at the conference: Limmud 2019 16.11.2019, Saturday 6.30-7.30 pm. The session offers three short presentations on the reading of SY Agnon. Yevgenia will talks about Agon as her literary inspiration, Maryana will present the birthplace of Agnon– Buchach, and Ula will talk about Amos Oz’s opinion of Agnon. Within the presentation the intertextual contexts of poetry of Nelly Sachs and Czesław Miłosz will be mentioned. Yevgenia, Maryana and Ula invite to this assembly of voices (a polyphony) on literature, national contexts, geopolitical changes and cultural work against the forgetting and misreading. Introduction: The Cities of Exile: SY Agnon (in the polyphony of r readings) by Urszula Chowaniec In the very first lines to the English edition of the book, The Silence of Heaven: Agnon’s Fear of God (1997/2000), Amos Oz, Israeli writer, notices that “Shmuel Yosef Agnon [born in 1888, in Buchach and died in Jerusalem in 1970], the dean of Hebrew prose and the recipient of 1966 Nobel Prize for literature is not well known for the English speaking world”. I think this statement, almost 20 years later is still valid, sadly, and this is why this panel came to Stockholm’s Limmud and I am thrilled to be part of it. In his book Amos Oz analyses Agnon’s theological standpoints as seen in his writings. Everyone who reads Amos Oz recognizes a lot of themes that Amos Oz was interested in Agnon’s writing as the crucial parts of Oz’s own literature, obviously with one change – the religious element, which in Oz’s writing disappears, at least in the affirmative level of his writing; Amos Oz affirms that he is a secular writer. But what Amos Oz says about Agnon? Amos Oz says about Agnon and his heroes: “usually treat the questions of reward and punishment, the ways of the world, and the reason for action as religious issues – providing that the term ‘religious’ is broad enough to encompass doubt, heresy and the bitter irony about Heaven (….)”. Amos Oz sees Agnon’s writing as situated between the “faith and the shock of doubt, between yearning and revulsion, between love and hate, and between intimacy and disgust” (p. IX). The is no anger in his writing, continues Oz, but mockery bitter as scorpions. “With all this mockery, Agnon is sometimes full of compassion for a man in his situation” (p. X) the situation under the blazing sun.… And this is just a taste of the richness of Agnon’s text as seen in one of the essays by Amos Oz. Yet, inspired by that, Maryane, Yevgenia and myself decided to talk about the SY Agnon and his amazing literary and philosophical legacy that we need to remember. The title of the panel was inspired by Agnon’s text: Because of that historical catastrophe when Titus the Roman Emperor destroyed Jerusalem and Israel was exiled from its land, 1 was born in one of the cities of Exile. But all the time I imagined myself as having been born in Jerusalem. We hear in this text almost compulsory leitmotivs of Jewish writing: the theme of Jewish identity and the theme of exile and the constant dream of return. Amos Oz challenges the text by saying, in his characteristic manner of reproducing the layers of interpretations, as follows: “Those words, as all readers of Agnon know, are true. But, strangely enough, the opposite is also true. Had Agnon chosen to say ‘Because of that historical catastrophe when East European Jewry fell apart, I became a Hebrew writer in Jerusalem. But I always saw myself as one who was born in one of the cities of Galicia and destined to be a rabbi there’—those words would also be true and right on target.” (p. 4). And this is – according to Oz - the heart of the trauma as a source of Agnon’s writing. The constant tension between here and there, the tow of origins and the imaginary homeland, the actual home and the home of the nation. These tensions produce an extreme amount of longing, unhappiness, searching for the truth(s) and the feeling of guilt. In Agnon’s stories, everyone is guilty, the only consolation lies in humility, says Oz: “Everyone is guilty in Agnon’s fiction: Isaac Kumer in Only Yesterday, who deserted his hometown and abandoned his father and brothers and sisters and violated ‘Thou shalt not covet’ and other prohibitions; and the guest in A Guest for the Night, who stayed the night and desired greatness—to be nothing less than a miracle-working saint who can restore his hometown from its destruction. Menashe-Haim in ‘The Crooked Shall Be Made Straight,’ and Manfred Herbst in Shira,and Hirshl Hurvitz in A Simple Story, and even the wretched Farenheim in ‘Farenheim,’ who ‘embezzled from the firm’—they’re all guilty.” (p. 4) But at the same time Amos Oz contradict himself and ask: Aren’t they just humans? Why the feeling of guilt? Perhaps the answer lies in the haunting notion of being exiled and searching for home, which -in the end - always be somewhere else? My one point at the end is that: for me is not surprising why Agnon’s literature was so appreciated and important for the Polish writers, the writers of my country, those who tackled the themes of exile, the lost country and the notion of home. I think here about the writer Czesław Miłosz, also Nobel Prize winner for the literature, but especially this year I think of Olga Tokarczuk, and her notion of being uprooted, exiled in her writing. They all have a lot in common, perhaps because Agnon speaks about themes more universal that we are often ready to admit. Let’s listen about the birthplace of the poet and the initiatives to restore the memory of Agnon by the director of Agnon’s literary centre in Buchach, Maryana Maksymyak, followed by the writer, Yevgenia Senik, who pesents her writing as inspired by the writing of Agnon. Thank you |
Maryana Maksymyak
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