by Amos Oz
My father, my mother, and I would leave him and Aunt Zippora to stand there for a while longer; we quietly took our leave and made for the stop of the No. 7 bus, which would surely arrive in a few minutes from Ramat Rahel and Arnona, because the Sabbath was over. The No. 7 took us to the Jaffa Road, where we caught the 3B to Zephaniah Street, a five-minute walk from our home. Mother would say:
"He doesn't change. Always the same sermons, the same stories and anecdotes. He has repeated himself every Sabbath as long as I've known him."
Father would reply:
"Sometimes you are a little too critical. He's not a young man, and we all repeat ourselves sometimes. Even you."
Mischievously, I would add my parody of a line from Jabotinsky's "Beitar Hymn":
"With blood and zhelezo we'll raise a gezho." (Uncle Joseph could hold forth at length about how Jabotinsky chose his words. Apparently, Jabotinsky could not find a suitable rhyme in Hebrew for the word geza, "race," so he provisionally wrote the Russian word zhelezo, "iron." And so it came out: "With blood and zhelezo / We'll raise a race / Proud, generous, and tough," until his friend Baruch Krupnik came along and changed zhelezo to the Hebrew word yeza, "sweat": "With blood and sweat / We'll raise a race / Proud, generous, and tough."
My father would say:
"Really. There are some things one doesn't joke about."
And Mother said:
"Actually, I don't think there are. There shouldn't be."
At this Father would interpose:
"That's quite enough for one day. As for you, Amos, remember you're having a bath tonight. And washing your hair. No, I'm certainly not letting you off. Why should I? Can you give me one good reason to put off washing your hair? No? In that case you should never even try to start an argument, if you haven't got the slightest shadow of a reason. Remember this well from now on: 'I want' and 'I don't want' aren't reasons, they can only be defined as self-indulgence. And, incidentally, the word 'define' comes from a Latin word meaning 'end' or 'limit,' and every act of definition denotes tracing a limit or border dividing what is inside it from what is outside, in fact it may well be related to the word 'defense,' and the same image is mirrored in the Hebrew word from definition, derived as it is from the word for 'fence.' Now, cut your fingernails, please, and throw all the dirty clothes in the laundry basket. Your underwear, your shirt, your socks, the lot. Then into your pajamas, a cup of cocoa, and bed. And that's enough of you for today."
11
AND SOMETIMES, after we had taken our leave of Uncle Joseph and Aunt Zippora, if it wasn't too late, we would linger for twenty minutes or half an hour to call on the neighbors across the road. We would sneak, as it were, to the Agnons' house, without telling Uncle and Auntie where we were going, so as not to upset them. Sometimes we bumped into Mr. Agnon as he came out of the synagogue while we were on our way to the No. 7 bus stop, and he tugged at my father's arm and warned him that if he, that is to say my father, declined to visit the Agnon home and treat it to the radiance of the lady's face, it, that is to say the Agnon home, would be deprived of her radiance. In this way Agnon brought a smile to my mother's lips, and my father would accede to his invitation, saying: "Very well, but only for a few minutes, if Mr. Agnon will forgive us, we shall not stay long, we have to get back to Kerem Avraham, as the child is tired and has to get up for school in the morning."
"The child is not tired at all," I said.
And Mr. Agnon said:
"Hearken, pray, good Doctor: out of the mouths of babes and sucklings thou hast established strength."
The Agnons' house was set in a garden surrounded by cypresses, but to be on the safe side it was built with its back to the street, as though hiding its face in the garden. All you could see from the street were four or five slit windows. You entered through a gate concealed among the cypresses, walked along a paved path by the side of the house, climbed four or five steps, rang the bell at the white door, and waited for the door to be opened and for you to be invited to turn to your right and to climb the half-dark steps to Mr. Agnon's study, from which you reached a large paved rooftop terrace that looked out onto the Judaean desert and the hills of Moab, or else to turn left, to the small, rather cramped living room whose windows looked into the empty garden.
There was never full daylight in the Agnons' house, it was always in a kind of twilight with a faint smell of coffee and pastries, perhaps because we visited just before the end of the Sabbath, toward evening, and they would not switch on the electric light until three stars at least had appeared at the window. Or perhaps the electric light was on, but it was that yellow, miserly Jerusalem electricity, or Mr. Agnon was trying to economize, or there was a power failure and the only light came from a paraffin lamp. I can still remember the half darkness, in fact I can almost touch it; the grilles on the windows seemed to imprison and accentuate it. The reason for it is hard to tell now, and it may have been hard to tell even then. Whatever the reason, whenever Mr. Agnon stood up to pull out a book from the shelves that looked like a crowded congregation of worshippers dressed in shabby dark clothes, his form did not cast one shadow but two or three or even more. That is the way his image was engraved on my childhood memory and that is the way I remember him today: a man swaying in the half-light, with three or four separate shadows around him as he walked, in front of him, to his right, behind him, above him, or beneath his feet.
Occasionally Mrs. Agnon would make some remark in a sharp, commanding voice, and once Mr. Agnon said to her, with his head a little to one side and with a hint of a sarcastic smile: "Kindly permit me to be master in my own house so long as our guests are with us. Once they have left, you shall be the mistress." I remember this sentence clearly, not only because of the unexpected mischievousness it contained (which nowadays we would term subversive), but principally because of his use of the word "mistress," which is rare in Hebrew. I came across it again many years later when I read his story "The Mistress and the Pedlar." I have never come across anyone else apart from Mr. Agnon who used the word "mistress" to mean the lady of the house. Although perhaps in saying "mistress" he meant something slightly different.
It is hard to tell: after all, he was a man with three or more shadows.
My mother behaved toward Mr. Agnon, how should I say, as though she were on tiptoe all the time. Even when she was sitting down, she seemed to be sitting on tiptoe. Mr. Agnon himself hardly spoke to her, he spoke almost exclusively to my father, but as he spoke to my father, his glance seemed to rest for a moment on my mother's face. Strangely, on the rare occasions when he addressed a remark to my mother, his eyes seemed to avoid her and turn to me. Or to the window. Or maybe this is not how it was, but simply the way it is etched in my imagination: living memory, like ripples in water or the nervous quivering of a gazelle's skin in the moment before it takes flight, comes suddenly and trembles in a single instant in several rhythms or various focuses, before being frozen and immobilized into the memory of a memory.
In the spring of 1965, when my first book, Where the Jackals Howl, was published, I sent a copy with some trepidation to Agnon, with an inscription on the flyleaf. Agnon sent me a nice letter in reply, said some things about my book, and concluded as follows:
"What you wrote to me about your book conjured up the image of your late mother. I recall her once some fifteen or sixteen years ago bringing me a book from your father. You may have been with her. She stood upon the doorstep, and her words were few. But her face remained with me in all its grace and innocence/honesty for many days. Yours sincerely, S.Y. Agnon."
My father, who at Agnon's request translated the article "Buczacz" for him from a Polish encyclopedia when Agnon was writing A City and the Fullness Thereof, would twist his lips as he defined him as a "Diaspora writer": his stories lack wings, he said, they have no tragic depth, there is not even any healthy laughter but only wisecracks and sarcasm. And if he does have some beautiful descriptions here and there, he does not rest or put down his pen until he
has drowned them in pools of verbose buffoonery and Galician cleverness. I have the impression my father saw Agnon's stories as an extension of Yiddish literature, and he was not fond of Yiddish literature. In keeping with his temperament of a rationalistic Lithuanian Misnaged, he loathed magic, the supernatural, and excessive emotionalism, anything clad in foggy romanticism or mystery, anything intended to make the senses whirl or to blinker reason—until the last years of his life, when his taste changed. Admittedly, just as on the death certificate of my grandmother Shlomit, the one who died of an excess of cleanliness, it is recorded simply that she died of a heart attack, so my father's curriculum vitae states merely that his last research was on an unknown manuscript of Y. L. Peretz. These are the facts. What the truth is I do not know, because I hardly ever spoke to my father about the truth. He hardly ever talked to me about his childhood, his loves, love in general, his parents, his brother's death, his own illness, his suffering, or suffering in general. We never even talked about my mother's death. Not a word. I did not make it easy for him either, and I never wanted to start a conversation that might lead to who knew what revelations. If I started to write down here all the things we did not talk about, my father and I, I could fill two books. My father left me a great deal of work to do, and I'm still working.
My mother used to say about Agnon:
"That man sees and understands a lot."
And once she said:
"He may not be such a good man, but at least he knows bad from good, and he also knows we don't have much choice."
She used to read and reread the stories in the collection At the Handles of the Lock almost every winter. Perhaps she found an echo there of her own sadness and loneliness. I too sometimes reread the words of Tirzah Mazal, née Minz, at the beginning of "In the Prime of Her Life":
In the prime of her life my mother died. Some one and thirty years of age my mother was at her death. Few and evil were the days of the years of her life. All the day she sat at home, and she never went out of the house....Silent stood our house in its sorrow; its doors opened not to a stranger. Upon her bed my mother lay, and her words were few.
The words are almost the same as those that Agnon wrote to me about my mother: "She stood upon the doorstep, and her words were few."
As for me, when many years later I wrote an essay called "Who Has Come?" about the opening of Agnon's "In the Prime of Her Life," I dwelled on the apparently tautological sentence "All the day she sat at home, and she never went out of the house."
My mother did not sit at home all the day. She went out of the house a fair amount. But the days of the years of her life, too, were few and evil.
"The years of her life?" Sometimes I hear in these words the duality of my mother's life, and that of Lea, the mother of Tirzah, and that of Tirzah Mazal, née Minz. As if they too cast more than one shadow on the wall.
Some years later, when the General Assembly of Kibbutz Hulda sent me to the university to study literature, because the kibbutz school needed a literature teacher, I summoned up my courage and rang Mr. Agnon's doorbell one day (or in Agnon's language: "I took my heart and went to him").
"But Agnon is not at home," Mrs. Agnon said politely but angrily, the way she answered the throngs of brigands and highwaymen who came to rob her husband of his precious time. Mistress Agnon was not exactly lying to me: Mr. Agnon was indeed not at home, he was out at the back of the house, in the garden, whence he suddenly emerged, wearing slippers and a sleeveless pullover, greeted me, and then asked suspiciously, But who are you, sir? I gave my name and those of my parents, at which, as we stood in the doorway of his house (Mrs. Agnon having disappeared indoors without a word), Mr. Agnon remembered what wagging tongues had said in Jerusalem some years before, and placing his hand on my shoulder he said to me, "Aren't you the child who, having been left an orphan by his poor mother and distanced himself from his father, went off to live the life of the kibbutz? Are you not he who in his youth was reprimanded by his parents in this very house, because he used to pick the raisins off the cake?" (I did not remember this, nor did I believe him about the raisin picking, but I chose not to contradict him.) Mr. Agnon invited me in and questioned me for a while about my doings in the kibbutz, my studies (And what are they reading of mine in the university these days? And which of my books do you prefer?), and also inquired whom I had married and where my wife's family came from, and when I told him that on her father's side she was descended from the seventeenth-century Talmudist and kabbalist Isaiah Horowitz, his eyes lit up and he told me two or three tales, by which time his patience was exhausted and it was evident that he was looking for a way of getting rid of me, but I summoned up my courage, even though I was sitting there on tiptoe, precisely as my mother had done before me, and told him what my problem was.
I had come because Professor Gershom Shaked had given his first-year students in Hebrew literature the task of comparing the stories set in Jaffa by Brenner and by Agnon, and I had read the stories and also everything I could find in the library about their friendship in Jaffa in the days of the Second Aliyah, and I was amazed that two such different men could have become friends. Yosef Hayyim Brenner was a bitter, moody, thickset, sloppy, irascible Russian Jew, a Dostoevskian soul constantly oscillating between enthusiasm and depression, between compassion and rage, a figure who at that time was already installed at the center of modern Hebrew literature and at the heart of the pioneering movement, while Agnon was then (only) a shy young Galician, several years Brenner's junior and still almost a literary virgin, a pioneer turned clerk, a refined, discriminating Talmud student, a natty dresser and a careful, precise writer, a thin, dreamy, yet sarcastic young man: what on earth could have drawn them so close to each other in the Jaffa of the days of the Second Aliyah, before the outbreak of the First World War, that they were almost like a pair of lovers? Today I think that I can guess something of the answer, but that day in Agnon's house, innocent as I was, I explained to my host the task I had been set, and innocently inquired if he would tell me the secret of his closeness to Brenner.
Mr. Agnon screwed up his eyes and looked at me, or rather scrutinized me, for a while with a sidelong glance, with pleasure, and a slight smile, the sort of smile—I later understood—that a butterfly catcher might smile on spotting a cute little butterfly. When he had finished eyeing me, he said:
"Between Yosef Hayyim, may God avenge his death, and me in those days there was a closeness founded on a shared love."
I pricked up my ears, in the belief that I was about to be told a secret to end all secrets, that I was about to learn of some spicy, concealed love story on which I could publish a sensational article and make myself a household name overnight in the world of Hebrew literary research.
"And who was that shared love?" I asked with youthful innocence and a pounding heart.
"That is a strict secret," Mr. Agnon smiled, not to me but to himself, and almost winked to himself as he smiled, "yes, a strict secret, that I shall reveal to you only if you give me your word never to tell another living soul."
I was so excited that I lost my voice, fool that I was, and could only mouth a promise.
"Well then, strictly between ourselves I can tell you that when we were living in Jaffa in those days, Yosef Hayyim and I were both madly in love with Samuel Yosef Agnon."
Yes, indeed: Agnonic irony, a self-mocking irony that bit its owner at the same time as it bit his simple visitor, who had come to tug at his host's sleeve. And yet there was also a grain of truth hidden here, a vague hint of the secret of the attraction of a very physical, passionate man to a thin, spoiled youth, and also of the refined Galician youth to the venerated, fiery man who might take him under his fatherly wing, or offer him an elder brother's shoulder.
Yet it was actually not a shared love but a shared hatred that unites Agnon's stories to Brenner's. Everything that was false, rhetorical, or swollen by self-importance in the world of the Second Aliyah (the wave of immigration that ended with World
War I), everything mendacious or self-glorifying in the Zionist reality, all the cozy, sanctimonious, bourgeois self-indulgence in Jewish life at that time, was loathed in equal measure by Agnon as by Brenner. Brenner in his writing smashed them with the hammer of his wrath, while Agnon pricked the lies and pretenses with his sharp irony and released the fetid hot air that inflated them.
Nonetheless, in Brenner's Jaffa as in Agnon's, among the throngs of shams and prattlers there shine dimly the occasional figures of a few simple men of truth.
Agnon himself was an observant Jew who kept the Sabbath and wore a skullcap; he was, literally, a God-fearing man: in Hebrew, "fear" and "faith" are synonyms. There are corners in Agnon's stories where, in an indirect, cleverly camouflaged way, the fear of God is portrayed as a terrible dread of God: Agnon believes in God and fears him, but he does not love him. "I am an easygoing sort of a man," says Daniel Bach in A Guest for the Night, "and I do not believe that the Almighty desires the good of his creatures." This is a paradoxical, tragic, and even desperate theological position that Agnon never expressed discursively but allowed to be voiced by secondary characters in his works and to be implied by what befalls his heroes. When I wrote a book on Agnon, The Silence of Heaven: Agnons Fear of God, exploring this theme, dozens of religious Jews, most of them from the ultra-Orthodox sector, including youngsters and women and even religious teachers and functionaries, wrote personal letters to me. Some of these letters were veritable confessions. They told me, in their various ways, that they could see in their own souls what I had seen in Agnon. But what I had seen in Agnon's writings I had also glimpsed, for a moment or two, in Mr. Agnon himself, in that sardonic cynicism of his that verged almost on desperate, jesting nihilism. "The Lord will no doubt have mercy on me," he said once, with reference to one of his constant complaints about the bus service, "and if the Lord does not have mercy on me, maybe the Neighborhood Council will, but I fear that the bus cooperative is stronger than both."
