A Simple Story by Shmuel Yosef Agnon

First published:Sipur pashut, 1935 (English translation, 1985)

Type of work: Psychological parable

Time of work: The late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries

Locale: Szybusz, Poland and Galicia

Principal Characters:

• The Narrator
• Hirshl Hurvitz, a young storekeeper’s son, at first too timid to declare his passion for Blume Nacht
• Blume Nacht, the daughter of Mirl and Hayyim Nacht
• Mina Ziemlich, the daughter of a wealthy merchant from Malikrowik, later to be Hirshl’s wife
• Baruch Meir Hurvitz, Hirshl’s father
• Tsirl Hurvitz, Hirshl’s mother
• Gedalia Ziemlich, Mina’s father
• Bertha Ziemlich, Mina’s mother
• Dr. Langsam, a neurologist
• Yona Toyber, a matchmaker from Szybusz
• Akavia and Tirza Mazal, a young couple

The Novel

Using an obtrusive narrator, a native of Galicia wise and tolerant concerning the foibles of men and women in love, Shmuel Yosef Agnon narrates a “simple” tale that grows ever more complex and meaningful. He begins with the fortunes of Blume Nacht, an attractive, clever, and industrious young woman who, as a penniless orphan, arrives at her cousin’s home at Szybusz, a Jewish shtetl (village) in southern Poland. Baruch Meir Hurvitz and his wife, Tsirl, decide that she might well serve as a maid in the household to earn her modest keep, and they agree to shelter her. Their only son, Hirshl, looks at the girl with deeper appreciation. Though he soon falls in love with her, he is too inexperienced in the ways of the world to approach Blume and instead allows fate to take control of his romance. While he vacillates, the shtetl matchmaker, Yona Toyber, works out for the young man a much more promising match—with Mina Ziemlich, from the nearby village of Malikrowik.

Passively, Hirshl allows his parents to prepare for this marriage; passively, he courts the equally inexperienced Mina; passively, he weds her. Always he had thought (or perhaps had hoped) that Blume might intercede for him and that they might run off together. Such things do not generally occur in the village of Szybusz, however, where people follow Jewish traditions, and Hirshl is, if anything, obedient.

Only after his marriage does he show signs of agitation that swell into revolt against the conventions of married life and finally turn into depression and near-madness. Desperate with his unrequited love for Blume, Hirshl strays from his home, suffers an emotional breakdown in the forest, and—with the assistance of his worried family—is placed in the care of the wise Dr. Langsam, a neurologist, and committed to a sanatorium. There, allowed time for sleep and the renovation of his frayed nerves, Hirshl regains his sanity. Indeed, he recovers more than his wits: He returns home to his wife and to his vocation as a shopkeeper with a new vigor. His rebellion is finished. Restored to his wife and children, content with his lot as an ordinary person in an imperfect world, he resumes a life of complacency. What of Blume? The narrator chooses not to discuss her fate; hers is another “simple story.”

The Characters

On the surface, many of the villagers in Agnon’s novella resemble stock figures of Jewish folk tradition. Tsirl, the typical manipulative mother, controls both her unassertive son and her genial husband. Yona Toyber is the shtetl matchmaker, whose wisdom derives as much from the conventions governing his vocation as from his own subtlety and the sense of tact which he acquired by observing human nature. The youthful protagonist, Hirshl, resembles in certain comic ways the classic schlemiel, the feckless victim of other people’s caprices.

Yet upon closer inspection, these characters appear to be less stereotypical, more complicated than a reader might suppose. After Hirshl suffers a nervous collapse, his parents act with unexpected sense to assist their son with proper help. Instead of reproving him, Tsirl supports him with motherly constancy. Yona Toyber is by no means the typical gossipy factotum of Jewish folklore; he is a man of religious erudition and not a gossip at all. A gentle, dignified, self-trained psychologist in his own right, he is one of the two authority figures who represent the internal harmony and continuity of a God-fearing community. The other is the university-trained neurologist, Dr. Langsam. Although a secular Jew with a wider range of intellectual and cultural interests than those held in common by the shtetl, he is nevertheless a religious man. Dr. Langsam’s professional “treatment” for Hirshl is, when judged according to the test of efficacy, just as appropriate as Yona Toyber’s professional choice of Hirshl’s mate. Dr. Langsam’s regimen of rest and quiet introspection works to heal Hirshl’s mental agitation; Toyber’s selection of Mina is, after all, appropriate. Hirshl’s soul is too small (or too conventional) to have pleased the nobler Blume.

A mysterious “night flower,” as her name may be translated from the Yiddish/German, Blume is by no means a stock character of Jewish folk literature. Her potential is great—as great in powers of self-sacrifice as it is in moral strength. Because she stands apart from the petty people of the shtetl, she must continue her story in the imagination of the reader, beyond the confines of the pages of Agnon’s book.

Within the small village of Szybusz are diverse souls, none as unique as Blume is, all comprising a community united by tradition and by the mysterious force of a destiny shaped by Divine Will. From Yona Toyber and Dr. Langsam through a range of the most humble persons—including the conventional lovers Akavia and Tirza Mazal (whose full story Agnon tells in a work of 1923, “Bidmi yameha”)—all members of the community are linked, frozen in time and commemorated as a lost portion of Jewry.

Critical Context

Like the other fiction by the 1966 Nobel Prize winner, A Simple Story re-creates the lost world of early twentieth century Jewish life. In general, Agnon’s work is—at least superficially—nostalgic, conservatively religious, often moralistic. On a deeper level, however, his fiction treats a quest for values in a once-static society slowly disintegrating because of modern pressures. As such, A Simple Story, like Oreach nata lalun (1939, 1950; A Guest for the Night, 1968) and Hakhnasat kala (1931; The Bridal Canopy, 1937), should be read not merely as an old-fashioned narrative depicting a bygone age but also as an ambiguous moral parable that concerns the human soul in turmoil.

In A Simple Story, Agnon’s parable lacks a distinct moral focus because his vision is comic. From the vantage point of retrospection, he examines his characters with amused tolerance for their follies, with compassion for their suffering. His tale ends, as most great comedies end, with an impulse toward reconciliation; with the ceremony of marriage for many of the minor characters; with the promise of integration and unity for the entire community. As is also true of great comedies, Agnon’s miniature world is touched by the sadness of life. No one who reads the account of Hirshl’s early discontent in a loveless marriage can dismiss the book merely as a folk romance. More in the pattern of Ivan Olbracht’s neglected masterpiece Golet v udoli (1937; The Bitter and the Sweet, 1964) than of Sholom Aleichem’s popular stories, Agnon’s comic vision rarely sentimentalizes or trivializes the past. As both a realist and a man of deep religious faith, Agnon treats his characters no better than they are—but also no worse.

Bibliography

Aberbach, David. At the Handles of the Lock: Themes in the Fiction of S.J. Agnon, 1984.

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 of the Fiction of S.Y. Agnon, 1968.

Fisch, Harold. S.Y. Agnon, 1975.

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

Kirkus Reviews. LIII, October 15, 1985, p. 1094.

Library Journal. CX, November 15, 1985, p. 108.

The New York Times Book Review. XC, December 22, 1985, p. 8.

Publishers Weekly. CCXXVIII, October 11, 1985, p. 58.