SOURCE: "The Genres and Forms, the Novella, and the Short Stories," in Shmuel Yosef Agnon: A Revolutionary Traditionalist, translated by Jeffrey M. Green, New York University Press, New York, 1989, pp. 167-241.

The Fantastic Folk Tale

A thorough study of even one story belonging to each of Agnon's genres is beyond the scope of this study; thus, I have chosen to analyze five so-called poles from the entire work, beginning with the short folk story "Three Sisters."

"Three Sisters" was first published in 1937 and is typical of Agnon's fantastic tales. It is outstanding in its brevity and tight structure. Its source is a ballad of social commentary ["The Song of the Shirt" by Thomas Hood (1799-1845)] that reached Agnon from English literature through Isaac Leib Peretz's Yiddish translation. What characterizes "Three Sisters" is the extreme modification of the motif, the social message of which has been raised to balladic-mythical significance.

"Three Sisters"

Three sisters lived in a gloomy house, sewing linens for others from morning light to midnight, from the end of Sabbath to Sabbath eve never moved from their fingers either scissors or needle, and the sigh never ceased from their heart, not on hot days nor rainy ones. But blessing came none from their work. And what dry bread they found was never enough to sate their hunger.

Once they were occupied making a fine dress for a rich bride. When they finished their labor, they remembered their sorrow, that they had nothing but the skin on their flesh, and that too was growing old and weak.

Their hearts filled with sorrow.

One sighed and said, "All our days we sit wearying ourselves for others, nor have we even a scrap of cloth to make ourselves shrouds."

The second one said, "Sister, don't invite misfortune."

She too sighed till she shed a tear.

The third wanted to say something too. As she started to talk, a blood vessel burst in her mouth and splattered, soiling the dress.

When she brought the dress to the bride, the rich man came out of his salon. He saw the stain. He scolded the seamstress and dispatched her with obloquy. And needless to say, he did not pay her.

Alas, if the second had spit blood, and the third had wept, we could have washed the dress with her tears, and the rich man would not have become angry. But not everything is done in timely fashion. Even if everything were done in timely fashion, that is, if the third one had wept after the second spat blood, there would still be no true consolation here.

The stylistic fabric of this story in Hebrew is quite rhythmical, bringing out the balance both within and between the sentences. The author heightened the emotional effect by sonorous means and through the use of rhetorical strategies, such as the anaphora ("from . . . from") and antitheses in the sentence structure ("morning . . . midnight"; "hot . . . rainy"), and also in the strategy of gradual intensification (skin "growing old and weak"). The story would merely be pathetic if its content were not based on a series of ironic antitheses.

The legendary elements of the story are conspicuous, for none of the figures is characterized. They are formulaic characters—as the number three is itself formulaic—acting in an eternal time (for example, dawn to midnight; from the end of the sabbath to the eve of the following sabbath; and rain and shine). The eternal act of sewing connects these sisters to the three sisters of Greek mythology who knit the threads of destiny.

The story is based on a tale of social protest about three sisters in their poverty, a rich bride, and a cruel rich man who does not pay the sisters' wages. However, Agnon broadened the scope of the tale. In the dialogue, which pierces through the eternal time frame, each of the sisters laments her bitter fate—one in words, one in tears, and one in blood. Yet sighs do not change fate; indeed, they make it worse. The order of the world does not depend on the social situation but on chance or on a blind force, which also brings suffering to humanity. The decree does not strike only the poor and destitute but penetrates the depths of the human situation. At the end, in ironic fashion the narrator responds to his "story" with aphorisms taken from Ecclesiastes 3:11—the sense of which are reversed. A change in the events would not change the situation, which is fundamentally bad. The ballad—the high point of which is the burst blood vessel and the culmination of which is the meeting with the rich man—is thoroughly and ironically epitomized in the remarks of the narrator. Thus, here is a structure based on folkloric components—contrasts between light and dark, the dialogue, the depiction of time, and the characters who are emblematic of the fates. Yet the content is modern, describing the human condition.

This particular story is not exceptional. When compared to other folk tales, both long and short, told by Agnon (for example, "Agunot: A Tale," "The Tale of the Scribe," "The Dance of Death," "The Dead Girl," and "The Tale of Rabbi Gadiel, the Infant"), it shows the author's tendency toward formulaic characterization and tight, dramatic plots advancing toward a climax that is a crisis—or a decree of fate—that is close to the world of imagination, myth, and universal significance. What is lacking in detailed visual description is made up by rhythms, intertextual mythical references from various cultures, and rhetorical intensification. Most of these texts are intense and tightly wrought. Their components do not simply interrupt the act of reading or break the linear continuity; rather, they deepen them.

The story is based on the parodic deautomatization of the folk tale. Peretz's version of this story is already an ironic retelling of the story about the three sisters waiting for a groom. Agnon made use of this motif and gave it a positive folk conclusion with "the rooster—ex machina" in The Bridal Canopy but not in "Three Sisters," in which he placed greater emphasis on the ironic aspect of the situation, denying any chance for the fortunate conclusion commonly found in folk tales about poor young girls. The source of evil is not the social struggle but rather the human condition. Man is thrown into a world where arbitrary powers rule without mercy. In this story, through the use of a traditional literary device—that is, the standard structure of a folk legend—Agnon described an absurd existential situation. Parody is one of the typical devices used by the revolutionary in his war against the tradition or in his attempt to reveal its vacuousness.

The Realistic Story

One would expect Agnon's realistic stories to be the opposite of his folk tales. In contrast to a plot and characters that lack specificity—the purpose of which is to make an emotional and ideological point—here is a plot derived from reality and peopled with well-depicted characters, all of which represent a full realization of literary structures. Agnon's first stories in the Land of Israel, such as "The Hill of Sand," were written in this fashion, as were later ones, such as "Metamorphosis," "The Doctor's Divorce," "Fernheim," and "Between Two Cities."

"Ovadia the Cripple" (1921), which tells the story of an errant maidservant betrothed to a miserable cripple, borders on naturalism. After a flirtation with the son of her employers, the maidservant sleeps with another servant and becomes pregnant. When her crippled fiancé returns from the hospital, he finds her with a bastard in her arms.

The crippled fiancé is a pathetic figure taken from melodramas and is reminiscent of Victor Hugo's Quasimodo or Mendele Mokher Seforim's Fishke the Lame. Knut Hamsun also wrote a story about an innocent cripple, Minutte, in Mysteries. The mistreatment of Minutte recalls the sadistic tormenting of Agnon's Ovadia in the dance hall. The wayward servant girl is also a rather familiar melodramatic figure (see and ). The relationships among the oppressed and miserable were a favorite topic in naturalistic literature. By exploiting this topic, naturalistic literature appealed to the basic instincts of its readership. The danger in depicting such characters is excessive sentimentality; and, in fact, the richness of the material can be its own undoing.

The problem confronted by authors who use such material, which can border on cliché, is how to give the details new meaning, how to motivate the plot, and how to specify its message. Agnon solved these problems through structure. The story takes place first in the consciousness of the hero, Ovadia the Cripple, and then in the dance hall, where Ovadia finds Shayne-Seril dancing and where he is tormented by the young men. Afterward, the paths of the two characters diverge. Ovadia goes to the hospital, and Shayne-Seril returns to her master's home. In the end, the author brings them back together. The hero leaves the hospital and finds that his betrothed has taken another lover.

A conspicuous line in the plot is the effort to forge a hidden link of cause and effect between Ovadia's deeds in the hospital and those of Shayne-Seril in her master's house. The fact that Ovadia does not leave the hospital somewhat determines the girl's fate, just as Shayne-Seril directly causes Ovadia's two failures. Thus, the relationship between the cripple and the sensual girl is based on mutual culpability; social circumstances and the characters' personalities are the root of the evil. The sages said, "Everything is predictable, and the choice is in our hands." But here everything is predictable, and people have very little freedom of choice. The fateful bond between the pair is presented ironically, both in the protagonists' thoughts and in the connections among the chapters. The hidden text, which expands the significance of the story, is revealed mainly in structural ways, such as links and gaps among the components of the story and the explanation of the heroes' fate.

One does not customarily look for a hidden text with multiple meanings in a naturalistic story. However, it is not Agnon's wont to go completely without hidden meanings. The story also implies intertextual connections that expand its significance; however, this expansion is not allegorical. The male protagonists, Ovadia and Reuven, allude only indirectly to biblical figures, although the story has affinities with the portion of the Bible beginning with "Vayishlah" [Genesis 32:4]. The Book of Ovadia, for whom Agnon's character is named, is read in the synagogue on the sabbath when that portion of the Bible is read. Indeed, upon examining the text from Genesis, one finds many indirect parallels with "Ovadia the Cripple." Just as the patriarch Jacob was maimed in the thigh by the angel, so, too, is Ovadia a cripple. In Genesis, Reuben violates his father's marriage bed and sleeps with Bilhah; similarly, Reuven, the redhead in Agnon's story, violates Ovadia's marriage bed. The hidden parallels between Ovadia and the patriarch Jacob and between the biblical Reuben and Reuven in the story have yet another aspect, suggested by the passage from the prophet Ovadia—which deals with the bitter war between Israel and Edom, the descendants of Esau. If the people of Israel are the seed of Jacob (or Ovadia), then red-headed people are the descendants of Esau. Jacob epitomizes the spirit; and Esau, the one who is enslaved to his instincts, epitomizes flesh and blood.

Agnon does not intend the connection to the tradition to indicate that the characters should not be taken as they are. On the contrary, the story's protagonists are just what they appear to be. However, the instinctual struggle waged in the story is enhanced by the biblical connotations, which are partially parodic and partially archetypal. Those connotations do not (to use the elder Israeli critic Dov Sadan's phrase) create "a story within the story." Rather than make the story of Ovadia more profound, the biblical comparison mocks the hidden archetype—that is, Jacob, the "plain man dwelling in tents" [Genesis 25:27]. The two forces, flesh and spirit—the hands of Esau and the voice of Jacob—are presented here in an ironic, sarcastic light—the latter in its hopeless impotence and the former in all its naked coarseness. The references do not intensify and expand but rather limit and dwarf the stature of the protagonists. That is to say, the structure and the texture (the hidden text) are meant to alter and deepen the naturalistic materials.

Moreover, toward the end the author brings the story to a climax, giving it a new and broader meaning. The tale does not merely recount the story of a couple that has been over-whelmed and crushed by eros and thanatos, as well as by the hypocrisy of bourgeois society, but goes beyond the exposure of the victims. Here is the final passage of the story:

Ovadia's mouth was open, his tongue like an immovable rock, and the sweets in his hand kept melting and melting. The baby suckled with pleasure at his mother's breast, with a still small voice. Ovadia took the candies with his right hand and the crutch with his left. The baby stretched and removed one hand from the teat, and Shayne-Sirel's anger was still not appeased. Ovadia feared to give her the candies and bent down and laid them on the infant's palm.

The reader might have expected that Ovadia would turn on his heels and leave the mother and her child to their sighs. But Ovadia does not. He feels that Shayne-Seril is not guilty. Apparently, in such affairs there are neither sinners nor guilty parties but merely creatures in need of mercy. The story is cruel and naturalistic and is cleared of all sentimentality by the author's sarcasm, but it concludes with a catharsis of human compassion. Different faces are brought to light. Agnon does not convey compassion via the shortcut of sentimentality but rather by following the path of woe.

"Ovadia the Cripple" is an example of Agnon's delicate handling of coarse naturalistic material, just as "Three Sisters" is an example of his ability to craft an entire world within a balladlike dewdrop without portraying actual human situations. The two stories illustrate the concept of fate from different points of view. The characters in the balladlike story accept and submit to fate, while the characters in the naturalistic story find a humane way of overcoming it. In the folk tale, depiction is formal and restricted; hence, the function of the intratextual features is expanded. In the realistic story, the description is detailed and extensive, thus limiting the function of those features; and allegorization is prevented despite them.

"Ovadia the Cripple" may also be seen from another viewpoint. Agnon writes ostensibly as a believer to a readership of believers, as a typical bourgeois to a bourgeois audience. According to customary laws, Shayne-Seril's baby was born out of wedlock; thus, judged by the standards of the Jewish bourgeoisie he is a social outcast from every point of view.

However, Agnon turns the moral tables here. Toward the end of the story he creates an effect of moral deautomatization, which is also an effect of literary deautomatization. The child, according to this view, need not be ostracized and cast out because Ovadia, although he is not the biological father, gives the child the candies—thus, accepting moral responsibility. This is not in keeping with the naturalistic school's material world of flesh and blood, although the protagonists are portrayed throughout most of the story according to that world's basic assumptions.

The naturalistic story receives a moral and spiritual dimension from the world of grace. In contrast to the bourgeois morality based on genetic rules and regulations, a humanistic ethos is portrayed, based on relationships of grace, mercy, and responsibility—all of which contrast with traditional bourgeois values. Agnon once again shows himself to be a traditional revolutionary both in form and in content.

The Abstract Story: The Humorous Feuilleton

The comic perspective is central in Agnon's work. He exploited every possible variety of comedy—from social satire, in "Of Our Young People and Our Elders," to farce, in "With the Death of the Saint" and "The Frogs." Agnon even employed Rabelaisian grotesquery in "Pisces" and "At Hemdat's." Most of the comic stories tend to hyperbole, thus intensifying the sense of realism, although a few are stripped bare.

One example of stark, comical abstraction is the feuilleton "On Taxes" (1950), included in The Book of the State. It is an abstract story without reference to place or time, to real characters, or to human situations. Furthermore, the protagonist is not an individual but rather a collectivity—that is, the state. The fictional situation with all its ramifications provokes laughter because it evokes official bureaucracies everywhere. It is taken as a comic hyperbole, a mechanism for its own sake beyond any actual need or purpose. In the story an imaginary state is about to go bankrupt, which leads to a strike threat by the officials. From the very first the bureaucracy is characterized as a superfluous body, creating work where there was none but to no purpose: "The grumblers quipped and mocked, saying, 'What work will the bureaucrats stop doing? Perhaps they'll stop their idleness and thumbtwiddling.'"

Meaningless activities are reiterated in various contexts. Committees are constantly being formed, each merely a comic synonym of its predecessor. Agnon's technique is to amass details that do not advance the plot, showing that every action is merely repetition and that the entire plot is superfluous:

They formed a new committee. Since the active intellect is active equally in every person, that committee proposed what the first committees had proposed, aside from the bill for expenses, which was slightly different from the bills of the first committees, since in the meanwhile the cost of living had risen by several points.

The coincidental and arbitrary turning point occurs when salvation comes to the state in the form of the cane, upon which taxes had not yet been imposed. The cane deflects the course of events, giving the plot a goal. In the author's words: "However the state was fortunate. Even in a trivial matter, its luck held. It happened that a certain elderly member of the House of Lippery-waggers forgot his cane."

That turning point provokes a chain reaction: taxation of canes, discussions of the form of taxation, a black market in canes, legislation obliging people to carry canes, the importing of wood from abroad, the burning of wood, the transfer of the ashes from the site of the fire to the sea, and finally the importing of finished canes—a precipitous decline in which each event pulls down its fellow. Since the actions do no one any good, the author intervenes to repair a fault but cannot do so. His attempt comes to little more than adding fault upon fault, a comic snowball showing with increasing clarity that action does not improve matters but simply drives them round and round to no purpose, until the cycle itself attains a value of its own.

Since everything done in the state is foolishness, only that which is not done is intelligent. The state is itself evil. The author is weary of an other-oriented society whose only force is verbal, taking its own social organization as a value in itself. The story does not relate to people; it is not people who pervert the world. The root of evil does not lie in the Weichsls and Deichsls or Mundspiegels who populate "Of Our Young People and Our Elders" but rather in the House of Lippery-waggers, the tax bureaucracy, and the state itself. Moreover, the bureaucrats, so long as they are not connected with the bureaucracy, are like anyone else—trivial people who would not harm a fly, collectors of jokes and scissors who serve in high positions. However, as soon as they put on their official hats, they are liable to do damage:

So the Treasurer sat there with the members of the Committee with a cordial expression and a smile on his face, not passing over a single prominent figure in the state without telling a joke about him, one of those jokes that people amuse themselves by telling. He said, "Most likely these will commemorate our colleagues rather than their actions, even though their actions are one long joke." He kept talking that way until the members of the Committee recalled why they had come. They raised their voices and spoke to him. Immediately his bright countenance altered, his lips twisted, his nose swelled, his ear-lobes turned black, and he looked entirely like a state official. If we didn't know him, we could not discern that he was capable of understanding a joke.

Here, the comic element is impersonal. The fictional world is detached from actual social materials and is presented as a bare skeleton. It is funny because the schematization of phenomena exposes their vacuity better than would a concrete description. The abstract scheme removes the coincidental, human, and individual element from the world, and everything is frozen. The world is driven like a mechanism without direction, a comic wheel revolving upon itself without significance. The reader is left without air to breathe. Even the narrator, who appears as an objective chronicler called "the author of The Book of the State," has no human reality.

Agnon's comic point of view is, to a large extent, anarchical. He does not advocate social reform or changes in the system; rather, the entire state mechanism seems fundamentally ridiculous to him. The story might be aimed at the political establishment of the State of Israel, which had just been born and already had managed to erect its own bureaucracy. (This story was printed in Haaretz in 1950!) However, it applies to any bureaucratic system in any place at any time. Agnon saw bureaucracy as a mechanism that feeds on itself and expands at the citizen's expense without any regard for common sense. This is an anarchical work written in a classical style.

Even when writing a satirical piece with comic abstraction of social reality, Agnon remained faithful to himself. Here, too, he played the role of a revolutionary who, using irony tinged with sharp sarcasm, destroys the most sanctified establishment in any society—the bureaucracy, which feeds upon itself, and the people's representatives, who make the parliament (which Agnon called "the house of lippery") into an institution that acts in its own behalf and supports itself with meaningless jabber and pointless laws.

This sort of work has various artistic limitations. Agnon's tendency toward an abstract worldview and toward situations merely hinted at is evident in his earliest writings. It is a style that appears in various proportions in different works. The better the equilibrium between the concrete and the abstract, or the specific and the universal, the more significant is the work. Agnon's abstract writing, in its many forms, is limited to a single meaning. This is because its components are not sufficiently concretized but rather are presented as abstractions or as a series of allegorical keys; thus, the situations are not open to more than one interpretation. The paradox is, of course, that the abstract texts are much more closed and unequivocal than are the concrete and ostensibly realistic ones. These techniques, which were supposed to reflect the modern formal revolution explicitly, are not always as open-ended and multivalent as Agnon's more conservative, traditional techniques.

In Agnon's traditional techniques, the modern "revolution" is implicit and alluded to in intertextual parodies and in minuscule stylistic and compositional shifts and deviations from traditional literary conventions. If any sin may be laid at the door of Agnon's work, it is the sin of abstraction. He exerted a negative influence on younger writers primarily because they seized upon the abstract and unequivocal aspects of his work.

The Abstract, or Nonrealistic, Story

The tendency toward abstraction is found mainly in the so-called modern stories that Agnon began publishing in the early 1930s, which ultimately were collected in The Book of Deeds. That book was Agnon's attempt to satisfy modern man's need to express a new realm of experience. Such an expression might simply have been a vital need for Agnon himself and represented a fulfillment of tendencies that had existed within him almost from the first (see, for example, ). In any case, I do not consider The Book of Deeds to be the finest of his works, although its influence on younger writers has been greater than the influence of his realistic fiction.

I will take the example of "Quitclaim" (in Hebrew, "Hefker"), published in Haaretz in 1945, which follows the pattern typical of The Book of Deeds. Generally, the narrator is the hero. The pattern is a kind of journey ending in a dead end or in an unexpected reversal; and, since all the stories appear in a single collection, each sheds light on the others.

At first we seem to be reading a story about a man who has made an appointment to meet a friend in a café. He lingers for a long time and later tries to go home. Since he seems to have missed the last bus, he goes by foot, enters a cul-de-sac, and becomes entangled with an eccentric character who apparently summons him to judgment. Finally, for no reason at all and with no explanation, he appears before a strange judge. The judge does not judge him, and he sets out once again. On his way, he notes another group of Jews who apparently also are waiting for their trial. The overt text is neither plausible nor logical; the circumstances are extremely surprising and bizarre. The story has no meaning unless the reader attempts to descend to its deepest depths and rescue the latent text.

A detailed analysis shows the story's message to be that the lower and upper worlds, which are not depicted in the overt text, are controlled by powers that do not permit a person to choose his own path. The protagonist vacillates from crisis to crisis and is forced to seek his way, but the inner obstacles are beyond his strength. Not only can he find no shelter in his own home, he also cannot resolve whether he has behaved properly.

That meaning is implicit in the name of the story, "Quitclaim," which suggests a world where the law has been abnegated, without judge or judgment. It is a world in which the holy and the profane and laughter and dread are intermingled. The plot is not bound by realistic cause and effect but is instead held together by bits and snippets having the same cohesive power or meaning—that is, a unified atmosphere. The inner journey of "that man" passes through various emotional stations and reaches the destination intended from the start.

I will now analyze in detail one of those stations along the way to show how the general meaning of the story crystallizes within the reader. Here is a central passage in which the protagonist stands before the mysterious judge to pay the forfeit for a sin he has not committed:

He asked me nothing but sat before his desk and took up pen and ink and paper and started writing. In the room it was quiet and the smell of kerosene wafted up from the heater. Only the sound of the pen scratching the paper was heard. If the pen does not break and the paper does not tear, he will never stop his writing. I stood in my place and thought to myself, hasn't the middle of his mustache turned white in the meanwhile? The middle of his mustache had not turned white, but its two ends were befouled.

This text is interesting because of the relationship between the overt text and a latent one. Earlier in the story, Agnon used expressions in reference to the judge that recall attributes of the Creator found in "The Song of Honor," a kabbalistic hymn incorporated in the sabbath liturgy.

"Quitclaim"	"The Song of Honot"
I saw before me a man, neither young nor aged.	And Thou art held to be aged and youthful.
Gray was sown on it at both its ends.	The hair of Thy head is gray and black.
And in the middle of the black mustache . . .
He stood and donned a miter with several ends.	He donned the miter of redemption.

Such a comparison seems to indicate that God is the hidden hero, latent in the figure of the judge. The figure in the overt text might also be a parody of the latent figure, by means of which the oxymorons attributed to the Creator are illuminated from a new point of view. Traditionally, the oxymoron is a way of expressing the ineffable greatness of God. This story, however, reveals a contradictory aspect of the oxymoron—that is, the eternal ambivalence of the highest judge, who lacks unequivocal answers to man's questions. In the description of the God-judge, the grotesqueness, characteristic of the previous passages, reaches a peak. The God-judge, a central figure in the story, throws the narrator-hero's world into such confusion that he is unable to reach any decisions.

When the narrator stands there like a pupil before his master or a sinner before his judge, the authority figure can be perceived as either comic or threatening. The ambiguity rests on the relationship between the overt text and the hidden one, a reciprocity that exists throughout and determines the special character of these stories.

What is the typical method of Agnon's abstract stories? As noted, the structure is based on the plot of a journey. The hero wanders through space. However, that space is not concrete but is rather the metaphorical embodiment of the soul or of a metarealistic world. Hence, the journey is not situated in historical or chronological time; it is the time of the soul, in which anterior and posterior are merely various stages in the hero's development. Such a method is closely related to expressionistic techniques, in which reality does not exist in itself; there are merely expressions of the fragmented ego or the ego's outcry.

The plot of the story knows neither causality nor probability but rather elliptical connections, which are both intratextual and intertextual. The materials that permit the discovery of the connections among the various links are given as the latent content of the overt text, and they are revealed to the interpreter as he or she fills the gaps through semantic, rhetorical, and structural analyses.

I have noted already that the overt text may be a parodic substitute for the subject hinted at by the latent text (the judge, the Lord of the Universe). The contrast sometimes reaches grotesque dimensions, as, for example, when the feeling of dread seems justified in the latent text but is comical and unfounded in the overt text. The relationship between what is implied in the two levels of expression is typical of the grotesque in these texts.

The latent text emerges for the reader both through a metaphorical understanding of the physical settings (for example, the cul-de-sac appearing in this story) and also through the accretion or extension of motifs as later ones shed light on those that came earlier. Thus, for example, the handkerchief (in the sense of a scarf or a shawl) appears in "Quitclaim" as the garment in which the narrator-protagonist wraps himself, not wanting any connection with the world about him.

All of these factors indicate that the world depicted is not anchored in reality but rather in a realm including far more than what the narrator-hero, who presents the story to the reader, is capable of interpreting for himself. The world of the story is a kind of psychological pattern. It could be interpreted as a repressed reality (in psychoanalytic terms), or as a metareality (following various metaphysical systems), or as a world of archetypes (according to Jung). In any case, the determining factor is the material representing multisemantic relationships between the latent subject and the overt one.

Naturally, one must realize that in fiction of this sort characterization declines in importance, and the protagonists cease being portrayed as unique individuals. As in folk tales, the character in the abstract story has a largely formal function. Even when the author gives names to his characters, they do not exist in their own right but must be taken as anonymous embodiments of emotional and identional elements of the psyche. Their appellations are likely to be allegorical, hinting at the latent text—the broad cultural connotation. But in such a case, one must understand the character from various points of view—that is, according to the meaning implicit or implied by the character's name (for example, Yekutiel = God shall acquit me and Ne'eman = faithful; both of these are epithets of Moses in midrashic literature, and they are used in Agnon's "A Whole Loaf ) or through the cultural links derived from the epithets (such as in 'The Song of Honor").

Although the story is told by a narrator-hero, a consciousness with a psychological structure, he functions within the story without comprehending his context. In his journeys, the narrator-hero encounters various characters that seem to be superfluous to the logic of the plot. Through the use of chance appearances, the "I" encounters projections of himself, which become aspects of the structure of the relationship between him and the emotional factors that comprise the work's internal structure. The parallel between microcosm and macrocosm gives these emotional factors metarealistic significance; as a result, the interpretation of the story is transferred from the psychological level to an abstract level and thus to metaphysical concepts and values.

Since Agnon's fiction of this type attempts to present the realm in which problems exist rather than the realm in which they are solved, the parodic technique of multiple meanings is an appropriate one. Agnon portrays an ambiguous world that is filled with anonymous heroes and settings and is studded with epigrams and generalizations. The symbolic coloration of the elements leads us to interpret them as though the author sought to identify the Everyman in his story with every person outside of the story, and that the author attempted to provide a complete exposition of what is known as the human condition. That is to say, he presents his own inability and the inability of Everyman to give unequivocal ratification to the content of the work or to any values as a general truth. Human alienation, the solitude of his generation, the opacity of reality, and the impassivity of the powers that be are the subjects of the story.

If this assumption is correct then the form of the story fits its subjects, and the latter are suited to the form. This story is the most extreme instance of the embodiment of the modern worldview in Agnon's oeuvre. Here, Agnon also used intertextual techniques related to the cultural tradition. The intertextuality is generally parodic in effect; it is extreme and, in most cases, leads to grotesque results. The messages of these texts are ambivalent. However, it is not the kind of ambivalence that portrays something and its opposite at the same time but an ambivalence that disorients the addressee. Despite the traditional style and the intertextual connection to a latent traditional text, the story exposes the social and moral anarchy of modern man.

Agnon was quite conscious of the "writerly" effect of these stories. The dreamlike codification demanded an "analytical" decodifier. The signifiers in these texts do not have determinable signifieds but are quite multivalent and have, of course, no definitive referent. Moreover, they do not have any informant-analysand in presentía who could provide the reader with further information by bringing up "unique" connotations and associations in reference to specific signifieds—by excluding irrelevant information and including relevant data. The result is that the analyst-addressee (the reader) has to fill the "empty" semantic units, using paradigms and semantic connotations alluded to in the text or drawn from the addressee's own life experience. In addition, the addressee must fill in missing links and gaps, sometimes using analytical (that is, Freudian) techniques.

The addressee must "rewrite" the text to the best of his or her abilities in the areas of explication, elucidation, and interpretation. In a sense, the text "wants" to be and actually becomes a "writerly" text. As a result of this demand upon the addressee, the circle of potential readers is diminished. The author expects his readership to be composed of analytical readers who act as critics or of critics who act as analytical readers.

Nonetheless, this type of story does not represent Agnon at his greatest. His powers are most impressive in stories where reality is mingled with what is beyond, in the private and collective spheres, as in the novellas or in the short stories, such as "Three Sisters" and "Ovadia the Cripple"—one of which is built mainly upon sonorous, rhythmic, and stylistic effects; whereas the other is based on scenes and concrete situations. The best of Agnon's nonrealistic stories are those with an element of the concrete, such as "The Overcoat," Edo and Enam, and "From Lodging to Lodging."

Between Abstract and Concrete: Stories Conveying a Philosophy of History

Several of Agnon's stories can be interpreted in many ways and operate simultaneously on several levels of meaning; these include "The Overcoat," "From Lodging to Lodging," Edo and Enam, and Forevermore, stories that are both existential and sociohistorical. Of course, the main meaning is existential, and the historical stratum is not a chronicle but rather the penetration to the roots of a situation through mythical writing. The mythic character of these stories, particularly Edo and Enam and Forevermore, tilts them toward a bond with traditional texts, which convey themes bearing on a philosophy of history.

"The Covering of Blood," included in the posthumously published Within the Wall (1975), constitutes the final link in that chain of stories. The existential level is less pronounced in "The Covering of Blood" than in the earlier stories, and the emphasis is placed on the historical stratum. This long short story may be regarded as a social survey of the history of the Jewish people in past generations. It is a general summation by the author, who looks at the past and anticipates the future. The traditional revolution reached its peak in these stories. In them, Agnon concretized the social and historical significance of the revolution that contained its own end within it. The revolution destroyed the tradition and, in the process, sowed the seeds of its own destruction.

The narrator-witness is confronted with the life stories of the three protagonists: Hillel, Adolf, and the old American. The three men are uprooted from Europe; two end up in the Land of Israel and one in America. They are not victims of the Holocaust; however, they are victims of the Jewish history that is epitomized by the Holocaust.

Hillel, an ordained rabbi, never is appointed to a rabbinical post because of baseless hatred within Jewish society, and even the post of ritual slaughterer is given to him as a favor rather than by right. Jewish society rejects him because it no longer believes in the values of the Torah and prefers material values. When he is exiled to the United States, his leg is amputated because Gittele-Frumtshis, the owner of the slaughterhouse, demands that he work day and night—not even releasing him to break his fast after the seventeenth of tammuz. Hillel is the victim of Jewish society in two versions of its exile, the European and the American (the latter is a kind of exacerbation of the former).

Adolf, a sergeant in the First World War, saves Hillel from death but is a victim of events between the two wars. He eats with Gentiles and lives with their women; assimilation makes him need their favors. He drifts from place to place and meets with destruction everywhere, until he emigrates to the Land of Israel. There, too, he is a beggar.

The old American reaches the New World as a child. He serves as a cantor's assistant until he marries a wealthy woman. Then he goes through a miniature holocaust: his daughter commits suicide after being deserted by the gentile singer who has gotten her pregnant, and his son is murdered by his friends after joining a band of thieves. The old man is bereft and solitary, undone by the assimilation of the second generation in the new place of exile.

The Holocaust is in the background, melding the three into a single figure that represents different aspects of the surviving remnant. The main character, Hillel, is a kind of Job whom the Lord does not bless in his later years. Both of Hillel's wives die because of the war, as do all of his children. He never has any possessions. In his confessions to the narrator-witness, there is a touch of a reproach directed on high. By choosing the name Hillel, Agnon asserted a connection between his character and the historical personage: the ancient rabbi who founded a school called the House of Hillel and who tempered the letter of the law with mercy. It was a later sage by the same name, Hillel, who said: "The Jews have no Messiah because they already devoured him in the days of Hezekiya." The reproaches of Hillel the sage, like those of Hillel in the story, are directed chiefly against the Jews who gobbled up their Messiah, both in earlier times (represented by the quarrel between the Hassidim and the Mitnagdim) and in the time of the State of Israel. National redemption brought no change. Rather than redemption replacing exile, exile usurped the place of redemption. The ordained rabbi became a slaughterer, and the slaughterer became a beggar. Hillel is now without the House of Hillel.

In the course of the story, Hillel mediates between the two other characters: Adolf, who saved Hillel from death in the First World War, and the old American, who saves him from starvation after his leg is cut off on the seventeenth of tammuz in Gittele-Frumtshis's slaughterhouse.

The irony, or rather the grotesquery, of history is shown mainly in Gittele-Frumtshis's slaughterhouse, where Hillel says the benediction over the slaughtering and is covered with blood. The implicit parallel in the written language is the legend about the prophet Zechariah, who was slaughtered by the Jews and whose blood bubbled up and could not be covered until Nevuzaradan came and slaughtered ninety-four thousand residents of Jerusalem on the blood of the prophet. That event took place on the seventeenth of tammuz (an unlucky day in the personal life of Agnon's Hillel). According to tradition, that is the day when the first tablets were broken, when the walls of Jerusalem were broken through, and when an idol was placed in the Temple. Such linguistic and cultural allusions also point to Bialik's poem "On the Slaughterer." Perhaps one is justified in viewing the hundreds of chickens that are slaughtered while multitudes of Jews were being murdered overseas as part of the ceremony of repentance. (The owner of the slaughterhouse sends Hillel eighteen dollars as compensation for his leg.) The parallel creates an unusual link between reward and punishment. Hillel's "blood" will not be atoned for until the Jews are slaughtered. Gittele-Frumtshis operates an assembly line of slaughter; she presses for increased productivity, her heart bent on gain. Jews eager for money lost sight of what was happening across the ocean. The dreadful "hand in hand" (the subtitle of the story) shows that the Jews are bound up with each other, creating a strange and grotesque kind of logic—a justification of fate, which is not sufficiently justified. It is almost possible to say that the technique of analogy ("hand in hand") is no longer a literary stratagem here but has become the ironic and grotesque subject of the story.

Analogy is an important device in most of Agnon's writings and serves various functions in his works. For example, in A Guest for the Night, he uses analogy to depict the disintegration of society despite the common fate of the individuals within it. In "The Covering of Blood," ironic analogy is an expression of Agnon's ironic view of history. The parallels among various phenomena that affect the social group shed ironic light both on the group itself and on the ironic author—the hidden entity, the master of history who creates phenomena so different and yet so similar. The writer's revolutionary irony is directed against both the Master of the Universe and the chosen people, whom He chose above all other nations. Another ambiguous parallel, as though blaming the Jews themselves for the Holocaust, is the name Adolf given to the Jewish sergeant:

Hard days came to him. He had no choice but to beg from door to door. At any rate he praised himself for not doing what Hitler did and standing at the doorways of convents for the bowl of sauce they handed him.

Adolf is a fornicator. A number of gentile women give birth to his progeny, and he suspects that the destroyers of the Jewish community are descended from him. Adolf confesses to Hillel, who describes the state of affairs to the narrator-witness:

I found him very depressed. I asked him what had happened to him, and he told me he had dreamt that a certain heathen of Hitler's party had struck a Jew and killed him cruelly, and that Jew was his nephew, and the heathen was the son of the lady who had had him by Adolf. In the daytime as well he sees all kinds of visions, and most of them are related to the results of that sin.

It is as if the victim created his murderer. But the ambivalent relationship to basic situations is created not only through the context of the names but principally by a parodic view of extraliterary situations, which are shown in a new light in the text. For example, the heroes frequently are caught in predicaments with no way out, and only saviors from the outside can rescue them from starvation and death. Their rescue offers neither consolation nor salvation. Rather than bringing redemption to the rescued, it brings profit to the rescuers, as when the slaughterer saves Hillel from starvation in order to exploit him (to keep a place open for his grandson) and when Gittele-Frumtshis behaves similarly. The story becomes a parody of the Jewish efforts at rescue between the two world wars. Even basic Zionist values, such as the ingathering of the exiles, are seen in a new light. The two immigrants—the survivors—do not journey to the Land of Israel of their own free will. Adolf is brought to Palestine by mistake. He is asked to serve as a translator for a circus, although he knows no Hebrew; he wanders about the country as a beggar without finding a place for himself. Hillel is sent to the Land of Israel at the expense of a rich American, but the ingathering of exiles does not bring unity. Here, art—as parody always has—distorts extraliterary motifs. As the reader compares fiction to reality, the meanings of the motifs are altered.

What is achieved through the intra- and intertextual connections, by means of the parodic use of extraliterary states of affairs, also is achieved through several fundamental symbols of the story: the severed leg, the hurdy-gurdy, the monkey, the parrot, and the dollars. Hillel's leg was not cut off when he was a child; a prince's coach did nearly run him over; and he was saved by a poor Jewish porter. His leg was not severed when he was buried in a landslide during the First World War; then, Adolf, another poor Jew, saved him. Only after ending up in Gittele-Frumtshis's slaughterhouse is his leg cut off because of her lust for wealth. All of the tension between rescue and rescue for the purpose of profit is exposed by the fate of Hillel's leg. The leg's value decreases progressively in the Land of Israel: an automobile destroys the rubber leg, and a wooden one takes its place (the gift of the Fair Measures Brotherhood); and holes turn up in the leg because a mad Hassid has done something with it. As the value of the leg decreases, so, too, does the value of Hillel's dollars. The state takes the dollars intended for the survivors of the Holocaust and derives profit from them.

Another central symbol is the hurdy-gurdy. Adolf receives the instrument from a beggar in Europe. He wanders through Austria with it and then brings it to the Land of Israel. The hurdy-gurdy plays the song of the sons of Korah (a rebel who opposed Moses) at the gates of the underworld ("Moses is one and his Torah is one"), but the song no longer expresses actual values. There is only the hidden echo of a not-so-splendid past. What remains is the hurdy-gurdy as a symbol of wanderings, to which the "Gypsy" monkey and the parrots are joined. The wandering Jews, Adolf and Hillel, have inherited a Gypsy legacy of aimless roaming.

In contrast to Agnon's decoherent stories, "The Covering of Blood" is not broken off but actually comes to a conclusion. The end attempts to predict the future of the native Israeli generation, as though returning to the question posed in A Guest for the Night.

The heroes of "The Covering of Blood" are alone. The American branch of survivors has no posterity. The children commit suicide or are murdered because they have assimilated. Yet Hillel is not alone in the way that Adolf, whose illegitimate sons are the murderers and destroyers, is. The only son and inheritor is Adolf's nephew:

I do not recall whether I mentioned Adolf's sister's son. Adolf told me he was the Adolf from a certain city, all of whose Jewish inhabitants were killed by Hitler, to the last man, and of those who went to the Land of Israel, some died of hunger during the First World War and others were killed by the Arabs' shells during the conquest of the land. Adolf had one sister whose second marriage was to a Hebrew teacher, and she had a son by him. The boy's father, his sister's husband, that is, died, leaving her nothing. She raised the son in poverty, by dint of hard work, and every penny she saved she spent on his education. When he got older he joined the youth movement, and in the end he settled in the Land of Israel and promised his mother he would bring her. He arrived in the Land of Israel close to the time of the war between the Jews and the Arabs. He took part in the war, was wounded, and recovered. After the war he went to a kibbutz and became a tractor driver. One day the Syrians crossed the border, seized him, and took him prisoner. Since that time no one has heard anything of him.

According to Agnon, because the Jews of the Land of Israel did not change, even in their own country, their fate is liable to be like that of the Diaspora Jews. Regarding both the children of the American father and those of Hillel, we could say in the most general fashion that the fathers are sour grapes, and the children's teeth are set on edge. But in the case of Adolf's nephew, we are stunned. There is no proportion between the sour grapes and the setting on edge of teeth. The narrator is himself astonished at that strange fate, just as he wonders over and over again whether there is any connection regarding reward and punishment between the behavior of an individual and the fate of the nation.

The fate of Adolf's nephew, the last remnant of a destroyed family, remains obscure. Hillel is waiting for the young man, who might not be alive. If he is alive, his life might not be worth living, considering the inheritance left for him by his Uncle Adolf—that is, things from the Diaspora and symbols of Gypsy life: the hurdy-gurdy, the monkey, and the parrot. That, of course, is a harsh vision. It is a prophecy of agonies that do not purify; it is exile with no redemption.

The only light in that darkness is Benyamin, an American boy whose soul yearns for Torah and who has settled in the Land of Israel to study with Hillel. Perhaps that is the final life raft: the Torah, which is independent of place or time and exists beyond the dialectic of exile and redemption and holocaust and rebirth.

In this story, abstraction and concrete illustration are intermingled. Each episode—Hillel during the war, Hillel in the slaughterhouse, Adolf in the Land of Israel—is detailed and stands by itself. However, the connections among the episodes and the paradigmatic, or intertextual, links with various cultural materials give the story its meaning as a statement of a philosophy of history. The technique of the multifaceted parallels is an adequate correlative for the subject: what happened to the Jews, "hand in hand," in different historical settings. We have here an actualization of history that has become fantastic, or else a grotesque illumination of real situations that seem to compete with each other in their deformation.

This long short story more or less sums up the thematics of the traditional revolution: On the one hand, it describes the dead end in which the Zionist revolution culminated after inheriting the inner crises of the traditional society—as shown by the life and wanderings of Hillel and Adolf. However, on the other hand, the story shows clearly that, according to Agnon, the Zionist revolution did not bring a balm to cure the protracted ills of the Jewish people. In the Land of Israel—where the revolution took place, where everyone believed that "all hopes would be fulfilled" (to quote a famous song of the Second Aliya), and where the "Divine Presence would also dwell"—the revolution did not bring the longed for results. This story seems to show that the solution to the inner paradoxes of the revolution that destroyed the tradition might be a strange return to the roots of the Jewish tradition—before it was established in any traditional or secular institutions. That return, which could be a way out of the morass, is embodied in the figure of the young American Jew who comes to the Land of Israel to combine the study of Torah and working the land. The Torah, in its purity, might be one way out of the situation with no way out. The narrative situation in "The Covering of Blood" resembles the situation in A Guest for the Night, and I believe that the analogy was a conscious one. Here again, the narrator-author is an addressee-witness to Hillers story or confession. In turn, Hillel is the addressee and witness of Adolf's story. These are two modern interpretations of the myth of Job—recollections of the suffering of two individuals who happen to be victims of the last fifty years of Jewish history. Like Job, they have lost their loved ones and their possessions. The two storytellers are victims of the collective history of their community. The addressee is similar to the "guest" in A Guest for the Night—that is, an aesthetic involved/noninvolved spectator. His guilt is the "implied" blame of Job's companions, who bear witness and listen to Job's complaints but who were mere bystanders, seeing Job's afflictions and doing nothing but misunderstanding and misinterpreting them intellectually.

The implied author's goal and message is the transference of the implicit guilt feelings of the narrator as addressee to the implied readers. In the act of reading, the readers become witnesses and spectators for the primary and secondary narrators of the story. The implied authors demand that the readers take responsibility upon themselves for the miseries inflicted upon their brethren. The readers also belong to the social circle (Jews in America and Israel) that, in the literary model, was at least partly responsible for the suffering of the victims and the survivors. Moreover, I believe that Agnon indicates that any survivor must accept some responsibility for the miracle of survival while his or her group was victimized. This is the meaning of the stories of Hillel and Adolf, and this is their significance for the narrator, for their addressees, and for the narrator's addressees as well.

Based on the inner logic of the plot, "The Covering of Blood" is also one of Agnon's most ambiguous and grotesque stories. For example, Adolf, the pursued, is given the first name of Hitler—the arch pursuer. Between the two a bizarre synonymity is created. The story also ends in deep despair, with a strange prophecy for the future of the Jewish state—the children of which are liable to inherit the Gypsy heritage. However, with the motif of Benyamin, Agnon concludes one of his last stories—apparently written in the 1960s—in a manner similar to the author of Ecclesiastes, the most pessimistic of the twenty-four books of the Hebrew Bible. There, it is written:

The end of the matter, all having been heard: fear God, and keep His commandments; for this is the whole man. For God shall bring every work into the judgment concerning every hidden thing, whether it be good or whether it be evil.