Chapter 11 A Tale of Love and Darkness (11)

Mum looked up to Mr. Agnon, how shall I say, always seemed to be on tiptoe.Even when she sat there, she seemed to be on tiptoe.Agnon himself hardly spoke to her, he seemed to only speak to my dad, but when he did, his eyes seemed to linger on my mother's face for a moment.Strangely enough, on the rare few occasions when he spoke to my mother, his eyes seemed to avoid her and look at me, either at the window, or it was not the case at the time, but it was engraved in my imagination in this way.A living memory is like ripples in the water, or like the skin of a gazelle shaking nervously before jumping. This living memory comes suddenly, vibrating with several rhythms or several focal points in an instant, and then solidifies and turns into a memory of memory. In the spring of 1965, my first book "Where the Jackal Howls" came out. I gave a copy to Mr. Agnon with trepidation and signed the title page.Agnon wrote me a beautifully worded reply about my book: "What you wrote to me about your work reminded me of your deceased Ling Tang. I remember she was a child of your father fifteen or sixteen years ago. Bring me a book from your lordship. You must come with her. She stands on the doorstep and doesn't say much.

But her face is elegant and holy, and I can't get it out of my eyes for many days.Sincerely, Agnon. According to Agnon's request, my father translated the article "Bukzakz" in the Polish Encyclopedia when he wrote "The All-encompassing City". When he defined Agnon as a "big diaspora writer" His stories lack wings, Dad said, lack tragic depth, not even a healthy laugh, just quips and mocking sarcasm, and if he's beautiful at times, he doesn't stop there Rest until it's lost in tedious gags and Galician wit. It seems to me that Papa sees Agnon's novels as part of Yiddish literature. He doesn't like Yiddish literature .Because of his rational Lithuanian nature, he hated magic, the supernatural, and unrestrained emotionalism, anything dressed in a vague romantic or mystical guise, and anything that deliberately confused the senses and robbed the intellect. Until he His tastes did not change until the last few years of his life. Admittedly, just as my grandma Shlomit's death certificate listed a man who died of a clean freak as having died of a heart attack, my dad's résumé thus only states that he Ended up working on an unknown manuscript by Peretz. These are the facts. I don't know what the real situation is, because I hardly ever told my dad about the real situation. He hardly ever told me his Childhood, his love, love in general, his parents, his brother's death, his own illness, his pain, or pain in general. We never even talked about my mother's death. Not a word Didn't. I didn't make it easy for him, and I never wanted to start a conversation that could lead to the ultimate revelation. If I started writing here all the things that we—Dad and I—didn't talk about, I could fill two This book. Dad left me a lot of work to do, and I still do it.

Mom usually said of Agnon like this: "That man has a lot of knowledge." Once she said, "He may not be a very good person, but at least he can tell right from wrong, and he also knows that we don't have many choices." She almost every winter Both read the short stories in the "Lock Handle" collection over and over again.Perhaps she found resonance in it and saw her own sadness and loneliness.I also sometimes re-read what Tierza Mazara of Beitminz said at the beginning of "She was in her prime": Mother died in her prime.My mother passed away when she was thirty.Mother's time in this world is short and painful.All day long she sits at home without leaving the door... Silence reigns over our unhappy home; the door is never opened to strangers.Mother was lying on the bed, not talking much.These are essentially the same words that Agnon wrote about my mother in a letter to me: "She stood on the doorstep and didn't talk much." , I always think of Agnon's apparently redundant sentence at the beginning of "In her prime": "She sits at home all day, never out of the door". My mother didn't sit at home all day, she went out. A lot of time. Yet her time in the world was few and painful. "Time of the world"? Sometimes I hear in these words the duality of my mother's life, the duality of Tirzam's, Leah's life, and Bet The duality of the lives of Minz's Tierza Mazara. As if they also cast more than one shadow on the wall.

Years later, the school in Kibbutz Khurda needed a literature teacher, so the committee sent me to study literature at the university.I plucked up my courage and rang the doorbell of Agnon's house. (Or in Agnon's words: I went to him with my heart.") "But Agnon wasn't home. ' said Mrs. Agnon, with a courteous air, the way she answered the gangs of brigands who came to rob her husband of his precious time. Mistress Agnon did not lie to me, Agnon It is true that Mr. is not at home, he is outside, in the garden behind the house, he suddenly appeared, wearing slippers and a sleeveless, collarless and unbuttoned jumper, greeted me, and then asked suspiciously, but Mr. Who was it? I gave my name and my parents' names, and there I was, standing on the doorstep of his house. (Mrs. Agnon entered the house without a word.) Mr. Agnon remembered the Gossip, he put a hand on my shoulder and said, aren't you the kid whose poor mother abandoned him and who didn't get along well with his father and left home to live in a kibbutz? Don't you Is that the kid who used to pick the raisins out of the cake and got scolded by his parents here? (I don't remember that, and I don't believe him about picking raisins, but I choose not to contradict him.) Mr. Agnon Invited me into the house, asked me what I was doing in the kibbutz for a while, my reading situation (what are you reading about me in college now? Which one of my books do you like?), and asked who I was married to. Madame's family background. When I told him to count from her father, she was Isaiah Horowitz, a 17th century Talmud scholar and Kabbalah scholar

His eyes lit up and he told me two or three stories, while at the same time he grew impatient and was obviously trying to get me off.But I mustered up the courage to tell him what was wrong with me, even though I was sitting there on tiptoe, just like my mother used to do.I came because Professor Gershawn Scheckerd had his first-year Hebrew literature students compare short stories by Brenner and Agnon set in Haifa. Having read the short stories and what I could find in the library about their friendship in Jaffa during the Second Aria, I was struck by how two such different people could have become friend.Joseph Heim Brenner was a Russian Jew, miserable, emotionally unstable, stocky, so-so, irascible, a Dostoevskyian, torn between enthusiasm and despair, pity and rage. swaying.Already at the center of modern Hebrew literature and the frontier movement, Agnon was then a shy Galician lad, a few years younger than Brenner, who was still almost Literary newcomer, a pioneer-turned-clerk, a suave and perceptive student of the Talmud, neatly dressed, a scrupulously rigorous writer, a lean, dreamy and sarcastic young man.What was it that attracted the two to each other in the days of the second Aria, so close that they were almost lovers before the outbreak of the First World War? Now, I think I can guess some of the secrets, but I was so innocent that day at Agnon's that I told my master about my homework, innocently asking if he could tell me the secret of his closeness to Brenner.Mr. Agnon frowned, and looked at me, or rather examined me for a moment, with squinting eyes, a cheerful expression, and a smile on his face.That smile—I later understood—was the butterfly flutter coveting a cute little butterfly.He looked at me and said, "Joseph Heim Brenner and I, God avenge him, were intimate in those years, based on a mutual love." I pricked up my ears, believing I was about to hear A secret that will put an end to all secrets, and I'm about to learn some exciting and well-kept love story that I can write a sensational article that will make me, a nobody, famous in the field of Hebrew literary studies .

"Who do you all love?" I asked, my heart pounding with the innocence of youth. "It's a secret." Mr. Agnon smiled, not at me, but at himself, almost winking at himself. "Yes, if you swear you won't tell anyone, I'll Only to you." I was so excited that I couldn't speak, how stupid I was, and kept making verbal promises to him. "Well, you know, I can tell you that Joseph Heim Brunner and I were madly in love with Schmuel Joseph Agnon when we lived in Jaffa." Yes, Agnon's self-deprecating sarcasm distressed him, as did his simple visitor, the one who came to tug on Agnon's sleeve.Although there is also a slight truth hidden here, there is still a vague hint of a secret: a strong and emotional man is attracted to a delicate young man, and a gentle Galician young man is also attached to a respectable hot-tempered and easy-going. Angry, the latter can take him under fatherly wings, or offer him a pair of brotherly shoulders.What binds Agnon and Brenner's short stories, however, is not a shared love but a shared hate.All the falsehood, rhetoric, or grandiosity of the second Arria (immigration wave that ended at the end of World War I) world, all the inauthenticity or pretentiousness of the Zionist reality Stuff, all the comfortable, sanctimonious bourgeois self-indulgence of Jewish life in that era was hated by Agnon and Brenner alike.While Brenner smashes all of this to pieces with the hammer of fury in his creation, Agnon unleashes the stench that inflates it by piercing through lies and pretense with biting satire.It is true that Brenner's Jaffa, like Agnon's Jaffa, has occasional glimmers of purely real characters amidst the hypocrisy and eloquence.Agnon himself was a strictly religious Jew who kept the Sabbath, wore a beanie, and was, literally, a man who feared God.In Hebrew, "fear" and "faith" are synonyms.There are corners in Agnon's novels where the indirect, masterly disguise is employed, and the fear of God is portrayed as horribly God-fearing.Agnon believed in God and was afraid of God, but he didn't love God. "I am a man of peace." Daniel Bach said in the novel "The Guest of the Night", "I do not believe that Almighty God wants his people well." This is a story full of paradox and tragedy, even despair. Agnon never expresses the theological position of the novel, but allows the secondary characters in the work to confide, hinting at what befalls the protagonist.I explored this theme when I wrote my book on Agnon, The Silence of Heaven: Agnon's Fear of God.Dozens of Jews, mostly from the ultra-Orthodox sect, including young people and women and even religious teachers and civil servants, wrote me private messages.Some letters are veritable confessions.They told me in various ways that they saw in their souls what I saw in Agnon.But what I see in Agnon's writing, I see, for a moment, in Agnon himself, in his ironic cynicism--a nihilism bordering on despair and playfulness.

"God has mercy on me no doubt," he had said in his endless complaint about the bus service. "If God doesn't have mercy on me, our district council may have mercy on us, but I'm afraid the bus cooperatives are worse than both of them." Powerful." During the two years I was studying at the University of Jerusalem, I made two or three pilgrimages to Tarapiut.My earliest short stories appeared in the Daval ("The Thing") Weekend Supplement and the Quarterly Kaishat ("Arrow", "Rainbow"), and I plan to leave them at Mr Agnon's, listen His thoughts, but Mr. Agnon apologized and said: "I regret not being able to read these days." Let me get it another day.And when I went to see him the other day, I was empty-handed, and I put the "Kaishante" with my work on it in front of my stomach, like an embarrassed pregnant woman.In the end, I didn't have the courage to give birth there, I was afraid that I would be annoying, and I left his house with a big belly or a bulging sweater like I came.Only a few years later, when the short stories were assembled into a book (Where the Jackal Howls, 1965), I worked up the courage to give him the book.After receiving the friendly letter from Mr. Agnon, I danced around the kibbutz for three days and three nights, full of joy, full of happiness, singing and roaring silently, roaring and crying from the bottom of my heart, especially in his letter Wrote: "When we meet, I will speak to you more than what is written here. I will finish my other novels during Passover because I love the short stories you have written. In novels, The protagonist is completely a person in real life.” When I was studying in college, a foreign magazine once published an article by a master of comparative literature (probably the Swiss Emile Steiger), according to his point of view In the first half of the twentieth century, the three most important writers in Central Europe were Thomas Mann, Robert Musil and S. J. Agnon.The article was published a few years before Agnon won the Nobel Prize in Literature.I was so excited that I stole the magazine from the reading room (photocopying was not allowed in college at that time) and hurried to Tara Puyute with it in my pocket for Agnon to happily read.He was very happy indeed, standing on his doorstep, wolfing down the whole article, before letting me in, and reading it over and over, probably licking his lips, and then reading it with the kind he sometimes uses to read it. I looked at me and asked innocently: "Do you also think Thomas Mann is such an important writer?" One night, I missed the last train from Rehovot to Kibbutz Hulda and had to take a taxi.The radio had been talking all day about Agnon and the poet Nelly Sachs being tied for the Nobel Prize, and the taxi driver asked me if I had heard of a writer called, what was it, Agnon: "You Look what this is called," he said in dismay. "We had never heard of him before, and suddenly he took us to the world finals. It's a pity that he ended up with a woman."

For a few years I struggled to get out of Agnon's shadow.I struggled to separate my creations from his influences, his dense, embellished and sometimes mediocre language, his rhythmic rhymes, a certain Midrashian smug, sonorous Yiddish tone, ha The lively and interesting soft voice of Sidi Legend, opened the distance.I tried to escape his influence, his irony and wit, his baroque symbolism, his mysterious maze-like games, his double semantics, his complex and profound technique.Although I have made great efforts to escape his influence, what I have learned from Agnon undoubtedly still reverberates in my writing.What did I really learn from him? Maybe: more than casting a shadow, not picking a raisin out of a cake, restraining myself, and grinding.And one more thing: my grandma used to say it in a sharper way than the Agnon expression I've found: "If you've cried until you have no more tears, then don't cry, just laugh."