Reform Judaism Magazine 11/98

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Significant Jewish Books

By Steven Schnur

With this issue we inaugurate our Significant Jewish Books column, inspired by UAHC President Rabbi Eric H. Yoffie's Reform Movement Literacy Initiative, which challenges all Reform Jews to read at least four Jewish books a year. In each issue we will recommend two titles representing the best of Jewish literature, both fiction and nonfiction, selected in cooperation with the UAHC Department of Adult Jewish Growth. It is our hope that you will read at least one of these selections on your own or with others in a study or book group. Connect with thousands of other Significant Jewish Books readers by accessing the Adult Jewish Growth website, where you'll find a discussion guide and more.

A Book That Was Lost and Other Stories
S. Y. Agnon
(Schocken, $15.00 paper, 436 pp.)

On receiving the Nobel Prize for literature in 1966, Shmuel Yosef Agnon remarked that journeying to Stockholm to receive the award would provide him particular pleasure "because there is a special benediction one says before a king and I have never met a king before."

A man of simple piety, he noted upon receipt of the prize, "Some see in my books the influences of authors whose names, in my ignorance, I have not even heard, while others see the influences of poets whose names I have heard but whose writing I have never read." The sources of his inspiration were sacred scripture, medieval Jewish sages, and nature. In fact, he was among the most widely read of his pioneering generation of Hebrew writers. Born Shmuel Yosef Czaczkes in 1888 in Buczacz, Galicia (then part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire), he received a largely private education, absorbing traditional Jewish texts through his learned father and secular German literature through his mother. Following the publication in 1903 of his first work, a Yiddish poem, he became a regular contributor to Yiddish and Hebrew periodicals, publishing more than seventy poems, stories, and essays in both languages by the time he left eastern Europe for Jerusalem four years later. There, at the age of nineteen, he began writing exclusively in Hebrew under the pen name Agnon. In 1913 he suddenly departed for Germany, spending the next eleven years writing, editing, and collecting Jewish tales in the company of some of the greatest Jewish minds of the century.

In Berlin, Agnon studied with Franz Rosenzweig, collaborated with Martin Buber on a collection of chasidic stories, befriended Gershom Scholem, and associated with the poet Hayim Nahman Bialik and the Zionist theorist Ahad Ha'am, as well as his future publisher Salman Schocken. Following a devastating fire in 1924 that destroyed his home along with his extensive library and several unpublished manuscripts, he returned to Israel, settling in a suburb of Jerusalem, where he resumed the Orthodox observance he had abandoned on first arriving in Palestine and formally adopted Agnon as his family name. For the next forty-five years, until his death in 1970, he produced more than two hundred stories as well as several novels and novellas, including The Bridal Canopy, A Guest for the Night, and In the Heart of the Seas. He also edited several anthologies, including Days of Awe, a collection of High Holy Day traditions. Much of his work has yet to be translated into English.

A Book That Was Lost is a collection of twenty-five stories which follow Agnon's life chronologically and geographically, and provide a broad sampling of his many modes and voices, from pietistic folk tales to stark modernism. The editors' commentaries on the stories offer background and keen insight into the author's themes and influences. Ultimately, Agnon probes the Jewish condition, his protagonists always seeking a balance between estrangement and community, antiquity and modernity, destruction and rebirth.

Here is an excerpt from A Book That Was Lost, beginning with a comment by the editors of the collection.

In "Hill of Sand," a story set in Jaffa in the years of the Second Aliyah, we encounter the writer as a young man unable to write, to love, to work. Agnon lets us feel the atmosphere of the period from the perspective of the youthful Hemdat, who witnesses the founding of Tel Aviv from afar.... This portrait of the artist as a young man uses irony to sketch conflict and indecision, and to draw the contrast between the youth's vaulting ambitions and his inability to realize them.
Hemdat rose and left his room.
Before he knew it, he had reached the dune.
He circled it at it an even distance.
Then he was standing on top of it. A chill, greenish moon lit the dune. Here, in this place, he first had seen her. Here he had walked with her. The Hill of Love, it was called. He felt a pressure in his heart. How close it all seemed. Her words lingered over the sand. That woman was born with a glass in her mouth. She never got drunk, though. She knew how to hold her liquor.
Hemdat stood on the dune. Just then he saw a shadow. It puzzled him, like an unfamiliar object found by a man returning home. He knew the dune and everything on it well. He tried to comprehend the shadow. Was it a bush or tree that had sprung up miraculously overnight? Perhaps it was a late stroller.
If it is the shadow of a tree, Hemdat told himself, our love is rooted and will last, and if it is the shadow of a person, it soon will be gone. He froze and did not move, willing himself between hope and despair. A sudden calm, like that between a baby's fall and its cry, came over him. The shadow stirred and moved in his direction....

Back To The Sources: Reading The Classic Jewish Texts
edited by Barry W. Holtz
(Simon & Schuster, $14.95 paper, 448 pp.)

The world rests on three pillars, according to the ancient rabbis: study, worship, and good deeds. The greatest of these, they say, is study, for it leads to the other two. But how does the modern Jewish reader go about studying the great texts of our tradition? While many have read the Bible, or at least the Torah, few have progressed beyond it to the Talmud and midrashic literature, fewer still to the medieval commentaries of Rashi and Ibn Ezra, the mysticism of Kabbalah, the teachings of the chasidic masters, and the liturgical formulations of the prayerbook. To comprehend such texts today, without some scholarly guidance, proves for most as difficult and as incomplete an undertaking as reading Homer, Dante, or even Shakespeare without the benefit of interpretive background notes. Customs, traditions, culture, history -- even the language itself -- requires explication.

With that in mind, the nine Jewish scholars in Back To The Sources have assembled an invaluable guide for the modern reader journeying through Judaism's most essential books. Assessing the contributions to Jewish life of each work and author and explaining the culture and times out of which they arose, Professor Barry Holtz and his contributors provide a meaningful context for the study of classic Jewish literature. As Holtz explains, "This book is an attempt to deal with the great texts in a popular, nonacademic context...to be accessible, but to speak with seriousness and without condescension. We have tried to ask: 'What is the enterprise of the great texts? How do they work? How might they speak to a modern reader?' Our goal is to fascinate, to illuminate, and in a modest sense, to inspire, by revealing something of the marvelous edifice of the Jewish textual tradition."

Here is an excerpt from the chapter on the origins of the Talmud.

Within a generation of its first appearance toward the turn of the third century C.E., the Mishnah had become the central text of the Oral Torah. In the Galilee, and increasingly in Babylonia as well, groups of rabbis and their disciples would gather to study its tractates, clarify their meaning, and apply their instructions to situations arising in their own lives. These study groups, which apparently began as informal arrangements meeting in people's homes, are the ancestors of the academies of Talmudic study (yeshivot) that are still the centers of rabbinic training today.
Over succeeding generations, as rabbis continued their study of Oral Torah, a tradition of commentary and explanation began to grow. The first generation applied itself chiefly to clarifying passages of the Mishnah that seemed obscure, but this work was soon accomplished, and rabbinic attention moved on to other concerns: extracting general principles of action from the particular rules that the Mishnah supplies, or expanding the collection of recorded precedents and actual application of Mishnah-law in functioning rabbinic courts. Soon a new body of Oral Torah began to accumulate with the Mishnah as its core: the first generation discussed the Mishnah; the second generation continued this discussion, but also discussed the comments of their predecessors; the third generation discussed the Mishnah, both sets of earlier comments, and also their relationship to one another; and so on for several hundred years.

Steven Schnur is literary editor of Reform Judaism magazine and author of The Koufax Dilemma.

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