Tenants of the Past

THE BRIDAL CANOPY by S. Y. Agnon. 389 pages. Schocken Books. $5.95.

IN THE HEART OF THE SEAS by S. Y. Agnon. 128 pages. Schocken Books. $3.95.

TWO TALES by S. Y. Agnon. 237 pages. Schocken Books. $4.95.

QUIET. AGNON is WRITING, reads a street sign in Talpioth, a fir-shaded suburb of Jerusalem. It honors the solitude of Israel's most beloved and most retiring author, Shmuel Yosef Agnon, 78, who until recently was almost unknown in the West. Lately, a steady tide of visitors has disobeyed the sign and trespassed on the austere hospitality of his house, which offers only a few folding chairs to guests. Israel counts Agnon a cultural hero, studies his work in its schools, and has given him a hero's place since he returned from Stockholm last December with the 1966 Nobel Prize for Literature.*

The West has a fresh chance to examine this distant literary figure. Some of his books were translated into English in the 1930s, but they attracted little notice. Now his publisher has placed three Agnon titles in U.S. bookstores, where they are selling with a briskness that owes much to simple curiosity.

Transcending Orthodoxy. Agnon's stubborn tenancy of the past sets formidable obstacles before the Gentile reader, or before anyone unfamiliar and unconcerned with Jewish tradition. His prose is majestically--at times annoyingly--Talmudic and is not easily translated from the Hebrew. Nor is his spirit, which is strongly flavored with Hasidism, an 18th century Jewish movement with strong emotional appeal to an oppressed and homeless people. Hasidism urged Jews to find joy in prayer and in their lot--an antidote to the despairs of exile. The existence of the State of Israel has helped dissipate the Hasidic appeal. But Agnon's spirit, his heart and his books still cherish the time when the Jew's chief sustenance was a dream.

In the Heart of the Seas sends a group of Jews from Galicia--now a part of Poland and the Ukraine, where Agnon was born--on a perilous but successful journey to the Holy Land. For Jews in Eastern Europe, that hegira is still difficult and at times even heartbreaking. But for most other Jews who want to go, the move is now free of serious obstacles, and further eased by El Al stewardesses--which is one reason why Agnon's rolling cadences in this story lose much of their meaning.

More often, Agnon transcends the Orthodoxy of his material. In The Bridal Canopy, the Hasid Reb Yudel Nathanson, a deliberately quixotic hero, half saint, half shlemiel, sets out to beg a dowry for his daughters. The book is one long metaphor for the wandering Jew, but Agnon heroes have a disconcerting universality. "A difficult thing to grasp," says Reb Yudel, pondering war. "What satisfaction do the kings derive in sending folk of this countryside to another land and folk of another land to this countryside? What difference does it make to the Angel of Death whether he has to come here or go there?"

The Bridal Canopy is a frame story, and the tales that Agnon tells along Reb Yudel's digressive way fill the landscape with a teeming humanity. Like Yudel himself, the characters appeal to readers of any faith: the pompous petty official totally unstrung by the disappearance of his cat; the husband whose love for his sterile wife crumbles at last before the siege of his kin; the cantor whose heavenly voice dissolves the synagogue in tears--and who gets blind drunk on a holy day.

Supernatural Fables. Two Tales is the one book among the three translations that should prompt U.S. readers to endorse the Nobel committee's judgment. Symbolic and supernatural fables, masterpieces of the form, they help to explain why Agnon has been compared to Kafka. In Betrothed, the heroine Susan suddenly appears before the hero, a young scientist on the threshold of a brilliant career, to remind him of the vows of fidelity they had sworn as children. Susan is the past: alluring, insistent; and the compulsion she represents is as enduring as mankind's yearning for its departed youth. Agnon does not solve the dilemma any more than life does. He ends by planting doubts about Susan's reality. Did the past, once gone, ever exist?

Edo and Enam, the second tale, develops much the same theme. Gemulah, the wife of Gabriel Gamzu, has been transplanted from an ancient land to modern Israel, and begins to wither like a flower torn from the soil. When the moon is full, she speaks in a tongue long dead and sings songs of unearthly beauty--all of this recorded by an unreal, evanescent figure named Ginath.

At last Gemulah sings the song of Grofith, a mythical bird who dies with the last note. She dies too, along with her mysterious auditor. It is Agnon's anguished challenge to his own quest: the past is alien, and unrecoverable, and he who seeks it is destined to live in the limbo between the sunset and the dawn.

* Which Agnon shared with Jewish Poet Nelly Sachs, who lives in Sweden.

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