“On the Road,” which was written in 1944, appeared as part of The Book of Deeds and it shares with the stories of that collection its focus on a first-person narrator, one who finds himself lost on the eve of a holy day and is keenly aware of his disconnection from any form of Jewish community. (The translation that appears here was abridged, with Agnon’s permission, for its original publication in Twenty-One Stories.) The story takes its narrator through a series of encounters with a group of Jews in ceremonial dress, who speak to him in archaic German and recount to him the slaughter that destroyed the surrounding Jewish communities. In the company of these Jews, the narrator visits settings that bear the signs of communal martyrdom. His experience is dreamlike: he seems simultaneously to remain asleep in the cleft of a rock and to move his limbs as he joins the ghostly company on their walk “to the house of God.” The effect is to amalgamate catastrophic events in the remote past and the destruction of German Jewry in the twentieth century.
Agnon’s protagonist, Samuel Joseph the son of Shalom Mordecai the Levite, joins this mysterious group of elderly Jews to complete the quorum of ten needed for public prayer. In doing so, he takes the place of one of their number, Samuel Levi, who has just died. We have here one of those instances in which Agnon sets up his own form of identity play, using the names of the living and the dead, his own and his father’s.
Ghostly confusions give way to something of the atmosphere of a folktale as the narrator steps into the community like a lost son who has found his place. The particular customs of this community have been shaped by their shared history. The narrator describes the lives of these people with a combination of affectionate understanding and anthropological observation, as he notes the variations in their liturgy that reflect the massacres they endured. When the narrator leaves the community, the Ten Days of Repentance between the New Year and the Day of Atonement have passed. Through his journey real or imagined — he has absorbed the lived experience of a community.
“On the Road” ends with the narrator’s concluding note of thanks to the Almighty who has “restored me to my place” in the Land of Israel. The concept of “my place” now includes within it the history of the community that vanished into the mist as he left it. That history displaces the emphasis from the narrator to the ghostly communities of Germany’s past. The story evokes their traditions and beliefs with an exquisite clarity, all the more haunting in light of events in Germany at the time of the story’s composition in the 1940s.
Stories of Germany
Studded with German names for people and places, “Between Two Towns” (1946) offers the reader poignant social comedy in a symmetrically constructed tale of two Jewish communities in neighboring towns in Germany. Here Agnon crafts a story of family separation in time of war, conveying to us the patriotism of Germany’s Jews in World War i, as well as the strength of their communal practices. Never questioning their place in the larger society, these characters go through their daily lives. The narrator of the story takes a delicately pious tone as he notes that God has granted the residents of Katzenau “a resting place among the nations from which to serve Him and to earn a livelihood, be it meager or ample.” Yes, the narrator acknowledges, in the past there may have been “countless edicts, attacks, murders, expulsions,” but that time has passed and now “Israel is no longer despised because of matters of faith.” The narrator’s wish to believe that good times have arrived at last supplies a poignant irony that makes us aware of the limited horizon of the world of this story.
Agnon has created for us a third-person narrator who is totally absorbed in the daily lives of the inhabitants of the two towns named Katzenau and who is blissfully ignorant of any Final Solution to come in the lives of German Jewry. It is we as readers who cannot escape the burden of a historical consciousness that casts a shadow over the world of the fiction. “Between Two Towns” bears comparison in this respect to the as-yet-untranslated novella “Ad Hena” (Until Now). Both are set in the Germany of World War i and, in both, the horizon of the narrative is limited to the vision of the characters themselves. This limitation of vision jars us; we cannot help but supply the larger historical perspective that the narrative so resolutely excludes. The effect is to heighten our sense of a terrible gap between the complacency and innocence of German Jews and their ultimate fate.
“Between Two Towns” takes a gently ironic view of its characters, in particular the schoolteacher who repays the hospitality of the townspeople with a pedantic correction of their practices that introduces a measure of suffering into their lives. Agnon has recreated for us here the daily lives of communities, with a full portrayal of the intricacies of their attachments and their idiosyncrasies. These are habits and practices that develop over time in relation to a setting, here the rustic German milieu of mountains, forests, and waters. This story might be read as elegiac or ironic in light of subsequent history. Nevertheless, that dimension does not detract from the full absorption of Agnon’s narrative energies in the substance of the lives that he creates.
The Doctor’s Divorce
1
When I joined the staff of the hospital, I discovered there a blonde nurse who was loved by everyone and whose praise was on the lips of all the patients. As soon as they heard her footsteps, they would sit up in bed and stretch their arms out toward her as an only son reaches for his mother, and each one of them would call, “Nurse, nurse, come to me.” Even the ill-tempered kind who find all the world provoking — as soon as she appeared, the frown lines in their faces faded, their anger dissolved, and they were ready to do whatever she ordered. Not that it was her way to give orders: the smile that illuminated her face was enough to make patients obey her. In addition to her smile, there were her eyes, a kind of blue-black; everyone she looked at felt as if he were the most important thing in the world. Once I asked myself where such power comes from. From the moment I saw her eyes, I was just like the rest of the patients. And she had no special intentions toward me, nor toward anybody in particular. That smile on her lips, however, and that blue-black in her eyes had the further distinction of doing on their own more than their mistress intended.
One indication of the degree of affection in which she was generally held was the fact that even her fellow nurses liked her and were friendly toward her. And the head nurse, a woman of about forty, well born, thin and wan as vinegar, who hated everyone, patients and doctors alike, with the possible exception of black coffee and salted cakes and her lap dog — even she was favorably disposed in this case. Such a woman, who couldn’t look at a girl without imagining her half wasted away, showed special kindness to this nurse. And one hardly need mention my fellow doctors. Every doctor with whom she happened to work thanked his stars. Even our professor, accustomed as he was to concern himself less with the suffering of the sick than with the orderliness of their beds, made no fuss if he found her sitting on a patient’s bed. This old man, the master of so many disciples and the discoverer of cures for several diseases, died in a concentration camp where a Nazi trooper tormented him daily by forcing him to go through exercises. One day the trooper ordered him to lie flat on his belly with arms and legs outstretched, and as soon as he was down, he was commanded to get up. As he was not quick about it, the trooper trampled him with his cleated boots until the old man’s thumbnails were mutilated. He contracted blood poisoning and died.