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Feb. 26, 2005 One of the dozen or so books, in addition to the Jewish Bible, that I have read in Hebrew was “Ir Umloáh”—translated into English a little grandiosely as “A City and the Fullness Thereof”—by Shmuel Agnon (1888-1970), the first Israeli to win the Nobel Prize for literature, awarded him in 1966. “Agnon” is a nom-de-plume; he was born Shmuel Czaczkes, in Galicia, a region in Poland (not to be confused with a region in Spain of the same name). Poland was a part of the Russian Empire during Agnon’s childhood. He moved to Palestine in 1908, but left to live in Germany for a decade, returning to Israel in 1924 to live out his days. For me reading a book in Hebrew is a major undertaking, and I probably spent 200 hours on Agnon’s book, which is beautifully written in the clearest, most elegant diction. It is a collection of anecdotes about life among the members of the Jewish community in Buczacz, Galicia in late tsarist times. At that time in Poland, Jews were segregated, whether de jure or just de facto, and in Buczacz they were a minority and mostly poor. The tenor of “Ir Umloah” is antipathetic to or contemptuous of Poles generally and of Christians in particular. I don’t know if the episodes in the book are supposed to be accounts of actual happenings or whether Agnon has allowed himself the license of embellishment for the sake of art, but they do tend to test the credulity of the reader. I’ll just summarize a couple of the key incidents Agnon narrates. In one episode, Agnon describes a bit, fat, half-wit of a Polish woman who was a voracious glutton always on the lookout for something to eat. She broke into a Catholic Church, stole some boxes of the sacramental wafers used in the Eucharist, and gobbled them up. Naturally, her neighbors, who were hysterical at the sacrilege, suspected her right away and confronted her, but she accused a local rabbi, saying that he stole the wafers to feed to his cat. The neighbors fell for it, and, in a rage, marched on the rabbi’s house with vehement accusations. When they arrived, the rabbi was reading a Hebrew Bible. The mob seized the Bible, and ignorantly concluded that it was a book on witchcraft. They began tearing at his clothes and striking him, and finally he was arrested and went to jail, where he awaited trial for two or three years. Eventually he was fined heavily and had to mortage or sell his house to pay the fine. One detail here that does not hold water is that the average Pole would understand immediately that a rabbi would be wise enough to know a cat would never eat Communion wafers. Furthermore, their food value is so slight that I can hardly imagine a gluttonous woman bothering with them. But that’s the tale Agnon told. In another episode, the local Wojewoda (provincial governor), a Christian, had risen to his dignity through complicity in the assassination of his brother. According to Agnon, Christians are capable of perpetrating almost any misdeed consciencelessly, but this crime was so villainous that even the unscrupulous Wojewoda began to feel tremendously guilty and fell ill. He visited all the local doctors and hospitals and even traveled to some major Polish cities to consult physicians, but no one was able to do him any good. He began to attend Church and pray fervently for forgiveness, but this didn’t help either. In growing desperation, he made a pilgrimage to the Holy Land and visited Shrines, immersing himself in various curative waters. He also went to Egypt looking for some special worms he had heard about that could help cure him. Nothing availed. He was sicker than ever when he finally returned to Buczacz, dispirited and resigned to his own imminent death. As he walked through town, he passed a rabbi’s house, and as a last recourse, asked the rabbi if there was anything he could do. The rabbi had mead (wine made of honey) that he had brewed in kegs in his basement. So drawing a cup of mead, he blessed it, and gave it to the Wojewoda to drink. Shortly thereafter the Wojewoda recovered completely. I’m just a little skeptical about this one too. But Agnon did win a Nobel Prize, so it must have been his other books that won him that distinction. Let me repeat that his diction and style are excellent; it's just the content that nonplusses me. ------------ About the author Thomas Keyes: I have written two books: A SOJOURN IN ASIA (non-fiction) and A TALE OF UNG (fiction), neither published so far. I have studied languages for years and traveled extensively on five continents. Email: udikeyes@yahoo.com Comment on this article here! ------------ All articles are EXCLUSIVE to Useless-Knowledge.com and are not allowed to be posted on other websites. ARTICLE THIEVES WILL BE PROSECUTED! |
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