Two Scholars Who Were in our Town and other Novellas

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In “The Story of the Seven Beggars”, one of the Tales of the great Hassidic Rebbe Nachman of Breslov, a hunchback describes his mind as “a little that contained a lot”. Since he could hold some ten thousand people in his mind, along with all their desires and problems and needs, all of their trials and tribulations and triumphs, every element of their lives and nooks of their personalities, he presumed that he must be the “little that contains a lot.” But, Rebbe Nachman relates, everyone mocked him, saying that those people in his mind were nothing and in fact he was nothing as well.

The influence of Rebbe Nachman on Nobel laureate S.Y. Agnon should not be underestimated. Agnon saw in the Hassidic Master the starting point of what would become modern Jewish storytelling. Gershom Scholem remarked that “if the ‘Story of the Seven Beggars’ had not already been told by Rebbe Nachman, it could have become an Agnon story and would have taken on a perfectly ‘Kafkaesque’ aura” — reminding us of that other Jewish surrealist writer, who together with Agnon and Nachman, were all shocked by “the permeability, the loosened state of tradition” (G. Scholem, “S.Y. Agnon — The Last Hebrew Classic?” in On Jews and Judaism in Crisis).

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