by S. Agnon
The narrator seems to be engaged in a polemical exchange with unnamed parties who argue that Buczacz was spared in the massacres. Refuting this position is presented as one of the tasks that will be accomplished by the telling of the story, even though it is subsidiary to the narrative’s main goals. Invoking God as the arbiter who will finally decide the matter is an equivocal statement. Does it mean that the issue remains vexed despite the story’s having been laid out by the narrator? Or does it express confidence in the ultimate—but not public or immediate—vindication of his conviction concerning the town’s fortunes during the massacres?
The narrator’s antagonist would appear to be none other than the historical record itself. According to most accounts—both contemporary seventeenth-century chronicles and modern historiography—the Jews of Buczacz defended themselves in 1648 and prevented extensive damage to the town, which, because it remained relatively intact, became a refuge for survivors from other destroyed communities.17 Although the town later suffered damage when it was occupied by Ottoman Turks, in the vast and horrendous spasm of anti-Jewish violence known in Jewish parlance as gezeirot taḥ vetat18 Buczacz was spared. So what then is the proof for the narrator’s revisionist assertion to the contrary, an assertion that remains tantalizingly unexplained and requires recondite divine sanction? The proof lies in the anecdotes, incidents and major plot developments that demonstrate the effects of the pogroms at almost every level and at almost every turn in the story. The puzzle is why the narrator chooses not to gather together these abundant instances and adduce them as evidence for an explicit refutation of the assertion that Buczacz eluded the effects of 1648.
There are two related reasons for this disinclination. The story focuses on the spiritual rather than the material or physical damage caused by the massacres. Admittedly, the town was spared overt death and destruction, but the theological crisis provoked by the broad sweep of events, though less stark and exposed, is more profoundly troubling. At the heart of the crisis lies the problem of theodicy: How could the God of Israel have abandoned His beloved people to the bloodthirsty depredations of the gentiles? Within the pious certainties of the shamash, there is ostensibly no crisis: “Because of His love for us, God encumbers us with suffering in order to purge us of the qelipot we have acquired in the lands of the Gentiles and thereby prepare us for the day of His Redemption” (9–10). Yet a multiplicity of evidence, with the case of Aaron’s apostasy figuring first and foremost, plays havoc with the neatness of the shamash’s explanation. The shamash’s own wide-ranging and digressive account of events works to undermine the certainty of his theology. Despite itself, his narrative records how the catastrophe insinuated itself into every aspect of Buczacz life and created a vast reservoir of belated trauma. “Suffering is hard,” states the shamash, “hard when it happens and hard afterward” (8). He is referring specifically to Aaron’s fate, but his comment on the aftermath of catastrophe radiates throughout the story.
The second reason for the narrator’s reticence lies precisely in the anxiety it arouses concerning the gap between the official theology and the suffering that came in the wake of the pogroms, a suffering that has changed shape but hardly diminished. On the one hand, the suffering is there, persisting and ramifying, and no account of life in Buczacz of that time can ignore it. On the other, to name it, to call attention to it as such, would mean to approach closer to the fraught and menacing theological boundary that Aaron has calamitously crossed over. This anxiety is palpable in the shamash’s reconstruction of events that took place fifty-four years ago. But does it resonate for the listeners to his tale some two generations later? It is crucial to keep this retrospective time difference in mind. The Buczacz we are introduced to at the opening of the story is a place where a great deal has faded from memory. The community grew and prospered in the second half of the seventeenth century. An accord was reached with the Potocki family, the Polish magnates who owned the town, which granted the Jews residential and occupational equality with Christian residents.19 There is in evidence more wealth and security and learning. This means not only that the tractates of the Talmud and its commentaries are more commonly available but also that the indiscretion of the scholarly son-in-law of a rich man can be overlooked precisely because he is a scholar and the son-in-law of a rich man.
In the intervening half century, in sum, two things have declined: the effects of the trauma of 1648 and a basic, class-blind piety in which competing with God’s word is unthinkable. Which of the two is the true subject of Hamashal vehanimshal and the real engine of the shamash tale? It is a question worth asking because both the shamash and the narrator are indefatigable in insisting that the purpose of the story is to underscore the mortal consequences of inappropriate speech. After his lengthy and sensational account of Aaron’s apostasy, for example, the shamash is at pains to persuade us that his story is being told only en passant as an introduction to the “main thing”: “That is the story of Aaron, husband of Zlateh, and it is through his fate that I came to see how severe is the punishment for all who talk during the service and the Torah reading. If this introduction is longer than the story, more severe still is the story itself” (27). The shamash is anxious here and elsewhere to avoid the perception of a symmetry or proportionality between the two themes. And it is not just Aaron’s tale that solicits our attention; after the tour of Gehinnom, beginning in Chapter 15 the story turns toward the epic account of the twentieth of Sivan, the communal commemoration of the martyrs who perished in the massacres. Neither theme, in the final analysis, can be left behind. That being the case, we are left to ask a series of questions: Is there a fundamental link between the two themes? Or is this is a story that is burdened with accommodating two separate ideas? And finally, why are the narrators so insistent on foregrounding one over the other? These are questions that will be returned to once the effects of 1648 have been more fully explored.
The damage done by Aaron’s apostasy extends beyond the theological questions it raises. By turning Zlateh into an agunah, Aaron’s disappearance prevents the fifteen-year-old girl from marrying for the rest of her life. This is a devastating blow to the rabbi because of his affection for her as the lone survivor of his family and his empathic sorrow over the barren life that lies before her. Indeed, he is nearly unhinged by the news. He neglects his communal duties, stops giving his regular public lessons on Maimonides and Alfasi and becomes wholly obsessed with the futile quest for a legal loophole that would release Zlateh from her bonds (10–11). The man who hews to a strict regimen of reticence now finds himself, again futilely, chatting for hours over brandy and cakes with gentile peasants in hope of extracting scraps of information about Aaron’s whereabouts. What precipitates this breakdown is not only heartbreak over his poor relative’s plight but the disappointment of a broader hope: “Our Master saw in Aaron and Zlateh his aspirations for a new generation that would serve God righteously in place of their parents murdered by the enemy” (8). The rabbi sees in the young couple the seeds of a recovery that would recoup horrendous losses and reestablish the chain of Torah learning. Aaron’s desertion therefore signals not just a private sorrow but the prospect of a sliding back into the morass of communal breakdown and disintegration. It is another example of how the trauma of 1648, rather than being contained by the passing years, extends its baleful effects like time-released capsules.
The effort at containment is palpable in the shamash’s account of Aaron’s fate. The shamash first tells us about the student’s religious crisis in Chapter 2, at the point when his disappearance is first discovered, and then again in greater length in Chapter 7, when he is encountered in Gehinnom. In both instances, the affecting and disturbing tale is thickly overlaid with the shamash’s stern moralizing. Only when the rabbi and the shamash first come across Aaron’s shade is the young man allowed to speak in his own voice. In its mixture of pathos and fatefulness, it is a moment that seems taken directly from Dante’s Inferno.
At this Aaron let out a wail and began crying loudly and bitterly. “They never let me! They never let me go to her! They buried me in their cemetery, a Gentile cemetery with a cross on my grave! . . . They cut me off from Jews, and I couldn’t even go into a Jewish home. When I wanted to leave my grave to visit my wife in a dream and tell her that I was dead and that she was free to remarry, the cross would bar my way, and I could not get to her. Rebbe, Gehinnom is terrible, but the torment of knowing that I left my wife to be an agunah is much, much worse.” (22)
Aaron’s remorse comes too late; his responsibility for a grievous wrong cannot be evaded. At the same time, however, he never meant to injure Zlateh, and his own plight is terrible and visited on him for eternity. Yet the shamash is quick to intervene and prevent Aaron from continuing to tell his story in his own words. He explains to his listeners that he will now proceed to narrate Aaron’s story in the third person, assuring them that none of the substance of the situation will be lost in converting from one mode to the other (22–23). He further assures the listeners that the shift is merely a technical matter necessitated by the fact he could not retrieve the young man’s exact words because of the profound mortification he (the shamash) was experiencing when he heard them.
The shamash’s quick appropriation of Aaron’s voice answers another need as well. It shuts down the source of pathos that radiates from the young man’s situation. Left to tell his own story in his own words, Aaron would reprise and amplify the soul-rending theological emergency that impelled him to take the heedless steps that delivered him to his present fate. The shamash therefore initiates deliberate measures to take over Aaron’s story and reframe it in such a way as to minimize the effects of the corrosive doubt consuming the life of the young scholar. He does so by making Aaron’s fate into a moral exemplum for the dangers of intellectual inquiry (ḥaqirah), which, rather than leading to true knowledge, places the seeker deeper and deeper into the clutches of the qelipot (literally, husks), seductive demonic forces that imperil the soul of the believer. This theological schema makes the shamash very much of his time and place and reflects the penetration of Lurianic Kabbalah into the scholarly circles of Polish Jewry, especially through the writings of Rabbi Isaiah Horowitz (c. 1565–1630), the author of the Shenei luḥot habrit, which itself was first published in 1648. Aaron is portrayed as a rationalist whose desperate search for reasons for God’s apparent abandonment of His people, for which he learns Latin and immerses himself in “alien” wisdom, leads him down a slippery slope to apostasy and death. In that portrayal, the harrowing pathos of Aaron’s individual fate, in all its troubling implications, is exchanged for a pitiable case study in a transgression against norms held jointly by the shamash and his pious listeners.
It is worth pausing for a moment to consider how unlikely it would be to find Aaron’s story, even as filtered by the shamash, in any text from the period in which our story is set. The explicit wrestling with the problem of theodicy provoked by national catastrophe has a distinctly modern tang to it, as do other features of the story, especially its consciousness of its multiple narrative planes. Indeed, in the final pages of the story, the narrator—that is, the overarching narrator who allows the shamash to recount many of the events—makes direct reference to the Holocaust, in which the communal register recording these events was destroyed. In fact, throughout ‘Ir umelo’ah20 references to the murder of European Jewry are common, although the events of that period are not represented. This means that Agnon’s narrator, in this story as in others, writes about earlier times out of an awareness of what has taken place in his own; and in a profound sense his very motive for telling these stories is fueled by that catastrophic loss. It is therefore not farfetched to say that at some level 1648 is viewed through 1939–1945, and vice versa. 1648 is presented as a kind of rehearsal for the Holocaust, while at the same time the sort of theological crisis Aaron suffers is retrojected from the modern period to seventeenth-century Galicia. The parallel can be taken even further. The Khmelnitski massacres, even though causing vast collective devastation, did not bring about the horrible totality of the Final Solution. Buczacz survived, albeit in the traumatized state described in our story, and with time Galician Jewry rebuilt its communities and institutions and flourished. Now, this would seem to be where the parallel breaks down, were it not for the fact that there is an offshoot of European Jewry that not only survived but flourished: the Yishuv and the state of Israel. And so there emerges a different kind of parallel, one between Buczacz and Israel. The whole of ‘Ir umelo’ah can be taken as a project in which one is substituted for the other, although it is never wholly clear at any given moment precisely which for which.
As much as Hamashal vehanimshal is a story that represents the traumatic persistence of 1648, it is also a story that represents the way in which catastrophe can be mourned. This is not mourning as a state of vanquished dejection but rather mourning as a dynamically active liturgical process that both commemorates the dead and tends to the needs of the living. Agnon devotes a substantial portion of the story to the observance of the twentieth of Sivan; he positions these scenes, especially the rabbi’s parables (as in the title of the story), so as to serve as the climax of the narrative, and he makes them thick with quotations from Scripture and the sacred poetry composed to lament the recent disasters. Whether or not the rabbi’s parables serve their climactic purpose is a question that will be taken up in a subsequent section. The focus here is on the ceremony of mourning.
Like the ninth of Av, the twentieth of Sivan (a date in the Hebrew calendar that falls in the late spring) is a date to which many calamities have been attached. Its origins perhaps lie in massacres surrounding a blood libel in Blois in 1171 and the day decreed by the Tosafist Rabeinu Tam for its commemoration. Five centuries later, when the Jews of Nemirov were murdered by Cossack bands in the late spring of 1648, the date was taken up in the aftermath as a day of fasting and mourning for all the victims of the massacres, much as in our own time the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising (April 19, twenty-seventh of Nissan) came to stand for the Holocaust as a whole. In the economy of its narrative, Hamashal vehanimshal turns away at this point from a preoccupation with the journey to Gehinnom and its aftermath and clears a monumental space for a depiction of the observance of the twentieth of Sivan. Even though the Jewish population of Buczacz is not large—it will become so in the following century—the depiction is monumental in the way it is framed. It is presented as a phenomenon of what might be called liturgical totalization. Every last member of the community, even nursing mothers with their infants, fasts and makes the trip to the cemetery and later stands for hours in the synagogue for the intoning of dirges and the rabbi’s eulogy for the dead. There is an intimate, reciprocal relationship between the living and the dead: “Some went to visit their relatives’ graves, some to entreat the dead to pray for the living” (39). Even though Buczacz physically escaped the massacres, it has subsequently been turned into a kind of necropolis. The cemetery itself is so overloaded with graves of martyrs that the Rabbi has relocated the venue of the eulogy to the synagogue, lest in the jostling kohanim, Jews of priestly origin, be inadvertently pushed into stepping on burial plots, where they are forbidden to go. For the Rabbi, the omnipresence of the dead is a nightmarish perception rather than an actuality. In explaining the transfer of the ceremony from the cemetery to the synagogue, he says, “Why do I need to go to the dead when they are coming toward me?” (40). The Rabbi’s meaning, according to the shamash, is that the town proper contains so many unknown graves of murdered Jews that it may be forbidden for kohanim to reside there altogether. The fact that the Rabbi has not issued a definitive ruling is found curious (qetsat qasheh) in the eyes of the shamash, given the Rabbi’s usual diligence in getting to the bottom of any legal issue he addresses. We, however, are given to understand that the matter is ultimately not a legal one but the projection of a consciousness enmeshed in the world of the dead.
As the ceremony p
roceeds, this extended scene comes to focus exclusively on the Rabbi, almost as if, in cinematographic terms, he were the subject of an extreme close-up. The Rabbi, we already well know, is the object of the shamash’s veneration, and it is therefore no wonder that his every gesture and utterance is taken to be infinitely meaningful. But the choice to place at the center of the scene a man so wholly absorbed in the reality of the martyred Jews is the sign of a broader narrative strategy intended to expose the depths of the trauma left in the wake of 1648. The Rabbi takes the prerogative of beginning with special memorial prayers for his own teacher, Rabbi Yeḥiel Mikhl of Nemirov, but he soon undergoes a breakdown. He bursts into tears, lays down the Torah scroll and places his head on the scroll. The object of fascination for the shamash and other observers in the congregation is the rabbi’s hair. Since receiving a wound to his skull during the massacres, he has not cut his hair, and his face is wreathed with a profusion of silver curls. Rather than attending to the grief that has momentarily disabled him, observers prefer a more transfiguring interpretation.
After a while he pulled himself up, and his white earlocks shone like polished silver. The interpreters of mystic secrets said that our Master had bathed his head in the waters of grace. His face shone in the crimson glow of the setting sun, but his eyes were closed, and our Master seemed like one who had been on a distant journey. Those same commentators said that he had returned from the far western edge of the world, where the Divine Presence resides, and there he had seen his Master, that holy light Rabbi Mikhl of Nemirov, and all the martyrs with him, sitting in the Academy on High, radiant in the Divine Presence. I do not concern myself with hidden matters—for a person like me what my eyes behold is sufficient—but I agree with those who say that every single one of our Master’s curls resembled a silver goblet that has been immersed in pure water. (41)
