwater flora. Through the distorting prism of dream memory, he sees Shoshanah emerging from the garden-pond “covered with wet seaweed like a mermaid, the water streaming from her hair.”

  The garden of childhood suggests the personal Eden of earliest life we all experience and irrevocably lose. In his attachment to Shoshanah Ehrlich, Rechnitz unconsciously seeks to recapture a pristine period of simple joy in his own life, just as in his attachment to the sea he is moved by the recollection of an earlier, more vital period in the life of humankind. Ironically, he becomes a kind of captive both to his beloved sea and to his betrothed Shoshanah.

  The bewitching, deceptive, and finally lethal allure of the remote past is embodied in both stories in the symbol of the moon. Gemulah is a somnambulist, or “moonstruck,” as the Hebrew, saharonit, suggests – fated whenever the full moon shines to go wandering over the rooftops, from Gabriel Gamzu, the husband of her unconsummated marriage, to Gideon Ginat, the man she strangely loves. Shoshanah Ehrlich is another kind of somnambulist, stricken with an uncanny sleeping sickness, who in a more naturalistic way also seems under the fascination of the moon. The sea with which she is linked in Rechnitz’s mind is in turn governed by the moon, and not only in the movement of its tides: when Rechnitz first conjures up its primordial presence upon reading Homer, “the moon hovered over the face of the waters, cool and sweet and terrible.”

  In Genesis, we remember, it is the spirit of God that hovers over the face of the waters, but the world of both these stories is dominated by a kind of erotic lunar demiurge whose creation, unlike God’s, has bottomless abysses, dizzying confusions of heights and depths, and no eternally appointed boundary between sea and land. The charmed leaves brought back by Gemulah’s father from a mountain cave, with their cryptic lines that look for a moment like the silver strands of the moon, belong to the same ambiguous sphere as Rechnitz’s seaweed hauled up from the bottom of the Mediterranean.