Only Yesterday
S . Y . A G N O N
Translated from the Hebrew by Barbara Harshav
Princeton University Press Princeton, New Jersey
nly Yesterday
Copyright ©
2000 by Schocken Publishing House Ltd. TelAviv, Israel
Introduction and Glossary by Benjamin Harshav, translator’s note by Barbara Harshav, Copyright © 2000 by Princeton University Press
Published by Princeton University Press, 41 William Street, Princeton, New Jersey 08540
In the United Kingdom: Princeton University Press, Chichester, West Sussex
All rights reserved
ISBN 0-691-00972-4
This book has been composed in Electra
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10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
The Only Yesterday of
OnlyYesterday
I
vii
Translator’s Note
I
xxxi
Prologue
I
3
A Delightsome Land
I
37
Jerusalem
I
193
From One Issue to Another
I
371
Epilogue
I
483
Glossary
I
643
I
v
The Only Yesterday of
Only Yesterday
As Agnon felt that this strangely intensive bygone world happened “only yesterday,” but was timelessly valid, so his own fictional world was alive, pervading all of modern Hebrew culture “only yesterday,” and can—and should—stand beyond its ostensibly parochial land-scape as one of the great literary myths of the twentieth century.
Shmuel-Yosef Agnon’s Hebrew novel
Only Yesterday
(
Tmol Shilshom
) was written in Palestine under British Mandatory rule in the late 1930s, finished in 1943 during World War II, and published after the war in 1945. The prominent Israeli literary critic Barukh Kurzweil, a German Ph.D. in literature and a leading authority on his fellow Austro-Hungarian novelist, pronounced: “The place of
Only Yesterday
is among the greatest works of world literature.” Those were not parochial sentiments of a “minor literature”; similar opinions were voiced by Leah Goldberg, Hebrew poetess and polyglot, translator of Petrarch and Tolstoy into Hebrew, and first professor of comparative literature at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem; and by Robert B. Alter, Professor of Hebrew and comparative literature at the University of California at Berkeley, a discerning critic and scholar of the European novel.
On the face of it, it is a simple story about a simple man, Isaac Kumer, who immigrated from Austrian Galicia to that cultural back-water, the southern Syrian province under Ottoman rule (the historical Palestine). He arrived with the Second
Aliya
—a few hundred secular idealists, mostly Socialist Zionists from Russia, who came to the Land of Israel between 1904 and 1914 to till the soil, revive “He-brew labor” and the Hebrew language, and became the founding generation of Israeli society. Isaac, however, who believed in their
I
vii
ideals, drifted back to the fold of Orthodox Jewry, the Guardians of the Walls in Jerusalem.
Yet in this most unbelievable margin of all margins, the great themes of twentieth century literature reverberated. Among the main concerns of the book are “the death of God,” the impossibility of living without Him and the impossibility of return to Him, the re-versibility of the Siamese twins Homeland and Exile, the weight of the traditional Library and the hollow sound of inherited discourse, the power of suppressed eroticism, and the ambivalent and drifting individual consciousness in an age of ideology. The book was written after Schopenhauer and Freud, after Spengler and Lenin—and grounded in the most austere, minimal society, in an impoverished fossil of an ancient myth.
Summarizing the book would be a futile exercise since its strength lies not in events but rather in hesitations about events. The historical context is as follows: in the sixteenth through eighteenth centuries, when Jews were barred from most West European countries, the great majority of world Jewry was concentrated in the largest European state, the united Kingdom of Poland-Lithuania, which included what is today most of Poland, Lithuania, Belarus, and Ukraine. Between 1772 and 1794 Poland was dismantled by its neighbors, Russia, Austria, and Prussia (which later became Germany). The majority of Jews found themselves in a huge geographical ghetto, the Jewish Pale of Settlement in the Russian Empire, and a large community lived in Galicia, the southern part of former Poland, now incorporated into the Austro-Hungarian Empire. There was an enormous explosion of the Jewish population in the nine-teenth century: from 2.2 million worldwide in 1800 to 7.5 million in 1880 and 16 million before World War II. The authentic Jewish territory in Eastern Europe was a network of small towns, where they constituted between one-half and two-thirds of the population. What united them was not an administrative hierarchy, but a dense cultural network, a religion with a Library of texts, a network of social and cultural institutions: separate Jewish schools, cemeteries, philan-thropic organizations, hospitals and hospices, publishing houses, books and newspapers, a literature in several languages, as well as
modern political parties and social organizations. All this was conducted in three private languages: Yiddish (for daily communication, education, politics, and modern life), Hebrew (of the Bible), and Aramaic (of the Talmud), as well as the languages of state and culture.
Agnon continues to call his homeland “Poland,” though under Austrian rule its culture was increasingly Germanized; whereas the Jews in Russia rapidly accepted Russian culture and ideologies and were considered “Russian Jews.” The revolutionary fermentation among Russian intellectuals, on the one hand, and the in-ferior status of Russian Jewry (deprived of the right of citizenship and disrupted by waves of pogroms), on the other, gave rise to a self-conscious literature and a whole gamut of political solutions and parties among the Jews of Eastern Europe, as well as the immigration of millions to the West and the US. This fermentation brought about a total transformation of the Jews, their languages, professions, education, their very place in general culture, geography and history, which we may call the Modern Jewish Revolution.
1
The Zionist immigration to Eretz-Israel was a mere trickle in a great stream— though its eventual results changed the nature of Jewish culture and identity as we had known it for two thousand years.
In the 1880s, a movement of Lovers of Zion (
Hovevey Tsion
) emerged in Russia, centered in Odessa, propagating the revival of the historical Land of Israel. In 1881, a small group of young intellectuals, who called themselves BILU (an acronym for “House of Jacob, come ye and let us go,” Isaiah 2:5), immigrated to Palestine and thus started the First
Aliya,
the First Immigration (1882–1904). This was the first wave of Zionist settlers in Palestine, the so-called New Yishuv (the “new settlement” or “new population”). They built Jewish settlements (or “colonies”), supported by Rothschild and ICA (the Jewish Colonization Association), and became farmers on the land. Only in 1897 did Theodor Herzl proclaim the World Zionist Organization in Basel with the goal of establishing a Jewish State in Palestine by political means. Herzl’s ideal swept the imagination of Jews
1
See my book, Benjamin Harshav,
Language in Time of Revolution
(Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1999).
everywhere, especially among the millions in Eastern Europe, but most Zionists paid the membership Shekel and stayed where they were. The real implementation of Herzl’s dream came through the subsequent waves of immigrants, especially from Eastern Europe.
There was also an Old Yishuv of a few thousand Orthodox, mostly old Jews, who came “to die in the Holy Land,” yet raised families and maintained a Jewish presence, mainly in Jerusalem and Safed. Many of them lived on the minimal “Distribution” (
Haluka
) given them by “Societies” (
Kolel
), according to their cities of origin, where the financial support came from. Traditional learning and reading religious books was a major preoccupation of the men.
The new Zionist immigrants regarded this subsistence off the Distribution, poor as it was, as the most abject, parasitic aspect of Jewish Diaspora life. Yet, as Agnon tries to show, winds of change penetrated these walls too: Some created neighborhoods outside the Old City walls—a symbolic as well as practical move—and established the first agricultural colony in Petach Tikvah (“The Opening of Hope”), some were artisans and supported their families with productive labor.
After the first wave of settlers ebbed, the Second
Aliya
arrived (1904–1914). Their ideological fervor was carried by young Socialist Zionists, mostly from Russia (fiercely debating between Marxist and anti-Marxist positions on Zionism). The immediate impulse was the pogrom in Kishinev in 1903, and the self-defense against the pogrom in Homel the same year (at the age of fifteen, young Rosa Cohen, mother of Itzhak Rabin, was one of the fighters and immigrants). The new pioneers intended to work the land, but work was scarce or nonexistent and the landlords of the First
Aliya
preferred cheap Ara-bic labor to the inexperienced Socialist bachelors. Collectives of He-brew laborers emerged, reviving the Hebrew language in public communication and, after World War I, erecting the first kibbutzim. All in all, there may have been three thousand pioneers, most of whom abandoned the Land after a year or two; according to Agnon, only two hundred workers remained. (In 1908 there were sixty members of the Marxist party
Poaley Tsion
and ninety of the anti-Marxist Socialists,
Ha-Po’el Ha-Tsa’ir
). Their slogan was: “Hebrew land, Hebrew labor, Hebrew language.” And though Hebrew sentences were spoken throughout the ages, between 1906 and 1913 the Second
Aliya
created the first Hebrew-speaking society, a Hebrew city, and Hebrew schools.
At the same time, however, there was an influx of secular Zionist immigrants to Jaffa and Jerusalem, and trade flourished. In 1909 Neve Tsedek, a Jewish neighborhood north of Jaffa emerged, which later turned out to be the beginning of the first Jewish city Tel Aviv; the first Hebrew high school, Gymnasia Herzliya in Tel Aviv, and the Bezalel School of Art and Design in Jerusalem were the pride of the New Yishuv. During World War I, Jews were persecuted by the Turkish authorities, some were conscripted into the Turkish army (fighting with Germany against the Allies), and some were expelled from Palestine. But after the war, when Palestine became a British Mandate territory where a “Jewish Home” was to be established, and a new wave, the Third
Aliya,
came from the Russian Revolution, the pioneers of the Second
Aliya
(Berl Katznelson, David Ben-Gurion, Meir Dizengoff) became the leaders of the Hebrew Yishuv.
This is the context Isaac Kumer enters. The rough outline of his story is as follows: Isaac Kumer was born to a poor family in a Jew-ish town in eastern Galicia. Losing his mother at an early age, he turned his father’s little store into a Zionist club and brought it to bankruptcy. A naïve bachelor, unlike most of his career-oriented generation, he consumed the Zionist phraseology lock, stock, and bar-rel, adapted it to his religious discourse, and actually went to realize the Zionist slogans. He went to the Land of Israel to plow its soil and revive it as in biblical times. But agricultural work was not to be found, since the earlier immigrants of the First
Aliya
, landowning farmers in new Jewish settlements, preferred cheap Arab labor to the rabble-rousing young socialists. Labor Zionism, too, turned out to be a pipe dream. Almost starving, Isaac found work by chance as a house painter in Jaffa and then in Jerusalem, and instead of tilling the soil or building the country, he painted over old houses.
In Jaffa, he neglected the religious commandments and drifted into secular behavior, common among his generation. He be-came intimate with Sonya, the daughter of a well-to-do family in Diaspora and a Gymnasium student. Like most members of the Second
Aliya,
Sonya was Russian, and for some reason she fl with this Galician simpleton and later rejected him capriciously. But when he ascended to Jerusalem, he wound up back in the Orthodox and anti-Zionist religious world of the Old Yishuv. Inexplicably, he fell under its spell and eventually married Shifra, the daughter of an extreme Orthodox fanatic, who was paralyzed and could not object to the match. One critic called the book “the Epic of a period,” and another described it as “the most weighty and important attempt in our literature to depict the life of the Second
Aliya
in the Land of Israel.” Indeed, one construct that Agnon offers the reader is a faithful and meticulous historical reconstruction, including descriptions of buildings and neighborhoods in Jerusalem and mundane, humaniz-ing anecdotes about legendary historical figures. Yet the documen-tary gesture resides only on the surface; behind its facade, enfolded in the novel’s allusive and elusive, ironic and shrewd style, is a complex field of multidirectional and ambiguous meanings, raising a tan-gle of constructs, to be made by the reader and contradicted again, questioning all major aspects of the human condition.