The Bridal Canopy, In the Heart of the Seas, and A Guest for the Night by Shmuel Yosef Agnon

First published:Hakhnasat kala, 1931 (The Bridal Canopy, 1937); Bi-levav yamim: Sipur agadah, 1935 (In the Heart of the Seas: An Allegorical Tale of S. Y. Agnon, 1947); Oreach nata lalun, 1939 (A Guest for the Night, 1968)

Type of work: Folk epic

Time of work: The nineteenth and early twentieth centuries

Locale: Eastern Galicia and Palestine

Principal Characters:

• Reb Yudel Nathanson, a poor and pious Hasid seeking husbands and dowries for his three daughters
• Nuta, a drayman who provides him with transport and companionship
• Reb Hanania, a man who joins and aids a group of Hasids going to Palestine
• Nilbavim, the enthusiasts traveling to Palestine
• The Narrator, who is on a purportedly brief visit to his hometown of Shibush
• Rachel Zummer, the hotelier’s daughter
• Yerucham Freeman, a native of Shibush who has been expelled from Palestine

The Novels

The Bridal Canopy is set in the Jewish world of eastern Galicia in the early 1800’s, in a culture still coherent and traditional, not yet fragmented by the impact of Haskalah (the Enlightenment) and emancipation. Most Jews lived either in a shtetl (small village) or in a larger town, such as Brody, the home of Reb Yudel. In dire poverty, without bed, table, or chair, Yudel spends his life “fashion[ing] a seat for the Divine Presence.” A Hasid, he sees beneficent Providence in every occurrence and joyfully fulfills each of the 613 commandments of his religion. Unfortunately, one of these commandments is to bring the bride under the wedding canopy, and Yudel has three daughters, so he must disrupt his routine of prayer and study to go begging for three dowries and the first of three bridegrooms.

Yudel starts his journey on the wagon of Nuta the drayman. His travels to fulfill the commandment elicit hospitality and generosity, and he and his hosts entertain one another with stories. From time to time, the two horses tell each other stories as well. These stories have little connection with one another or with Yudel’s quest; they are quarried from the rich veins of Jewish folklore and religious tradition, and are both didactic and steeped in the unquestioning acceptance of Providence and miracle.

When Yudel has collected two hundred gold pieces, he cannot continue to beg. He therefore installs himself in an inn and resumes his normal routine of prayer and study, with complete faith that God will provide. The townsfolk conclude that he must be rich, especially when they discover that his last name, Nathanson, is also that of a wealthy Brody merchant. Thus begins the series of coincidences and scenes of mistaken identity through which Yudel moves in pious serenity. He accepts a match for his daughter with the son of the town’s wealthy merchant, pledging an enormous dowry despite his poverty.

After accepting the match, Yudel returns home and resumes his interrupted routine. He is untouched by the fact that his adventures have become legendary in the verses of the popular Brody singers. As the groom’s family and the real Reb Yudel Nathanson finally discover the bride, Yudel’s wife and daughters attempt to prepare a feast in their dank cellar room. They decide to cook the rooster who awakens Yudel for the morning prayers; it escapes, however, and as the women chase it, they stumble upon a fabulous treasure in a cave. Wealthy beyond measure, Yudel finds dowries and husbands for all three of his daughters. His family obligations fulfilled, he and his wife make aliya: They “go up” to the Holy Land and live out their days there.

In the Heart of the Seas begins, in a sense, at the point where The Bridal Canopy ends. A group of Hasidim from Buczacz, in Galicia, are preparing to make aliya when they are joined by Reb Hanania. Even more pious than his new companions, he has endured much travail to reach them. He occupies himself with both organizing their journey and repairing various ritual and secular objects. As the travelers move toward the sea, the Jews along the way provide them with aid and encouragement. Unfortunately, when their ship leaves Istanbul, they discover that Hanania is missing. A violent storm blows them back; repeating the voyage, they finally reach Jaffa, kiss the soil of Palestine, and soon discover that Hanania has already arrived. He had missed the ship when he delayed in order to give the religious authorities evidence of the death of a certain man, thus ending the dead man’s wife’s status as an agunah, a woman neither divorced nor widowed, in limbo because her husband’s fate is unknown.

As the delayed Hanania had watched the ship leave Istanbul, God had suggested to him that he spread out his kerchief and sail upon it to the Holy Land. The Hasidim on shipboard had several times glimpsed this figure during their voyage and speculated upon it. While many of the Hasidim later encountered difficulties after settling in Palestine, Hanania grew stronger each year, dying at the age of one hundred; he was buried with his kerchief covering his eyes.

A Guest for the Night is narrated by an unnamed native of Shibush, in Galicia, who had been the first in the town to make aliya. When the 1929 Arab riots in Jerusalem destroyed his home, his wife and children went to stay with her parents in Germany, and he returned to visit his birthplace, arriving on the eve of Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement. He hopes to draw strength from the sources of his childhood but finds only decay and despair. As recipient of the key of the beit midrash (house of study), he becomes provider of light and warmth in the central place of the religious tradition. Although the overwhelming desolation is attributed to World War I, it soon becomes obvious that the narrator cannot rejuvenate the fragmented and moribund traditional community. Instead, he aids the aged Reb Shlomo to join his dead son’s comrades in Palestine. When the hotel keeper’s daughter, Rachel, marries Yerucham Freeman, a disillusioned Zionist expelled from Palestine, the narrator presents their newborn son with the new key to the beit midrash.

Rejoining his family after a year and returning to Jerusalem, the narrator finds the old key in his luggage and recalls the tradition that in the messianic age all the synagogues and beit midrash of the Diaspora will be reestablished in the Land of Israel. The new child, the first to be born in Shibush for many years, named for the narrator, will thus be able to continue the tradition in the Land of Israel.

The Characters

The major, and most of the minor, characters in the novels are Hasidim, pious Jewish men rooted in the rabbinic tradition who spend their days and nights in prayer and study. Their purpose in life is to fulfill the commandments, which involves them in the life of the community but which also often means that they detach themselves from much of secular reality, instead relying completely upon the Divine Presence and accepting whatever occurs.

There is little or no character development. For example, Yudel remains essentially untouched by his experiences. While the many minor characters tend to personify the “types” of traditional shtetl Jews, they also provide much of the rich texture of the first two novels. The presence of the narrator is a constant reminder of the author, the real creator of these fictive worlds, whose pervasive if gentle irony undermines the characters’ certainties. The spare plot line, essentially episodic, is developed by the interaction of the characters. While the narrator remains unseen, in In the Heart of the Seas, one of the nilbavim is clearly Shmuel Yosef Agnon himself, although no more developed or vital to the plot than is any other minor character.

In A Guest for the Night, however, the protagonist is a first-person narrator whose life apparently follows that of Agnon, including his two traumatic losses of house and library, his separation from wife and children, and his location in Buczacz and Jerusalem. Agnon grew up in Buczacz, in what was then known as Austria-Hungary, which appears as itself in the first two novels and is only thinly disguised as Shibush in the third. To leave either Buczacz or Jerusalem produces a sense of betrayal, either of one’s roots or of one’s heritage and destiny. It is clear, however, that the narrator is not even a fictionalized Agnon but Agnon’s literary creation. For the novel, the complex personality of the narrator is crucial. His introspection, his deep feelings of guilt and futility, and his sense of alienation provide both the plot structure and the interaction with the novel’s characters. These characters, essentially sketched through the narrator’s eyes, manifest various aspects of twentieth century humanity. They remain static in their attitudes; the narrator changes, accepting the loss of his nostalgic ideal and the permanence of his future, his home, in Jerusalem.

Critical Context

Agnon was recognized as a major literary talent with the arrival of his first Hebrew short story in 1908. He acquired fame, status as a classic writer, and numerous literary prizes in Israel (in 1966, Jerusalem put up a sign on his street: quiet—Agnon is writing). The scarcity of English translations of his works, however, limited his reputation among English-speaking readers, at least until he received the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1966.

Agnon belongs among the late nineteenth century neo-Romantic writers such as Micah Joseph Berdichevsky and Isaac Leib Peretz. Not influenced by Franz Kafka (also a product of that movement), Agnon’s work nevertheless has often been compared to Kafka’s, as Reb Yudel has inevitably been compared to Don Quixote. Critical opinion of Agnon is so varied that he has been labeled as both a traditionalist and a modernist. One of the causes for the confusion is that Agnon developed as a writer over a long literary life, frequently revising his works for later publication. In addition, he donned many public and private masks. These personas fed into critical analysis, especially since much of the raw material for his fiction was drawn from his personal experience and was then extensively reworked, and in fact distorted, by his artistic imagination. In reality, none of his work is in any real sense autobiographical.

Agnon was an individualistic and sophisticated literary craftsman. He was the master of the short story; his few novels are episodic. The quiet, yet lyric and flexible, Midrashic Hebrew style that he adopted is archaic but familiar to modern Hebrew readers and has influenced the development of modern Hebrew. Yet its simplicity in translation may seem lifeless and lose much of its charm, as well as its rich biblical and rabbinic allusions and wordplay.

Several themes recur in Agnon’s works, and critics have debated their meaning. Agnon himself refused to provide any clues, declaring that a writer said all that he had to say in his writings. On one occasion, he went so far as to tell an editor, “I write things simply as they are.” His fantasy intuitively recast reality. To recapture an ideal world is impossible, and turns nostalgia into nightmare; Agnon bridged the ideal and the real worlds through fantasy and his mastery of literary form.

Bibliography

Alter, Robert. “Shmuel Yosef Agnon: ‘The Alphabet of Holiness’ and ‘The Israeli Novel,’” in After the Tradition, 1969.

Band, Arnold J. Nostalgia and Nightmare: A Study in the Fiction of S. Y. Agnon, 1968.

Hochman, Baruch. The Fiction of S. Y. Agnon, 1970.

Ribalow, Menachem. “Samuel Joseph Agnon: Major Novelist of Yesterday and Today,” in The Flowering of Modern Hebrew Literature, 1959.

Scholem, Gershom. “Reflections on Shmuel Yosef Agnon,” in Commentary. XLIV (December, 1967), pp. 59-66.