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.]