A Book that Was Lost and Other Stories by S Y Agnon
Cohen, Carolyn
WORLDS LOST & FOUND A Booh that Was Lost and Other Stories S. Y Agnon, edited with introductions by Alan Mintz and Anne Golomb Hoffman Schocken Books, $27.50,436 pp. Carolyn Cohen Hhis...
...Agnon combines a seeming childlike innocence, the sophisticated understanding of a rabbinical scholar, and the urbane wit of a seasoned artist...
...At the same time, the narrator gently parodies the moral certainty that can result from an exclusive reliance on an encyclopedic knowledge of a tradition...
...The pleasure in reading these stories comes from their humor and irony...
...For example, in the title story, "A Book that Was Lost," the narrator discovers a book by one of his favorite rabbinic scholars...
...The stories deftly observe how the religious context of an orthodox tradition converges with individual experience...
...Here he writes about exile and homelessness in a land he once viewed as a refuge...
...The ironic and playful parallels between the craftsman and the Holy One making the prayer shawl enhance the psychological complexity of the daughter's attraction to one who cannot be possessed...
...Radiant in the light of her beauty...There are times when some hindrance creeps in and snaps a thread in the loom...
...Agnon captures human instincts in memorable ways...
...Why and how the book gets published and sent to Jerusalem is explained...
...It becomes clear that sending the book involves letting go...
...The last story, "The Sign," is focused on a sense of place...
...These stories, so embedded in a religious tradition, do not easily realize the psychological realism of some of his novels, particularly his later novel Shiva...
...The book serves as a metaphor for a way of perceiving the world that is slowly vanishing...
...The book is likened to a kite that a child holds "as long as it stays in his hand, it belongs to him, but when he lets it fly, it disappears high in the sky and he is left empty-handed...
...While not all the stories are couched in a biblical language, "Agunot" sets a pattern...
...The translators' commentaries, which include a guide to structure and religious allusions, tend to oversimplify the emotional texture of these tales...
...With this action, the focus of the story shifts to her intended bridegroom, a young rabbi who is now seen as victim...
...The beauty of this story hinges on the way vulnerable characters are transformed by growing self-awareness...
...The young rabbi's prophetic dream of the craftsman brings him to a self-awakening and exile...
...Boundaries between his life in Israel and his past in Eastern Europe slip away as the narrator's mystical vision allows him to see and hear the words of a medieval Jewish poet, Solomon Ibn Gabirol...
...Gabirol's poetry keeps the past alive for the narrator, who is poised between dissolution of one world and emerging conflicts of another...
...In stories such as "Agunot," "A Book that Was Lost," and "The Sign/' characters are often trapped within a tragicomic situation and exiled not so much from a place but from their deeper sources of emotional and spiritual fulfillment...
...The prayer shawl emerges as a metaphor associated with what can protect and unravel meaning in our lives...
...In this and other stories framed in the idealized context of a folk tale, Agnon always subverts our expectations...
...The conflicts in the stories exist not between characters but more between the narrator's sense of an outer and inner life, where the inner life is driven by desires, premonitions, and dreams...
...Agnon's home in Israel was destroyed in 1929 by an Arab invasion...
...The story develops around certain themes of the Song of Songs, where the relation of the Holy One to Israel is likened to that of a lover and beloved...
...Still, the characters' conflicts with their own desires also remind us of how we are imprisoned and liberated by our own deeply held modern attitudes and beliefs...
...In the book's first story, "Agunot," the daughter of a wealthy man about to enter an arranged marriage with a young rabbi finds herself in love with the craftsman her father hired to make the ark for the wedding...
...His childhood recollections of early twentieth-century Jewish life in Hungary provide the spiritual context for his experience of modern Israeli society...
...The daughter, characterized as "not knowing her own heart," is lured by the song of the ark craftsman, Ben Uri...
...In Hebrew, Agunot means "Souls in Limbo...
...Biblical scholarship has been vital to shaping Agnon's identity as a writer...
...These stories should be read in light of Agnon's scholarly books, Days of Awe (1965) and Present at Sinai...
...Her sweet and docile nature is shattered when she smites the ark after the "Evil one has told her that the ark separates her from her beloved...
...One hears in the first autobiographical recollections as well as in the more contemporary stories, the voice of a narrator charmed by the biblical interpretations of a tradition...
...The story begins, "A thread of grace is spun and drawn out of the deeds of Israel and the Holy One, blessed be He, Himself, in His glory, sits and weaves...
...Carolyn Cohen Hhis collection of short stories by Nobel Prize-winner S. Y. Agnon presents a world remote to most readers...
...In Agnon's story, the Holy One is humorously portrayed as both a devoted parent and as a weaver of the prayer shawl of deeds...
...Many of the stories are folk tales in which the late Israeli writer conveys both his reverence for and ambivalence toward the Orthodox Jewish tradition that shaped his imagination...
...a tallit for Israel to deck herself in...
...At times Agnon speaks as the romantic, and in other instances he shows how easily we forget how dislocation and exile assume the guises of home...
...There are things you do out of love, but nevertheless you do not hasten to complete them...
...His style, often grounded in references to biblical and rabbinical texts, can feel heavy-handed for a postmodernist...
Vol. 123 • April 1996 • No. 7
