Vol. 8 No. 15 · 4 September 1986
pages 22-23 | 3263 words
Open Book
Nicholas Spice
- A Simple Story by S.Y. Agnon, translated by Hillel Halkin
246 pp, £13.10, March 1986, ISBN 0 8052 3999 5
- At the Handles of the Lock: Themes in the Fiction of S.Y. Agnon by David Aberbach
Oxford, 221 pp, £18.00, November 1984, ISBN 0 19 710040 6
- Snakewrist by Christopher Burns
Cape, 240 pp, £9.95, July 1986, ISBN 0 224 02351 9
Shmuel Yosef Czaczes, one of the finest writers of the 20th century, was born in 1888, in Buczacz, a small town in Galicia. Take out a large atlas and look up Buchach. You will find it in the Ukraine, about a hundred miles east of Ivano-Frankovsk (formerly Stanislav) and two hundred miles south-east of Lvov (formerly Lemberg). To the south-west lie the Carpathian mountains, and beyond them Transylvania. To the west and north, the eastern borders of Hungary, Czechoslovakia and Poland. To the north and east, the vast expanses of the Ukraine and of White Russia. At the back end of Eastern Europe, well this side of the Russia that tourists are allowed to visit, Galicia is now a forgotten zone, a part of old Europe whose existence we are not aware of and do not even know that we are not aware of. Perhaps it was always like that. In 1888, when Galicia still belonged to the Austro-Hungarian Empire, the citizens of cosmopolitan Vienna must have looked on it as the ultimate backwater. It is where A Simple Story is set, most of the novel taking place in Szybusz – Buczacz in disguise.
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Letters
Vol. 8 No. 18 · 23 October 1986
From David Aberbach
SIR: Your reviewer of my book on Agnon’s fiction (LRB, 4 September) contends that ‘the thesis is a bad vehicle for literary cogitation.’ This may be true of many writers, but Agnon is one of the exceptions. He is one of the most scholarly of modern writers. He did not intend his work merely to be ‘read’ but to be studied and learned almost as one studies Holy Scriptures. In one of his most revealing stories, the author-narrator stands outside a synagogue on the eve of the Day of Atonement and sees that an original work of his own is included among the scrolls in the Holy Ark. The oblique, allusive nature of Agnon’s style is ideally suited to scholarly interpretation. Most of the finest critical writing on Agnon has come from the universities. It is interesting, too, that Agnon’s closest friends and acquaintances were not his fellow writers, most of whom he despised, but scholars such as Gershom Scholem, Martin Buber and Dov Sadan. For these reasons and others it is hard to form an accurate picture of Agnon’s achievement on the basis of a single work in English translation. His works – which span six decades – are interconnected and built on one another. The meaning of one story is often elucidated by another. It is true that a scholarly approach has its limitations, but so does every approach to literature, including – as Virginia Woolf and many others have pointed out – book reviewing. One wonders what is worse: a DPhil student who knowingly focuses on a particular limited approach as it sheds new light on a complex writer, or a reviewer who, whether out of ignorance, bafflement or indifference, fails to come to grips with the substance and implications of this approach.
David Aberbach
Department of Jewish Studies,
