German Jews in Agnon's Work

BY DAN MIRON

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The German-Jewish historical experience has found only marginal expression
in the so-called "new Jewish literature" of the last two hundred years. 1 The
reasons for this are not hard to discern. Although the two main branches of this
new Jewish literature, the Hebrew and the Yiddish, both originated in Germany
as a product of the German-Jewish Enlightenment of the last quarter of the
eighteenth century, their development took place almost exclusively elsewhere.
Both of these languages, which were used by German Jews at that time - one for
religious and cultural purposes, the other as a spoken idiom - soon became
obsolete, apart from the Synagogue where Hebrew services continued. Under
the influence of accelerating acculturation into non-Jewish society, Jews lost
their linguistic separateness, spoke and wrote German, and thus took no part
in the development of Hebrew and Yiddish literature, which continued in
Eastern Europe, under cultural, social and economic circumstances radically
different from those of German Jewry.
This brought about a twofold cultural discontinuity. On the one hand,
German-Jewish writers, even those intellectually able to recognise the German-
Jewish culture as a separate entity, were in most cases linguistically and
culturally barred from gauging the historical depths of their own experience.
For most of them, the great traditions of Ashkenazic Jewry, which had been
created in Germany from the days of the Roman Empire onward, were almost
terra incognita.
On the other hand, Eastern European Jewish writers, whose linguistic and
cultural commitment to Hebrew (and later to Yiddish) enabled them, at least
theoretically, to preserve the contact with their past, were lacking in an intimate
knowledge of the actualities of German-Jewish existence. To the extent that
Eastern European Jewish writers were able to observe German Jews, either in
their native milieu or as travellers in the East, their observation was inevitably
vitiated by their preconceived cultural stereotypes, just as the impression most
German Jews had of the Ostjude was often caricatured beyond recognition. In the
nineteenth century, the Eastern European Jewish intellectuals regarded the
daytsch (German Jew) as an ideal figure of enlightened Jewish existence. In the
twentieth century, under the influence of nationalistic ideologies, this same figure
became the incarnation of the spiritual failure of assimilation: a smug Philistine
who lived the self-satisfied life which Ahad Ha'am described as "avdut betoh herut"
(slavery within liberty). In both cases, the psychological as well as the social
reality of German Jewry was obscured.
It is typical that Sh. Y. Abramovitsh (Mendele Mocher Sforim, 1836-1917),
1
This essay is based on a lecture given at the Leo Baeck Institute in New York on 19th September
1977.
265
 266 Dan Miron
the major nineteenth-century writer of fiction in both Hebrew and Yiddish,
had to bring to an end his expansive Bildungsroman, Dos vintshfingerl (The Magic

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Ring, 1865)2 at the point where his young protagonist, Hershele, is about to
leave the Jewish Pale of the Ukraine for Leipzig. It seems that the author felt
unable to convey the reality of his protagonist's life in a German as well as a
German-Jewish milieu. Even a writer such as M. Y. Berdiczevski, who had
lived in Germany for the last thirty years of his life, never attempted the fictional
portrayal of German Jews. When the young Eastern European Jewish intel-
lectuals of his stories arrive in Germany, they live in a Jewish vacuum. If they
establish any contact with their environment, they are attracted to non-Jewish
Germans, and evade their co-religionists whom they regard with open hostility.
In the last fifty years a few attempts have been made to bridge this literary
gap between the two branches of Ashkenazic Jewry. Even as German-Jewish
intellectuals, under the influence of thinkers like Martin Buber, began to show
an interest in Eastern European Jewish culture and literature, some Russian-
and Polish-born writers tried to find ways of realising the German-Jewish
experience. Recent German-Jewish history, as manifest in the life of three
generations of one family, wasfictionalisedby the Yiddish novelist I. J. Singer
in his Mishpokhe Karnovski (The Family Carnovsky). A portrayal of a German-
Jewish community in the Renaissance was attempted by the Yiddish writer Y.
Opatoshu in his novella A tog in Regensburg (A Day in Regensburg), and by such
Hebrew writers as A. A. Kabak in the historical novel Shlomo Molho and H. Hazaz
in the historical dramatic parable Beketz hayamim (At the End of Time). How-
ever, up to the last generation of writers these attempts remained isolated and
erratic.
This was not even changed by the actual presence of the German Jew, the
so-called yeke, in Israel in the 1930s and 1940s. While this presence enabled a
few writers (such as H. Hazaz and Y. Shenhar) to come closer to the German
Jews and to appreciate the pathos of their existence under the new conditions of
Israel, it did not do much to change the entrenched attitude of most writers
towards German Jewry as an alien and stereotyped entity. Thus German Jews
appeared in the literature of the pre-state days mainly as the butt of satire. Only
in the very last generation did some Jews, born in Germany, reach Israel at a
time when they were old enough to have detailed memories of a childhood and
adolescence in the German-Jewish milieu, and yet young enough to absorb the
new language completely and eventually to develop as Hebrew writers. And then
the inside story of German Jewry found its Hebrew voice in the novels of Naomi
Fraenkel, and in the poetry and prose of Yehuda Amikhay.
There was, however, one major pre-Israeli writer who completely succeeded
in breaking down the walls of alienation and entering with great sympathy and
understanding into the experience of German Jews. Sh. Y. Agnon,3 who during
2
Translated into Hebrew by the author himself and published 1896 under the title Be'emek
habahah {In the Valley of Tears); it was re-shaped later.
3
For an earlier, more concise survey of Agnon's treatment of the figure of the German Jew see
Baruch Benedikt Kurzweil, 'The Image of the Western Jew in Modern Hebrew Literature', in
LBI Tear Book VI (1961), pp. 175-182.
 German Jews in Agnon's Work 267
the first two decades of his literary career was known mainly as the poet of the
Eastern European shtetl and as the re-creator of hasidic tales and legends, sur-

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prised his readers in 1933 with the short story Panim aherot (A Different Face),
which offered an unusually keen insight into marital relationships of modern
secularised German Jews. This was followed by other short stories, such as
Harofe ugrushato (The Doctor and his Divorced Wife, 1941) and Ferenheim (1949),
which take place in various German and Austrian locations and deal with the
tribulations of matrimonial conflict. These stories were almost immediately
recognised as foremost examples of the short story genre in Hebrew.
Agnon then added two long novellas, Ad hena (Even Until Now, 1952) and
Behanuto shel mar Lublin (In Mr. Lublin's Store, written in the 1960s, published
posthumously, 1974), which take place in Berlin and in Leipzig in the days of
the First World War, and are crowded with German-Jewish characters as well as
non-Jews. To these we must add Agnon's last major novel, Shira, which was
begun in the late 1940s, and left unfinished at the author's death in 1970.
Although set against an Israeli background, with pre-1948 Jerusalem as its
focus, this novel represents the author's boldest attempt to delve into the
German-Jewish mentality. Through a description of the psychological, sexual
and intellectual conflicts which tear apart the orderly existence of a German-
born professor at the Hebrew University, Agnon was trying to convey - among
other things - the share of the German Jew in the crisis of modern times. Agnon
made the German Jew one of the main subjects of his late writings. He produced
a considerable body of first-rate fiction in which the experiences of German
Jews, both in Germany and in Israel, function as the thematic focus.
Various circumstances enabled Agnon to perform this feat of imaginatively
re-creating what was for him a basically alien reality.

As a Galician-born Jew whose youth had been spent in the atmosphere of the
turn of the century under the Austro-Hungarian monarchy, Agnon grew up in
a world which was much closer to the Germanic and the Judaeo-Germanic
sphere of influence than that of contemporary Russian-born Hebrew writers.
Geographically and culturally he developed as a liaison between the two
estranged camps of Ashkenazic Jewry. It is not only that he learned German as
soon as he had crossed the boundaries of traditional Orthodox Jewish education
and began to read, as an enlightened youth would, the poetry of Schiller and
Goethe. Agnon also recognised, as a child, the existence of non-cultural links
with Germany and German Jewry. His home town, Buczacz, which looms so
large in most of his works, was located in the centre of an area which was the
agricultural hinterland of Eastern Germany. Its natives emigrated to such
commercial centres as Leipzig or even Berlin, and maintained their connection
with their birthplace as importers of agricultural produce, furs and other
products of the less industrialised East. Thus we encounter, in the stories and
novels dealing with the Buczacz of Agnon's childhood and youth, the "German"
relatives, that is, the Galician Jews who had emigrated to Germany but were
always returning to Galicia on business or sending presents and letters on such
family occasions as weddings and funerals (for instance, Hershele's Leipzig
268 Dan Miron
relative, an importer of eggs, in Sippur pashut [A Simple Story, 1935]). While
political ties connected Agnon's home town and childhood milieu with Vienna

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(for instance, the various descriptions of elections in Buczacs in such stories as
Bencfarenu uvizkenenu [With our Young and with our Old]), Germany (particu-
larly Prussia and Saxony) is even more tangible as a cultural and economic
influence.
As is well known, as a young writer Agnon spent over ten years in Germany.
Having left Palestine for what he thought would be a short excursion (on the
occasion of the Vienna Zionist congress of 1913), he was caught by the outbreak
of the First World War and remained in Germany not only throughout the war
but also during the first half of the Weimar Republic. Living in Berlin, Leipzig
and Homburg, and establishing close relations with such German Jews as
Salman Schocken (who became his publisher), the young Gershom Scholem
and others, Agnon reached his full stature as a writer. Here he wrote and
published some of his most important works and came into particularly intimate
contact with German Jewry by marrying Esther Marx, a member of a well-
known Konigsberg family.
More significantly, Agnon had from the start what might be called a catholic
Jewish vision: a deep sense of the unity of the Jewish people and its religion. He
ignored the estrangement of the two branches of Ashkenazic Jewry. He had an
intuition of what life had been like when the differences between Polish Jews
and Jews of Bavaria or the Rhine valley were still superficial, and when intel-
lectual as well as geographical movement was taking place from the Ukrainian
borders of the Polish empire to Altona, Frankfurt a. Main and even Amsterdam
and Paris. A Polish rabbi might refer questions on matters of law and ritual to
his colleagues in Prague, Vienna, Wiirzburg or Mainz, while the leaders of
German-Jewish communities would regard the East as the natural refuge in
times of pogroms, expulsions and persecutions.
Accordingly, Agnon begins his creation of the myth of Buczacz by retelling
the legend of the pilgrimage in early medieval times of a group ofJews from the
Rhine valley to the East. Their destination was the Land of Israel; but they did
not know the way, and only knew that they had to keep travelling eastward.
Gradually they left the area where German, the language they knew, was
spoken, and where cities and villages were relatively frequent, and entered a
savage land of forests and wild beasts with a sparse sprinkling of an agricultural
aristocracy with whom they could communicate only in Latin. The link with this
aristocracy, beneficial to both sides, brought the pilgrimage to a premature end.
Instead of reaching the Land of Israel and praying on the holy Mt. Moriah,
they built their shul in a clearing of the primeval forest, in a place rich in rivers
and in lakes. Thus they established the nucleus of an early Eastern European
holy community.
Later, in the days of the Crusades, they were reinforced by refugees from the
Jewish communities of the Rhine valley, and so were reconnected with their
cultural origins. Developing their own brand of Orthodox Jewish scholarship,
they nevertheless referred difficult matters to the German-Jewish rabbinical
authorities. In the course of a few hundred years, their town became a rabbinical
 German Jews in Agnon's Work 269
centre in its own right, which exported religious experts to the West, where
Jewish learning had begun to lose ground.4

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Elsewhere the narrator tells with delight the story of the seventeenth-century
rabbi Binyamin the son of Rabbi Meir of Buczacz, who was invited to become
the Chief Rabbi of Vienna. When the Viennese Jews were expelled, he departed
for the Bavarian town of Fjorda (= Fiirth), where he established a distinct
rabbinical and literary tradition.5 Thus Agnon's world transcended his con-
temporary Galician neighbourhood and extended to the Ashkenazic forebears.
It was one consistent effort of a nation in exile to establish a sanctified Jewish
existence on Gentile soil.
All this is related with Agnon's extraordinary talent and complete mastery
not only of the confessional autobiographical mode of fiction, which was the
primary literary form of so many of his Hebrew contemporaries, but also of the
epic mode which demands the creation of believable, full-bodied fictional
worlds. From the very beginning of his career, Agnon proved himself a master
not only of the lyrical novella but also of the story dealing with characters and
situations detached from the author's immediate experience. His imagination
could enter into and re-create with authenticity the mentality of a hasidic
innocent living at the beginning of the nineteenth century, a schizophrenic
young man of the contemporary era, an old German antique dealer completely
absorbed in bygone times, and a much younger professional German girl
athlete.

II
Yet Agnon's reflections on German-Jewish life were still those of an outsider
who was measuring and judging it in comparison with other varieties of Jewish
existence, and by criteria extrinsic to it. However, he strove consciously to
destroy the stereotype of the German Jew, and to appreciate the positive aspects
of German-Jewish life. From time to time he would even exhort his readers to
free themselves from their notions of the yeke, the comic German Jew. For
instance, he lets his first person narrator in Ad hena digress from the story and
address the readers with this aggressive apology:
"All our traditional notions of German Jews are nonsensical; and if we praise the Jews
of other countries for their knowledge of the Torah, their reverence, their righteousness,
their piety, their innocence, we should praise German Jews for their integrity, their
keenness of mind, their sense of responsibility, their faithfulness in keeping their word.
Also . . . most of the knowledge we have in Jewish studies is nothing but the sawdust
which fell from the tools of the great craftsmen, that is, the German-Jewish scholars." 6

As much as such a passage reveals the author's positive attitude and broadness
of mind, it also indicates his position as an external observer who must evaluate
German-Jewish life in comparison, that is, from the outside.
It would not be surprising then to find that most of Agnon's tales with a
4
Sh. Y. Agnon, 'Buczacz', in Ir umlo'a, Jerusalem-Tel Aviv 1973, pp. 9-13.
5
Sh. Y. Agnon, Behanuto shel mar Lublin, Jerusalem-Tel Aviv 1974, p. 175.
•Sh. Y. Agnon, 'Ad hena', in Kolsipurav shel Sh. T. Agnon, vol. vii, 1 lth edn., Jerusalem-Tel Aviv
1966, p. 93.
270 Dan Miron
German-Jewish background actually deal with the problem of the confrontation
of East and West. The focus is on German-Jewish life as it is revealed when it

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comes into contact with the Eastern Jewish element. On the face of it, this seems
not to apply to all of the above-mentioned stories, which, in this and other
respects, seem to fall into three different categories.
The two novels, Ad hena and Behanuto shel mar Lublin, are openly autobio-
graphical and reflective. They deal with a young Eastern European intellectual's
stay in Germany during the First World War. Here the vantage point of the
outsider, who compares German-Jewish life not only with his own Eastern
European background, but also with the budding Palestinian Jewish milieu, is
at the very centre of the works. The protagonist, who is also the narrator, is
completely passive. Not only is he trapped in Germany by the war; he cannot
get on with the research and writing of his study of the history of costume -
which in these stories is Agnon's way of referring to his own art. The narrator
therefore drifts from one city to another, always looking for a place to stay, and
considering this phase of his life to be completely empty. He becomes a mere
vehicle of observation.
Behanuto shel mar Lublin, a story almost two hundred pages long, is supposed to
be a record of the protagonist's thoughts and reminiscences during the few hours
he spends one Friday in the household goods store of one Mr. Lublin, a Leipzig
Jewish merchant who has befriended him and enabled him to stay in the city
despite the strict war-time regulations regarding the presence of foreigners. Thus
the story seems to be the encounter of a man of reflective mind, grown up in
conditions alien to German-Jewish reality, with this very reality under war-time
pressures.
The short stories dealing with matrimonial difficulties, estrangements and
divorces do not seem to have anything to do with the encounter of East and
West. In them we have either a third person, omniscient narrator, who tells of
the life of his German-Jewish protagonists without overt reference to anything
outside it, or a first person, confessional narrator, relating his personal impressions,
again without reference to anything external. For instance, Ferenheim is the story
of a German-Jewish soldier who returns home to find his wife estranged and she
and her family unwilling to accept him. Panim aherot concentrates on the
consciousness of a man who has just divorced his wife and who only now seems
to comprehend the depth of his love for her. In Harqfe ugrushato, the protagonist,
a doctor, unfolds the story of his love for a nurse whom he met at the hospital
where they both worked, their subsequent marriage and his inability to live
with the knowledge that his wife had been sexually involved with someone else
before she met him; this gradually destroys their marriage.
The focus in all of these stories is on the intimate tensions between husband
and wife, which the author perceives with acuity and sensitivity. They seem
therefore unrelated to a particular Jewish context; in all of them, the fact that
the protagonists are Jews is referred to only indirectly. (In Panim aherot we learn
of it only because the divorce was performed by a dayan according to Jewish
law.) These stories are among those works of Agnon which can be understood
by readers with no Jewish background at all.
 German Jews in Agnorts Work 271
The long novel Shira, told by an omniscient third person narrator, is the love
story of Professor Manfred Herbst and the eccentric nurse Shira. The strange

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love-hate relationships of a yeke professor and a modern Eastern European
"liberated" woman are delineated on a wide historical, social and intellectual
background: Palestine in the 1930s and 1940s; Herbst's childhood and youth in
Germany; the crisis of modern historical scholarship as illustrated by Herbst's
inability to shape his expert knowledge of Byzantine history into a coherent
historical study; the politics of the European powers in the age of Fascism in
contrast to the petty academic politics of the small provincial University of
Jerusalem with its bickerings and jealousies; the juxtaposition of kibbutz and
Palestinian city life; the miseries of German-Jewish refugees of bourgeois back-
ground in the new Palestinian circumstances; and more. The encounter between
Jewish East and West, and the German-Jewish problems in general, although
certainly included in this vast panorama, hardly seems to be the pivot of the
work.

Ill
The differences between these categories are real and significant. They follow
from the generic, structural, rhetorical and thematic differences among the
stories themselves, and prove that Agnon's vision of German-Jewish life was
broad enough and varied enough to find expression in more than one narrative
form. However, when we pay close attention, either to seemingly minor details
of the stories or to their overall, generalised meaning, we see that these differences
are counterbalanced by one basic similarity. It consists in a recognition of the
German-Jewish experience in terms of its relationship to Eastern European
Jewish existence.
Take for instance the short stories dealing with tensions between man and
wife and the breaking-up of a marriage, which seem to be completely detached
from the East-West confrontation. Apparently Agnon chose a German-Jewish
background for them precisely because this would allow them to be placed in a
universal and not specifically Jewish context. Nowhere but in the Germany of
the First World War and the years immediately following had Agnon encoun-
tered in his own past a secularised Jewish element without a specifically Jewish
style of life.
Secularised Jews in Eastern Europe were still, to a very large extent, con-
nected in various ways to traditional Jewish existence. In the family drama of
Hershele in Sippur pashut, the conflict between love and a marriage of con-
venience eventually results in the schizophrenia of the protagonist. For all its
modernity of theme, this drama cannot be understood out of its context, the
essentially traditional milieu of an Eastern European small town. Without the
dead weight of the conventions and traditions of such a milieu, Hershele's total
inability to assert his own wishes would not make sense. It is not only his mother
and father that Hershele must fight, but a history of family relationships going
back to forgotten generations. Insanity is for him the only way out of his conflict.
Against a Palestinian background, Agnon's love stories inevitably attain a
272 Dan Miron
specifically Jewish dimension, even when the protagonists are "modern" and
secularised; for instance, in the novel Temol shilshom (Heretofore, 1933-1946).

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Because of the religious and historical aura of the land itself, almost everything
that happens there gains a religious and historical significance and attains a
Biblical analogue. The Messianic tension which imbues life in Eretz Israel,
whether it is rendered in political Zionist terms or in spiritual, religious ones,
even permeates the relationships between secularised men and women, with a
specifically Jewish significance. Germany, therefore, seems to have supplied
Agnon with the only Jewish social background in which the tensions between
men and women could be dealt with in their purely personal aspects.
But this is only superficially true. When we examine these stories more closely,
we realise that they resemble each other in ways which certainly have to do with
societal and even national factors. The men in Agnon's German-Jewish love
stories are always individuals separated from society, while the women always
seem to exist within a societal framework. They have family - brothers, sisters,
cousins - and they have friends. For instance: Ferenheim, returning from the
Russian prisoner-of-war camp, has to deal not only with his estranged wife, but
with her protectors - her sister and brother-in-law, who surround her and
encourage her in her rebellion against her husband. He is barely allowed to see
her, and has no such natural allies himself. In his desperation, what he seeks is
not so much the recovery of his wife's love, but just some kind of communication.
But he is faced with the cold and barely civil disdain of the united family, and
the hypocritical evasions by which they shut off every possibility of communica-
tion. It is only Ferenheim's nephew, a little boy who has not yet learned polite
hypocrisy, who reacts directly - with fear and hatred - to his uncle's appearance.
In this painful directness Ferenheim finds his bitter consolation.
In Harofe ugrushato, we learn that the protagonist's father was a poor tinsmith;
but this has left no trace in his son's life. Presumably the latter, who moved up in
society by becoming a doctor, has lost all connection with his own family. Dina,
his wife, is the daughter of a rich and respectable Jewish family of Vienna.
Ironically, she shows no interest in her relatives, while her husband, when their
marriage is already beginning to break up, tries to gain access to them. He says:

"In those days I began to visit some of my wife's relatives with her, and I'll tell you
something strange. I've already said that Dina was of good family, and that her relatives
were well-known people. Well, they and their households had a pleasant effect on me,
and I began to respect my wife because of her relatives. These people, whose forefathers
had lived in ghettoes, have achieved riches and honor; their riches are an ornament to
their honor, as their honor is an ornament to their riches . . . After some time, I would
think of my wife's relatives without considering her to be connected to them, as if I were
their relative and not she . . ." 7

Although the desire for upward social mobility is certainly present, we have
here more than just the wish of an opportunist to attach himself to the rich and
powerful through marriage. We have as well the striving towards an ideal
"aristocratic" type, and the need for an ideal closed society, indeed, an ideal
7
Sh. Y. Agnon, 'Harofe ugrushato', in Kolsipurav shelSh. T. Agnon, vol. iv, 1 lth edn., Jerusalem-
Tel Aviv 1966.
 German Jews in Agnon's Work 273
family. What the protagonist seems to find in his wife's family is actually what
he wanted to find in his beloved wife (and which she could not supply); a

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perfect and harmonious intimacy, a relationship both warm and dignified,
without the slightest blemish. It is the fact that this blemish (her pre-marital
involvement with someone else) could not be eradicated, that finally destroys
the marriage, withers his relationship with his wife's relatives, and makes him,
once again, a lonely man.
Even in Panim aherot, a story in which the family background is less important,
the dramatic situation of the couple, fresh from the divorce court, is rendered in
these terms. It begins with the comparison of the wife, who is met by her friends,
and the husband, who is completely alone. He manages to break through his
loneliness only by his ability to chase away those friends and to gain, for an
evening at least, the attention and the love of his divorced wife.
With the slightest of hints, Agnon makes us understand that these stories
deal not only with men and women in the general sense. We have here men
outside their original society, and women within their society. It is then but one
step more to realise that some of the stories deal with immigrants: enterprising
Jews who have come from another place and married into the Jewish middle
class of the new country. So it is not at all surprising to find Ya'kov Milh, the
protagonist of Harofe ugrushato, in the half-ruined Buczacz which is revisited by
the narrator of Ore'ah nata lalun (A Guest for the Night, 1939). Ya'kov Milh (like
the narrator) was born in Buczacz, the son of a poor family. He is an Eastern
European Jew who attempted to assimilate into Austrian Jewry. While the
narrator emigrated to Palestine, Milh went to Vienna to study medicine,
became a successful doctor, met Dina when she was a nurse, and through her
had had the opportunity to become part of the Jewish Viennese high society.
Now, after the break-up of the marriage, he has returned to his home town,
no longer able to endure his total alienation in the West. He is an impoverished
doctor, his patients consist mainly of the Ruthenian peasants of the countryside.
He has come home to live out his failure among his own people. When he meets
the narrator, a childhood schoolmate, his pent-up need for communication
breaks out into the confession upon which the story Harofe ugrushato is based. The
two men also talk about Hartmann, the protagonist of Panim aherot, who is also
revealed as a Galician Jew, an immigrant of great business acumen who made
good in Germany, and married into the upper-middle class.8
Thus these stories deal covertly with the encounter between Eastern and
Western Ashkenazic men and women in a specific context. The encounter is
both societal and sexual, with the West represented by the women and the East
by the men. This sexual representation is loaded with significances, for Agnon
perceives contemporary German Jewry as civilised, cultivated and refined but
passive. The East produces the eager, enterprising, mobile men. Hence the
inevitable conflict. The men, vigorous and competitive, are torn from within.
They live the life of the uprooted: they have lost contact with their own heritage
and are trying to connect themselves, through their marriages, with another one.
8
See ch. 67 of Ore'afr nata lalun, in Kol sipurav shel Sh. T. Agnon, vol. iv, 1 lth edn., Jerusalem-Tel
Aviv 1966.
274 Dan Miron
This weighs down the relationship between them and their wives and brings a
corrosive element into the erotic and emotional encounters.

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IV
In Behanuto shel mar Lublin, the East-West tensions are inherent in the social
reality portrayed by the narrator, independent of his own point of view. As
related above, the story consists of a series of reflections in which the narrator
indulges during the Friday afternoon he spends in the store of one Mr. Lublin,
in the old business section of Leipzig. Lublin has introduced the mail-order
system into Leipzig's commercial life. While every store in the city is full of the
bustle of customers, his store is completely empty of people; the protagonist,
who has been left there while the owner is called away for a consultation at the
Rathaus, has no one to talk to and nothing to read but the telephone directory.
So he occupies himself in musing and ordering the Leipzig milieu, and his life
in it, into something like a story, in which thefigureof the successful Mr. Lublin
looms large.
This Mr. Lublin had been born in Buczacz to a very poor family. Mistreated
as a child, he had run away from home at the age of eleven. He found his way
to Leipzig, where he had a poor relative, for whom he worked in exchange for
room and board. Left penniless when his relative became bankrupt, the lad
was rescued by a Mr. Nahut, a rich Jew whose family had lived in Germany for
generations. Now fed and clothed by his new benefactor, Lublin was given a
job as an errand boy in the man's household goods shop. Eventually he became
a merchant much more successful than Mr. Nahut, married his patron's
daughter, Nora, and even gained prestige among non-Jews - for he is now held
in high esteem by the members of the Rathaus. This last is something which the
Nahut family and the other German Jews of the city have never achieved.
Later Mr. Lublin was to become a public benefactor when he bought up the
old business centre, in Baticher Strasse, in its entirety, and (unlike the German
merchants) did not tear down the fine seventeenth- and eighteenth-century
warehouses in order to erect new buildings. He, the Galician Jew, contributed
to the preservation of the historic German character of Leipzig. And he per-
mitted the four old craftsmen, who had had their workshops in this ancient
quarter of the city for generations, to stay on in their traditional places of work
rent-free. More German in his sympathies than the Germans themselves, he has
thus become a most respected figure in the city, someone whom the leading men
consult from time to time on urgent financial and municipal matters. Now,
during the war, he and his family have become a veritable symbol of German
nationalism: his two sons are in the army, with one already a prisoner of war of
the French, and his wife and daughter busy themselves with charities connected
with the army - activities financed by Mr. Lublin.
What was the driving force which made this poor boy from Buczacz, who had
mastered the German language late in life and with great difficulty, such an
important figure in an ancient German commercial centre? This question is
answered in both explicit and implicit terms.
 German Jews in Agnon's Work 275
Implicitly, Mr. Lublin is placed at one end of a spectrum at the other end of
which stand the four German octogenarian artisans who now live on his charity.

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These four old men symbolise complete immobility and inability to adapt to
modern circumstances. They are the result of the German Middle Ages, the
remnants of the guild culture, trained by fathers who were themselves trained
by their own fathers in the tradition of the Meistersinger von Niirnberg. Now they
sell hardly anything, and are completely out of touch with their own grand-
children (one of whom is a famous woman athlete, another an aspiring poet:
both, by the way, have had passages of flirtation with the narrator himself).
The four portraits of these artisans certainly can be said to constitute the most
incisive insight into the character of the German people to be found in Hebrew
literature. However, they are necessary in the story not only in their own right,
but also as a representation of torpor, the very opposite of Mr. Lublin's successful
mail-order business innovations. If the artisans represent historical immobility,
Mr. Lublin is dynamism per se. In an intermediate position we find the Nahut
family and the rest of the old German-Jewish contingent, who made good, but
never quite that good. The narrator asks himself the reason for this difference
between Mr. Lublin and his benefactors, and it is in his answer that he deals
explicitly with the issue of East versus West. He remembers the confession of
Mr. Lublin's father-in-law, the old Mr. Nahut: "We and our fathers, who were
born here, cannot claim that these gentlemen [the leading citizens] even know
who we are. And this Galician Jew comes and goes freely in their houses." 9
And the narrator comments:
"How has this Galician Jew achieved something which the Leipzig Jewish notables
could never achieve? It is that they themselves are too similar to the leaders of the city
in their deeds, in their thoughts, in their minds. For years, they and their fathers and
their forefathers strove to emulate the leaders of the city, and they succeeded. Thus, in
spite of themselves, they became superfluous; the leaders of the city have no use for them.
Not so with that Galician Jew. Even if he tries to emulate the Germans, his own flavor
remains; his mind does not grow stale. So when one of the members of the City Council
meets him, he finds in him something which he cannot find in himself, nor in anyone
else."10

This passage indicates by implication the inevitable future decline of the

Lublin family; they must, in the next generation, also lose their dynamic.
Lublin has achieved his success in a typically Jewish way, by virtue of being a
stranger and an upstart; he is a stimulating factor, like leaven in the dough.
However, this also explains his tendency to overdo things, and his personal
restlessness and incompleteness. While he is such an important member of the
community, he does not share in its culture; this is made clear by the description
of an evening the narrator spends with him in the theatre, watching a new play
(which is, by the way, based on the history of the Nahut family). Lublin is
unable to appreciate it. On the other hand, he has no connection with the many
Galician Jews, most of them poor and wretched, who throng the city now that
their home towns have been destroyed by the war.
Lublin is torn by his conflicting allegiances (which also explains why he is so
X0
'Befyanuto shel mar Lublin, p . 11. Ibid.
276 Dan Mir on
helpful to the narrator, who is a modern Europeanised Jew, also from Buczacz).
His incompleteness is underlined, towards the end of the story, by the narrator's

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dreaming of a Mr. Stern, who is the Buczaczer par excellence. Stern has never
left Buczacz, and has become the veritable symbol of its history, its lore and its
mythology. We hear that it is from him that the narrator himself (and, by
inference, the author, Agnon) has inherited the sense of Buczacz as both a
living and a historical presence.
Now Mr. Stern, whose recent death is indicated by his face, in the course of
the dream, gradually changing in colour to that of clay, sits with the narrator
in Lublin's store and utterly rejects the merchant and his success. He, the deeply-
rooted Eastern European Jew, is the antipode of Lublin, who is uprooted and
half-Westernised. The narrator attempts to negotiate a compromise between
these two. But no matter how hard he tries to explain the necessity, the inevit-
ability, of Lublin's exodus, Stern never deigns to recognise this betrayer of
Buczacz. Obviously, the narrator, as a representative of the author, finds him-
self torn between the figures of Stern and Lublin.

V
How can these differences and conflicts be resolved ? One attempt, as we have
seen, is the search for the common past, the ancient unity of Ashkenazic Jewry.
In Behanuto shel mar Lublin, this search is indicated not only by the narrator's
reflections on the Western origins of the Buczacz Jews and on their own contri-
butions to the West in the form of the renowned rabbi who ended up in Fjorda
near Niirnberg. It is presented much more dramatically and directly in that
section of the story which describes the narrator's lengthy dream and precedes
the evocation of Mr. Stern. Here the narrator, deep in sleep in his own room, is
awakened by medieval messengers who abuse his landlady and the rest of the
German boarders in the house, and order him to come with them. He is driven
through a medieval half-pagan Europe to the court of Charlemagne, the bitter
foe of the Saxons, who has ruined their country. The great medieval king and
general has called upon the Saxon Jew - the narrator - to write a letter in the
language of the Bible to the Court Jew Isak, the subject of the king of all the
Mohammedans. It was through this very Isak that the Mohammedan king sent
Charlemagne an elephant, "which gladdened his heart excessively for no
Christian king before him had ever seen such a large and wise animal".11 Now
Charlemagne wants to learn from Isak how to take care of the elephant, what
delicacies it will savour, etc. It is only through the help of a Jew who has
mastered the language of his forefathers that this diplomatic mission can be
accomplished.
The dream ultimately conveys the secret identity of the narrator as a writer
and a Jew: despite his alien status in Leipzig, he is the Saxon Jew who can,
through the common Hebrew language which links him with his co-religionists in
Asia and Africa, function as a writer in Charlemagne's court. Of course,
language is here indicative of another, broader common denominator: religion.
u
Ibid., p. 159.
 German Jews in Agnon1 s Work 277
It is religion - in its living sense, not in its shrivelled ritualistic remnants - that
can reunite the various divisions of the nation, and supply written literature

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with an historical significance. Religion, for Agnon, is not just a matter of the
past; it is a living force, which has always permeated Jewish existence, and does
so even in the present, when it is denied or merely paid lip service. For him,
religion is the only true cohesive force in Jewish life. Without it, everything must
inevitably disintegrate.
For instance, Jewish culture is presented in Ad hena in the form of books,
which are shipped from Eastern Europe to Germany where they are stored by
collectors. The point is that no matter how knowledgeable bibliographers like
Steinschneider may be, their scholarly efforts will be wasted unless absorbed by
a regenerated Jewish religious culture.* Here this fate is symbolised by the huge
private libraries left after the death of the collectors, and haggled over by
rapacious dealers while the books themselves are devoured by mice in sealed
and stuffy chambers. In a sense, it is the bibliophiles, some of them Eastern
European Jews, who are responsible for the fate of these books, since they have
never taught their sons to read and love them; and in any case, these sons are
now being killed on the battlefields for the greater glory of Germany.
A Dr. Mitl, one of these collectors, is keenly aware of this situation as he
rummages through piles of old Jewish books which have been sent by the
German army from the little towns of Poland and the Ukraine. He plunges his
hand into the pile and pulls out a book at random:
"What do I have here ? A small sidur, and in it, near the Shma prayer, a piece of parchment
with a request for a better understanding of the Torah. What else do I have ? A mizrakh,
an illuminated scroll of Esther, and a succah poster, like those you and I used to make
when we were children. I was already about to take my hands off this plunder of the poor,
who have been thrown into exile and robbed of everything they hold dear. But the hands
of a bibliophile cannot be restrained . . . " 12

So Mitl keeps rummaging until he finds an unknown collection of dirges for

the Fast of the Ninth of Av, which corroborates a major discovery of his (which
had been viewed sceptically until now). The satire is here honed to afineedge:
Mitl rejoices in the book which will secure his reputation, but he is fully aware
of the barren nature of this discovery, and of the fact that the book has reached
him only by being torn out of its natural and living context, where it served an
authentic spiritual purpose. Instead of being used to express anguish over the
destruction of the Temple, the book now becomes the delight of the scholar, a
corroboration of historical knowledge, yet another item in the long annals of the
Wissenschaft des Judentums.
Of course Agnon, himself a scholar, is not reducing his satire to a crude
denigration of scholarship and of scientifically verifiable knowledge. He respects
the German masters of Jewish studies and their monumental scholarly achieve-
ments. But he agrees with those who argue that it is only through a revived
sense of living religion that meaningful Jewish studies can be developed. And
*This is apparently an allusion to the anecdote of Steinschneider's pronouncement on Wissen-
schaft des Judentums to Gotthold Weil; see Introduction to LBI Tear Book XXII (197 7), p. X - Ed.
12
Ad hena, p. 20.
278 Dan Miron
it is not only Jewish studies which, without religion, become a mere con-
glomeration of facts and barren information; this also holds for humanistic

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scholarship in general.

The problem of the relevance of humanistic studies and of history as a

scholarly discipline is central to Agnon's novel Shira. Indeed, it is one of the four
levels on which the complicated plot of this large and almost encyclopaedic
novel develops:
The first, the historical level, is the line of historical development which
drives the main characters of the novel from Germany to Palestine, and carries
the entire Palestinian-Jewish community towards strife and statehood. It
includes the Jewish-Arab conflict and the impact of the Nazi rise to power on the
lives of the European Jews and on the liberal outlook of the German Jews.
The second level is that of scientific humanism, as perfected in the nineteenth
and early twentieth century in Germany. Manfred Herbst, the protagonist of
the novel, is the disciple of this intellectual movement which is mercilessly
parodied and caricatured in many of the other characters.
The third is the level of family life. There is much in Shira which recalls the
traditional Familienroman, with its detailed depictions of the relationships
between husband and wife, parent and child, and with its emphasis on the
minute details of daily life which slowly and steadily accumulate into a family
history.
The fourth level is that of the aberrant extra-marital relations between
Herbst and the nurse Shira, who does not even seem physically attractive, and
whose sexual fascination for Herbst must inevitably lead to his downfall.
This fourth level, although by no means quantitatively dominant, is the most
important one. It conditions the overall meaning of the work, as indicated by the
fact that the title of the novel is the name of this woman. Shira's sudden and
overwhelming attraction for Herbst, with which the novel begins, introduces
the theme of disintegration which is the main theme of the work. Herbst is
attracted by this strange and seemingly unappealing nurse because his world,
fashioned by liberal politics, scientific humanism and familial stability and
loyalty, is ripe for destruction.
The upsurge of dark powers in history, as well as in the mind and psyche,
renders this world irrelevant. Herbst stands at the threshold of the dark tunnel,
through which Shira will be his guide. She can serve this purpose because
anarchism and nihilism are heroically incorporated in her; she lives by them
and is ready to pay any price that such an existence may demand. The meaning
of her life is symbolised by the malady which finally drives her away from any
human contact: leprosy.
But her leprosy has a kind of dark sainthood about it. It is the ultimate price
for total freedom; for Shira has never accepted any kind of restriction or
obligation. Married at an early age, she ran away from her husband before the
marriage could be consummated. She came to Palestine but is not a Zionist and
has only disdain for the rhetoric of Zionist politics. She hates the Jewish religion,
she mocks the pretensions of literature and science. The only reality she will
 German Jews in AgnorCs Work 279
recognise is that of the illness of her patients. She is totally negative to the point
of purity, and, as her name suggests, to the point of poetry. For Shira is poetry.

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In various ways Agnon implies that Shira is the symbol of the basic poetic urge
when it is divorced from the idea of God, that is, when it is not put at the service
of the transcendental.
Coming into touch with her, Herbst's orderly life crumbles. His familial
Gemutlichkeit fades; he loses intimate touch with his wife and daughters. And he
realises that his scholarly lifework will end in failure, for he cannot see the
intellectual synthesis which would transform his vast collection of historical data
into a meaningful whole. He considers the idea of giving up scholarship for
poetry, and begins to write a tragedy. But under his hands, literature too becomes
arid. Whatever he touches is bound to wither. He is finally driven into an
obsessional search for Shira, who has disappeared. We know that the unfinished
novel was to have led to his joining her in the leper colony.
Throughout the novel, there are hints of a solution, a way out of this maze.
One of the symbols of such a redemption is Professor Neu, Herbst's teacher, who
has completely revised the discipline of Byzantine studies. Neu's scholarly
endeavours are fruitful, and this is connected with the fact that he is deeply
religious. Another such symbol is Lisabet Neu, his grandniece, who lives in
Jerusalem in poverty. She attracts Herbst almost as much as Shira does; but her
aura of modesty - she belongs to the Frankfurt Orthodoxy - prevents him from
ever expressing his feelings. She appears in the novel as an unreachable Beatrice,
an insufficient counterbalance to Shira; for Herbst is too distant from Lisabet's
spiritual world to be much helped by her. He feels her purity, but its effect is
too weak to save him.
Here we can see how the East-West encounter is so central to this expansive
work about the downfall of a German-Jewish intellectual, in spite of the pro-
liferation of other themes and issues. Herbst, as a German Jew, is a product of
the meeting of East and West. In his family history, the story of Lublin repeats
itself. Herbst's father, a Polish Jew from Poznari, came to Berlin as a penniless
boy and ended up marrying the daughter of his German-Jewish employer and
taking over his father-in-law's business. He became the loyal German citizen
who gave his son a German education and saw him go off to the battlefields of
the First World War.
And this son, Herbst, suffused himself in German humanistic culture. He
married Henrietta, a pretty German Jewess, launched an academic career and
established a good family life. His only dissatisfaction with his environment was
indicated by his mild Zionism; and when he was invited to teach at the budding
University ofJerusalem, he emigrated to Palestine before the Nazi rise to power.
Professor Neu and Lisabet Neu, on the other hand, are Western Ashkenazic
Jews of an old and well-established family, which came from the Rhine valley,
the cradle of Ashkenazic Jewry and its culture. In the modern guise of Frankfurt
Orthodoxy, these two represent the medieval Ashkenazic Jews. We know that
the Neus were, for generations, a family of great merchants who were also great
scholars of the Torah. The fact that Professor Neu chose an academic rather than
a commercial career was disapproved of by his family, who thought that a
280 Dan Miron
profession should provide a livelihood, while spiritual sustenance could come
only from the Torah.

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Shira, in contrast, is the totally godless and anarchistic representative of the
East. Indeed, there is something Doestoevskian in her total affirmation of the
negative. In the stories which she tells Herbst about her past, she evokes an
Eastern Europe which is half-pagan, a savage land of forests, wild beasts and
tyrannical landlords. The only person who caught her youthful imagination
was a strange Jewish tenant farmer, who was said to have had intimate relations
with the despotic female landowner, and whose only companion in his lonely
cottage, hung with the pelts of wild animals, was an old peasant woman whose
daughter had died after he seduced her.
It is this virile figure whom Shira married and from whose house she fled
naked into the snowy forest, without allowing him to touch her. The tale of this
nightmarish flight in the snow has a great impact on Herbst, and it becomes a
model for his own relationship with Shira. We sense how this contact with the
dark and demonic East corrodes the superstructure of Herbst's liberalism and
humanism. It is the same East to which the Rhine valley Jews came on their way
to Palestine, and where they built the town of Buczacz, among wild animals,
half-civilised landlords, thick forests and gushing rivers. These medieval Jews,
relatives of the ancestors of the Neu family, sanctified the pagan pandemonium
by bringing into it the light of the Torah and the regulations of the rabbinical
law. Now, Eastern European Jewry, divested of this light and this law, is in the
throes of a new paganism, and the direction in which it is moving is indicated by
the character of Shira.
Her encounter with Herbst is, in a sense, a sort of modern clash between East
and West, parallel to the medieval encounter. The medieval German Jews came
to Poland and, to some extent, exorcised its demons. Now a secularised German
Jew meets a representative of this wildness, a new demon, and is dominated by
her. It is only through a new ray of Divine light that the process can be reversed.
In the novel itself, this ray never shines. But its inevitability is indicated. While
the philosophical relevance of this religious eschatology to the non-religious Jew
can, and must, be questioned, the aesthetic excellence of Agnon's presentation
of it is beyond doubt.