Jews and Poles in the Agnon Imaginary

• In Event: New Readings in Modern Hebrew Fiction

Abstract

‘Ir umelo’ah [A City in its Fullness, 1973] contains the great cycle of stories that Agnon wrote during the last fifteen years of his life about Buczacz, the Galician town in which he grew up and lived until his emigration to Palestine in 1907. Although most of the stories concern matters of learning and worship among the town’s elite, significant attention is given to the relations between Jews and Poles. Like most towns in Poland before the partitions, Buczacz was owned by a wealthy noble—in this case the Potocki family—who exerted total control over the affairs of the Polish, Jewish, and Ruthenian (Ukrainian) communities in the town and its environs. The stories accurately represent the complex mechanism whereby the Jews provided valuable services for the Polish magnates in return for a large measure of internal autonomy. Against this general background, the stories also register the dark side of this arrangement: the interference in rabbinic appointments, imprisonment for non-payment of usurious lease fees, blood libels fanned by Catholic priests, and cruel and capricious victimization of Jews by Count Potocki himself.

This paper focuses on two major stories that stage alternatives to Jewish helplessness. The first, “R. Moshe Aharon? mokher mei devash” [R. Moshe A, the Mead Merchant], tells the story of a wealthy and worldly community leader who rescues a great Polish prince from death. Haunted by guilt from the commission of a terrible sin, the Prince vainly travels the world as a pilgrim in search of atonement until Providence brings him to R. Moshe A’s doorstep. The second, “Hashutafim” [The Sharers], describes how a poor Jewish charcoal maker rescues an enfeebled Count Potocki, who has become detached from his hunting party and gotten lost in his own trackless forests. Recovering in the Jew’s rude cottage, the nobleman observes Jewish prayer for the first time, and as a reward for his rescue, he grants the Jew and his descendents the permanent right to occupy the basement of the newly constructed town hall to the everlasting fury of the Count’s own descendents.

After analyzing these texts, the paper asks why Agnon wrote two stories that imagine not only the neutralization of victimization but a reversal of the power relations between Pole and Jew. The suggestion is offered that Agnon is exploiting the resource of the literary imagination to mount an exercise in alternative history. He invents a plot that should have been true and uses his narrative power to create retrospectively an alternative world in which history is corrected and restored.

author

• Alan L. Mintz, The Jewish Theological Seminary