Twenty-One Stories     by Shmuel Yosef Agnon, Translated by N Glatzer Published by Schocken Books Pub. Date: June 1970 Format: Paperback, 288 pages Dimensions: 0.79 x 7.94 x 5.37 in. ISBN: 0805203133 List Price: $19.00, £5.95 Buy online from Amazon.co.uk for £5.95 Buy online from Amazon.com for $19.00 Published by Schocken Not available for ordering Published by Schocken Pub. Date: 1970 Not available for ordering

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Agnon, who won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1966 was the first writer in Modern Hebrew prose to give the language real international standing. He was though, radically unlike other great, Nobel-winning writers of the century like Thomas Mann or Albert Camus. Some of his preoccupations, such as the struggle to live a religiously-observant existence in a modern world, seem archaic but this somehow fits well with the whole notion of Modern Hebrew; the revival of a literature and a language from the past for a revived Jewish nation.

In this ’modern archaism’ there is a similarity with Isaac Bashevis Singer, more a less a contemporary and also born in Poland. Perhaps the fact of the Holocaust — which finally destroyed a traditional Jewish civilisation already under attack from many directions; scepticism, emigration, Communism and Polish nationalism — it could be this made the contrast between traditional and modern ways of life so stark that both tried to re-create Jewish history and experience, often particularly cherishing archaism and tradition. In any case, reading Agnon is distinctly an odd experience. An experience perhaps better to undergo with the short works that are collected in Twenty-One Stories, in Two Tales: Betrothed and Edo and Enam or The Book that was Lost.

Some of the most outstanding, and perhaps representative, of the Twenty-One Stories are the short, uncanny To the Doctor, which is as disturbing as a nightmare or The Document, where its protagonist is caught up in a Kafkaesque bureaucracy; ’So one day passed and so a second... The clerks sat on — their faces bent over their papers and their pens writing automatically, incessantly. The clock ticked gloomily away. Its hand moved slowly, and a dead fly was stuck to it and moved along with it.’ A simple, vivid story but constructed out of effortless transitions from one mood, one thing to another. Agnon is the writer of abrupt changes, he makes them seem natural — which is alarming to the reader unwittingly caught on his narrative thread.

Perhaps these sudden shifts are appropriate for a man whose own life shifted several times, dramatically enough between countries and states; Austria-Hungary, Poland, Palestine, Germany and Israel. Agnon’s ’shifting’ reaches a peak here in From Lodging to Lodging, the story of a man who is seeking a cure for a physical illness but is also suffering from profound spiritual wounds. A story too of separation — as often in Agnon — the man’s wife and children are far away. Ultimately though, and to the reader’s surprise, From Lodging to Lodging is a powerful and convincing story about human compassion that manages to emerge from a seemingly flat re-telling of banal events. One of his short masterpieces.

Also a masterpiece, but with a streak of humour too, is Friendship. In Friendship life is slowed down for us by this master of narrative time and space. Slowed down, as in a film by Andrei Tarkovsky or Robert Bresson, we realise how much fiction (or film) usually depends on narrative excitement — but that if we stop and contemplate we might see as much or much more.

Love is an Agnon theme too, charmingly in the often-anthologised First Kiss and, more sombrely, in The Doctor’s Divorce, a highly original story, the theme is love but also ’the worm in the rose’ of a great love; jealousy. It’s Agnon in his gloomy rejection-of-the-world mood; the world can only be a snare and a delusion because of the self-tormenting perversity of the human heart.

Finally, At the Outset of the Day is one of the very best in the Twenty-One Stories collection, combining many major Agnon themes elegantly, elegaically, heart-breakingly. Read it and be moved, amazed, grateful.

’After the enemy destroyed my home I took my little daughter in my arms and fled with her to the city. Gripped with terror, I fled in frenzied haste a night and a day until I arrived at the courtyard of the Great Synagogue one hour before nightfall on the eve of the Day of Atonement. The hills and mountains that had accompanied us departed, and I and the child entered into the courtyard. >From out of the depths rose the Great Synagogue, on its left the old House of Study and directly opposite that, one doorway facing the other, the new House of Study.

This was the House of Prayer and these the Houses of Torah that I had kept in my mind’s eye all my life. If I chanced to forget them during the day, they would stir themselves and come to me at night in my dreams, even as during my waking hours. Now that the enemy had destroyed my home I and my little daughter sought refuge in these places; it seemed that my child recognised them, so often had she heard about them.

An aura of peace and rest suffused the courtyard. The Children of Israel had already finished the afternoon prayer and, having gone home, were sitting down to the last meal before the fast to prepare themselves for the morrow, that they might have strength and health enough to return in repentance.’ (p252 At the Outset of the Day)