Beyond Agnon

By BEZALEL STERN

Aleppo Tales
By Haim Sabato
250 pages. The Toby Press. $19.95.

S.Y. Agnon has been hailed as the greatest of Israeli authors. One of the first Hebrew novelists to revitalize the once-forsaken language, Agnon still managed to give his new, modern Hebrew an air of the Biblical, the Talmudic, and the Midrashic. Agnon excelled at his pursuits, writing fine—often great—modernist novels and stories that blended the contemporary with the wisdom of thousands of years of Jewish tradition.

Over time, Agnon’s style has given rise to many would-be successors. For many writers, the desire to imitate and parrot Agnon’s masterpieces, especially for those writing in Hebrew, has been strong. Unfortunately, most attempts have only met with minimal success. This is due mostly to the indisputable fact of Agnon’s greatness as both a writer and a scholar. Agnon’s personal library contained thousands of what he would have termed sifrei kodesh—holy books—works of Jewish poets and sages stemming from the times of the Jewish temple in Jerusalem to his own day. His library also encompassed a good deal of secular literature, from Shakespeare to Kafka.

A Conservative Rabbi once commented to me that the only people that could make sense of Agnon in today’s world are people like himself—that is, women and men steeped in both the Jewish tradition and the secular world. In many ways, he had a good point. Agnon’s writing becomes much richer when one perceives his often obscure references. But what is hard to read and understand is even more difficult to write. It would take someone of S.Y. Agnon’s prowess and genius—prowess in ability and genius in scope and depth—to replicate adequately and even possibly create a work that ranks with Agnon’s unique achievements.

This ability of combining both a passion for the literary and a breadth of knowledge of the corpus of Jewish works, can be found in the newly translated work of Haim Sabato, Aleppo Tales. This collection of two short stories and a novella, originally published in Hebrew in 1997, both continues and expands upon the tradition of Agnon. Sabato, who teaches Talmud at a yeshiva near Jerusalem, uses his knowledge of Jewish texts to enhance and propel his stories, while at the same time never losing sight of his ultimate goal: to create great literature.

And great literature is truly what these “tales” strive to become. The three stories in the novel, all loosely interconnected, have as their focus the city of Aram Zova, an ancient Jewish community in north-western Syria which was the home of Sabato’s forebears. But the book is about much more than a single city. In Sabato’s text, one gets the sense of a community, once strong in its beliefs and confident in its leaders, slowly breaking down.

In the first and weakest of the three stories, “Truth Shall Spring From the Earth”, the protagonist—a man, like the author, named Haim (which in Hebrew means “life”)—slowly and by stages discovers the magnum opus of his great-grandfather, a revered rabbi. The reverence and honor given to the now destroyed society is evident throughout the story:

The people of Aram Zova are proud of their city, and unstinting in its praise. They are as proud of its air and its fountains as of the acumen of its tradesmen; proud of the poets and the cantors of their city…They believe there is no cantor in the world to compare with their cantors, no hymn to compare with their hymns.

The fact that the city is spoken about in the present tense makes its ultimate destruction and abandonment all the more poignant.  This reverence, by the final story, “Broken Tablets,” is all but shattered. The grandfather of the narrator becomes, after moving to Israel, just another individual, a “broken tablet” to the world. One shares Sabato’s sense of loss, and at the same time of inevitability and surrender to the forces of history, watching the old man transform from being one of the “sages of Aram Zova” whose “pupils feared him,” the leader of the community, into a destitute and lonely man living in a refugee camp near Jerusalem, tormented by the loss of his former glories.

The middle story of the book, though, which is by far the longest of the three—comprising almost two-thirds of the text—is also the most powerful one in the collection. “The Wheel Turns Full Circle” chronicles four generations in the life of a single family. The Sapportas of Aram Zova become, in many senses of the word, the respective touchstones of their generations. The story of the Sapportas begins in the mid-19th century and continues for around one hundred years, until the 1970’s. While historical events, in Sabato’s fiction, are always hazy and in the background, and dates do not always mesh perfectly, the greater pieces of Sabato’s work come together, by the final chapter, like an intricate fresco.

What makes the structure of the novel so beautiful and enticing is that by the third page of this very long story, Sabato has told the reader everything that is going to happen. As we follow the “story which began in the village of Tedef near Aleppo, continued amid the rioting students of Paris, and ended at the Western Wall” we already know the outcome. However, in a supreme act of meta-fiction, Sabato leads the reader on a fantastic romp from one false door to another. The story, which has been made clear by the end of its first chapter, changes and renews itself again and again. The astonished reader, baffled both by the story’s false senses of security, stumbles again and again into the meticulously crafted traps that Sabato creates for him.

Here, more than in the other two stories in the book, we see what Sabato really has to offer, both as a writer and as a chronicler of Jewish memory. Agnon portrayed the Jew as he made his way from Europe to Israel. Sabato, it seems, has the ability to portray the Jew as he makes his way from Arab lands to the Holy Land. As we follow the Sapportas’ journey, from being sages in Aram Zova, to being businessmen, philosophers, and rabbis in France, New York, and Israel, the true plight of the Eastern Jew, and specifically of the Eastern religious Jew, finally becomes clear.

It is a sad fact of contemporary Israeli life that Mizrachi Jews—those Israelis who made their way to Israel from Arab lands, have been consistently degraded, their stories often drowned and lost in the breadth of tales by their more prominent Ashkenazi brethren. Sabato’s function, then, is an incredibly important one. He has the supreme ability, as this first book of fiction he has produced makes clear, to chronicle the lives of Mizrachi Jews with the same acumen and skill that Agnon utilized to portray the lives of his Ashkenazic compatriots. His book, then, is not only a great work of literature. It is an important and crucial voice that needs to be heard if Israel is to become a truly egalitarian society.


Discussion Question

Is it possible for Israel to develop a truly egalitarian society, in which Ashkenazim and Sephardim are both seen and treated as equals? >>