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PDF FormatWhen it first appeared, And the Crooked Shall Be Made Straight was so Hebraic in its poetics that many readers thought it was not Agnon’s own creation at all, but a popular folktale. They were not entirely wrong: Agnon did employ elements that had already appeared in various folk stories, as well as in several collections of Hasidic legends. He did not invent the story from scratch, although he did adapt it heavily. But this adaptation was accomplished without detaching the story from its popular roots. Rather, Agnon retained the popular version’s linguistic style, its simple, anonymous narrator, and its incessant reference to early Jewish sources. The tale opens as follows:
It happened that a man named Menashe Haim, a resident of the holy community of Butchatch, may his city be built, amen, became impoverished, and his destitution, heaven forbid, led him astray. He criticized other Jews and was reprimanded and pursued, though he harmed no one. He earned himself a name and a legacy, as is explained in this book at length. Regarding him and those like him it is written: “And they shall atone for their iniquity”; which Rashi, of blessed memory, interprets: “And they shall atone for their iniquity through their sufferings.”57
This opening, which offers a summary of the story that follows, imitates the popular Hebrew poetic voice as it was known to most Hebrew-language readers. In the original version, many of the expressions are written in the traditional Hebrew shorthand, relying on acronyms that establish the identity of the narrator as a Tora scholar addressing learned readers such as himself. The very use of such a code, even without reference to the content of the story, is indicative of a closed, “communal” and particularist style, which stands in marked contrast to the universal communicativeness to which the artistic, individualistic Western narrative aspires. The reference to the Jewish sources that concludes the above passage further intensifies the popular, impersonal impression that gives the reader a clear signal to the effect that this is not a personal, original work, but the recycling of a set of known texts.58
Similarly, Agnon makes use of the travels of the book’s hero, Menashe Haim, among the towns of Galicia, to interpose references to Hasidic stories and aphorisms. Much of the book is dedicated to such references, fostering the impression that the author merely pieced together bits of traditional lore.
Menashe Haim stayed at the home of a simple man, and talked with him about the words of the righteous, such as what was told by the holy rabbi of Neshchiz, that in Berditchev there was a respectable man named R. Liber, of blessed memory. One winter night, after the fair, someone came to his house, seeing that the candle was still lit. R. Liber received him in a hospitable manner, and he himself made the bed for him to sleep in. The guest asked him: “Why does his honor so trouble himself to make the bed for me?” R. Liber replied to him: “Do you think it is I who makes the bed? It is not I who does so.” The point was that he makes his bed and prepares himself for the World to Come. And in the book Imrei Kodesh by the Seraph of Strelisk, he cautioned that a man should have a guest at his table at every meal; even if he stuffs his face like a complete Gentile, it counts as though he has had in mind all the mystical intentions of the holy Ari [i.e., R. Isaac Luria], of blessed memory. It happened that R. Eliezer, the father of the holy Ba’al Shem Tov, was extremely hospitable, and it is known to many that because of his hospitality he merited to have the Ba’al Shem Tov born to him.59
This effect of a quasi-folktale, a kind of “Hasidic story,” likewise accompanied dozens of other stories that Agnon later wrote.60 His most extreme writings of this sort, in which Agnon does not appear as author but as the compiler and editor of existing popular material, were the monumental compilations Days of Awe (1938), a collection of customs and legends for Rosh Hashana and Yom Kippur; Book, Writer and Story (1938), legends concerning the culture of the book and the history of manuscripts from the period of the Sages and afterwards; Present at Sinai: The Giving of the Law (1959), midrashim and legends regarding the giving of the Tora at Sinai; as well as more modest “collections,” such as Agnon’s Alef Bet (1984) and The Ba’al Shem Tov Stories (1986).61 Agnon, of course, did not limit himself to Hebrew poetics. He tried his hand at a number of other techniques, including a more surrealistic, Kafkaesque approach which found expression in The Book of Deeds (1941), Thus Far (1952), “Edo and Enam” (1950) and “Forevermore”(1954). However, these forays by Agnon, as brilliant in their own way as they were, are secondary to his central literary enterprise. The backbone of Agnon’s writings, consisting of his three major novels, The Bridal Canopy (1931), A Guest for the Night (1938), and Only Yesterday (1945), and most of his short stories, clearly belongs, in terms of poetics, to the Hebrew side of his work.
Although Agnon was universally respected, even revered, it is hard to escape the fact that of all the later Israeli writers who claimed him as their mentor, none adopted his Hebrew poetics. The tradition of narrative prose to which Agnon was devoted, and with which he achieved so much, did not speak to them. The authors upon whom Agnon had an effect were influenced by the non-Hebraic aspects of his writing. A.B. Yehoshua, Yitzhak Orpaz, Gabriel Moked, David Shahar and other writers who published surrealistic, allegorical, existentialist stories in the 1960s, borrowed from the Agnon of The Book of Deeds, “Edo and Enam,” and the surrealistic chapter on the dog Balak in Only Yesterday.62 The more Hebrew the poetics of a given work by Agnon, the less it was absorbed into Israeli literature. The Bridal Canopy, his most Hebrew work, is thus today the most neglected of all his writings.63
It is not Agnon, but Yosef Haim Brenner, who is the most widely emulated of Israeli authors. Brenner’s poetics can be understood as the precise opposite of those of the Hebrew narrative tradition. Unlike the restrained Agnon, Brenner writes in an intemperate, impatient and at times frenzied fashion. As opposed to the epic panorama that characterizes Hebrew literature, Brenner concentrates on a limited human circle that is at once “uprooted” from its past and claustrophobic. Unlike the historical perspective of Hebrew poetics, Brenner offers “notebooks” from the immediate present. Instead of employing an impersonal narrator, Brenner’s narrator offers up personal confessions. Unlike Agnon’s language, which is infused with tradition, Brenner’s language is choppy, detached and chaotic. Unlike the esoteric message of the biblical, talmudic, Hasidic or Agnonian narrator, who reveals little and leaves the reader to surmise the rest, Brenner exposes virtually everything in his portrayal of the internal struggles of his characters. And unlike the dynamic, vigorous flow of action that propels traditional Hebrew prose, Brenner presents us with static “situations” that contain almost no action, but are rife with emotional agitation instead.
When Agnon sets out to write the story of a character who moved to Palestine in the years prior to World War I, he opens his work with a sentence embodying all the main elements of Hebrew poetics:
Like our other brethren, the people of our redemption, those of the Second Aliya, Yitzhak Komer left his land, his homeland and his city and went up to the land of Israel, to build it from its ruins and to be built from it.64
When Brenner writes about the same period, he begins with the following sentences, which represent everything that Hebrew poetics is not:
A publisher that I know seduced me—and I was seduced—to publish with his help and by his publishing house the following writings, which I took out of the bag of someone who was wandering and in pain in Exile. I knew for certain that I could not withstand the pressure from those readers and critics who would claim that I am too soft—if only they would be so kind as to speak softly—to include additional writings, that is to say, fragmentary and unordered notes, in our poor literature, which is in any case full of fragmentary notes and disorder, while what it is really missing, as is known, is complete things, that are polished and finished. In order, however, to give myself some small amount of credit, I should mention that I, too, had a problem—and not only this!—with this publisher when he came to me with his proposal. I complained to him: “What difference does it make if the author of a book is, according to you, a professional writer? Please, what artistic value is there to these crazy writings of his, which contain no poetic pathos, nor broad-mindedness, nor a finely tuned style, nor any architecture, and not even any world-embracing expression of the soul, as one critic demands when he speaks of the purpose of art, nor any other sublime purpose—the eternal purpose of art—to elevate the spirit and cause esthetic pleasure?... You tell me, what is there here? Some accounts, confessions, letters, some sort of disconnected lines, without any unusual subject matter, and without even piquant symbolism!... Please—poor, weak, lean lines, with none of the milk or fat of art!”65
