A Book that Was Lost

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For my Bar Mitzvah, a friend of my parents, a Jewish writer, gave me a small bundle of books that included a collection of Agnon tales. In those days I did not wonder much about the authors of the books I read. A friend had given me The Hobbit and I didn’t know or much care that Tolkien was British, that his dark vision was shaped by a world war, that aspects of his imaginary world drew on Norse mythology. I merely plunged into the story of a small furry creature who follows a wizard and defeats a dragon.

It was the same with Agnon. I once read an interview with I.B. Singer where he talked about reading Dostoyevsky at the age of nine and simply assuming that Dostoyevsky — despite the anti-Semitism, or perhaps even because of it — was a Yiddish writer. This is how I read Agnon — I did not worry about translation, linguistic or cultural barriers. I did not think about Biblical, Mishnaic, Hasidic reverberations, or modern Hebrew interpolations. I just read. And so his stories entered through the same door that Tolkien, and that Dostoyevsky, enter when you read them as teenagers, which is actually the only door literature ought to go through, at least in the beginning.

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