The bard of Talpiot

Curators hope to find Israel's only Nobel literature laureate S.Y. Agnon's missing books.

By LINDA GRADSTEIN
SY Agnon 521 (photo credit: Courtesy Agnon House)
SY Agnon 521
(photo credit: Courtesy Agnon House)
Shmuel Yosef Agnon started writing stories in Hebrew and Yiddish when he was just eight years old. But it took 70 years for the Nobel committee to award him literature’s greatest prize in 1966 “for his profoundly characteristic narrative art with motifs from the life of the Jewish people.”
Agnon shared the prize with German Jewish poet Nelly Sachs. He remains the only Israeli author to receive the Nobel Prize for literature.
This year marks 100 years since the publication of his first book, And the Crooked Shall Be Made Straight. Only 50 copies were printed and the whereabouts of just two are known. One is in the hands of Agnon’s family, and the other is in the National Library in Jerusalem. To mark the centennial, the Agnon House, the foundation that administers Agnon’s family home in Jerusalem as a museum, is hoping to find more of the first edition originals and purchase them for posterity. About 20 copies are believed to have been sent to the US, where a large contingent of Agnon’s neighbors from Galicia emigrated.
Agnson’s Nobel medallion hangs on a plain beige wall next to the library in his modest home in Talpiot in southern Jerusalem.
Agnon was allowed to pick the background for the presentation case and he chose a colorful scene of Jerusalem alongside an ancient map that places Jerusalem at the center of three continents.
Jerusalem was always at the center of Agnon’s life as well, although it took him a while to reach the holy city. Born Shmuel Yosef Halevi Czaczkes in Buczacz in Galicia – today the Ukraine – in 1887, his father was a rabbi who also worked in the fur trade.
Agnon never attended school beyond a few years at a local heder, or religious school.
His father taught him Jewish texts and his mother read him German literature. Years later, he would spend month after month in Germany’s libraries, teaching himself European literature.
His first poem, written in Yiddish about a Kabbalist, was published when he was 15.
A few years later he moved to Palestine and settled in Jaffa, where he became part of a literary salon that included writers such as Yosef Haim Brenner. It is here that Agnon wrote his well-known story Agunot or Forsaken Women. He was also inspired by the title to change his name to Agnon, and to abbreviate his first name to “S.Y.” in English or “Shai” in Hebrew, which means “gift.”
Poignant
In 1912, Agnon published his first novella, And the Crooked Shall be Made Straight.
He was just 23. His friend Brenner had promised to pay for the printing but Brenner didn’t have much money either. So he went to an Arab-owned shop near the Jaffa Gate in the Old City of Jerusalem and returned a pair of leather suspenders he had recently bought.
With that money, he published the book.
The poignant story surrounds a childless husband and wife who fall on hard times.
As was common in Eastern Europe in those days, the husband asked the local rabbi for a “begging certificate,” attesting to the fact that he is a legitimate beggar. During his travels, the husband sells the certificate to another man, who is later found dead. The wife, thinking her husband has been killed, remarries and has a child.
Many years later, the husband comes back and sees his wife and her new family from afar. He is caught in a quandary. If he announces his return, it means that his wife remarried against the tenets of Jewish law.
Even worse, the child is a mamzer – born from a forbidden relationship – and cannot marry another Jew. The man leaves his wife to her new life, without revealing his identity, and continues to watch them from afar.
Soon after the book’s publication, Agnon returned to Germany to further his autodidactic education. He forged two relationships that were to be crucial to the rest of his life. The first was with Esther Marx, the daughter of a German banker, whom he married in 1920. Her father reportedly opposed the match, seeing Agnon as a struggling writer who wouldn’t be able to support his daughter. They had two children, Emuna and Hemdat, both of whom still live in Jerusalem today.
Agnon also met the publisher Salman Schocken, who became his patron, enabling Agnon to devote his life to writing. But things did not proceed as planned. In 1924, Agnon was living in Bad Homburg in Germany when a fire ripped through his house, destroying his extensive library.
“He said his greatest novel, In the Bond of Life, was burnt to cinders there,” says Eilat Lieber, curator and director of the Agnon House. “He took it as a sign to come back to Israel, which he did in 1924, moving to an apartment in Jerusalem.”
Agnon left his wife and children in Germany for almost two years, and did not seem to be in a hurry for them to join him. Even after they followed him to Jerusalem, he spent little time with them. They were not allowed to make noise while he was writing, or ever come into his library on the upper floor of their home. Emuna writes that she was afraid to invite friends to the house, worried they would bother her father when he was writing.
Agnon moved to the then-isolated neighborhood of Talpiot on the southern border of Jerusalem, midway between the Old City and Bethlehem. In 1929, during the Arab riots, Arabs from surrounding villages attacked the neighborhood. Many homes in Talpiot were torched. Agnon’s rented home in Talpiot was burglarized and looted and his library was destroyed for a second time.
The residents of Talpiot, including Agnon, were evacuated to the center of the city.
Yet the tree-lined neighborhood on the hilltop halfway between the Old City of Jerusalem and Bethlehem had a strong pull on Agnon.
Mountain
“Until Talpiot was built, the king of the winds ruled there throughout the land, and all his ministers and his servants – strong and grueling winds there on the mountain and in the valley, upon the hill and in the gorge, doing whatever their hearts desire, as if the land had been given to them alone.
One time, I happened to get there. I saw that the place was nice and the air was pure, and the sky pure blue and the land spacious, and I strolled to my content,” Agnon wrote.
He set about building a new home on land he had purchased with a commanding view over south Jerusalem. In 1931 he moved into the house he would live in for almost 40 years.
Yet Agnon was also influenced by the 1929 riots. His house, built in the Bauhaus style, is like a fortress, with small narrow windows covered with iron grilles. At the time it was built, it was the easternmost home in the neighborhood, with views of the Judean desert and the Dead Sea.
It was here that he wrote what critics have described as the greatest Hebrew novels of the 20th century, including A Simple Story, Yesterday and the Day Before, and Shira.
But despite his growing fame and financial success, the house is surprisingly modest.
“I will not praise my home, as it is small, and I will not be ashamed of it for there are bigger and better than it,” Agnon wrote in the story From Enemy to Lover. “My home is small, but there is space in my home for a man like me who does not seek grandeur.”
This quote, with a large picture of Agnon, greets visitors to his house, which is now preserved as a museum and seminar center.
While the bedrooms have been demolished to make room for a lecture hall, the “parlor” is still intact. A small rickety square table surrounded by four wooden folding chairs is where the Agnon family received guests.
They lived a very simple life, and Agnon encouraged his two children to live a life of the spirit, rather than the flesh. He taught his daughters to shower only in cold water, a custom his 91-year-old daughter Emuna says she maintains until today. He was a vegetarian and was careful with his diet.
On a table is a radio with a small plaque on it that says “Shabbat.” Agnon, who was religiously observant, used the plaque to remind his wife Esther, who was secular, not to use the radio on Shabbat.
Upstairs lies the real heart of Agnon’s world: his musty library of 8,000 volumes, many with little pieces of paper sticking out to mark passages Agnon had noted.
The books are in Hebrew, German, English and Yiddish. They are not behind glass and a visitor can pick up the books and thumb through them. Agnon spent much of his time up here, even sleeping here so he could write undisturbed. Agnon wrote standing up, by hand, and his wife Esther later transcribed his stories and novels on an old Remington typewriter also on display.
In one of Jerusalem’s historical ironies, the house is on Klausner Street, named after Joseph Klausner, a Jewish historian and professor of Hebrew literature who lived across the street. The two men couldn’t stand each other, and Klausner did everything in his power to prevent Agnon from receiving the Nobel Prize in literature.
Klausner died first in 1958, so the street was named after him. Agnon got a street in a different part of Jerusalem.
New language
Agnon’s writings are deeply Jewish, whether he is writing about his birthplace in the Ukraine or the modern state of Israel.
“Nobody writes like him,” says Dr. Ruchama Albag, an expert on Agnon and lecturer at the Levinsky college in Tel Aviv. “He invented a new language that combines the Bible, the Talmud and modern Hebrew.”
That lyrical language is not always appreciated by local schoolchildren who struggle with Agnon in literature classes beginning in sixth grade and continuing through high school.
Agnon was also not always appreciated by Zionists in the early years of Israel who wanted to forge a new Israeli identity that was not tied to the past in Eastern Europe.
Agnon made frequent references to that world that was later destroyed in the Holocaust.
“Agnon did not fit in with the Zionist generation of the 50s and 60s,” says Lieber. “He is very Jewish but less Israeli.”
In the last few years there has been a resurgence of interest in Agnon and his writings.
The Agnon House holds popular lectures and seminars, and even annual trips to Agnon’s birthplace in the Ukraine.
Yet Agnon’s themes are also universal.
“He seems to have had an intuition that the world of Eastern Europe would not remain and he made it his mission to try to preserve this world,” says Albag. “At the same time, he wrote about what thousands experienced – leaving home and immigrating to a new world.”