S. Y. Agnon's 'A Simple Tale' ('Sipur Pashut') – Part 3

 

[This is the final installment of “S. Y. Agnon’s A Simple Tale (Sipur Pashut).”  I finish up my search for information about an English translation of Agnon’s novella and report on the play’s presentation in Baltimore, the production that initiated the search in the first place. 

[That little fact is explained in Part 1, posted on 2 May, and I strongly recommend that readers just starting this account go back and read Parts 1 and 2 (posted on 5 May).  Aside from that initiating incident, there are several more details about this chronicle that are explained in the earlier installments and Part 3 will make much more sense if you read them first.

[Part 3 covers the end of my search, including a report on the Baltimore performances of the Habima adaptation with many of the reviews of the production published in local papers and some more distant outlets.  I’ve even reported on the publication of the English translation of the novella and the New York Times book review upon its release.]

I continued the report on the availability of A Simple Tale on 11 February:  An hour and a half spent in the NYPL Main Branch (42nd Street and 5th Avenue) revealed that apparently no English translation of the story had ever been published here or in England, or any other English-speaking country. 

I checked the Index Translationum, published by UNESCO as a list of all literature translated, and several bibliographies of Hebrew literature translated into English.  The only recorded translation of A Simple Tale was the German translation noted in the 9 February memo.  As far as I could tell, I’d exhausted all reasonable resources for locating a translation of the story. 

The script version wasn’t mentioned in any index or bibliography, and probably had never been published.  The only likely source for the adaptation was Habima in Tel Aviv.  It was problematical whether they’d release their version if it had never been published.

I’d asked Helen in Tel Aviv to check on the availability of either the script (in any language) or an English translation of the story in Israel on the chance that a version of either may have been published there and not imported.  I expect it to take a while to get the answer.

Further checking also revealed that the only available copy of the German translation (from which an English version might be adapted) was the non-circulating one at the NYPL Main Branch.  I planned to check a little further to be sure; I had the numbers of Columbia University’s and Hebrew Union College’s libraries, and Goethe Haus.  Bobst only had the original Hebrew version of the story as I indicated in the 9 February memo. 

(It’s interesting to note that Agnon’s works had been translated into nearly every European language, including Swedish, Danish, and Portuguese.  There were also versions of several of his stories in Korean, Vietnamese, and Turkish.  No one seemed to have translated Sipur pashut into any language other than German.  I hadn’t even located a Yiddish translation of it—which seemed counterintuitive since that would have been the common language of northern European Jews in pre-World War II Galicia.

([In fact, there was a Yiddish translation of Sipur pashut, published in 1958 (A Posheṭe mayse, New York: Der Kval).  Translated from the Hebrew by Agnon’s good friend Eliezer Rubinstein (1926-89), of whose rendering, which the author felt preserved his writing style, Agnon said: “Anyone reading it would have thought that I had written it in Yiddish myself.”

([I didn’t find this translation until I used the then non-existent resource of the Internet.  It’s doubtful, though, that a Yiddish version of the story would have been any more use in our quest than the German version was.

([In 2002, A Posheṭe mayse was adapted for the stage by Shmuel Atzmon and produced by Yiddishpiel, a Yiddish theater company in Tel Aviv.]

The German version was relatively recent, 1967, and is in modern German.  This is distinguished from pre-WWII German documents and publications, which were written in Frakturschrift, a Gothic alphabet that’s very hard to read if you didn’t grow up with it.  It is, however, 276 pages long, militating against either working on it in the library or photocopying it at $42 a copy at 1985 library prices.

On 13 February, I reported that calls to the libraries of the Goethe Haus and Hebrew Union Col­lege revealed that neither had a copy of any translation of the Agnon story.  (Goethe Haus doesn’t handle translations into German, only German literature.)  I subsequently visited Hebrew Union College library (1 W. 4th Street), but that just confirmed that they didn’t have either an English or German version of the story.

A call to the Israeli Consulate provided the name of an Israeli-based bookstore that just opened a branch in New York City: Steimatzky, 56 E. 11th Street (now closed).  This was the best help the consulate could give me. 

Steimatzky didn’t have any translations of Agnon, but they called another dealer, who didn’t have A Simple Tale, but provided the Israeli publisher of Agnon’s works, Schocken Books.  Steimatzky  said they’d contact Schocken’s New York office and let me know the availability (and cost) of ordering a translation of the story.  I said I’d report the information they passed on to me.

I took out The Fiction of S. Y. Agnon by Baruch Hochman (Cornell University Press, 1970) from Bobst.  (I was still an NYU grad student at this time—my work with Cynthia was an internship for her class—so I had access not only to Bobst, the NYU bookstore, and other NYU facilities, but also the Downtown Consortium, which included, among other schools, Hebrew Union College.)   

The Hochman book includes an extensive discussion of A Simple Tale (which the author calls A Simple Story; pp. 94-111).  It also indicates in the publication data that the “English translations from . . . Sipur pashut [A Simple Tale] were made by Baruch Hochman,” indicating that there were no others available in 1970.  A note on page 200 confirms this.

Hochman remarks that the story

centers, not primarily on the manners of the shtetl [a Jewish village or small town in Eastern Europe] in transition, but on the inner experience of a young man unwittingly in conflict with both himself and his envi­ronment.  It is essentially a study of repression, madness, and final adjustment within the bourgeois family, as we know it from turn-of-the-century European fiction.

Also:

A Simple Story seems to start out as a romantic tale of young lovers who are thwarted by their elders . . . .  But it moves toward neither of its predictable endings.  That is, it presses neither toward tragic devastation nor toward a comic resolution in which the will of the obstructive elders is overcome.  Rather, it moves toward an ironic reconciliation of the hero with those elders and their values.  Yet, though Hershel is treated ironically, we are somehow relieved when he “makes it” in conventional terms and “becomes a man.”  We end by partially approving a reconciliation to a milieu which has been shown to be inimical to every value of youth, life, love, or, for that matter, authentic tradition.  Still, we go on scoffing at that milieu.

I held onto the book for a while in case anyone was interested in having a look at it (since we didn’t seem to be able to lay our hands on the original story too readily.)

I planned a trip to Lincoln Center Friday, the 15th, or Saturday, the 16th (on an unrelated matter).  While I was there, I saw what that resource had to say about Agnon, the script of A Simple Tale, and the performance(s) of the Habima in the summer of ʼ81.  A report to Cynthia on that information followed on 16 February.

There was no evidence of any further performances of A Simple Tale after the Baltimore festival appearance.  According to a Variety article dated 3 June 1981, Habima’s A Simple Tale played Toronto before Baltimore. 

Variety had announced on 5 March 1980 that Habima planned a run at Broadway’s John Golden Theatre with A Simple Tale, its first visit to New York City since 1964.  The run was to start in January 1981 and then move on to one-night stands in Washington, Boston, Chicago, Philadelphia, and Montreal.  Shmuel Firstenberg, an Israeli impresario, was producing the tour and was going to offer three other attractions to compliment the Agnon adaptation. 

For the proposed Broadway production of A Simple Tale, the author-narrator was to be on stage the whole play and make introductory comments on each scene.  The producers decided that this made more sense than using a simultaneous translation through earphones, and a “prominent American actor” would appear as the narrator.

In Variety on 3 June 1981, Habima managing director Shmuel Omer explained that “a feasibility study on the back of a used envelop promptly discouraged the economics of [a Broadway] engagement.”

A Simple Tale was performed in Baltimore on 6, 7, 9, 10, 11, 13, and 14 June 1981.  The production was Habima’s first visit to the United States in 25 years and, according to United Press International, part of the first international theater festival in this country’s history.  The Habima show was the opening performance of the festival, débuting on 6 June.

Edwin Wilson in the Wall Street Journal reported on 19 June 1981 that the Habima performance during the International Theatre Festival was given at the Baltimore School for the Arts in the neighborhood of Mount Vernon.  He described one scene which moved him particularly:

The scene in which [Hirschel] loses his mind is undoubtedly one of the most theatrical mad scenes ever staged.  As a demon stalks him, Hirschel topples over a two-story stack of boxes, swings an iron bed on wheels in a fierce arc and finally throws pillows filled with white feathers into the air.  Suddenly a shower of feathers falls from above and the stage becomes a snow storm of feathers.  Symbolically Hirschel is lost in the maelstrom of the family business [packing and selling chicken feathers].

Cynthia had extolled this same scene to me when she first broached the subject of seeking out this play.  As readers will see, it was the theatrical highlight of the production, singled out in nearly all the reviews.

The Baltimore Sun’s R. H. Gardner recounted a conversation he had with an actor who played in My Fair Lady in Russia.  The actor was explaining how “harrowing” it was playing before an audience that doesn’t understand the language of the performance. 

“You deliver a line that customarily brings down the house, and they just sit there staring at you,” the actor said.  Gardner wondered if, during his mad scene in A Simple Tale, actor Moshe Becker, “as he tore about with a shoe on his head, banging into props and scattering feathers until the stage looked as if it had been hit by a 6-inch snowfall . . . if he himself weren’t wondering, ‘Do they have the slightest idea why I’m behaving this way?’”

Gardner went on: “Such a thing can undermine an actor’s performance, but there was no indication that Moshe Becker let it affect his.  Indeed,” the Sun reviewer added, “he and the rest of the company, all of whom were superb, carried on as if they were in their own theater in Tel Aviv instead of . . . before people who for the most part could not understand them.”

Nonetheless, Gardner felt, “Despite the language barrier, the play has been so well put together . . . that it can be followed, in broad outline if not minute detail, and its power and artistry should be evident to all.”

Though a “simple” story, the adapters and director have imbued it with various expressionistic devices that considerably deepen its emotional impact.  The audience is taken inside the character’s head and allowed to experience with him strange sounds—notably cackling laughter, eerie music and, especially, a jarring chord, repeated at strategic moments to recall the insane relative, dwelling in rags somewhere in his mind.

The passage of time during the period his madness is developing is conveyed by the frequent crowing of a cock . . . .  The whole production—from [Ziona Shemesh’s] two-level set, with its hanging human figures and dangling pillows, to Y[ossi] Mar-Chayim’s evocative music—has been imaginatively conceived, and the performances . . . are uniformly excellent.

As for the acting, the Sun writer lauded Lia Koenig and Eliezer Jung, who “seem right on key as the parents.  [Yael Perl] has a hauntingly lovely quality as the orphan girl [Bluma] the hero loves but can’t marry, and Amiran Attis is nothing short of terrifying as the uncle [the “insane relative” mentioned above].” 

Like so many of the other reviewers, however, Gardner was especially taken by the young actor who made his début as Hirschel in Tel Aviv: “Of course it is Mr. Becker’s virtuoso performance as the son that, through its energy and variety, manages to dazzle the audience throughout.”

In conclusion, Gardner recommended, “For all who take their theater seriously, [A Simple Tale] is, I should think, a must.”

“To see the Habimah National Theatre of Israel performing S. Y. Agnon's ‘A Simple Tale’ is to see the preservation of several traditions at once,” proclaimed the Washington Post’s James Lardner.  He was invoking, first, the original Habima’s artistic guidance from Konstantin Stanislavsky, alluded to earlier from Lardner’s column (see Part 2), and, second, “the lost world of the shtetl, or Jewish ghetto . . . .”

Because the script isn’t translated, “a great deal of dialogue is spoken, and a verbally-minded theatergoer is bound to feel frustrated,” cautioned Lardner.  “Even those casually acquainted with Hebrew, I am told, could find Agnon’s poetic language . . . difficult to follow.”

“The play was presumably chosen for export,” Lardner figured, “because the storytelling approaches the flavor of pantomime at times, and the action is always richly and vividly illustrated.  (When Hirshel and [Mina] are married, for example, a net descends on them and wraps them in a stranglehold.  When Hirshel goes mad, all the neatly arranged props and furniture go haywire, and the stage is covered with feathers.)”

The WaPo review-writer reported, “The power, technical skill and total coordination of the players come across—language barrier or no language barrier.”  He concluded that “for anyone interested in modern Hebrew theater and literature, this is a rare opportunity.  Nothing like it is likely to come our way again anytime soon.”

In the Wilmington, Delaware, Evening Journal, Philip F. Crosland felt, “‘A Simple Tale’ is an appropriate title.  The plot is so simple that were it not for one electrifying scene in which the protagonist goes mad amid a blanket of falling feathers, it would hardly be noticed.”

Crosland also thought that “the play would have held this reviewer’s interest better had it been in English instead of Hebrew.”  He asserted that “it becomes tedious to watch players communicating a play of little action in a strange (to me) language.”

“The action,” reported the review-writer, “moved rather stiffly until the dramatic and visual highlight, when Herschl’s mind snaps and he slashes pillows and other containers, flinging their contents about the stage, as an overhead container showers more feathers, creating a feathery screen through which the rampaging Herschl is observed obliquely.”

The Evening Journal’s reviewer observed, “The set was intentionally cluttered.”  With “brown, black and somber tones” predominating, it set “a mood.”  Crosland characterized the performances, “like the play,” as “competent but undistinguished.” 

For UPI, Glenne Currie remarked that, though A Simple Tale “was played in Hebrew,” he found that “the story is less important than the production, which was magnificent.”  Currie noted that “Habimah still shows its debt to Stanislavky’s Moscow Art Theater . . . .  In fact Habimah probably is more representative of the common heritage than the present Moscow Arts.” 

“It really is a simple tale,” affirmed the UPI writer, “of love found and lost, of the strengths and weaknesses of tradition.  But,” he added, “the expressionistic set, the exemplary acting, and the orchestrated direction which combines with the incidental music to give the effect of a spoken opera, add up to the sort of total production which the theater aims for but seldom attains.”

In Baltimore’s Afro-American, Ida Peters complained that the presentation of Habima’s A Simple Tale in the city’s International Theatre Festival was an example that the festival “left much to be desired” because “some of the troupes who perform in Hebrew and Spanish [were] without written explanation of what is happening on stage.”

Peters cited “Baltimore critics [who] each said they couldn’t understand what was happening or told a different version from what I thought I saw.”  Reiterating what “the press release says” (the plot laid out as previously described above), Peters gave “[m]y view”:

On Hirshel’s wedding night he castrates himself and refuses to sleep with his bride.  When his bride turns up pregnant, he goes mad.

“At the show this reporter caught,” the Afro reviewer observed, “the absence of laughter and the complete silence of the audience proved that not one person in the half-filled auditorium understood what was going on.”

She felt, “For a student of theatre arts especially those studying theatre design, sets and lighting ‘A Simple Tale’ could be a must see.  For the average theatre-goer,” the review-writer warned, “it has no appeal.”

In addition to Peters’s allusion to the quality of the tech work, she acknowledged, “Most masterful scene [sic] was Hirshel’s dance of madness . . . .  He was accompanied by a half-naked maniacal figure [presumably the boy’s insane uncle] who danced his frenzied contortions with him [the “maniacal figure,” I presume] pulling him [Hirshel] deeper and deeper into his own hell.” 

Peters also complained that the Baltimore School for the Arts, “while it has a large stage is not fully renovated and is like an old barn.  The temporary seats are uncomfortable.”  She was the only reporter who mentioned this, but I looked up the school to see what the reviewer could have meant.

It turns out that the BSA, a newly-established Baltimore public high school for preparing student artists for careers in the performing and visual arts, was in its first year of operation in 1981.  Not all the renovations to the once-elegant former Alcazar Hotel, built in 1888 and closed as a hotel in 1932, had been completed at the time of the Simple Tale presentation. 

Only the first four floors of the seven-story structure were ready for use.  The theater where Habima was working (and several other festival performances were given) had been the hotel’s first-floor grand ballroom.

Except for confirmation from Steimatzky/Schocken about the availability of the text, and an answer from Helen in Tel Aviv, this concluded the research I could think of to locate a copy of the script or an English version of the story.  I suspected the only way of getting the script would be to contact Habima directly and ask if they would let us have a copy.  I told Cynthia that if she wanted me to do any more on this, she’d have to let me know.  I said I’d run out of ideas.

On 20 February, I reported that Judy at Steimatzky called that day to say that Schocken Books, Agnon’s publishers, didn’t have a translation of A Simple Tale at that time, but that they planned to issue one in the fall.  The release, which would be part of an anthology, was slated for September ʼ85.  I saw no reason why we couldn’t wait until then to do anything about an adaptation.  

For now, I felt, all we could do is await word from my friend in Tel Aviv about a possible English version available in Israel (unlikely) and from Ellen Foreman’s (another TJ colleague of Cynthia’s) Habima contact about the availability of their dramatization.  I thought that put an end to the research in this matter for the time being.

After I sent this memo to Cynthia, she memo’d me back to “put Agnon on hold, except when that project literally falls in your path en route to another goal.”

On 1 March, she reiterated: “Good work on Agnon.  Now put it on hold pendin[g] the September publication of the story and any word we get from our feelers to Israel.”

Schocken Books indeed published A Simple Story (as the translation was entitled) in Israel in January 1985 (also Syracuse University Press in the U.S.), though it didn’t reach the United States until December.  (It was not part of an anthology.)  It was translated from the Hebrew by Hillel Halkin, an American-born translator, biographer, literary critic, and novelist, who has lived in Israel since 1970.  There have been further publications since then.  (There’s even a Kindle edition available.)

In his New York Times review of the new book, Robert Alter, a professor of Hebrew and comparative literature at the University of California, Berkeley, called Agnon’s novella an “understated masterpiece” and Halkin’s translation a “skillful (if at times rather free) rendering of Agnon’s elegantly stylized Hebrew.” 

Finding it “a mystery” that it took 50 years for A Simple Story to be released in English, Alter declared that “one must be grateful for its appearance now.”

The novella, Alter found, “conforms . . . closely to the European realistic novel of the 19th century.”  Indeed, the UCB professor asserted that “Agnon learned [the] quasimusical technique [‘of recurring motifs’] for developing themes from ‘Madame Bovary’ [(1857) by Gustave Flaubert (1821-80), French novelist] and, probably, also the early Thomas Mann [(1875-1955), German novelist and short story writer].” 

The book reviewer pointed out that “Agnon recalls Flaubert” in his “frequent use of an ironic free indirect style to lay bare the self-deceptions, mental evasions and hypocrisies of the principal characters.”  The actions in the story, though, are “rendered by Agnon with extraordinary subtlety and conviction.”

“In his intelligently argued afterword,” Halkin “counters the consensus of Agnon criticism,” observed Alter, “by proposing that we regard this as an ‘antimodernist’ work, since it goes beyond the usual modernist hostility to bourgeois values.  The novel’s conclusion could suggest that society, after all, provides vitally needed stability.”

In the end, Alter labeled A Simple Story a “wonderfully complex novel [that] keeps the mind restlessly alert, contemplating in shifting perspectives the human figures and social institutions it so persuasively represents.” 

[Several of the journalists who covered the North American appearances of Habima’s A Simple Tale made mention of the fact that the performances were in Hebrew without translation or a full English synopsis of the plot in the program.  While some writers applauded the clarity of the performances despite the language barrier, a few complained strongly about their inability to understand the story.

[By and large, Americans are language chauvinists.  According to a company director from India at the 1986 Theatre of Nations, Martha Coigney (1933-2016), the head of the U.S. Center of the International Theatre Institute, an agency of UNESCO and sponsor of TON, warned that “to take any non-English-speaking theater to America is next to impossible.”  

[In Passport, the newsletter of Baltimore’s Theatre Project, Philip Arnoult (now founder of the Center for International Theatre Development), admonished that our “one-and-a-half language society,” as he called it, prejudices Americans against foreign-language performances.  Unless it’s Tango Argentino, Marcel Marceau, or grand opera, Americans just won’t accept it.  

[Ray Conlogue of the Toronto Globe and Mail cited a statement by the famous American director and theater critic Harold Clurman that he could tell a good performance even in a language he didn’t comprehend (see Part 2).  I’ve seen many shows in languages I don’t understand at all, like Swedish and Bulgarian and even Marathi (the language spoken in Maharashtra State, India), and have enjoyed them immensely. 

[I particularly recall two national companies I’ve seen in the past decades: the State Theater of Lithuania with a play called The Square by the company’s then-director, Eimuntas Nekrosius (1952-2018), and the Ivan Vasov National Theatre of Bulgaria, with a Russian play called Retro by Alexander Galin (b. 1947).  I didn’t know either play, of course, and both were performed in the companies’ native languages. 

[And both were magnificent performances—and experiences.  The Square (1980), which was at the Joyce Theatre on 8th Avenue in Chelsea in ’91 as part of the short-lived New York International Festival of the Arts, had simultaneous translation, but I have always remembered that play as a fascinating and, at the time, unique take on the shift from communism/totalitarianism to freedom/democracy.  This was one of the best theatrical experiences I’ve ever had, and it remains with me even today as a vivid impression.  Thirty-one years later, I still remember it. 

[Retro (1979), which was part of the Theatre of Nations in Baltimore in ’86 (see my report on this international theater festival, posted on ROT on 10 November 2014), didn’t have a translation—just a synopsis in the program—but the acting was so absolutely sharp that that was all I needed to decipher what was happening. 

[The company worked in almost perfect Stanislavsky style for this domestic comedy and every action and intent was entirely clear and comprehensible, even though I couldn’t understand a word of the dialogue.  The truthfulness of the performances and the consistency of the characterizations managed to come through. 

[Comedies, I think, are the hardest plays to communicate when you don’t understand the language.  A recording of the Retro performance would have been a perfect instructional video for Stanislavsky acting.  I guess that my remembering these performances 31 and 36 years afterwards says something.]

S. Y. Agnon's 'A Simple Tale' ('Sipur Pashut') – Part 2

 

[Welcome to the second installment of “S. Y. Agnon’s A Simple Tale (Sipur Pashut).”  It’s a continuation of my account of the search for information on Agnon’s 1935 novella and the 1979 play adapted from it.  This part includes a detailed synopsis of the play’s plot and a review of its première at Habima in Tel Aviv.  I also cover the play’s 1981 North American début and the press reception of that appearance at a theater festival in Toronto.

[Readers who have just joined this post should go back to 2 May and read Part 1 first.  You will understand what follows much better if you know the rationale for this search and have the explanations of many of the details that recur in Parts 2 and 3 (coming up on 8 May.)]

The next steps in my search for the stage adaptation of S. Y. Agnon’s A Simple Tale seemed to be to check out the New York Public Library for the Performing Arts at Lincoln Center to see if it had a manuscript of the play, contact the Israeli Consulate for whatever help it might offer, and track down a library specializing in Jewish/Hebrew culture (Hebrew Union College?). 

There was also the possibility of contacting Habima directly, but that would probably be a lengthy process.  I did have an actress friend who lives in Tel Aviv (the late Helen Eleasari; see my memorial post on 22 April), and I told Cynthia that I could easily ask her to check on the availability of the story or the play in English from Israeli sources.  Since I owed her a letter anyway, I said I’d go ahead and ask her to look around.

I suggested that there’d probably be copyright problems to deal with, but a last resort could be to translate the German version of the novella (I didn’t know anyone who could translate Hebrew) and work from that.  I said I could probably handle the German myself with a little work.  (I said that before I learned how tricky Agnon’s prose is.)

The original Habima production of A Simple Tale in Tel Aviv opened on 1 January 1979 and was held over through the rest of the year.  The novella had been adapted for the stage by Shlomo Nitzan and Itzhak Goren, and staged by Yossi Yizraeli, whom the Jerusalem Post said, “has made Agnon’s work his own province.”  The cast numbered 25 with a backstage crew of 16.

Habima (which literally means ‘the stage’ in Hebrew) began as a Hebrew-language theater in 1912 in Bialystock, Russia, a small city of about 56,000, of which 40,000, or 72%, were Jews.  After World War I, Bialystock reverted to Polish control (as it had been before the turn of the 19th century) and Habima decamped for Moscow.  

The company’s founders invited the great theater pioneer Konstantin Stanislavsky (1863-1938), founder of the Moscow Art Theater, to lead the nascent troupe, and he arranged for Yevgenii Vakhtangov (1883-1922), a pupil of his who was also influenced by experimentalist Vsevolod Meyerhold (1874-1940) and became a friend of innovative actor, director, and teacher Michael Chekhov (1891-1955; see my post on 2, 5, and 8 November 2019) to train the company.

Considering the small size of the Hebrew-speaking audience in Moscow and the rise of official anti-Semitism in the Soviet Union, the company found the going rough and decided to emigrate.  In 1926 Habima toured Eastern Europe, Germany and Western Europe, and the United States.  

The troupe split, with one contingent of the acting company choosing to stay in the U.S.  After a well-received visit to Palestine and a return to Europe, the rest resettled in Palestine, then under the British Mandate of the League of Nations, in 1931.  Habima built a permanent home in Tel Aviv and since 1958 has been the National Theater of Israel.

In the words of Washington Post review-writer James Lardner, the company “still shows its original influences—the intense flamboyance of the Yiddish Theatre and the realistic emotional texture of the Moscow Art Theatre,” though there’d been no contact since Habima left Moscow in 1926.

Mendel Kohansky’s review in the Jerusalem Post included a comprehensive synopsis of the plot of the 1979 Habima hour-and-45-minute stage adaptation of A Simple Tale:

We are in Agnon country—a small town in Galicia, where the Jews live their lives in a partially imposed, partially self-imposed, ghetto.  They are devoted to religion, to learning, to earning a living.  It is the end of the 19th century or the beginning of the 20th, some of the Jews there are already glancing across the wall, attracted to non-Jewish Europe, its different style of living, its liberal thinking and sophistication.

The hero of the story, Hirshel, belongs to the old world.  His parents own a prosperous wholesale chicken feather business [for stuffing pillows, mattresses, and cushions]; his mother always has a thick wad of money in one hand, an abacus in the other; his father just takes orders.

Hirshel wants to study the Tora [sic; the first five books of the Hebrew Bible, also known as the Five Books of Moses], a greatly respected pursuit in his environment, but not for sons of prosperous merchants.  His parents believe he would be much better off in the family business.

Hirshel is also in love, with Bluma, a pure dove of a girl, but a penniless orphan.  His mother approved of the girl, but she thinks that a boy like Hirshel should marry well—into a family at least as prosperous as his own.  Her choice for him is Mina, the daughter of Berta and Gedalia Tzimlich [ziemlich is German for ‘almost’].  Mina has received an education befitting her station in life, in a boarding school for girls run by a lady who eventually converted to Christianity.  Consequently, Mina is a worldly, sophisticated girl who wears elegant dresses and nightgowns, douses herself with perfume, and calls Hirshel “Heinrich” [German for ‘Henry’].

Under his mother’s gentle but firm persuasion, Hirshel eventually marries Mina.  And he abandons his studies to devote himself to the wholesale chicken feather business.  But his heart is with Bluma, and with the volumes of the Talmud [a collection of Jewish writings on the practical application of Judaic law and tradition].  The conflict leads to fearful suffering [on the part of Hirshel] which culminates in [his] madness.

Cured of his illness, Hirshel returns to his family, to his wife who has borne him a child, to the business, and to a clearly laid out future.

There are faint echoes of The Dybbuk in the story, but instead of the tragic grandeur with which the heroine’s life ends there, we have here an ending full of gently ironic, poignant wisdom.

[The Dybbuk (pronounced DIB-uhk) is a play by S. (for Shloyme; Yiddish for Solomon) Ansky (1863-1920), written originally in Russian between 1913 and 1916.  Later, Ansky himself translated it into Yiddish.  A Hebrew version was staged in Moscow at Habima in 1922, the troupe’s first great success.  A new production was staged at Habima in Tel Aviv by Joseph Chaikin (1935-2003) in June 1979, starring Moshe Becker (b. 1954), the young actor who débuted as Hirschel in A Simple Tale.

[The play depicts the possession of a young woman by the dybbuk, or malicious spirit, of her dead beloved.  Her father had forbidden their marriage.  The dybbuk, which can be expelled only by exorcism, at first refuses to leave the possessed woman’s body but is eventually persuaded to do so.  In the end, the woman dies and her soul is united forever with that of her beloved.]

A young man in the business, constantly running up and down ladders, occasionally stops to speak to the audience in the author’s voice.

When the story comes to its resolution, with Hirshel on his way to becoming a respected merchant and family man, the narrator tells us: The Lord, may His Name be blessed, created the first man with two faces and two backs, and all the future generations have two faces and two backs, and they can move in either direction.

Hirshel, he tells us, cast his eyes on a girl, and in his ignorance assumed that he was commanded to do so, until others came and showed him that he was not so commanded.  It made him very sad, but in the end he consoled himself, like one who suffered a loss but was rewarded with a find.

In his Jerusalem Post evaluation of the adaptation on stage, a “difficult task” which he declared “could hardly have been done better,” Kohansky asserted that director Yizraeli “has achieved remarkable results.”

The play, Kohansky added, “is anything but simple.”

On the surface the story is about a young man whose spiritual and intellectual cravings are stymied by a coldly materialistic environment, but it hides a wealth of Agnonite meanings.  The adaptation and staging, with its baroque richness, successfully bring them all to light.

Labeling the production “poignantly sad, tragic and humorous” and “rich in directorial invention,” the JP reviewer reported, “There is never a dull moment” in the show, which “proceeds from climax to climax until it reaches a frightening Walpurgisnacht in the scene of the hero’s madness.”

(Walpurgisnacht, or Walpurgis Night, the night from 30 April to 1 May, is the night when witches are believed to hold satanic revels.  Hence, it can refer to any episode or situation having the quality of nightmarish wildness.)

The review-writer found Ziona Shemesh’s set, lit by Nathan Pantorin, “an astonishing farrago of thousands of objects, big and small.”

At first sight it appears to have been thrown together with no rhyme or reason, but there is method in the madness and as the show progresses it emerges as virtually another cast of characters, supplementing the human cast.

It is by far the most complex stage design I have ever seen, a set constantly in motion, reaching a frenzy in the mad scene when the stage becomes a thick storm of chicken feathers.

Kohansky had praise for several performances.  He singled out Moshe Becker “in the extremely difficult part of the hero, a part which could easily lead an actor . . . into excess.”  He also lauded Lia Koenig’s Ziril, Eliezer Jung’s Baruch Meir, Sandra Sade as Mina, Ruth Geller and Pesach Gottmark as her parents, Yael Perl as Bluma, and Eli Gorenstein as the narrator.

The reviewer described Yossi Mar Haim’s score as “crashing chords like messengers of destiny contrasted with gentle interludes on the violin and cello.”

The 1981 Habima presentation of A Simple Tale in North America was in Hebrew with a prologue in English.  The narrator, representing Agnon, was part of the original concept of the production (and the novella) and the prologue was translated into English.

Variety reported that the mountings in Toronto and Baltimore would have a cast of 13 with 20 stagehands backstage.  The troupe traveled with “two tons of scenery, props and electric gear.”  Feelers mentioned in Variety for a Broadway run never came to fruition. 

(On the way home from its North American performances, Habima played two performances in Zürich, Switzerland, at the Schauspielhaus for the Zürich Festival in June.  It was a sort of reciprocal visit, as the Schauspielhaus ensemble had been in Israel recently before.)

According to the Toronto Globe and Mail, A Simple Tale was presented at the Toronto Theatre Festival, the city’s first international theater fest, 25-31 May 1981 at the St. Lawrence Centre.

In the Globe and Mail, Ray Conlogue opened his review of Habima’s A Simple Tale by wondering “whether it is possible to review a play performed in a language not known by the reviewer.”  The question, he explained, was “painfully immediate” because this was a production he “did not enjoy.”

Conlogue listed several issues that affected his enjoyment of the production, including his “non-comprehension of Hebrew and the company’s failure to provide a scene-by-scene breakdown . . ., either in the program or onstage.” 

“But beyond that,” he explained, “is my lurking suspicion that S. Y. Agnon’s novel really is a simple tale, and that the Habimah has tried to project onto it a density of expressionist staging and melodramatic performance that it cannot support.”

The reviewer acknowledged that “Siona Shimshi’s set is a marvellous [sic] abstraction of the family’s poultry business, with a floor-to-ceiling pile of feather bags suspended magically to one side and an equally improbable pile of wicker boxes on the other.”  The Globe and Mail writer continued:

A small scrim in the middle hides an unnamed person who occasionally makes an ear-splitting din: a foreshadowing of Hirshel’s madness.  When he is finally committed to the asylum . . ., the scrim lifts and reveals a lunatic who on one level is the inmates of the asylum; on another, a reflection of Hirshel himself.

But Hirshel needs no reflection in this grotesque and overwrought mad scene.  A bloody bandage on his foot, the result of accidentally smashing a glass on it during his marriage ceremony, is placed on his head and transformed into a surreal cockscomb. 

(A word of explanation for readers who’ve never attended a traditional Jewish wedding under a chuppa [wedding canopy]: usually at the end of the ceremony [depending on local custom], the groom breaks a glass wrapped in a napkin, crushing it with his right foot.  The explanations for this gesture differ, and modern weddings have varied the practice, but the tradition continues.)

Conlogue objected: “I just do not believe that an unhappy marriage will convince a man that he is a rooster—not even if being a rooster is a symbolic rejection of his family’s business and of the entire culture it represents.  An overloaded symbol quickly becomes ludicrous.”  

He found the mad scene “melodramatic and overlong, which cannot be forgiven by any allowance for an unfamiliar esthetic.”  The review-writer went on to list some of the “many directorial errors,” such as “the failure to give Bluma a scene in which she could establish the relationship between herself and Hirshel.” 

“For every awkward or misplaced expressionist image, however, there was one that worked,” Conlogue found. 

One recalls the wedding ceremony, where Hirshel’s mouth stops moving in the middle of the groom’s speech (while a recording of his voice continues, he looks about in terror and bewilderment); or his mother embracing him on his return from the asylum, grabbing his midriff while he leans backward like a Chagall angel.

He also acknowledged the “strong” performances, invoking renowned director Harold Clurman (1901-80), who directed at Habima often even though he didn’t speak Hebrew.  Conlogue affirmed that Clurman had “insisted that one could tell an actor was doing a speech well even if one didn’t understand the language,” and called upon the director’s ghost to back him up when he stated that Moshe Becker “seems a remarkable young actor [26 at the time of the Toronto performances] and that Lia Koenig and Eliezer Jung as his parents spoke with warmth, credibility and a wealth of nuance.”

(I can’t be sure to what statement by Clurman Conlogue is referring here.  In On Directing (1972), however, the renowned director, theater critic, and Group Theatre co-founder responded to a question about directing plays in languages “of which you are totally ignorant”: “After several readings and the repetitions of scenes for a week or two, I begin to associate the foreign sounds with the script in English . . . .  I am able to detect errors in readings and even . . . faults in diction.”)

On the other hand, the Globe and Mail reviewer felt that “Sandra Sadeh as Mina did not seem particularly deeply felt, however, and Yael Pearl as Bluma had nothing to go on but some not-very-inspiring choreography.”

Finally, Conlogue complained that the promised English-language narration turned out to be only one reading of a brief summary at the beginning of the performance.  He suggested that the narrator could have appeared “in the blackouts between scenes” to provide more details of what was happening or, as an alternative, provide a “detailed breakdown in the program.”

Henry Mietkiewicz of the Toronto Star began his notice with a lament: “Even the thrill of finally seeing a Hebrew-language play performed in Toronto by a professional Israeli company cannot disguise the disappointment at being offered a weepy melodrama tarted up to look like respectable theatre.”

“Upon entering the St. Lawrence Centre last night,” continued Mietkiewicz, “one almost expected the heavens to part in honor of the awesome event: religious and political dignitaries from Israel and Canada had gathered at a gala Toronto Theatre Festival performance to witness the first North American appearance in 25 years of the Habimah National Theatre of Israel.”

As for the show itself, the Toronto Star reviewer reported, “When the lights dimmed, it was only a surprisingly powerful performance by leading man Moshe Beker that narrowly rescued A Simple Tale from being totally transformed into another heart-rending episode of As The Ghetto Turns.”

Referring to a plot summary, the TS writer observed, “Masterpieces have been based on flimsier plots and, indeed, it took a writer like Agnon . . . to turn A Simple Tale into a touching expression of life’s bitterest ironies.”  (I assume Mietkiewicz was referring here to the source novella—which, ROTters will recall, wasn’t available in English in 1981; it was, however, published in Hebrew and German.)

Such an atmosphere “is precisely what Beker manages to convey, whether in a speechless moment of terror and confusion under the wedding canopy or as the howling madman who murderously stabs pillows and flings clouds of feathers across the stage.”

The rest of the cast, complained Mietkiewicz, played “depthless stereotypes, especially Lia Koenig, who badly overplays Hirshel’s mother Tsirel and speaks as though all her lines were underlined and in capital letters.”  (Readers might contrast this assessment with those of Mendel Kohansky of the Jerusalem Post, Globe and Mail reviewer Ray Conlogue, both above, and R. H. Gardner in the Baltimore Sun, in Part 3.)

Even a misguided mother unable to comprehend her son’s distress could not possibly have been envisioned by Agnon as Koenig’s cackling, conniving glutton.

Mietkiewicz wasn’t finished, however: “A pox upon Shlomo Nitzan and Yitzhak Goren for saddling their adaptation with a Jewish Greek chorus who interrupts and debases the most poignant moments by deigning to inform us dumb yahoos what the players are feeling.”  (I should point out that Agnon used a narrator in the original novella, though I don’t know what the content of his contributions was.)

In his parting remark, the Toronto Star review-writer advised “Torontonians still hungry for good Hebrew drama” that they “will have to spend 15 hours on an eastbound trans-Atlantic flight or 25 years wondering about Habimah’s next visit.”

In contrast with his northern colleagues, Terry Doran, theater reviewer for the Buffalo [New York] Evening News, publishing in the Baltimore Sun, exclaimed of Habima’s A Simple Tale: “Don’t miss it.  It is brilliant theater, and this is a judgment offered in spite of the fact that not a single word was understood by this member of the audience” (because it was performed in Hebrew). 

“The power of this theater is that everything is understood, short of the subtle nuances of Hebrew, and I’m not even sure that isn’t so.”  (I rather suspect Doran meant his last phrase to say he wasn’t sure it is so.)

“The tale is simple,” stressed Doran; “it is also profound.  It has a tough kernel.” 

All the events of the play are “accomplished ingeniously and beautifully on a single set constructed of hanging things, ladders, items of commerce, that offers several focal points and deep recesses.”

From the dark recesses emerge the players, the musicians and in a stunning display fragments of [Hirschel’s] subconscious.

It is characteristic of this production that the most moving, even transcendant [sic] moments are more or less wordless.  They are delivered in the ultimate theatrical language, a volatile mix of movement, gesture, sound, sight and word.  It’s worth the price of a festival.

[I hope all ROTters will return on Sunday, 8 May, for the final installment of “S. Y. Agnon’s A Simple Tale (Sipur Pashut).”  I’ll be covering the appearance of Habima’s stage version of Agnon’s novella at Baltimore’s International Theatre Festival in June 1981 and the press reception of the performances.  I also bring the story of the search to its conclusion, with a coda covering the release of the English translation of the story in 1985, including a book review.]

S. Y. Agnon's 'A Simple Tale' ('Sipur Pashut') – Part 1

[I’ve written a few times, mostly in connection with some of the script reports I’ve posted over recent months, about working with Cynthia (C. Lee) Jenner, a dramaturg and one of my teachers in the New York University Department of Performance Studies graduate program, when she was trying to launch a new theater company in New York City called Theatre Junction. 

[Theatre Junction was just forming in the spring of 1985.  Cynthia wanted to launch a company run by dramaturgs and focusing on both new plays and new performance forms, including new adaptations of non-dramatic material (including older sources) and translations. 

[TJ, as it came to be called, was ultimately never realized, but in the months while Cynthia was starting the process, she was already looking for striking material and creative artists the new theater could present and I was among those doing some of the looking, research, digging, and reading.

[Some years before starting to work on TJ, Cynthia had seen a play in Baltimore presented by Habima, the National Theater of Israel.  She’d been very taken with the performance and wanted me to track the play down and see if it was available in English or could be translated.

[I did this before there was the Internet or newspaper databases, so the quest was all by legwork, mail, and library searches.  (There used to be an annual publication from UNESCO called Index Translationum.  It catalogued all literature published in translation.) 

[I was fortunate that many of the resources I needed, such as New York University’s large library, the library of Hebrew Union College, and an Israeli bookstore, are all in my downtown neighborhood, but other facilities aren’t.  The Billy Rose Theatre Collection is at the New York Public Library for the Performing Arts, up at Lincoln Center and all literature materials, including novels and reference books, are in the NYPL main research library on 5th Avenue at 42nd Street, now designated the Stephen A. Schwarzman Building.  That meant traipsing all over Manhattan for various bits of information.

[I spent weeks identifying the play, A Simple Tale, and then tracking down the story on which it was based.  The problem was that they were both in Hebrew—the story was by Shmuel Agnon, known as Shai Agnon and published in the U.S. as S. Y. Agnon, the only Nobel laureate in literature (1966) who wrote in Hebrew.  The play was adapted by Habima from Agnon’s story.

[(Agnon’s Hebrew nickname, Shai, is not an uncommon phenomenon in Israel.  It is an acronym formed from the initials of his given first and middle names, Shmuel Yosef [Samuel Joseph]: ShY.  [The Y and i are both romanizations of the same Hebrew letter yod (י), which in English transliteration is represented by either the consonant y or the vowel i.] 

[(Many Hebrew names—of people, places, and agencies—and phrases are abbreviated as acronyms.  It’s a practice dating back to ancient times because it’s easy to make a pronounceable word from the initial letters or elements of Hebrew words or names since the Hebrew alphabet contains virtually only consonants.  Hebrew-speakers insert vowel sounds at will, guided by tradition, within any string of letters.  

[(Thus, initials such as, say, RMBM [for Rabbi Moshe ben Maimon] or TzHL [for Tzavah Hahaganah L’Yisrael – Israel Defense Force (IDF), the Israeli military] can be read as Rambam or Tzahal.  [In acronyms, the most commonly inserted vowel is a.  That’s the case with Shai.])

[There turned out to be no English version of the story or the play.  I got lucky on two counts.  Right near me off University Place in the East Village was a branch of an Israeli bookstore, Steimatzky, which eventually informed me that the story was about to be published in English.  That’s as far as we got.  All that before there was even a theater in which to produce it!

[I have all the memos I sent to Cynthia on this search, so below is an account, “S. Y. Agnon’s A Simple Tale (Sipur Pashut),” drawn from my messages to Cynthia as my research progressed (plus contemporary enhancements from the ’Net), of the quest for the play she remembered seeing what turned out to be about 3½ years before.

[The play and its source story have two English names, A Simple Tale and A Simple Story.  I’ll try to be consistent in my references by sticking with A Simple Tale, the translation Habima used, but in quotations, I’ll have to use the form the original writer used, so try to go with the flow.]

[Readers will also find that the characters’ (and actors’ and stage artists’) romanized names will vary in spelling from publication to publication (Hirschel, Hirshel, Hirshl, for instance).  I’ll try to stick with the names as they appeared in the Habima stage adaptation, where possible, except within quotations. 

[In addition, I’m going to use what seems to be the Habima’s current preferred spelling of its name—without a final h—except within quotations.  Most English publications, it seems, used ‘Habimah’ for the theater company’s name in the ’80s, but the theater’s website uses ‘Habima’ now.

[”S. Y. Agnon’s A Simple Tale (Sipur Pashut)” will be posted in three installments.  Part 1 is below; Parts 2 and 3 will follow at three-day intervals.]

My introduction to the search for the play Cynthia Jenner had seen and remembered years later—my “mission assignment,” so to speak—was an oral request from Cynthia which I reduced to an undated, hand-written note.  Here’s what it said, untangled a bit:

Habima Theatre’s play done at Baltimore’s last theater festival (several years ago—2-4 seasons ago).  About a family of feather merchants – early 20th/late 19th century.

This reveals how little she gave me to go on.  Cynthia didn’t remember the name of the play, the author, the year of the performance she saw, or the name of the festival.  She remembered one factoid about the plot, that the family at the center were feather merchants.  She also sketched out a scene, which I’ll point out later, that had impressed her.

I found the pertinent information from which I could assemble the basic data, all in the first memo.  Once I had that, I looked up each fact and put together a larger picture of the author, story, and stage adaptation.

Now, with the ’Net and the NYPL databases, I got all kinds of information to which I didn't have access before.  Since the publication of the English version of the story, scads of new commentary, including book reviews, have also appeared.

On 9 February 1985, I sent Cynthia the first memo on my search to identify the play she’d seen in Baltimore several years earlier.  I’d learned that the play performed by Habima a few seasons back that she wanted me to identify was A Simple Tale (sometimes called A Simple Story) by S. Y. Agnon.  It was performed in Baltimore in June 1981 as part of the International Theatre Festival.

Bobst Library, New York University’s main library on Washington Square, yielded the following information about the author and the piece:

Samuel Joseph (aka: Shmuel Yosef, known as “Shai” [pronounced SHY]) Agnon, born in 1888 in Galicia (originally part of Poland; since the 18th century, a province of the Austro-Hungarian Empire), was the Nobel laureate in literature in 1966, sharing the prize with Nelly Sachs, a German Jewish poet.  He wrote mostly novels and short stories in Hebrew (and a few in Yiddish), drawing on both old testament sources and contemporary East European/Yiddish life for his material.  A Simple Story is one of his stories, published in 1935.  Agnon died in February 1970.

Shmuel Agnon was born Shmuel Yosef Halevi Czaczkes in Buczacz, Galicia, then part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire.  (As Buchach today, it’s part of Ukraine.  In 1918, after World War I and the dissolution of the empire, Galicia disappeared as a geographical realm.) 

In 1908, the young writer—he began writing in Hebrew and Yiddish when he was 8 and published his first poem at 15—emigrated to Ottoman Palestine, and continued writing there.  That same year, 1908, he published a story called “Agunot” (“Forsaken Wives”).  The tyro author used the pen name Agnon, derived from the story’s title, for the publication.

(In Hebrew, and in traditional Jewish law, an agunah—that’s the singular form—is a wife whose husband won’t grant her a divorce, stranding her in legal limbo.  The get, or divorce document, must be presented to a wife by her husband.)

So, why adopt a derivative of this Jewish legal term as a pen name?  Cynthia—who isn’t Jewish—provided the explanation that “‘agunot’ means ‘a deserted soul,’ or more fully ‘a lost soul searching in vain for its kindred soul.’” 

Aside from the fact that agunot is plural, so it would have to mean ‘deserted souls’ and ‘lost souls searching . . . for their kindred souls,” the concept doesn’t really fit—at least not to me.  (It also doesn’t seem correct because an agunah isn’t just a ‘soul,’ it’s specifically a woman and a wife.)

“Agunot,” the story, is about two people who are married but estranged—together, but alone.  The marriage is a failure.  Agnon wrote often about relationships, not just between people but also people and concepts, ideas, or people and commitments, that don’t work and end in disappointment. 

Agnon was an observant Jew and a committed Zionist, but he left Galicia for Palestine and departed after a scant four years.  He went to Germany, and left again, finally to settle in Palestine for the rest if his life.  Yet, he had differences with Israel and Judaism, too.

I think what he wanted to say with his choice of professional name is that commitments and expectations can be illusory and leave you bereft.  Sometimes, I think he’s telling us, what you think you want, what you think is right, can turn out all wrong and leave you . . . well, forsaken.  This is what happens in the extreme in A Simple Tale.

David Aberbach, a former professor of Hebrew and comparative literature who published on the writings of Agnon, proposes: “The name, in a sense, defines the world which Agnon creates.  It suggests the mood of his art, the pathos of incompleteness, of being unfulfilled.”  Like the wife in “Agunot”—married but no longer in a marriage; estranged, but not free—Agnon felt caught in a sort of limbo.

Another, related meaning can be seen in an alternative translation of agunot.  It can also mean ‘anchored’ or ‘chained,’ as a woman chained into a marriage out of which she can’t get.  Once again, we see that Agnon may be pointing to bad relationships or harmful commitments from which one can’t extricate oneself.

In 1912, the writer moved to Germany for 12 years, after which, in 1924, he returned to Palestine, now under the British Mandate.  That year, he took Agnon as his official surname.

Agnon was twice awarded the Bialik Prize, an annual literary award given by the city of Tel Aviv for significant accomplishments in Hebrew literature (1934 and 1950).  He was also twice awarded the Israel Prize, for literature (1954 and 1958), an award regarded as the highest cultural honor bestowed by the State of Israel.

In 1966, he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature “for his profoundly characteristic narrative art with motifs from the life of the Jewish people.”  The prize was shared with author Nelly Sachs.  Agnon died on 17 February 1970 of a heart attack.  He’d been living in a nursing home south of Tel Aviv and was rushed to a hospital a few miles away where he died at 82.

He received a state funeral and was buried at his request on Jerusalem’s Mount of Olives.  The Jewish Cemetery on the Mount of Olives is the largest and holiest Jewish cemetery on earth.  At 500 years old, it’s the oldest and most important Jewish cemetery in Jerusalem.  

Agnon not only wrote in Hebrew, which must have seemed strange—even a little blasphemous—to his Jewish neighbors in Buczacz and, later, in Berlin and Bad Homburg, Germany, but his writing was often couched in words and phrases different from what would become established modern Hebrew in Israel, loaded with intricate wordplay and echoes of biblical and historical texts.  Indeed, some literary analysts have said that even native Hebrew-speakers would have difficulties reading Agnon’s prose, which is notoriously hard to translate.

Until the new State of Israel established Hebrew as its official language, it was purely a liturgical tongue for use in prayer and Talmudic debate, not commerce or daily life.  Those are what Yiddish was invented for.  It’s why there’s a Yiddish theater and Yiddish literature.  Even today, there are Haredi Jews in Israel who won’t speak Hebrew in daily discourse. 

Agnon’s distinct language is based on traditional Jewish sources, such as the Torah and the Prophets; Midrashic literature, relating to early Jewish interpretation of or commentary on Biblical texts; the Mishnah, the collection of oral laws forming the basic part of the Talmud; and other Rabbinic literature.  He also drew on Hasidic folk stories; Hasidism arose in Poland, in the area near where Agnon was born.

A Simple Tale (the novella) takes place in Buczacz (called Szybusz in the novella; in Hebrew, shibush means ‘muddle’ or ‘error’) at the start of the 20th century.  (There are references to the Russo-Japanese War, 1904-05.  Most of Agnon’s stories don’t precisely refer to the years in which they’re set.)  The story, however, also belongs in the world of Shai Agnon, a world of legend, folklore, and dreams.

The story is of Hirschel Horwitz, the 16-year-old son of Baruch Meir (which means “Blessed Enlightener” in Hebrew) and Ziril (‘jewel’ or ‘princess’ in Yiddish) Horwitz, a respected Jewish family in their community. 

Bluma Nacht (whose name in Yiddish invokes “Night Flower”), after her mother’s death, becomes a servant in the house of the Horwitzes, distant relatives, and Hirschel falls in love with her.  Bluma, beautiful and almost superhumanly capable, repudiates Hirschel, who’s passive and immature (his name means ‘little deer’ in Yiddish). 

When pressed by his redoubtable parents, he slips bewilderedly into marriage with Mina, a perfume-wearing boarding-school graduate.  Bluma meanwhile moves to another household and is rarely seen again, leaving the reader’s expectations unfulfilled.  Hirschel’s too, for she is ever-present in his heart, stunting his sexual relationship with Mina and driving him from melancholy to madness. 

Hirschel’s parents take him to a psychiatric hospital, where during the extraordinary treatment of a Dr. Langsam (the German word for ‘slow’ or ‘slowly’), he recovers.  During the hospitalization, he learns that he had a son.  Hirschel’s cured and returns home, where he accepts being married to Mina, and they have a second son. 

That he recovers, returns to his wife, and begins to find in what had been an emptyheaded, passive girl robust sensuality and social understanding, seems to reflect his emerging maturity and acceptance of the middle-class solidity represented by his parents and the town itself.

Hirschel discovers that he loves Mina and at last can put Bluma behind him.  He gradually reintegrates into life in Szybusz, realizing that by loving his son, he can make up for the childhood he himself didn’t have.

At the time of my search, A Simple Tale didn’t seem to have been translated into English, either as a short story or a play.  Bobst had the original Hebrew (סיפור פשוט – Sipur pashut), and the New York Public Library only listed a German version (Eine einfache Geschichte; S. Fischer, 1967) in the main reference library at 42nd Street and 5th Avenue.  There was no circulating copy listed. 

I noted that the Hebrew word sipur can be rendered in English as ‘story’ or ‘tale’ or other synonyms.  Therefore, English translations, if any, would have variations in the title for which we were searching.  (Habima appeared to use A Simple Tale as the English version of the title, but publications didn’t always follow that preference.)  It also meant that references to the story or the play adapted from it may have had diverse titles in reviews and reports (as, indeed, they did).

The same kind of variation, as I mentioned, would also occur in the spellings of the names of the characters when romanized in different English renderings—including both translations of the story or the play and reviews or discussions of Agnon’s work. 

The Union Catalogue of the Library of Congress did not list the story at all, and I didn’t locate any English-language anthology that included it.  (There were several anthologies of Agnon’s stories, but A Simple Tale wasn’t included in them.  As indicated by both the Hebrew and German versions, the story seems to be published separately—it’s really a novella—and not anthologized.) 

[This has been the first installment of “S. Y. Agnon’s A Simple Tale (Sipur Pashut).”  Parts 2 and 3 will be published on Thursday, 5 May, and Sunday, 8 May.  I hope you will all come back to read the rest of my account for the search for and discussion of Agnon’a novella A Simple Tale and the play Habima adapted from it.]