The Story of a Life (19 page)

Had he said all this in a well-modulated voice, I would perhaps have taken it better, but because his voice grew louder and louder from one moment to the next, I eventually stopped listening and heard nothing more than gratingly offensive noise.

What a different man Agnon was! Agnon also held fast to his forefathers’ beliefs, but his conversations were composed and wise. What Greenberg sought to do by storm, Agnon achieved with silence. I knew Agnon very well. He never voiced direct criticism about my writing; instead, he’d offer double-edged comments that were semi-ironic, sometimes teasing. That evening, Greenberg spoke to me with all the ardor in his heart, as a father speaks to a son. His words were neither measured nor rational, but they were authentic.

That was my only meeting with Greenberg; I never saw him face-to-face again. I would sometimes see him in the street, billowing past like a stormy spirit or standing and talking to someone with great passion. I distanced myself from him. His demands on me were not the demands that I cared to make on myself. But he apparently kept me in sight. On more than one occasion he inquired about me through friends. And more than once he relayed a clear injunction: “Don’t get bogged down in small details. Deliver your message loud and clear. One cannot speak of great catastrophes in whispers.”

I knew that he truly and sincerely respected me, but I no longer went to visit him, nor did I ever see him again. I was told of his death when I was abroad.

A FEW MONTHS before Agnon’s death, I passed by his house in Talpiot. A window was open and music blared from it; I felt that something was not right. I hovered near the window but did not dare to knock on the door. Eventually, however, I summoned up the courage and knocked. Agnon opened the door, happy to see me. It turned out that he had been listening to the news and had dozed off on the sofa; the radio had stayed on at full blast.

“How thoughtless of me to have left the radio on!” he said apologetically. “It’s good that you woke me up.” He went right off to make me a cup of coffee.

Because I so loved his writing, Agnon became my guide through the great confusion I experienced when I began to write. My encounter with the writer himself proved less simple: in Agnon, irony was so deeply ingrained and so sophisticated that sometimes it was hard to detect. Admiring professors and not a few foolish fans flocked to him. No wonder he protected himself with this arsenal of irony. The pity was that this method of expression became so ingrained
within him over the years that it became second nature to him, and he could no longer manage without it.

During the 1950s, Agnon was considered the most important writer in Israel. Everyone lavished praise on him. Research was devoted equally to important and trivial aspects of his work. And, as often happens, people almost stopped reading his books. Did he know? Was he aware of this? It’s hard to say. He was absorbed in himself, talked mostly about himself, and grumbled about those who stood in his way, who didn’t appreciate him as he felt they should, who bombarded him with letters, who were noisy on his street and hampered his writing, or who wrote negative reviews of his work. There is no doubt that he had a generous nature and was extremely perceptive regarding people and their situations. But he never expressed this. What stood out most was his self-absorption.

That evening, Agnon was different, as if he had come out of hiding. He didn’t talk on as he usually did, but asked me things and listened to my replies with great attentiveness, as if he had just met me for the first time and was trying to solve a riddle. I told him what I had been through during the war—though not in great detail, for I knew that his attention span was short. But that evening he was apparently eager to hear, because he kept asking for more details. Eventually he said, “What you saw in your childhood would be enough for three writers.”

Then he said something unexpected. “When all’s said and done, I’ve spent my entire life among books, either reading or writing. I haven’t had it hard—it wasn’t as if I had to work my way up from the gutter. Had I been a blacksmith, or a farmer working the land, or a craftsman with a strong connection to his material and his tools, I would have been a different writer.”

I felt that he spoke from the heart. For years people have been talking about the symbolism in Agnon’s writing,
and it turns out that Agnon himself, like any real writer, preferred the tangible to the symbolic.

Several times that evening he questioned me about what I had done to survive alone in the forests, what I had eaten, and with what I had covered myself at night. When I told him about the Ukrainians among whom I had worked, he asked me to say a few words in their language. For his part, he told me many things I had never known about the city of my birth, about its intelligentsia and its rabbis, and about the infamous Jacob Frank, the false messiah, who poisoned many souls by convincing people to sin so as to hasten the redemption.

This was Agnon without his affectations. That same evening, he tried to explain to me what my parents had not been able to tell me and what I wasn’t able to learn during the war years. “Every writer needs to have a city of his own,” he said, “a river of his own, and streets of his own. You were expelled from your hometown and from the villages of your forefathers, and instead of learning from them, you learned from the forests.”

It was almost as if he was trying to prepare me for the days ahead. The irony in his voice receded and a yearning took its place. I loved this voice, for it reminded me of the narrator’s voice in his stories.

On that evening, I sat across from an old man, a man in the fullness of his years. He knew that all the honors and compliments that had been showered upon him were like chaff. What would stand the test of time was the voice—a voice without ambiguity or deviousness or irony—that he had inherited from his forefathers, the voice one could hear in his novel
Tehillah.
This was Agnon’s true voice. The disguises and the evasions were, in the end, merely outer garments, necessary perhaps to capture the reader’s attention, but not the core of what he had to say.

That evening, he spoke to me with the cadences of his forefathers, the sound of which still echoed in my ears from the time I had spent at my grandparents’ home in the Carpathians. He spoke to me very plainly and told me that in his youth he had tried to study from one of the Jewish holy texts every morning, so as to draw upon their cadences and their holiness. He couldn’t always manage it. Sometimes the books would confuse him. He advised me to study the works of Rabbi Nachman of Bratslav, and not only the stories that were then in fashion, but
Likutei Maharan
, a mystical book full of secrets both divine and human. As he spoke to me, something glowed within him, and I realized that this was an altogether different Agnon, one who still roamed his—and my—native land, the Carpathians, where the Ba’al Shem Tov had walked with his pupils. That evening, he felt that it was important for me to learn where I had come from and where I had to go.

Then he told me about his book
Days of Awe
, over which he had labored for many years so that Jews would find it helpful during the High Holy Days. To his eternal regret, the critics and general public never felt as he did about it.

It was already late, and I rose to leave. Agnon stopped me. “Sit. What’s the hurry?” he said. I felt that loneliness was weighing him down and that it was hard for him to be alone. He revealed something else to me that evening—that over the past few months he had been thinking a great deal about his father and his mother. Had he the time, he would have gone back and told their story in a completely different way. He felt there were more than a few defects in his writing that he wanted to correct, but this would have required considerable energy, which he no longer had. In previous years he had been able to stand at his lectern and write for hours, but this was now hard for him. And that’s how I parted from him. My heart told me that I would never see him again, and my heart guessed right.

DURING THE YOM KIPPUR WAR, I served as a lecturer in the army’s Education Corps, and I found myself stationed alongside the Suez Canal. This unexpected war brought back to me, and apparently not only to me, memories of World War II. They surfaced during every discussion. The young soldiers were interested in the most minor details about the war, as if trying to fill in the gaps from those years long past. Unlike their questions on other subjects, the questions they asked about the war were not ideological or arrogant, but were full of empathy and went right to the point.

Children of Holocaust survivors were particularly interested. Their parents either hadn’t told them of their experiences or had told them very little. Although they had learned a bit in school, it was always in either a generalized or a frightening way, such as films of Auschwitz.

Long stretches of desert time loomed before us, and we had the opportunity to explore issues that were far from simple, such as the complex relationship between victim and murderer, or the ideas and beliefs that nurtured Jewish intellectuals
in the years before the Holocaust. And what were these beliefs? That the world was making progress, moving ahead for the good of all. That if Jews were to leave the narrow confines of their world to put down roots and become part of the larger world, they would be accepted with open arms. That this progress would dispel the poisonous vapors of past hatreds.

Not too many years earlier, Holocaust survivors were confronted—even harassed—by all kinds of bluntly rude questions: Why didn’t you resist? Why did you let yourselves be led like lambs to the slaughter? Survivor-witnesses brought in to speak at high schools and youth-movement meetings were set upon with these questions. The survivors would stand in front of these groups trying to defend themselves as the young people attacked them with facts gathered from newspapers and books. On more than one occasion, the survivors would leave feeling guilty as charged.

But it was different now. The passing years had done what passing years tend to do. Ideological convictions had softened or disappeared. Different truths worked their way through the collective consciousness. These soldiers were no longer the youths who had been filled with certainties and arrogance, but young people who realized that life sometimes springs something unexpected on us—such as this present war—and that one should not judge others hastily, to say nothing of misjudging them.

If I’d had some texts to work with, we would certainly have studied them in depth. Such complex issues are hard to grasp without the help of written materials. So I decided instead to tell them about myself. It’s not easy to reveal yourself to a large audience. True, a writer always speaks about himself, but the act of writing is like putting on clothing: you don’t stand there stark naked. This time, however, I didn’t
have a choice; without source texts I knew that I would not be able to speak about the usual clichéd approaches to anti-Semitism and the weakness of the Jews.

First I told them about my parents and my city. My parents, modern assimilated Jews, saw themselves as an integral part of the European intelligentsia. They took an interest in literature, in philosophy, in psychology—but not in being Jewish. Father was a successful industrialist and a member of upper-middle-class society. We took pride in the German we spoke and cultivated the language. Even during the late 1930s, my parents deluded themselves into believing that Hitler was a passing phenomenon. There were many signs that indicated the bad times to come—every daily newspaper and every weekly journal revealed the truth—but no one actually believed that things would turn out as they did. Delusion. Holocaust survivors would be accused to their faces of blindness and of self-delusion. But here, on the banks of the Suez Canal, the term “delusion” had a different ring to it. Even our excellent military intelligence had not foreseen this scenario; even our army had misled us.

A different sort of delusion.

For me this was an encounter on two different levels. The stark, bare desert and the soldiers who gathered around me were constant reminders of my wanderings in Europe after the war, and of my first years in Israel. For years I had tried to forge a bond with the desert landscape that I loved from the first moment I saw it. But I didn’t dare write about it; actually, I couldn’t. My childhood, my parents, and my grandparents had been part of a different landscape. I couldn’t uproot myself from the landscape to which they had been connected. When I first arrived in Israel, I was indeed in close contact with the land for four years—looking after trees, which I loved—but the barrier between me and my adoptive landscape
still remained. Now, however, amid the sand dunes, hundreds of kilometers away from our homes, all of us felt like strangers who were trying to understand not only what had happened in the Holocaust, but also what was happening here. We had been trying to change. Had we changed? Or had we actually remained the same strange tribe, incomprehensible to itself and incomprehensible to others?

It was not only I who spoke; the soldiers expressed their feelings, too, particularly those whose parents had survived the Holocaust. They resented the fact that their parents had kept their previous lives hidden from them for years, cutting them off from their grandparents and from the language of their grandparents, creating an artificial world around them, as if nothing had happened. I tried to defend myself and their parents. Holocaust survivors had faced excruciating choices, the main one being whether to continue living with the memory of the Holocaust or to start a new life. They had chosen the new life. That choice was not lightly undertaken. They had wanted to spare their children the memory of suffering and the shame; they wanted to raise them to become free men and women, without that dismal legacy.

We should not forget that it was not only the survivors who wanted to repress their experiences; the feeling throughout Israel at the time was that survivors should renounce their past and put aside their memories. During the 1940s and 1950s, religious beliefs and European mannerisms were seen as alien values to be kept out of Israeli life. Both the religious Jew and the assimilated Jew were frowned upon.