Indebted: Capitalism and Religion in the Writings of S. Y. Agnon [1 ed.] 082294457X, 9780822944577

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INDEBTED

INDEBTED Capitalism and Religion in the Writings of S. Y. Agnon

Yonatan Sagiv

Hebrew Union College Press University of Pittsburgh Press

Published by Hebrew Union College Press, Cincinnati, OH, 45220, and the University of Pittsburgh Press, Pittsburgh, PA, 15260 Copyright © 2016, Hebrew Union College Press All rights reserved Manufactured in the United States of America Printed on acid-free paper 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 ISBN 13:978-0-8229-4457-7 Cataloging-in-Publication data is available from the Library of Congress.

To Ravid Whose deeds and heart are spun by a thread of grace

CONTENTS

Acknowledgments  ix Translation Table  xi A Monetary Prelude: Agnon’s Time in Germany  xiii Introduction  1 Chapter 1: The Gift of Debt  16 Chapter 2: Talking Through Money  48 Chapter 3: Can’t Buy Me Love  92 Chapter 4: The Incomplete Text and the Indebted Author  130 Conclusion  161 Notes  167 Bibliography  201 Index  211

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

It feels more than appropriate to begin a book that examines notions of debt in Shmuel Yosef Agnon’s writing by acknowledging my own indebtedness to all the wonderful scholars and institutions that helped to shape this work. Much of the research and writing of this book began at the Skirball Department of Hebrew and Judaic Studies at New York University. I am truly grateful to Yael Feldman for her wisdom, encouragement, and scholarly advice that guided me down this long path, and for teaching me to aspire to the highest research standard. I would also like to thank Anne Golomb Hoffman for her input and her illuminating theory that informs my own writing about literature in general and Agnon’s writing in particular. The feedback given by Gabriela Basterra, David Engel, and Mark Gelber was of paramount importance. I am especially grateful to Gabriela Basterra, whose theory and academic commitment have inspired me. To David H. Aaron, the director at Hebrew Union College Press, I owe a great intellectual debt. Thank you for all our illuminating discussions, your invaluable interdisciplinary knowledge and radical perspective. This book benefited so much from your criticisms and insight. I am also grateful to Sonja Rethy, the managing editor of Hebrew Union College Press, who devoted so much of her time, expertise, and wisdom in editing this manuscript. I am also most thankful to Angela Erisman for her inestimable intellectual and practical help in the shaping of this manuscript. I feel very fortunate to have the opportunity to publish my work at Hebrew Union College Press.

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I would also like to personally thank two friends and scholars. Shira Hadad—thank you for your stimulating intellectual work on Agnon, and for our discussions which helped me tremendously in this research. Sage Anderson—I am profoundly indebted to your scholarly knowledge of literary theory and German culture, to our invigorating conversations, and, above all, to your crucial help in polishing both my thinking and my language skills. The publication of this book would not have been possible without the support of several wonderful academic institutions and organizations. I thank the Skirball Department of Hebrew and Judaic Studies at New York University for making my graduate experience meaningful and deeply gratifying. I would also like to thank the Provost’s Global Research Initiatives at New York University for supporting this project. I am thankful for the financial support of the Israel Institute Post-Doctoral Fellowship Program, which helped me to bring this manuscript to completion, to publish this book, and to teach modern Hebrew literature and culture at the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS), University of London. Lastly, I thank the Centre for Jewish Studies at SOAS for being an exciting and thought-provoking academic home. A Note about Agnon’s Works Due to Agnon’s extensive writings, the translated and untranslated works are not noted as such in the book. Please consult the table on the opposite page to find which of Agnon’s works cited have been translated into English. Unless otherwise noted, all translations of Agnon’s works in this book are my own. References to Agnon’s work will appear by page numbers in parentheses in the body of the text, the English followed by the Hebrew. The page numbers reflect the numerical value of the Hebrew letters that mark the pages in the original edition.

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ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Titles in Hebrew

English translation

)’‫ כרך א‬,‫הכנסת כלה (כל כתביו‬

The Bridal Canopy

Not yet published in English (author’s translation)

)’‫ כרך ב‬,‫אלו ואלו (כל כתביו‬

These and Those

)’‫ כרך ג‬,‫על כפות המנעול (כל כתביו‬

At the Handles of the Lock

)’‫ כרך ד‬,‫אורח נטה ללון (כל כתביו‬

A Guest for the Night

)’‫ כרך ה‬,‫תמול שלשום (כל כתביו‬

Only Yesterday

)’‫ כרך ו‬,‫סמוך ונראה (כל כתביו‬

Near and Apparent

)’‫ כרך ז‬,‫עד הנה (כל כתביו‬

To This Day (The collection was not translated as a whole, only the novella by the same name)

)’‫ כרך ח‬,‫האש והעצים (כל כתביו‬

The Fire and the Wood

‫עגונות‬

Agunot (Abandoned wives)

‫הפרוטה‬

The Coin

‫והיה המישור לעקוב‬

And the Crooked Shall Be Made Straight

‫ולא ניכשל‬

And We Shall Not Fail

‫חוש הריח‬

The Sense of Smell

‫לפי הצער השכר‬

Matching Reward to Agony

‫סיפור פשוט‬

A Simple Story

‫פנים אחרות‬

Metamorphosis

xi

T itles in H ebrew

English translation

‫בדמי ימיה‬

In the Prime of Her Life

‫בלבב הימים‬

In the Heart of the Seas

)‫עד הנה (הנובלה‬

To This Day (the novella within the volume of the same title)

‫גבעת החול‬

The Hill of Sand

‫לבית אבא‬

To Father’s House

‫המלבוש‬

The Garment

‫תהילה‬

Tehila

‫פי שניים‬

Twofold

‫הרופא וגרושתו‬

The Doctor’s Divorce

‫עם כניסת היום‬

At the Outset of the Day

‫אגדת הסופר‬

The Tale of the Scribe

‫מדירה לדירה‬

From Dwelling to Dwelling With Our Youth and with Our Aged

‫בנערינו ובזקנינו‬ ‫קשרי קשרים‬

xii

Not yet published in English (author’s translation)

Knots

‫התזמורת‬

The Band

‫נרות‬

Candles

‫אסתרליין יקירתי‬

My Dear Esterlyne

‫מעצמי אל עצמי‬

From Myself to Me

A MONETARY PRELUDE Agnon’s Time in Germany

Money was the rising star at the turn of the nineteenth century in Europe. Heralded by many contemporary economists as the symbol of economic rationality and the facilitator of a stable social order, money was considered one of the greatest institutional advances of humankind.1 Yet in spite of such warm praises, money also gained a rather dubious reputation. Rumor had it that money was indeed something unimportant, at times even suspicious, a neutral “veil” that only obscures the “real” economic basis of society, namely, the good old practice of barter, the direct exchange of good and services.2 The idea that money is neutral and inconsequential in terms of “real” economy was emphasized in modern times by classical British economists. For the founding fathers of capitalist economic theory, such as Adam Smith, David Ricardo, and John Stuart Mill, money was an invention that expedites the calculation, measure, and exchange of commodities, which form the real “wealth of nations,” as the title of Smith’s famous 1776 book suggested.3 In their focus on the analysis of commodities as actual wealth, classical economists regarded money as just another type of commodity; money as commodity was able to function efficiently as a medium of exchange, a store of value, a measure of value, and a means of payment. Divisible, transportable, and supposedly possessing intrinsic value, precious metals were historically explained as best suited to serve all these functions. Following the understanding of money as an object with intrinsic value, classical British economic theory asserted that when the market was left to its own devices, free competition would regulate the economic and monetary matrix, thus ensuring a balance of “natural” prices and costs. 4

xiii

The emergence of Britain as the first developed capitalist nation in Europe cemented the concept of money as a commodity that possesses its own intrinsic value, in both practice and theory. By the end of the eighteenth century, the English gold standard had become the monetary model for all modern states. Following in its footsteps, British classical economic theory also migrated to the rest of Europe.5 This invasion was quickly challenged, however, especially by scholars of the German Historical School of Economics. Throughout the nineteenth century, this group actively participated in political and economic unification of the scattered German-speaking kingdoms.6 Political, economic, and scholarly ventures helped to establish unified Germany as the leading industrial nation in Europe by the beginning of the twentieth century. During that period, many German sociologists, economists, and philosophers formulated alternative theories about the nature of capitalism as a whole, and the character of money in particular. It was Karl Marx who, already in the mid-nineteenth century, claimed that money was an alienating force that does not neutrally represent socio-economic relations but actually shapes them. Later, in the early twentieth century, sociologists and economists such as Georg Simmel and Georg Friedrich Knapp highlighted that the importance of money does not lie in its substance, but rather in its function. As Simmel argued in The Philosophy of Money, first published in 1900, the value of money is never intrinsic, but established via social trust accredited to it by the community. Influenced by Nietzsche, who claimed that economic exchange stands at the origin of human interaction, Simmel defined money as “nothing but the pure form of exchangeability.”7 Similarly, in The State Theory of Money (1905), Knapp claimed that the substance of money is inconsequential to its role. Money, for Knapp, was a symbolic means of accounting and settling debt, and as such money should be created and managed by the state.8 Though Knapp’s and Simmel’s theories of money differ on several accounts, both are major contributors to the establishment of the credit theory of money, the second major alternative for the conceptualization of money.9 In contrast to the classical economic understanding of money as a commodity, credit theory holds that money is only a function. Money symbolically expresses social and political relations between people, specifically relations of debt and credit. The

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A MONETARY PRELUDE

idea of money as a function, not a substance, necessarily dictates the understanding of money as purely symbolic, the representation of which by precious metals being only one specific example. Thus, in the credit theory of money, the value of money is never intrinsic but rather determined by extrinsic conditions, such as community trust or state authority. While Knapp’s book dealt the hardest blow in Germany to the classical understanding of money as a commodity with intrinsic value, his work exclusively focused on economics. Alternatively, many German historians, sociologists, and economists at the turn of the century turned their attention to the relationship between economic and non-economic phenomena. Already in the 1880s, the method dispute (Methodenstreit)—the most famous economic debate in Germany—centered on the “right” approaches needed for the “correct” analysis of political economy. While Gustav Schmoller, the head of the German School, focused on historical empiricism and the relationship between economy and collective concepts such as “the nation” and “the people,” Carl Menger, who founded the Austrian school, favored a more abstract theoretical approach, relying on deductive analysis. A generation later, Max Weber and Werner Sombart presented conflicting theories about the genesis of capitalism. Whereas Weber famously argued that Protestant ethics laid the groundwork for capitalist rational production, Sombart emphasized the mercantile aspect of capitalism as located in Judaism and in the “calculating” character of the Jews.10 Ironically, Sombart’s ideas, which had anti-Semitic and celebratory undertones at the same time, were praised by liberal Jews and Zionists alike, albeit for different reasons. On the one hand, liberals felt that Sombart’s analysis acknowledged the Jews’ unique contribution to the development of capitalism. On the other hand, Zionist activists saw in his work a judgment of the “abnormal” dispersion of Jews in mercantile professions, leading to the call to resolve the “Jewish Question” with a national solution underlined by economic reorientation of Jews from commerce to agriculture.11 The transformation of Germany into an industrial powerhouse, along with the ongoing proliferation of monetary and economic theories in the early twentieth century, deeply impacted the cultural and literary production of the day. As the philosopher Karl Joël noted,

A MONETARY PRELUDE

xv

“We all certainly experienced the way in which around the turn of the century the socio-economic interest of the period was elevated into aesthetic interest.”12 One powerful example of such deep influence was Simmel’s conceptualization of money as the embodiment of the modern spirit, facilitating individualism and freedom on the one hand, isolation and mediation on the other. Simmel’s understanding of money as an all-pervasive force that shapes human consciousness influenced both Hugo von Hofmannsthal, who read The Philosophy of Money several times, and Robert Musil, who referenced Simmel’s work in the drafts of his seminal unfinished novel, The Man Without Qualities. In his 1910 novel The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge, Rainer Maria Rilke, who knew Simmel personally, incorporated the sociologist’s ideas on how money and the modern metropolis together form a new culture of relative, shifting, and transitory values.13 Among these famous authors who—to paraphrase Joël—transformed the socio-economic interest of their period into aesthetic productions, another canonical figure remains to be named. Arriving in Berlin from Jaffa in 1912, twenty-five-year-old Shmuel Yosef Agnon had already established his reputation as a young and promising Hebrew author following the success of his first stories in Hebrew: “Agunot” (Abandoned wives) in 1908 and the novella And the Crooked Shall Be Made Straight (‫ )והיה העקוב למישור‬in 1912.14 Agnon would certainly live up to that reputation, gaining recognition over the next forty years as the greatest master of modern Hebrew literature. In 1966, four years before his death, Agnon would become the only Israeli author to date to win a Nobel Prize. At the time of Agnon’s arrival in Germany, Berlin had already become the thriving center of a Jewish cultural, religious, and political renaissance, led by diverse figures from different generations such as Herman Cohen, Leo Baeck, Franz Rosenzweig, Martin Buber, and Gershom Scholem, to name but a few. On the one hand, the Jewish renaissance in Berlin was very much a religious revival, characterized by a changing attitude toward Eastern European Jewry. If by the end of the nineteenth century the elite of assimilated German Jewry saw Polish Jews as primitive and poor “cousins” across the border, young Jewish-Germans, now engaged in a search for a lost authenticity, saw things differently. For these circles, Eastern European religious Jews (Ostjuden) served as an inspirational model of spiritual and creative

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A MONETARY PRELUDE

Jewish energy. At the same time, the Jewish renaissance also featured strong Hebrew and Zionist components. By 1908 a branch of the World Zionist Organization had opened in Berlin. A year before that, the writer Shay Ish Hurwitz founded the Hebrew journal The Future (‫)העתיד‬, and the first International Conference on Hebrew Language and Culture was held in Berlin in 1909.15 In those years, influential writers such as David Shimonovitz (Shimoni) and Mikhah Yosef Berdyczewski settled in the city. Later, in the days of the Weimer Republic, many more would follow. Agnon fit both trends perfectly; a proclaimed Zionist, a speaker of Yiddish, Hebrew, and German, he lived as a non-observant Galician Jew at the time, yet, as an author, his literary sensitivity was heavily influenced by Jewish religious texts. This reputation preceded him in Germany. Even before Agnon’s arrival in Berlin, the story “Agunot”— written in a style referencing biblical and rabbinic language—was published in Die Welt, the Zionist journal edited by Martin Buber. The warm reception given to the German translation helped Agnon quickly to become a renowned figure in Jewish renaissance circles, and his time in Germany was to have great significance to his entire oeuvre. Not only did Agnon write a few of his best-known works in Germany, such as “The Tale of the Scribe” (“‫( )”אגדת הסופר‬1917), and In the Prime of Her Life (‫( )בדמי ימיה‬1924), but many of his short stories were also translated into German shortly after they appeared in Hebrew. Even after his return to the land of Israel in 1924, Agnon kept writing about German Jews in such famous works as the 1933 “Metamorphosis” (“‫)”פנים אחרות‬, and the 1949 “Fernheim,” as well as his 1970 posthumous novel Shira.16 While Agnon’s time in Germany shaped his literary representation of the Eastern and Western European Jewish diaspora, the end of his stay—to quote Gershom Scholem—marked a decisive moment in Agnon’s transformation into a “great artist who had mastered his torments.”17 Scholem refers here to the 1924 fire that destroyed Agnon’s library in his Bad Homburg home, along with all of his original manuscripts, including hundreds of pages of an unpublished novel. Agnon, who saw the fire as divine punishment for his long galut (exile) from the Holy Land, returned shortly afterwards to the land of Israel and once again adopted Orthodox practices.18 There, he went on to write his most famous works, such as the 1935 A Simple Story (‫)סיפור פשוט‬, A Guest for the

A MONETARY PRELUDE

xvii

Night (‫ )אורח נטה ללון‬published in 1939, and Only Yesterday (‫תמול של ־‬ ‫( )שום‬1945). Profound and contradictory in their depictions of Jewish society in the diaspora and in the land of Israel, these novels exemplify Agnon’s ability—to paraphrase Scholem—to fully capture the tension between the totality of Jewish religious life and the historical forces leading to its demise.19 Agnon’s stay in Germany also had a crucial effect on an aspect of the author’s work that has gained barely any scholarly attention up to this point: the literary exploration of money and economy, and their effects on Jewish society, religion and identity. These issues constitute the main concern of this study. It was during his first few years in Berlin that Agnon formed friendships with key figures of the Jewish renaissance, especially Gershom Scholem, Franz Rosenzweig, and Martin Buber, all of whom were acquainted with Simmel’s work on money and the modern metropolis. Buber, who was especially close to Agnon, was also Simmel’s student and long-time admirer. Additionally, in contrast to Simmel, who never really incorporated ideas about Judaism and Zionism into his work on capitalism, many other German-Jewish scholars examined the relationship between Judaism and capitalism before and after World War I, making sociological inquiry into the economic aspects of Jewish history a central focus of Jewish scholarship in Germany at the time.20 Consequently, many of the discussions of the Jewish renaissance in Berlin centered on economic issues: socialists, Marxists, liberals and Zionists publicly debated the economic role of Jews in Europe, as well as in new settlements in the land of Israel. Agnon, who attended many lectures on Jewish scholarship, philosophy, and the social sciences, met the rich businessman Shlomo Zalman Schocken at a lecture by Joël, who reviewed Simmel’s Philosophy of Money.21 The meeting with Schocken, who later became the young author’s patron, would change the course of Agnon’s career. The correspondence between Agnon and Schocken reveals a fascinating mixture of cautious friendship, business, and a shared deep interest in Jewish culture. Most importantly for the purposes of this study, the letters shed light on Agnon’s personal, religious, and literary preoccupation with economic matters. Much of the correspondence naturally revolves around the issue of money, as Schocken pays Agnon a regular stipend and also employs him as a buyer of rare

xviii

A MONETARY PRELUDE

Jewish books. Agnon writes to Schocken about money constantly, sometimes to voice personal concerns, sometimes to settle accounts, and sometimes to tell anecdotes about money and economics, some of which reference Jewish religious sources. For example, in a 1919 letter from Munich, Agnon mentions Rashi’s interpretation of Deuteronomy 7, which expresses the idea that the evil people who profit in this world will be denied access to the world to come.22 As I will show in the first chapter of this book, many of Agnon’s literary works explore this standard rabbinic theodicy, precisely by highlighting and subverting its economic underpinnings. Alongside his interest in the relationship between economics and religious thought, Agnon is also preoccupied in these letters with modern commerce and capitalism. He asks Schocken to send him essays that Schocken himself wrote, titled “The Development of Department Stores in Germany,” “The Mercantile Conditions of Department Stores,” and “Sale and Purchase.”23 His interest is not purely theoretical; Agnon constantly comments and complains about the cost of living in Germany during World War I. The correspondence thus indirectly documents one of the most radical economic transitions in modern history, as experienced personally by Agnon: Germany’s decline from its status as the leading industrial nation of Europe to being a vanquished state afflicted by poverty and hyperinflation. In fact, Agnon’s personal experiences in World War I Berlin served as a platform for his 1952 novella To This Day (‫)עד הנה‬, which describes the urban journey of a young intellectual Jew stranded in Berlin. Typical of Agnon’s engagement with the tension between modernity and religious tradition, the protagonist’s purposeless journey in Berlin transforms into a rescue mission: the salvage of old religious Jewish books from the hands of greedy merchants. The flâneur’s wanderings in To This Day provide just one example of how Agnon’s personal experiences in Germany shaped the author’s literary engagement with money and economy. Echoing the monetary theories that proliferated in early twentieth-century Germany, money appears in Agnon’s works as a social and cultural force that radically impacts human society and individuals, their hopes, desires, and values. While little scholarly attention has been dedicated to this matter, Agnon’s conceptualization of money and economy is germane to the major themes of his writing. Particularly implicated

A MONETARY PRELUDE

xix

are tensions between tradition and modernity, between Jewish society in the diaspora and the national enterprise in the land of Israel, and between the romantic and personal aspirations of the person visà-vis oppressive societal, religious, and cultural norms. As is evident from this partial list of the themes that occupy Agnon’s writing, the author’s complex literary treatment of money and economy relates not only to his early stay in Germany, but also reflects his unique position within such discourses as Judaism, Zionism, modernity, and modern Hebrew literature. The ways in which money and modern economy impact, engender, and endanger such discourses in Agnon’s oeuvre is precisely what this book will now turn to examine.

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A MONETARY PRELUDE

INTRODUCTION

Reading the works of Shmuel Yosef Agnon in New York in 2008 against the backdrop of the economic crisis evolving in the United States at that time had an unintended effect: I started to think of Agnon as an economist. Encountering Agnon in high school (as every child who grows up in the Israeli education system does), and later in university, my perception of the canonical author was shaped through Gershon Shaked’s paradoxical definition of Agnon as a “revolutionary traditionalist.” Born in 1888 in Galicia, an erudite “pupil” of the Jewish sacred multi-textual tradition but also of the writings of the Haskalah (the Jewish variant of Enlightenment) and of European literature, Agnon remains a puzzling literary giant; his pseudotraditional style cleverly “masks” modern themes while his modernist writings invoke, allude to, and converse with the world of Jewish tradition.1 Contradictory and complex in its genres, styles, and themes, Agnon’s writing articulates the impact of modernity, with all its existential, political, and romantic angst, on traditional Jewish society. Agnon, who saw himself as the heir “of Jewish tradition over its many generations,” created out of this encounter a rich oeuvre which weaves together the major historical, religious, and national events that determined modern Jewish existence.2 And still, despite the wealth of subjects and forms present in Agnon’s work, I had never thought of his writing as having much to do with economics. Suddenly, though, in 2008, I began to notice Agnon’s preoccupation with money. In his satirical novella With Our Youth and with Our Aged (‫)בנערינו ובזקנינו‬, published in 1920 when Agnon lived in Germany, a full page is devoted to a meticulous list of the vicissitudes of the inflation of different coins in early twentieth-

1

century Galicia. Situated around the same time and place, the 1935 novel A Simple Story (‫ )סיפור פשוט‬details the socialist and capitalist doctrines being discussed in the Jewish community while also focusing on each of the characters’ relationship with money and experience of class division. Shifting the perspective from Jewish diaspora to the land of Israel, the short story “From Dwelling to Dwelling” (“‫)”מדירה לדירה‬, published in 1940, comically laments the poor state of the real estate market in the newly founded city of Tel Aviv in the 1930s, while Agnon’s 1945 novel Only Yesterday (‫ )תמול שלשום‬consistently chronicles the protagonist’s economic struggles and debts in early twentieth-century Palestine. As I was immersed in the news of crashing global markets, a national debt of 9.6 trillion dollars, and the poor state of my own student loans, Agnon’s constant use of the language and metaphors of economy became the main focus of my research. As early as in “Agunot” (Abandoned wives), Agnon’s first story in Hebrew published in Palestine in 1908, one finds the introduction of money into the story as a sign of potential ruin. Aiming to do “great wonders” for the restoration of Jerusalem from “its ruins,” Sire Ahiezer, a man “renowned for his riches,” is determined to marry his daughter Dina to Ezekiel, a “wondrous lad” living in Poland. As was then customary in nineteenth-century Orthodox Jewish society in Europe, marriage in the story represents a common trade: the actual wealth of the father of the bride in exchange for the symbolic wealth of the groom—his religious and intellectual prestige. Appropriately, the text ironically states that the sages “bless this match with all their hearts and wages.”3 During the matchmaking process, however, Sire Ahiezer’s insistence on “importing” a groom to the land of Israel has “slighted all the seminaries . . . in the land of Israel” (406; 41). Contrary to her father’s grandiose plans, Dina falls in love with the artist Ben Uri, commissioned by Sire Ahiezer, in celebration of his daughter’s wedding, to build a Holy Ark (‫)ארון הקודש‬, “such as the eye of man had never seen” (407; 41). (The Holy Ark is a box to house Torah scrolls, and is considered the holiest part of the synagogue after the Torah scrolls themselves.) The passionate love between Dina and Ben Uri is undercut, however, not only by Sire Ahiezer’s matchmaking, but also by Ben Uri himself, who is so captivated by his task that he ignores Dina to concentrate solely on the Holy Ark.

2

INTRODUCTION

Ben Uri’s complete libidinal investment in his artistic creation comes with a price: a vengeful Dina shoves the Holy Ark out the window in a fit of jealousy, and its “enigmatic” fall is seen by the rabbi in Jerusalem as proof of Ben Uri’s presumed sins. As a result, the Holy Ark is banished from sight, Ben Uri disappears, and Sire Ahiezer marries Dina to Ezekiel with the help of the same rabbi, who also ignores Dina’s confession of her love for Ben Uri. The marriage turns out to be nothing less than a disaster. Asserting ironically that even if Ezekiel craved wealth, and “here was wealth, so prodigal,” the text emphasizes that the groom is miserable. Just like his wife who is emotionally invested in Ben Uri, Ezekiel is also emotionally invested in another, in Freidele, who laments Ezekiel’s wedding to a “dowered maiden.” Agnon’s story, thus, constructs a dichotomy between the modern, romantic love affairs of the couples (Ben Uri and Dina and Ezekiel and Freidele) and the Orthodox Jewish practice of shiddukh (matchmaking), presented here as an economic contract motivated by Sire Ahiezer’s desire for symbolic and material excess. Sire Ahiezer not only found a groom who “had no peer in the world,” and ordered the design of an ark “such as the eye of man had never seen”; he also built a “great academy in Jerusalem” for this groom, its walls, scrolls, and books embellished with gold and silver ornaments. Sire Ahiezer is adamant in his desire to acquire the best groom, the best Holy Ark, and the best academy that money can buy. He uses capital in order to get credit from both the divine and the public. Sire Ahiezer invests all of this money so that God could be “truthfully” praised in Jerusalem, as if he believed that the worship of God could be fulfilled only through conspicuous consumption (406–7; 41). Whereas the text pits the modern spirit of the Haskalah against traditional Jewish practice, it still frames the desire for human erotic union within a story of the desire for union with God. In “Agunot”— composed in the unique weaving of biblical and rabbinic writings that became Agnon’s signature style—a tale of modern love is enveloped by a pseudo-midrash about the love between God and Israel. Referencing the Song of Songs and other Jewish sacred texts, the opening passage depicts God as a groom who abandoned Israel because of her wrongful deeds, leaving the people as an agunah (a chained wife), a term which in rabbinic halakhic literature denotes a woman abandoned by her husband. 4 As the plot of “Agunot” pro-

INTRODUCTION

3

gresses, Dina will be jilted by Ben Uri, who, after the desecration of his religious artwork, escapes Jerusalem, feeling discarded by God. The narrator of “Agunot” conflates Ben Uri’s predicament with that of Dina when he addresses the divine, stating: “God! Till when shall the souls that dwell in your kingdom suffer the death of this life, in bereavement . . . in suffering and dread?” (409, 44). God, however, never responds. In Agnon’s story, therefore, both modern lover and religious believer are abandoned because of their wrongful deeds.5 As such, the term agunah constitutes in Agnon’s text the state of the abandoned modern subject in a God-forsaken world.6 The circulation of both divine and human love in the text is thwarted at least in part by Sire Ahiezer’s “wrongful deeds,” his act of matchmaking based not on faith or romantic love, but on self-aggrandizement. Paradoxically though, while it is an economic contract that destroys the harmony between God and his congregation, it is precisely this harmony which is implicitly presented in the text as an economic alliance. Presenting the love relationship between God and Israel through the metaphor of weaving, the opening passage notes that God spins a “thread of grace” out of the deeds of Israel into a prayer shawl for the congregation. The thread of grace becomes torn if some “hindrance creeps up,” and can only be restored by Israel’s repentance and by deeds “that bring pride to their doers.” Consequently, the opening paragraph presents an economic infrastructure of religious faith. In this transaction between the subject and the divine, “good” deeds are exchanged for participation in the “power and the glory” and for “love which fills the heart of every man in Israel.” At the same time, “bad deeds” lead to the “darkest melancholy” (405; 39–40). As such, Agnon’s opening passage confirms Marcel Mauss’s theory that the structure of ancient religions is based on a gift economy with the deity, a reciprocal economic exchange between God and his congregation.7 Still, Agnon’s story also complicates the opening’s simple symmetrical division between the exchange of the good deeds and bad deeds that establish the economic infrastructure of religious faith. Whereas Sire Ahiezer’s acquisition of the Holy Ark (a transaction in itself) could be considered a “good deed” that is exchanged for participation in divine “power and glory,” his over-reliance on capital and prestige within the Jewish community turns the same transaction

4

INTRODUCTION

into a “bad deed.” However, as the following chapters will demonstrate, there is no easy solution to stabilize this economy. While monetary acts may lead to the derailment of profitable exchange between the subject and the divine, thriftiness, asceticism, or the attempt to exclude money from this economic equation may also end in catastrophe. No exact sum can balance this account. In the specific case of “Agunot,” the “bad deeds” in the text—Sire Ahiezer’s excess, Dina’s jealousy, Ben Uri’s artistic zeal—all lead to a crisis in the exchange of prayer and ritual: after the Holy Ark’s banishment the synagogue “stands desolate, without ark, without prayer, without learning” (410; 45). After this religious-economic crisis, other crises soon follow: Dina and Ezekiel divorce, the synagogue remains deserted, and Sire Ahiezer and Dina leave Jerusalem, which remains impoverished. Monetary, libidinal, and divine economies become unsustainable. Yet the story ends with an interesting subversion of the analogy operating between the disparate economies in the text. The rabbi, who promised Dina God’s forgiveness in exchange for her marriage to Ezekiel, and saw Ben Uri’s fallen ark as God’s punishment “paid” in exchange for the artist’s sins, now understands that he himself “will suffer exile” (414; 50). After dreaming of the exiled Ben Uri, the rabbi himself goes out into exile in search of the missing artist, a search the ending of which remains unknown. On the one hand, through the rabbi’s exile, the text critiques his naïve trust in a reciprocal and profitable exchange between God and believers. On the other hand, “Agunot” presents us with a symmetrical economy of its own, suggesting elusively that the rabbi who banished Ben Uri from the “portion of his kingdom” is banished himself from “a portion in the redemption of Israel” (415; 51). As such, the paradoxical ending makes it difficult to determine if Agnon’s text undermines or, rather, reinforces the existence of what I would term “divine economy.” No restoration, no redemption, no restitution in sight, the lack of closure in “Agunot” presents the reader with the crisis of the concrete and symbolic economies operating in the text. Modern Jewish Economy and the (Relative) Silence of Scholarship Surprisingly, while Agnon’s intense preoccupation with monetary issues and economics received a fair amount of study by scholars, it

INTRODUCTION

5

never received systematic critical attention. This discrepancy may be at least partly explained by Derek J. Penslar’s argument that after the Holocaust discussions linking money and Judaism have “lost respectability,” being associated with Nazi anti-Semitism.8 Subsequently, as Penslar claims, despite the fact that in the Western world “Jewish economic activity has been an object of awe and wonder” to antiSemites, philo-Semites, and Jews alike, scholars have tended to ignore these overly charged issues. In the specific case of modern Hebrew literature, I would add to Penslar’s argument that it was also the predominance of labor Zionism’s values in the foundation of modern Hebrew culture and the State of Israel which contributed to the exclusion of the relationship between Jews and monetary economy as a worthy topic of literary examination. Proponents of labor Zionism—such as A. D. Gordon, Arthur Rupin, Ber Borochov, and David Ben-Gurion, who would become Israel’s first prime minister— wished to form the Jewish state in the land of Israel in the image of an agricultural, productive, and socialist society. This approach left little room for scholarly investigations into the relationship between modern Hebrew literature and capitalism outside the realm of Marxist critique.9 In the last twenty years though, Jewish Studies scholarship has changed considerably in this regard, producing fascinating historical and anthropological contributions to the study of Jewish and Israeli economic activity in modernity and antiquity. In fact, in Shylock’s Children: Economics and Jewish Identity in Modern Europe, Penslar claims that it is impossible to fully account for modern Jewish consciousness without considering the engagement of Jewish thought with economy. Analyzing Jewish economic discourses in nineteenth-century Europe, Penslar emphasizes how the simultaneous advent of Enlightenment and capitalism brought about a radical change in Jewish self-perception.10 Beginning in the middle of the eighteenth century, in what Jacob Katz termed the “great upheaval” of Europe, capitalism has undermined classic social divisions through such notions as the free laborer, free competition, and the accumulation of money as political power, while thinkers of the Enlightenment offered a secular basis for a civil society divorced from religion.11 As Penslar underscores, parallel to the external process of the emancipation of religious minorities in Europe, internal developments in Jewish communities facilitated the growing separa-

6

INTRODUCTION

tion between religious and economic life. As Jews took on more and more prominent roles in imperial and inter-imperial commerce, and later in banking, free professions, and even in manufacturing and heavy industry, a relatively secular Jewish economic discourse emerged, diversifying and reaching its peak toward the end of the nineteenth century. Presented with new socio-economic possibilities propelled by capitalism and civil society, a growing number of Jews perceived themselves in terms of a political economy. Their growing and varied roles in a secular modern European economy offered an alternative to religion as an organizing principle for Jewish selfidentity.12 The modernization and capitalization processes in Jewish society produced polarizing reactions. Whereas the possibility of assimilation to host societies was met with much objection in rabbinical and Hasidic circles, the promoters of Haskalah in late eighteenth-century Berlin, as Jonathan Karp demonstrates, saw the Enlightenment as presenting a unique historical opportunity for the integration of Jews into their environment. Adopting the eighteenth- and nineteenthcentury valorization of the regenerative force of productive labor, adherents of the Haskalah (the maskilim) actively sought the economic reconfiguration of Jews from traditional roles as traders and money-lenders to the fields of crafts and agriculture, be it as part of the larger framework of a capitalist agenda or a socialist one. The belief in regeneration through productive labor (and its counterpart—the belief in the corruptive nature of commerce) subsequently played a vital role in the socialist and Marxist character of later Eastern European Haskalah and of labor Zionism in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.13 Modern Hebrew Literature and Jewish Economy The aforementioned scholarly silence about the intricate links between Judaism and money has unfortunately generated a misguided perception of the history of modern Hebrew literature. The global crisis in 2007–08 and the ensuing 2011 social protests in Israel opposing rising economic inequality and increased cost of living—predating the “Occupy Wall Street” movement in America by merely two months—sparked a renewed interest in the relationship between money and literature in the country. Thus, for example, the popular

INTRODUCTION

7

literary supplement to Yediot Aḥaronot published an article in June 2013 which surveyed a slew of new novels preoccupied with economics. Interviewing a host of writers and scholars, the article declared that after many years of ignoring economics as a lowly topic, “Hebrew literature finally discovered money.”14 This assertion, however, is inaccurate to say the least. Though it is not possible in this short introduction to neatly summarize the approaches of modern Jewish literature to such a broad topic as “economy” in general or “Jewish economy” in particular, it is clear that both modern Hebrew and Yiddish literature have always actively engaged questions about economy. The literature of the Haskalah presented an ideological struggle between the workings of ossified religious institutions and the love affairs of young maskilim.15 Importantly, in Haskalah fiction, this dominant ideological conflict usually featured an economic component. Critiquing what they saw as the primitive economic behavior of rabbinical and Hasidic Jewry in Eastern Europe, as well as the exaggerated dispersion of Jews in financial occupations such as commerce and moneylending, writers of the Haskalah advocated two solutions to the “abnormal” economic existence of the Jewish diaspora. The first solution was the adoption of rational capitalist discourse and practices. For example, seminal Hebrew works of the Haskalah, such as Asher Braudes’ 1876 novel Religion and Life (‫ )דת וחיים‬or Peretz Smolenskin’s 1868 The Wanderer in the Paths of Life (‫)התועה בדרכי החיים‬, often portray excessive rabbinical stringency contributing to the worsening economic conditions of European Jewry. In these early Hebrew novels, the rabbis’ negation of Western, secular, and modern knowledge only increases the severe poverty of their Jewish congregations.16 In the modern Yiddish novel The Headband (Das Sterntüchel) by Israel Aksenfeld, social critique also adopts a modern capitalist economic discourse to depict religious characters and institutions as irrational, greedy, and lazy.17 Whereas the abovementioned Haskalah novels advocated the correction of the Jewish collective through its participation in a capitalist modern European economy, another strand of Haskalah literature offered a second solution through a romanticized concept of manual labor and agriculture, mitigating the importance of monetary economy. Though the glorification of agriculture seems at odds with mod-

8

INTRODUCTION

ern capitalist economy, the promotion of these notions is in fact a testimony to eighteenth- and nineteenth-century classical economic doctrines. Following Adam Smith’s 1776 The Wealth of Nations, many classical economists saw agriculture, labor, and crafts as the basis for a productive capitalist economy, while commerce was deemed despicable yet “functional.”18 In this spirit, Abraham Mapu’s 1853 biblical romance The Love of Zion (‫)אהבת ציון‬, considered the first novel of modern Hebrew literature, identifies the evil characters of the novel with counterfeit coins and artificial urban life, while the good characters of the novel, mainly the lovers Amnon and Tamar, are associated with images of nature. Along these lines, when the pagan priest Zimri arrives in Jerusalem, he throws away his wooden idols, yet not before peeling off their golden coating, which is revealed to be masking a common material.19 As Dan Miron previously underscored, Zimri’s act thus points to a break between appearance and real value.20 In Mapu’s novel, gold is not a reliable store of value, but is associated instead with pagan and superstitious beliefs; it is nothing but a deceptive signifier, a false idol. In contrast, the novel juxtaposes Amnon and Tamar’s wedding, which takes place in a rural landscape near Jerusalem and is concurrent with the miraculous return from captivity of King Yoram, Amnon’s father, and his generous redistribution of the land’s wealth to his loyal followers. In this way, the novel’s end restores the validity and value of the name of the father as the privileged and “natural” signifier of a land-based and agricultural civilization.21 The Haskalah writers’ adoration of productive labor, agriculture, and biblical Jewish nationalism influenced later Zionist authors of the First and Second Aliyah (the first and second waves of immigration to Palestine, 1881–1914), such as Moshe Smilansky, Yehoshua Eisenstadt Barzilai, Yosef Luidor, and David Shimoni, who all idealized the figure of the Jewish pioneer in their works. In his famous 1911 essay entitled “The Eretz Israel Genre and its Artifacts,” Yosef Haim Brenner critiqued many of the above authors for their idyllic, ideology-driven, unrealistic portrayals of life in the new and struggling Jewish settlements in Palestine.22 Still, the valorization of manual labor continued throughout the works of Hebrew poets of the Third Aliyah (1919–1923), as can be clearly seen in Abraham Shlonsky’s seminal poem “Toil” (“‫ )”עמל‬published in 1927. In this

INTRODUCTION

9

poem, part of a sequence titled Gilboa, the speaker asks his mother to dress him up in a coat of many colors and lead him to his daily toil. Using biblical references such as Joseph’s cloak and the story of Isaac, the poem reinforces a sense of worship and sacrifice. For the speaker, building the homeland is at once a necessary daily burden and a sacred task.23 The literature of Haskalah then envisioned the regeneration of the Jewish people through modern economic reconfigurations, in the form of productive labor in a capitalist or socialist framework, or by the adoption of a rational monetary discourse and practice. However, Haskalah literature’s naïve belief in the redemptive power of different forms of modern economy was quickly complicated. On the one hand, the continuous pogroms against Jews in the second half of the nineteenth century in Eastern Europe undermined the belief that participation in modern European economy would suffice to solve the “Jewish Question.” Disillusioned by recurring violence, Jewish authors often presented condemnations of capitalism in their works, treating it as a new system of oppression, rather than a means of successful assimilation. While later masterpieces such as The Nag (‫)סוסתי‬ by Mendele Moykher Sforim or Sholem Aleichem’s Menahem Mendel continued to portray Jewish economy as primitive and parasitic, they also diverted much of the blame into a criticism of the aggressive and illusory nature of modern capitalism.24 Take, for example, Mendele’s The Nag. In this satirical allegory, Isrolik, a young maskil, believes that in finding a respectable and modern profession he will avoid the fate of his impoverished friends, who married early and had to support huge families. However, after failing his medical entrance exams, Isrolik meets a nag tortured by cruel youths and dogs. Conversing with the nag in Yiddish, he discovers that this nag is actually an unfortunate prince, representing the Jews’ degraded state in exile. Relying on her experience of past times, the nag ridicules Isrolik’s hopes in the Haskalah. First, she accuses the European authorities of making Jews work as moneylenders and merchants only to later persecute them for their lowly trades. Second, she demands to know why the Jewish nation should need to assimilate in order to receive their God-given equal rights. In the odd couple’s subsequent journey, Isrolik also encounters the chief demon, Ashmodai, who confesses to owning all the new industries and factories. By using capitalist econ-

10

INTRODUCTION

omy and ideas of the Enlightenment age, Ashmodai wishes to erase human particularities, turning all people into one nation of slaves. Mendele’s satirical allegory thus brings about a triple attack: on the poor state of the Jewish diaspora; on Haskalah’s naïve hopes of assimilation; and indirectly on classical economists’ ideas of the utopian “free market” and “invisible hand.”25 Alternatively, the economic and material hardships in Palestine, the challenges of manual labor and, as a result, the migration of many Jews back to Europe in the early twentieth century hampered the socialist fantasies of Jewish national revival. Addressing these issues, Yosef Haim Brenner, the major author of the Second Aliyah, questioned the successful “rebirth” of the Jewish subject in the land of Israel in such works as the 1911 From Here and There (‫ )מכאן ומכאן‬and Nerves (‫)עצבים‬, and in the 1920 Breakdown and Bereavement (‫)שכול וכישלון‬. In From Here and There, the protagonist, named literally “clueless” (‫ )אובד עצות‬is driven by his own idealism to the land of Israel, yet he experiences intense physical and mental suffering upon arrival, quickly finding out that he is unable to pursue his ideal of manual labor. On the one hand, the protagonist repeatedly claims that the new Jewish settlements in the land of Israel are similar to the Jewish ghettos in the diaspora, in that both are a product of alienation and victimization. On the other hand, Brenner’s text imagines the Jewish affinity with commerce and usury as an inherent perversion, comparing the Jewish nation to a whore who constantly chooses dependence over freedom.26 In the end, though the protagonist does decide to stay in the land of Israel, he severely questions the possibility of Jewish collective rehabilitation through national solutions, economic reorientations, or productive labor. Forever Indebted: Outline of Chapters Shmuel Yosef Agnon is heir to all these conflicting attitudes. Weaving together religious, Zionist, socialist, and capitalist “codes,” to use Roland Barthes’ terminology, Agnon’s complex and diverse body of work directly engages with such subjects as money, modern monetary economy, commerce, usury, and productive labor. Moreover, as can be deduced in “Agunot,” economic doctrines cannot be separated from other discourses operating in Agnon’s texts. Analogies between monetary, libidinal, divine, and literary transactions abound, and

INTRODUCTION

11

while the economic underpinnings of the different themes in “Agunot” are exposed in the text, the text also discloses its own economic structure. As such, “Agunot” anticipates Marc Shell’s argument that “money talks in and through discourse in general” and that “the monetary information of thought, unlike its content, cannot be eradicated from discourse without changing thought itself.”27 In other words, money, and by extension monetary economy, not only appear in a discourse, but also shape the structure and limits of that discourse. Agnon’s writing demonstrates that while discourses such as religion, language, or psychoanalysis seem separate from the operations of monetary economy, these discourses at the same time cannot escape being caught up in an economy of their own, subjected to rules of exchange, calculation, profit, and loss. My reading of Agnon’s works, therefore, follows a double axis. On the one hand, each chapter focuses on Agnon’s literary use of the images of debt, money, and economy. On the other hand, each chapter examines how these economic themes illuminate other focal points in Agnon’s oeuvre: mainly, religious faith, language, romantic love, and writing. By tracing Agnon’s literary explorations of economy in conjunction with other major subjects of his writing, my work aims to uncover the economic underpinnings of precisely such discourses that are positioned as “outside” or “beyond” the economic sphere. Subsequently, Agnon’s relentless preoccupation with economic crises in his texts, his figurative use of economic language, and his famous subversions of literary closure all contribute to what I call Agnon’s “law of permanent debt,” which consistently undermines any claims for the sustainability and stability of real or symbolic economies. Although this project does contextualize Agnon’s literary works in Jewish history and economy, this is not a work of economic history. My focus on economics in Agnon’s writing draws from different theoretical fields, ranging from Marxist theory, semiotics, and narratology to psychoanalysis and the philosophy of money. Above all, the prism of this work is a literary one. My disparate readings of Agnon’s works through a multi-layered critical lens aim to follow Roland Barthes’ suggestion that the model of reading should be productive not representative.28 Accordingly, in the chapters that follow, I do not interpret Agnon’s texts as representations of historical truths, nor do

12

INTRODUCTION

I maintain any “loyalty” to a preferred ideological vantage point. Alternatively, I read Agnon’s works as productions of economic, historical, religious, literary, and psychoanalytic codes, the complicated intersections of which I aim to outline. The first chapter of this book, titled “The Gift of Debt,” begins by tracing the themes of “debt” and “gift” in Agnon’s first novella And the Crooked Shall Be Made Straight (‫)והיה העקוב למישור‬, published in 1912, which tells the story of the bankruptcy of middle-class shopkeepers Menasheh Hayim and his wife Kreindel Tcharni in midnineteenth-century Galicia. Following Nietzsche’s claim of the internalization of debt as the origin of monotheist religion and JudeoChristian morality, I argue that Menasheh Hayim’s eventual travels as a beggar construct an analogy between capitalism and religious faith (termed here as divine economy) as two systems of debt and credit. As a result, Menasheh Hayim’s journey brings up questions of sin, responsibility, and the hierarchy of monetary and divine debts. Whereas Menasheh Hayim’s life is constructed via debts to external authorities, the protagonist’s death exchanged for his wife’s life suggests that the debt to the real other, to use Emmanuel Levinas’s terminology, functions in the text as a gift which bypasses the economy of debt and credit. Read this way, Menasheh Hayim’s death for an other against the demands of an external authority becomes a critique of both the traditional and modern Jewish subject constituted through debt to religion or its modern substitutes such as capitalism or Zionism. I continue to analyze Agnon’s investigation of the economic infrastructures that shape Jewish religion and Zionist ideology in the second chapter, “Talking through Money,” where I consider the relationship between monetary economy and language as two semiotic systems involving the production, distribution, and consumption of signs. Manifesting the perpetual conflict between religious tradition and modernity, Agnon’s 1939 novel, the first person narrative A Guest for the Night (‫)אורח נטה ללון‬, stages a struggle between these two semiotic systems through the visit of a religious Zionist author to his impoverished hometown, Buczacz in Galicia. The guest’s attempts to restore his childhood house of study (‫ )בית מדרש‬on the one hand, while convincing the townspeople of the rightful claim of Zionism on the other, share a common denominator—both are constituted

INTRODUCTION

13

through the guest’s rejection of money and commerce. The guest’s strict condemnation of money, however, introduces contradictory views about money. Whereas money in the novel marks a person’s dependence on material conditions, money at the same time also stands as the emblem of the pure signifier which lacks any materiality or intrinsic value. Accordingly, money poses a twofold threat to the guest’s attempts at restoration. While money in Agnon’s text subverts the guest’s attempts to surpass or ignore the crucial role of material conditions in Jewish existence, money also—as Saussure’s arbitrary signifier par excellence and Simmel’s “exchangeability personified”—undermines the guest’s fantasy of Hebrew as a sacred language, a language, to follow Anne Golomb Hoffman, which the guest believes to be based on intrinsic and eternal values that can salvage himself, the town, and the future of Jewish diaspora. Shifting from semiotic systems to psychoanalytic theories of love, “Can’t Buy Me Love,” the third chapter of this work, examines Agnon’s A Simple Story, published in 1935, which tells the story of the failed love affair between Hirshl Hurvitz, the son of wealthy shopkeepers, and his poor cousin, Bluma Nakht. Informed by historical contextualization of the modern term “romantic love” and by Freud’s economic conceptualization of ego formation, my reading underscores the possible analogies between the circulation of money and libido in the capitalist market and in the inter-subjective love relationships in the novel. Employing psychoanalytic theories of narcissism and melancholia, I argue that Agnon’s text presents Hirshl’s mother Tsirl’s greed and Hirshl’s narcissistic love not as antagonistic, but as modeled upon a shared desire for endless accumulation and consumption based on an inherent sense of deficit. Reconstructing the different libidinal economies that compose the love triangle of Hirshl, Bluma, and Mina, this chapter attempts to answer the question: can “romantic love” present us with an economic exchange that is not based on self-interest and profit? “The Incomplete Text and the Indebted Author,” the fourth and last chapter of the book, continues the scheme presented in the three previous chapters, but also extends and departs from it. My reading of Agnon’s 1950 tale “The Garment” (“‫)”המלבוש‬, which tells of a tailor who cannot finish a garment commissioned by a lord, shifts the analytical lens of this project from the author’s narrated worlds onto the

14

INTRODUCTION

author’s own economy of narration and writing. Through centering on the two major tropes in the text, the act of weaving and the debt, I read the character of the tailor as a self-portrait of the author, a subject indebted to the inaccessible ideal of the wholeness and perfection of art. Along these lines, informed by Hillis Miller’s deconstructivist approach to the ubiquitous metaphor of “writing as weaving” in Western culture, my reading of Agnon’s short story juxtaposed with his letters and essays establishes the author’s literary economy as structured on the endless production of incomplete texts. Focusing on Agnon’s imagery of “writing-as-weaving a torn garment,” I read “The Garment” as an allegory of writing which exposes Agnon’s literary economy as governed by “the law of permanent debt,” in which the text-asgarment is read as an inherently unfinished product. Determined by the inability to produce a “coherent whole,” Agnon’s indebted literary economy undermines the stable and finite production, distribution, and consumption of meaning in the exchange between author and reader. The production of incomplete texts constitutes the author’s task as infinite as he hopelessly struggles to write more, to finally pay off his lingering debt. Consequently, Agnon’s “law of permanent debt” paradoxically defines not only the indebtedness of writing to its inaccessible whole, but also the perpetuation of the hermeneutic cycle. Writing and reading both become incomplete, but also limitless. The sense of indebtedness thus turns into excess. Subverting closure and destabilizing meaning, Agnon’s indebted writing calls readers to return, and to reevaluate his complex texts time and time again.

INTRODUCTION

15

CHAPTER 1

THE GIFT OF DEBT

In reading And the Crooked Shall Be Made Straight (‫)והיה העקוב למישור‬, Agnon’s first novella, published in 1912 in pre-state Israel, one motif stands out clearly: money. The text’s pious narrator outlines the disastrous route to bankruptcy taken by middle-class shopkeepers Menasheh Hayim and his wife Kreindel Tcharni in mid-nineteenthcentury Buczacz, Galicia. After the childless couple loses their shop and all their assets, Menasheh Hayim sets out to raise money as a beggar, with the help of a letter from the town rabbi, which lists his name and misfortunes. Failing to get enough donations, he is persuaded by a drunkard beggar to sell him his letter so the beggar can raise a fortune with it. The plan fails. Not only is Menasheh Hayim later robbed, losing all of his money yet again, but the drunkard beggar, now his double, suddenly dies. Subsequently, the letter found in the drunkard’s clothes is used as proof of Menasheh Hayim’s death. Later, upon his return to Buczacz, Menasheh Hayim discovers that his wife has remarried and given birth to a son. Acting against Jewish religious ruling, Menasheh Hayim decides to keep silent in order to protect the happiness of his wife, and slowly languishes and dies in a nearby cemetery. Though monetary economy plays a crucial rule in the text, the many insightful essays written about Agnon’s novella have either relegated its extensive role to the historical backdrop of the nineteenth-century Jewish diaspora, or accepted too willingly the narrator’s construction of the strict opposition between a misguided economic pursuit and “proper” religious ideals. Even Baruch Kurzweil, the first scholar to emphasize the ironic, tragic, and subversive aspects of the novella, saw the text’s preoccupation with money as serving only to condemn the protagonist’s utter dependency on bourgeois values.1

16

Contrary to both of these approaches, my reading of the text highlights not the opposition, but rather the multiple analogies, intersections, and conflations between the economic and religious spheres. By focusing on the extensive portrayal of the monetary economy visà-vis the description of religious perceptions in the text, one discovers that economy does not reside “outside” of religion in this novella, but is actually ingrained in it. The result is a construction of religious thought in the form of what I will call, following Nietzsche, a divine economy—an economic infrastructure of religion as founded on the idea of infinite human debt and divine credit.2 Consequently, the religious subject can never, as the pious narrator of And the Crooked assumes, truly escape economy, for this subject is already constituted by economy. The close examination of the two seemingly contradictory terms “debt” and “gift” in the text highlights Menasheh Hayim’s journey, life, and death as exemplifying Agnon’s attempt to rethink the economic constitution of modern Jewish identity after the breakdown of Jewish tradition in nineteenth-century Europe. In fact, not only does And the Crooked explore the notions of “debt” and “gift” in the spheres of economy, religion, and subjectivity, but the publication of the text itself only came about as a result of these very exchanges. In what has become by now one of the most well-known anecdotes in the history of modern Hebrew literature, in December 1911 a young Shmuel Yosef Agnon sent the manuscript of And the Crooked (completed in a four-day writing marathon), to his friend, and by then renowned author, Yosef Haim Brenner. A week later, Brenner wrote back ecstatically, praising the text and offering to publish the novella. Eager as he was, though, Brenner had to borrow money in order to finance the publication. As Agnon tells the story, he himself even saw Brenner selling his new suspenders in a pawnshop to raise more money toward the realization of the project.3 Yet, despite the difficulties, the endeavor succeeded. The first edition sold out in a matter of weeks, and Brenner was able to pay off all his debts, even transferring a surplus to Agnon. Out of this debt and economic exchange, which blurred the distinction between friendship and commerce, And the Crooked was published, and instantly heralded by the prominent literary critic Fishel Laḥover as a “treasure.”4 While Laḥover used the word “treasure” as a metaphor, indicating the symbolic wealth of Agnon’s prose, the literal meaning of his praise

THE GIFT OF DEBT

17

inadvertently underscores the economic values that determine the artistic values of Agnon’s text. The costs of production of Agnon’s novella, its promotion by Brenner (a key agent in the then tiny field of literary production in the land of Israel, to use Pierre Bourdieu’s terminology), and the positive sales figures of the first edition cannot be separated from any “inherent” artistic qualities of the work.5 Just as the story of the publication of And the Crooked exposes the economic underpinnings of artistic discourse, Agnon’s story delineates the economic infrastructure of religious faith. Debt as an Empty Space An introductory plot summary, referencing the tradition of the Hasidic story on which Agnon based his own novella, precedes the first chapter of And the Crooked.6 It divides the text’s movement into three discernible cycles. In the first one, Menasheh Hayim loses all his assets. In the second cycle, his poverty makes him sin against God, who is referred to in the text by a Hebrew term for “creator” (‫)קונה‬. The term appears in Genesis 14:19 when Melchizedek, king of Salem, describes God as “Creator of heaven and earth,” and became highly prevalent in Judaism during the period of the Mishnah and the Talmud.7 While the term is understood as “creator” or “maker,” it also has economic connotations, such as “owner,” “buyer,” or “possessor.” These associations highlight the central biblical doctrine, upheld in later rabbinic writings, that God is literally the creator, and thus the owner of the world and of humanity.8 Though in the second cycle Menasheh Hayim sinned against God, his creator and owner, in the summary the reader learns that in his wanderings Menasheh Hayim never harmed a fellow human being. According to the narrator this is why, in the third cycle, Menasheh Hayim’s death earns him a name and a “remainder” (‫)שם ושארית‬.9 This biblical expression, which appears in 2 Samuel 14:7, refers to the family name and heirs left after a man’s death. Though Menasheh Hayim dies childless, this expression in Agnon’s novella points to the cemetery guard who erects Menasheh Hayim’s gravestone on his true burial place at the end of the text, thus commemorating his name after death. Moreover, Agnon’s text ends with ‫תנצב”ה‬, a common Hebrew acronym for a biblical verse which means “may his soul be bound up in the bond of eternal life.”10

18

THE GIFT OF DEBT

Rather than offering only what seems to be a clear ethical judgment of the life and death of the story’s protagonist, the summary, using economic metaphors and underscoring an economic content, also highlights an imbalanced account. It begins with a loss, and ends with an excess, a remainder. In moving from the introductory plot summary to the plot itself, a reading of And the Crooked through an economic lens reveals that what binds the story’s three cycles is the persistent influence of “debt” and “gift” in the interrelated spheres of religion, economy, and subjectivity. In actuality, there is no need to “impose” an economic lens on the novella, for the narrator supplies one from the very beginning: And the sage, may he rest in peace, said that capital will always evaporate due to some nonsense in order to teach and show the weakness and inferiority of money, which has no real substance. He said that it is the nature of money to decrease, lessen, and disappear due to foolishness or some insignificant reason. . . . Thus, when we see a wealthy man impoverished, who has lost all his fortune, we should not wonder and examine how has this happened. . . . for the nature of money is to lessen, for any reason at all (61).

According to the narrator, capital amounts to nothing because the nature of money is inferior, weak and unreliable. This is why one should not attempt to find any causality in economic crises. Capital vanishes due to any cause precisely because it has no “real” substance. In stark contrast with the marked tone of condemnation of capital and economic pursuits expressed in this passage, Meir Tamari argues that the Torah perceives wealth as a sign of God’s approbation. Wealth is God’s gift to human beings. In fact, Tamari claims that as a result, halakhah legitimates and encourages economic activity and self-sufficiency as long as they are subjugated to the religious sphere.11 Tamari emphasizes a prevalent and continuous Jewish textual tradition, pointing to rulings up until modern times that have promoted a harmonious balance between the economic and religious spheres, seeing the two as intertwined rather than opposed. At the same time, as Mordechai Levin shows, since the medieval period, and especially in Eastern European communities such as those in Russia, Poland, and Galicia, a dominant Jewish strain has emerged, highlighting the opposition between the economic and the religious spheres, con-

THE GIFT OF DEBT

19

demning economic pursuits as foolishness, and envisioning money and economic activity as a severe hindrance to religious devotion.12 In Galicia, where And the Crooked takes place, rabbinical and Hasidic leaders who opposed each other on doctrinal points expressed a mutual disdain for economic activity and productive labor in legal, moralistic, and didactic writings published well into the nineteenth century and beyond. This condemnation of the pursuit of money led to an interpretative enterprise that strove to reverse the meaning of such words in ancient Jewish sources as melakha (work), amal (labor), and asaqim (business), redefining them as exclusively referencing the work of religious study (study of the Torah).13 Whereas Tamari wishes to imagine the Jewish religion as only established on a harmonious balance between the religious and economic spheres, and thus highly compatible with a capitalist and rational model, Levin tells a different story, highlighting a strain of ascetic Jewish legal rulings and socio-economic practices that oppose the presuppositions of modern monetary economy. The opening of the first chapter of And the Crooked clearly places the narrator within this latter branch of Jewish ascetic thought. True to his position as a pious storyteller, the narrator invests much time and effort in constantly asserting that money is not “real,” that its importance is imagined, and, as a result, that there is no point in trying to comprehend the production, distribution, functions, and movement of money. In short, there is no need to understand monetary economy, for the true nature of money is false and its movement is determined by God, not by reason. The paragraph, however, reveals its irony when read in the larger framework of the entire novella, ending with the tragic death of indebted Menasheh Hayim. First, the perception of the irrelevance of a rational analysis of monetary economy stands in clear opposition to the rest of the chapter, which engages in a meticulous examination of the economic conditions of mid-nineteenth-century Galicia that led Menasheh Hayim and Kreindel Tcharni to bankruptcy.14 Second, in contrast to the argument about money’s inconsequence, it is precisely the lack of money that will radically affect the couple’s decision to close their store and provoke Menasheh Hayim’s subsequent journey as a beggar. Money, and by extension monetary economy—be it “imagined” or “real” (and I shall focus closely on this

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distinction in the second chapter)—plays a decisive role in the life and death of Menasheh Hayim. Moreover, a comparison between And the Crooked and its earlier models—Hasidic tales such as those in The Good Oil (‫—)שמן הטוב‬would compel us to take the narrator’s views with a grain of salt, and instead to attribute these statements to the ironic intention of the implied author.15 These earlier Hasidic versions, much more aligned with Agnon’s narrator’s claim, do not examine the specific economic causes that led to their protagonists’ impoverishment. The abundance of economic details in Agnon’s text seems to be deliberately inserted for the purpose of standing in ironic opposition to the narrator’s pious declarations. Originally members of a typically mid-nineteenth-century Galician middle class made up of Jewish merchants and shopkeepers, Menasheh Hayim and Kreindel Tcharni slip into a financial decline which begins with a competition. While competition is considered to be a basic and positive element of capitalism in classic economic thinking, Agnon’s text presents competition as the driving force of economic crisis, echoing Marx’s vision of capital’s predestined collapse due to its inherent need for expansion.16 Unlike classical economic doctrines that insist crisis can be avoided by rational planning, Marxist theories underscore crisis as an essential feature of the irrational, unstable, and contradictory foundations of capitalism which propel the system unto inevitable ruin.17 In the story, a rival merchant offers to pay the landlord more rent for Menasheh Hayim and Kreindel Tcharni’s store. This competition for the store leads to the landlord raising the rent, which further increases the couple’s expenses and causes their income to dwindle. In his detailed description, the narrator goes so far as to include monetary information on new taxes in the town of Buczacz, registering even the specific ratio between the state tax and the cost of rent. Later, the narrator lists all of the couple’s failed expenditures, as well as the exact details of the price wars among the merchants in the town, to the point of recording even the price of a new coffee grinder. As the slippery slope from riches to rags gains momentum and money begins to run out, the first imagery of debt appears in the text as an expanding lack. The constant “leakage” of money leaves behind “an empty space between the goods” (62) and the emptiness establishes a sense of “lack” in the store.

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Still, while offering a highly detailed economic account, the narrator continues to frame the story’s events within a religious worldview, commenting that: “When God wants to undermine a man’s path, quickly his luck will run out” (62). The narrator thus nourishes a growing tension between two possible explanations for the course of the story’s events. On the one hand, in keeping with his pious position, the narrator offers a metaphysical and ahistorical approach, suggesting that the divine determines the economic sphere, and that God is the source of all earthly resources. On the other hand, the narrator supplies all of the necessary information to construct a historical and rational narrative to account for the couple’s financial decline. In this narrative, all is marked, measured, and quantified by money. Within the framework of the story, a universal modern capitalist language based on abstraction, calculation, and exchange competes with and replaces a traditional religious discourse in explaining the couple’s downfall. Yet, while the pious narrator explicitly advances only the proposed opposition between these two discourses, the text also implicitly reveals multiple analogies between these two competing narratives. This conflation of the economic infrastructure of capitalism with religious faith, however, is precisely what the pious narrator wishes to efface. To reconcile an amoral, impersonal, and asymmetrical free-market economy with the idea of a benevolent omnipotent God is certainly not a desirable theological task. Investing Trust and Giving Credit When Menasheh Hayim and Kreindel Tcharni anxiously debate selling all their merchandise to a crafty merchant, the narrator suddenly tells a tale about the Ba’al Shem Tov, the founder of Hasidic Judaism in eighteenth-century Eastern Europe. In the tale, a tax collector, who welcomes the Ba’al Shem Tov to his home, needs to pay a debt immediately, or he will lose his house. Marching penniless to meet his creditor, the tax collector encounters a traveller, who happens to owe him money. Looking from afar, the Ba’al Shem Tov sees the tax collector leaving the traveller with nothing in hand, only to be summoned back by the traveller, who proceeds to pay him. The traveller later tells the Ba’al Shem Tov that when he saw how honest the tax collector was, he paid him all the money he had previously owed him. The Ba’al Shem Tov concludes the story by telling his disciples that

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God rewards those who have trust (‫ )ביטחון‬in him. The tale thus weaves into the text one of the most prevalent principles of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Hasidic thought: the idea of trust in the divine as the only true determinant of a person’s fate.18 That which brings about good fortune in business is not a rational analysis of the market or an active economic pursuit, but rather complete trust in the workings of the divine.19 The principle of trust in God was heavily critiqued in the literature of the Haskalah because the maskilim viewed this trust as promoting irrationality and laziness. Against the religiously devout and irrational subject, writers of the Haskalah erected a modern and enlightened subject who is a forceful preponderant of the advantages of rationality, and an advocate for universal economic discourse as a means for Jewish collective rehabilitation. The opposition between these two constructions of subjectivity was often established through either the adoption or rejection of modern economic practices, as can be seen in such early Haskalah novels as The Headband (Das Sterntüchel) by Israel Aksenfeld or the early version of Vale of Tears (‫ )עמק הבכא‬by Mendele Moykher Sforim.20 The tale of the tax collector, claims Baruch Kurzweil, serves as an ironic reverse mirroring of the tragic fate of Menasheh Hayim.21 While the tax collector is saved due to his trust in God, Menasheh Hayim and Kreindel Tcharni fall deeper into debt due to a bad bargain, or, according to the lamenting narrator, due to their lack of trust. Unlike the traditional religious Jewish subject, who puts his trust in the debt to the divine over any other concern, the couple has succumbed to capitalist ideology. For Kurzweil, the Hasidic tale teaches readers that, in the modern story of Menasheh Hayim, such naïve tales and miracles are not possible. In Menasheh Hayim’s world, God remains unresponsive. The tale can also teach us readers another lesson. The readings of the Hasidic tale—by the Ba’al Shem Tov, by the narrator, and even by Kurzweil—all adhere to the language of miracles, which presupposes a strict opposition between religion and economy. In other words, the varied readings of the tale uphold a dichotomy between having trust (as belief) in God and having trust (as credit) in money, and between the receiving of a salary and the winning of a divine reward. However, by the same token, when we reverse the reading of the Ba’al

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Shem Tov, we also wonder if the tax collector cannot be perceived as a truly accomplished businessman. Following the tale’s own logic, it seems that the tax collector had not only a debtor of his own, but also two creditors to negotiate with—his landlord and God. The Hasidic tale tells a story of two acts of commerce, not just one. For Friedrich Nietzsche, commerce and exchange are not merely acts of human subjects, but rather are economic procedures standing at the origin of human subjectivity. Claiming that “Setting prices, measuring values, thinking up equivalents, exchanging . . . preoccupied the very first thinking of human beings to such an extent that in a certain sense it is the thinking per se.” Nietzsche underscores that economics formulated human thought.22 Exchange between persons enabled human beings to measure, compare, calculate, and establish values. Exchange facilitated agreements and settlements between people, thus founding human society. As the most rudimentary form of human interaction, the relationship between buyer and seller, or between debtor and creditor, constitutes later, more complex, social institutions such as religion, morality and the law. Accordingly, for Nietzsche, the sacredness of duty, the sense of guilt, conscience, and above all the belief in God originated in the sphere of the economic contract: the law of exchange. As a result, what stands at the basis of the relationship between God and humanity is the exchange between creditor and debtor. In the case of religious thought, this divine economy constitutes the human being as an infinitely indebted subject vis-à-vis an all-powerful creditor. With the violent evolution of collective monotheistic religion, the religious subject internalizes economic debt so as to experience it as guilt before the fiction it created—before God. Nietzsche’s argument finds fertile linguistic ground in Hebrew, where the words duty (‫)חובה‬, debt (‫ )חוב‬and guilty (‫ )חייב‬all share the same root.23 Equivalently, Nietzsche begins his examination of divine economy by highlighting this linguistic connection in German, where the word Schuld refers to both guilt and debt. Agnon, who spoke both languages, would have been aware of these multiple resonances. The linguistic connections between debt, duty, and guilt in Hebrew and German highlight the economic underpinnings of religious thought. The duty to God is experienced by the religious subject as an infinite debt in the form of guilt. In this divine economy between the indebt-

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ed religious subject and God the creditor, the exchange of debts and duties—rituals, prayers, services, festivals, and sacrifices—for divine rewards is underlined by the ultimate exchange: the guilt of the indebted subject for the forgiveness of the all-powerful creditor. Accordingly, the tale of the tax collector in Agnon’s And the Crooked teaches the religious subject that human debt to the divine stands above, beyond, and prior to any other debt. Divine economy determines monetary economy. This is exactly why the tax collector is so calm when his creditor demands his due payment. The tax collector knows that his trust in the divine sphere over the monetary sphere will be his most beneficial investment. As such, the tale also shows that, according to the notion of trust, the infinitely indebted subject invests trust in order to be paid back by a divine reward. Though the structure of divine economy is supposedly based on an infinite debt to God, this debt, once embraced, is simultaneously effaced through the perception of a reciprocal and profitable exchange. Notably, as I shall expand upon shortly, Marcel Mauss draws upon the Jewish principle of trust—this divine economy—as an example of his theory of the gift, a structural explanation of both primitive human economies and ancient religions. The structure of a divine economy based on trust in a reciprocal and profitable exchange appears throughout Agnon’s oeuvre. For example, in a short story entitled “The Coin” (“‫)”הפרוטה‬, a poor man who does not take a silver coin in order to observe the sanctity of the Sabbath is rewarded: “since he observed one Sabbath in poverty, he was allowed to observe many Sabbaths in riches.”24 This structure is elaborated in greater detail in Agnon’s lengthy first novel, The Bridal Canopy (‫[ )הכנסת כלה‬1931], in which the poor and devout Reb Yudel Hasid also wanders as a beggar to raise money for his daughter’s marriage. However, what little money Reb Yudel Hasid manages to collect on his journey he spends while studying Torah at an inn. Undiscouraged by his financial predicament and putting his trust in God, Reb Yudel Hasid agrees to a dowry he cannot afford upon finding a suitable match for his daughter. When the groom’s rich family arrives for the wedding, all seems lost. Yet, in the end, Reb Yudel Hasid is rewarded for his devotion through God’s miraculous intervention when his wife, in her pursuit of an escaped rooster, accidently finds a golden treasure hidden in a cave.

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The novel’s “happy ending,” however, presents a critique of Reb Yudel Hasid’s irrational devotion through the golden reward which in fact serves as the author’s final ironic undercutting of his protagonist.25 As the opening of And the Crooked indicates, Agnon’s poetics presents the imagery of gold as insubstantial, transient and unworthy. Similarly, although gold as God’s gift is a familiar biblical trope, gold and wealth also function in the Bible as a deceptive distraction that draws one away from God. This is why the Book of Proverbs warns us many times that “Those who trust in their riches will fall.”26 Above all, the receipt of these material, quantified, and measured divine rewards, the acceptance of gold as divine reward, is exactly what reduces religious thought to nothing more than the most basic logic of a calculable exchange. In other words, the acceptance of wealth as a divine reward is precisely what annuls God, turning trust into credit, God into creditor, and faith into nothing more than economy. In this sense, then, what is shared among all the aforementioned texts is the semblance of a conflict between the duty (debt) to God and the monetary debt. When each protagonist resolves the conflict by choosing his debt to God over his monetary debt, the stories seemingly maintain the opposition, elevating the principle of trust over rational economic activity and the divine debt over the monetary one. However, the same conclusion that supposedly cements this opposition, subjugating economy to religion, also subverts it. The receipt of gold as a divine reward reverses the story’s explicit moral claim, turning religion into nothing but economy. In this process, the divine reward itself literally turns into a salary, redefining the relationship between believer and God as one of a purely economic nature. Thus, while the narrator of And the Crooked explicitly advocates the principle of trust in God as purely a matter of spiritual faith, the text constructs the notion of trust as actually constituting a divine economy that shares the same logic as a monetary economy—the logic of a utilitarian, reciprocal, and profitable exchange of investment and reward.27 The Infinitely Deferred Debt While the Hasidic tale in And the Crooked produces credit in both divine and monetary economies—the payments made with trust and with money both end in a successful transaction—Menasheh

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Hayim and Kreindel Tcharni’s storyline points to a different analogy between capitalist economy and divine economy. In their story, both economies are based on an endless postponement of debt, destined inevitably to collapse. Aptly enough, while the word “trust” appears more than five times in the two-page-long Hasidic tale, the word “debt” begins to haunt Agnon’s text right after Menasheh Hayim and Kreindel Tcharni’s bargaining with a fellow merchant only advances their downward spiral. Although they finally earn enough money to pay their rent, they later realize that they are left with no money to buy goods for the store, and no goods to sell for money. For Marx, the circular movement of money in capitalism turns the positions of buyer and seller into those of creditor and debtor due to the temporal separation between the acts of selling and buying.28 The effect of this necessary separation, based on the principle of credit, is that the circulation of money is always on the brink of a crisis. As such, crisis is an inherent feature of capitalism; it can be postponed, but never avoided. For Marx, crisis is the final destination point of the capitalist endeavor.29 The description of capitalistic circulation as a constant movement founded upon debt and destined for a fall materializes in Agnon’s text through its intense focus on the notion of interest. When the desperate couple takes a high-interest loan, the narrator comments that “the next morning Kreindel Tcharni went to the city and bought all that was missing from her store, and all the cupboards were filled with food, and all was well” (69). The happy conclusion is, however, immediately charged with irony when the narrator follows it with an explanation that the biblical Hebrew term for interest (‫ )נשך‬literally means “bite.” The narrator further explains that the rabbinic interpretation of this word (or rather metaphor) points to the nature of interest, which keeps on “biting” into your shares.30 Though “customers are not lacking,” and “when asked for donations, Kreindel Tcharni gets all dolled up, laughing with her eyes” (69), this constant oscillation between, on one side, fullness, food, laughter, and money, and, on the other, the hollowing emptiness of interest and debt, rapidly intensifies. Kreindel Tcharni rushes around, putting herself in constant circulation, borrowing continuously from her neighbors, “sometimes for profit” and sometimes just for “the sake of the business,” while their debt continues to increase.

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The tension between excess and lack, movement and pause, materializes in full force in the image of the empty/full store, through which a rampant movement of customers, vendors, commodities, and money keeps circulating for the sake of appearance and movement itself. Menasheh Hayim and Kreindel Tcharni ignore their debt and increase their spending in the hope of setting circulation back on track, but the actual effect is that economic movement is brought to a complete halt. Within the logic of this story, the encroachment of debt can be postponed, yet never overcome: Because God protects man and his affluence is infinite . . . as it is told in the books of truth. . . . But when the heavens shall fall, all winged creatures will come to an end, and when the pillars of the store are ruined, where will livelihood be found? And though many times they took upon themselves the words of the wise, “sleep without food and rise with no debt,” it was only the first half of the advice which was applied (71–72).

In the paragraph above, the narrator refocuses the reader’s attention on the term “debt” when he explains that although Menasheh Hayim and Kreindel Tcharni accepted “the words of the wise, to “sleep without food and rise with no debt,” they only fulfilled the first half of this advice. Attributing the economic crisis to divine authority yet again, the narrator uses the metaphor of the “pillars of the store,” an image that merges economic and religious spheres by inserting the religious “pillars” of the Temple into the description of an everyday store. While the metaphor ironically mocks Menasheh Hayim and Kreindel Tcharni’s “religious” subjugation to commerce, it also marks the breakdown of both divine and monetary economy. The movement of mercantile fervor, running on an empty battery before the crash, is analogous to the divine “plenitude that came down, but did not stay” (72). Agnon’s text portrays both capitalist circulation and God’s plenitude as forces that produce a semblance of excess while yielding nothing. Both the divine and monetary economies are founded on a debt that can be deferred, but never paid off. Their equally destructive circulation leaves behind a ruined, closed, store governed by a debt that appears once again as the “empty space” where the mezuzah, a religious sign of trust, once was.

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The closing of the store finds Menasheh Hayim doubly indebted— to the capitalist economy and to the divine economy. The conflict between these two economies, which the text constructs as coincident but different, mirrors another conflict staged within Menasheh Hayim and Kreindel Tcharni’s marriage: the couple has no children after a ten-year marriage, a time limit after which halakhah encourages the man to divorce his wife.31 The halakhic practice of divorce due to infertility presupposes the wife’s barrenness. As a result, a husband who failed to produce children with his wife is obligated to divorce her and marry another woman with whom he can fulfill the commandment of procreation. In other words, marriage is conceptualized in halakhah as an economic contract entailing production of a commodity (children). Hence, the husband who fails to produce that commodity with the help of his wife needs to substitute the value of one female with another. In biblical times, this economic structure was accommodated through the option of addition, rather than substitution, through the use of a surrogate child-bearer, as occurred in the case of Abraham, Sarah, and Hagar. Menasheh Hayim’s refusal to divorce is portrayed as a sin against God by Kreindel Tcharni, who thinks that “she has made him sin. Ten years, ten years . . . and still he does not divorce her” (68). The text thus constructs the couple’s marriage as another site of conflicting debts. In preserving his contract of marriage with his wife, Menasheh Hayim is already in breach of his contract with God, and now suffers under three conflicting deficits: a debt to the divine, a monetary debt, and an intersubjective debt. Read this way, the questions the text raises become questions of economics: can one determine the hierarchy of these debts in this markedly ironic text? Which one should be paid first and by what means? And, above all, what light do these questions shed on Menasheh Hayim’s death for the sake of Kreindel Tcharni at the end of the text, a death commonly defined in Agnon scholarship as tragic? Comparing Menasheh Hayim’s religious, monetary, and romantic relationships in economic terms illuminates the ways in which his debts to both capitalism and divine economy are not mutually exclusive, but coincident. Menasheh Hayim’s experience of his circumstances is constituted equally by his debt to divine economy and

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to capitalist circulation, as he persists in believing that if he finds the means to pay off his debt he will be saved. Still, unlike the Hasidic tales or early Haskalah novels, neither paying in trust nor paying in money will help Menasheh Hayim. In this sense, Agnon’s text critiques not only the indebted subject of Jewish religious thought, but also its later replacement: the modern, rational subject of the early Haskalah who puts his trust in the advantages of science, history, and economy. As exemplified by Menasheh Hayim’s double indebtedness, both subjects are still determined by an external authority demanding its due. His failure to pay off his debt mocks the principle of trust that naïvely imagines divine economy as a reciprocal and profitable exchange, and at the same time critiques the naïve trust of the early Haskalah in rational economic discourse as the savior of the modern Jewish subject. Working against the hopes of both traditional and modern Jewish ideologies that believe, respectively, in the profitability of divine or human economic exchange, Agnon’s text asks whether it is not precisely the structure of a calculable and reciprocal exchange that annuls any possibility of recuperation. In the religious and capitalist spheres at work in And the Crooked, crisis is inevitable, inscribed within the economic system. No matter what strategy Menasheh Hayim chooses—a letter from the town’s rabbi, alms from others, or even returning to the mercantile game—he fails to pay off his debt. In this structure of a constitutive indebtedness to external authority, no economic transaction succeeds, no help can be truly given, and no gift can keep on giving. Questions of Giving The question of the gift first appears in Agnon’s text when Kreindel Tcharni and Menasheh Hayim lose all their money. To Kreindel Tcharni, the act of giving money to the poor signifies social power. This is why “at any opportunity to publicly give charity (‫)צדקה‬, Kreindel Tcharni’s donation would not go unnoticed” (72).32 However, once she finds herself on the receiving end, Kreindel Tcharni turns to Menasheh Hayim in despair, saying: “if God does not want us to benefit from our own labor as every son of Israel, we will arrive, heaven forbid, at the gift of flesh and blood” (76).33 The phrase “gift of flesh and blood” (‫ )מתנת בשר ודם‬comes from an additional section of the blessing for sustenance (‫)ברכת המזון‬, in which one prays to God:

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“Please make us not dependent, O Lord our God, upon the charity of others [literally: gifts of flesh and blood] nor upon their loans, but rather upon of thy hand, which is full, holy, open, and generous.”34 Recited after every meal that includes bread, the blessing not only distinguishes between open and generous divine gifts and dismal human gifts, but hints at an equation between these human gifts (gifts of flesh and blood) and loans. One wonders whether a gift given as a loan, a gift that needs to be reciprocated, can still be called a gift. For Marcel Mauss, the answer is a positive one. In The Gift, his seminal anthropological essay published in 1924, Mauss argues that the capitalist notion of a free, pure gift works against the primitive universal custom of the obligatory gift—what he calls the giftthrough-exchange. The economy of the gift—the economic structure of primitive societies and ancient religions—can be summed up best by the Latin formula do ut des: I give so that you might give. This gift economy also explained for Mauss the notion of sacrifice, which he saw as “a gift that compels the deity to make a return.”35 Using ‫צדקה‬, the Jewish concept of charity, as an example of his theory, Mauss argues that alms are used in ancient religions as both gifts to human beings and sacrifices to God.36 Consequently, for Mauss, the gift economy encourages religious, ethical, and social obligations, while capitalist societies that renounce it turn a person into an “economic animal,” operating as a utilitarian and calculating machine. Critiquing Mauss, however, Jacques Derrida claims that if giving a gift is defined as a giving which anticipates no reciprocation, then any entrance of the gift into an economy, circulation, or exchange implies a return and thus destroys the gift.37 In other words, the gift is opposed to economy, annulled by it. Where there is calculation, interest, or reason, there can be no gift, only credit and debt. The gift may, in fact, be an impossible trope—a conclusion which leads Derrida to suggest that, paradoxically, the only gift possible is one that cannot be recognized as a gift. This suggestion recalls Maimonides who, in his highly influential conceptualization of Jewish charity in the twelfth century, lists giving in secret—when donor and recipient do not know of one another—as one of the most sacred acts of charity.38 At the same time, for Maimonides and for all codifiers of Jewish law after him, the most sacred form of charity was not the giving of donations, but rather the giving of interest-free loans to the poor.39 Paradoxically, the Jewish

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system of charity to the poor identifies its most sacred act of giving as in fact an act of loaning, a concept which, at least according to Derrida, excludes the idea of the gift and the act of giving. Taking this discussion into account, Kreindel Tcharni’s fear of the “gift of flesh and blood”—of the charity given by others—can be explained through Mauss’s description of the capitalist world as a zoo filled with economic animals. The story’s narrator makes a similar, if indirect, argument when he quotes Buczacz’s Jewish peddlers in saying: “For who is willing nowadays to use his trade for the purpose of charity without getting paid?” (74). The capitalist system, constituted on the basis of exchange, profit, and utilitarian calculation, excludes any possibility of the gift, or of giving. The capitalist world of Buczacz leaves no room for compassion or charity. It operates on the basis of brutal competition and survival of the fittest. However, Kreindel Tcharni expresses her fear of the gift by quoting from a traditional blessing from a pre-capitalist age, whose value-set is by no means an isolated case in Judaism. Maimonides, for example, who devoted many of his writings to the ethics of charity, warns: “Do not accept gifts from human beings; trust in God, blessed be he, and not in generous men.”40 In his warning, Maimonides also cites Proverbs 15:27: “He that hates gifts shall live.” While it is true that the Hebrew Bible emphasizes the importance of charity, it is also true that poverty is sometimes perceived in the biblical text as a punishment from God and as a state marked by shame and embarrassment. 41 The Hebrew Bible and later rabbinic authorities often limit creditors’ rights in order to prevent increasing the debtor’s shame. 42 While many maintain that these restrictions represent a noble social approach, these restrictions also presuppose that being indebted to another person, being poor and in need of gifts from others, is indeed a matter of shame. Echoing these and later rabbinic texts, Kreindel Tcharni’s eagerness to give alms while fearing to receive them points at an unresolved tension in Judaism. On the one hand, giving gifts is a strategy for social justice, a sign of one’s commitment to God, of one’s generosity and devoutness; on the other hand, accepting the gift is a sign of a wavering trust in God, of one’s inability to sustain oneself, of social and religious weakness. To accept the gift is a mark of shame and guilt. As such, many rabbinic and Hasidic Jewish texts in fact view the gift as ambivalent and potentially dangerous.

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There is another way, however, to read Kreindel Tcharni’s fear of the “gift of flesh and blood,” which complicates our first reading. Though the common interpretation of the phrase “the gift of flesh and blood” refers to gifts received from others, the quotation appears in Agnon’s text in a more ambivalent way: as a gift received by others, but also as a gift given to another. This ambiguity is ingrained in Hebrew, for the word in Hebrew for “gift” (‫ )מתנה‬is derived from the same root as the verb “to give” (‫)לתת‬. The “gift of flesh and blood” in Agnon’s text, therefore, is an object received but also given. In fact, when Kreindel Tcharni’s quote is read retroactively, in light of Menasheh Hayim’s eventual death, this phrase, this “gift of flesh and blood,” is now weighted with another meaning: sacrifice. The phrase thus works in Agnon’s text as foreshadowing Menasheh Hayim’s tragic end. Kreindel Tcharni fears not only receiving the “gift of flesh and blood,” gifts from others; she is also afraid of the giving up of the flesh and blood, understood now as the “gift of self-sacrifice.” Read in this manner, Agnon’s text is aligned with Mauss’s theory of sacrifice-as-gift, which sees sacrifices as gifts given to God in exchange for his future rewards. Arriving at a place of need for the “gift of flesh and blood” becomes, in Agnon’s text, an arrival at the act of sacrifice. Just as Mauss sees sacrifice as a gift given to the deity, Agnon’s play with the phrase identifies Menasheh Hayim’s future death as a gift of self-sacrifice. Distinguishing itself from a Maussian gift, however, Menasheh Hayim’s gift is not necessarily given to God, but instead to Kreindel Tcharni without her knowledge. It is given in exchange for the life of his beloved. The gift and the act of giving, therefore, are already constructed from their first appearance in Agnon’s text as passive and active, dangerous and beneficial, selfish and selfless. For now, though, since the exchange occurs within the capitalist system, a system intrinsically founded on debt, both giving and receiving the gift remains impossible. While receiving the gift is marked by fear and shame, giving the gift is transformed into an exhibition of social power. The gift is a result of calculation and exchange, and must always result in debt. Ironically, or perhaps ominously, it is a gift, revealed later as a curse in disguise, that seals the text’s first cycle of capitalist exchange and shifts the focus to the sphere of Jewish charity. The town’s rabbi gives a letter to Menasheh Hayim to help him raise more donations

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on his journey. It is this letter, which a desperate Menasheh Hayim later sells to the drunkard beggar, which will be used as the evidence for Menasheh Hayim’s “death.” A warning against such a letter as a dangerous object already appears in one of the Hebrew sources of And the Crooked, the Hasidic tale “The Good Oil.”43 In that tale, the rabbi refuses at first to give a letter to the protagonist because he says he has a premonition that this letter will bring the traveller to his downfall. Contrary to this direct warning in the Hasidic tale, Agnon’s text omits any direct commentary on the letter. This omission presents Menasheh Hayim in a more positive light, while also utilizing the tragic reversal of his fate as an element of surprise. In contrast to the didactic nature of the Hasidic tale, Agnon’s text is open to multiple evaluations and interpretations of Menasheh Hayim’s responsibility for his own fate. Avoiding any single judgment, the text raises the possibility of seeing Menasheh Hayim as a modern protagonist trapped in an impersonal economy that he cannot master. As such, the text focuses our attention on the nature of the letter itself as a poisoned gift, bringing to mind Mauss’s observation that “the Gift therefore at one and at the same time is what should be done, what should be received, and yet what is dangerous to take.”44 The Impossible Gift If the first cycle of Agnon’s text focused almost exclusively on the capitalist economy, which by nature excludes any true act of giving, the text’s shift to an exploration of the Jewish system of charity can be understood to mark a sense of hope. As opposed to the capitalist system governed by exchange, commerce, computation, and utilitarian logic, the Babylonin Talmud suggests at one point that charity (‫)צדקה‬ is equal in importance to all the other commandments combined. 45 Could this calculation offer something more substantial than the utilitarian capitalist calculation that governs the text’s first cycle? In the beginning of the second cycle, wherein Menasheh Hayim’s poverty makes him sin against God, we immediately encounter one of the main tropes that will define the workings of Jewish charity in the text, namely, decency. When Menasheh Hayim arrives at the first town, carrying the rabbi’s letter of “credit” vouching for his honesty, he meets a crowd of young yeshivah pupils at the synagogue who question him about the purpose of his visit. Menasheh Hayim

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mockingly answers that he is here to tell them about the origin of their names: “‘And why are you called ‘dead?’ . . . Maybe for leaving me, a decent guest (‫)אורח הגון‬, with no one to assist him, until his strength runs out and he dies of hunger.’ So said Menasheh Hayim and so he did in each and every place” (85). 46 In the most practical sense, one finds here Menasheh Hayim’s unique mode of operation in a community ridden with poverty. 47 Faced with brutal competition, Menasheh Hayim designates himself as a “guest,” not a “beggar,” in order to receive adequate hospitality. He succeeds, and throughout his wanderings people give him shelter, food, and occasionally even money in exchange for his commodities: his conversational skills, his fables, and his good humor. Menasheh Hayim’s emphasis on the term “decent guest” accentuates the economic aspect of charity as an act of exchange by quietly weaving into the text one of the most determinant factors in the distribution of Jewish charity. 48 As Elimelech Horowitz notes, the term “decent”—as a criterion distinguishing between people worthy or unworthy of receiving charity—already appears in the ancient period of the Babylonian Talmud. And, since the medieval period in Europe, Horowitz adds, there has been a proliferation in the usage of the term “indecent” to indicate not only immoral character, but also to refer to people who were foreigners and outsiders to the Jewish communities. This usage leads him to assert that in addition to the practical aggravation caused by rising pauperism, the perception of poor people as a threat and burden to society is deeply ingrained in Judaism. 49 Why should people give charity only to “decent” poor people? In the logic of the “Jewish gift economy” charity has the status of a commandment (‫)מצווה‬, which will be rewarded by God. In this calculation, therefore, the value of the act of charity depends on whether the one who needs help is worthy of help. This specific moment of calculation supports the general economic infrastructure of charity which becomes explicitly clear in a story Menasheh Hayim hears of one Reb Liber who generously welcomes a guest, giving him his own bed to sleep in. Explaining his generosity to the astonished guest, Reb Liber says: “Do you think that I am making your bed? It is mine I am making.” The narrator further explains: “He meant that he was making and preparing his own bed in the world to come” (89).

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Emphasizing this logic of exchange motivated by self-interest and reward, Reb Liber’s reply aligns the calculation of the “Jewish gift economy” with that characterized by the capitalist system in the first part of the text. In the capitalist system one invests in order to be rewarded in this life, and in the “Jewish gift economy” one invests in order to be rewarded in the afterlife; both systems offer a utilitarian logic of self-interest and profit. Still, should this charity motivated by exchange necessarily be negatively valued? The Maussian law of the gift-through-exchange, which even uses the Jewish charity system as a historical example, argues that this gift economy in fact promotes social and ethical bonds. Correspondingly, Menasheh Hayim’s experiences as he travels, and the stories he hears along the way, exhibit the Maussian law of the gift-through-exchange. No act of giving to people or to God takes place in the text without the calculation of future reciprocation. Even in Menasheh Hayim’s letter, the rabbi promises divine rewards to future donors for their generous giving. Within the discussion between Mauss and Derrida on the nature of the gift, Agnon’s text anticipates Derrida’s arguments in showing how economy annuls the gift, eroding the possibility of giving without reciprocation. Accordingly, the cycle of the text focused on the “Jewish gift economy” ends with the story of Rabbi Enzil and the beggar. In this story, before attending a charitable Sabbath dinner held by Rabbi Enzil for the poor members of the community, a beggar unknowingly calls the rabbi a miser to his face in a public bathhouse. In response, Rabbi Enzil advises the beggar to eat before supper so as not to rely on this infamous miser. Following this advice, the beggar walks into the trap, and a lengthy description ensues recounting his regret and suffering in face of the extravagant dinner that Rabbi Enzil has prepared for his revenge. This story within a story emphasizes the annihilation of the gift once it enters public exchange and social power relations. Working against Mauss’s claim that the gift is only possible through exchange, Menasheh Hayim’s begging only serves to set the gift in opposition to economy, under whose logic every gift becomes a future debt which can not always be repaid. For Agnon, once there is an economy of alms, a “Jewish gift economy” structured by rules, calculation, and exchange—be it even the gratitude and humility of the reciprocator—the system itself destroys the possibility of a true gift.

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The Letter, or, When Economies Break Down It is an act of commerce gone awry that seals the second cycle of the story, and, through the workings of the Jewish gift economy, brings Menasheh Hayim back to his hometown. Missing his wife dreadfully and lacking the money to travel, Menasheh Hayim decides to sell the rabbi’s letter to another beggar. In accordance with the narrator’s critical tone toward Menasheh Hayim’s behavior, many scholars see the selling of the letter as Menasheh Hayim’s tragic mistake, if not an outright sin: Menasheh Hayim’s subsequent actions and mishaps— his unsuccessful attempts to earn more money at a business fair, his spending spree and gluttonous binge, his waking up penniless after being robbed by his innkeeper—are all read as proof of his flawed character.50 However, Menasheh Hayim goes to the big market fair (‫ )היריד הגדול‬precisely because he wishes to return to his wife as an “honest” and a “respectable” merchant, and not as a “beggar.”51 Above all, moralistic judgments aside, what determines Menasheh Hayim’s actions is his continued cooperation with the various economies of debt in the text. What motivates his sale of the letter and his ensuing engagement in commerce is his lingering trust that both divine and monetary economies are established, in the end, on a profitable exchange. A product of his traditional religious millieu on the one hand, and of the emerging capitalist market on the other, Menasheh Hayim still puts his hopes in both the divine and the secular economy: “and now God, may he be blessed, is his helper . . . he will be able now to buy merchandise from the actual source [‫]המקור ממש‬, and just like people say: the one who falls and gets up, earns the chance to take another step.” (97). Still, the actual source, be it the market or be it God, fails Menasheh Hayim again, and this failed venture anticipates the all-encompassing crisis that will soon envelop him. The text now shifts focus to the letter found in the clothes of the dead beggar, leading to the rabbi’s public declaration of Menasheh Hayim’s death. The selling of the letter, the selling of the letters of “the name that is etched inside it” (95), triggers what will be the complete breakdown of trust in any system of signification operating within the text, be it religion, economy, or language.52 On returning to Buczacz, Menasheh Hayim learns what the reader already knows: he himself was declared dead, and, as a re-

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sult, Kreindel Tcharni has remarried and given birth to a son. Commenting on the impossibility of Menasheh Hayim’s return to his former life, Kurzweil observed the ironic opposition between this tragic return and the successful return of Odysseus, noting that both men are recognized upon their return home only by a dog.53 Another argument can be drawn from the comparison between these two figures: if Menasheh Hayim’s demise happens in the midst of the burgeoning capitalist order in Eastern Europe, Odysseus, following Adorno’s reading of the Odyssey, is no less the harbinger of capitalism. Marked by the rationality and calculation that enable his successful return, Odysseus becomes the prototype of the bourgeois capitalist who vanquishes all prior modes of thinking.54 Hoping for the same fate as the mythical Greek hero, Menasheh Hayim also fantasizes about a religious, economic, and familial recuperation. As he travels back to Buczacz, his thoughts center around the notion of the monetary debt: “he calculated how much money the dog’s owner owed him and how much he paid back . . . he swore not to neglect the claiming of debts as he used to” (118–19, emphasis added). Here, for the first time, the reader learns that Menasheh Hayim was not only indebted to others, but also that others were indebted to him. His deliberations point once again to the association between shame and financial impoverishment in Judaism. Menasheh Hayim is reminded that he was ashamed to collect debts from others in the past so as not to appear as a person in need. Now, however, after having begged for others’ money, he is no longer ashamed “to beg” for the return of his own. Picturing himself as once again respectable and wearing fine clothes, Menasheh Hayim fantasizes about a successful return that will establish him as an autonomous and self-reliant subject. On his return to Buczacz, then, Menasheh Hayim’s self-perception is still very much constituted by the demands of both the capitalist economy and the Jewish gift economy. Despite his unshaken trust, Menasheh Hayim’s return, unlike that of the cunning and fortunate Odysseus, does not usher in an era of a flourishing economy, calculable profit, or the reign of rationality, but the opposite. His return marks a literal and metaphorical economic crisis. Not only did his trust in monetary and divine economy fail him, but he must now also discover that the letter, and the letters of his name, signify much more than he can control or comprehend.

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The letter, the essence of a wandering text, wandered beyond his control. Its act of signification effects a doubling of Menasheh Hayim: the beggar with the letter who died, and the beggar without the letter who lives. The letter thus marks death where there is life and life where there is death.55 It is a gift that gives much more than was intended. In fact, it gives the opposite of what was intended: the gift becomes the harbinger of death. Like money and God, the letter becomes a determining force that cannot be trusted, though paradoxically its effect is based on trust itself. The letter in Agnon’s text thus becomes the final breaking point of economy, religion, and language, all of which can no longer be accredited. The logic of these systems’ movement and the intelligibility of their signification becomes opaque, and none of their signs, be they coins or letters, can be trusted. This extreme state of unintelligibility, of a break between signs and what they presume to signify, is already hinted at when Kreindel Tcharni stands at the empty store after their failed bargain, astonished by the fact that “her calculations and her eyes contradict one another, namely, the bill is the bill, but the store is still empty” (67). While it is the trust in bills, letters, coins, and texts—in short, in signs—that determines the events of Menasheh Hayim’s life, a trust in signs is no longer possible; one can no longer trust their “inherent” truth. This all-encompassing crisis of signification is foreshadowed in the beggar’s song Menasheh Hayim hears when he visits the fair: “I returned to the world of chaos [‫]תוהו‬/ And each door was closed for me” (99). The world of chaos symbolizes here the instability of any system of signification, in which the production, exchange, and consumption of signs becomes unintelligible, thereby leaving the modern Jewish subject with no coherent narrative through which he can grasp both his life and his looming death.56 It’s a Difficult Job, but Someone Has to Do It Menasheh Hayim’s discovery of his own death is preceded by an epigraph from the Book of Job: “For according to their deeds, he will repay them” (117).57 Taken from Elihu’s speech discrediting Job’s claim of innocence, the quotation draws a parallel between the Book of Job and And the Crooked as two texts that examine the economic infrastructure of faith, while relating it to the issue of innocent suffering.

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In other words, both texts interrogate the ways in which innocent suffering problematizes the perception of God as benevolent and just. Translated into economic terms, the Book of Job asks the question whether economy and faith necessarily share the same structure of a symmetrical exchange in which the righteous profit and the evil pay for their misdeeds. The idea of a just divine economy necessarily dictates that, whereas human virtue is exchanged for divine credit, human sins are exchanged for divine retribution. To refuse this theodicy, to acknowledge the existence of injustice and innocent suffering as both Job and Menasheh Hayim do, points to two possibilities. The first, advanced by Nietzsche, is the atheist solution. Faith in God collapses due to its inability to justify itself economically. This is why the mere analysis of the economic infrastructure of religious thought leads Nietzsche to think of God as an invention, as wishful thinking. Agnon, however, pursues a second option, utilizing Job precisely in order to recalibrate the symmetrical economic infrastructure of religious faith. Economic metaphors, analogies, and examples are abundant in Job. For Job’s friends, wealth is a gift from God, while poverty is God’s punishment. Eliphaz the Temanite claims, for instance, that the sinners “will not be rich and their wealth will not endure.”58 Consequently, though they contend that human knowledge is limited, and inferior to divine knowledge, Job’s friends insist that the relation between God and believers is one of a reciprocal and calculable exchange. Hence, if Job lost his fortune, he must be guilty. This is exactly the same symmetrical economic logic that guides some Agnon scholars when they so zealously seek out Menasheh Hayim’s sins, ascribing to him responsibility for his tragic fate. In opposition to these arguments, Job does not accept any theodicy that appropriates human suffering for a greater good. Yet, while Job sees that commensurable exchange does not exist, he still demands an explanation for his unjust suffering. Correspondingly, God’s response to Job focuses on the limits of human knowledge, but does not use human limitation to rationalize innocent suffering. This is why God harshly criticizes Job’s friends who chastised him under the assumption that divine economy operates on the basis of symmetrical exchange. In this sense, to trust in God’s divine economy as profitable is to justify human suffering. God himself undermines

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the idea of a just symmetry in his address, when he asks Job: “Where were you when I laid the foundations of the earth? Tell me if you have understanding. Who determined its measurements? Surely you must know!”59 (emphasis added). Here, God implies that no one knows the measurements—the criteria, as it were—for the economics of divine credit or retribution, or if such an economic system even exists. The book’s ending further undercuts the notion of a symmetrical divine economy, when “the Lord restored the fortunes of Job . . . and the Lord gave Job twice as much as he had before.”60 Throughout the Book of Job, God’s actions as creditor are unpredictable and unjustified. He first lets Satan abuse Job, taking away his children, his wealth, and his respectability, only to reward him at the end. In fact, this “happy” ending, this irrational compensation of an impossible doubling completely subverts the naïve idea of a just, transparent, and symmetrical economy. Twice as many herds as Job once had perhaps make economic sense, but can twenty new children truly compensate for Job’s ten dead ones? Job and Menasheh Hayim differ from one another in several respects. While Job “was blameless and upright,” Menasheh Hayim—at least according to Jewish law—has a few “sins” tucked away under his belt, namely, his refusal to divorce, the selling of his letter, his gluttony, and his decision not to trust completely in God. Secondly, whereas Job converses with and is even “rewarded” by the divine, Menasheh Hayim never hears the voice of God. And yet, as with Job’s sufferings, it is the sheer disproportion between any of Menasheh Hayim’s sins and his tragic end that strikes the reader as unjust and triggers our identification with him.61 Consequently, the differences between Menasheh Hayim’s tragic end and Job’s dubious rewards only highlight the same infrastructure of divine economy as crisisprone, opaque, and irrational from the perspective of the human subject who participates in it. Innocent suffering is just part of the job. Between Credit and Crisis Physically alive but legally dead, Menasheh Hayim begins the third cycle of the text in a state of social excommunication. As many scholars have noted before, Menasheh Hayim finds himself in an impossible bind. As a living dead man, he can resolve his excommunication by telling the truth. However, if he tells the truth Kreindel Tcharni

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will have to divorce her husband, and her son will be considered a bastard according to the rules of halakhah.62 Simply by living, Menasheh Hayim condemns Kreindel Tcharni to sin according to Jewish law; but, at the same time, Menasheh Hayim cannot commit suicide, for this too will make him a sinner.63 Already socially dead, Menasheh Hayim’s meditations on his religious “catch-22” take form as he wanders outside the town, ending up at the cemetery. The text thereby creates a separation between the two social spheres already explored—that of the capitalist monetary economy and that of the Jewish gift economy—and the isolated space of the cemetery, which exists outside of these economies of credit and debt. Prior to his arrival at the cemetery, Menasheh Hayim still draws a link between his faults, his guilt, and his feelings of shame before others and God. Despite the narrator’s suggestion that God is to blame—earlier he laments, “Master of the universe, you are just . . . but may what you have caused to happen here be the fate of all the enemies of the people of Israel” (83)—Menasheh Hayim shifts the blame for his misfortune from God onto himself, internalizing it as guilt and shame. His subsequent deliberation in favor of telling the truth goes as follows: “The sages said: whoever is ashamed of his sins is forgiven for his transgressions” (122). Guilt is thus engaged in a double exchange. While divine innocence is purchased at the cost of human guilt, this human guilt is later sold back to God for the price of forgiveness, making God either the savviest, or the most gullible businessman on earth. Menasheh Hayim’s deliberations further advance the text’s critique of the indebted religious subject as motivated by self-interest, calculation, reciprocal exchange, and foreseeable profit. The religious subject, according to Agnon, does not defy economy, but rather emerges from it. Still, while the religious subject is supposedly infinitely indebted to God, this infinite debt always awaits effacement under the horizon of a divine reward, based on the principle of trust. In this scheme of trust, where faith becomes simultaneously a debt to be paid off and a credit to be cashed in, how should we consider Menasheh Hayim’s death, which enables Kreindel Tcharni to live on? In its final section, the story progresses through a succession of exchanges which culminate in the exchange of Menasheh Hayim’s death for Kreindel Tcharni’s life. At first, Menasheh Hayim’s decision

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to keep silent allows him to exchange his torments for a fleeting “spirit of comfort.” Later, the guard of the cemetery, who senses Menasheh Hayim’s sorrow, tells him of a woman who came and bought a gravestone for a dead beggar. Realizing that this woman was Kreindel Tcharni, Menasheh Hayim reciprocates by recounting his story to the guard. Later, after Menasheh Hayim’s death, the guard, in exchange for the story, erects the gravestone over Menasheh Hayim’s true place of burial, “and gives him a name and a remainder in Israel” (127). This “name and remainder,” however, does not offer the reader a reaffirmed trust in a symmetrical and profitable divine economy or suggest the final ironic gesture of an atheist tragedy.64 Instead, the “name and remainder” in the text highlights Menasheh Hayim’s death as a gift of self-sacrifice, a gift given to his beloved in an asymmetrical exchange the results of which remain unknown for the subject who actively takes part in this ambiguous circulation. The Gift of Debt In thinking back to the sages’ claim that guilt can be exchanged for forgiveness, we should register that Menasheh Hayim’s decision to substitute his own life for Kreindel Tcharni’s life is an expression of his objection to the sages’ judgment. Defying their calculation, Menasheh Hayim wonders if it is really “forgiveness he desires, when Kreindel Tcharni is locked in hell?” (122). Menasheh Hayim understands that, according to the sages’ computation, he can indeed exchange his guilt for divine forgiveness, but at the cost of Kreindel Tcharni’s hope of a happy life. He thus rejects their calculation on a two-fold basis. First, Menasheh Hayim’s own experience repudiates the sages’ trust in a profitable divine economy, constituting it instead as irrational, asymmetrical, and destined for crisis. Second, the sages’ calculation of profit ignores Kreindel Tcharni’s potential suffering. As such, Menasheh Hayim’s choice of silence over and against Jewish formal ruling (against what he perceives to be the order of the divine) is propelled not by thoughts of divine credit, but by the thought of his wife’s suffering—of the other’s pain. It is only after making this decision to keep silent, only after defying the calculation of guilt and forgiveness, that Menasheh Hayim reaches the cemetery. The division drawn by the text between, on the one hand, the spheres of monetary and Jewish gift economy as based on a utilitar-

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ian economic logic, and, on the other hand, the sphere of the cemetery, which offers another type of calculation altogether, recalls the ethical philosophy of Emmanuel Levinas. In Otherwise than Being, Levinas opposes the ethical structure of the one-for-the-other—the subject’s extreme responsibility for the other within—to rational peace, which he equates with commerce. War as the preservation of self-interest, claims Levinas, is transformed into its opposite as peace; “but this rational peace . . . is calculation, mediation and politics. The struggle of each against all becomes exchange and commerce. . . . Interest is maintained by the future compensation.”65 In order to think beyond the utilitarian exchange between subjects in the state of peace-as-commerce, Levinas constructs subjectivity as the locus where otherness crosses the boundary of the self. Thus subjectivity, for Levinas, emerges through an initial openness to the other who already inhabits the self. In other words, Levinas does not see the subject as an autonomous being, first defined on its own terms and only later addressing the other as a separate entitity. Levinas grounds subjectivity in a primordial state of an originary relation between the self and other; this heterogeneous structure is what forms the subject to begin with.66 As a result, subjectivity is founded on the demand of the other-within-the-self to respond to and to be responsible before him. “The one-for-the-other is the foundation of a theory,” wherein the ethical structure of subjectivity is determined by providing for the other with one’s own substance.67 Strikingly, though Levinas opposes the relation of the onefor-the-other to commerce and exchange, he nonetheless still describes the ethical bond between the self and the other as a “debt.” Conceptualizing the response to the other as an original debt that cannot be paid off, Levinas writes: “This response answers before any freedom, and before any understanding, for a debt contracted before any freedom and before any consciousness and any present”68 (emphasis added). This original and infinite debt is what stands at the root of the relation between the self and the other. Through the understanding of Menasheh Hayim’s death as a Levinasian debt, And the Crooked becomes a narrative that traces the transformation of the meaning of debt and its relation to the emergence of the modern Jewish subject. In the first two cycles of the text, Menasheh Hayim is constituted as an indebted subject through

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his relationship both to God and to capitalism. Inseparable from the circulation of the monetary and divine economies, the text envisions the subject’s debt as an empty, or negative, space that corrodes subjectivity and economy from within. The text’s exposure of these economies as bankrupt is a critique of both the religiously indebted Jewish subject and its modern replacements—the subject of the early Haskalah with its unqualified indebtedness to universal rational economy, and even the Zionist subject. It was already in the early stages of twentieth-century Jewish nationalism that modern Hebrew literature replaced an exilic and passive Jewish religious martyrdom with the idea of an active and heroic sacrifice for the future nation.69 In the cemetery, however, Menasheh Hayim’s social excommunication results in his rejection of any debt to larger structures, whether God or emerging nation, and he becomes instead indebted solely to the real other: his wife. By refusing to exchange his guilt for divine forgiveness, Menasheh Hayim chooses instead to exchange his life for Kreindel Tcharni’s life, though his choice is in opposition to what he imagines as God’s demand: “and he kept his silence, and spared her . . . for if she had sinned, he would carry her sin” (122). While in the formal economies at work in the text debt is always a negative presence that negates any form of giving, Menasheh Hayim’s silence paradoxically functions as both debt and gift. His silence can be read as paying an infinite debt to the other, but, at the same time, this silence, which leads to his death, also becomes the “gift of flesh and blood” mentioned by Kreindel Tcharni earlier in the text. It becomes the gift of self-sacrifice, a giving up of one’s own flesh and blood, one’s own life, for the other. Foreshadowing his gift of self-sacrifice, Menasheh Hayim’s name in Hebrew in fact acts as a double paronomasia. In Hebrew the name “Menasheh” (‫ )מנשה‬derives from a root comprising both the verb “erased” and the noun for creditor. The word Hayim (‫ )חיים‬denotes life. As his name indicates, Menasheh Hayim erases his own life in order to exchange it for the life of his beloved. His act of giving transforms Menasheh Hayim from an indebted subject into a creditor, a giver of life. Above all, Menasheh Hayim’s self-sacrifice is a gift given not to God, and not in order to compel God to give something in return, but given to Kreindel Tcharni without her knowledge, and without expectation of recompense. In this respect, paying one’s debt

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to the real other, paying with one’s own life to save an/other life, is the only act of giving in the text that breaks away from the reciprocal exchange that annuls the gift. Read in this way, Agnon’s text indirectly serves as a critique (avant la lettre) of Derrida’s contemplations on the gift. While for Derrida, in both Given Time and The Gift of Death, debt as a negative term always effaces the possibility of the gift, Agnon’s text conceives of debt not only as the annulment of the gift, but also as the condition of the gift in itself, the gift of debt, as it were. Unlike the Hasidic tale in the story, Menasheh Hayim’s story constitutes divine economy as asymmetrical, impenetrable, and destined for an inevitable crisis. Still, in his own moment of crisis, Menasheh Hayim substitutes his own life for Kreindel Tcharni’s against what he knows to be the formal demand of God, but without renouncing his belief in God. Unlike Job, Menasheh Hayim never hears from God. Unlike Abraham, he receives no angels’ visit, and no sign. Yet, Menasheh Hayim still gives his own life for the sake of his beloved without a rejection of faith, without knowing in what light his silence will cast him, or Kreindel Tcharni, in the eyes of God. This is why he confesses to the guard that “even in the world of truth [the afterlife] he expects no rest” (127). Menasheh Hayim still believes in God, yet chooses to act against any formal demand that claims to represent the wishes of the divine. His rebellion is an act of faith, yet his faith is an act of rebellion. It is precisely because of this paradox that his silence can be a true gift. He gives without expecting reciprocation, not from God, and not from Kreindel Tcharni, who will never know of his gift.70 In fact, Menasheh Hayim’s silent gift is mirrored by Kreindel Tcharni’s purchase of the gravestone, which she aims to keep secret. Reflecting each other’s acts of giving without any horizon of reciprocation, Menasheh Hayim and Kreindel Tcharni break away from trust in either a divine or a monetary economy based on a utilitarian exchange. Both enter into an economy of love established on the asymmetrical exchange of paying an infinite debt to the real other, with no trust in or credit toward a future compensation. In this sense, our pious narrator should not be trusted when he asserts that Menasheh Hayim earned his divine reward of “a name and a remainder.” It is in this moment of giving back credit that the text collapses into itself: trust is restored, circulation recuperates, and

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any true gift is lost. Indeed, Menasheh Hayim’s self-sacrifice is enacted only after the text has shattered all trust in religion, economy, and language. The reader thus can never truly know if the crooked indeed became straight, as the title of Agnon’s story suggests.71 This is why Menasheh Hayim says to the guard right before his death: “As the Holy Sh’lh wrote: ‘Know, my sons, that the keys are given to man, and in that lies a hidden secret, for truly into the hands of man they are given, the external keys, and the inner keys’” (127).72 Reading Menasheh Hayim’s riddle, one realizes that what is given, the gift that is given to human beings by God, cannot be deciphered. On the one hand, Menasheh Hayim argues here that the keys to a person’s understanding of himself and of the world are given to him. On the other hand, what is given is a secret, which will remain hidden. Menasheh Hayim’s puzzling words thus construct divine economy as ambiguous, asymmetrical, and opaque, while entailing his own self-sacrifice as a gift, the existence and the results of which will remain a secret to both donor and recipient.73 Written in Palestine in 1911, and set in mid-nineteenth-century Galicia at a time of burgeoning modernity and nationalism, Agnon’s story imagines a modern Jewish subject who is constituted through the paying of an infinite debt to the real other, while expecting no divine reciprocation, no future reward, and no approval from any formal authority, ideology or economy.

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CHAPTER 2

TALKING THROUGH MONEY The first-person narrator of Agnon’s short story “And We Shall Not Fail” (“‫)”ולא ניכשל‬, published in 1937, begins his tale with a warning. A person should never change the customary liturgy (‫ )נוסח‬of his or her ancestors. This warning is immediately followed by a religious explanation: ever since biblical times, the twelve ancient tribes produced twelve different sets of prayers, each delivered to twelve heavenly gates. As a result, a person who changes the prayers of his ancestors “confuses” the gates. The narrator explains that recent generations have already been punished for confusing the prayers, hence creating chaos and altercations in heaven and on earth. Employing the kabbalistic notion of repair (‫)תיקון‬, the narrator adds that since then, the world has remained fragmented.1 In the second section of this story, however, the reader soon finds out that the narrator also contributes to this confusion, for he no longer prays the way his ancestors did. As a child, the narrator prayed with his father, using the customary liturgy of the Hasidic movement (‫)נוסח ספרד‬. When he started traveling back and forth between Europe and the land of Israel, however, he prayed in many variations according to the different congregations he lived with. Disguising this initial break in the narrator’s personal history, the text plays with the identical spelling in Hebrew of the plural form of the word “father” and the word “ancestors” (‫ )אבות‬in order to emphasize an idealized religious and familial continuity. However, as more and more variations of the prayers populate the text, this naïve spiritual account is undermined by a comically lengthy description of the now overwhelming number of these variations. In the midst of this inflation, the narrator emphasizes that, despite the many different ways that

48

he now recites the prayers, he always adheres to one of his father’s customs: in the blessing of sustenance he still adds the phrase “and we shall not fail” (‫ )ולא ניכשל‬after reciting the line “that we may never be ashamed or disgraced.” Surely then, we can understand the narrator’s aggravation when a guest, the daughter of a distinguished lineage of Ashkenazi rabbis, tells the narrator that his father’s version is wrong, for it does not appear in any prayer book. The narrator notes that after he indeed fails to find even one book containing the variation, “this woman said: ‘didn’t I tell you that these words are not part of the blessing?’ And when she said so, she looked at me like a person telling his friend: this coin (‫ )מטבע‬has been rejected.”2 As in “And We Shall Not Fail,” this imagery of words-as-coins is also featured in Agnon’s short story “The Sense of Smell” (“‫)”חוש הריח‬, published in the same year. In “The Sense of Smell,” the narrator qua writer defends his usage of the phrase “smelling hut” (‫)סוכה מריחה‬, which he uses to mean a hut that releases fragrance. However, as a begrudging grammarian tells the narrator, this phrase can also be understood to mean that the personified shelter actively engages in the act of smelling. The narrator, concerned about contributing to the desecration of Hebrew, worries that he “had done harm to the beauty of the language.”3 In the original, the term used to express the beauty of the language is the very common Hebrew metaphor ‫מטבע לשון‬, literally a “language-coin.” Keeping in mind this prevalent Hebrew metaphor, how should we understand the economic and linguistic implications of the imagery of words-as-coins found explicitly in Agnon’s fictional work since the mid-1930s? The Hebrew metaphor language-coin (‫ )מטבע לשון‬can be translated more idiomatically in English as the coining of a phrase. The relationship between money and language highlighted in both the Hebrew and English expressions is underscored in German as well, where the idiom “ein Modewort prägen” means to “mint an expression.” These different idioms all refer to the potentiality of metaphors, idioms, and figurative expressions to become so commonly used in everyday language that their meaning is automatically understood. We all know, for example, that when a friend tells us that the woman he kissed last night had lips like roses, he means that her lips were soft and bright red, but not that her kiss felt thorny because of her three-day stubble.

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Language-coins—the coinage of expression—therefore points to the fact that metaphors become recognizable and thus exchangeable through their circulation in language. In this sense, to coin a phrase becomes the metaphor of dead metaphors: a figurative expression, the metaphorical character of which has been forgotten due to popular use. Moreover, by bringing together the monetary and the linguistic fields, the coinage of phrases becomes the metaphor that exposes the nature of all metaphors, even of all languages. It underscores how words attain their value—as both meaning and signification—only through circulation, thus bringing to the fore Ferdinand de Saussure’s understanding of language as a social institution, a system of signs in which meaning, recognition, value, and signification are determined only through a community of speakers. 4 Saussure’s radical conceptualization of language as an economic structure is indebted to both Karl Marx and Georg Simmel’s structural approaches to monetary economy and language. While already in 1867 Karl Marx highlighted in Capital that the value of a commodity can only be expressed through another commodity, it was Georg Simmel who later claimed in his seminal work The Philosophy of Money (1900) that linguistic values, just like monetary values, are always contextual.5 Influenced by the implications of these works, Saussure’s Course in General Linguistics (1916) analyses language as an impersonal system in which signifiers act like currency, acquiring their meaning (signified value) only through their relation to other signifiers, not through relation to any fixed truth or external referent. To follow Saussure then, if one’s words or coins are not recognized by a community, they have no value of their own. The narrators in Agnon’s “And We Shall Not Fail” and “The Sense of Smell” are thus afraid both to discover that their words will not be accepted as valid coins by their communities, and—even more alarming—that they will not be accepted by God. In the specific case of “And We Shall Not Fail,” the guest’s metaphor of words-as-coins reconfigures the narrator’s structure of twelve tribes, twelve prayers, and twelve heavenly gates into a reciprocal economy that operates smoothly on the basis of the production, distribution, and consumption of valid coins, i.e., customary and verified liturgy. To utter an incorrect phrase while praying amounts to paying with a counterfeit coin. In the text, these coins, these sacred texts and words, are stamped with the father’s

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name and the ancestors’ legacy. Consequently, to use a counterfeit coin would mean not only to undermine the father’s name, but to also trigger— to use Anne Golomb Hoffman’s observation—the narrator’s exclusion from his ancestors’ world, a world of sacred language. As Golomb Hoffman shows, Agnon’s writing about writing is marked by an incessant movement between two opposing concepts of language. The first, in line with Jewish rabbinic texts, describes Hebrew as a sacred language from which the world itself was formed. The idea of the elevated and unique status of Hebrew as a holy language spoken by God and embodying divine wisdom has existed in Judaism in different forms for nearly two thousand years.6 In contrast, the second concept describes Hebrew just as any other conventional language, a system of signification in which the relationship between signifier and signified is “arbitrary and unmotivated,” to use Saussurian terminology. Here, words attain their meaning through social circulation, not through reference to any extra-lingual referent, truth, or divine wisdom.7 Put in economic terms, the narrators of “And We Shall Not Fail” and “The Sense of Smell” are afraid of possibly participating in the devaluation of Hebrew language. Both are concerned that the specific words they use will be exposed as false— as counterfeit coins, devoid of any inherent relation to the divine. Having accused the narrator of “And We Shall Not Fail” of precisely such religious-linguistic crimes, the rabbi’s daughter later sends the narrator a book about Jewish superstitions, implying once again that his prayer, including his father’s two words, is nothing but a counterfeit coin. When the narrator receives this “poisoned gift,” he has an urge to respond with a sarcastic note stating that, according to one opinion, all the customs that do not appear in the Shulchan Arukh are considered superstitions.8 Although the narrator is being sarcastic, his imagined note smuggles into the text a historical perception of the development of authoritative religious texts that subverts his own naïve view of the eternal and continuous character of the Jewish religion and Hebrew language, as expressed in the first section. The narrator, however, refrains from replying, or from repaying, due to his “difficulty in writing letters.” Just as in “The Sense of Smell,” where the narrator finally asserts his correct usage of language through reference to the dream of the sages, the narrator of “And We Shall Not Fail” also finds his justi-

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fication in a miraculous incident. On the day commemorating his father’s death, the narrator happens to find a prayer book that does contain his father’s variation. Seeing this, the narrator comments: “And the letters came to me and said: ‘now you see that your father’s words can be trusted.’”9 Forgetting all of a sudden his difficulty in writing letters, the narrator sends the small prayer book to the rabbi’s daughter as a “gift,” marking in red the controversial words. The narrator confirms his victory when he is invited to the woman’s wedding in Jerusalem, where she shows him his book, now bound with precious stones. Thanking the narrator, the woman says that his book saved her; she was about to marry a non-Jew, yet when she opened the prayer book and saw the words “And we shall not fail,” she married her Jewish childhood love instead, and immigrated to the land of Israel. Completing a full circle, the narrator concludes the story by saying that the sages were right: if two words saved a Jewish soul, think how many Jewish souls would not have perished if all of Israel refused to change their ancestors’ customs. The story thus intertwines the continuation of sacred language as it literally constitutes the world with the fulfillment of God’s promise of a national redemption.10 In both “The Sense of Smell” and “And We Shall Not Fail,” sacred words and texts are at risk of being exposed as counterfeit coins. Though in both stories the narrators succeed in proving themselves right, and thus ensuring their access to the sacred language, it is the text’s “very self-consciousness about language” that maintains the tension between the perception of Modern Hebrew as a holy language and as a conventional one.11 This tension becomes highly ironic in “And We Shall Not Fail,” where the salvation of a Jewish soul is brought about not necessarily by the sacred words of a prayer, but rather by a petty exchange of books orchestrated by a narrator mostly preoccupied with proving that he is in the right. At the same time, the immediate identification of the father’s prayers with the ancestors’ prayers is dubious at best, considering that the father belongs to the Hasidic movement that originated in mid-eighteenth-century eastern Poland, and which has in fact created a deep rift within institutional Judaism.12 Above all, what undermines the triumphant realization of the two narrators’ fantasies of sacred language is precisely the imagery of words-as-coins. What is really at stake here is the very notion

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of Hebrew as an eternal sacred language, which is threatened not so much by the imagery of false words as counterfeit coins, but by the possibility that all words actually do function as currency. Meeting Another Guest In order to fully explore this possibility, I turn my attention now to Agnon’s modernist novel A Guest for the Night (‫)אורח נטה ללון‬, first published in 1939. In this novel—inspired by the author’s visit to his hometown of Buczacz in 1930—Agnon’s exploration of money’s crucial role in the formation of modern Jewish identity, and its effects on Judaism, receives its most complicated account. During his visit to Buczacz, Agnon was haunted by the severe economic situation of Eastern European Jewry, which had been worsened by the longlasting effects of World War I and the hyperinflation that later inflicted Poland’s economy.13 In several letters written during the visit, Agnon repeatedly describes the horrors of the poverty he found in Buczacz, horrors that will later become a dominant theme in A Guest for the Night. In one of these letters, Agnon writes: “Never did I imagine such poverty, blessed be God that he delivered me from the diaspora to Israel.”14 However, in contrast to the profound trust in God expressed in the letter, A Guest for the Night, written years after the author’s visit, undermines trust in both Judaism and in Zionism by presenting money as possessing both material and symbolic significations.15 In classical economic theory, money is any object or material that functions as a medium of exchange, a store of value, a measure of value, and a means of payment.16 Elaborating on these different and at times contrasting functions of money, Marx underscores that, in capitalist economy, money is not only a means of circulation, but in fact becomes the final purpose of capitalist production, i.e., the accumulation of moneyed wealth. While in Capital Marx refers mostly to the gold standard common in his lifetime, he highlights that the value of money, be it in the form of metal coins, paper notes, or credit, is always determined by the community, the state, or the law. For Marx, the value of money in circulation is decided by its symbolic function, not by any actual material worth.17 Marx’s theory of money is at least partially indebted to Aristotle, who was the first to formulate the tension in the character of money in Politics, where he presents two conflicting views of coins.18

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Focusing first on the direct relationship between the metal and its intrinsic worth, and then on coinage as a purely human convention, Aristotle distinguishes between two different conceptions of money. In the first, money possesses a positive essentialism as it is incorporated under household management (oikonomia), which for Aristotle forms the natural unit of economy. By focusing on the household, Aristotle attempts to limit the acquisition of money, and, at the same time, to limit money’s ability to stand in for the goods necessary for the family. In Aristotle’s second conception, money is viewed as a negative symbolic human convention. Using the double meaning of the Greek word tokos—both interest and offspring—Aristotle argues that commerce and usury oppose nature by allowing money to be exchanged endlessly with itself. For Aristotle, in the unnatural exchange of commerce and usury, the offspring is unnaturally equivalent to the parent; it is a sign that signifies nothing but itself. Money thus possesses the dangerous potential to change from a means to an end. Put in Marxist terms, money is transformed from a medium of exchange to the sole aim of capitalist production. Therefore, in Aristotle’s view, commerce and, above all, usury are unnatural, limitless, and immoral. Aristotle’s condemnation of usury and commerce was incorporated into Christian teachings, and from the early medieval period contributed heavily to the active casting of Jews in Europe into the professions of commerce, trade, and usury.19 As in classical Greek philosophy, early Jewish rabbinic thought was acutely aware of both the essentialist and the symbolic aspects of money. Contrary to Aristotle though, the sages did not view the symbolic function of money in a negative light. The monetary theories of the Mishnah and the Talmud include the sages’ acknowledgment that “the value of the coin has two components—a commodity component based on the intrinsic worth of the metal, and a fiat component, dependent on government decision.”20 Indeed, the corpuses of the Jerusalem and Babylonian Talmuds, developed under the Roman and the Sasanian empires respectively, show that early rabbinic literature expressed a sophisticated conceptualization of coins and coinage. The sages routinely underscored the “symbolic” government stamp, and not the “intrinsic” metallic nature, as the decisive element in determining the value of money. While fully aware of the symbolic nature of currency, early rabbinic literature did not view money, usu-

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ry, or commerce as unnatural, as long as these were subjugated and secondary to the religious sphere.21 Still, as I have shown in the previous chapter, the early rabbinic condoning of money and commerce was not shared by many later branches of Eastern European Judaism, which promoted poverty as an ideal, and renounced all material preoccupations in the name of complete devotion to religious studies. Set in Poland in the 1930s, A Guest for the Night is a first-person narrative detailing the lengthy visit of a guest—who shares many biographical details with Agnon—to his hometown, Shibush.22 Returning to Shibush on the eve of Yom Kippur (the Day of Atonement), the guest receives the key to the house of study (‫)בית מדרש‬ from the townspeople, who proclaim that they are leaving due to recurring pogroms and severe poverty. In the accusatory words of Elimelech Kaiser, “We are leaving this place (‫ )המקום‬because he whose place is on high has left us, though he has not left us any peace.”23 Taking on the role of key-holder in place of those who accuse God for their suffering, the guest quickly comes to regard the key as the symbol of a sacred calling to restore the house of study to its status as the vital center of Torah study it was in his youth.24 The guest’s continuing efforts at revival, however, are, in the words of Baruch Kurzweil, no more than “artistic fiction.” They are destined to fail because the key may literally open the door to the house of study, but the world it symbolizes—the naïve childhood of trust and sacredness—is long gone, destroyed by time and the horrors of World War I.25 It is not only the destructive passage of time, however, that subverts the guest’s various artistic fictions. What further undermines these fictions from their very beginning is the dual role that money and monetary economy play in their constitution. Significantly, money operates in Agnon’s complex novel both as a sign of material conditions and also as Saussure’s “arbitrary and unmotivated sign.” Each of these conceptualizations of money threatens the guest’s fantasies of revival in a different way. In what follows, my reading of A Guest for the Night is divided into two parts. The first part investigates money in its immediate relation to material existence. Both a Zionist and a pious devotee, the guest’s attempts at renewal introduce contradicting perceptions of Jewish economy vis-à-vis the decayed condition of his hometown. While the narrator entertains messianic fantasies that completely negate the material reality of the townspeo-

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ple, other characters in the novel question, subvert, and ridicule the guest’s money-less and body-less ideals. As a result, money becomes the symbol par excellence of material conditions that stand in opposition to abstract ideologies claiming to surpass those conditions. At the same time, however, the novel also presents money as nothing but “a sign of a sign,” an abstract stand-in that can be exchanged for anything. Consequently, the second part of my reading analyzes the symbolic function of money as an arbitrary sign that thwarts the claim to truth of any other semiotic system. While the guest perceives Hebrew, one system of signification, as an ideal and eternal sacred language, the transformation of money into an all-encompassing and self-enclosed system of signification (an end in itself, to recall Aristotle) threatens the guest above all. Hence, A Guest for the Night becomes a textual battleground between sacred language and money: two different systems of signification struggling over the definition of value. This struggle unfolds both on the level of action and the level of discourse. While the conflict is acted out in the plot, the nature of the conflict is semiotic. In this sense, the determination of the nature, value, and relationships between money, language, and writing as semiotic systems affects not only the representation of texts within the novel, but also the way we interpret the novel itself. The Cost of Flesh: When God Becomes a Debtor From the beginning of the novel, the guest’s spiritual mission of restoration is embedded in the two-fold context of monetary and divine economy.26 Already on the first evening of his return, the guest is struck by the poverty and desolation of Shibush’s streets and residents: “Every house, every ruin, every heap of rubbish caught my eye and held me . . . Nothing was as I had seen it when I was little” (8;3). Though he constantly records the signs of poverty surrounding him, when the guest sees the “scanty” clothes of the congregants reading the Torah in the house of study, he comments that these people are “not of the kind that deserves this honor,” and asks himself, “Had they bought the honor with generous donations (‫( ”?)דמים‬14;9). The translation here fails to transmit the charged and ironic play of meanings conjured in the original sentence. In the Hebrew text, the narrator uses the word ‫דמים‬, which in Modern Hebrew denotes either money or blood.27 The appearance of ‫ דמים‬in Agnon’s novel thus

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joins together blood—as body, as life—and money as two mediums of exchange in the circulation of divine economy.28 Ironically, the more well-to-do guest wonders ungenerously if the poor congregants paid money (‫ )דמים‬for the honor of reading the Torah, without yet realizing that this honor was paid for with blood (‫—)דמים‬with one’s own life. The conflict between a rejection of, or participation in, the doubled currency (of blood and money) of divine economy is precisely what stands at the center of the first argument between Elimelech Kaiser and the guest in the house of study. Attacking the guest for his implied criticism, Kaiser bluntly accuses him of being one of “these tourists that stay in fine great cities . . . and tell us to stay . . . where our fathers prayed so we can have the privilege of dying as holy martyrs and thereby win the world’s praises by showing what fine people the Jews are who willingly accept suffering and die for the glory of God” (18; 13). Elimelech ends his attack by pointing out that none of the people fasting in the house of study “knows what he’ll break his fast with” (19; 14). Targeting both martyrdom and poverty, Kaiser’s response plays again on the double meaning of the word ‫דמים‬, highlighting divine economy as a ruthless exchange that demands the payment of both body and money, yet gives back nothing in return. Though the guest refrains from replying to the angry Kaiser out of respect for the people’s hardships, he still tacitly critiques the town, thinking: “perhaps they had no intention to pray, because they did not believe in the power of prayers or their reward (‫( ”)שכר‬21; 17). True to Kaiser’s accusations, in setting the act of praying in the framework of a symmetrical and profitable economic exchange, the guest positions himself as the agent of the principle of trust in divine economy. In contrast to the townspeople, the guest still accepts the sacrifice of the body, and of life itself, as a religious ideal. For him, the body is a valid and valued coin in the circulation of divine economy, predicated on human debt and divine reward. In accordance with this view, the guest later turns the house of study into a semi-shrine for historical examples of Jewish martyrs.29 The guest’s construction of the body as a worthy investment corroborates Yael Feldman’s claim that the guest adheres to the perception of Jewish “martyric tradition” as “a source of higher knowledge.” Accepting the trade between pain and knowledge through the payment of flesh, the guest still views martyrdom as noble.30

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A Guest for the Night is thus a continuation of Agnon’s interrogation of the divine economy in Jewish tradition which began in And the Crooked. Whereas Menasheh Hayim’s self-sacrifice for Kreindel Tcharni (the “gift of flesh and blood”) simultaneously critiqued trust in a profitable divine economy while maintaining the possibility of faith as an asymmetrical and impenetrable exchange between God and humanity, Agnon’s later novel examines divine economy precisely on the basis of the unjust sacrifice of one’s life. The attack culminates early on in the novel in the chapter titled “Between Father and Son,” which details an argument between Reb Shlomo and his son Daniel Bach, whose wooden leg came from “the same source as all the other troubles: from the things Jews have to do for a living. . . . [T] he angel in charge of livelihood did not find me right with two legs, so he cut one off” (10; 4). Bach’s explanation targets livelihood, but also God (who is in charge of livelihood) as the reasons for his missing leg. Explaining why he no longer observes religious practices, Bach tells the guest how, after a severe bombing in the trenches of World War I, he reached for his phylacteries and discovered them strapped to the arm of a corpse lying in a mass grave.31 Opposing both the guest’s and his own father’s theodicy, Daniel Bach says: A man can bind himself to the altar and give up his life for the glory of God. . . . With his dying breath he can pronounce the confessions of faith . . . like the great Rabbi Akiva in his torment, until his soul departs. But to be bound every day, every hour, every moment, on seven altars, to have one limb consumed today and tomorrow another—that is something not every man can stand. I’m only a human being of flesh and blood, and when my flesh rots and my blood stinks, my lips cannot utter the praises of the Almighty. And if I do utter his praises, is it to the glory of God if a lump of rotting flesh or a skinful of stinking blood cries out: “Thou have been righteous, no matter what befalls me, I have been wicked”? (37; 34, emphasis added).

Bach’s powerful attack is precisely set against the impossible and asymmetrical exchange demanded in the name of divine economy, exemplified in its extreme by the martyric tradition. Underscoring the discrepancy between flesh and spirit, Bach’s speech undermines the hierarchy of values that posits the suffering of the flesh as secondary to the importance of a transcendent trust. The payments the

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flesh must make in the workings of divine economy, states Bach, are simply too high. Bach’s direct protest is later amplified by Leibtche Bodenhaus’s striking monologue toward the novel’s end which tells the story of a soldier so severely wounded he no longer looks human. This soldier, who “lost his limbs and had nothing left of his face,” was treated by a doctor who tried to transform him back into the image of man (himself made in the image of God). As in Bach’s monologue, which focuses on the tortured mouth that can not utter God’s praises, Leibtche’s doctor invests much time in “sewing” and “gluing” the mouth of the poor soldier. Still, when the soldier is shipped with Leibtche to hospital, a German lieutenant takes him off the ambulance, leaving him to die in the middle of the road. Framing this story in a discussion of Spinoza, Leibtche claims that he cannot comprehend what the great philosopher meant when he taught us not to weep, but only to understand. In a chapter titled “A Great Principle of Philosophy,” Leibtche presents an analogy between “sublime” philosophy and Judaism in their parallel demand to sacrifice the body in exchange for a complete trust in God or in God’s modern replacement: reason. Though Leibtche says he means no “impudence against Heaven,” he points, just like Bach, to a breach between corporeality and philosophy or religion, stating that “this heart is a heart of flesh, it has not reached the heights of philosophy yet, it suffers and weeps and sometimes it brings up ideas that are foreign to philosophy” (381–82; 408, emphasis added). Both Leibtche and Bach focus, therefore, on the materiality of fleeting flesh as “foreign” to the abstract and eternal ideals of religion and philosophy. Both speeches undermine the foundations of divine economy in its impossible demand for payment with one’s life. The mouth designed to glorify God emits cries of suffering instead, its materiality foreign to the symbolic trade. The flesh as a transient substance is an inadequate coin to be exchanged for a future divine reward, which never arrives, and will never compensate for the flesh’s torments. Defending his trust in divine economy, the guest responds to Bach with a fable about a Jew who lost his whole family on the way to the land of Israel. Yet, he admits to Bach that he does not know how this fable of Jewish martyrdom ends. When the guest simply

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makes up a happy ending, Bach replies by recalling the Book of Job: “I see no recompense in that. Job, who never existed and was only a parable, was consoled for the death of his wife and children . . . but I doubt whether a living man would accept such consolation” (39; 36). Significantly, Bach’s dismissal undermines the guest’s theodicy by using an argument about literary representation. He emphasizes a break in the relationship between texts and the world. Literature, even religious texts, cannot faithfully represent the world. Whatever “happens” in religious writings cannot be substituted for real life. Therefore, it does not even matter if Job was compensated by God or not. In the real world, no divine reward could compensate for the payment with one’s life. In this sense, literature is nothing but a counterfeit coin.32 Bach and Leibtche often specifically refer to the tragedies of World War I, and the violent reality of war haunts the townspeople for years after its end. In Leibtche’s words: “If an hour has passed by without my remembering it [the war], I feel a kindness has been done to me” (382; 408). The charges made in these two speeches appear over and over throughout the novel in an overwhelming succession of war stories, such as those told by Mrs. Zommer and Fridah the Kaiserin, among many other characters. Their harrowing tales of rape, murder, and poverty not only call into question the cost and the reward of martyrdom, but also recall past pogroms previously mentioned in the novel. As a result, A Guest for the Night constitutes Jewish history not as a linear progression, but as a circular and repetitive violent occurrence. Working against the guest’s religious perception of martyrdom, Bach turns Nietzsche’s concept of God as creditor on its head: no longer the infinitely indebted subject expecting a reward, certainly no Menasheh Hayim who renounces human calculation and divine reward, Bach refuses to “pay” his share. Just as in Bialik’s 1903 poem “In the City of Slaughter” (“‫)”בעיר ההרגה‬, which imagines God as bankrupt after the Kishinev pogrom, Agnon’s Daniel Bach displaces God from the position of the Nietzschean all powerful creditor to that of an unreliable debtor who, after World War I, becomes accountable for the poor state of his congregation.33 Imagining God-as-debtor triggers a reading of the guest’s relationship with Hanokh the wagoner as the ironic mirroring of the relationship between God and the naïve believer. When the guest hires

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Hanokh to bring wood for the house of study, he wants to pay him generously, yet comments, “at first I wanted to give him the whole purse, but when I had taken it out, I changed my mind and gave him a small coin” (108–9; 111). Instead of giving him more money, the guest tells Hanokh about the wonders of the Holy Land given in exchange for the Jews’ trust in God. Yet even before Hanokh’s disappearance in the snow, the guest wonders if he should have given him a larger and fixed salary, saying: “And when my own heart says to me: Fix his wages . . . so that he should not imperil his life on the roads, I put my heart on hold from today to tomorrow” (130; 135). After Hanokh’s death, the guest is haunted by recurring dreams of Hanokh’s spirit, implicating the guest in his death. In this subplot, the guest unwittingly occupies God’s position. His unfulfilled promises of a reward combined with his restriction of Hanokh’s actual livelihood lead the poor and naïve wagoner straight to his death.34 Contaminated Money I: Economic Crisis/Religious Restoration The guest’s wish to efface the suffering of the flesh from the divine economy runs parallel to his wish to exclude money from the divine sphere. Aligning the body with money, the guest desires to ignore the importance of material conditions in the preservation of trust. Remembering Daniel Bach’s explanation of the loss of his leg, for example, the guest omits Bach’s targeting of God as the “cutter of limbs,” and only blames the pursuit of money for Bach’s accident, thinking: “So long as he [Daniel Bach] was in the line of battle he was sound of limb, when he took the burden of earning a living he lost his leg” (30; 26). Even when the narrator finally leaves Shibush, he looks at Bach “standing on his artificial leg, which he owed to his ignominious trade in this exile” (433; 464, emphasis added). By reading the guest’s contempt for money as an essential part of his artistic fiction of religious restoration we may place him in the lineage of Agnon’s most pious narrators, such as those in And the Crooked, The Bridal Canopy, and In the Heart of the Seas (‫)בלבב הימים‬. Though the narrative of A Guest for the Night takes place after World War I, the guest’s religious perceptions are still guided by the ideal of a complete devotion to religious studies based on the exclusion of money and economic pursuits. While much of Jewish

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tradition legitimated economic activity in accordance with biblical perceptions of wealth as God’s gift, ascetic notions of self-denial nevertheless existed at various points in Jewish history, beginning already with rabbinic Judaism. Based on the utilitarian exchange of ascetic behavior in this world for divine rewards in the world to come, Eliezer Diamond demonstrates how these “incidental, instrumental and essential” forms of asceticism were at least partly responsible for the development of later ascetic factions in rabbinical and Hasidic Judaism in medieval times and modernity.35 This ascetic approach may have formed also in part as a result of Judaism’s dialectical relationship with Christianity, which saw usury, commerce, and money as contaminated and opposed to the divine sphere.36 It is precisely because of this ingrained opposition between money and religion in the ascetic strains of Judaism that the guest imagines the people’s arrival at the house of study as a decisive moment in which the high religious sphere triumphs over the lowly economic and material sphere. The guest states that “sometimes a Jew comes from the market . . . but when time has come for the afternoon prayer, he has left his trading. Though perhaps just when he is standing in the house of study a person might have come and let him earn a copper, still he left all his affairs and came in to pray” (115; 118). Much later in the novel, when winter has passed and the people stop coming to the house of study, the guest once again uses economic reasons to explain their absence, detailing for the length of a page all the mercantile activities—such as the trading of tobacco, textiles, and groceries—which prevent them from coming back to pray (274; 294). Ironically though, while the guest pretends that the gathering in the religious realm of the house of study surpasses material needs and economic pursuits, he remains semi-conscious of the fact that only after he hires Hanokh the wagoner to bring wood to the house of study do people start to show up, not so much for the books as for the heat. Even when reminiscing about the town’s glorious days in the past, times of peace when “everyone’s livelihood flew straight into his house,” the guest sees money as a threat to the religious sphere. In his memories, socialist-inclined and moderately religious Jewish teachers forsook their education and faith in order to become merchants by marrying rich merchants’ daughters, “for great is the power of

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money” (47; 45). Not only in its lack, but also in its abundance, money has a dangerous and contaminating power. It moves by the force of seduction. Aristotle’s warning that wealth can easily transform from a means into an end, thus distracting one from true virtue, anticipates ascetic factions within rabbinical and Hasidic authorities that condemned economic pursuits in this world, which is only a corridor (‫ )פרוזדור‬to the true privileges of the afterlife.37 In this vein, while prominent figures in the Hasidic movement, such as Rabbi Abraham Ben Dov Bar and Rabbi Nahman of Breslov, preached the great religious value of abstinence, among rabbinical authorities, the eighteenth-century Gaon of Vilna, known for his ascetic piety, is rumored to have said that a man who craves money cannot attain the crown of the Torah. His follower, the maggid Hillel ben Zev, targeted greed and material acquisition as the main causes for all the religious, social and national ills of his time.38 Despite the differences between these philosophical and theological arguments, what is common to both approaches is the understanding of money as a poor substitution for what is truthful and eternal. In each approach, this substitution possesses the power to become an end in itself. Following these lines, the guest’s memories of the town’s time of prosperity become ambivalent. Even in this transient moment of harmony between the religious and the economic realms lies money’s seductive power to lure one from a righteous path. This general history of the contamination of the religious sphere by the economic one becomes a personal biography when the guest discloses that his historical narrative also describes the life of the hotel owner, Mr. Zommer, who was once a teacher but married the daughter of a merchant. The historical account hits closer to home later in the novel when we discover that the guest’s father also became a merchant instead of a rabbi, and hoped that his son would “repair” (again, a conjugation of ‫ )לתקן‬his own past mistakes by himself becoming a rabbi. The guest, however, has become a writer. The guest’s contempt for money is thus explained in the intersection of a personalbiographical axis on the one hand, and a religious-historical one on the other. The rejection of money is justified not only by religious reasoning but also by psychological motivations. The negation of money becomes the son’s inheritance and the compensation for his guilt.

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The guest’s understanding of money as only a worthless substitution becomes evident also in his relationship with Ignatz, the town beggar, who, after losing his nose in the war, has three holes in his face that “shine” like coins (29; 26). The relationship between the two serves as a continuation of Agnon’s critique of the Jewish gift economy, which appeared already in And the Crooked as a system of exchange motivated by self-interest and calculation.39 Though the guest constantly gives money to Ignatz, he is always worried that Ignatz is a “dishonest” poor person, which might render his own donation worthless in God’s eyes. In addition, in a grotesque moment, the guest explains that Ignatz is the most “successful” of all the disfigured beggars of Shibush precisely because of his special deformity: while hand-less beggars cannot reach out with their hands for money and leg-less beggars cannot chase you down the street, Ignatz “runs after you looking at you with the three holes in his face, crying pieniadze (money); immediately you throw him a copper, if only so that he should not look at you” (119; 122). The guest, therefore, uncovers the self-interest and calculation behind monetary donations, and exposes them as a cynical strategy masking disgust for the other’s deformed figure. Monetary donations become a sign of distance from the other, rather than care for the other. The guest’s cynicism regarding the effectiveness of moneyed charity becomes clearer later in the novel. Waiting for a train to bring oranges from the land of Israel, the guest asserts that monetary donations are in fact useless substitutions for real action and genuine care. Thinking of the monetary help given to Shibush after the war, the guest comments that “charitable funds have no strength.” He then distinguishes between the actual charity that makes your “brethren’s troubles your own,” and the monetary donations accomplished when “a rich man . . . throws a penny to a poor man,” which only lowers a poor man’s spirit, and leaves the rich man’s “brethren” poor (200– 201; 214). 40 At the same time, in the context of Agnon’s novel these thoughts also shed an ironic light on the guest. The worthless giving of money is in fact what is most characteristic of the guest’s relationship to the entire town. When the guest asks Ignatz what he truly thinks of the townspeople, Ignatz replies with no hesitation: “They’re all beggars, everyone” (320; 343). In this instant, Ignatz’s deformed and grotesque figure (arousing both sympathy and disgust) becomes

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a synecdoche for the entire town of Shibush, filled with poor and broken bodies, such as Bach’s with his wooden leg and Rubbervitch’s with his rubber hand. The guest associates these artificial or missing limbs with the pursuit of money through begging and trading. On his first night visiting the town, the guest says: “This night I shall know no sleep: Rubbervitch’s hand or Bach’s foot will come to terrify me” (13; 8). Later in the novel, just before his final departure from the town, the guest comments again that Bach lost his foot as a result of his “ignominious trade.” Both money and artificial limbs, for the guest, represent man-made, inferior substitutions that oppose God’s authentic creations. The terrifying intertwining of artificial limbs with money comes to life in the vision of Schutzling, the anarchist-turnedmerchant who predicts that “in the future, all creatures will hobble with their artificial legs and gesticulate with their rubber hands and cry through their noses pieniadze, pieniadze (money, money)” (317; 340). In this apocalyptic image, artificial limbs and money together form a secular economy of substitutions, devoid of any relation to the eternal and sacred sphere. As such, Schutzling’s vision serves as a monstrous embodiment of what Georg Simmel famously termed in 1900 “the metaphysical quality of money.” According to Simmel, money, the major function of which is to facilitate exchange, becomes in capitalism “exchangeability personified.” In an all-pervasive monetary economy, money’s potential to be exchanged for other objects and vice versa creates an accelerated process in which “money increasingly becomes nothing but money,” turning all other objects into money as well. 41 Ironically, while the guest effaces the importance of the monetary sphere, he nonetheless engages with the townspeople almost exclusively through monetary exchange: the restoration of the house of study with the help of money, the buying of the book Hands of Moses in order to secretly help a poor widow, and the payment of salaries to Hanokh and Reb Hayim are only a few examples. Consequently, the guest’s monetary relationship to the deformed Ignatz becomes analogous to his support of and exchange with many of the poor residents of Shibush. This is why, for Gershon Shaked, the guest’s new and expensive overcoat, bought in town, is a mark of shame for its wearer. The guest’s overcoat signifies the socio-economic gap between the

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wealthier guest and the poor townspeople, a gap the guest wishes to eliminate through his disregard for money. 42 While the guest argues that money is only a substitution for active care for the other, his actions simultaneously offer the opposite view: the restoration of the house of study is a poor substitution for what the impoverished town truly needs: money. Subsequently, the novel suggests that to ignore the essential role of money in a capitalist system amounts to denial of the other’s inherent needs. After all, it is the guest who confesses that “wherever you cast your eyes you find either suffering or poverty, but there is one place in the town where you find no suffering. This is the old house of study, the key to which is in my possession. Once I noticed this, I doubled my stay there” (31–32; 28). Contaminated Money II: Zionism The guest-as-narrator, argues Golomb Hoffman, is the author of his universe. In his role as narrator, the guest attempts to restore his religious and national identity through the fiction that “God is in his heaven and all is right in the world.” At the same time, because clearly all is not well in Shibush, the guest conceals his own role as author: “He pretends that the fiction that we read is not a fiction, particularly not one that he composed.”43 One of the breaches in the guest’s concealment of his artifice concerns the names of the people who come to the house of study. When the guest succeeds in bringing the townspeople back to the house of study, he notes: “It did not take long before all the sons of Jacob came along, Joseph and Benjamin, Naphtali . . . Jews of our town whom I have thought fit to call by pleasant names in keeping with their pleasant deeds, although their actual names are ugly, like Shimke, Yoshke, Veptchi, Godznik and other names of the sort” (114–15; 117–18). Appropriately, the “pleasant” Hebrew names revert back into “ugly” Yiddish names when the guest describes the desertion of the house of study by “Shimke, Yoshke, Veptchi, and Godznik,” who go back to their trades in textile and tobacco, leaving behind their religious studies (237; 254). In this confession of name change, we detect both the guest’s admission that his story is fiction, and also the implicit insertion of Zionist ideology into the construction of this fiction. The guest’s artistic fiction within the novel consists therefore not only in the

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religious revival of the house of study, but also includes national Jewish redemption in the land of Israel. The guest’s insistence on “translating” Yiddish names into Hebrew ones expresses the prevalent approach of many Zionists and maskilim, who, in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, came to see Yiddish as a degraded dialect, a sign of the distorted and emasculated state of the Jewish diaspora. The revival of Jewish nationality in the land of Israel was constituted through a complete negation of Yiddish, perceived then as the Jewish language of exile, and as the language of money, trade, and greedy capitalism. 44 While the guest rejects money in the contexts of Zionism and Judaism, it is important to note that these two contexts are at times opposed. Whereas major strands of secular Zionism rejected commerce as well as Torah study in order to rehabilitate the Jewish collective, ascetic strains in Judaism rejected the pursuit of money as well as productive labor and national solutions, seeing all of these as hindrances to religious devotion. As I will show later on, the guest’s denial of this conflict simultaneously reflects and covers up his own ambivalence regarding the two homelands of Judaism: the land of Israel and the diaspora (specifically his hometown in Galicia). The guest’s condemnation of money, then, is doubly framed. While the guest’s objection to money arises in the context of his religious convictions, his aversion to commerce also marks a historical shift in the self-perception of Jewish economic discourse noted by many recent scholarly works. Until the period of early Haskalah in the mid-eighteenth century, many rabbinical authorities had actually encouraged their congregants to work in commerce, banking, and finance, as these professions, as opposed to manual labor, allow more time for Torah study. 45 In fact, in their negotiations with non-Jewish authorities, community leaders even presented Jewish commerce as a specific contribution of the Jewish community to their European host societies, and at times as even a mark of divine uniqueness.46 However, the forging of centralized empires and the rise of early and industrial capitalism, informed by the spread of the Enlightenment belief in the redemptive power of manual labor, contributed to the perception of the Jewish mercantile role as primitive, non-productive, and parasitic. This view consequently led to plans by both Jewish and non-Jewish authorities for an economic reorientation of Jews away from commerce and toward agriculture and

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crafts. 47 Internalizing this approach to Jewish economy, the early maskilim of late eighteenth-century Berlin, as well as later Eastern European maskilim, saw the “productivization” of Jews as crucial for the regeneration and modernization of the Jewish community. 48 This concept was later incorporated in the visions of various streams of Zionism developing in Russia, Poland, and Galicia. Using socialist and Marxist doctrines (while also internalizing the anti-Semitic association between Jews and commerce in Christian thought), many prominent figures in Zionism, such as Nahman Syrkin, Ber Borochov, Arthur Ruppin, and A. D. Gordon, stressed the “unnatural,” and “parasitic” economic situation of Jews in exile and the corruptive quality of money, while preaching for Jewish regeneration through “normal” productive labor in the land of Israel. 49 The admiration for agriculture, and the desire to form a new future through the revival of a biblical past of physical labor, are apparent from the nascent days of modern Hebrew literature in the midnineteenth century, beginning with Abraham Mapu’s novel Love of Zion (‫ )אהבת ציון‬and the biblical poems of Yehuda Leib Gordon, such as David and Barzillai (‫)דויד וברזילי‬. Early twentieth-century authors such as Moshe Smilansky, Yosef Luidor, and Shlomo Tzemach carried on this admiration of the new and heroic Jewish pioneer who devoted his or her life to working and protecting the land.50 The dichotomy between the positive image of productive agricultural labor and the negative, parasitic, and exilic image of commerce persisted in Hebrew literature well into the founding of the Israeli state in 1948, in the work of pre-state generation authors such as Moshe Shamir and S. Yizhar.51 The townspeople’s Yiddish names make another appearance in A Guest for the Night when the guest visits the pioneers (‫ )חלוצים‬who work in a village outside Shibush, preparing for their immigration to the land of Israel. On his first visit, the guest notes with admiration that these “youngsters” were scolded by their parents for “leaving their shops and taking up farming” (269; 288). Later he refers to this contrast again, commenting: “Just think: the sons of Shimki, Yoshke, Veptchi, and Godzhik have abandoned the ways of their fathers and do not want to live off each other or off other people, but from the hand of the Holy One, Blessed Be He” (275; 295). Here, mercantile existence in the diaspora is once again identified with the Yiddish language and described in parasitic terms. Commerce, usury, and mon-

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eylending in the diaspora are opposed to the work of the land, which is imagined as an economic, religious, and national rejuvenation. The guest thus distinguishes between the Yiddish and Hebrew names in accordance with his messianic and Zionist value system. While he associates the “pleasant” Hebrew names with “pleasant” deeds, such as the national Jewish settlement and religious worship in the land of Israel, he identifies the “ugly” Yiddish names with “shameful” occupations such as commerce and trade done in exile. The guest’s wish to purge commerce from the newly emerging Jewish nation in the land of Israel is indicative of a moment in Jewish thought and politics defined by a desire to sever the historical link between money and Jews, a desire explicitly articulated in Chaim Weizmann’s famous comment at the Zionist conference in London in 1920: “moneyless Jews, or money without Jews.”52 However, while the ideology of the second and third waves of immigration to the land of Israel was indeed predominantly socialist, the economic infrastructure laid down in these years was often capitalist in nature: concentrated on cities, industry, and profit-making, and facilitated by private capital, mercantile activity, and an emerging middle-class.53 By 1931, for example, only nineteen percent of the Jewish population actually lived in agricultural settlements. By 1937 most Jewish colonies were built by private capital. Labor Zionism soon became the movement of an elite minority in Jewish society in the land of Israel. This led to the historical paradox that while socialism and Jewish productive work (‫ )עבודה עברית‬were the official hallmarks of Zionist leadership, the new Jewish state was in fact mostly built by private ownership and capitalist endeavors.54 Agnon himself was highly aware of these two nationbuilding alternatives that had split the Zionist movement in the decades preceding and following the foundation of the State of Israel in 1948. He faithfully recorded the struggles between socialist and capitalist factions in his cannonical 1945 novel Only Yesterday. Using these conflicts as historical background, the novel follows Isaac Kumer, who immigrates to the land of Israel in 1908 in hopes of becoming a pioneer only to become a painter of signs in Jerusalem. Torn between the comforts of religious bourgeois life and his forsaken Zionist-socialist ideals, Kumer will tragically and unexpectedly die from the bite of a rabid dog, a death which—as Dan Miron has argued—symbolizes the impossibility of bridging between these two worlds.55

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Ignoring the economic and material conditions in the diaspora as well as in the land of Israel, the guest continuously constructs his artistic fictions of religious and national revival through the exclusion of money and commerce. When the guest argues with the anti-Zionist town rabbi, he praises all of the different occupations of the Jews living in the land of Israel in the 1930’s; yet, among the farmers, the builders, the miners, and the craftsmen, not even one lonely merchant is to be found. Wishing to seamlessly merge his two ideals of religious and national revival, the guest claims that tailors and shoemakers in the land of Israel are talented in their crafts and also highly proficient in the writings of Maimonides. In another argument, when the rabbi accuses the settlers of secularism, the guest replies: “I myself serve as the expiation for their sins. They plow, sow, and plant, and give their lives for this land that the Lord swore to give to our forefathers. . . . Because they give their lives for the land, he has entrusted the land to them” (170; 180). In keeping with the irony in this novel, the guest who wishes to purify both religion and Zionism of commerce can only express his messianic visions in terms of exchange, commerce, and credit. Transforming the emblem of passive martyrdom into the heroic, active sacrifice for the land, the guest produces artistic fictions based on divine economy, while deducting from his account the role of money and the cost of the tortured body. Still, as frequently happens in the novel, it is the guest himself who provides us with the contradictory information necessary to read his artistic fictions with irony. Early in the novel, when the guest preaches the virtues of the land of Israel, he admits: “May the Almighty not punish me if I exaggerated somewhat and went too far, after all it was not for my honor that I did so, but for the honor of the land of Israel, whose glories it is meritorious to relate even when it is in ruins” (264; 283). As a result, the guest implicitly urges the reader to read his fiction with caution, and even against the grain of the guest’s explicit ideologies, wishes, and desires. The Capital of Zionism and the Calculation of Narrative The need to take the guest’s artistic productions with a grain of salt is reiterated by the guest’s most vociferous opponent: Yeruḥam Ḥofshi, Shibush’s notorious communist and disillusioned Zionist, whose last

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name in Hebrew means “liberated.” The guest notes that Yeruḥam keeps staring hatefully at him, and indeed, at their first meeting, Yeruḥam berates the guest for the sentimentality of his early poem “Love until Death” (“‫)”אהבה עד שאולה‬, which motivated Yeruḥam to immigrate to the land of Israel. Yeruḥam blames the poem for misrepresenting life in Palestine. In contrast to the poem, which glorifies sacrificing oneself for Jerusalem, Yeruḥam argues that, in reality, those who immigrated to the land of Israel returned to the diaspora to become merchants and clerks, just as the guest has done (or so Yeruḥam implies). As proof, Yeruḥam says that, after coming to the land of Israel, he wished to share an orange with the guest, as brothers do, yet he soon discovered that the guest had left earlier for Berlin. The guest, however, replies angrily to Yeruḥam’s accusation, stating that the fault does not lie with him, for “there is not a single generation that did not sing the praises of the land of Israel” (89–90; 90). Aligning himself with a divinely appointed lineage of poets (according to Yeruḥam, a lineage of liars), the guest claims that the fault lies with Yeruḥam’s generation, which demands to find the land as they desire it to be, not as God desires it to be.56 Going back to the issue of literary representation, the guest claims that his literary representation is faithful to God’s utopia, not to everyday reality. While Yeruḥam, like Bach before him, claims that literary representation amounts to counterfeit money, the guest holds that both Yeruḥam and Bach cannot adapt to the sacred task: laboring for God’s final vision. After this unresolved argument, the second discussion between the guest and Yeruḥam aptly appears under the title “Settling of the Account.” The title accurately foreshadows the guest’s construction of the “peace process” in mathematical and economic terms, as he orders a box of oranges from the land of Israel for the purpose of “repaying” Yeruḥam. The guest’s understanding of the world around him in terms of calculation is underscored by other chapter titles as well. Thus, for example, the chapter, “Calculations,” presents the guest as he debates whether he or God should repay Reb Hayim for the latter’s invitation of the guest for lunch. From the guest’s miserly aggravation at the fact that he has had to pay for Schutzling’s drinks (299; 321), to his mathematical “proof” of Jerusalem’s spiritual virtues (92; 92–93), to his assessment of God as he “who gives and takes

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double the measure” (192; 205), the guest calculates each aspect of his own narrative. These examples highlight once again that the guest’s artistic fictions—aimed at the renunciation of calculation through the emblem of martyrdom—are paradoxically constituted by a different calculation. The emphasis on the guest as a compulsive calculator suggests that not only his artistic fictions in the narrative are the product of calculation, but that the guest’s narration is also a form of calculation.57 I will develop this point in the next sections. Accordingly, in the third discussion between the guest and Yeruḥam, the guest claims that “if we draw up an account, we will find out that more of our dead were killed for the liberation of Poland than in draining the swamps” (283; 303). To this calculation, conducted in support of the exchange of life for the founding of the future state, Yeruḥam replies with his own calculation, arguing that these men died “so that the money of the people of Israel will find its way to the pockets of capitalists” (283; 303). Yeruḥam’s Marxist critique of the economic underpinnings of the Zionist enterprise frames the sacrifice of life as exchanged not for Jewish national independence, or for the fulfillment of a messianic promise, but rather for a new kind of economic subjugation to a capitalist universal order. Significantly, Yeruḥam’s perspective on the Jewish national revival as a purely economic transaction is reiterated by another hotel guest, who perceives Jewish existence in the diaspora and the land of Israel as two different economic options. His only reason for wishing to immigrate to the land of Israel is that he recently lost all his money. While our guest mockingly calls the other guest “the calculator” (“‫)”בעל חשבונות‬, the latter actually serves as the parodic double of our own guest-narrator, anticipating the reasons for his future return to the land of Israel. The three discussions between Yeruḥam and the guest, oscillating between conflict and friendship, are charged with a dash of homoeroticism: “I have a secret fondness for this young man,” comments the guest when he first sees Yeruḥam. “That lean body without an ounce of fat, those eyes that burn like the eyes of a sufferer from malaria, and also if you will, his ragged, dust-colored working clothes move my heart” (84; 84). Under the guest’s fond gaze, Yeruḥam’s lean body, his physical labor, his working clothes, and the hint of malaria present him as the embodiment of the ideal image of the Hebrew pioneer.58 Ironically, this pioneering working man is revealed as the

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agent who most vehemently undermines the guest’s construction of the Zionist enterprise as the process of purifying the Jewish nation of money and commerce. For Yeruḥam, the nature of the national Jewish revival is precisely the reverse: he sees Zionism as a colonial extension of a greedy capitalist ideology. Though the two disagree about whether Zionism is the true messianic end of the Jewish diaspora, the guest chooses to leave his (duplicate) key to the house of study to Yeruḥam and his wife Rachel’s son. Consequently, Yeruḥam, the very image of the new Jewish pioneer, ironically marks the potential for Jewish regeneration, not in the land of Israel, but rather in the diaspora. Talking Through Money If the narration of A Guest for the Night is an act of calculation, and if the narrator of this text is also its calculator, then our guest’s hope to escape economy cannot be as easily fulfilled as he so desperately wishes. This narration-as-calculation recalls Marc Shell’s claim that “money talks in and through discourse in general. The monetary information of thought, unlike its content, cannot be eradicated from discourse without changing thought itself.”59 In other words, monetary economy is not only the content of language and thought, but it also structures their condition and possibilities of being. Language as well as thought, argues Shell, work on the basis of logic established through abstraction, substitution, calculation, and exchange, characteristics that for Nietzsche emerge with the rise of money in human society.60 Though the guest does not state it in these terms, it is precisely his intense focus on the nature of money vis-à-vis the nature of language that establishes the conflict between money and language as two systems of signification competing for dominance in the novel. The analogy between monetary economy and language, and between political economy and linguistics, is one of the most consistent and striking features in Saussure’s Course in General Linguistics. In both fields “we are confronted with the notions of value; both sciences are concerned with a system of equating things of different orders.”61 In fact, in order to explain his then revolutionary concept of language as a semiotic system, Saussure utilizes again and again the imagery of money, relying on the common analogy of words-as-coins in the

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Western tradition.62 Elaborating his concept of the linguistic sign as arbitrary and unmotivated, explaining how a signifier has no natural relation to what it signifies, and discussing language as a social institution impervious to individual changes, Saussure claims that “it is not the metal in a piece of money that fixes its value. . . . Its value will vary according to the amount stamped upon it and according to its use inside or outside a political boundary; this is even more true of the linguistic signifier.”63 In fact, it is precisely when Saussure laboriously articulates his concept of language as “only a system of pure values,”64 and these values as only relational, that money figures most predominantly in his lectures. As Roland Barthes succinctly clarifies: “From the point of view of language, the sign is a coin which has the value of a certain amount of goods which it allows one to buy, but also has value in relation to other coins. . . . It is because language is a system of contractual values . . . that it resists the modification coming from a single individual, and is consequently a social institution.”65 The guest, therefore, dreads precisely this affinity between monetary economy and language as two systems of purely relative values. This is why the guest constantly tries to oppose these two systems, on the one hand wishing to elevate Hebrew to the status of an eternal sacred language with intrinsic true value, while on the other hand degrading money to a transient, untrustworthy, if not entirely deceitful sign. Unlike the narrators of earlier works such as “And We Shall Not Fail,” and “The Sense of Smell,” who focus their attention on counterfeit coins, the guest-as-narrator is obsessed with stories of inflation, which Mrs. Schuster (the tailor’s wife), describes as: “reason enough to drive a man out of this world” (63; 62). Telling a story about life during the period of hyperinflation in post-war Germany, Mrs. Schuster remembers a time when Mr. Schuster came home with “a sackful of millions for his pay.” When she told him that they should hide this enormous amount of money from robbers, Mr. Schuster said that even if he threw all the money out the window, “before the robbers come to pick it up, a policeman will come and fine me for throwing this rubbish in the street.” Mrs. Schuster concludes the story sorrowfully, saying: “All that money was not worth a penny” (63; 62). In telling another story of inflation in wartime Poland, Mrs. Zommer, the hotel owner, repeats Mrs. Schuster’s observation when

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she asks in despair: “What is the use of money if it does not buy food?” (125; 129). According to these stories, money is dangerous because it has no intrinsic value. Money is completely contingent upon the credit extended to it. Highlighting indirectly the main tenents of the credit theory of money, these stories of inflation expose the symbolic nature of money—its function as a medium of exchange devoid of its own essence. What economic crises and wartime reveal, as Marx argues, are exactly the socially determined relations between prices, exchange value, and the objects they claim to represent.66 There is nothing natural, essential, or stable in the relationship between the monetary sign and what it signifies at any given moment. In the extreme poverty of Shibush, money, “the language that equates all in the abstract,” reveals its artificiality.67 Its power to signify and substitute is called into radical question. In this state of rapid inflation, money can no longer signify another object, such as food. In fact, money is so “deceitful” that it cannot even signify itself. It is not even its own equivalent. What once was worth millions is not “worth a penny,” and the once-valued paper is now only “rubbish.” Yet, far worse than money’s lack of essence is the fact that money undermines the notion of essence itself. On the same visit to Schuster the tailor, the guest tells of the “adventures” of the tailor’s German antique chair. During the war, rich German nobles from Berlin wanted to buy antique and authentic furniture from peasants in distant villages. The peasants, however, commissioned new furniture from craftsmen in Berlin, and resold it as antique for a much higher price. Then, “when the plague of inflation came and the rich men lost their property . . . they sold their mansions to foreigners . . . they [the foreigners] sold them [the chairs] for next to nothing, so the tailor was lucky enough to buy that chair” (59; 58). In following this story, the nature of money presents two problems for the guest. On the one hand, the value of money in itself is always situational, always relational to that which it can be exchanged for. On the other hand, the exchange value that money signifies has nothing to do with the “real” value of things. At times, a new chair may cost as much as an antique chair, a fake chair will cost as much as an authentic chair, and at times a mansion may cost as much as a few potato peels. Money never signifies the “true” value of an object. It even works the other way

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around: it is the social exchange of money that constitutes the value of an object. Challenging the naïve assumption that prices faithfully represent values instead of constituting them, Marx asks: when will people finally discard the illusion “that rents grow out of soil and not out of society?”68 Marx’s frustration with classical economists anticipates Saussure’s aggravation with classical linguists, when he asserts time and time again that “signs function then not through their intrinsic value but through their relative position.”69 The situational value of money is precisely why the first-person narrator of A Guest for the Night is haunted by stories of inflation. What is at stake here is not counterfeit money, fake antique chairs, or decayed mansions, but the possibility that money subverts all dichotomies of appearance and essence, authenticity and copy, truth and falsity. The man-made monetary sign is strictly situational and functional. Money is determined by social trust. It exerts force only on the basis of society’s faith in its force. However, once trust has been established—as Georg Simmel has famously argued—money attains in its circulation “a metaphysical quality: it extends beyond each particular use of itself . . . it realizes the possibility of all values as the values of all possibilities.”70 When reaching prominence, monetary economy functions as a semiotic system of pure, relative, and contingent values that usurps all other values. Its secular, contingent “metaphysics” subverts any external claim for transcendence, for a pre-existing essence, or a prior existence of the signified. For Simmel, who published The Philosophy of Money in 1900—a time of prosperity in Germany—these traits, though viewed ambivalently, are the trademark of an emerging society valuing human individuality and secular democracy. It is precisely because of its secular, and relative, yet nevertheless metaphysical, qualities that money challenges the guest’s fantasy of Hebrew as a sacred language, a language through which he wishes to fulfill his mission of restoration, saving himself and his hometown.71 Sacred Language and the Gold Standard Speaking with Rachel Zommer in an early chapter of the novel entitled “A Parable and its Meaning,” the guest grows critical of the young girl, who “has forgotten that she is the daughter of kings.” Just before imagining the Torah as a king’s crown, the guest uses the term

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“shelter” (‫ )סוכה‬as another metaphor for the Torah in the context of a parable about a man who is saved from the cruel sun by going into a shelter.72 The shelter, we are told, is made by God, and its furnishings are “the books that are in the house of study.” Not only are these books there “to supply all his needs,” but when we read these books, “not one of the peoples can hurt us. . . . The Torah surrounds those who study it with goodness. . . . When we turn our eyes from the Torah, the Torah turns its eyes away from us and we become the lowest of nations.” Following this parable, the Holy Scriptures are imagined as a king’s crown, which can be heavy, but the wearing of which yields the reward of honor and exaltation. To forget the nature of this honor is “worse than all other evils” (33, 29–30), for the Torah is sacred and infinite. Quoting the famous midrash, “there are seventy faces to the Torah: turn it around and around, for everything is in it,” the guest highlights in his warnings the Torah’s holy and eternal essence.73 The same midrash appears as part of Yosef Dan’s elaboration of the differences between the Jewish concept of Hebrew as a sacred language and contemporary semiotic theories of conventional language. For nearly two thousand years, numerous Jewish texts proclaimed in different variations that God created the world with speech, as it is written in Genesis 1:3: “And God said, let there be light: and there was light.” As such, the Hebrew language is both human and divine. Not only spoken language, but also writing—Hebrew letters—are sanctified in many Jewish religious texts; thus, for example The Zohar, one of the central texts of the Jewish mystical tradition, states that God consulted the Torah before he created the world. Hebrew writing and language therefore not only “represent,” but literally constitute the world as an integral part of God’s creation. The idea of language and world as intertwined can be found in the Hebrew language itself in the word ‫דבר‬, which signifies both “word” and “thing.” From this perspective, a semiotic theory is only one facet of the seventy faces of the eternal Torah.74 Though the guest, as he claims, has also forgotten that he is a son of kings, he still promotes the distinction between Hebrew as a sacred language and other conventional languages. For him, while these other languages are nothing but currency, a free-floating and endless exchange of signifiers, Hebrew as a sacred language is pegged to a gold standard, i.e., to the signified: the eternal and transcendent

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truth, the wisdom of God.75 This limit, however, is always at risk because Hebrew can be reduced to conventional language, as the guest’s own memories illustrate. Detailing his transformation into a young poet, the guest distinguishes between the beautiful writing of the eternal letters of the Torah, in which “what was fitting in the past is fitting in the present and is fitting for the future,” and his own present-day writing, which has been “spoilt” ever since “I made other poems about a different kind of love” (372; 398–99).76 This personal history anticipates a general history of Jewish poetry. In what Gershon Shaked called a historical sermon on the origins of Hebrew poetry, the guest details a sequence of four generations of poets, imagined as a fall from prophetic inspiration.77 Here again, the guest contrasts the sanctity of eternal sacred writing with his devalued modern writing: “We do not have the power to do as one group or the other, but are like a child who dips his pen in the ink and writes what his master dictates. So long as his master’s writing lies before him, it is beautiful . . . but when his master’s writing is taken away, it is not beautiful” (420; 449). The metaphor of a “fall” from prophetic inspiration, imagined as a deterioration of writing, only holds if we still maintain that modern Jewish writing is necessarily bound to a prior and constant signified: God’s wisdom, the gold standard. Only then does modern writing become a “debasement of coins.” However, if we recall Marx’s claim that even gold is already purely a symbol, which “is to a certain extent masked by metallic tokens,” then modern writing can be thought of as a process of linguistic inflation and deflation, questioning the existence of the original signified.78 The guest’s identification of sacred language with a beautiful eternal writing and of “bad” writing with purposeless and misleading texts (such as Leibtche’s translation of Genesis into German rhymes, a text the guest judges as devoid of divine inspiration) anticipates Derrida’s critique of Western philosophy, in which “the age of the sign is essentially theological.”79 Western tradition, argues Derrida, perceived the spoken word as having an immediate relationship with the divine law. It imagined spoken language as a natural, universal, and non-temporal writing, “a divine inscription in the heart and soul,” thus relegating writing in the literal sense to the status of the finite, artificial, and deceitful; as “metaphoricity itself.”80 As “a sign of a sign,” writing posits the dangers of the endless movement of signifi-

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cation, an endless exchange of signs. Reading the Course in General Linguistics, Derrida shows how this Western tradition persists in Saussure, who warns against the power of writing to usurp spoken language. Writing is a distortion of meaning, a break with nature. However, it is precisely when Saussure banishes writing to a position outside the system of language, claims Derrida, that he simultaneously inscribes writing within language itself. In the formulation of language as a system of relative values, based on the notion of the arbitrary and unmotivated sign, writing is discovered to be “at the origin of language.”81 For Derrida then, the understanding in Western tradition of spoken language through the metaphor of a “natural writing” is precisely what turns all languages into signs of signs. If spoken languages are indeed the same as writing, then any language is just another system of metaphors that negate any unmediated relation to an external or ideal reality. While Derrida’s discussion in the Course in General Linguistics focuses only on writing as that which stands at the origin of language, writing, however, has a sibling in Saussure’s text: money. As I have previously shown, it is the monetary sign that Saussure frequently turns to in the elaboration of his idea that “signs function then not through their intrinsic value but through their relative position.”82 It is money, as much as writing, which becomes in Saussure’s text the emblem of metaphoricity itself. The understanding of money as an act of transformation, as Marc Shell elaborates, is exactly what stands at the root of Marx’s statement that money has the power “for turning an image into reality and reality into a mere image.”83 In a capitalist economy, commodities are not exchanged directly, but first transformed into money, and vice versa. Money thus facilitates a process of endless ex/ change, an infinite circulation through which money can be imagined and materialized in the shape of all other commodities, and all other commodities can be imagined as, and transformed back to, money. In this sense, money dictates acts of endless metaphorization. This affinity between writing, money, and metaphoricity explains precisely why Derrida defines différance as an economic concept of the limitlessness of language. The monetary sign exemplifies the endless process of exchange that exposes any prior signified, any gold standard, as just another signifier, another coin contingent on socio-historical circulations. The meaning of linguistic signs, just

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like the value of monetary signs, never directly expresses the thing in itself, but is always defined in relation to other signs. Meaning and value are never inherent, but always relational and external. In this sense language is never simply literal, but always figurative as well, mediated through the exchange and substitution of signs. Could this ominous limitlessness be the reason that the guest obsessively registers the words Ignatz uses when he asks for money? The guest, who records that Ignatz uses at times the Polish word for money, pieniadze, and at other times the Hebrew word ‫מעות‬, tells Ignatz that he “cannot bear to hear the holy tongue used to speak of filthy lucre” (423; 452). If money is an act of metaphorization, the guest’s anger discloses the fear of the discovery that “sacred” language is in fact also based on acts of a free-floating, endless economic exchange. The link between money and metaphor, therefore, clarifies the guest’s confessed aversion to figurative language. While priding himself on his success in drawing people to the warm house of study, the guest suddenly shifts to a small lecture on figurative language: After having arrived at years of understanding, I have come to hate any forms composed of different parts that do not accord with each other, especially a picture whose parts exist in reality but whose combination and conjunction exist not in reality but only in the imagination of the artist; and most especially things in which only some part of the concrete image has been shifted to the abstract image . . . so I was surprised to find myself beginning to make analogies and saying there are symbolic things here—for a man from the land of Israel has come down to bring warmth to the sons of exile (117; 120).84

In the paragraph quoted above, the guest lists his aversion to various kinds of figurative language, including synecdoche, metaphors, symbols, and analogies. On the one hand, the statement is peculiar. Not only is the guest himself a writer, but Jewish tradition is highly textual, relying heavily on both a literal understanding of the Bible, and also on reading the implicit meaning of the text through figurative tropes. On the other hand, this statement makes sense if we read it against the backdrop of the conflict between the Jewish concept of sacred language woven into the world, and the understanding of figurative language as an act of economic exchange that highlights a break between language and any external or ideal reality.

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Despite all of his explicit intents and purposes, it is the guest who provides an account of the circulation of sacred language as a progression of linguistic inflation, thereby exposing its claim to sacredness and truth as nothing more than metaphor. The guest’s telling of the history of the Hasidic movement in Poland is actually a variation on the opening of “And We Shall Not Fail.” This time, the people of Shibush pray to one of the twelve gates fixed in heaven in the Ashkenaz variation, but when they mistakenly believe that the messiah has come, they change their prayers, thus confusing the gates. While the guest condemns this false messiah (probably a reference to Shabbtai Tzvi, the seventeenth-century self-proclaimed messiah who converted to Islam), he glorifies the Ba’al Shem Tov, the founder of the Hasidic movement, as a true messiah whose corrective change of the prayers now “repairs” (again a conjugation of ‫ )לתקן‬the confusion, triggering a spiritual restoration. However, this history of spiritual restoration is contested in the novel by other characters such as Pinḥas Arye, who belongs to an Orthodox sect and believes the Ba’al Shem Tov to be a false messiah as well. As in “And We Shall Not Fail,” and in contrast to the guest’s fantasy of a spiritual and linguistic revival through the restoration of sacred language, the guest’s account of the Ba’al Shem Tov’s legacy actually grows more confused as he details the rapid proliferation of the various Hasidic houses of study founded after the Ba’al Shem Tov’s death. After this inflation of sages, synagogues, rituals, and texts, the ironic ending note is that when one person tells a story about the Ba’al Shem Tov, some of the Hasidic people smile, because they do not consider the sage’s deeds and texts as “books of truth.” The guest’s account, already a text signifying another text, thus describes a historical process of inflation within the circulation of texts vying for the status of an eternal sacred truth. This truth, however, is revealed each time to be a disputed value, contingent on social trust. The status of truth as nothing but a historical claim—or in Derridean terms an effect of belief, credit, or accreditation—is reiterated once more in an argument that develops between the Orthodox Pinḥas Arye and the more hasidically inclined guest, who argue about the truth of the Torah. Mirroring each other’s arguments, the guest and Arye accuse one another of making the Torah a means, not an end in itself. For each, the other’s interpretation of the text is not

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a “truth,” but always an interpretation, an illusion of truth, a mere debased coin. Each of them thinks of his own reading as holding a more immediate relationship to the truth of the text. However, the same accusation made by both parties highlights the irony in their shared blindness to their resemblance to one another. Their struggle for dominance over a truth that is constituted each time not as “pure gold,” but merely as a coin (only the effect of credit), brings to mind Nietzsche’s claim that “truths are illusions about which one has forgotten that this is what they are; metaphors which are worn out and without sensuous power; coins which have lost their pictures and now matter only as metal, no longer as coins.”85 When Language Betrays the Truth The guest’s confessed aversion to figurative language attunes the reader to the fact that the guest can, nonetheless, not help but constantly use symbols, analogies, metaphors, and similes, many of which are drawn from midrashic and kabblistic literature. The key, the overcoat, the oranges, the shelter, the king’s crown, the sun, the heat in the house of study, the roads fixed by Yeruḥam Ḥofshi, the scrolls that lose their embellishments—these are only some of the signs purposefully charged with symbolic meaning by the guest’s narration. However, it is precisely the guest’s incessant recycling and production of metaphors that belies his own fantasy of a sacred language, for the character of figurative language itself thwarts the attempt to locate any ideal essence. Paradoxically, the guest’s wish to distinguish Hebrew from other, and conventional, languages, which operate on the basis of a free-floating economic exchange, is only expressed through his usage of figurative language: the exchange, for example, of the Torah as first a shelter, and then a crown. After the guest naïvely assigns transcendent value to the holy language through a symbol of transient earthly wealth (an ironic gesture in itself), Yeruḥam’s wife, the young Rachel Zommer, much to the guest’s dismay, turns his metaphor upside down. The young woman tells the older guest that she has no business with crowns, especially “today when crowns of kings lay in museums and no one takes pride in them” (33; 30). In this exchange of words between generations, the meaning of the word “crown” is continuously displaced, invested in each instance with different meanings

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and significations. The exchange between Rachel and the guest produces an inflation of signifiers, marking the crown as a symbol of sacred texts, secular sovereignty, divine authority, and earthly wealth, or as a work of art, an irrelevant relic, a historical artifact—and the list can go on. Appearing early in the novel, this short exchange anticipates the growing ironic discrepancy between the guest’s fantasy of an eternal sacred language and his own narration, a discrepancy governed by the substitution of figurative language, and by economic exchange in which words-as-coins are susceptible to fluctuating values determined by social and historical circulations, which in turn produce processes of inflation. Linguistic inflation also afflicts the most recognized symbol of the novel: the key to the house of study. The famed key goes through many twists and turns in the plot: the “original” key is lost, the guest creates a new duplicate key, and later bequeaths it to Yeruḥam Ḥofshi and Rachel’s son at the end of the novel. In helping Rachel to give birth, the duplicated key figures in the novel as a substitute for the book Hands of Moses, a copy of a “sacred” and “original” text in itself which was formerly used in the town as an amulet to alleviate difficult childbirths. Subsequently, upon his return to the land of Israel, the guest discovers the lost “original” key, yet keeps it locked in a box. Wearing a second key on his neck, the guest waits to open the box at a future time when, according to the sages: “The synagogues and the houses of study abroad are destined to be established in the land of Israel” (440; 471). Tracing these elaborate mutations, Gershon Shaked argues astutely that the key motif is crucial in establishing the thematic conflicts in the novel, mainly between authenticity and substitution, truth and falsity, Zionism and diaspora.86 The key’s tortuous path easily explains its status as the most contested symbol in the novel. It was Baruch Kurzweil who first emphasized the key as an ironic symbol that exemplifies by negation the guest’s futile attempts at reconstructing a world long destroyed.87 Since Kurzweil, generations of scholars have tried to stabilize the novel’s irony. While for some, such as Yael Feldman and Uri S. Cohen, the novel does not offer any hopeful Zionist resolution, for others, such as Arnold Band and Dan Laor, the ending suggests a synthesis of national and religious values.88

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Taking into account all these different evaluations, the key’s movement both “inside” and “outside” the text exemplifies the novel’s logic of linguistic inflation, which subverts any clear semantic evaluation. Instead of pointing to any fixed meaning, the key purposefully triggers Barthes’ economy of reading, which aims to “multiply the signifiers, not to reach some ultimate signified.”89 As such, the key summons us to read, to understand, to interpret, to “unlock” the meaning of the text, but it is at the same time a reminder that something in the text, some meaning, always remains locked away. But was the key in this text ever “just a key”? Was there ever an original key? Already in its first appearance in the novel, the key is constituted through opposing discourses. While for the guest the key is a symbol of the glorified past of divine trust, for many of the townspeople the key symbolizes a worthless relic of a bankrupt town, economy, and faith. The key thus begins its textual life as a figure of speech stamped by ironic contrast. It is precisely because of Agnon’s contradictory and ironic use of the key as a literary trope that the key in this text—or rather this key-as-text and -as-coin—continues to circulate, accumulating more significations, meanings, and evaluations. Consequently, the key’s meaning and signification cannot be pegged down, precisely because it always simultaneously signifies two opposing concepts. While the duplicated key that remains in the diaspora is on the one hand an inferior copy, on the other hand, following Golomb Hoffman, this copy has the power of regeneration, of literally facilitating childbirth.90 While the original key, the one now found in the land of Israel, signifies possible redemption, from the beginning it also marks decay and oblivion, and ultimately is locked away. In this sense, the key-as-text defies the concept of origin. It is constituted through differing circulations at one and the same time, always resisting decisive determination. The key always points at both a thesis and an antithesis. Just like money, the key subverts all dichotomies of original and copy, authenticity and substitution, and essence and function. Both play an ironic role in the novel as signs that always signify something else.91 Money: The Agent of Irony Irony, Paul de Man writes, “possesses an inherent tendency to gain momentum and not to stop until it has run its full course; from the

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small and innocuous exposure of a small self-deception it soon reaches the dimension of an absolute.”92 No observation could be more accurate with respect to A Guest for the Night, where the structure of irony works on the levels of both action and discourse.93 On the level of action, the guest, who wishes to exclude money from both Judaism and from Zionism, is only able to imagine the existence of these ideologies through an economic framework of exchange. In other words, the guest wishes to transform ‫—דמים‬as both money and body—into tokens in a symbolic economy, while at the same time imagining this symbolic economy to be the reality of his world.94 On the level of narration, the guest-as-narrator produces a fantasy of sacred language that claims the status of an inherent and eternal truth, but does it through the use of a figurative language marked by exchange and substitution. His desire to escape calculation always fails, for his own narration is formed and framed by calculation. The guest’s calculation always turns into a miscalculation. It is money then, read as both a sign of material conditions and also as a “sign of a sign,” that doubly undermines the guest’s impossible artistic productions. On the one hand, money, because of its immediate relation to material existence, questions any symbolic economy that tries to negate corporeal and economic conditions. On the other hand, money as an arbitrary sign thwarts any other semiotic system’s claim to truth. Just as the monetary sign exposes its value and other values as contingent on specific circulations, so irony as a rhetorical device reminds us that the meaning and signification of the linguistic signifier is always dependent on the contexts, perspectives, and narratives in which it operates. In A Guest for the Night, money works as the agent of irony, exposing every sign in its indeterminacy, pushing every ideology toward its breaking point. The work of money as irony’s agent intensifies with the guest’s decision to return to the land of Israel. The novel supplies different reasons for this decision: first, by the guest’s repeated account, his Zionism prompts his return. Second, his wife writes to him, suggesting that they should go back. Third, the guest has wondered throughout the novel whether it is time for him to return. While the guest’s deliberations repeatedly envision the land of Israel as the Jewish homeland, they also point to the existence of two possible homelands. This doubleness can be extrapolated from the guest’s dream in which he is in

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Jerusalem in a burial vault with the locksmith who will duplicate the lost key. In the dream, the locksmith says the name “Shibush,” yet with “no sweetness to it.” This leads the guest to wonder if he left his town for the land of Israel because its name was never beautiful. “Or perhaps the name was always beautiful. . . . If so, why had I left it and gone up to the land of Israel?” (93; 94). The dream expresses the tension between the two homelands of Judaism—between the fantasy of a religious restoration in the diaspora, and the uncertain realization of the messianic revival of Jewish life in the land of Israel. The guest’s indecisiveness, as well as the multiple and contradicting resolutions of many of the other characters in the novel, have fueled scholarly debate about whether the novel’s ending supports the guest’s Zionist ideology or undermines it. However, adding to the ironic subversion of a determined ideological “resolution” on either side is the fact that immediately preceding the guest’s decision his money runs out. Significantly, toward the end of the novel, the guest acts out two self-parodies that mirror and mock his earlier accusation of the townspeople in their refusal to pay the ‫( דמים‬as both money and body) necessary for the preservation of divine economy. In the first self-parody, the guest gets sick and feels as if he “has nothing in the world except himself and his suffering.” Wondering how this sickness came about, the guest attributes it to the “cause of all causes,” yet this religious Jewish term for God refers in this case to the food the guest ate the night before.95 The pious term used mostly by Reb Hayim in the text creates an ironic contrast between Reb Hayim’s later death— marked by silence, sincere prayers, and care for his daughters as expressed in his will—and the guest’s vociferous agony and his fear “of death that did not budge from my eyes” (374; 400). In the midst of this “dramatic” night, triggered by food poisoning, the guest also writes a will, concerned mostly with the burial place of his own body. The “severe” sickness, however, passes within a night. The juxtaposition of the guest’s exaggerated digestive suffering with the novel’s many harrowing tales of the physical terrors of World War I renders the guest’s own promotion of heroic self-sacrifice presumptuous, if not completely ridiculous.96 This moment of mock suffering is framed in a larger-scale parody of the guest’s aversion to money, ironically mocked by his own obsessive calculations of his financial concerns, which are scattered

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throughout the last eighty pages of the novel. When at first his money begins to run out, the guest comments that “since the day my meals began to grow fewer, I sit less in the house of study” (338; 362). In the following pages, the discord between the guest’s monetary worries and his religious devotion grows stronger as he obsessively counts his remaining money, noting again and again that “my money was slowly dwindling, every day I counted it, and every day it grew less and less” (415; 444). The decision, in a subsequent chapter, to finally leave Shibush ties together both parodies of money and body: mentioning again that his money is decreasing, the guest begins to write letters on used paper. Writing to his wife on the page of the erased will he drafted on the night of his food poisoning, the guest imagines that she will need to borrow his spectacles when trying to read the erased text. Telling her that his sight has become dimmer, the guest imagines his wife attributing his failing eyesight to his constantly sitting in the house of study. The imagined dialogue ends with the guest going to “count my money to see if I have enough for the expenses of the journey” (417; 446). Much more than any conscious devotion to an ideological calling, it is money and body—the fear of the collapse of his material conditions—that determines the guest’s decision to return to the land of Israel, casting him once again, to use his own insult, in the role of the calculator (‫)בעל חשבונות‬. Did his return to the land of Israel, triggered by material conditions, change the guest? One is tempted to answer in the affirmative. While admittedly the guest still dreams of the day when houses of study will descend upon the land of Israel, he now distinguishes between the religious parable and the limitations of his body. When he puts the original key away in a box, the guest claims: “Still the key lies there, waiting with me for that day. However, it is made of iron and brass, but I, who am flesh and blood, find it hard to endure” (440; 472, emphasis added). At the end of the novel, therefore, even the guest recognizes that money and body as material conditions stand in contrast with, affect, and determine ideological constructions that presume to efface them. The novel, however, does not end with a simple, one-sided resolution. The guest’s emphasis on the body as “flesh and blood” echoes Daniel Bach’s focus on the body as a “lump of flesh” in the beginning

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of the novel. While the end thus seems to reinforce Bach’s argument for the body as that which precedes and disrupts symbolic economy, it also reminds us of the argument between Bach and the guest about the body as a fit or unfit token in the circulation of divine economy. Whereas the guest does repeat Bach’s position towards the novel’s end, he nonetheless still admires Bach’s father who joined other pioneers in settlements in the land of Israel, risking their lives for the Zionist enterprise. The body is thus constituted in the novel’s end not only as flesh, but again as a potential monetary and linguistic sign to be exchanged for a future reward. Accordingly, in the text’s underscoring of the body as “a lump of flesh,” both Bach and Leibtche focus on the mutilated mouth that cannot praise the Lord. These two metaphors, the lump of flesh and the tortured mouth, refer to Uri Zvi Greenberg’s poem “With My God, the Blacksmith” (“‫)”עם אלי הנפח‬, published in 1928.97 The poem, which imagines the poet as a prophet tortured by God, describes the poet’s mouth as an open wound, and his body as a lump of flesh and metal on which God the blacksmith hammers away. Since the poem ends with the speaker’s return to his God as to a lover, the tense struggle between God and speaker ends with the establishment of the poet as prophet and the artistic production as a divine mission.98 Through the allusion to Greenberg’s poem, the body-as-substance is thus discovered to be also a discursive body. The body as a substance that disrupts symbolic economy, as a substance prior to any ideology, to any act of metaphorization, is ironically constructed as such by a reference to another text. While the tortures of the body in Greenberg’s poem are proper tokens invested in the economy of artistic production, Daniel Bach and Leibtche’s speeches reverse the poem’s meaning. The tortured mouth cannot praise God, and the tortured body is not “stamped” by prophecy. Still, the irony is precisely that the signification of the body as what is prior to any discourse is determined through discourse itself. The body as substance becomes a figure of speech. In this respect, the valuation of the body as “substance,” of money as “gold,” and of texts, language, and writing as “sacred,” is never intrinsic or authentic, but is always the product of belief or credit. The guest’s latest identification of the “body” as substance, not as a symbolic token, should not be taken here as the revelation of truth, but rather as a discursive shift. In Agnon’s novel even

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bodies, therefore, join texts and coins as metaphors that are always engaged in the process of inflation and deflation, always involved in the process of reaccreditation and reevaluation upon their entrance into different historical, social, and cultural circulations. The Value of Writing Just as the body, originally regarded as a substance-prior-to-anymetaphor, is discovered as already a metaphor, so is the recurring identification between the guest and the author Shmuel Yosef Agnon exposed as figurative. Though many early essays view the novel as an autobiographical confession, recent scholarly work usually resists asserting any decisive relation between this first-person narrator and the actual author of the text.99 Viewing money as one of the key metaphors of this intricate novel—a metaphor about the contingent nature of metaphors—underscores the idea that the guest-as-narrator should be viewed as an active agent in the process of literary coinage, metaphorization, and signification, wherein the actual author Agnon is only one possible signified supplied by the text. Given that even the proper name “Agnon” was constructed from the author’s first story in Hebrew, entitled “Agunot,” we can see how this signified already points to another signifier. As a result, A Guest for the Night should not be thought of as a personal confession, but rather as an elaborate allegorical construction of the image of the author.100 The guest’s constant allusions to biographical details of Agnon’s life led Gershon Shaked to construct a sophisticated argument in his pivotal essay, “The Narrator as Author.” Although many have come to think of this essay as presenting a naïve identification of the two, Shaked presents a much more complicated argument, in which he claims that the allusions to the life of Agnon are aimed at reflecting the textual construction of the author’s role as witness to the suffering of his people.101 The narrator, argues Shaked, learns to see his calling not as a self-involved mission of restoration, but as an act of testimony. This view was later developed by Arbel, who identified the key with the act of writing—as a monument to a world lost. While concurring with these sympathetic views of the act of writing in the novel, I wonder if what guides this benevolent view of writing is the hovering image of the “actual” Shmuel Yosef Agnon as the most accomplished author in the Hebrew literary reconstruction of the

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Jewish European past.102 Contrary to this positive image of the writer and of writing, the guest’s obsessive focus on calculations in A Guest for the Night in fact reveals a much darker view of the role of literary production as a parasitic and unequal exchange. The guest’s emphasis on writing as a process of exchange finds its first expression in his double: the salesman. The two, as Shaked noted before, are guests in the hotel. Both have left their wives and children to come to Shibush, and both are attracted to Mrs. Zommer’s daughters. Also, I would add, both measure the world in terms of money and calculation. For example, when criticizing the salesman for his mercantile occupation, the guest wonders at the same time if he should avoid sitting down with Mr. Zommer’s son, for “every conversation with him cost me money” (290; 311). What is more crucial to our point is that both characters also distribute their merchandise—one, commodities, the other, stories—in exchange for money. Highlighting the economic aspects of writing and publishing, the guest tries to raise more money in order to stay in Shibush by collecting his publishers’ debts to him in a chapter aptly titled: “The Way of Writers.”103 In the chapter, the guest goes on to complain about publishers who do not pay him his full fees, of other publishers who even demand payment from him, and of readers who expect to read his books in exchange for “nothing.” In contrast to the guest’s emphasis on religious texts as sacred objects, his long list of complaints underscores that his texts at least also operate as commodities in a capitalist market. To write and publish, then, is to engage in an economic exchange, and hopefully one that will become profitable for the writer. At the same time, in this novel the exchange of texts for financial profit is based on a previous transaction: the exchange of stories between the townspeople and the guest, the torments of an other’s body in exchange for the guest’s literary production. Thinking back to Greenberg’s “With My God, the Blacksmith,” the poet-as-prophet pays with his body, with the torments of his own “lump of flesh,” in order to produce his artistic work, later coined and stamped as prophecy. In A Guest for the Night, however, it is the tortured body of the other that is exchanged for the production of the author’s text. This parasitic exchange presents itself in another analogy in Agnon’s novel between the capitalist lawyer Tzwirn (the salesman’s

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employer) and the guest. According to the guest, instead of caring for his clients Tzwirn does “all kinds of doubtful things for his own sake, to make money out of other people’s troubles” (288; 309). Still, in a subsequent chapter, the narrator’s childhood friend Aaron Schutzling states that the sign of the guest’s love for Shibush is his insistence on “digging up gravestones to discover their secrets” (293; 314). Read as an analogy, both Tzwirn and the guest dig in others’ troubles, in others’ graves, and exploit others’ tortured bodies for the production of their own monetary and symbolic capital. In this light, whereas the writing of the novel indeed results in the literary reconstruction of a lost world, the act of writing in the novel originates in a feeding off this past—in the exchange of the guilt of a parasite for the commemoration of past generations.

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CHAPTER 3

CAN’T BUY ME LOVE

“In common sense as well as in scholarship,” writes Eva Illouz, “romantic love stands above the realm of commodity exchange and even against the social order.”1 Indeed, Illouz’s research on love in capitalist culture begins by expanding on this common divide; whereas the concept of “romantic love” is predicated on the private sphere, irrationality, selflessness, and singularity, the capitalist market is associated with the public sphere, rationality, self-interest, and interchangeability. However, working against this division, Illouz shows how the very modern construction of romantic love is paradoxically shaped by the forces of the capitalist market itself. In a similar vein, while the notion of this dichotomy dominates many of the scholarly readings of Agnon’s 1935 novel A Simple Story (‫)סיפור פשוט‬, this chapter explores the novel’s analogies between economy and love, read here through a psychoanalytic lens. My shift to psychoanalysis is doubly motivated. As I show in the next section, while economic practices such as exchange, consumption, and accumulation are very much intertwined with irrational impulses, unconscious desires, and anxieties, Freudian and post-Freudian psychoanalytic conceptualizations of self and love are modeled on economic infrastructures. In recognizing these interactions between economics and psychoanalysis, my present reading outlines the psychological motivations of early twentieth-century Jewish economy, simultaneously tracing different economic models of love as portrayed in Agnon’s novel.2 Written in the tradition of nineteenth-century European realism, A Simple Story focuses on the story of Hirshl, son of wealthy shopkeepers Tsirl and Baruch Meir Hurvitz. Hirshl falls in love with his

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poor relative Bluma Nakht, who comes to live at his parents’ house after her mother’s death. Set again in the familiar territory of the town of Shibush at the beginning of the twentieth century, this adolescent love is nipped in the bud by Hirshl’s mother, who is adamant that her son marry Mina, daughter of the rich merchant Gedalia Ziemlich. Dreamy, passive, and easily manipulated by his mother, Hirshl marries Mina, yet secretly remains in love with Bluma, who moves out of Hirshl’s parents’ home just before his wedding. Hirshl’s unresolved conflict culminates in a mental crisis, and he is later sent for treatment at Dr. Langsam’s sanatorium. In the intentionally equivocal ending of the novel, Hirshl returns to Shibush to raise a family with Mina, yet thoughts of Bluma continue to haunt his mind. In this sense, the ending of A Simple Story, as Nitza Ben-Dov claimed, is just ambivalent and “tricky” enough to encourage multiple readings. Whereas those with a “pragmatic soul” will find Hirshl and Mina’s marriage to be a “happy ending,” others, with a “romantic soul,” may see the story as ending on a sad note.3 The ambivalent and open-ended resolution of the novel elucidates why Agnon’s “not so simple” story, as Dov Sadan termed it, has inspired decades of scholarly debates about the Hirshl-Bluma-Mina triangle. 4 In fact, not only did scholarly interpretations of this novel change with time, but so did the nature of the scholarship itself. While scholars of the first half of the twentieth century focused more on the historical and social context of the novel, later scholarship centered around the psychological meaning of the text as a story of the “universal” longing for romantic love and self-realization, and the “authentic” suffering of the person who faces society’s oppressive norms.5 Still, although these two major interpretative traditions are indeed opposed on many accounts, most readings of the novel share a common denominator: the assumption that Hirshl’s psychological state—which early in the novel is summed up by Hirshl himself as “pain” (‫—)מכאוב‬is radically antithetical to the socio-economic world of Shibush, a town “full of merchants.” In this sense, Kurzweil’s assertion that Hirshl’s emotional language of love is at war with the collective language of commerce and commodities remains the cornerstone of scholarly discussion about A Simple Story until this day.6 However, from a sociological perspective, romantic love is not just a personal, authentic, and transcendent feeling opposed to so-

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cietal norms, but a complex idea shaped by historical, cultural, and social processes.7 Correspondingly, the notion of romantic love has changed radically throughout the ages; in ancient Greece, for example, romantic love was discussed in relation to male fraternity and not with regard to women, while courtly love in medieval times was portrayed as unconsummated and directed at an inaccessible love object. Importantly, even the emphasis on love in Romanticism was framed in terms of a private feeling, and not in the context of marriage. In fact, prior to the twentieth century, romantic love was hardly a prerequisite for marriage, which was arranged by parents in many societies. This was also the norm in Jewish society in Europe. Consequently, many scholars argue that the modern identification of romantic love with individuality, a sense of self, and free choice is a relatively recent invention.8 The perception of love as a romantic ideal transcending the socio-economic order, claims Illouz, was heavily promoted by the capitalist order itself in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. The concept of an irrational, romantic love that surpasses social, economic, and ethnic boundaries indeed celebrates individualism, free choice, and self-definition—ideas that are paramount to the capitalist spirit. While the idea of spontaneous romantic love did exist in different forms prior to the capitalist age, capitalism offered a unique new formula. The modern configuration of “exhilarating” romantic love—eventually consummated in the “laborious” social institution of marriage—brings together two contradictory aspects of the capitalist system: the frivolous world of capitalist consumption, and the Weberian view of capitalist production based on ascetic Protestant values, strict rationality, and productivity.9 Adding to this conceptualization of modern romantic love as a conflicted structure rooted in modern times, Joanne Brown also defines romantic love as both an “heir of the enlightenment and of, broadly speaking, religious passion.”10 While the idea of romantic love of a singular object emerges from the religious subtext of unrequited courtly love in medieval times, the modern consummation of passionate love in a marriage has its roots in the age of reason and capitalism, predicated on individual choice, rationality, and responsibility. Both Illouz and Brown underscore the dialectical relationship between the modern concept of romantic love and societal and cultural norms of the capitalist era.

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Even if romantic love can be disruptive of economic and social configurations, it is also true that the way we think, theorize, and even experience love is shaped by these same apparatuses. While the aforementioned theories highlight different conjunctions between modern romantic love and capitalism, the vast majority of interpretations of A Simple Story strictly oppose these notions. From the 1960s onward, scholarship on Agnon read A Simple Story through a psychoanalytic lens. Hirshl’s experience of love and subsequent “pain” were examined through such terms as repression, sublimation, substitution, projection, and psychotic outbreak. As a result, for scholars who assert that Bluma is Hirshl’s “true love,” Hirshl’s struggle for authentic love comes at the cost of pain and suffering. His denial of this pain at the end of the novel is the result of repression.11 In contrast, for a small minority—amongst them, the authors A. B. Yehosua and Amos Oz—by the end of the novel, Hirshl learns to “truly” love Mina. According to these readings, Hirshl’s love for Bluma is either an infantile wish to find a substitute for an emotionally absent mother (Yehoshua) or an unconscious desire to repeat the relationship with the above mother, overcome at the end with Mina’s help (Oz).12 In these more “optimistic” interpretations, Hirshl’s pain is exchanged for a mature “true” love. Two problems arise in the above readings. First, despite the use of psychoanalysis, romantic love is rarely examined through a psychoanalytic frame. There is either a “wrong kind of love” that needs to be rationalized in psychoanalytic terminology, such as infantile wish, repression, or substitution, for example, or the notion of “true love,” appearing as a timeless, and self-explanatory ideal. Secondly, in these readings, authentic love always remains above and beyond the market. Once either Bluma or Mina is identified as the “true” love object, romantic love is never discussed in economic terms or in its relation to economy, for its nature is simply foreign to them. Although exchange, cost, and substitution prefigure in all these psychoanalytical interpretations, the readings ignore any analogies between the psychoanalytic and the economic discourses that appear in the novel. To establish such analogies, it is helpful to consider the economic infrastructure of Freudian psychoanalysis. As Lawerence Birken elucidates, three meta-psychological hypotheses underpin Sigmund

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Freud’s psychoanalysis. Freud’s topographic and dynamic hypotheses, detailing the psychic spaces and the apparatus of repression respectively, received much critical and scholarly attention. The third hypothesis—the economic one—has been comparatively neglected, paradoxically, because it is so ubiquitous in Freud’s thought. Tracing closely the economic hypothesis, Birken argues that although Freud changed much of his earlier psychoanalytic presuppositions in favor of his later dual-drive theory (the life and death drive theory), his economic conceptualization of the production, distribution, and consumption of the libido by the ego still dominated his later theories as well. Appropriately, Freud consistently speaks of the ego and the libido in terms of gain, loss, excess, depletion, enrichment, and impoverishment. In this sense, Freud’s “idea of a ‘psychic economy’ was no mere metaphor.”13 To follow Birken, Freud’s psychic or libidinal economy was in fact very much grounded in his own historical and economic background. Consequently, Birken locates Freud’s concept of “Homo Sexualis” in nineteenth-century political economy theories of “Homo Economicus,” specifically those of marginalist doctrines.14 These late nineteenth-century economic doctrines viewed “Homo Economicus,” or economic man, as first and foremost a consumer, wishing to fulfill his needs in a competitive world of scarce means. Correspondingly, this economic concept can be found in the early stages of Freudian theory, where the ego is still thought of more in terms of a self, and the libido is defined as the instinctual energy of the unconscious. For Freud, the ego arrives in this world as a “self-contained economy” that needs to maintain a fixed amount of libido through accumulation and discharge. Constantly in search of resources in a world of scarcity, the unconscious wishes to consume material and immaterial objects in order to fulfill its needs. As Birken explains, the unconscious as guided by the pleasure principle is not time-sensitive. It does not “understand” or operate with the concept of time. As a result, from the perspective of the unconscious at least, “all objects are scarce in so far as there was no time through which they could be produced.”15 For Freud, only after the initially enclosed ego can no longer internally distribute its libido does it turn to external objects and develop the time-sensitive reality principle in order to maintain its level of libido. Thus, the ego is always “on the lookout”

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for objects to substitute in order to attain its balance, guarantee its pleasure, and avoid suffering. In this sense, Birken claims, neuroses that seem uneconomical or wasteful in fact safeguard the principle of a profitable economic exchange rooted in the logic of psychoanalysis. Considering the economic underpinnings of psychoanalytic theories and vice versa, this chapter will now examine Hirshl’s notion of romantic love not as antithetical to his socio-economic background, but rather as a product of it. In this reading, however, I will not assume a causal relation between the economic and psychological spheres. Avoiding both vulgar Marxism and a depoliticized, “universal” psychoanalytic approach, my reading does not assert the precedence of either sphere. Instead, this chapter will delineate possible analogies between the different aspects of modern Jewish economy in the age of early capitalism and the field of psychoanalysis, as they are shaped in Agnon’s “not so simple” story. This exploration will first underscore how psychological mechanisms affect economy and subsequently how economic logic informs and shapes psychoanalysis. Economy in “Times of Change” The plot of Agnon’s A Simple Story is situated in the first decade of the twentieth century, a period considered the golden era of capitalism.16 Though industrialization and modern transportation worsened the economic situation of many Jewish populations in Eastern Europe, these changes also propelled a minority toward powerful positions in banking, commerce, and industrial production.17 While A Simple Story still acknowledges the traditional economic functions of Jews in Europe through its focus on the mercantile realm, the narrator stresses again and again that these are “times of change” in Shibush. Accordingly, the novel constructs a complex portrayal of the modernization of Jewish economy in Shibush through a quasi-socialist perspective.18 While the Hurvitz family belongs to a bourgeois, urban class, and the Ziemlich family is part of a small, rural, wealthy class, Bluma comes from a poor family bankrupt by her deceased father, Hayim Nakht, a book-loving and delicate man who lost the family’s assets in bad investments. As a result of the emphasis on different classes in the text, the love affair between the wealthy Hirshl and poor Bluma highlights the socio-economic tensions that subvert the traditional structure of

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a Jewish society already well on the way toward secularization and modernization.19 The tensions between the classes are underscored early on in the novel by Tsirl, who shares the hostile attitudes of the bourgeois class toward the demands of the working class, and toward housemaids who “are not even ashamed to call themselves socialists.”20 In general, though, the text presents these new struggles for economic equality and social mobility in a positive light through the subplot involving Getzel Stein, the employee in the Hurvitz store, and mainly through the reader’s identification with Bluma’s suffering, as seen in the commodification of her body, for: “Bluma owned nothing in the world, all she could call her own were her own two hands that she let out to others” (72; 23). The modern aspects of the economic sphere of Shibush are also seen in the town’s participation in the global network of the early twentieth century. While we read of the migration of people from Shibush to America, the growing importance of the dollar, and the distribution of newspapers around the world, nothing captures the weaving of Shibush into the emerging global capitalist system more accurately than the image of eggs. These eggs, which appear intermittently throughout the text, are produced in Galicia and sent by trains to Germany and to the rest of Europe by Mina’s uncle, Arnold Ziemlich. The narrator emphasizes that “the chickens had no idea what made them keep pecking and laying but those who grew them and sold them know perfectly well that each single egg laid was for Herr Ziemlich from Germany” (269; 227). The image of the chickens as unaware participants in a larger socio-economic system brings to mind Hirshl, who “had wanted Bluma, but both God in heaven and Tsirl and Yona Toyber on earth had seen to it that he wound up with Mina” (262; 220). From Hirshl’s perspective, at least, his ability to master his own life is equated with that of a caged chicken. Continuing with the poultry metaphors, Hirshl’s imitation of a rooster demonstrates ambivalence towards his self-perceived “castration,” as I shall later show. Indeed, the parallelism between Hirshl and a caged chicken or soon-to-be slaughtered rooster could encourage a Marxist reading of the novel, which would cast the repression of Hirshl’s subversive erotic desire for Bluma in exchange for his marriage to Mina as the reproduction of capitalist society through societal and cultural subjugation.21

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Though A Simple Story is susceptible to such readings, unlike nineteenth-century European social novels Agnon’s text does not point toward an alternative utopian order. Still, while the novel later shifts focus to disclose psychological dimensions of Hirshl’s story, this turn does not signal the end of the novel’s socio-economic critique and exploration, as previously argued by various scholars.22 Indeed, to offer a utopian solution to the ills of capitalism coupled with a resolution of the novel’s conflicts would go against the modernist and open-ended narrative stratagies that characterized Agnon’s writing throughout most of his carrer. Instead, A Simple Story continues its investigation of capitalism precisely by highlighting the intertwinement of the public socio-economic and the private subjective spheres. By uncovering the mutual effect of economics and psychoanalysis, the novel presents different models of romantic love, questioning whether love can offer us an economic exchange that surpasses self-interest, utility, and profit. Accumulation, Consumption, and Lack The interweaving of the “external” socio-economic sphere and the “interior” psychological sphere, which together construct the modern Jewish economy in the novel, begins with Tsirl Hurvitz. As Ziva Shamir argues, Tsirl is the character who dominates the first and “socially oriented” half of the novel. Tsirl is a dominant character in two senses: not only is she the most prominent character in the first half of the novel, but she also influences the decisions of the other characters in the novel, while letting them think that their own motivations guide them.23 Consequently, the construction of the economic sphere in the text ironically begins “at home” with Tsirl’s exploitation of her poor relative. As Nitza Ben-Dov emphasizes, Bluma does not find shelter at the Hurvitz home by appealing to the compassion of her relative Baruch Meir, but by proving her value to Tsirl’s calculating nature. Only after seeing Bluma’s resourcefulness when the orphan girl prepares breakfast for the entire family does Tsirl allow Bluma to stay at her home, replacing the servant who just left.24 Subsequently, by juxtaposing Tsirl’s treatment of Bluma with Tsirl’s management of the store, the text underscores Tsirl’s all-encompassing economic valuation of both people and business:

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Bluma’s stay with her cousins was a long one. Tsirl neither pampered nor picked on her. Indeed Tsirl knew how to get along with people. She ran a shipshape shop, knew the habits of each customer, and never looked down on anyone, not even the poorest of buyers. “Today he bought for a penny,” she would say, “but tomorrow he can win a lottery and buy for a pound.” The tiniest tot who came to make the smallest purchase was treated by her with affection. . . .” Now that he is small,” Tsirl said, “so are his needs. But when he’s big, they’ll be great” (60; 8–9).

What enables Tsirl to run a “shipshape shop” is the same quality that motivates her approval of Bluma’s stay once she realizes her value as unpaid help. In Tsirl’s rationalization, Bluma does not receive wages because Tsirl will pay her dowry once Bluma gets married. However, because Bluma leaves the Hurvitz house before Hirshl’s marriage and on her own accord, she never receives any compensation. Tsirl’s behavior is guided by self-interest, future planning, reinvestment, and calculation. She is the personification of economic rationality. In this manner, Tsirl is nice to children, affectionate to customers, and fairly hospitable to her poor relative only when it is profitable to her. Above all, Tsirl measures this profitability through one universal and quantifiable criterion: money. Appropriately, through the use of indirect speech, the narrator ironically makes clear that Tsirl’s decision to encourage her son Hirshl to work at the store instead of continuing his religious studies does not arise from any “lessened respect for religion,” but only because for Tsirl “any occupation whose practical value was doubtful seemed to her less than an ideal” (66, 15). The narrator’s ironic commentary throughout the ensuing paragraphs establishes Tsirl’s worldview as structured by the language of profitable economic exchange, both literally and symbolically. Accordingly, it was an economic rationale that motivated Tsirl to send Hirshl to study Torah in the first place. As the narrator emphasizes, Tsirl orchestrated Hirshl’s future career as a rabbi not so much out of “her piety,” but out of the need to pay a past debt. Tsirl’s great-great-grandfather insulted the town’s rabbi who in return cursed the Hurvitz family with “madness” throughout the generations, and “from that day on there was not one generation in Tsirl’s family without a madman” (66; 16). For Tsirl, therefore,

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Hirshl’s career as a rabbi is an exchange which will annul the ancient curse. In fact, it is precisely this old debt that turns A Simple Story into the story of the accumulation of unpaid debts, and of the crisis this accumulation instigates. It is only because of the most recent “madman” in the Hurvitz family (Tsirl’s brother) that poor Baruch Meir was even able to wed the wealthier Tsirl—considered a lesser match due to her family’s generational mental illness. Working in her father’s store, Baruch Meir broke his engagement to Mirl, Bluma’s mother, in order to wed Tsirl. From this perspective, one can already see Hirshl’s love for Bluma as carrying the potential for the spiritual reparation (‫ )תיקון‬for his father’s past mistake, or, alternatively, as the payment for his father’s debt. In this sense, if Hirshl would have married Bluma, he would have cashed in, so to speak, on his father’s broken promise. The crooked would have finally become straight. However, because of Hirshl’s marriage to Mina, which prevented the realization of his love to Bluma, he never pays this debt. Instead, by repeating his father’s mistakes, he only defers its payment. Consequently, Hirshl’s subsequent mental breakdown can be explained not only in psychological terms, but also as the result of two standing debts resulting from his father’s “sin” and the rabbi’s curse.25 In this case, Tsirl’s decision to transplant Hirshl from religious studies to the store—her calculation of monetary profit—only increases the debt in another “phantom like” economic order, bringing it to crisis. As such, A Simple Story presents an idea that we have already recognized in Agnon’s first novella, ironically titled And the Crooked Shall Be Made Straight—the idea of the infinitely deferred debt. While Hirshl’s mother is characterized by traits associated with economy such as rationality, abstraction, calculation, and selfinterest, Tsirl also possesses one more quality pertinent to the definition of capitalism as a new economic and cultural system—the desire for endless accumulation of capital. According to Marx, while in previous economic systems, such as feudalism, wealth and social power were measured by lands and material possessions, in capitalism, reliance on money, and the constant need to reinvest capital due to competition, transforms the accumulation of money as social power to a limitless process.26 In a system where all can be translated and equated by the universal language of money, Tsirl invests all

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of her talents toward the prospect of surplus capital. Appropriately, the narrator observes that “Certainly the store could not have done without Baruch Meir who kept the books . . . yet least of all could it have done without Tsirl who knew from talking with each customer just what he was worth. . . . A man’s money . . . had its own voice that spoke when he did” (134; 86). This desire to accumulate is most poignant when Tsirl and Baruch Meir sit together in the closed shop “when schilling rose above schilling on the counter and all was right in the world” (91; 43). The way Tsirl attempts to hoard money is complemented at the same time by her desire for endless consumption, symbolized by her insatiable appetite. As the narrator sarcastically expands, Tsirl, “who had reached the age when what concerns a woman most is what she has to eat and drink” (74; 25), is fixated on what, how, and when she will eat. For her, the order of meals actually determines temporality: when her trusted cook left, “nature itself had gone awry,” and only when Bluma replaced her did “nature resume its proper course as if the months of the year were inscribed right over the stove” (75; 26). For Shaked, the association of meals and wealth with the “great mother” motif in the novel marks Tsirl as the representative of the idea that the bourgeois world is the only place of stability in an otherwise mad human existence.27 In contrast to Tsirl, writes Shaked, it is Gedalia Ziemlich’s paranoid fears of bankruptcy which expose this false sense of safety in bourgeois life. However, it is in fact Tsirl’s desire for endless accumulation of capital and its counterpart, the endless consumption of goods, which early on exposes the instability of the bourgeois world and capitalist logic. When it comes to food or money, Tsirl is never completely satisfied. Her desire for food leaves her constantly hungry. Though “what Tsirl liked best was a proper meal” (75; 26), and though Tsirl relishes Mina’s parents’ extravagant feasts, she is nevertheless jealous of the wealthier banker Gildenhorn who “travels so much that he must eat new foods every day.” Tsirl’s jealousy of Gildenhorn is accompanied by the thought that “The world might be full of beautiful things, yet not everyone has the luck to enjoy them” (167; 121). No matter how much money Tsirl accumulates or how much food she consumes, she is never full. The impossibility of fulfilling her need for endless accumulation and consumption indicates an inherent sense of lack “within” Tsirl. In

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this respect, Tsirl already exemplifies Shaked’s “inner weaknesses” of the bourgeois world, or in Marx’s terms, the self-contradictions of capitalism which necessarily lead to crisis. The limitless need for capital’s expansion, argues Marx, creates a constant imbalance, leading cyclicly to the exhaustion of the same markets capital later needs for its expansion. As such, crisis is inscribed within the capitalist structure.28 Correspondingly, Tsirl’s desire for endless accumulation and consumption are based on her denial of an inherent sense of lack; in other words, she seeks the negation of deficit. In this respect—consistent with Jewish societal norms, but also because of her exclusive reliance on the logic of profitable exchange—Tsirl will manipulate Hirshl into marrying the wealthy Mina Ziemlich, a decision that ultimately comes at the cost of her son’s mental health. In chapter 14, the text moves seamlessly from Tsirl’s evaluation of people as potential capital to Gedalia Ziemlich’s severe anxieties. The text thus encourages a reading of Tsirl and Ziemlich together for the purpose of outlining the psychological infrastructure of modern Jewish economy in the age of early capitalism. “Not a man to parade his fortune” and also “a generous giver to charity,” Ziemlich is only motivated by a sense of impending doom. As such, Ziemlich “was not a happy man . . . this was not because he did not have enough, but because he feared losing what he had and sinking back to poverty. He was keenly conscious of the fact that while he lacked for nothing . . . other no less worthy Jews lived in penury. . . . The creditor would come tomorrow to collect his debt” (135–36; 88). 29 Here, one of the key tropes in Agnon’s poetics—the notion of debt—articulates Gedalia’s fears. The debtor’s fear keeps gnawing away at Gedalia, who later in the novel still fears that “if not today then tomorrow, the creditor would call in his debt and expect to be paid back in interest” (165; 119). In fact, Gedalia is so consumed by his imagined indebtedness that he feels he is operating on the basis of a lack that will soon be revealed to the world. Put in economic terms, Gedalia’s anxieties indirectly insert one of the main principles of the credit theory of money into the story, namely, the idea that money is not a commodity with an inherent value, but is only a social relation of debt and credit. Putting his own paranoid twist on this theory, Gedalia can only see monetary relations as the transfer of potentially ruinous debt, not as the exchange of wealth and acquisition of value. Gedalia Ziemlich’s

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impending sense of indebtedness and lack is literally transcribed in his name, which in Yiddish means “seemingly great.” In one sense, Gedalia’s sense of lack can be contextualized by what I have termed Jewish divine economy, which establishes the believer as infinitely indebted to his all-powerful creditor.30 Gedalia’s attitude then is possibly no more than a paranoid exaggeration of Jewish religious thought. Still, why the paranoia? As evident in Agnon’s earlier texts, Jewish tradition also promotes the notion of “trust” that accepts the endless debt to God, but also effaces that very same debt under the horizon of a divine reward. Thus, the economic infrastructure of Jewish thought does not necessarily lead to paranoia, but can encourage a manic acceptance of this debt and its future reward.31 In stark contrast to such characters as Ḥananyah of In the Heart of the Seas (‫ )בלבב הימים‬or Reb Yudel Hasid of The Bridal Canopy, who trust in divine economy regardless of actual outcomes in real life, Gedalia Ziemlich presents us with their mirror image in his paranoid mistrust, the unconscious belief that nothing will be rewarded, and all will be taken away. Accounting for Ziemlich’s unconsciously paranoid position, A Simple Story supplies a biographical explanation. The narrator emphasizes Ziemlich’s upbringing in a poor family, “going to bed without supper, rising without breakfast” (136; 88). Even as Ziemlich’s fortune grows and he further climbs the socio-economic ladder, he is stricken by memories of “his brothers and sisters crying from hunger” (136; 89). Just like Tsirl who never feels full, Ziemlich, who is haunted by his past poverty, never feels like he truly owns even a penny. Whereas Gedalia was raised in a poor family and Tsirl in an upper-middle-class home, both characters are obsessed with money. They can only evaluate the world through a “monetary lens.” Surprisingly, the same anxieties experienced by Gedalia and Tsirl were presumably shared by none other than the father of psychoanalysis, Sigmund Freud, as shown in S. L. Warner’s essay “Freud and Money.” Born of Galician parents and raised in the mid- to late nineteenth century in Freiberg and Moravia, Freud claimed to be haunted by his childhood poverty. As Warner shows, this led to a recurring anxiety about lack of money, and to a constant preoccupation with incurring, deferring, and paying debts. Through biographical claims that Freud in fact “perpetuated a myth” of poverty, Warner adopts

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Peter Drucker’s theory that Freud suffered from “poorhouse neurosis,” a mental illness that characterized many middle-upper-class Jews. The spread of capitalism in the late nineteenth-century AustroHungarian Empire (Agnon’s Galicia included), accompanied by the emancipation of the Jews, encouraged “a very rapid economic climb upwards from its previous lower base” of some of the Jewish population. According to Drucker, this radical change in Jewish society resulted in the common “poorhouse neurosis” that manifested itself in a constant fear of poverty and bankruptcy, and an “obsessive talking about money while always claiming not to be interested in it.”32 The theory of the “poorhouse neurosis” serves as an interesting base for a historical and psycho-social response to the anti-Semitic myth of an inherent “Jewish” obsession with money. Though Drucker’s theory pertains only to modernity, Jews’ reliance on money began in the early medieval period. After the church enacted a law against usury in 806 AD that covered the entire Christian population, Jews in Europe were cast as facilitators of finance, commerce, lending, and interest. In order to bypass the church prohibition, Christian rulers imposed the task of collecting lease payments and taxes upon Jews, often forbidding them from working in other professions. Barred from owning land in Europe until the late nineteenth century, it was money and not land that served for many Jews as the means of socioeconomic subsistence in their European host societies.33 The psychological cost of this historical necessity that Jews had to rely on money for political survival is woven into Agnon’s A Simple Story, more openly in Gedalia Ziemlich and more subtly in Tsirl Hurvitz. Reading Gedalia’s paranoid fears of bankruptcy alongside Tsirl’s insatiable appetite brings to the fore a complicated and vulnerable portrayal of modern Jewish economy in the age of an early capitalism characterized by a desire for endless accumulation and consumption based on a haunting notion of debt and deficit. This double movement historically originated in the political powerlessness of the Jewish population in Europe, which could have only been helped by capital. Subsequently, in Agnon’s novel, “rational” economic practices such as profitable exchange, investments, calculations, and long-term planning and saving are motivated by psychological and “irrational” reasons such as greed, desire, and above all anxiety.34 While Gedalia is obsessively fixated by the lack of money, Tsirl transforms anxiety

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into a blind trust in the ability of money, the universal and rational language­, to define and explain the world. Tsirl’s blind trust in the power of money will lead to Hirshl’s crisis. Hirshl’s problematic inheritance, however, does not result from his mother’s insistence on seeing the world through an economic lens. As indicated in previous chapters, money indeed speaks through language, and no discourse can eliminate economy, for it is also structured by it. Tsirl’s “mistake,” rather, lies in the specific economic discourse she bequeaths to Hirshl. Tsirl teaches her son that there is only one language of economy possible: the desire for endless accumulation and consumption based on the negation of deficit. Subsequently, it is precisely Hirshl’s repression of his sense of lack which will trigger the crisis of his libidinal economy. The Melancholic Lack and the Endless Consumption of Love Just as the economic logic in the novel is informed by psychological structures, so is the psychological sphere in the text shaped by an economic logic. Nonetheless, it is the narrator of A Simple Story who distinguishes between Hirshl’s “inner” experience and questions of economics. After Bluma’s employment in the Hurvitz house begins, the narrator explains the unjust fate of poor Bluma, as understood through Hirshl’s perspective for the first time: Though he was only sixteen years old, he was old enough to know that life was not an idyll. There are those who claim that the whole problem with the world was its being divided into the rich and the poor. Indeed, that was a problem. Certainly though, it was not the main one. The main problem was that everything was so painful (‫( )מכאוב‬61; 10).

Following the narrator’s lead, many scholars have argued that indeed Hirshl’s pain is the cost of the “universal” struggle of the person to pursue romantic love against the oppressive norms of the collective. However, Hirshl’s conclusion that the “main problem in the world” was “that everything was so painful” appears in the novel well before his infatuation with Bluma. In contrast, then, to the assumption that Hirshl’s pain and suffering are necessarily the result of his unconsummated love of Bluma, we might rather assume, as A. B. Yehoshua

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previously did, that Hirshl’s “pain” might rather be the origin of his love. Hirshl’s deepest conflict, argues Yehoshua, is found in his relation to his mother. Tsirl is a dominant yet emotionally absent mother who sabotages Hirshl’s love for Bluma out of fear that Bluma will take her place with her “maternal qualities.”35 While Yehoshua’s observation about Tsirl’s emotional detachment is accurate, his decision to define this mother-son relationship as based on the repression of an aggressive conflict, followed by a smooth resolution with Hirshl’s love for Mina, seems too optimistic. If indeed Bluma was only a “substitute” for Tsirl, does Mina not end up serving the same purpose? After all, Hirshl only “falls in love” with Mina when she becomes more maternal (and even that is debatable according to the long history of scholarly discussion on this matter). Above all, can we say that Hirshl was “cured” of his “conflict” when the extreme measure taken for this cure, according to Yehoshua, is moving his first son, Meshulam, out of the house to be taken care of by his grandparents? Tsirl was indeed an absent mother. After the birth of Hirshl, the narrator describes in detail Baruch Meir’s love for Hirshl, yet, as concerns Tsirl, “As soon as Hirshl was weaned, she went back to work full time in the store. . . . And though Hirshl was her only child, she was careful not to show him too much love . . .” (62; 11). Appropriately, when Langsam treats Hirshl after his mental crisis by singing to him, the narrator comments that Hirshl was “entranced” by the singing just as “he might have been as a child” listening to a “sweet, gruff . . . lullaby,” but “Tsirl, however, had never sung to him . . .” (233; 190). Hirshl’s pain, then, is not connected initially to the loss of Bluma, but to the much earlier and unconscious loss of his mother. In his seminal essay “Mourning and Melancholia,” published in 1917, Freud observed that while in mourning the subject knows what he has lost; in melancholia the nature and origin of the loss remain unconscious. What interests Freud in the comparison between these two modes is the potential ability to give a “characterization of the economics of the pain.”36 Whereas in mourning the libido that was once invested in the lost object is slowly and painfully re-invested in other objects, the melancholic incorporates the lost object into his own ego, while reinvesting his libido inward. Consistent with his emphasis on “mental economics,” Freud describes the melancholic subject, who con-

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sciously abuses himself but unconsciously directs these attacks to the internalized lost object, as “internal work is consuming his ego.” As a result, the melancholic subject is in danger of “emptying the ego until it is totally impoverished.”37 From this perspective, Hirshl’s realization that “everything is painful” is the first sign of a melancholic condition. As such, Hirshl presents us with a libidinal economy operating on the basis of an inherent sense of lack due to the symbolic loss of the mother figure. In this stage of lack, which secretly destabilizes his libidinal economy, Hirshl meets Bluma, who was “almost his twin” (76; 27). Bluma, therefore, functions in the text as the substitute for Tsirl, and also as the hopeful resource of symbolic nourishment to fill Hirshl’s existing deficit. The loss of the mother as the origin of an unstable libidinal economy is a familiar trope in Agnon’s writing, as can be seen in the 1924 novella In the Prime of Her Life (‫ )בדמי ימיה‬and in “Betrothed” (“‫ )”שבועת אמונים‬published in 1941. The importance of the trope of the dead/absent mother is further underscored in A Simple Story when Tirza, the protagonist of In the Prime of Her Life, appears as a minor character. In the novella, Tirza pursues her dead mother’s first love, Akavia, in an attempt to “repair” (‫ תיקון‬,‫ )לתקן‬her mother’s past mistake of marrying her father, a premise analogous to Hirshl and Bluma’s love affair as the possible spiritual reparation of the broken engagement of Baruch Meir and Mirl. The novella’s charged plot sets up Tirza’s complex array of faulty libidinal exchanges: substituting herself for her mother, substituting Akavia for her mother, or substituting Akavia for her father, all in her attempt to cope with the death of her mother. In the section that follows, I will further develop the possible intersections between these two texts in which the two protagonists set out in search for a maternal substitution to fill their melancholic lack. In describing Hirshl’s growing love for Bluma, the text plays a two-fold game. On the one hand, by situating this love affair against the backdrop of a religious yet bourgeois society, Agnon highlights values such as free choice and individualism. On the other hand, the text also emphasizes the socio-historical and cultural dimension of this “individual” and “authentic” love, as the narrator intermittently details the social customs and practices related to this new kind of

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love. Thus we are informed that the cultural climate has changed: while the matchmaker, Yona Toyber, used to manipulate sons’ love according to their parents’ wishes, now he manipulates the parents to follow their sons’ wishes. Through each of the characters’ points of view, we learn of the new social practices surrounding romantic love: Mina hears that young lovers read the poems of Schiller to each other these days; Hirshl learns that you are supposed to bow before the girl and kiss her hand as you ask her to marry you, and “this image is etched in his mind.” At the same time, society, as a whole, begins to appreciate popular singers who sing “bawdy lyrics.” The novel itself is interlaced with stories of unrequited love, which either involve minor characters or appear in the romantic novels consumed by the characters. An entire culture, hence, of a new romantic love with its own economy of requirements, practices, and expectations emerges in the novel. To follow Illouz, this new culture, celebrating romantic love as a prerequisite for marriage predicated on personal choice, was enthusiastically promoted in the era of industrial capitalism. Love was now constituted as “a utopia of transgression.” With the increasing secularization in modernity, an opposite process of the sacralization of love gained more force. The career of love in modernity then is a complicated one. Stemming partially from religious roots, it was secularized only to become a quasi-religion in itself. In an increasingly commodified world, argues Illouz, modern romantic love was perceived in the early twentieth century as the supreme value—an expression of individuality, emotional abundance, and the realization of personal and private happiness.38 Illouz’s historical analysis can also be applied to the narrative of romantic love in modern Jewish society, even though this community still remained fairly distinct from the Christian bourgeoisie after the emancipation of Jews in nineteenth-century Europe. Though marriages were still arranged by matchmaking and exclusively conducted within Jewish society, with the advent of the Haskalah in the nineteenth century, writers of this movement attacked religious Jewish society for its “social practices that distorted sexuality.”39 Revolting against the tradition of marrying at a young age and the practice of matchmaking, the maskilim adopted modern European concepts of romantic love and promoted a model of the European bourgeois family in the hope that these new

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concepts would produce a healthy sexuality, and by extension a normative and productive society. Romantic and personal love became both a utopian ideal and a strategic device in the Haskalah’s critique of the abnormal state of Jewish society in the diaspora. Correspondingly, Agnon’s novel portrays a traditional Jewish society in which religious institutions and authority are already in decline, as the modern concept of “romantic love” is well on its way. Neither a devout man, nor a Zionist, nor a socialist, Hirshl falls in love with Bluma with all his melancholic anguish, which was deprived of any other symbolic outlet. Accordingly, the modern construction of romantic love as a spiritual utopia of eternal bliss greatly informs Hirshl’s love of Bluma, as it is often described in the text in terms of a limitless and transcendent abundance. Hirshl can think of “a thousand excuses” to be with Bluma, and when Bluma leaves Hirshl in her bedroom after their hands merely brushed against each other for the first time, he lies on her bed and “a thousand years might well have passed, for the world stopped to exist for him” (82; 34). The usage of the number one thousand, a trope in biblical literature, charges Hirshl’s love with a sense of spiritual infinity. 40 It is precisely the desire to accumulate these moments of transcendence which guides Hirshl’s fantasies of Bluma as an object to be endlessly consumed. Seeing Bluma is like gazing at a “cavern” opened to reveal a “hidden treasure that was his for the taking,” or eating “a candy” in the hope to “retain its taste” forever (78; 29). Later, Hirshl’s love of Bluma is associated with a well-known Jewish myth in Genesis Rabbah, which tells how God first created human beings as half male and half female and then sundered them. 41 The Jewish myth in Genesis Rabbah, dating back to the fifth century CE, likely has its origins in Hellenistic culture, possibly drawing from Aristophanes’ parable in Plato’s Symposium. While the Jewish myth can be found in different variations in rabbinic and mystical writings, Aristophanes’ parable became one of the most famous precursors in Western culture for the modern concept of romantic love. 42 The novel’s allusion to the Jewish myth and to Aristophanes’ parable emphasizes Hirshl’s feelings of lack (“half a person”), and his subsequent need to fulfill this lack (finding his second half). With all their differences, the Jewish and Greek parables both exemplify again that the concept of “personal” and “spontaneous” romantic love in modernity is predi-

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cated on existing albeit disparate cultural schemes. In this sense, as Joanne Brown highlights, our need to fall in love always exists prior to loving anyone in particular. As a result, the concept of romantic love can overlap with the definition of a narcissistic object choice in psychoanalytic discourse. 43 In Aristophanes’ tale, for example, as well as in the psychoanalytic concept of narcissism on which I will elaborate further in the next section, love is designed as a means to the end of self-completion or as a libidinal investment for a future return. Correspondingly, while the scenes depicting Hirshl’s longings for Bluma are among, if are not themselves, the most beautiful and romantic love scenes written in modern Hebrew literature, these fantasies present Hirshl as a consumer. As we shall see in the next section, Hirshl wishes to passively consume “the wondrous mystery” of Bluma in order to balance the melancholic lack that undermines his libidinal economy. Ironically then, Hirshl’s love for Bluma, supposedly opposed to the economic sphere, is modeled after the same double movement which characterizes the structure of modern Jewish economy as presented in the novel. Just like Tsirl and Gedalia’s economic logic, Hirshl’s romantic love presents itself as the insatiable desire for endless consumption based on the negation of an inherent deficit. Narcissus and Bluma Reading Freud’s conceptualization of the economics of love vis-à-vis Agnon’s A Simple Story serves a dual purpose. While Freud’s psychoanalytic theory illuminates Hirshl’s economy of love and its predestined collapse, the different economic models of love portrayed in A Simple Story enable a rethinking of the economic infrastructure offered by psychonanalytic theories regarding the circulation of love between self and other. In the later stages of Freud’s thought, melancholia is inherently linked with narcissism. Melancholia, as Martin Bergmann argues, is in fact a narcissistic disease. 44 Accordingly, in “Mourning and Melancholia” (written one year after the 1914 publication of “On Narcissism: An Introduction”) Freud observed that the melancholic’s reinvestment of his libido onto his own ego (the unconscious incorporation of an external object denying its loss) results from a narcis-

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sistic object choice. Melancholia, says Freud, is a regression from a narcissistic object choice to a state of primary narcissism in which the ego refuses to invest libido in external objects, but only distributes the libido internally. What the melancholic and the narcissist share, elucidates Bergmann, is that they can only love an object as far as it embodies their unconscious projections. Both the narcissist and the melancholic therefore deny the existence of others as separate beings through unconscious mourning and cycles of projections. This is why, for Bergmann, narcissist subjects can only maintain love relationships with what he terms “echo people”—others who neutrally echo back what the narcissist wishes to see—while denying the act of projection. This denial, however, may have a grievous cost. As Freud wrote in “On Narcissism: An Introduction”: “in the last resort we must begin to love in order not to fall ill, and we are bound to fall ill if, in consequence of frustration, we are unable to love.”45 Freud’s statement, linking love and mental illness, can only be understood in the context of his economic construction of the ego, and consequently, of love. Freud’s economic conceptualization of love in “On Narcissism” stems once more from his understanding that the ego is “first and foremost a device designed for mastering excitations.”46 Following his concept of a primary narcissism that precedes object relations, Freud establishes the ego as a bank of libido, distributing the excitations it receives from both inside and outside onto itself. Only when there is an excess that cannot be distributed internally, the ego-bank starts investing libido in external objects, where it places its “energies in return for a bonus of pleasure.”47 For Freud, the libidinal investment for future profit becomes the general economic model of love, as he asserts that “this sexual overvaluation is the origin of the peculiar state of being in love, a state suggestive of a neurotic compulsion, which is thus traceable to an impoverishment of the ego as regards libido in favor of the love-object.”48 Though for Freud, any mature love develops from the transformation of infantile primary narcissism to object love and to an ego ideal, he eventually shifts to a gendered notion of adult love. While men primarily love through the anaclitic model of attachment (loving those who take care of you), women are prone to narcissistic object choice; falling in love with people that they see as projections of their own

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ego ideal, or who offer them supplementations for their lost primary narcissism. Thus, their need does not lie in “the direction of loving, but of being loved.”49 Freud’s gendered division is wobbly at best. Both of his models contain narcissistic features, and thus subvert his own problematic gendered demarcation.50 Still, what is crucial for the psychoanalytic discussion of the economics of love in relation to A Simple Story is that regardless of his gendered divison, Freud always defines love as a limited and scarce resource. Love, as a precious resource, is always meant to be exchanged, never to be squandered in the circulation of libido between self and other. When one gives love his or her ego is depleted, yet when one receives love his or her ego is enriched. Consequently for Freud, “loving in itself . . . lowers self-regard; whereas being loved, having one’s love returned and possessing the loved object; raises it once more.”51 Just as in a monetary economy then, if one invests love with no return and without a “secure” base, one risks imminent crisis. For the narcissist, the crisis is that much more imminent. Adapting Freud’s definition of narcissism to Melanie Klein’s schizoid-paranoid position, Hanna Segal and David Bell, two of Klein’s most renowned successors, emphasize that the narcissist constantly engages in projective identifications (libidinal investments) due to his or her not recognizing others as separate beings. As a result, the narcissist who never learned to differentiate between self and other, and consequently did not develop an integrated ego, is prone to feelings of emptiness and depletion.52 The understanding of both melancholy and narcissism as processes of impoverishment helps to explain Hirshl’s mental crisis in economic terms. While the description of Bluma as Hirshl’s “twin” can be perceived as a literary formula repeating Aristophanes’ ideal romantic love as the joining together of two halves, this perception of Bluma also signifies the narcissistic character of Hirshl’s love. Hirshl sees Bluma as a reflection of himself that can fulfill his melancholic lack. Appropriately, Hirshl and Bluma’s first encounter is marked by the act of nourishment when Bluma prepares breakfast for the Hurvitz family. From that point onward, as Ben-Dov shows, the cake that was served at breakfast will serve in the text as a “conductor” leading to Bluma.53 In other words, Bluma becomes a symbolic source of nourishment for Hirshl. Not only imagining Bluma as a “hidden

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treasure” or a “candy” to be devoured, Hirshl later fantasizes about Bluma acting as a mother for his and Mina’s first son.54 In this light, Hirshl’s fantasies of love-as-consumption suggest that he is indeed the successor of Agnon’s famous alter ego, Ḥemdat, of “The Hill of Sand” (“‫ )”גבעת החול‬published in 1920.55 In one of Agnon’s most quoted sentences, the dreamy and romantic poet Ḥemdat describes himself to the vibrant Yael Ḥayut, as “a beggar of love who puts his love in a torn knapsack.”56 The image of the beggar (prominent as well in A Simple Story as we shall later see), is juxtaposed here with the torn knapsack, invoking not only a sense of emotional impoverishment, but a sense of an economic crisis which cannot be stabilized. Contrary then to Menasheh Hayim, whose love of Kreindel Tcharni in And the Crooked is constituted through the act of giving without reward, Hirshl’s love of Bluma, just like Ḥemdat’s before him, is expressed through consumption. In his fantasies, Hirshl never conceives of himself as an active caretaker, and, in accordance with Freud’s observation that “the aim and the satisfaction in a narcissistic object choice is to be loved,”57 Hirshl is indeed a beggar of love. It is precisely in this model of consumption where the ideals of romantic love and the psychoanalytic concept of narcissism converge. In both, love functions as a utilitarian economic device for self-completion through the appropriation of the other. Yet Hirshl is not only a passive consumer of love; he is also love’s merchant and accountant. Hirshl, who sees love as a utopia of transcendent abundance, wishes to maintain this excess through two main fantasies: the first is endless consumption, the second, a utilitarian mercantile exchange. Just as the idea of the endless consumption of love is reflected in Agnon’s other characters, such as Ḥemdat, the notion of love as a symmetrical economic exchange appears, for example, in Agnon’s 1933 “Metamorphosis” (“‫)”פנים אחרות‬. In the short story, the love of businessman Michael Hartman for his wife Tony is described in terms of commerce: “(He) began to be jealous of her account of every man . . . he would say: Has she no husband . . . that she has to chase about after others? Michael Hartman was a merchant and he sold his goods by weight and by measure. He knew that to waste a measure meant losing it.”58 While Hartman’s mercantile perception of love destroys his marriage, the confluence between the logic of profitable exchange and the logic of love works perfectly

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well in the marriage of Hirshl’s own parents, Tsirl and Baruch Meir, who symbolically sit together in their closed store, counting money. While “there were some people in Shibush,” who thought that “only the man driven out of his senses by passion could claim to be love’s acolyte,” Tsirl and Baruch Meir are happy passing their days “making money.” While the tone is somewhat ironic, it is wrong to assume that their marriage is loveless. Indeed, the narrator often emphasizes the couple’s love, maintained under the logic of a utilitarian economic exchange. 59 Just like Tsirl before him or Michael Hartman, Hirshl registers his love through meticulous accounting; the fantasy of love is a mercantile exchange. Early in the novel when Bluma is frustrated with Hirshl’s passivity and her dismal situation as a servant in his parents’ home, she becomes silent and angry. Not recognizing her predicament, Hirshl thinks, “I see you’re keeping accounts . . . if you mean to give me the silent treatment . . . believe me . . . I can be as silent as you” (82; 33). However, critiquing Hirshl’s utilitarian perception of love as a symmetrical mercantile exchange, the narrator directly observes: “And yet the fact was that it was Hirshl, the son and grandson of shopkeepers who were used to weighing and measuring all things, who was keeping accounts” (82; 33). Hirshl’s accounting of love is highlighted in other instances. As Bluma leaves the Hurvitz home after discovering Tsirl’s plans to marry Hirshl to Mina, for example, Hirshl can only blame Bluma for her departure: “In a vague way, Hirshl began to feel that, if he had not stood steadfast forever, this was only because Bluma abandoned him. He could never have a change of heart unless she changed toward him” (95–96; 47). Consequently, at least one factor that determines Hirshl’s renowned “passivity” is his calculation of love. Hirshl is incapable of an investment without a guaranteed return. Ironically, toward the end, Hirshl still projects his own mercantile perception of love onto Bluma. Unable to differentiate between himself and Bluma, Hirshl thinks: “Not only did she never love me. . . . The reason that she does not marry is that it might give some man pleasure” (266; 224).60 In fact, Hirshl’s narcissistic love, which envisions Bluma as his “twin,” always masks the real Bluma. When Hirshl searches for Bluma after she leaves, the narrator sarcastically remarks that

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“though he thought about Bluma all the time, it never occurred to him that she might be working somewhere else. . . . He imagined everything . . . without it crossing his mind for a moment that she needed a roof over her head” (98; 50). Not being able to recognize his superior social position as a wealthy male in a semi-traditional and patriarchal society, Hirshl expects that Bluma will take on the active role in pursuing him as her lost object of love. Accordingly, when he finally learns that Bluma now works at the house of Tirza and Akavia Mazal, Hirshl fantasizes about how Tirza will teach Bluma to pursue him just as Tirza actively courted Akavia. For Agnon’s devout readers, the analogy is supposedly clear. Just as Tirza tried to “repair” the past mistakes of her mother who did not marry her true love Akavia in In the Prime of Her Life, so is Hirshl supposed to compensate for his father’s wrongdoings (marrying Tsirl “for money” instead of marrying Bluma’s mother “for love”).61 Following this line of reasoning, Hirshl’s marriage to Bluma will make the crooked straight, or, alternatively, balance out the account. Both characters were to pay their parents’ debt with their love. However, to follow Yosef Even, this reading, shared by some scholars and by Hirshl himself, is flawed on three accounts: first, unlike Tirza’s miserable mother, Baruch Meir is completely content with Tsirl. Second, even if the “crooked past” reference is correct, it is Hirshl, the son of the “oath-breaker” Baruch Meir, and not Bluma, who needs to assume the active role in the present. Last, Tirza’s attempt to embody her mother’s position ends in a loveless marriage. Nitza Ben-Dov, too, emphasizes Tirza’s agony when she realizes that she has in fact repeated her mother’s mistake in marrying a man she does not love. Looking at Akavia and at her father, Tirza realizes toward the end of the story that the person she really longs for is her dead mother.62 Hirshl’s idealized version of Tirza and Akavia’s marriage ignores the ambivalent ending of the text. Tirza, who felt indebted to her mother, wished to pay her mother’s debt and to fulfill her own melancholic lack through substitution and exchange. Instead, by doing so, Tirza only assumed her mother’s debt. What remains unexplained, though, is why Hirshl assigns Tirza’s active role to Bluma in his fantasies. Why does Hirshl perceive Tirza’s melancholic story as a happy fairy tale? The answer lies in Freud’s notion that the narcissist only invests his libido, and can only fall in

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love with the projection of who he is, who he was, what he once lost, or who he wants to be.63 Bluma does not only function as Hirshl’s reflection, or his maternal substitute, but also as the projection of his ego-ideal. Hirshl, who rationalizes his passivity in stating, “as long as I’m living with my parents, not even my habits are my own” (132; 83), unconsciously projects his active and omnipotent ego-ideal onto Bluma. Hirshl’s libidinal investment thus also successfully maintains his position as a consumer (beggar) of love. For that same reason, right after Bluma’s departure, Hirshl waits “for Bluma to realize that it is up to the woman to take the first step. . . . Then he began to hold it against her. If she did not do something soon, it would be too late” (98; 50). Hirshl projects this omnipotent ego-ideal not only on Bluma, but also on the memory of his dead uncle, who, at least according to Tsirl’s point of view in the text, “instead of turning out normal, had been driven mad by academic studies” (66; 15). As Malka Shaked argues, the uncle’s madness, established in the text as indebted to extra-religious studies and to the rabbi’s curse, becomes, for Hirshl, a symbol of a conscious and heroic anti-social defiance.64 Indeed, Hirshl and Mina’s farcical engagement scene orchestrated by Tsirl and Yona Toyber marks the first time Hirshl thinks that “maybe my mother’s brother wasn’t crazy after all when he ran to the woods. Maybe he knew what he was doing” (112; 64). To that end, Hirshl’s expectations that Bluma actively pursue him are analogous to his growing idealization of his uncle’s madness. Both operate as narcissistic projections, and, as such, both function as libidinal investments that slowly drain Hirshl’s ego up to the point of libidinal bankruptcy. Hirshl’s Madness as Bankruptcy Freud’s utilitarian outlook on the “economics of the mind” was widely criticized by both followers and opponents.65 Writing from the perspective of object relations theory, Segal and Bell heavily object to Freud’s economic model of love for its conception of persons as “self- economies.” Rejecting Freud’s idea of primary narcissism, Segal and Bell alternatively claim that no ego exists prior to its formation through object relations. While the two critique Freud’s “hydraulic” mechanism, their essay is nonetheless also suffused with economic terms such as enrichment, impoverishment, depletion, and exchange,

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highlighting the fact that an economic infrastructure underlies object relations theory as well.66 While the two oppose Freud’s definition of “normal” love as a process of ego depletion, Segal and Bell still adopt Freud’s view of the narcissistic subject who, as they claim, does experience love as a limited and fixed resource. As a result, Segal and Bell underscore that “There are many patients who experience love as a threat, fearing that it might deplete them. Male patients sometimes experience this concretely . . . in a way that corresponds to Freud’s first hydraulic model of libido. They feel that love is a substance of which they have a finite amount, and so they have to prevent themselves from losing it into their objects.”67 No wonder, then, that miserable Mina reproaches Hirshl for his distant kisses, telling him that “looking at you, a person might think that every kiss costs a fortune” (173; 127). Mina is observant. Operating under the economic perception of love as a scarce resource, Hirshl is indeed fearful of “wasting” his love, which he intently preserves for Bluma in hope of a future return. Alert to the unstable economic infrastructure of a narcissistic love, A Simple Story carefully shapes Hirshl’s love for Bluma in the period after his marriage to Mina as a process of libidinal depletion through the consistent use of the word “lack” (‫)חסר‬.68 The verb first appears in the text in a purely economic context when we read that Bluma’s impoverished father, Hayim Nakht, was truly loved by her mother though he was “lacking” in assets and money (69; 20). Since this first appearance, though, the verb starts to signify not only an economic-material deficit, but also an economic-psychological one. The double connotation is artfully used in the text to emphasize the irony arising from the contrast between the material wealth, i.e., “fullness,” so valued by Jewish society, and the emotional and libidinal poverty, i.e., “lack,” experienced by Hirshl in his life. In what follows, the narrator ironically describes Hirshl’s upbringing in a wealthy home (with an alienating mother) as “lacking nothing,” while also comparing it to Mina and Hirshl’s loveless marriage in which they “lived in comfort and lacked nothing” (162, 164; 115, 118). Still, while highlighting the ironic contrast between material fullness and emotional poverty in the text, the growing use of the word “lacking” in both the economic and in the psychological sense does

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not distinguish between the two meanings, but rather conflates them. Hirshl’s libidinal economy, undermined by an unconscious melancholic lack, only grows more unstable as his heart is constituted first as “divided” between Mina and Bluma, then as “incomplete,” and later as “lacking.” The growing deficit in Hirshl’s libidinal economy culminates in his speech to Mina when he openly admires his mad uncle who “rebelled” against society. In this heart-rending scene, Hirshl tells Mina for the first time of his uncle, yet Mina senses that Hirshl is speaking of himself. In the monologue, Hirshl imagines that if his uncle were sane, his father would have made him marry a woman he did not love. Stating twice that his uncle’s heart is an “empty shell,” Hirshl then shifts from third person to first person, describing himself at the end as feeling “empty inside” (173–74; 127–28).69 It is precisely at this stage of extreme deficit that Hirshl’s unstable libidinal economy will collapse. Not only does Hirshl keep investing his libido in narcissistic projections of Bluma and his uncle, but at the same time he also rejects Mina’s investment in him. Whenever Mina tries to communicate with him, Hirshl refuses. “‘Do I mind her?’ he asked himself. ‘No more than I mind anyone else. It’s just that she’s always around. It’s like having to wear a coat all the time that never keeps you warm’” (169; 123). Simultaneously, as Hirshl rejects Mina’s investment, he also feels that he is investing in Bluma without any reciprocation. And so, in the chapters leading to Hirshl’s breakdown, the text emphasizes Hirshl’s fantasies about influencing Bluma by what can only be described as the calculation of magical thinking: “Hirshl believed that if he thought very hard about someone . . . that person would be bound to come. No matter how hard he thought of Bluma, it was true, there was still no sign of her. . . . He told himself ‘I’ll think harder’” (178; 132). In order for the circulation of a narcissistic libidinal economy to function, argues Bergmann, a narcissistic subject and an “echo” object are needed.70 Only then can the circulation of projections be maintained. Bluma, however, is anything but an echo. In fact, the deeper Hirshl falls into narcissistic fantasies of their future reunion, the farther Bluma stays away. On the day of Hirshl’s wedding, Bluma does not come. “Not that she was indifferent. Bluma loved Hirshl. But as Hirshl had married someone else, it did not do good to think of him” (151; 105).

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The text provides two explanations for Bluma’s decisive estrangement from Hirshl. On the one hand, Bluma admired Mirl, her strong mother who loved her poor father unconditionally. Though Bluma loved her sensitive father as well, she resented his passive attitude, an attitude that eventually led to his death and subsequently to her mother’s death. Hirshl’s passivity, then, reminds Bluma of her father’s flaws, and she decides to stay away. On the other hand, Bluma’s relation to her father is composed not only of resentment, but also of love. This ambivalent relationship is revealed in the dialogue between Tirza and Bluma when the two stare at Hayim Nakht’s portrait. “‘I look like my mother,’ said Bluma, reddening as if caught in a lie. . . . Silently they regarded the picture. . . . Mrs. Mazal slipped out of the room. The little she had said made Bluma see her father in a new light” (97; 49). This new light is precisely what provides a second explanation for Bluma’s decision to “simply put him [Hirshl] out of her mind” (208; 164), and for her “conclusion that not every woman had to marry, by which she meant herself as well” (208; 164). We do not know what Mrs. Mazal said in that scene. We only know it made Bluma think of her father’s face as “sad,” yet “peaceful.” In that moment, Bluma, who previously rejected her father, regards him with newfound appreciation. Indeed, even before Bluma becomes conscious of this positive feeling, the narrator emphasizes the unique bond between the two characters. It was Hayim Nakht who taught his daughter to read and love books: “He said to her: at least I will have taught you how to read. No matter how black your life is, you can always find a better one in books.” The narrator immediately follows this remark by describing how, even as a servant in the Hurvitz home, when Bluma’s two small hands were “let out to others . . . her mind was free and could roam where it pleased” (72; 23). What Bluma thus inherited from her father is a sense of independence, and also a sense of separation from the practical and utilitarian values of the bourgeois world as represented by the Hurvitz family. Bluma’s memory of her father, along with the lessons he taught her and the intellectual tools he gave her as a child, enable her to keep her distance from Hirshl. Bluma’s new identification with her father, however, comes at a price; Bluma estranges herself not only from Hirshl, but also from any romantic involvement with other men in Shibush. “Having been

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unlucky with one once, Bluma wanted no more mother’s or father’s boys, whether they dreamed of Zion or of the millennium” (196; 152), the narrator comments. In this way, Bluma becomes the mirror image of her father; while he gave up on labor, Bluma gives up on love. Just like her mother, Bluma is an assertive and resourceful woman. Just like her father, she despairs of any active participation in love and closes herself off from society.71 This is precisely why the narrator precedes the abovementioned segment with the observation that, “for all that she denied being like her father, she resembled him in many ways” (196; 152). Contrary to Hirshl’s fantasies, therefore, Bluma is no longer waiting for him. She will neither enter his store nor his life. The conflict between the two reaches its decisive moment in the first encounter between them since Bluma left the Hurvitz home. Following Tsirl’s suggestion for a remedy for his sleepless nights, Hirshl begins a habit of late night strolls, yet uses them to secretly circle the Mazals’ home where Bluma resides. One night when Bluma steps out, he finally calls out to her, but she retreats back inside, closing the door. The irreducible difference between Hirshl’s fantasies of union and the harsh reality of Bluma’s separate existence becomes the final trigger of Hirshl’s crisis. As Freud claims, the narcissist subject “who is impoverished” in his ego constantly searches for “the cure of love” that will stabilize his fragile economy.72 Contrarily, Bluma’s refusal to act as this cure will bring Hirshl’s libidinal economy to a crash. As a result, in the two short chapters that follow Bluma’s rejection, Hirshl’s crumbling libidinal economy centers around the loss of its projected ego-ideal via the image of the rooster. Here, in an ironic play on words lost in translation, the Hebrew word ‫גבר‬, used intermittently in the original text to denote “rooster,” also means “male.” Therefore, as Gershon Shaked noted, the rooster appears as the symbol for Hirshl’s “repressed masculinity” throughout the episodes of his “erotic madness.”73 In what follows, Hirshl’s desire to kill the rooster crowing outside his house symbolizes his murderous impulses not only toward Mina, but also toward himself for his failure. Later, when Hirshl goes to the woods in his moment of “selfpossession,” as Shaked terms it, he starts crowing like a rooster. Once found in the woods, Hirshl pleads with his family not to kill him, because “I am not a rooster.”74 On the one hand, Hirshl’s ambivalent

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relationship to the image of the rooster, moving from identification to rejection, represents a maddened attempt to come to terms with the conscious loss of Bluma, and through it with the loss of his own projected ego-ideal. On the other hand, what turns Hirshl’s mourning into melancholy and what turns his frustrated love for Bluma into libidinal bankruptcy is precisely the unconscious loss of his mother for whom Bluma herself was only a substitute. Substitution is a key term here. While Hirshl is unable to consciously grasp the double loss, his crisis brings about an unconscious attempt to restructure his collapsed libidinal economy through acts of substitution and exchange. Although Hirshl’s crisis begins with identifying with the image of the rooster as an omnipotent ego ideal, by its end Hirshl exchanges the rooster for another animal—a frog. In the woods, when wondering if a man who kills himself hears the call of the rooster, Hirshl decides that this imaginary suicidal man will only hear the frogs in river croaking “ga-ga-ga.” In this sense, the shift to the image of the frogs marks Hirshl’s attempt to decrease his libidinal investment in Bluma, or, to put it more bluntly, to kill this side of himself. Accordingly, in the original Hebrew text, the “ga-gaga” of the frogs is associated with the Hebrew noun for longing, ‫געגוע‬ (ga’agu’a). The exchange of the crowing of the rooster for the sounds of the frogs represents Hirshl’s substitution of the great libidinal investment of “magical thinking” (his imagined attempt at influencing Bluma) for a greater acceptance of his separation from her, leaving him only longing. Consequently, when Hirshl is brought back home from the woods, he refers to Mina as Bluma by mistake, reassuring her: “Bluma, I didn’t go cockle-doodle-doo, I just went ga-ga-ga” (218; 174). While this puzzling sentence expresses a sorrowful regret for his passivity and weakness in the past, it also presents a desire to exchange his “costly” projected ego ideal for the complete surrender associated with the sound of the frogs, a position that will not deplete Hirshl’s libidinal economy as much as the former one. It is no wonder that the character who highlights the economic infrastructure underlying Hirshl’s mental crisis is none other than the paranoid Gedalia Ziemlich. Whereas the whole family was “in fright” due to Hirshl’s breakdown, “Gedalia alone took it calmly. All his life he had been waiting for disaster to strike, and now that it had, it was not at all a surprise” (218; 174). Agnon is always a difficult au-

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thor to translate, and the English word “disaster” does not transmit the two-fold connotations of the Hebrew word ‫ פורענות‬in the original text. While this word signifies “calamity,” the same root is also used in the word ‫פרעון‬, which means “payment due.”75 In the original text, therefore, Gedalia’s point of view constitutes Hirshl’s crisis through a double economic prism: while the first prism constructs the crisis as the bankruptcy of an indebted libidinal economy, the second prism sets Hirshl’s madness as the result of another possible debt: the “phantom like” economy of the rabbi’s curse. The Bailout and What Remains of Love Many scholarly interpretations of A Simple Story, for example the influential and forceful reading of Dan Miron, conclude that Hirshl suffering is far better than him living a comfortable life devoid of the “mental awareness” that “stands at the core of authentic psychic existence.”76 Consequently, in this outlook on the novel, Hirshl’s time at Dr. Langsam’s sanitarium is not a productive therapeutic experience, but rather a period of social indoctrination repressing Hirshl’s romantic love.77 While Miron unequivocally determines that A Simple Story is a novel in the tradition of realism and that Hirshl’s madness should be understood as a realistic portrayal through a psychoanalytic lens, Miron leaves Hirshl’s love for Bluma outside the psychoanalytic paradigm, rendering it simply a self-explanatory transcendent ideal. Alternatively, the contextualization of Hirshl’s desire for Bluma in psychoanalytic theories of love constructs it as the product of melancholia and narcissism, appearing in the text as processes of libidinal impoverishment. From this perspective, Dr. Langsam did not “fail” because of his participation in Hirshl’s social subjugation. Instead, Dr. Langsam failed because Hirshl’s perception of love as a fixed and finite “substance” remained the same. Langsam, however, did see that Hirshl’s crisis originated in his sense of melancholic lack. As Ben-Dov shows, Langsam, who sings Hirshl songs of the blind beggars of his hometown, provides Hirshl with the love that Tsirl never did.78 The functioning of Langsam as a maternal substitute supplies Hirshl with the source of nourishment for which he was so obsessively searching. And when Langsam sings, Hirshl feels as “he might have been as a child” listening to a “sweet, gruff . . . lullaby” (233; 190). True, Hirshl never becomes conscious of

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his melancholic relationship to his mother, yet Langsam manages to enrich his depleted ego through the substitution of maternal love.79 At the same time that Langsam restores Hirshl’s libidinal reservoirs, the doctor also mitigates his negative and draining projections of Shibush by telling nostalgic stories of his own hometown. Though Langsam’s loving stories of his town at first evoke in Hirshl unhappy memories of Shibush—of his hatred toward Mina, and his love of Bluma—this work of memory somewhat succeeds in changing Hirshl’s libidinal distribution.80 As the treatment progresses, Hirshl’s thoughts of Bluma weaken, “yet while he no longer invoked her image, it still sometimes hovered before him” (227; 184). At the same time, Hirshl’s torturing hatred toward Shibush turns into the numbing sense that “it was not necessarily his favorite spot, yet being away from a place made a man think of it” (239; 195). The following paragraph informs us that “Hirshl felt that he was back to normal” (239; 195). Normal in this case, though, does not mean happy or even self-aware. Hirshl never becomes conscious of the origin of either his melancholia or his narcissistic love. He never consciously mourns his loss. Looking at Dr. Langsam, whose wife committed suicide, Hirshl wonders why he looks sad: “and he still could not understand how as rich a man as Doctor Langsam could have such a suffering face” (234; 191). Yet Langsam, as we have seen, partially succeeds. In the last chapters of the novel, Hirshl does find more joy with Mina than he ever had before. Their relationship grows, and Hirshl is now able to be nourished by Mina and give her nourishment, as they symbolically drink from each other’s morning cups of coffee. The new and improved couple even has another child; the first was born while Hirshl stayed at Langsam’s sanatorium. Symbolically, whereas the first child, Meshulam, conceived when Hirshl was still tormented by thoughts of Bluma, was born a sickly infant, the second son is born healthy. Still, not all is rosy between Hirshl and Mina: “sometimes when they were together, Hirshl thought of Bluma” (266; 224).81 The sublimated split between Mina and Bluma is heightened once more when Hirshl comes across a blind beggar who plays a song “that was boundlessly sweet and sad and seemed to have no beginning and no end” (268; 226). The encounter with the beggar, the manifestation of the beggars from Dr. Langsam’s stories, as stated by Ben-Dov, trig-

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gers in Hirshl a weird reaction as he suddenly tosses the beggar a coin “bigger than any coin that anyone like him was given” (268; 226).82 The tossing of the coin marks Hirshl’s movement between his two major fantasies of love. While Hirshl’s first fantasy of love as endless consumption is symbolized in the beggar’s song that has “no beginning and no end,” the toss of the coin also reflects Hirshl’s second fantasy of love as mercantile exchange. Whereas the scholarly readings of the novel usually pit Hirshl’s love for Bluma as authentic and romantic (endless consumption) against Hirshl’s love of Mina as shallow (mercantile exchange) or vice versa, both of Hirshl’s fantasies of love share a common thread: they expose Hirshl’s experience of love as a substance of “a finite amount,” lost once distributed, with no return. As such, Hirshl’s encounter with the beggar marks his decisive move from the model of consumption to the model of mercantile exchange. Consequently, the libidinal economy based on a melancholic deficit that structures Hirshl’s psyche from the beginning is also what constitutes him until the very end. Above all, it is Hirshl and Mina’s decision to relocate their sickly first son, Meshulam, to his grandparents’ house that emphasizes Hirshl’s persistent idea of love as a scarce and limited resource. The name Meshulam, whose name in Hebrew means “paid,” charges this subplot with due irony; it is difficult to accept scholarly claims that Hirshl learns to truly love Mina, since this newfound ability comes at the cost of removing one of his sons from their home.83 “Cost” is the appropriate word here, since Meshulam has never been “paid for,” according to the Jewish religious custom that requires the father to redeem his first-born son from a Jewish priest (‫)כהן‬.84 While Hirshl is in the sanatorium, and afterward, he never pays for Meshulam, as the narrator emphasizes. The question of payment in love, of payment as love, and of love as payment, therefore, still hovers at the novel’s end. Hirshl does function as a father to Meshulam. He plays with him and even sings to him, yet Meshulam lives at his grandparents’ house, and he and his brother grow apart from one another. Did Hirshl truly redeem his son? Or will Hirshl be, just like Tsirl before him, a present-absent parent to his son, caring for him with just the right “amount” of love so as not to deplete his own limited resources? Along these lines, in the last few pages of the novel,

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when Mina asks Hirshl if he is content with Meshulam living away from home, Hirshl answers positively. “Love,” Hirshl says, “can’t be divided. . . . Love comes to us only when no one stands between it and us” (272; 229). Hirshl’s mathematical equation might refer of course not so much to Meshulam and his brother, but rather to Mina and Bluma. Yet, be it Mina and Bluma, or Meshulam and his brother, in either case, what Hirshl’s response underscores is the enduring calculation of love. For Hirshl, love remains a precious and limited resource, never to be wasted unwisely on others, but, rather, carefully preserved and guarded. A Different Economy of Love: An Addendum of Love Dedicated to Mina “It would be pointless to criticize Mina in order to praise Bluma, for Mina too was a well-mannered and attractive young lady” (89; 40), says the narrator of A Simple Story. This statement has not been registered by most critics, who direct sharp arrows at the poor girl chosen by Tsirl to be Hirshl’s wife. For Ben-Dov, for example, Mina is shallow, passive and dumb, for Even she is “human, but simple,” and for Ziva Shamir she is boring and superficial.85 Though one can agree that Mina Ziemlich does appear at first as a spoiled, rich, and shallow girl, not only does her character develop throughout the novel, but Mina ends up presenting an alternative economic model to Hirshl’s narcissistic and utilitarian perception of love. Like Hirshl’s, Mina’s heart is described in the text in economic terms of private ownership, commodity, and exchange. Before Mina is engaged to Hirshl, her heart is still in her “possession,” and has not yet “mortgaged” itself (‫ )התמשכן‬to another.86 When Mina finds out she is to wed Hirshl, the narrator observes: “Yet, if one could not exactly say that Hirshl Hurvitz was the young man of Mina’s dreams . . . something about him attracted her. She herself did not know that it was the power of the inarticulate love that she felt for him” (90; 42). The moment Mina weds Hirshl is described as the moment when her heart will no longer be her own property. Its self-contained economy has been breached. Young, assimilated, and spoiled, Mina, who “had the graces of a city girl,” grew so different from her parents that at the sight of them together one might “have thought her the daughter of a Polish no-

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bleman besieged by two Jewish peddlers” (89; 41). Mina, as a rule, is mostly concerned with her return to the city from her boring village life. As such, self-centered Mina does start out as a narcissistic character in her own right. For Freud, the wish to sleep implies a desire for narcissistic withdrawal from the world, and Mina, who wakes up after all the other village people have started their day, tells her mother: “If you’re asking me how many hours I slept, the answer is more than enough. But if you’re asking me how I feel, the nights are too short for my sleep” (159; 113).87 If we understand Mina’s sleep as a sign of her initial narcissist position, we can also understand her “strange” reaction when Tsirl tells her she should take care of her wonderful servant. “Mina was startled. All her life she had been looked out for by others, and now she was being told to look out for someone herself” (167; 121). However, Mina’s reaction is immediately followed in the text by the discovery of her first pregnancy, hinted at already in her lack of appetite. In this light, Mina’s startled response has nothing to do with giving orders to servants and cooks, but has everything to do with the ability to give love to another human being. Tsirl’s remark thus triggered Mina’s ambivalent feelings about becoming a mother, and giving maternal love. In this sense, the question of how we love, and the economy of love, becomes relevant to Mina’s character, just as it is to Hirshl’s. Despite the harsh claims against her, Mina is not shallow nor does she lack a dynamic psychic world. In fact, she constantly tries to engage in a nurturing dialogue with Hirshl, sharing with him her secrets, her friends’ tales, and her dreams. Though this might sound like a literary prescription for feminine superficiality, what underlines Mina’s constant attempts to talk to Hirshl is her understanding of the importance of dialogue. After several of these futile attempts at conversation, Mina blatantly tells Hirshl that he should not expect her to die and disappear, adding despairingly: “What I’d like to know is exactly how you envisage spending our life together. . . . I don’t care what you say to me but for God’s sake say something! Your silence is killing me” (209; 164). The portrayal of Mina as boring or shallow should in fact be attributed primarily to Hirshl’s point of view, which escalates from slight hostility to repressed murderous aggression: “If she dreamt of ants, for example, she would insist on describing them ant by ant until Hirshl could feel his skin crawl with them and even

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detect their odor, which was like that of Mina’s bath lotion” (170; 124). Clearly, Mina’s positive characteristics are easily masked by Hirshl’s negative point of view. Furthermore, Mina matures into an honest and observant person. She is well aware of Hirshl’s misery. “Mina was far from blind; though she had never tasted love, she knew what love was not” (171; 126). Though she wrongfully suspects her friend Sophia of being Hirshl’s love interest, she is honest with Hirshl, confronting him about his dislike for her. Unlike Bluma, who leaves at the first signs of Hirshl’s passivity, and unlike Tsirl, who never listened to her son, Mina is the only one who openly asks Hirshl about his feelings and tries to resolve them within the couple’s dynamic. Even after she learns of the madness in his family, and even after she uncovers his love for Bluma, Mina still stays by Hirshl’s side. To position Mina against Hirshl, Bluma, and Tsirl is to evaluate each character’s position in the economy of love shaped in the text. On the one hand, Tsirl perceives love only as a mercantile act, meant to maintain or add to her possessions. Like mother like son, Hirshl’s fantasies of love as endless consumption or as a utilitarian exchange set up love as a limited resource. Both mother and son operate on the basis of lack, hoarding their love in the name of self-interest. Bluma, on the other hand, inherits her father’s rejection of labor, but adapts it to the sphere of love. Once she becomes disappointed with the Hurvitzes’ economic model of love, she despairs and stays away. In this sense, Bluma’s famous gray dress, the “snug bodice” of which “kept her beauty well confined” (196; 152), brings to mind Melville’s scrivener Bartleby’s gray eyes which are “dimly calm” and his face with “not a wrinkle of agitation.” Just as Bartleby refuses his boss’s summons, so does Bluma reject all her suitors. She would simply prefer not to.88 “Though grief, worry, humiliation, and other emotions could easily have endangered Mina’s pregnancy, she overcame them all and gave birth to a baby boy” (234; 191). These lines can offer the key to Mina’s alternative economic model of love. Mina does not succumb to the economic logic of lack and consumption that guides Hirshl and Tsirl, nor does she remain outside of the economy of love like Bluma. Instead, through her pain and grief, through conscious mourning, Mina is able to overcome her narcissist position and give life and love

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to others around her. For Segal and Bell, to consciously mourn for others signifies an ability to differentiate between self and others. Unlike the unconscious loss in melancholia, mourning integrates and strengthens the ego. Through mourning, we enter an ethical and inter-subjective world.89 In this sense, it is Mina who becomes the heiress to Menasheh Hayim’s economic model of love, a model based on the ethical giving of the self to the other. This economy of love is based on asymmetrical exchange, as exemplified through Menasheh Hayim’s gift of self-sacrifice to Kreindel Tcharni in And the Crooked. Similar to Segal and Bell, Otto Kernberg, one of Freud’s greatest followers, also critiques Freud’s conceptualization of love as based on the autocratic economy of an ego which exists prior to object relations. “I believe we may question a certain tendency in Freud’s essay,” writes Kernberg, “to consider narcissistic libido and object-libido as adding up to a fixed total amount, in an inverse relationship with each other.”90 Using object relations theory to adjust Freud’s theory, Kernberg claims that primary narcissism (self-love) and primary object-love (love from and for others) cannot be separated or clearly distinguished in the early development of the ego. By “opening up” the sources of love and locating its production both “inside” and “outside” the ego, Kernberg actually offers a different economic model for love. Believing in a closed off economy of primary narcissism necessarily led Freud to claim that to fall in love entails a lowering in self-regard and in the ego’s libido. Alternatively, for Kernberg, as long as one develops a well-integrated ego through conscious mourning, then “the actualization of the ego-ideal in the love relationship raises self-esteem.” Consequently, Kernberg claims “that the images in our mind of those we love, and by whom we feel loved, strengthen our self-love.”91 Contrary to Tsirl or Hirshl, who believe that in love, as in commerce, once you give something away, your inventory diminishes, Kernberg suggests that by giving love to an other, your self-love only grows further. His different economic model suggests that the distribution of love to others does not impoverish the ego’s libido, but rather enriches the originary supply of love. Mina realizes this logic. At the end of the novel, while Hirshl still argues that love cannot be “divided” into two, it is Mina who gently offers a different outlook on love, saying to him: “It is the nature of love to always have room for one more” (272; 229).

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CHAPTER 4

THE INCOMPLETE TEXT AND THE INDEBTED AUTHOR In the previous chapter, my reading of Agnon’s A Simple Story ended with emphasis on the closing dialogue between Hirshl and Mina. While it is true that, in the narrator’s words, “Hirshl and Mina’s story is over,” the novel itself does not conclude with their dialogue. In fact, instead of granting the reader a sense of closure, the novel ends with the narrator’s statement that Bluma’s story is not over. The narrator also promises the reader that “everything that happened to Bluma Nakht would fill another book.”1 This promise, however, was never fulfilled. Subsequently, it only adds to the reader’s sense of incompletion. The narrator’s “promise” disrupts the ending of the novel, leaving it disturbingly open. Closure and completion are tremendously charged terms in literary theory, and theoretical discussions of literary endings are too vast and complex to be fully exhausted in the framework of this chapter. As a good starting point for discussion, H. Porter Abbott offers a useful distinction between the definitions of “closure” and “ending” in literary theory. For Abbott, all narratives are to some degree “chains of suspense and surprise,” leaving readers in fluctuating states of impatience, wonderment, and partial gratification. Relying on Roland Barthes’ definitions in S/Z, Abbot stresses that narratives employ two codes: “the proairetic code,” (expectations and actions) and the “hermeneutic code” (questions and answers). Thus, narrative raises expectations and questions, and closure is defined by how well these questions and expectations have been answered and satisfied.2 Fulfillment, however, is a tricky business. Both completely

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fulfilled expectations and completely reversed expectations can give the reader a sense of closure. As Abbott underscores, expectations may answer one of two needs: to see them fulfilled, or to see them violated. Hence, a narrative can end without offering closure. Unlike any ending—the actual point where a text terminates—the sense of closure is inherently correlated to a feeling of resolution and completion of the themes and actions of the narrative. Abbott offers a functional definition of closure, yet the discussion of literary endings is also historically framed. Although any historical periodization is always qualified by exceptions, many scholars still point to modernist literature as a cultural and intellectual turning point with respect to the issue of closure. Malcolm Bradbury and James McFarlane claim that the common denominator of many works of modernist fiction is their undermining of coherent sequences of historical linearity and character development, traits commonly found in Classicism and Realism. Specifically, Bradbury and McFarlane argue that the modernist novel questions logical and progressive order, linear narrative, and a stable and positivist representation of reality. Consequently, the destabilization of the closure of the novel—where tensions and problems are supposedly resolved—has played an important role in modernist fiction. In high modernism, the traditional closure of the novel was perceived as an artificial solution to, and false representation of, reality’s chaos.3 In addition to prose, Barbara Herrnstein Smith suggests that whereas Renaissance poetry had maximal closure and Romantic poetry had weakened closure, closure in modernist poetry became minimal. 4 However, as we shall later see, post-structuralist critiques addressing the issue of completion find even traditional closure to be the product of specific cultural approaches to interpretation, not an inherent quality of any given text. Although it is written in the tradition of nineteenth-century European realism, Agnon’s A Simple Story presents a narrator who explicitly highlights the novel’s incompleteness; the trajectory of the story has gone amiss along the way. In promising a future book, the narrator in fact confesses to a debt. While A Simple Story began with Bluma’s story, the plot has subsequently changed its course. As Hirshl’s role grew, Bluma’s part diminished. A narrative choice was made. Construction and selection of certain details necessarily left

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others outside the limited scope of the narrative. The investment in the characters changed, as did the “finished” product. This shift in the author’s method of production in turn affects the reader’s consumption of the text. As Dan Miron argues, “the story of Bluma Nakht has been severed . . . and the reader clearly feels that the traditional satisfaction awaiting him at the end of the novel has been taken away.”5 Significantly, it is not only the reader or the narrator who is disturbed by this lingering debt, but also the author himself. In a letter to Dov Sadan in October 1935, right after the publication of the A Simple Story, Agnon writes: “This simple story . . . is haunting me. It feels as if every paragraph and sentence within it are demanding more . . . even the stars in the sky and the worms in the earth taunt me, telling me if you had paid more attention . . . your Hirshl and you, his author, would have turned out better.”6 Reading these lines in conjunction with the novel, we can trace an interesting connection. The notion of indebtedness to an unfinished work migrates from the narrated world and the narration of A Simple Story into the world of the text’s production—the world of the author—and thus enters into the economy and labor of writing. This sense of incompleteness and of indebtedness to the unfinished work is by no means alien to Agnon’s oeuvre. In fact, as Dan Miron convincingly demonstrates, all of Agnon’s five major novels are characterized by their lack of closure.7 For Miron, Agnon’s open-ended novels are symptomatic of his struggles with the “foreign” form of the European novel, which encapsulates the Western humanist belief in the ability of human beings to shape their destiny. In this respect, the traditional closure of the classical European novel signifies the fulfillment of a person’s potential for secular and personal self-realization. This mindset, argues Miron, was foreign to Agnon, who was skeptical regarding the omnipotence of human and national will, and whose Jewish faith highlighted a person’s inability to realize himself without tradition, religion, and ultimately, God. In contrast to Miron, Gershon Shaked claims that Agnon’s novels lack closure not because of any difficulty with the form of the European novel, but rather due to the author’s use of a dualistic structure. For Shaked, Agnon’s novels always construct two antithetical plots. Whereas the novels usually end with the more pessimistic resolution of the two plots, the texts also retain hidden and contrasting possibilities, pointing

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toward potential future redemption. This dualistic structure, never fully synthesized, forms the infrastructure of Agnon’s open-ended novels.8 Whereas Miron and Shaked focus exclusively on Agnon’s novels, Michal Arbel demonstrates that the majority of the author’s works, including his novellas and short stories, “end with complex endings, that employ the meaningful modernist play of constructive and deconstructive elements.”9 Analyzing disparate works such as “Agunot” (1908), written in the Hasidic tradition, and the modernist, Kafkaseque stories of The Book of Deeds (‫ספר המעשים‬, published between 1932 and 1945), Arbel exemplifies how the problematics of “ending” has preoccupied Agnon throughout his life-long experimentations with literary genres.10 As Arbel demonstrates, Agnon’s engagement with literary endings is well situated in the broader modernist assault on traditional closure as an artificial solution to the irrationality and chaos of life.11 While Arbel does outline the modernist strategies that undermine traditional closure in Agnon’s earlier works, she underscores that the later Agnon has effectively deconstructed the possibility of any literary ending by constructing an “open literary space,” which presents itself as the endless and incomplete reconstruction of the ruined world of European Jewish diaspora. For Arbel, Agnon’s writing paradoxically becomes infinite precisely because it attempts to reconstruct a finite history. Arbel introduces an image of Agnon as the author who dedicates his entire being to the endless literary representation of a lost world—a task of artistic redemption which can never be completed. Arbel’s portrayal of the author was prefigured by none other than Agnon himself. While Agnon never published an autobiography, he provided a symbolic interpretation of his biography. For example, Agnon claimed that his birth date corresponded to the Ninth of Av, the date of the destruction of the Temple. And like the Temple, Agnon’s home was destroyed twice.12 To follow Golomb Hoffman, Agnon’s deliberate choice to publicly combine personal dates with national and religious dates amounts to “a construction of an autobiographical myth . . . that links writer and writing to Torah, nation, and history.”13 At the same time, Golomb Hoffman shows that Agnon also kept personal documents, enabling researchers to refute some of

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the dates of his manufactured public persona. Consequently, Golomb Hoffman concludes that in the contradictory fashioning of his persona as fiction, Agnon “allows for the myth of the writer, while making visible its construction.”14 The construction of the author’s persona began with the name Agnon, a pseudonym chosen by the author and modeled after the publication of “Agunot,” his first Hebrew story published in Palestine, in 1908. In Jewish tradition, as has been noted, the term agunah (literally, chained) denotes a woman who cannot marry because her husband has disappeared without divorcing her. Agnon, as “a fiction constituted by writing,” thus becomes for Golomb Hoffman a dual figure. On the one hand, the name constructs the author as free to fashion his own persona; on the other hand it marks the author, Agnon, as the one who has been forsaken by God.15 Read as fiction, Agnon’s self-portrait thus offers a narrative which is contradictory and complex enough to accommodate several images of the author. Along these lines, in this concluding chapter I will offer another image of the author. Through a close reading of the story “The Garment” (“‫)”המלבוש‬, juxtaposed with Agnon’s letters and essays, I will construct an image of the author as a subject indebted to the endless production of incomplete texts. In “The Garment,” images of an indebted author, incomplete texts, and the endless production of writing come to the fore, as writing is constituted through two major tropes—weaving and debt. Reading this text through Agnon’s paradoxical image of “writing as weaving a torn garment,” I claim that the author cannot “finish” any text for two reasons: a text is by nature an “unfinished garment,” and the author is by nature an infinitely indebted subject.16 These two conditions together form Agnon’s narrative theory, based on what I term as the “law of permanent debt.” This extrapolated narrative theory subverts the completion of every single text, therefore undermining the production of any finite and stable meaning. “The Garment” as Text Published in 1950, “The Garment” tells the story of a tailor commissioned to prepare a garment for a lord (‫)שר‬.17 On the day of the transaction, the tailor decides that the garment is unfinished. Tormented by his failure, the tailor is granted a second chance; the lord gives him

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more time to finish, yet the tailor still neglects the repair (‫ )תיקון‬of the garment for such activities as eating, drinking, and arguing with his wife, but also for praying.18 In the midst of all these diversions, the tailor soils the garment with food prepared by his wife. After he rushes to clean the garment in the river, a fish comes along and swallows it. Then, in his attempt to salvage the garment, the tailor drowns. At this point, and for the first time, the narrator directly addresses the reader, with what seems to be an instructional commentary. In the concluding paragraph, the narrator states: “The lord has many garments, and he could have given up this one. However, the tailor, who lost the garment which was made of the fabric in the lord’s workshop, what shall he say, and what shall he reply when he is asked where the garment is?”19 Referencing the common Jewish mystical imagery of the soul as a radiant garment, Gershon Shaked reads “The Garment” as an allegorical text. For Shaked, “The Garment” is a religious parable about an anti-hero, preoccupied with daily matters such as drinking and eating instead of repairing the soul given to him by God. In this interpretation, the ending scene is read as a reference to the biblical story of Jonah, in which the prophet Jonah, who runs away from God, boards a ship only to be thrown off after a storm and then swallowed by a fish. Only after three days of repentance in the fish’s belly does God release Jonah, who now agrees to complete his divine mission. Following Shaked’s influential reading, other scholars such as Arnold Band, Glenda Abramson, Shoshana Rabin, and Arye Ben Yosef also read the garment exclusively as a symbol of the tailor’s soul.20 According to Shoshana Rabin, in Midrash Jonah the storm is seen as punishment for a man who is unwilling to devote his life to God, and the fish is viewed as his burial place. After his repentance, however, Jonah is given a second chance, or even a second life, in the service of God. Agnon’s tailor, on the other hand, neglects the task of repair, missing out on the second chance offered to him by the lord.21 All of the above-listed scholars underscore that the narrator’s commentary at the end of “The Garment” emphasizes both the tailor’s sin and subsequent punishment for his mindless neglect of duty to God. Convincing as they are in certain respects, such readings present two problems. First, daily prayers in the synagogue are among the distractions that prevent the tailor from finishing his garment. While

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in the synagogue, the tailor thinks about how he is far more afraid of the lord’s servants than of God. His subsequent reflections exhibit a clear conflict between the time needed to repair the garment, and the time needed for morning and evening prayers. If customary prayers are performed in the service of “repairing” one’s soul before God, why should there be any conflict with an action that symbolizes exactly the same concern? The second problem lies in the reading of the narrator’s commentary as a direct condemnation of the tailor. To follow Arnold Band’s logic, the surreal and allegorical nature of “The Garment,” coupled with the indecisive character of the tailor, establishes Agnon’s 1950 text as a later extension of his stories from the 1930s, collected under the title The Book of Deeds.22 If this is true, then reading “The Garment” as a simple parable surely goes against the interpretive perplexity that greets Agnon’s earlier stories as opaque modernist allegories. To understand “The Garment” as a cautionary tale of the tragic fate of an observant Jewish subject is to ignore what scholarship has most valued in Agnon’s work, namely his multifaceted, self-conscious, and ironic style of narration. Alternatively then, “The Garment” can also be read as a selfreflective narrative on the art of narrative itself. In this allegory, the tailor’s weaving constitutes a metaphor for writing, while the garment functions as a text. Analyzing works ranging from the early “Agunot” to the much later 1952 novella To This Day (‫)עד הנה‬, Baruch Kurzweil demonstrates that many of Agnon’s works feature an analogy between books and garments. For Kurzweil, this recurring analogy in Agnon’s fiction represents the modern Jewish world as a godless reality bereft of books and garments. Kurzweil argues that for Agnon, after the break from tradition, books and garments alike are torn and damaged.23 However, whereas Kurzweil focuses on Agnon’s analogy between written texts and garments, i.e., finished products, my reading of “The Garment” underscores Agnon’s unique simile of “writing as weaving a torn garment”—a writing that can never reach its completion. My Text Is a Torn Silk Gown The image of writing as weaving in literature and literary theory dates back to Greek culture.24 Reading Aristotle’s Poetics, Hillis

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Miller argues that “an example of this tradition going all the way back to Aristotle is the use of the image of the knotted or unknotted thread, in which the complication of plot is perceived to be the tying of threads, and ending the unraveling (denouement).”25 However, employing a deconstructivist reading of Aristotle’s image, Hillis Miller claims that one cannot distinguish between tying and untying in literary theory. While the ending of the text is considered to be an untying of the plot’s knotted threads, the same ending is also imagined to be the tying of loose ends. Textual ending therefore stands for both tying and untying. For Hillis Miller, “This is another way of saying that no narrative can show either its beginning or its end. It always begins or ends in medias res.”26 Expanding on this idea in his subsequent book, Ariadne’s Thread, Hillis Miller shows how common metaphors of reading and writing as threads create a logo-centric narrative theory, which establishes closure as the revelation of truth and wholeness.27 Turning the myth of Ariadne on its head, Hillis Miller claims that while Ariadne’s thread traces the labyrinth, it also doubles it. Consequently, while a text is viewed as a labyrinth to be traced and deciphered as a unified whole, each interpretative reading creates its own maze of contradictions and dead ends.28 Whereas Hillis Miller uses Aristotle’s metaphor of the knotted thread in order to undermine the idea of closure, the young Agnon anticipates Hillis Miller’s move by offering a different image: “writing as weaving a torn garment.” While Agnon already juxtaposed weaving and writing in “‘Agunot,” he articulated this specific image more clearly in an early essay published in 1910, in which he referred to the prose of his mentor, Shin Ben Zion, as “the weaving and making of silk.” Although the imagery comes out of his deliberate play on Ben Zion’s story entitled “Silk,” Agnon develops this metaphor further: “In desolate halls the spider weaves its webs. And in the desolation of life, the writer weaves his silk.”29 For Gershon Shaked, this initial simile renders writing and weaving as similar acts of transformation: writing transforms desolate and forsaken spaces.30 According to Shaked, Agnon describes the literature of Ben Zion by invoking the tension between the beauty and wholeness of silk (form), and the fragmented and problematic content it exposes. Shaked asserts that such tension is precisely what came to define Agnon’s own fiction. In this light, Agnon’s essay in fact exposes his own convictions about lit-

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erature and its relationship to the world. Writing, like weaving, does not represent reality, but acts as clothing that enables us to see reality more clearly; the beautiful form, the whole garment, does not cover the truth, but reshapes it so that we can look at it directly. Still, what Shaked ignores here is that while Agnon does emphasize the beauty of the silky gown woven by the author, he simultaneously imagines the garment as torn: “Despite the wholeness of his [the author’s] soul . . . our eyes witness tears and tears in the work that emerges beneath his hands [ . . . ] it is like the void that stood before the acts of Genesis, and man, the creator, weaves his silk around this void.”31 Just as God created earth when it was a “formless void,” writing is weaving around and from a void, a lack.32 Writing paradoxically employs absence as its raw material; it not only points toward something tangible, but also toward a void. The writer thus has an impossible task to perform: weaving something from nothing, but also reflecting the fact of nothingness through the text’s being. More importantly, the text itself as a “silk gown” is not marked by wholeness; its very form is incomplete. Through the garment, we catch a glimpse of a “void.” Along these lines Agnon imagines Ben Zion walking in the street wearing a coat made out of silk “all torn.” Author and text, tailor and garment, all are torn. The tearing of clothes is a traditional expression of grief in the Bible, and subsequently forms a part of Jewish mourning customs. Accordingly, the incomplete text and the unfinished garment become signs of mourning in Agnon’s essay. Reviewing Ben Zion’s texts, Agnon lists several reasons for this act of mourning: the absence of the father, the alienation of the modern Jew from his ancestral tradition, the poverty and weakness of Jewish diaspora, but, above all, the absence of God’s Torah from the modern world. Again, all of these themes also prefigure Agnon’s own work. The modern text is unfinished both as a sign of mourning for a flawed reality, but also as the reflection of this imperfect world. The incomplete text results from and reflects an inherent lack. The text as torn garment therefore inherently possesses an unresolved tension between divine creation and absence, being and nothingness, the desire for wholeness of form and its own torn nature. As such, tracing Agnon’s paradoxical imagery of “writing as weaving a torn garment” shows that the author’s concept of the production of an incomplete text is rooted in his poetic thought from its nascent

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stages. This incompleteness, however, has two different explanations. Whereas Agnon’s 1910 essay focuses more on mimetic motivation— the modern text remains unfinished because it represents an imperfect reality—Agnon’s later views, as we shall see in “The Garment,” underscore that the text remains unfinished because writing itself always begins and ends in medias res. As Agnon’s first person narrator of To This Day comments: “Were I to tell you everything that followed, the number of chapters, subchapters and sub-subchapters in my story would be infinite.”33 Can One Repair A Torn Garment? Agnon’s early and continual preoccupation with notions of the incomplete text is further embodied in the paradoxical imagery of “writing as the weaving of a torn garment.” In light of this complicated simile, how should we read the tailor’s discovery in “The Garment,” namely that the lord’s garment, his own work, ultimately remains incomplete? On the one hand, the opening of “The Garment” assigns blame to the tailor. Only when it is time to bring the finished garment to the lord does the tailor—earlier preoccupied with other “more important” chores—realize that the garment is unfinished. By implying that the garment is unfinished because the tailor unwisely dedicated time to other chores, this opening already introduces the moral of the story, a moral that develops in detailed descriptions of the tailor’s varied evasions of the task of repair. However, on the other hand, the text consistently refuses to supply any specifications about the aspects of the garment that remain unfinished, and the ways the garment could have been finished: “[The tailor] examined the garment to see what was missing. The buttons are sewn, and fine details even embellish the garment. Yet the garment was missing something. Something that makes the garment a garment, and without it, the garment is not a garment” (305). The enigma of this lack is not resolved by the text. In fact, the lack of explanation is emphasized repeatedly, when the tailor refers to the unfinished garment in general terms such as “unfinished,” “incomplete,” or “just missing something” (306, 309). By limiting the reader to the tailor’s point of view, the text maintains a sense of uncertainty. Not only do we not know what is missing from the garment; there is

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even the possibility that the garment is not missing anything at all. We only have the tailor’s word for it, and he could just be obsessive, insecure, or afraid of the lord, for he thinks that “the garment is unbecoming of a lord” (307). At the same time, to read “The Garment” as an allegory of writing, informed by Agnon’s paradoxical imagery of “writing as weaving a torn garment,” does imply that the garment-as-text is undone. To recall Kurzweil’s mournful reading, the modern world is filled with torn garments and damaged books. If Kurzweil is correct, then the tailor’s judgment of the garment as unfinished is accurate. Still, in this light, can any tailor ever weave a whole garment in our modern world? Can an author ever complete a text? For Kurzweil, the answer is obviously no. However, what Kurzweil ignores in his analogy is the position of the modern author as a tailor who, through his art and through his labor, attempts to retrieve the wholeness of both garments and books through the act of weaving. As Golomb Hoffman shows, the “middleman” position of the modern author (and modern writing) appears already in “Agunot,” which incorporates the earliest use of Agnon’s imagery of the text as garment in his fictional work.34 The text’s opening passage establishes God as a tailor who spins “a thread of grace . . . out of the deeds of Israel,” creating a prayer shawl to cover Israel. However, there are times when the “the prayer shawl is damaged” and “this affliction of love leads to darkest melancholy” that persists until the strength of spirit repairs the tears, making the garment whole again.35 Agnon’s text is a (per)formative text: while imagining writing as weaving, the text seamlessly weaves together quotes from the Song of Songs and many other biblical and talmudic sources.36 As Golomb Hoffman shows, this heightened sense of intertexuality has two major effects. First, while the opening passage serves to frame Agnon’s text, the passage also alludes to other traditional Jewish texts “outside” its own frame. In so doing, the frame story blurs the outlines of the text, to the point where “it is impossible to tell where one begins and the other leaves off.”37 Second, by weaving itself into Jewish tradition, Agnon’s story becomes a “strand in this fabric,” thus invoking “a frame of reference larger than itself within which deeds are either restorative or harmful to the prayer shawl, the fabric that binds God to Israel.”38 In light of these lines, and as we shall later explore more

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fully, Agnon’s early choice to imagine writing as weaving has overarching consequences for his conceptualization of the labor of writing as an endless process of production. To write a text is only to weave one strand into a divinely inspired, ever-expanding fabric. When viewed in the larger context of Agnon’s weaving imagery, the tailor’s incomplete garment is necessarily, intrinsically unfinished. As a work of art, as a text, the garment might appear incomplete in light of the wholeness of God’s thread of grace, the writings of the Torah, and Jewish tradition as written by divine inspiration, if not by God himself.39 The garment is unfinished when compared to the imagined wholeness of the prayer shawl, the divine ideal of the complete work of art. From this perspective, the tailor-as-author is indeed facing an impossible task. In the modern world of “The Garment,” the tailor labors to weave a torn garment intended to restore the divine and whole prayer shawl, which always remains inaccessible to the human mind. In this respect, while it is true that the tailor’s garment remains unfinished, its completion may lie beyond the power of any tailor’s finite labor. To Weave, To Calculate: Indebted Writing Never Ends Read as an allegory on writing, “The Garment” offers another explanation as to why the garment remains incomplete, an explanation that stems from the understanding of writing and the writer as constituted through the notion of debt. Significantly, from the beginning of “The Garment,” the tailor’s labor is carried on within the framework of debt: “A tailor was sitting and making a garment. The garment was made in honor of a lord, and the fabric was the finest it can be, taken from the fabrics made in the lord’s workshop” (306). The tailor is therefore doubly indebted. Not only is the garment made for the lord, but even the fabric, the raw material, belongs to the lord. In other words, the lord in “The Garment” also functions as a creditor. He is not only the customer, but the creditor who loaned the material in expectation of the task’s completion. The double exchange between seller and buyer, creditor and debtor, will be concluded, and the double debt paid off, only if the garment, the work of art, or the text, is completed in the end. The position of the author as a subject indebted to God, his creditor, appears clearly in a speech given by Agnon at the Hebrew

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University in 1963, on the occasion of receiving the NYU award. In this speech, titled “Letters and Books,” Agnon states that “the sacred language was given in twenty-two letters . . . and when the holy scriptures were canonized, the sages said whoever brings into his house more than twenty-four books lets confusion enter his home.”40 After mentioning that in Modern Hebrew new words were invented for the terms “literature” (‫ )ספרות‬and “author” (‫)סופר‬, Agnon imagines the relationship between God and modern and ancient authors alike as a contract, stating that God gives “ . . . these writers the letters of the sacred language to write in. And when a man is slated to become an author, God takes from his good treasure such and such amount of letters, and gives it to the author.”41 In this speech, the economic infrastructure of the double debt to God, which for Agnon defines the task of writing, is strongly linked with the theme of calculation. To follow Agnon, God only gives a fixed number of letters to each author. Consequently “if the author is smart . . . he counts each and every letter. . . . If the author is not smart, he wastes his letters on useless words.” As for Agnon himself, he was also “slated to be a writer,” and even he may have wasted a few words. Still, “One thing I can say before you . . . and even before the court on high, is how much I have tried to protect the divine heritage so that it not be lost.”42 According to Agnon, then, even if he was indeed wasteful at times, by using God’s treasure and by writing for God he produced works that are of value in this world and in the world to come. As in the opening of “Agunot,” Agnon’s speech casts the author’s work, or the tailor’s garment, as either restorative or damaging to God’s thread of grace—to his divine word and text. Calculation is therefore crucial. It determines whether or not one succeeds in paying one’s debt to God. As seen in chapter 2, this is precisely why the narrator of A Guest for the Night is so obsessed with calculation, why he is constantly afraid that his money and words are running out. However, the guest’s conscious narration-as-calculation is marked by irony and inflation, traits that he denies. As a result, the guest who wishes to pay precisely what he owes by the means of his narration constantly defaults on his debt. To calculate correctly is no trifling matter. Agnon admits in his speech that he also wasted letters of the sacred language, sometimes out of “imagined” needs and reasons. Agnon’s confession of unintended wastefulness recalls the tailor

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in “The Garment,” who also miscalculated the time he should devote to needs which he imagined to be important at the time. Lacking God’s omniscience, only able to reflect after the fact rather than predict what is to come, the limited human perspective necessarily leads to miscalculations of time, money, actions, and words. Yet for Agnon, there is no way to write without calculation. To calculate is intrinsically related to the task of writing in Modern Hebrew. The association between calculation and narration is even linguistically ingrained in the word ‫סופר‬, which in Modern Hebrew denotes “author,” but has always also functioned as the present conjugation of the verb “to count.”43 Moreover, in the history of Jewish religious scribal practices, the “author” (‫ )סופר‬was truly a counter, since he had to keep track of the number of letters in the text when copying the canonized scroll to guarantee accuracy of transmission. In a short book review published in 1926, Agnon introduces another correlation between miscalculations and the task of writing in Modern Hebrew. The problem is not only the danger of wastefulness or excess, but also its opposite: frugality, or, in rhetorical terminology, brevity. Oscillating between excessive length and brevity, the problem of writing in Modern Hebrew becomes for Agnon the problem of “precision.” Moving into an economic discourse, Agnon writes that “idioms exist in every nation and language, coins coined by generations past. In prolonging what was once short, one becomes wasteful, in shortening what was once long, one debases the value of coins.”44 As we have already seen, through imagery of words-as-coins in “The Sense of Smell” and A Guest for the Night, the “proper” usage of a word was crucial to Agnon’s writing. To inflate or deflate the value of coins, to use words in excessive length or exaggerated brevity, can dangerously contribute to the loss of divine heritage. In his book review, Agnon adds that, especially when writing in Hebrew, “the doubts are many.” Indebted to the proper usage of sacred language, the modern author has to refer to the sources of Jewish textual traditions to see whether he is correct or not—“and even then, he does not always find what he was looking for.”45 To follow Agnon, the modern Hebrew author is always prone to miscalculations, to wastefulness, or to frugality. Precision elusively resides between the dangerous poles of “excessive length” and “brevity.” Correct calculation and purpose-

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ful writing are not only questions of technique, but also matters of religious and spiritual urgency. Modern Hebrew writing participates in divine economy, in the economic infrastructure of human debt and divine reward. 46 Thinking back to A Guest for the Night, if words truly function as coins, the value of which is never intrinsic, then the author’s calculations constantly run the risk of turning into miscalculations. The modern author is thus sentenced to an infinite process of recalculation. In “The Garment,” it is precisely the participation of modern writing in divine economy that explains the lord’s position also as a divine figure in the text; the allegory of God as the creditor of the indebted author is twofold. According to Agnon’s 1963 speech, God is a benefactor. He gives away letters from his treasury, sharing his power of creation so that authors can write. Conversely, in a letter to Yosef Haim Brenner, Agnon writes that, according to a passage he found in the Book of the Pious, if an author fails to write, it is as if he is withholding from God his power of creation, marking the author as “a thief.”47 Correspondingly, the ambivalent position of God as both benefactor and punisher is presented in “The Garment” in the contrast between the lord who gives his fabric to the tailor, and the lord who sends his evil servants to abuse the tailor for his failures. 48 However, in reading the lord as God, the creditor of authors, we are encountering the same problem that arises in Shaked’s reading of the story: if God is the creditor of the modern author, why should there be a conflict between the time needed for the garment’s repair and the time needed for such religious acts as praying? On the one hand, “The Garment” seems to oppose the repair of the garment and religious work. For example, the tailor terms his thoughts of repair during his prayer time as “foreign thoughts” (314), which prevent him from praying properly. Here, the task of repair is contrasted with religious work, averting the tailor’s participation in divine economy. On the other hand, the tailor’s task of repair is embedded with religious overtones through the text’s constant employment of the nominal form “repair” (‫)תיקון‬, which charges the tailor’s task with religious and spiritual significance. An explanation (but not a resolution) for this contradictory constitution of the act of weaving in “The Garment” lies in Agnon’s two-fold conceptualization of the task of modern Hebrew writing.

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Speaking about his role as a modern author in a speech given at Hebrew University in 1958, Agnon said that as a child, “If I found a piece of paper, I wrote on paper, if I didn’t find paper I wrote on my heart. . . . Because I labored on poems, I did not find time to labor on the teachings of Torah. My father was sad. I was supposed to study the Torah, but I spent my time writing poems.”49 Subsequently, throughout his career, as Golomb Hoffman previously claimed, Agnon presents modern Hebrew writing as an ambivalent task.50 On the one hand, modern Hebrew writing is contrasted with the study of Torah, and with an idealized religious dedication. On the other hand, writing is a part of the sanctified labor that protects divine heritage from loss. As such, the dual position of modern Hebrew writing only exacerbates the author’s chances of miscalculation. Not only is it difficult to calculate correctly in writing, but the author also needs to calculate the opportunity cost of his time spent writing vis-à-vis other obligations. As I shall show in the next section, the unresolved tension between “pure” religious devotion and the ambivalently constructed sacred task of modern writing comprises only part of what constitutes the modern author as a tragic figure in “The Garment.” The Indebted Author as Tragic Figure Agnon’s 1912 first novella And the Crooked introduced Menasheh Hayim as an indebted subject, torn between incompatible religious, monetary, and inter-subjective debts. This early novella constructed divine economy and capitalism as analagous crisis-prone systems in which the indebted subject is inevitably led to his tragic fate. Written thirty-eight years after And the Crooked, “The Garment” adds another dimension by establishing literary economy as also based on an infinite, unstable, and asymmetrical exchange between author, text, and reader. In other words, “The Garment” presents the wholeness and ideality of fiction as itself another fiction. While the wholeness of the work of art can never be realized in full, it is precisely the indebtedness to this impossible ideal that constructs the modern author as a tragic figure. In her reading of Agnon’s characters who are artists and craftsmen as hidden portraits of the author, Malka Shaked identifies two contrasting views of the act of modern writing which emerge in works such as “Agunot,” “The Tale of the Scribe” (“‫ )”אגדת הסופר‬and

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“Forevermore” (“‫)”עד עולם‬, to name but a few. According to Shaked, in agreement with religious Jewish thought Agnon publicly proclaimed that only religious and ethical writings constitute ideal expressions of divine truth. In this explicit view, fiction written for fiction’s sake is regarded as inferior to the Hebrew Bible, Mishnah, and the Talmuds. The sole purpose of modern writing is to glorify the sacred past and its sanctified writings. By contrast, Shaked claims that Agnon’s writing discloses yet another implicit view of modern writing, one that originates in romantic and modern ideals of personal creative genius. Here, the work of art is understood as a direct expression of the author’s persona and imaginative genius. Only through the complete devotion of the artist to his art will the work become whole. In this admittedly overtly romanticized perspective, while the artist invests all of his sexual, mental, and emotional drives in his work, the wholeness of the work compensates for these frustrated drives.51 These two views of art, as Malka Shaked underscores, dictate two very different takes on the author. In the religious Jewish view, the author as a person does not matter; what is at stake is only the endurance of tradition. Accordingly, the author’s divinely ordained devotion is not perceived as tragic. However, in the romantic and later modern periods, the perception of art as an expression of the artist emphasizes both the wholeness of the written work and the persona and life of the individual; one is the condition for the other. This double and contradictory emphasis necessarily dictates a tragic construct of the author who supposedly dedicates his whole being in the world for the sake of the ideal work. Agnon’s artist characters, such as Ben Uri of “Agunot” and Raphael of “The Tale of the Scribe,” argues Shaked, embody Agnon’s combination of the two views. Although they devote themselves to religious-artistic work—Ben Uri’s ark and Raphael’s scribes—these two artists still exemplify “the cost” that modern artists “pay” in order to “produce” their ideal work. Using economic metaphors, Shaked highlights the tragic price charged for the perfection of art in Agnon’s works. The genius-artist pays off the debt to his art at the expense of all other debts that tie him to the world.52 Agnon’s ideas on writing in Modern Hebrew offer an additional synthesis of Jewish religious and modern romantic approaches to the notion of art. Shaked claims that whereas the Jewish religious view elevates past writings at the expense of the degraded work of art of

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the present, the romantic approach sanctifies the work of art precisely because of the individual genius who creates it. However, Agnon construes modern Hebrew writing not only as inferior vis-à-vis the elevated writing of the past, but also as the possible extension of this past writing. As Anne Golomb Hoffman demonstrates, Agnon’s writing on the subject of writing presents the modern Hebrew author as constantly moving between states of exclusion from, and inclusion in, the world of divine heritage, a world embodied in the writing of Hebrew as a sacred language.53 Consequently, writing in Modern Hebrew becomes a sacred duty in and of itself, a sacred debt to God. To write properly in Modern Hebrew can, after all, restore the torn prayer shawl. At the same time, going back to the imagery of “writing as weaving a torn garment,” this task as sacred debt is perhaps impossible to repay. In “The Garment,” the modern author as tailor needs to make a whole garment, yet he can only produce an unfinished one. Agnon’s paradoxical description of the tailor’s garment as both ordained by the lord, but also “unbecoming of a lord,” (307) fits well into Golomb Hoffman’s presentation of Agnon’s writing on the subject of modern writing, as it “both elevates the mission of the writer as the protector of a precious linguistic heritage, and denigrates the capacity of modern writing to carry out that high task.”54 To complicate things further, as I will show in the next sections, Agnon also uses this tension between modernity and sacred inheritance to present the modern writer as not only the protector of a precious linguistic heritage, but also as its competitor. Along these lines, “The Garment” presents an interesting reversal of the logic that Malka Shaked traces in Agnon’s portrayal of the artist as a tragic figure. In Shaked’s examples, the artist repays the debt to his sacred calling at the expense of all other debts. Raphael does not fulfill his marital obligations to Miriam, and Ben Uri abandons Dina for the creation of the perfect ark. These artists default on all other payments in order to pay off their sacred debt to God. To paraphrase Derrida, complete devotion to the production of the perfect work of art dictates a betrayal of other people.55 In contrast, “The Garment” presents us with the portrait of an artist who does not complete his divinely ordained work. Here, the tailor fails to pay his debt to the ideal work of art, and consequently to God. In this tale, the tragic cost does not lie in the default on all

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other debts for the sake of art’s perfection, but rather in the constitutive impossibility of paying the debt commissioned by the ideal of wholeness. In “The Garment,” the tragic cost originates not in the completion of one’s work, but in its incompletion. Here, the artist does not mourn the loss of the world for the sake of his art; on the contrary, the artist mourns the existence of the world that prevents him from completing his work. In “The Garment,” the modern author becomes a tragic figure precisely because he can neither repay his debt to art, nor to God. However, Agnon’s stories of artistic completion are not only the opposite of “The Garment” as a story of incompletion; they are also analogous to it. Just like Menasheh Hayim in And the Crooked, even the artists, who have perfected their work, face an impossible debt before God. By paying their debt to God through the completion of their art, the artists still default on other debts: to their marriages, their beloveds, or to the commandment of procreation. All these debts, as we have previously seen, are also calculated in the circulation of Jewish divine economy. In this sense, all of these stories end with debt. While these artists, who have completed their work, are still indebted to varied unfulfilled obligations, in “The Garment,” by contrast, the artist’s engagement with these obligations results in a tragic indebtedness to his imperfect and incomplete work. Impossible Distributions of Time: The Condition of Writing an Incomplete Text When the tailor comes to the lord without the garment, the lord accusingly tells him: “you did not spend your days for the sake of the garment” (309). This accusation literally comes with a price. The contract has been breached; the exchange falls through. At the same time, the dialogue between lord and tailor also establishes another exchange, between debt and guilt. To recall, in the divine economy between the indebted religious subject and God the creditor, the exchange of human duties (debts) for divine rewards is underlined by the ultimate exchange: the guilt of the indebted subject for the forgiveness of the all-powerful creditor. To be responsible for one’s actions means to be responsible before God. Thus, to be found guilty in God’s eyes is to hold a debt to God. Accordingly, from the moment of the first breach of the contract, the tailor’s guilt and his debt grow

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in direct proportion to each other. The more the tailor refrains from the task of repair, the more his guilt and debt increase.56 In the escalation of guilt and debt, the hungry tailor first leaves the garment unfinished in favor of his wife’s cooking. Later, it will be for morning prayers, afterward for evening prayers, and in between for drinks, food, and idle chat at the nearby pub. During all of these “disturbances,” the tailor has “thoughts of anger and remorse.” These thoughts, however, do not impel him to complete his task. On the contrary, the tailor blames these useless thoughts that “distract the mind” from the task at hand. “Because of all these thoughts,” the tailor reflects, “I am not thinking about the garment” (311). The tailor, then, is caught up in a vicious cycle: when involved in any other task, he thinks of the garment, yet while repairing the garment, he is always distracted by his thoughts. The conflict is only exacerbated by the tailor’s awareness of his own actions. Instead of enabling change, self-reflection only increases his guilt, which in turn becomes another source of distraction. Guilt only produces more guilt. This endless cycle—distractions triggering guilt, which becomes a distraction in itself—intensifies throughout the text. Yet the incessant production of guilt also discloses a “deficit of time.” When going reluctantly to eat, the tailor thinks that “it was better for man if he was created without the need for food or drink. . . . A man works so he will have something to eat and eats so he will be able work” (311). The tailor’s complaint indirectly refers to God’s punishment of Adam in the expulsion from the garden of Eden: “In toil you shall eat of it [the ground] all the days of your life. . . . By the sweat of your face you shall eat bread until you return to the ground, for out of it you were taken. You are dust and to dust you shall return.”57 In accordance with some Jewish sources, the tailor postulates here that the human spirit is circumscribed by the “curse” of labor, performed for the sake of physical needs.58 In an interesting reversal, whereas the traditional sources lament the body/spirit dialectic as a possible obstacle to spiritual perfection, the tailor refers to this divide in relation to the category of art. To follow the tailor’s logic, the expenditure of time (and labor) necessarily dedicated to corporeal needs is incompatible with artistic perfection. The human potential to create is thus limited from the beginning, by time and by the body. In other words, the production of art is lim-

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ited by mortality, which dictates that one’s body and one’s time are not completely one’s own. As such, the elderly tailor’s struggles with the task of repair acquire a dark overtone. The conflicting demands on the tailor’s time, as well as the tailor’s own relentless but impotent calculations of time, all underscore the notion of an inherent temporal deficit. Expecting the servants’ arrival, the desperate tailor tries to quickly repair the garment, but “if he did not damage what had already been repaired, he did not repair what should have been repaired” (306). Following this statement, the tailor’s task of repair oscillates between these two poles: he either never finds the “right” time to repair the garment, or he only damages it further. The tailor’s struggle against time is reminiscent of Paul Ricoeur’s claim that narratives present characters who orient themselves in circumstances they have not created, producing consequences they did not intend. For Ricoeur, narratives exhibit a person who is “responsible” and “abandoned” at the same time. Narratives unfold in “the interplay between being able to act and being bound to the world order.”59 To follow Ricoeur’s argument, the time deficit in “The Garment” results from a double bind. On the one hand, as an agent who is responsible for his own actions, the tailor is certainly inept. On the other hand, the text also presents the tailor as bound to time and body in ways that are not entirely under his control: he is responsible for others’ material and social needs, and is indebted by the enigmatic incompletion of the garment—all of which limit his actions in the world. Similarly, the tension between being able to act and being bound to the world order is precisely what Agnon, in many of his letters, sees as constituting the act of writing. In letters to scholars such as Dov Sadan and Baruch Kurzweil, to fellow writers such as Brenner and Bialik, or to Esther, his wife, Agnon divulges an incessant fear of the possibility that he will not be able to finish his work on time. Indeed, a year before the publication of “The Garment,” Agnon wrote a letter to Kurzweil that could as well have appeared as one of the elderly tailor’s interior monologues: “As you have heard, I have just sent many of my works to print. Much I labored on them, and much labor still waits. My strength decreases, and my hand is exhausted. Many times, I need to stop in the middle of a sentence because my

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strength runs out. . . .” In another letter, from 1955, Agnon writes that “from powerlessness and disruptions of everyday life, I am unable to finish even one story.”60 In these letters, Agnon complains of a body overworked, of financial obligations, of bureaucracy, of friends, and even of the need to write these very same letters, all of which take up the time that should have been devoted to the sacred task of writing. At the time of writing the above letters, Agnon was nearing his seventieth year. Frustration with his deteriorating health is obvious. However, the same complaints also appear in much earlier periods of his life. In a letter written in 1924 in the land of Israel, Agnon writes to Esther (then living in Germany), that, due to financial problems, he plans to work as a teacher, and therefore would probably not have time to write. In another letter from 1925, he complains to Esther that writing letters prevents him from finishing even one story.61 In a 1935 letter to Dov Sadan, Agnon complains: “My power is running out, my brain is dumb, and my limbs are exhausted.”62 Furthermore, it is not only when he is not writing that Agnon feels he has no time left to complete his work. The alarming time deficit haunts Agnon even when he is writing, and even after he has “finished” writing. In a letter to Dov Sadan from 1937, Agnon states in regard to his anthology Book, Author, Story (‫ סיפור‬,‫ סופר‬,‫)ספר‬: “I am pleased with my book, but not pleased enough. If I had time for more proofreading, I would have made it into a whole vessel.” In late 1938, in another letter to Sadan, this time referring to A Guest for the Night (already at that time in the printing house), Agnon confesses: “I have three wonderful chapters in my mind, but I had to give them up due to lack of time.”63 In Agnon’s letters, as in “The Garment,” the author never has enough time to complete his work. This time deficit is brought about by the different obligations that comprise his life—the economics of daily life. Notably, Agnon refers to these obligations as debts. Apologizing to Sadan that he did not respond to his letters because of his other duties (‫)חובות‬, Agnon refers to himself as a debtor (‫)בעל חוב‬.64 Agnon’s slide from the word “duties” to the word “debt” illustrates his economic conceptualization of time and of writing. Equating obligations and debts, Agnon’s letters construct the production of writing as established on an inherent deficit of time. The author’s calculations of time only highlight the idea that time has already run out. Because

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the distribution of time is dictated to the author not only by himself, but also by others (social, marital, and financial obligations to other people) and above all by the Other (as God, as body, as death), the author never “has” enough time to finish the work. In “The Garment,” the protagonist’s inability to find the time to repair the garment, or to calculate time correctly, turns the tailor into the self-portrait of the indebted author, as he fails to produce his “whole vessel.” “The Garment” thus constitutes the modern author as a tragic figure who bemoans his corporeal existence for undermining the perfection of his art—never to be whole, never to be completed. The Law of Permanent Debt: Toward a Narrative Theory In the narrated world of “The Garment,” the sense of an inherent time deficit creates erratic movement. Trying desperately to level an imbalanced account of different and conflicting debts, the tailor can only zigzag indecisively between different expenditures. To choose to pay one debt necessarily means to default on others. The indecisive movement between partial payments dictates a bankrupt economy of lasting debts, an economy of loss governed by what I would term Agnon’s “law of permanent debt.” In fact, throughout this study, Agnon’s “law of permanent debt” revealed itself time and time again. In And the Crooked, Menasheh Hayim is constituted through conflicting debts to monetary economy (capitalism), divine economy (God), and to inter-subjective economy (his wife). In choosing to pay the debt to his wife, Menasheh Hayim by necessity leaves other debts unpaid. In A Guest for the Night, the guest is indebted to projects of restoration in both the land of Israel and the diaspora; the regeneration of the former is accomplished via the destruction of the latter. In A Simple Story, Hirshl’s madness as bankruptcy originates in his unresolved debts to Mina and Bluma, and to his mother’s bourgeois world and the rabbi’s curse. On the one hand, to describe Agnon’s narratives as “unbalanced accounts” does not tell us much. Narratives by definition begin with a state of uncertainty, in that they are all, to some degree, “chains of suspense and surprise.”65 They necessarily begin in a state of flux, or rather, a state of debt. However, whereas Aristotelian denouement and subsequent theories of traditional closure taught audiences and

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readers to expect catharsis and a sense of completeness at the narrative’s end, Agnon’s endings usually remain only partially resolved. Utilizing different tactics to undermine a sense of closure, Agnon’s narrators underscore debts in the narrated world, but also in the narration of that world. Consequently, I suggest that Agnon’s “law of permanent debt” not only determines the literary representations of such themes as religious thought, capitalism, and psychoanalysis, but that this law also determines Agnon’s literary economy itself. In other words, the “law of permanent debt” governs the production, distribution, and consumption—the internal arrangement—of narrative itself.66 “When you narrate you construct,” proclaims H. Porter Abbott. Thus, he succinctly summarizes more than one hundred years of formalist, structuralist, and post-structuralist narratological discussions of such terms as “selection,” “combination,” and “composition,” which rely on Aristotle’s famous definition of plot as the “construction of events.”67 Indeed, as Seymour Chatman argues, the dominant dual model of narrative in formalist and structuralist theories follows Aristotle’s division between praxis as the imitation of real actions in the world, and mythos as the order given to this sequence. Aristotle’s division influences later formalist terms such as fabula (the sum total of events) and sujet (the story as actually told), as well as structuralist theory’s distinction between “story” (the chronological order of events) and “narrative discourse” (the actual order as presented to the reader).68 Though Chatman does not mention this, Aristotle’s mythos is already a second process of selection and (re)organization of praxis, which as an imitation of “real” actions in the world functions as an organizing process in itself. As Barbara Hernnstein Smith states, mimetic and realistic fiction presents only the illusion of being a historical action or utterance. The story represented by narrative discourse has never occurred “prior” to the writing of that narrative. Consequently, the process of selection and arrangement of details in narrative assumes a historical origin that never existed in the first place.69 This argument is employed by Herrnstein Smith in her later, post-structuralist, critique of the dual model theory of praxis and mythos. Analyzing the differences between more than five hundred versions of “Cinderella,” Hernnstein Smith demonstrates that there

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is no possibility of determining which version is the original story, and which versions are later reworkings of a narrative discourse. Any “original” story is only another version, produced by a specific point of view. “Story” and “narrative discourse,” Herrnstein Smith suggests, are only different versions of a narrative, each produced via different choices in the selection and arrangement of events and linguistic signs.70 To narrate, therefore, invariably means to make choices. In narrative theory, the problematic of choice is inherently linked to the issue of wholeness. For Aristotle, the play’s length must be appropriate—not too short, not too long—in order to achieve “unity and wholeness.”71 The author needs to correctly calculate the text’s form and themes in order to successfully produce a complete and beautiful structure and a strong sense of closure in order to maximize the reader’s profit: catharsis. Following Aristotle, the idea of correct calculation, in the sense of establishing an effective literary economy, became a prevalent idea in modern literary analysis of the internal organization of different genres of fiction.72 The correlation between correct calculation and a “successful” textual economy is also imperative in poetry. Thus, for example, Coleridge writes on the notion of meter in poetry as involving “the perpetual and distinct attention to each part, which an exact correspondent recurrence of accent and sound are calculated to excite.”73 Using this quote in her work on poetic closure, Herrnstein Smith argues that Coleridge’s meter informs the reader that he is in the presence of poetic discourse, a structure in which the reader expects to find the kind of closure “experienced as integral, coherent, complete, and stable.”74 In order to produce a “whole structure,” the poet or author needs to wisely invest: to make the right choices and calculations. The author needs to pay off all debts to the reader from start to finish. Yet to follow Agnon, correct calculation is exactly what the modern Hebrew author finds difficult to accomplish. To make the right choice at the right time, to calculate, is precisely what the tailor in “The Garment” fails to do, what he simply cannot do. “The Garment” raises the possibility that no artist can create a whole vessel, for the tailor is like all “people who only recognize later what they needed to recognize earlier” (305).

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No wonder, then, that the strong association between miscalculation and authorship is highlighted not only in “The Garment,” but also in the story’s puzzling predecessors: the stories in The Book of Deeds, most of which have authors as protagonists.75 As often noted before, the title The Book of Deeds is ironic. Just like the tailor in “The Garment,” the protagonists in these stories are overwhelmed and incapacitated by allegorically and literally diverging paths. Confronted with different choices, they are unable to just pick one route. Just like the tailor, they zigzag erratically between obligations, duties, and debts. In “Twofold” (“‫)”פי שניים‬, for example, the first-person narrator reminisces about how he missed the important evening prayer of Yom Kippur (Day of Atonement) because he spent the time trying to decide which of his two different prayer shawls (‫ )טליתות‬he should take to the synagogue. The story evokes a sense of loss, as the narrator emphasizes that although many Days of Atonement have passed since that day, yet “my mind cannot rest, for I lost this particular Yom Kippur which I wasted doing nothing.”76 The motif of doubling in the story—tales of sages who observe two days of atonement instead of one, and the narrator’s possession of two prayer shawls—ironically enhances an acute sense of the irrevocable loss of this day, which once gone, “does not return.”77 In fact, “Twofold” hints at Agnon’s law of permanent debt already in the title, which implies themes of calculation, exchange, and mathematics. Significantly, the narrator of “Twofold” explicitly associates the impossibility of choosing correctly with an economic deficit when he states: “If I had not wasted my time, and chose one prayer shawl of my two prayer shawls, perhaps I would not have come to such deficit (‫)גרעון‬.”78 “Perhaps” is a key word. In the concluding paragraphs, the narrator admits that he is fond of his two prayer shawls, and notes that “a man who owns two equal objects takes the first, yet stares at the second, takes the second, yet stares at the first thing; his heart is divided, and his mind is confused.”79 The narrator is constantly confronted by the need to make a choice or a calculation, yet in the narrated world of “Twofold,” making a choice or avoiding doing so (also a choice in itself) always results in a debt. The story thus ends with the narrator’s sense of loss as he wraps himself in only one of his two prayer shawls.

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In the stories of The Book of Deeds, as in “The Garment,” every choice triggers a loss. To choose one path marks all other paths not taken. To pay one’s debt leaves other debts unpaid.80 There is never enough time to accommodate all that one needs to do, pay, and above all—write. What these stories have in common is that traits such as indecisiveness, miscalculation, and defaulting on debts are correlated with characters who are authors. Agnon’s consistent association of the law of permanent debt with either implicit or explicit portrayals of authors prompts my reading of the stories of The Book of Deeds and “The Garment” as allegories of writing. Miscalculation is not only a theme in these narratives; it is also the way narratives are produced and constructed. Consequently, Agnon’s law of permanent debt establishes a narrative theory that underscores the structure of narrative as inherently incomplete. To make one choice is to leave other choices unexplored. To tell one story is to leave other stories untold. To calculate is to miscalculate. Narration is a process of paying debts, which never ends with a balanced account. Writing is always indebted: not only to God, but also to its own lack of completion. Through the juxtaposition of the “debt” and the “unfinished garment,” “The Garment” exemplifies how Agnon’s imagery of “writing as weaving a torn garment” affects literary economy. To weave an unfinished garment, or to write an incomplete text, commands infinite labor. In this sense, Agnon’s paradoxical image of weaving truly anticipates Hillis Miller’s deconstructivist reading of Aristotle’s “thread” as grounding a different literary economy: an endless production of incomplete texts. For Agnon and Hillis Miller, a coherent whole cannot be attained. If Aristotle’s ending is revealed as both “untying the knot” and the “tying of loose ends,” then writing (and reading) become endless processes of production, while single texts are rendered as unfinished and incomplete products. Agnon’s unfinished garment always calls for more weaving. This endless production of incomplete texts that are woven together is apparent in Agnon’s oeuvre, which consistently recycles characters from one work into another. In this light, might we think of Agnon’s body of work not as comprising individual textual units, but rather as an ever expanding fabric(ated) world, in which each single work is always only an unfinished garment?81

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The Bottom Line: Turning Loss into Excess The impossibility of paying the debt in full is inserted into “The Garment” in the occurrence of two unpaid bills: one to the lord, one to a bartender. Right after his morning prayers, the tailor avoids the task of repair once again by going for a drink with a friend at a pub. Trying to balance out his debt to divine economy vis-à-vis his debt to the unfinished garment, the tailor prays again in the evening, yet is haunted by calculations of money. Suddenly remembering his tab at the pub, the tailor understands that he owes money to the bartender. Although he swears to go back to the pub in order to pay his debt, the tailor never does so. Instead, distracted once again after spilling food on the garment, the tailor goes to wash it in the river. When a big fish swallows his garment, the tailor tries to salvage it, and drowns in the process. As the tailor drowns, thoughts of his debts to the lord and the bartender engulf him. The tailor is figuratively drowned by the burden of his debts. That an indebted tailor drowns in his own debt does sound like poetic justice—divine retribution for default on a debt to the divine. This is exactly the symmetrical and circular economy that Arnold Band, and subsequently Glenda Abramson, establish when they read “The Garment” as an “allegory of sin, guilt, and retribution.”82 To read the ending of “The Garment” as such secures a profitable economy of reading: it gives us a strong sense of closure. These interpretations exemplify what Roland Barthes terms as the complete “deciphering” of the “single ‘theological’ message” from the “Author-God.”83 The text reaches its final signification as the product is consumed. The exchange established between author and reader results in profit. As Barthes also observes, just as in capitalist circulation, now that the text’s meaning has been consumed, it can finally be discarded.84 Yet Band’s and Abramson’s insistence on closure comes at a cost. Reading the garment as the symbol of the soul, they must ignore the conflict between the act of prayer and the task of repair. In order to secure their profitable economies—the divine economy of sin and retribution, the circular and the stable literary economy of the coherent text—they need to over-read the narrator’s final commentary. Although the narrator never openly blames the tailor for his death, their readings turn the narration into a blatant accusation.

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Alternatively, to read “The Garment” as an allegory of writing does not bring about closure. Instead, it underscores tensions and problems of incompletion. If the text is indeed only an unfinished garment, why did the tailor die? Was he really punished for a task he could not complete? What does that say about sin, divine retribution, and economy? What if the tailor had invested more time in the task of repair? Would it ever have been enough? Instead of offering closure, “The Garment” as an allegory of writing examines the death of an author. Unable to complete his work, define its limits, or accomplish its wholeness, the tailor dies. Yet the author’s death, to quote Barthes, is also the birth of writing.85 It opens up the text to many different dimensions of writing. In the death of the author as the imagined origin of the text, writing refuses its origin. It subverts any ending, or any “ultimate meaning.” As such, to read the tailor’s death only as divine retribution ignores the productive and positive aspects of the notion of debt (and death) operating in Agnon’s work in general, and in his extrapolated narrative theory in particular. Whereas his debt is indeed what brings about the tragic death of the tailor-as-author in “The Garment,” debt is also what establishes the task of writing as endless. By focusing on the sense of indebtedness to an unfinished garment, “The Garment” constitutes Agnon’s narrative theory as based on the endless production of incomplete texts. It is exactly because the debt has not been fully paid off, because the garment can never be truly finished, that the tailor as an infinitely indebted subject has to continue with his labor. As such, Agnon’s law of permanent debt grounds debt as the source of both narrative and narration. Moreover, it is not only writing, but also reading and interpreting that become infinite due to Agnon’s indebted writing. If Agnon’s law of permanent debt undermines the concept of “wholeness,” then the reader can no longer think of the single text as a closed-off unit awaiting full and stable deciphering. As Hillis Miller reminds us in Ariadne’s Thread, by using economic metaphors much of narrative theory promoted the ideal of a direct, linear, and rational economy of writing and reading. If writing is the production of signs, reading becomes the consumption and reproduction of meaning as parts subordinated to a previously produced whole. However, Hillis Miller

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contends, “No one thread . . . can be followed to a central point where it provides a means of overseeing, controlling and understanding the whole.”86 Similarly, Agnon’s insistence on leaving unknotted threads, debts, ironies, and unresolved tensions at the endings of his works forces the reader to return again and again to the process of interpretation, which always remains incomplete, entangled, and undetermined. This is where indebted writing, as production based on the law of permanent debt, transforms into the reproduction of excess. The incomplete and unresolved text dictates the perpetuation of an endless hermeneutic cycle. The notion of debt in Agnon’s literary economy has a dual purpose then. It is a sign of both lack and surplus, of loss and excess. Whereas debt marks the site of the death of the author in “The Garment,” it also marks the birthplace of the narrator who addresses the reader—the narrator who “stands in,” so to speak, for the author who tells the story of debt. While this narrator does imply that the tailor should have taken better care of the garment, he never claims that the garment could have been repaired and finished. Read in this way, the ending of “The Garment” does not offer closure, but rather emphasizes the unresolved tension between the incomplete text and the desire for ideal textual wholeness. The tension between wholeness and incompletion that seals “The Garment” brings us back to the constitution of Agnon’s writing. To recall, Golomb Hoffman argues that the opening of “Agunot” positions the modern author as the one whose deeds can either restore or damage the prayer shawl that “binds” God to the people of Israel.87 Agnon’s modern writing thus emerges when there is already a tear in the fabric, a rupture of the textual tradition that “binds” God to his people. Modern writing is born at the moment of a break from tradition. Just like “The Garment,” which juxtaposes the image of the garment and the notion of the debt, the verb “bind” as used by Golomb Hoffman can be associated with both the world of weaving and with the world of the legal contract. Indeed, Agnon’s writing stands in a unique double bind in relation to Jewish tradition. On the one hand, as Agnon himself acknowledged, his writing is indebted first and foremost to the Bible, the Mishnah, the Talmud, and midrash.88 His writing is bound by and woven into the sacred texts of Jewish tradition. On the other hand, as the word “Agunot” implies,

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Agnon’s writing is precisely indebted not only to tradition, but to its break, to the void left behind by these sacred texts—to the tears in the prayer shawl. To follow Gershon Shaked’s observation: “The absence of the holy writings is the source of his [Agnon’s] inspiration.”89 The debt to tradition, therefore, becomes for Agnon a double-edged sword. On the one hand, debt is the source of Agnon’s oeuvre; it is the theme, the motivation, and the framework of his art. On the other hand, actually paying the debt might prove dangerous, for what would become of Agnon’s modern writing if God’s thread of grace, the perfect prayer shawl, should ever be fully restored? An answer to this question may perhaps offer another explanation for the tailor’s default of payment in “The Garment.” Is it possible that while the tailor wanted to pay his debt, he also wished to avoid paying it in full? Similarly, if Agnon’s writing had achieved its goal, if modern Hebrew writing had indeed restored God’s thread of grace, would this not have signaled the point of its own demise? After all, by fully paying its debt, Agnon’s writing would have also reached its end. The law of permanent debt would finally be overturned. The prayer shawl would become whole. This is precisely where the protection of divine heritage also transforms into a competition with it. The tension that Agnon maintains between Jewish sacred tradition and his modern writing as both its continuation and its replacement replicates, to paraphrase David H. Aaron, the structure of Jewish writing in antiquity as a struggle over “modernization.” In antiquity as well as in modernity, the writer struggled to keep outmoded texts relevant, preserving literary inheritance while recognising that it was obsolete, paying homage while actually undermining tradition.90 In this light, Agnon’s incomplete narratives exhibit the calculation of miscalculation. The staying power of Agnon’s modern, ironic, and self-reflexive writing can only be guaranteed by the tension between tradition and its break, between preservation and subversion, and between acknowledging the debt to God and yet never paying it off in full. The lasting significance of Agnon’s writing is secured by this constant oscillation between the hope of redemption and the ruins of this world.

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CONCLUSION

The Book of Proverbs informs us that “those who trust in their riches will wither, but the righteous will flourish like green leaves.”1 Many of Shmuel Yosef Agnon’s pious narrators and characters would happily endorse this warning. The trust in divine agency, they would say, is the only true determinant of a person’s fate, including his or her economic and material pursuits. However, the relationship between economy and religion is not such a simple story after all. If we indeed accept Nietzsche’s argument that “Setting prices, measuring values, thinking up equivalents, exchanging, this preoccupied the very first thinking of human beings to such an extent that in a certain sense it is the thinking per se,” it follows that one cannot escape economy, not in religion, nor in subjectivity, language, or thought. Economy is inherently and unavoidably ingrained within these spheres.2 Accordingly, this book has offered a double view, outlining the central role of economy, money, and debt in Shmuel Yoself Agnon’s oeuvre, while also examining how these economic notions shape other dominant themes in the canonical author’s work, namely, religious faith, language, romantic love, and writing. Employing perspectives from economic theory, semiotics, psychoanalysis, narrative theory, and Jewish and religious studies, my aim here was to lay bare the economic underpinnings of discourses that are considered to reside “beyond” the economic scope. In Agnon’s work, there is a dominant suspicion about the sustainability of any economic structure. The concrete and symbolic economies surveyed in this project—monetary, divine, semiotic, libidinal, and literary—are prone to cyclic eruptions of inflation, loss, and crisis. Under Agnon’s law of permanent debt the stability,

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productivity, and profitability of economies are always in a transient stage. Agnon’s literary economy, often transgressing traditional closures, together with the profound irony ingrained in his writing, make it impossible to determine if these economic crises are indeed the product of the break with tradition (the repercussions of the “original” crisis of divine economy as it were), or, alternatively, if this theodicy is but a fantasy, marking permanent debt as the inherent economic infrastructure of human and divine existence. Even when accepting the latter option, I believe that Agnon’s poetics does not only reject this theodicy, but also its secular opposite: atheism. In this light, Menasheh Hayim’s self-sacrifice in And the Crooked or Yitzhak Kumer’s horrible death in Only Yesterday do not point either toward a cruel God or a merciful God. Instead, Agnon’s work undermines the idea of divine economy as just and profitable, yet without seeking the effacement of God’s existence. Alternatively, Agnon’s poetics constructs divine economy as erratic, asymmetrical, and destined for crisis. Innocent suffering is simply part and parcel of its unpredictable circulation. Though the infrastructure of divine economy is thus exposed, its rationale remains opaque, thus maintaining a sense of enigma residing beyond human reach. This is precisely why—in contrast to most scholars who see Yitzhak Kumer’s death at the end of Only Yesterday as either proof of a symmetrical divine economy of sin and punishment or a tragic testimony to a Godless world—Agnon himself wrote to Kurzweil in regard to Kumer’s senseless death that this devastating and irrational ending is only a representation of the “the horrifying existence that is revealed to me from time to time. And as much as it is possible I try to sweeten it but this time I could only be its author.”3 Though this tension remains unresolved in Agnon’s writing, what the majority of Agnon’s narrators share, regardless of their location within or outside of religious positions, is their aversion to money. Unlike the fantasy of a sacred language established by the idea of the eternal truth of Hebrew letters, and unlike romantic ideas of art’s transcendence, the monetary sign does not enable one to entertain thoughts of an ideal and objective truth. Even Georg Simmel’s definition of “the metaphysical quality of money,” describing the moment when money transforms from a means to an end in an all-pervasive monetary economy, dictates a world of radical exchangeability. 4

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Money as “exchangeability personified” transforms everything else into money as well. In this spiritual interchangeability there are no fixed values except money as a medium of exchange, which itself has no intrinsic value and no specific content or substance. Defined by people’s belief in its value, money’s value is relational. As such, when monetary economy becomes dominant, as in capitalism, no value can be held as purely intrinsic. Money, as a social institution, thus becomes the dictator of temporality. To be in time, to be evaluated by history, necessarily implies taking part in monetary circulation and exchange. In this light, Shmuel Yosef Agnon’s picture on the fifty shekel bill issued by the State of Israel in 1985 presents an interesting illustration of the complicated relationship between value, monetary expression, literature, and history. On the one hand, Agnon is the first and only novelist to be depicted on a state-issued bill in Israel. Consequently, Agnon’s literal transformation into currency serves as the formal stamp of the author’s position as the most prominent figure of modern Hebrew literature. In the circulation of Israeli-Jewish national culture, Agnon is the strongest currency, the gold standard against which all other authors are measured. On the other hand, Agnonas-bill underscores, as printed series do, the reality of an impending renewal or termination. Agnon as currency is always dependent on the vicissitudes of value, determined by economic, social, and cultural demand. Certainly, to have one’s face printed on a bill is a credit to one’s position in the national cultural field. Yet, what does it mean if one’s bill is extracted from circulation, as in fact happened to Agnon’s bill, which was terminated at the end of 2014? Indeed, what do these acts of renewal and termination tell us about the way we determine the value of an author and his literary work as both literally currency and commodity? As the above questions clearly indicate, my research into the relationship between economy and literature in Agnon’s work has yet to end. Importantly, Agnon himself was acutely aware of these questions. His writing often evokes the tension between the position of books as sacred texts or transcendent works of art, and their status as commodities. In the first-person novella To This Day (‫)עד הנה‬ published in 1952, the protagonist-narrator, an aspiring Eastern European scholar living in First World War Berlin, answers the call

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of Doctor Levi’s widow and goes to the town of Grimma to advise her on the handling of the doctor’s library. In the course of his journey, he meets Doctor Mittel, an Eastern European Jew like Doctor Levi, who tells the narrator about another collection of prayer and study books also brought from conquered Eastern Europe back to Germany, “books” that once “Jews had a use for,” “half washed away by tears,” and filled with “grey hairs.”5 Moving from flat to flat in Berlin, and going back and forth from Berlin to Grimma, the protagonist’s journey changes from a consultation expedition to a rescue mission when he finds out that a group of people wants to buy Doctor Levi’s books because “there might be money to be made out of them” (154; 160). While trying to get the protagonist’s advice on the value of the “merchandize,” members of the group—Nahum Berish and Alter Lipe, both Eastern European Jews, as well as the German-Jewish businessman Herr Kitzingen— perceive conversational skills, wine, and books only as commodities, quantified and differentiated according to their monetary value (153–156; 158–161). Along these lines, Agnon’s text constructs a stark dichotomy between, on one hand, the narrator and such characters as Doctor Levi and Doctor Mittel, who value books as particular, unique, and even sacred objects, and, on the other hand, group members whose appraisal of books depends only on the analysis that nowadays “there isn’t much market for books” (154; 160). The group’s market-based evaluation of books brings to mind Marx’s claim that “It is only by being exchanged that the products of labor acquire a socially uniform objectivity as values which is distinct from their sensuously varied objectivity as products of utility.”6 Though To This Day does not focus on the question of labor, the text still pointedly shows how the sensuous particularities, the histories, of these books—drenched with tears, fingerprints, and dirt, books which “were important enough to their owners”—are expunged during the abstract monetary assessment determined by market demand. However, Agnon gives this opposition another twist. First of all, the fact that the market prices of these books are dropping reflects another phenomenon. As Dan Miron shows, in the assimilated modern world of German Jewry these books have indeed “been torn out of their living context where they served an authentic spiritual pur-

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pose.”7 Through Doctor Mittel’s disparaging remarks about German academic bibliographers who discard such books, Agnon’s text critiques businessmen and modern scholars alike for reducing these books to mere commodities or objects of research without taking into account their specific spiritual history and context. In contrast, when he returns to the land of Israel toward the end of the text, the protagonist builds a two-room library in his new home for Doctor Levi’s books, to be sent to him by his widow. Quoting the Sabbath morning service from which the novella’s title is taken, the narrator concludes the narrative by correlating his return to the land of Israel (‫ )עלייה‬and the “redemption” of the books with a future national and religious Jewish revival. Yet, typical of Agnon, this ending is ironic. Though the protagonist celebrates the books’ “escape” from their destiny as commodities in the diaspora, he nonetheless discloses that the land of Israel is still “in shambles” and that the books have yet to arrive. Strolling through the “empty rooms,” the protagonist realizes that his solution has a drawback: disconnected from links to the Jewish diaspora, the books might be destined to become a private collection in a remote land. Agnon’s text therefore suggests that the extraction of an object from commodity circulation can also mean the effacement of this object from socio-cultural memory, indeed from history.8 Moreover, by the end of the text, we still do not know if the protagonist succeeded in actually severing the relationship between books, money, and the market. We do not know if Doctor Levi’s widow’s “miraculous” decision to send the books to the protagonist was in fact a mere business transaction. Indeed, we cannot know this because the protagonist remains suspiciously silent on the matter. Significantly, a few pages before we are aware of his silence on this point, the protagonist directs the reader’s attention to his omissions by highlighting the incomplete nature of literary representation, stating that if he chose to tell us everything, “the number of chapters, subchapters and sub-sub-chapters in my story would be infinite” (167; 173). Right before this admission, the protagonist also states that he will not tell us how he bought new clothes and shoes in times of war for he does not wish to “be blamed for the crassness of going on a wartime shopping spree” (165; 171–72). Presenting these passages in such close proximity, the text underscores the protagonist’s intentional concealment of

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the financial means used to acquire Doctor Levi’s books. By the end, it is impossible to know if the protagonist received these books as a gift or if he in fact purchased them—an act which will necessarily constitute these books as commodities yet again. Let us assume that the protagonist did buy the books. Does this transaction, framed under the awareness of the books’ historical and religious importance, differ from the other transactions the protagonist so objected to? Does any commodification necessarily efface the unique particularities of an object? Or might we think of commodification not only as the cancellation of other forms of value but also as an act toward their preservation? I will not attempt to answer these questions now. But here, as well as throughout the texts we have discussed, Agnon’s ironic and ambiguous writing opens up an exploration of the tensions between art and commerce, and transcendence and temporality, in the context of an indebted economy, forever on the brink of crisis.

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CONCLUSION

NOTES

A Monetary Prelude: Agnon’s Time in Germany 1. Sally Herbert Frankel, Two Philosophies of Money: The Conflict of Trust and Authority (Oxford: Blackwell, 1977), 2–8. 2. The double constitution of money can be traced back to Aristotle’s ideas of money in the Politics, as will be discussed in more detail in chapter 2. 3. Geoffrey Ingham, The Nature of Money (Cambridge: Polity, 2004), 2–35. 4. Ingham, The Nature of Money, 15–17, 35–37. 5. Ingham, The Nature of Money, 41. 6. For a historical and theoretical elaboration on the German Historical School of Economics, see Yuichi Shionoya, ed., The German Historical School: The Historical and Ethical Approach to Economics (London and New York: Routledge, 2001), and Gilles Campagnolo, Criticisms of Classical Political Economy: Menger, Austrian Economics and the German Historical School (London and New York: Routledge, 2010). 7. Georg Simmel, The Philosophy of Money, trans. Tom Bottomore and David Frisby (London: Routledge, 1990), 130. 8. Frankel, Two Philosophies of Money, 47–48. 9. Joseph Schumpeter argued that there are only two major theories of money: the commodity theory and the credit theory. Though Knapp, Simmel, and other German scholars contributed greatly to the credit theory of money, the geographical division is by no means clear cut. Thus Carl Menger, the founder of the Austrian School of Economics, promoted the commodity theory, while British economists such as James Steuart and Alfred Mitchell-Innes were early proponents of the credit theory of money. See Ingham, The Nature of Money, 6, 39–40. 10. Shionoya, “Rational Reconstruction of the German Historical School: An Overview,” in The German Historical School, 7–19.

167

11. Derek J. Penslar, Shylock’s Children: Economics and Jewish Identity in Modern Europe (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001), 165–66. 12. In The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism (1905), Max Weber claimed that Puritan ascetic practices form the basis for the capitalist system which relies on rational production and wealth accumulation. Alternatively, in 1911 Werner Sombart published The Jews and Modern Capitalism, in which he differentiated between the heroic entrepreneurial capitalism associated with German industry and the lowly mercantile capitalism symbolized by Jewish commerce. See Penslar, Shylock’s Children, 163–64. 13. Originally quoted in David Frisby, Sociological Impressionism: A Reassessment of Georg Simmel’s Social Theory (London: Routledge, 1992), 132. 14. Dan Laor, The Life of Agnon (Jerusalem: Schocken, 1998), 93 [Hebrew]. 15. Shachar M. Pinsker, Literary Passports: The Making of Modernist Hebrew Fiction in Europe (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2011), 105–8. 16. For additional reading on Agnon’s literary representation of German Jews, see Dan Miron, “German Jews in Agnon’s Work,” Leo Baeck Institute Yearbook 33 (1978): 277. 17. Gershom Scholem, “Agnon in Germany: Recollections,” in On Jews and Judaism in Crisis, ed. Werner J. Dannhauser (New York: Schocken Books, 1976), 125. 18. Laor, The Life of Agnon, 167. 19. Scholem, “S. Y. Agnon: The Last Hebrew Classic?” in On Jews and Judaism in Crisis, 95. 20. Penslar, Shylock’s Children, 161–73, esp. 172. 21. Laor, The Life of Agnon, 106. 22. Emunah Yaron, ed., Shai Agnon – S. Z. Schocken: Correspondence 1916–1959 (Jerusalem and Tel Aviv: Schocken, 1991), 100 [Hebrew]. Emphasis mine. 23. Yaron, ed., Shai Agnon – S. Z. Schocken: Correspondence, 30.

Introduction 1. Gershon Shaked, Shmuel Yosef Agnon: A Revolutionary Traditionalist (New York: New York University Press, 1989), 1–7, 13–22. The word “tradition” in this book indicates the varied Jewish religious and social practices prior to the critical reevaluations of Judaism and Jewish life as represented by early nineteenth-century Wisschenschaft des Judentums (Jewish Studies) in Germany, and later by Haskalah in Eastern Europe. However, this book

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NOTES TO PAGES xv–1

will also use the dichotomy between “tradition” and “modernity” as an initial binary division to be further complicated and challenged. 2. Shaked, Shmuel Yosef Agnon, 23. 3. For original Hebrew text, see S. Y. Agnon, “‫עגונות‬,” in ‫[ אלו ואלו‬These and Those] (Jerusalem: Schocken, 1966), 406. For English translation, see “Agunot,” in A Book That Was Lost: Thirty-Five Stories, ed. Alan Mintz, Anne Golomb Hoffman, and Nachum C. Glatzer (New Milford: The Toby Press, 2008), 41. 4. Halakhah is the collective legal body of Jewish tradition which includes biblical law, legal parts of the Mishnah and the Talmud (the corpus of rabbinic literature from the second century BCE until the seventh century CE), and later rabbinic rulings. 5. Agnon’s analogy also recharges the love for God with human eroticism, while erotic love becomes suffused with religious significance. Baruch Kurzweil indicates that the religious-erotic theme in the story is doubled, pertaining to the relationship between Dina and Ben Uri, and between God and Israel. This doubling calls for the regeneration of Jewish religion not through its stale institution, but through a turn to art and the libido. See Baruch Kurzweil, Essays on the Works of S. Y. Agnon (Jerusalem: Schocken, 1962), 328–53 [Hebrew]. 6. Revealingly, Shmuel Yosef Halevi Czaczkes fashioned his pseudonym “Agnon” following the publication of “Agunot.” As Anne Golomb Hoffman argues, the author’s choice created his public persona as a “figure of indeterminacy.” The name Agnon marks “a longing for completeness amid the awareness of isolation and distance from the source.” See Anne Golomb Hoffman, Between Exile and Return: S. Y. Agnon and the Drama of Writing (New York: State University of New York Press, 1991), 68–69. 7. I will develop this argument further in chapter 1. See Marcel Mauss, The Gift: The Form and Reason for Exchange in Archaic Societies (New York: W. W. Norton and Company, 2000), 18–20. 8. Derek J. Penslar, introduction to The Economy in Jewish History: New Perspectives on the Interrelationship between Ethnicity and Economic Life, ed. Gideon Reuveni and Sarah Wobick-Segev (New York: Berghahn Books, 2011), vii. 9. While such critics as David Knaani and Israel Rosenzweig, to name just two, did engage with economic issues in their literary reviews before and after the foundation of the Israeli state in 1948, their analysis was committed to a classical Marxist or socialist point of view. Additionally, Marxist critique declined from prominence in the late 1970’s, partly due to changes in the political landscape in the Western world as well as in Israel, where

NOTES TO PAGES 1–6

169

Begin’s historic 1977 victory facilitated a shift from government-directed economy to free market policies. 10. Penslar, Shylock’s Children, 3–5. 11. See Jacob Katz, Out of the Ghetto: The Social Background of Jewish Emancipation, 1770–1870 (New York: Syracuse University Press, 1973), 28–42, 57–80. 12. Penslar, Shylock’s Children, 50–89. 13. See Jonathan Karp, The Politics of Jewish Commerce: Economic Thought and Emancipation in Europe, 1638–1848 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2008), 201–10. 14. Yoni Livne and Tzlil Avraham, “Financial Declaration,” Yediot Aḥaronot, June 28, 2013, 26. 15. Gershon Shaked, Modern Hebrew Fiction (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2000), 5, 18. 16. David Patterson, The Hebrew Novel in Czarist Russia: A Portrait of Jewish Life in the Nineteenth Century (New York: Rowman and Littlefield Publishing, 1964), 129–33, 200–202, 208. 17. Dan Miron, From Romance to the Novel: Studies in the Emergence of the Hebrew and Yiddish Novel in the Nineteenth Century (Jerusalem: Mosad Bialik, 1979), 200–216 [Hebrew]. 18. Jonathan Karp, The Politics of Jewish Commerce, 29–30, 201–10. 19. The name Zimri is already associated with paganism in the Hebrew Bible. Zimri, from the tribe of Simeon, slept, against God’s command, with Kozbi, a Midianite princess. As a result he was killed by Pinhas. See Numbers 25:10–15. 20. Miron, From Romance to the Novel, 36–51. 21. Abraham Mapu, The Love of Zion and Other Writings, trans. Joseph Marymount (New Milford: The Toby Press, 2006). 22. Yosef Haim Brenner, “The Eretz Israel Genre and its Artifacts,” in Writings, vol. 2 (Tel Aviv: Am Oved, 1953), 268–70 [Hebrew]. 23. Stanley Burnshaw, T. Carmi, and Ezra Spicehandler, The Modern Hebrew Poem Itself (London: Harvard University Press, 1989), 81–82. 24. These two works have multiple publication dates. The Nag was first published in Yiddish under the title Di klyatshe in 1873, and was later reworked and translated into Hebrew in 1909. Menahem Mendel, an epistolary novel, was published serially in different journals from 1892 to 1913. The first book of the two volumes was published in 1909 and the second in 1913. 25. Mendele Moykher Sforim (S. Y. Abramowitz), The Complete Works of Mendele Moykher Sforim (Odessa: Moria, 1917) [Hebrew].

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NOTES TO PAGES 6–11

26. See Yosef Haim Brenner, Writings, vol. 1, 157–333, esp. 215, 238–39, 273–74. 27. Marc Shell, Money, Language, and Thought: Literary and Philosophical Economies from the Medieval to the Modern Era (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1982), 180. 28. Roland Barthes, S/Z (New York: Hill and Wang, 1974), 4.

Chapter 1. The Gift of Debt 1. Baruch Kurzweil, Essays, 190–93. An exception to this approach was Israel Rosenzweig’s short review of And the Crooked through a Marxist point of view. See Israel Rosenzweig, “The Complaint Against Capitalism or And the Crooked Shall Be Made Straight,” in Orlogin 11 (1955): 312–14 [Hebrew]. 2. Notably, the usage of the term “divine economy” in both Jewish and Christian traditions predates Nietzsche’s specific definition. In Christian doctrine, for example, divine economy can also refer to the economic understanding of the revelation of God through the son and the spirit in the history of revelation, as well as to the internal relations of the trinity, and to the Jewish or Christian economy of salvation. See Ralph Del Colle, “The Triune God,” in The Cambridge Companion to Christian Doctrine, ed. Collin E. Gunton (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 121–39. 3. Agnon wrote this in his eulogy for Brenner, who was killed in the 1921 Jaffa riots. See Dan Laor, The Life of Agnon, 76–80. 4. Fishel Laḥover, “And the Crooked Shall Be Made Straight,” in On “And the Crooked Shall Be Made Straight”: Essays on Agnon’s Novella, ed. Yehuda Friedlander (Ramat Gan: Bar-Ilan University, 1993), 13–21, 14 [Hebrew]. 5. Pierre Bourdieu, The Field of Cultural Production: Essays on Art and Literature, ed. Randal Johnson (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1993). 6. The tradition of the Hasidic story began with the publication of In Praise of the Ba’al Shem Tov in 1814, which contains 251 tales of the life Rabbi Ben Eliezer, the founder of Hasidism. The Hasidic story usually presents a framing story within which shorter stories are intertwined, all of which didactically praise the virtues of the tzadik (the Hasidic sage) and the power of belief. See Gdalia Nig’al, “Hasidic Sources in one of S. Y. Agnon’s Stories” in On “And the Crooked Shall Be Made Straight,” 165–71 [Hebrew]. 7. The corpus of rabbinic literature, dated from the second century BCE until the seventh century CE. 8. See Jacob Rosenberg and Avi Weiss, “Land Concentration: Efficiency, Slavery, and the Jubilee,” in The Oxford Handbook of Judaism and Economics, ed. Aaron Levine (New York: Oxford University Press, 2010), 74–91.

NOTES TO PAGES 11–18

171

9. Agnon, “‫והיה העקוב למישור‬,” in ‫[ אלו ואלו‬These and Those], 57. 10. See 1 Samuel 25:29. 11. Meir Tamari, With All Your Possessions: Jewish Ethics and Economic Life (New York: The Free Press, 1987), 25–38. 12. Mordechai Levin, Social and Economic Values in the Ideology of the Haskalah (Jerusalem: Mosad Bialik, 1975), 16–26 [Hebrew]. 13. Penslar, Shylock’s Children, 55. 14. Unlike much of Europe (including Russia), which experienced a technological and economic revolution in transportation and communication by the mid-nineteenth century, Galicia remained economically and technologically underdeveloped until the end of the century. Still, in 1848, ten years prior to the period depicted in Agnon’s story, the Habsburg Empire abolished serfdom in Galicia, and introduced the idea of freedom of the press and freedom of association, among other newly granted social, political, and economic civic rights. See Larry Wolff, The Idea of Galicia: History and Fantasy in Habsburg Political Culture (Palo Alto: Stanford University Press, 2010), 183–84, 198–99. 15. See Gdalia Nig’al, “Hasidic Sources in One of S. Y. Agnon’s Stories,” 165–76. Also see Louis Landau, “Sources and Pseudo Sources in And the Crooked Shall Be Made Straight by S. Y. Agnon,” Hasifrut 26 (1978): 94–103 [Hebrew]. 16. For a discussion of the varied ideologies of classical economy, see Norman P. Barry, On Classical Liberalism and Libertarianism (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 1987). Also see Karl Marx, Capital: A Critique of Political Economy, vol. 1 (Washington: Regnery Publishing, 1996). 17. For further explanation of the centrality of crisis in Marx’s analysis of capitalism, see David Harvey, The Enigma of Capital and the Crises of Capitalism (London: Profile Books, 2010), and Simon Clarke, Marx’s Theory of Crisis (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 1993). 18. Levin, Social and Economic Values, 16–18. 19. I translated the word ‫ ביטחון‬as trust, not as faith (‫ )אמונה‬in order to distinguish between two different concepts. Whereas the word “trust” refers throughout this book to a belief in the circulation of divine economy as a system of human debt and divine credit—a system of reciprocal and profitable exchange—the word “faith” denotes here a belief that is not grounded in a symmetrical economic model that includes divine rewards. 20. See Dan Miron, From Romance to the Novel, 200–216, and Gershon Shaked, Mendele: Before and After (Jerusalem: J. L. Magnes Publishing, 2004), 50–77 [Hebrew]. 21. Kurzweil, Essays, 29–30.

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NOTES TO PAGES 18–23

22. Friedrich Nietzsche, “On the Genealogy of Morality,” in Beyond Good and Evil/On the Genealogy of Morality, trans. Adrian Del Caro (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2014), Section 8, 259. 23. The shared root is ‫חיב‬. 24. Agnon, “‫הפרוטה‬,” in ‫[ אלו ואלו‬These and Those], 344–46. 25. For Dan Miron, Reb Yudel Hasid’s complete trust and submission to God is a “strange, incomprehensible” interpretation of the entire Torah, which emphasizes conscious human choice. This leads Miron to challenge the common perception of Reb Yudel Hasid as the positive embodiment of the Jewish spirit. See Dan Miron, A Study of S. Y. Agnon’s Narrative Art in The Bridal Canopy (Tel Aviv: Hakibbutz Hameuchad, 1996), 254–56 [Hebrew]. 26. Proverbs 11:28. 27. Gdalia Nig’al also reads Agnon’s novella as a critique of the principle of trust in God common to Hasidic tradition. See Gdalia Nig’al, “Hasidic Sources in One of S. Y. Agnon’s Stories,” 168–69. 28. Marx argues that as the economic system expands, it becomes impossible to predict the fluctuations of the circulation of money. Karl Marx, Capital, vol. 1, 112–13. 29. See Karl Marx, The Communist Manifesto (Chicago: Gateway Editions, 1985). 30. The explanation for the term “bite” (‫ )נשך‬appears in the Babylonian Talmud, Tractate Bava Metzi’a 60b:5. 31. See Babylonian Talmud, Tractate Yevamot 64b. 32. The word ‫ צדקה‬in Hebrew comes from the root ‫צדק‬, which means justice. The linguistic connection points to the relationship in Jewish thought between charity and social justice. 33. Just as in Latin and in English, in Hebrew, the word for “gift” (‫)מתנה‬ is derived from the same root as the verb “to give” (‫)לתת‬. My translation here is intentionally very literal. I wished to preserve the ambivalent meaning of the gift in Agnon’s text, as an object received but also given, as I will show below. 34. See Forms of Prayer [‫( ]סדר התפילות‬London: The Movement For Reform Judaism, 1995), 470. Though the blessing for sustenance was formulated in the period of the Mishnah, the biblical commandment to thank God for food and the land appears already in Deuteronomy 8:10. 35. See Mary Douglas, foreword to Marcel Mauss, The Gift, ix. 36. Marcel Mauss, The Gift, 18–19. 37. Jacques Derrida, Given Time: 1. Counterfeit Money (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996).

NOTES TO PAGES 24–31

173

38. Moses Maimonides, Mishneh Torah: Sefer Zera’im, Hilkhot Matnot Aniyim [Book of Seeds, Laws of Gifts to the Poor] 10:10–14. 39. See Meir Tamari, “Jewish Ethics, the State and Economic Freedom,” in The Oxford Handbook of Judaism and Economics, 468–79. 40. Moses Maimonides, Mishneh Torah, Sefer Kinyan, Zechiyah uMatanah [Book of Acquisiton, Laws of Entitlements and Gifts] 12:21. 41. In Deuteronomy 28:48, poverty is God’s punishment for disobedience. In Proverbs 13:18, poverty and shame are the consequences of ignoring God’s discipline and instruction. 42. See Yoel Domb, “Ethical Demands on Creditors in Jewish Tradition,” in The Oxford Handbook of Judaism and Economics, 221­–43. 43. See Landau, “Sources and Pseudo Sources,” 94–103. 44. Mauss, The Gift, 59. 45. See Babylonian Talmud, Tractate Bava Batra 9a: “Tzedakah is equal to all the other commandments combined.” 46. The themes of guests and hospitality are dominant in Agnon’s poetics, as I will show in the second chapter, devoted to Agnon’s novel A Guest for the Night. Jewish tradition sees hospitality to poor guests as a commandment (‫)מצווה‬. While Menasheh Hayim is a guest who is in need of hospitality and assistance, Agnon’s novel presents a tragicomic twist, establishing the guest in a position of power vis-à-vis his impoverished hometown. 47. Penslar, Shylock’s Children, 35–38, 132–33, 188. Jewish pauperism was an acute problem for both the European authorities and for Jewish communities well into the nineteenth century. 48. Following Mauss, I shall refer to Jewish charity from now on as the “Jewish gift economy.” 49. Elimelech Horowitz, “Charity, the Poor and Social Regulation in European-Jewish Communities,” in Religion and Economy, ed. Menahem Ben Sasson (Jerusalem: Merkaz Zalman Shazar, 1995), 209–31 [Hebrew]. 50. For Kurzweil, for example, the sale symbolizes Menasheh Hayim’s complete surrender to the values of the bourgeois world. See Kurzweil, Essays, 188–92. For Halperin, the sale becomes the trademark of a Jewish tragedy. See Sarah Halperin, “On the Jewish Nature of the Tragedy And the Crooked Shall Be Made Straight,” Alei Si’ach 10:11 (1981): 101–8 [Hebrew]. In Hillel Weiss’s reading, the beggar is no less than the embodiment of Satan. See Hillel Weiss, Analysis of Five Stories by S. Y. Agnon (Tel Aviv: Akad, 1974), 112–28 [Hebrew]. 51. The “big fair” is a term in Judaism used to describe the afterlife opposed to the “small” and “meaningless” fair of mercantile life. The text’s use of the religious term to describe an actual fair is another example of

174

NOTES TO PAGES 31–37

the text’s two-fold irony deployed against Menasheh Hayim’s subjugation to capitalism, but also directed toward the economic infrastructure of religious thought. See Levin, Social and Economic Values, 16–17. 52. For a study on the important role of proper names in Agnon’s fiction, see Shira Hadad, “A Thousand Names They Called Him: Naming and Proper Names in the Work of S. Y. Agnon.” PhD diss., Columbia University, 2012. 53. Kurzweil, Essays, 203–5. 54. Theodor W. Adorno and Max Horkheimer, “Odysseus or Myth and Enlightenment,” in Dialectics of Enlightenment (New York: Continuum, 1969), 35–50. 55. In his reading, Uri S. Cohen focuses on Menasheh Hayim’s selfperception as dead, even prior to his alleged or actual death, due to his childless marriage. See Uri. S. Cohen, Survival: Senses of Death Between the World Wars in Italy and Palestine (Tel Aviv: Resling, 2007), 35–40 [Hebrew]. 56. For Kurzweil the song symbolizes specifically the dread felt by the maskilim, the young, secular Jews who left the sheltered world of the Torah. See Kurzweil, Essays, 26–28. 57. Cf. Job 34:11. Hillel Weiss was the first to discuss at length the analogy between the two texts. However, Weiss views Menasheh Hayim as a rebellious character, in contrast to Job. Unlike Weiss, I argue that both characters can be perceived as rebellious in some parts of the texts. See Weiss, Analysis, 102–12. 58. Job 15:29. The assertion repeats throughout the book in different variations. See Job 20:15–20, 22:16–20, 27:13–18. Unless otherwise noted, all translations of the Bible are taken from Bruce M. Metzger and Roland E. Murphy eds., The New Oxford Annotated Bible (New York: Oxford University Press, 1989), 625–73. 59. Job 38:2. 60. Job 42:10. 61. Halperin, “On the Jewish Nature of the Tragedy,” 101–8. 62. Babylonian Talmud, Tractate Yevamot 87b. 63. Though there is no direct prohibition against suicide in the Bible, Jewish law usually relies on Genesis 9:5 to establish suicide as a sin against God. 64. For alternative readings of Menasheh Hayim’s “name and remainder,” see Weiss, Analysis, 94–102, and Ziva Shamir, “Halakhah in Practice— Agnon’s Reply to Yalag,” Moznaim 54 (1989): 84–90 [Hebrew]. 65. Emmanuel Levinas, Otherwise Than Being: Or Beyond Essence (Boston: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 1983), 4–5.

NOTES TO PAGES 37–44

175

66. For further explication of how Levinas’s ethical perception of subjectivity differs from other modern philosophical theories of subjectivity, see Gabriela Basterra, Seductions of Fate: Tragic Subjectivity, Ethics, Politics (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004). 67. Levinas, Otherwise Than Being, 136. 68. Levinas, Otherwise Than Being, 12. 69. Yael Feldman, Glory and Agony: Isaac’s Sacrifice and National Narrative (Palo Alto: Stanford University Press, 2010), 41–45, 108–11. 70. The only one who knows of Menasheh Hayim’s sacrifice is the guard, yet even he never says to Menasheh Hayim that his sacrifice is a righteous act that will be rewarded. As we have seen, the erection of the gravestone can also be interpreted in many ways, and not necessarily as a divine reward. 71. The title of the story is a quote from Isaiah 40:4, a prophecy foretelling redemption. 72. The Holy Sh’la (1555–1630), Rabbi Isaiah Levi Horowitz, was an important Jewish codifier who combined mystic and orthodox doctrines. His most known work is Two Tablets of the Covenant, published in 1648 after his death [Hebrew]. 73. The question of knowledge about Menasheh Hayim’s self-sacrifice and its results functions in different ways in Agnon’s text. While Kreindel Tcharni does not know anything about the act (an actual secret kept from her by Menasheh Hayim and the cemetery guard), Menasheh Hayim obviously knows of his own actions, but cannot know how his self-sacrifice will be perceived by God and how it will affect Kreindel Tcharni in the afterlife. The impossibility of knowing the results of his act is precisely what transforms his self-sacrifice into the Holy Sh’la’s “hidden secret,” and constructs it as a pure gift.

Chapter 2. Talking Through Money 1. The word ‫ תיקון‬in Jewish tradition(s) is embedded with religious, mystic, and spiritual connotations. The concept ‫( תיקון העולם‬repairing/ restoration of the world), became more prevalent in Kabbalah with Isaac Luria in the sixteenth century, and refers to the collective work of humanity together with God to repair the fractured world, assembling its fragments back to their primordial state as whole vessels. For a historical explanation of the origins of the concept, see Gershom Scholem, “The Messianic Idea in Kabbalism,” in The Messianic Idea in Judaism: And Other Essays on Jewish Spirituality (New York: Schocken Books, 1974), 37­–48. 2. Agnon, “‫ולא ניכשל‬,” in ‫[ אלו ואלו‬These and Those], 292. The word coin (‫ )מטבע‬refers here to the term “the coin of prayer” (‫)מטבע התפילה‬, denoting

176

NOTES TO PAGES 44–49

the prescribed set of obligatory prayers, which appears in the Jerusalem Talmud and various other halakhic writings. At the same time, this abbreviation could also be read through the Hebrew idiom ‫( מטבע לשון‬literally “language-coin,” or idiomatically equivalent to the English expression, “coining a phrase”), which refers to a metaphor used so commonly in everyday language that its meaning is understood automatically. Correspondingly, as Marc Shell shows, a common analogy of words-as-coins also appears in Western tradition since Plato. As I shall show below, these idioms will have continued relevance to my reading of Agnon’s “And We Shall Not Fail” and “The Sense of Smell” (“‫)”חוש הריח‬. See Marc Shell, The Economy of Literature (Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press, 1978), 37–38. 3. For original Hebrew text, see Agnon, “‫חוש הריח‬,” in ‫[ אלו ואלו‬These and Those], 298. (English translation: “The Sense of Smell,” in A Book That Was Lost, 152.) 4. Ferdinand de Saussure, Course in General Linguistics (Chicago: McGraw-Hill, 1965), 113. 5. See Marx, Capital, vol. 1, 27–28, and Simmel, The Philosophy of Money, 98. For an excellent introduction to Simmel’s work, see Gianfranco Poggi, Money and the Mind: Georg Simmel’s Philosophy of Money (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993). 6. For a historical tracing of the idea of Hebrew as a holy language, see David H. Aaron, “Judaism’s Holy Language: The Origins of the Concept L’shon Haqodesh,” in Approaches to Ancient Judaism 16 (1999): 49–107. 7. Golomb Hoffman, Between Exile and Return, 4–5, 104–5. For another study dedicated to the the relationship between Agnon’s writing, semiotics, and post-structuralist theory, also see Yaniv Hagbi, Language, Absence, Play: Judaism and Superstructuralism in the Poetics of S. Y. Agnon (Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 2009). 8. Shulchan Arukh by Yosef Karo was published in 1563. It is considered the standard legal code of Judaism. 9. Agnon, “‫ולא ניכשל‬,” 293. 10. Michal Arbel, Written on the Dog’s Skin: On the Perception of the Work of Art in S. Y. Agnon (Jerusalem: Keter, 2006), 57 [Hebrew]. 11. Golomb Hoffman, Between Exile and Return, 119. 12. Nancy Sinkoff, Out of the Shtetl: Making Jews Modern in the Polish Borderlands (Providence: Brown Judaic Studies, 2004), 31–45. 13. Yaji Thomashefsky, “The Jews in Poland’s Economy 1918–1939,” in Existence and Disruption: On Poland’s Jewry, ed. Israel Bartal and Israel Gutman (Jerusalem: Merkas Shazar, 1997), 415–26 [Hebrew]. 14. Dan Laor, Life of Agnon, 236–37.

NOTES TO PAGES 49–53

177

15. I am again referring here to “trust” as a concept stipulating the belief in a divine economy of human debt and divine credit. 16. Geoffrey Ingham, The Nature of Money, 2–35. 17. See Marx, Capital, vol. 1, 102–7. Marx’s theory of money has been a source of many debates. For alternative views see Fred Moseley, ed., Marx’s Theory of Money: Modern Appraisals (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005). 18. Aristotle, Politics, ed. Carnes Lord (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984), 50–51. 19. Jerry Z. Muller, Capitalism and the Jews (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2010), 20–25. 20. Lawrence H. Schiffman, “Talmudic Monetary Theory: Currency in Rabbinic Halakhah,” in The Oxford Handbook of Judaism and Economics, 619. For more information on monetary concepts in the Talmud, also see Roman A. Ohrenstein, “Economic Thought in Talmudic Literature in the Light of Modern Economics,” in American Journal of Economics and Sociology 27, no. 2 (April 1, 1968): 185–96. 21. For an excellent discussion on the differences between Greek, Christian, and Jewish approaches to interest and usury, see Muller, Capitalism and the Jews, 15–72. 22. Shibush is the fictional name of Agnon’s home town Buczacz, which appears by its historical name in And The Crooked Shall Be Made Straight. In Hebrew, “Shibush” is derived from the root ‫שבש‬, meaning to err or distort. 23. For the original Hebrew text, see Agnon, ‫( אורח נטה ללון‬Jerusalem: Schocken, 1966), 18. For English translation, see S. Y. Agnon, A Guest for the Night, trans. Misha Louvish (New York: Herzl Press, 1968), 13. In the original text, Agnon plays with the meaning of the word ‫מקום‬, which means “place,” and is also a name for God. The translator transmits this play with “place,” and “he whose place is on high.” 24. Although the guest presents a conservative-religious stance throughout the novel, he identifies himself at the same time as a modern and secular writer. I discuss below this tension in the guest’s personal biography in relation to his aversion to money. 25. Baruch Kurzweil, Essays, 54–68. 26. Biblical doctrine and later rabbinic sources see God as the creator and therefore owner of the world and humanity. As such, God is considered the provider and distributer of wealth given to humanity in exchange for the complete trust of his believers. Subsequently, I refer here to divine economy as the economic infrastructure of Jewish religious thought predicated

178

NOTES TO PAGES 53–56

on human debt and divine credit. For the concept of God as creator and owner in Judaism see Tamari, With All Your Possessions, 25–38. For a fuller elaboration on divine economy and the notion of trust, see chapter 1. 27. In post-biblical Hebrew, the word ‫ דמים‬usually denotes “money.” At the same time, however, the word ‫ דם‬signifies “blood.” While the two words are formally considered two separate lexical entities, ‫ דמים‬can also seem to be the plural form of ‫דם‬. Consequently, in Modern Hebrew ‫ דמים‬came to refer to either money or blood. Note for example ‫שפיכות דמים‬, literally referring to the spilling of blood, while ‫ דמי כיס‬means allowance. 28. In the Hebrew Bible, blood is equated with life. See Leviticus 17:14: “For the life of every creature is its blood.” 29. Michal Arbel also reads Kaiser and Bach’s monologues as exemplifying the text’s subversion of the emblem of martyrdom promoted by the guest. My reading differs from Arbel’s in contextualizing the emblem of martyrdom in Agnon’s economic discourse. See Arbel, Written on the Dog’s Skin, 120–25. 30. As Yael Feldman argues and as I shall soon show, while the guest is the representative of the traditional perception of martyrdom, Daniel Bach critiques what Feldman terms as “holy pain” and the trade of “painknowledge-power.” See Yael Feldman, “‘When My Flesh Decays . . . My Lips Cannot Sing the Praise of God’: Agnon’s Holocaust Critique of ‘Holy’ Pain.” (Paper presented at the Scholion Conference on Knowledge and Pain, Jerusalem, Israel, May 24–26, 2010.) 31. Phylacteries, in Hebrew ‫תפילין‬, are small leather cubes containing verses from the Torah written on parchment. 32. In chapter 1, I have already noted Agnon’s use of the Book of Job in relation to the term “divine economy.” While the torments of Job subvert trust in a symmetrical and profitable divine economy, Bach’s dismissal of literary representation here adds a further twist to Agnon’s treatment of the Book of Job which began in And the Crooked. For Bach, the character and closure of the biblical text does not matter since literary representation itself is false. 33. Written and published right after the 1903 Kishinev pogrom, “In the City of Slaughter” instantly became Bialik’s most influential poem. See Hayim Nachman Bialik, The Complete Works of Hayim Nachman Bialik, ed. Yaakov Fikhmen (Tel Aviv: Dvir, 1946), 96 [Hebrew]. 34. See also Michal Arbel’s reading of this subplot in Written on the Dog’s Skin, 67–70. 35. These later factions include, for example, such movments as “the German pietists of the twelfth and thirteenth century . . . the ascetic mystics

NOTES TO PAGES 56–62

179

of sixteenth-century Sefad, the ascetic school within the eighteenth-century Hasidic movement, the austere eighteenth-century Ga’on of Vilna and his circle, and the self-denying adherents of the nineteenth-century musar movement in Lithuania.” See Eliezer Diamond, Holy Men and Hunger Artists: Fasting and Asceticism in Rabbinic Culture (New York: Oxford University Press, 2004), 60–61, 132, 135. For other historical accounts of ascetic notions and practices in Judaism, see Steven Fraade, “Ascetical Aspects of Ancient Judaism,” in Jewish Spirituality from the Bible through the Middle Ages, ed. Arthur Green (New York: Crossroads, 1988), 253–88; David Biale, “The Longing for Asceticism in the Hasidic Movement,” in Eros, Engagement and Prohibitions, ed. Israel Bartal and Isaiah Gafni (Jerusalem: Merkaz Zalman Shazar leToldot Israel, 1998), 213–25 [Hebrew]; Alan Nadler, The Faith of the Mithnagdim: Rabbinic Response to Hasidic Rapture (Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press, 1997), 78–102; and Mordechai Levin, Social and Economic Values, 16–25. For the dominant view of Judaism as a non-ascetic religion, see Tamari, With All Your Possessions, 25–38. 36. Muller, Capitalism and the Jews, 20–25, 29–33. 37. The idea of this world as a “corridor” to the afterlife gained popularity in the Jewish world in the second half of the eighteenth century, following the publication of Moshe Hayim Luzzato’s 1740 ethical treatise Mesilat Yesharim (Path of the Just). See Menachem Marc Kellner, “The Structure of Jewish Ethics,” in Contemporary Jewish Ethics and Morality: A Reader, ed. Elliott N. Dorff and Louis E. Newman (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995), 15–21. 38. See Nadler, The Faith of the Mithnagdim, 88–90, 78–102. Also see Levin, Social and Economic Values, 20–21. 39. Notably, Agnon’s preoccupation with divine economy and the Jewish gift economy continued throughout his writing career. The 1947 “Matching Reward to Agony” (“‫)”לפי הצער השכר‬, for example, tells of Mar Rivi Tzidkiya, a righteous Jewish community-leader, whose donations to the abject poor are calculated in relation to his poems glorifying God; the better the poem, the bigger the donation. Still, one day, after Tzidkiya finishes writing his finest work yet—a poem exalting the binding of Isaac—a sacrilegious poor man ridicules his poem and his donation. For the beggar, torments of the flesh cannot be compensated. Following the encounter Tzidkiya burns his poem, thus renouncing his former trust in a profitable divine economy. However, in contrast to A Guest for the Night, as Yael Feldman notes, Agnon ends this later tale by re-establishing his protagonist’s trust. Sick and frail, Tzidkiya prays to God, exalting the binding of Isaac, and is blessed. The end therefore cements a successful exchange of the human debt (torments of the

180

NOTES TO PAGES 63–64

flesh) and the divine reward (redemption). See S. Y. Agnon, “‫לפי הצער השכר‬,” in ‫[ האש והעצים‬The Fire and the Wood] (Jerusalem: Schocken, 1966), 5–19. See Feldman, “‘When My Flesh Decays. . . My Lips Cannot Sing the Praise of God’: Agnon’s Holocaust Critique of ‘Holy’ Pain.” 40. As we have seen in the first chapter, following Maimonides, many great Jewish codifiers have highlighted the giving of interest-free loans, not donations, as the highest form of charity. This system assumes that monetary donations cannot break the cycle of poverty. See Meir Tamari, “Jewish Ethics, the State and Economic Freedom,” in The Oxford Handbook of Judaism and Economics, 468–79. 41. Simmel, The Philosophy of Money, 441. 42. Gershon Shaked, The Narrative Art of Agnon (Tel Aviv: Sifriyat Hapoalim, 1973), 243–44 [Hebrew]. 43. Golomb Hoffman, Between Exile and Return, 84. 44. Benjamin Harshav, Language in Time of Revolution (Palo Alto: Stanford University Press, 1999), 17–24. Notably, Yael Feldman examines Agnon’s semiotic play with Hebrew and Yiddish in A Guest for the Night in her essay “How Does a Convention Mean? A Semiotic Reading of Agnon’s Bilingual Key-Irony in A Guest for the Night.” Hebrew Union College Annual, no. 56 (1985): 253–69. In what follows, I address this essay in more detail. 45. Tamari, With All Your Possessions, 27–28. 46. Penslar, Shylock’s Children, 60–68. Also see Jonathan Karp, The Politics of Jewish Commerce, 21–42. 47. Karp, The Politics of Jewish Commerce, 201–5, 213–18. For a more specific elaboration on economic theories in early capitalism in regard to commerce and Jews also see Karp, “Can Economic History Date the Conception of Jewish Modernity?” in The Economy of Jewish History: New Perspectives on the Interrelationship between Ethnicity and Economic Life, ed. Gideon Reuveni and Sarah Wobick Segev (New York: Berghahn Books, 2010), 23–43. 48. Penslar, Shylock’s Children, 68–89. Also see Karp, The Politics of Jewish Commerce, 201–20. 49. Gideon Shimoni, The Zionist Ideology (New York: Brandeis University Press, 1995), 170–74, 179–87, 208–16. 50. Gershon Shaked, Hebrew Narrative Fiction 1880–1980, vol. 2 (Tel Aviv: Hakibbutz Hameuchad, 1983), 13–37, 152–55 [Hebrew]. 51. Shaked, Hebrew Narrative Fiction 1880–1980, vol. 3 (Tel Aviv: Hakibbutz Hameuchad, 1988), 182–89, 215–17, 235–39 [Hebrew]. 52. Baruch Kimmerling, Zionism and Economy (Cambridge, MA: Schenkman Publishing Company, 1982), 20. Significantly, this statement

NOTES TO PAGES 64–69

181

was made in the context of a growing and bitter feud between Chaim Weizmann and Louis D. Brandeis, which centered on, among many other things, the question of the funding and shaping of Jewish settlements in the land of Israel. While Brandeis wanted to fund the Zionist enterprise in the land of Israel according to efficient capitalist principles, Weizmann saw his program as too limited for the nation-building project. Alternatively, wishing to preserve the pioneering character of Zionism and to enhance the sentiment of national awakening, Weizmann insisted on mobilizing national capital through donations from the Jewish masses. See Michael Berkowitz, Western Jewry and the Zionist Project, 1914–1933 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 56–76. 53. Baruch Kimmerling, Zionism and Economy, 21, 27–29. Also see Derek Penslar, Zionism and Technocracy: The Engineering of Jewish Settlements in Palestine, 1870–1918 (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1991), 150–55. 54. Anita Shapira, Israel: A History (Waltham: Brandeis University Press, 2012), 61, 112–16. 55. For further analysis of the socialist and capitalist agendas in Only Yesterday and their relation to Isaac Kumer’s tragic death see Yonatan Sagiv, “And I Love You for Your Crooked Sandals: Capitalism, Socialism, Religion and Shoes in Agnon’s Only Yesterday” in Thoughts on Shoes, ed. Ori Bartal, Gal Ventura, and Einat Leeder (Tel Aviv: Resling, 2014), 146–72 [Hebrew]. 56. Yeruḥam’s accusation echoes Plato’s famous critique of poets who deceive, and thereby corrupt their audience, by manipulating words to create false impressions. See Susan Levin, The Ancient Quarrel Between Philosophy and Poetry Revisited: Plato and the Greek Literary Tradition (New York: Oxford University Press, 2001), 132–33. 57. Agnon himself refers to the act of writing in terms of calculation, as we shall fully explore in the fourth chapter of this work. See, for example, Agnon, “Letters and Books,” in From Myself to Me (Tel Aviv: Shocken, 2000), 74–78 [Hebrew]. 58. Much of the territory Jewish pioneers had purchased for settlement in the land of Israel was located in lowlands infested with malaria. The disease quickly became one of the biggest challenges facing the Zionist enterprise. 59. Marc Shell, Money, Language and Thought, 180. 60. Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morality, section 8, 258–60. 61. Saussure, Course in General Linguistics, 79. 62. As noted earlier, the image of words as coins appears already in Plato’s Republic. See Shell, The Economy of Literature, 37–38. 63. Saussure, Course in General Linguistics, 118. 64. Saussure, Course in General Linguistics, 111.

182

NOTES TO PAGES 69–74

65. Roland Barthes, Elements of Semiology (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1977), 14. 66. Karl Marx, Capital, vol. 1 (Washington: Regnery Publishing, 1996), 117–20. 67. Marx, Capital, vol. 1, 54. 68. Marx, Capital, vol. 1, 63. 69. Saussure, Course in General Linguistics, 118. 70. Simmel, The Philosophy of Money, 221. 71. Golomb Hoffman, Between Exile and Return, 83. 72. The appearance of the shelter (‫ )סוכה‬as a metaphor for the Torah appears already in “The Sense of Smell.” Golomb Hoffman identifies the role of the shelter in the story as doubled, acknowledging a pious distance from the sacred text on the one hand, and acting as a metaphor for the Torah on the other hand. See Golomb Hoffman, Between Exile and Return, 117. 73. Bamidbar Rabbah 13:15. 74. See Yosef Dan, On Holiness: Religion, Ethics, and Mysticism in Judaism and Other Religions (Jerusalem: J. L. Magnes Publishing, 1997), 108–16 [Hebrew]. 75. David Stern refuted the identification of the rabbinic Jewish principle of “scriptural polysemy” with such modern literary concepts as “indeterminacy” and différance. For Stern, the multiple and contradictory readings of the Torah should not be confused with post-structuralist notions of the limitless play of signifiers, or the indefinite deferral of meaning. The endless process of interpretation of sacred texts originates in a “divine revelation,” not in the arbitrary and unmotivated nature of signifiers. Whereas for Derrida, différance is “the most general structure of economy as such”—i.e, the linguistic production of difference and deferral, leading to a limitless exchange of signifiers—the economy of sacred language operates on the basis of a gold standard, i.e., the divine will. See David Stern, “Midrash and Indeterminacy,” in Critical Inquiry 15:1 (1988): 148; and Jacques Derrida, Positions (New York: Continuum, 2002), 17. 76. Exemplifying the same tension between Jewish secular and religious writing that is highlighted by the narrator of A Guest for the Night, the famous poet Moshe ibn Ezra also regretted in his later life what he termed as his youthful scribbling. It is possible that Agnon here is indirectly commenting on the golden era of Jewish-Spanish secular poetry in early medieval Andalusia. While such renowned poets as Yehuda Halevi, Shmuel Hanagid, and Moshe ibn Ezra wrote secular poems on drunkenness, the banality of life, and erotic lust (frequently homoerotic), later religious codifiers such as Yosef Karo condemned these writings for their foolishness. In

NOTES TO PAGES 74–78

183

this sense, the narrator’s description of the modern devaluation of religious sacred writing in A Guest for the Night is a repetition of what had already taken place during the medieval period. See Dan Pagis, Hebrew Poetry of the Middle Ages and the Renaissance (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991), 69–71. 77. Shaked, The Narrative Art, 276. 78. Marx, Capital, vol. 1, 104. 79. Jacques Derrida, Of Grammatology (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1976), 14. 80. Derrida, Of Grammatology, 17. 81. Derrida, Of Grammatology, 44. 82. Saussure, Course in General Linguistics, 118. 83. Shell, The Economy of Literature, 37–42. 84. While this passage might be construed as also pertaining to modern painting, it is framed within the guest’s monologue about the symbolism of such words as “sun” and “heat” in relation to the land of Israel. As a result, I read this passage as a discussion of figurative language. 85. Friedrich Nietzsche, “On Truth and Lying in a Non-Moral Sense,” in The Birth of Tragedy and Other Writings, ed. Raymond Guess, trans. Ronald Speirs (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 141–53. 86. Shaked, The Narrative Art, 243. 87. Kurzweil, Essays, 50–69. 88. See Yael Feldman, “How Does a Convention Mean?”; Uri S. Cohen, Survival, 37–47; Dan Laor, S. Y. Agnon: New perspectives (Tel Aviv: Sifriyat Hapo’alim, 1995), 52–59 [Hebrew]; and Arnold Band, Nostalgia and Nightmare: A Study in the Fiction of S. Y. Agnon (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1968), 283–327. 89. Roland Barthes, S/Z, 165. 90. Golomb Hoffman, Between Exile and Return, 96–103. 91. As Paul de Man indicates, from Aristotle until the eighteenth century descriptive rhetorical tradition defined irony as “saying one thing and meaning another.” The relationship between a sign and its meaning is thus discontinuous and demands further articulation. De Man also mentions that this definition is problematic, for it only points to the shared structure of irony and allegory, or even to figurative language in general. Later, de Man will claim that a more discriminate definition would be that irony reveals the existence of an inorganic temporality that allows no end and no totality. See Paul de Man, Blindness and Insight: Essays in the Rhetoric of Contemporary Criticism (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1983), 187–227, esp. 208–22.

184

NOTES TO PAGES 78–84

92. Paul de Man, Blindness and Insight, 215. 93. Feldman, “How Does a Convention Mean?” 252. 94. As previously mentioned, the Hebrew word ‫ דמים‬denotes blood, and also money. The text’s play on this double meaning serves to critique the use of body and money as two mediums of exchange in the circulation of divine economy. 95. The term ‫( סיבת כל הסיבות‬cause of all causes) was common in the writings of Maimonides’ philosophical contemporaries, and was later popularized by kabbalistic thinkers. It denotes the concept of a limitless and impersonal God at the root of all existence. See David S. Ariel, Kabbalah: The Mystic Quest of Judaism (Oxford: Rowman and Littlefield Publishing, 2006), 58–62. 96. The guest glorifies martyrdom at many points throughout the novel. In so doing, he consistently justifies the body as a valid medium of exchange for the purposes of divine economy. See, for example, the guest’s arguments with Daniel Bach, Yeruḥam Ḥofshi, and the town’s rabbi, all discussed earlier in this chapter. 97. Uri Zvi Greenberg, In the Thickness of Poetry: A Selection of Poems, ed. Dan Miron (Jerusalem: Mosad Bialik, 2007), 165 [Hebrew]. See Reuven Shoham, Poetry and Prophecy: The Image of the Poet as a “Prophet,” a Hero and an Artist in Modern Hebrew Poetry (London: Brill, 2002), 243–44, 286. 98. In this poem, God is not only a blacksmith, but God can be thought of as a coin maker. God takes the raw material of the speaker’s body and, through stamping, transforms him into an ideal poet and prophet. The poet’s prophecy can now also circulate (just like money) between poet and readers. In this sense, the poet becomes a coin, dispensing more coins. Poetry becomes usury, quite the antithesis of the poem’s explicit view of poetry as prophecy. 99. See, for example, Shimon Halkin, “On A Guest for the Night,” in Shai Agnon in Hebrew Criticism, vol. 2, ed. Avinoam Barshai (Tel Aviv: Schocken, 1992), 189–91 [Hebrew]. 100. Cohen, Survival, 73–78. 101. Shaked, The Narrative Art, 246–53, 268–78. 102. Dov Sadan, On S. Y. Agnon (Tel Aviv: Hakibbutz Hameuchad, 1978), 27 [Hebrew]. 103. In Hebrew, the irony is even clearer, for the chapter is entitled “‫ממידת סופרים‬,” which can also be translated “of the ‘weight’ or ‘measure’ of writers.”

NOTES TO PAGES 85–90

185

Chapter 3. Can’t Buy Me Love 1. Eva Illouz, Consuming the Romantic Utopia: Love and the Cultural Contradictions of Capitalism (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997), 3. 2. With the term “Jewish economy,” I am referring to Jewish economic life, activity, and conciousness as shaped in early modern and modern Europe. Following Jonathan Karp, I am especially concerned here with “those (economic) aspects commonly identified with Jews (commerce, exchange, brokerage, and financial activities, particularly money lending).” See Jonathan Karp, The Politics of Jewish Commerce, 1. 3. Nitza Ben-Dov, Unhappy/Unapproved Loves: Erotic Frustration, Art and Death in Agnon’s Fiction (Tel Aviv: Am Oved, 1997), 201 [Hebrew]. 4. Sadan, On S. Y. Agnon, 32. 5. Dan Miron, The Fictitious Doctor: Reflections on Classic Jewish Literature (Tel Aviv: Hakibbutz Hameuchad, 1995), 165–70 [Hebrew]. 6. For Kurzweil, in the 1950s, the generational conflict between Hirshl and his parents is seen as the war of the individual’s “emotional language” against the collective’s language of “commerce and commodities.” In the 1970s, Gershon Shaked maintained that the focal point of Agnon’s novel is the realization that the numbing bourgeois world only conceals the existential truth of the human condition, which is emotional suffering. Similarly, in the 1990s Dan Miron also asserts that “romantic eroticism” and “suffering” are the only “authentic” values in Agnon’s novel. See Kurzweil, Essays, 38–50, 353–58; Shaked, The Narrative Art, 197–204; and Miron, The Fictitious Doctor, 194–217. 7. For alternative arguments in sociology, considering romantic love as an inherent and stable feeling throughout the ages, see, for example, Elaine C. Hatfield and Richard L. Rapson, Love, Sex and Intimacy: Their Psychology, Biology, and History (New York: Harper Collins College Divison, 1994). 8. Susan S. Hendrick and Clyde Hendrick, Romantic Love (London: Sage Publications, 1994), 4–6, 14–26, 37–45. 9. Illouz, Consuming the Romantic Utopia, 6–11, 46–47. 10. Joanne Brown, A Psychosocial Exploration of Love and Intimacy (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006), 32. 11. In this line of interpretation, we can count many works already addressed in this chapter by such scholars as Dov Sadan, Baruch Kurzweil, Gershon Shaked, Dan Miron, and Nitza Ben-Dov. 12. See A. B. Yehoshua, “The Closure of the Plot as a Key to the Interpretation of the Work,” in Beyond Simplicity: On Agnon’s ‘A Simple Story’ in Hebrew Literary Criticism, ed. Ziva Shamir, Dan Laor, and Uzi

186

NOTES TO PAGES 92–95

Shavit (Tel Aviv: Hakibutz Hameuchad, 1995), 114–32 [Hebrew]. Also see Amos Oz, The Silence of Heaven: Agnon’s Fear of God (Jerusalem: Keter, 1993), 58–70 [Hebrew]. 13. Lawrence Birken, “Freud’s ‘Economic Hypothesis’: From Homo Economicus to Homo Sexualis,” American Imago 56:4 (1999): 311–30. 14. The existence and character of economic man or “Homo Economicus” was a central tenet in nineteenth-century political economy theories, part of the attempt to analyze the relations of production, distribution, and consumption in a given national context. Avant la lettre, the description of economic man appears in John Stuart Mill’s 1836 “On the Definition of Political Economy, and on the Method of Investigation Proper to It.” In Mill’s essay, economic man is focused on the attainment of wealth, while also taking into account such desires as luxury, leisure, and procreation. Only in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries did the modern identification of economic man with rationality become dominant. See Joseph Persky, “Retrospectives: The Ethology of Homo Economicus,” The Journal of Economic Perspectives, 9 (2) (1995): 221–31, esp. 221–24, 227–28. 15. Birken, “Freud’s ‘Economic Hypothesis,’” 318. 16. The novel mentions in passing the Russo-Japanese war of 1904–1905. For original text, see Agnon, ‫סיפור פשוט‬, in ‫[ על כפות המנעול‬At the Handles of the Lock] (Jerusalem: Schocken, 1966), 179. For translation, see Agnon, A Simple Story, trans. Hillel Halkin (New York: Schocken Books, 1985), 133. For the analysis of the three decades leading to the First World War as the golden era of capitalist production and extensive global commerce see Nial Ferguson, The Ascent of Money: A Financial History of the World (London: Allen Lane, 2008), 286–98. 17. Bina Garchenska-Kedri, “The Jews in the Economic Development of Poland,” in Existence and Break: On Poland’s Jewry, vol. 1, ed. Israel Bartal and Israel Gutman (Jerusalem: Merkaz Shazar Letoldot Israel, 1997), 315–34 [Hebrew]. 18. I agree with Gershon Shaked’s claim that Agnon’s novel employs socialist critique but does not offer any economic solutions or a consistent socialist agenda. I will address the socialist character of the novel and Shaked’s own argument in more detail below. 19. Kurzweil, Essays, 353–58. 20. For original text, see Agnon, ‫סיפור פשוט‬, 74 (for translation, see Agnon, A Simple Story, 25). 21. For example, in The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State, Engels claims that the family as a social unit under capitalism indoctrinates bourgeois values, subjugates women, and preserves private prop-

NOTES TO PAGES 96–98

187

erty. The bourgeois marriage, for Engels, is nothing but a hypocritical illusion. Merging psychoanalytic and Marxist theory in Eros and Civilization, Herbert Marcuse claims that the reality principle of capitalism represses a person’s instincts and subjugates desire to the law of productivity. See Friedrich Engels, The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State (New York: Pathfinder Press, 1972); Herbert Marcuse, Eros and Civilization: A Philosophical Inquiry into Freud (Boston: Beacon Press, 1955). 22. See, for example, Shaked, The Narrative Art, 206–7. 23. Ziva Shamir, “Seventy Aspects of Simplicity: A Reading of  ‘A Simple Story,’” in Beyond Simplicity, 199–203 [Hebrew]. 24. Ben-Dov, Unhappy/Unapproved Loves, 240–43. 25. Dov Sadan was the first to argue that Hirshl’s madness has two possible explanations: a psychological one, and what he termed as “the horror of the phantom”—an unnatural explanation. See Sadan, On S. Y. Agnon, 32–36. For the perception of Hirshl and Bluma’s love affair as the reparation of Baruch Meir and Mirl’s past see Baruch Kurzweil, Essays, 43–47. 26. See Karl Marx, The Communist Manifesto. For an explanation of the Marxist conceptualization of capitalist expansion as an endless process, see David Harvey, The Enigma of Capital and the Crises of Capitalism, 40–47, 57–59. 27. Shaked, The Narrative Art, 209. 28. Simon Clarke, Marx’s Theory of Crisis (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 1993), 93–97; Harvey, The Enigma of Capital, 40–47, 70–71, 107–11, 116–18. 29. Note on translation: the last sentence quoted is my translation, since Halkin’s translation diverges from a literal rendering of the original text. See Agnon, ‫סיפור פשוט‬, 136. (For translation, see Agnon, A Simple Story, 88.) 30. See chapter 1 for a further elaboration on the economic infrastructure of Jewish religion as founded on the idea of human debt and divine reward. 31. For Melanie Klein, the paranoid-schizoid position is an early stage in ego development, when ambivalence and mourning cannot be attained. Paranoia—the anxiety of annihilation—is experienced as coming from the outside, from an “uncontrollable and overpowering object,” yet it is also a projection of the internal death drive. In our case, Gedalia projects his past fears onto an outside object, God the all-powerful creditor, who will eventually destroy him. Alternatively, In “Mourning and Melancholia,” Freud argues that in melancholia and mania, an original loss remains unconscious. Whereas the melancholic does not comprehend what he has lost, the manic does not comprehend the loss he is triumphing over. For Freud and

188

NOTES TO PAGES 99–104

Klein, mania and melancholia are aberrations of mourning. Along these lines, a complete trust in a profitable divine economy against all odds can be read as a manic negation of loss in real life, and the belief in redemption as the denial of death and loss. For example, the pilgrims in Agnon’s 1934 novella In the Heart of the Seas reach the land of Israel, believing that they will be rewarded by God for their journey. However, as the narrator details, they are also afflicted there by many disasters and deaths. Despite this “breach” in the contract, they never lose their trust in divine economy. See S. Y. Agnon, “‫בלבב הימים‬,” in ‫[ אלו ואלו‬These and Those], 496–98, 521–22, 527–28, 548. (For translation, see Agnon, In the Heart of the Seas [Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2004]). Also see Sigmund Freud, “Mourning and Melancholia,” in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, vol. 14, ed. James Strachey (New York: W. W. Norton and Company, 1976), 253, and Melanie Klein, “Notes on Some Schizoid Mechanisms,” in The Selected Melanie Klein, ed. Juliet Mitchell (New York: The Free Press, 1986), 179. 32. S. L. Warner, “Freud and Money,” The Journal of the American Academy for Psychoanalysis 17(4) (1989): 609–22. 33. Muller, Capitalism and the Jews, 15–25. 34. Though early theories of capitalism such as Max Weber’s The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism highlighted the rational aspects of capitalism, more contemporary scholarship also emphasizes aspects of irrationality in the capitalist system. Following Marx, David Harvey claims that capitalist crises are the “irrational rationalisers of an inherently contradictory system.” Harvey also highlights irrational behaviors that facilitate capitalist circulation such as psychological motivations, fears, desires, and beliefs which shape production, consumption, and finance. See Harvey, The Enigma of Capital, 71, 123–24, 156–57. 35. See Yehoshua, “The Closure of the Plot as a Key to the Interpretation of the Work,” 125–26. 36. Freud, “Mourning and Melancholia,” 244. For Freud, mourning and melancholia do not necessarily result from the death of a person, but can be brought about also from a symbolic loss of a person, and even from the loss of an ideal such as “liberty” or “one’s country.” 37. Freud, “Mourning and Melancholia,” 246, 253. 38. Illouz, Consuming the Romantic Utopia, 6. 39. See David Biale, Eros and the Jews (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997), 155–61, 168–76. 40. Among other examples, Exodus 34 states that God keeps “mercy unto the thousandth generation.” See Exodus 34:6–7. For Gershon Shaked,

NOTES TO PAGES 105–110

189

the number one thousand signifies the impossibility of quantifying love, which for Hirshl thus stands in opposition to the world of commerce. See Shaked, The Narrative Art, 215. 41. See Genesis Rabbah 8:1. 42. For original text, see Agnon, ‫סיפור פשוט‬, 249. (For translation, see Agnon, A Simple Story, 206.) 43. Brown, A Psychosocial Exploration of Love and Intimacy, 35. 44. Martin S. Bergmann, “Echo, Self-object and Love.” Paper presented at the 31st Annual Scientific Conference, Washington Square Institute, New York, February 25, 2007, http://bit.ly/1Q64WOo. 45. Sigmund Freud, “On Narcissism: An Introduction,” in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, v0l 1. 14, 85. 46. Freud, “On Narcissism,” 85. 47. Freud, “On Narcissism,” 78. 48. Freud, “On Narcissism,” 87–88. 49. Freud, “On Narcissism,” 90. 50. Hanna Segal and David Bell, for example, argue that the “male” anaclitic model involves projective identifications of the original caretaker, and therefore is also much concerned with narcissism, and the desire to be loved. Thus, both (non-gendered) models contain narcissistic features. See Hanna Segal and David Bell, “The Theory of Narcissism in the Work of Freud and Klein,” in On Freud’s “On Narcissism: An Introduction” (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1991), 156–58. 51. Freud, “On Narcissism,” 98. 52. Hanna Segal and David Bell, On Freud’s “On Narcissism: An Introduction,” 160–63. 53. Ben-Dov, Unhappy/Unapproved Loves, 243. 54. This was noted by Yehoshua, who sees it as a stage in the resolution of Hirshl’s conflict with his mother. See Yehoshua, “The Closure of the Plot as a Key to the Interpretation of the Work,” 129. 55. For Ben-Dov, Ḥemdat’s metaphor of “the beggar of love” serves as a positive image of romantic love and, equivalently in A Simple Story, the blind beggar who Hirshl meets in the market represents the hidden and repressed poetic side of Hirshl. Thus, for Ben-Dov, the blind beggar who plays a song “with no beginning and no end” becomes a symbol of Hirshl’s unrequited and endless love. My reading, in contrast, focuses alternatively on Shaked’s suggestion that the beggar represents the impoverished part of Hirshl’s soul. Correspondingly, while in Ben-Dov’s reading the beggar takes part in a model of production, this reading associates the position of the beggar with a model of consumption. See Ben-Dov, Unhappy/Unapproved Loves, 208–10, 230–38, and Shaked, ‘The Narrative Art, 219–20.

190

NOTES TO PAGES 110–114

56. See S. Y. Agnon, “The Hill of Sand,” in A Book That Was Lost, 113. For original text, see Agnon, “‫ ”גבעת החול‬in ‫[ על כפות המנעול‬At the Handles of the Lock], 371. 57. Freud, “On Narcissism,” 98. 58. For original text, see Agnon, “‫פנים אחרות‬,” in ‫[ על כפות המנעול‬At the Handles of the Lock], 454–55. For translation, see Agnon, “Metamorphosis,” in A Book That Was Lost, 453–54. 59. For original text, see Agnon, ‫סיפור פשוט‬, 64, 91, 167. (For translation, see Agnon, A Simple Story, 13, 43, 121.) 60. In this case, Agnon uses Hirshl’s inner monologue as an excuse to playfully quote an old Yiddish joke. 61. This common analogy between the parents’ generations in the two works was first pointed out by Baruch Kurzweil. See Kurzweil, Essays, 47. 62. Notably, many (male) scholars actually thought of the ending of In the Prime of Her Life as a “happy ending.” See Shaked, The Narrative Art, 206; Kurzweil, Essays, 42, 47–48, and Band, Nostalgia and Nightmare, 115–18. For Ben-Dov’s reading, see her Unhappy/Unapproved Loves, 187–95. Also see Yosef Even, “A Few Remarks on A Simple Story,” in Beyond Simplicity, 67–70 [Hebrew]. 63. Freud, “On Narcissism,” 90. 64. The emphasis on Hirshl’s admiration for his mad uncle is part of Malka Shaked’s overarching argument that encourages a pluralistic reading of Agnon’s novel. Shaked argues that Hirshl’s madness should be read from the perspective of multiple and simultaneous hypotheses that, while excluding each other, cannot themselves be excluded from the text. In expanding Sadan’s double explanation for Hirshl’s madness, Shaked suggests four possible interpretations: a mental breakdown; a conscious emulation of the uncle’s madness as an anti-social rebellion; a metaphysical explanation focusing on the rabbi’s curse; and a strategy to evade army recruiting. See Malka Shaked, “Was Hirshl Mad? Towards a Pluralistic Reading of the Plot of Agnon’s A Simple Story,” Hasifrut 32 (1982): 132–47 [Hebrew]. 65. Birken, “Freud’s ‘Economic Hypothesis,’” 315–18. 66. Object relations theory, which began with Melanie Klein and Roland Fairbarn, puts the ego’s development via relation with others (other objects) at the center. In object relations theory, the infant’s relation to the mother is the first and most important tendency in the baby. Subsequently, the ego is formed in infancy and early childhood through a series of introjections of, and projections onto, other objects. The development of ego is never separate and independent from others. See David E. Scharff, Introduction to Object Relations Theory and Practice: An Introduction (Lanham, MD: Jason Aronson Inc., 1995), 3, 8–16, 8–20.

NOTES TO PAGES 114–118

191

67. Segal and Bell, “The Theory of Narcissism in the Work of Freud and Klein,” 163. 68. Hillel Halkin’s translation of A Simple Story does not consistently follow the original text in its frequent use of the verb. As such, the next section alternates between his translation and mine. 69. In the original text, there is also an escalation. While Hirshl’s heart was described before as ‫( חסר‬lacking), in this speech Hirshl describes his uncle’s and his own heart as ‫חלל‬, which can be read as both “empty” and “dead.” See Agnon, ‫סיפור פשוט‬, 371. 70. Bergmann, “Echo, Self-object and Love.” 71. In Hebrew, the name Bluma also means “closed off,” or “sealed.” 72. Freud, “On Narcissism,” 100. 73. Shaked, The Narrative Art, 221–23. 74. Ziva Shamir previously showed that Hirshl’s moment of emotional crisis references a well-known Hasidic tale by Rabbi Nahman of Breslov which tells of a prince who one day starts to act like a turkey, sitting under the table with no clothes while pecking on bread and bones. See Shamir, “Seventy Aspects of Simplicity,” 216. 75. The two words share the same root: ‫פרע‬. 76. Miron, Fictitious Doctor, 174. 77. Miron’s essay, for example, attempts to show that Dr. Langsam’s methods of treatment do not belong to the field of psychoanalysis. 78. Ben-Dov, Unhappy/Unapproved Loves, 226–28. 79. In contrast to Miron’s complete denouncement of Dr. Langsam’s methods as unrelated to psychoanalysis, according to Bergmann one of the most vital steps in the psychoanalytic understanding of love was reached by Ferenczi, who showed that “children who are not loved do not feel welcome in the world.” Ferenczi claimed that there is an inherent link between love received and the capacity to give love, and broke away from Freud’s perception of primary narcissism. See Martin S. Bergmann, “On Love and Its Enemies,” Psychoanalytic Review 82 (1995): 1–19. 80. Ben-Dov, Unhappy/Unapproved Loves, 262, 268. 81. Meshulam, the name of Hirshl and Mina’s sickly infant, ironically has associations with Hebrew words such as perfect, completed, or fulfilled, all stemming from the same root: ‫שלם‬. Significantly, the word ‫ משולם‬itself denotes the verb “paid.” I will return to this below. 82. Ben-Dov, Unhappy/Unapproved Loves, 230–38. For Ben-Dov, the beggar symbolizes Hirshl’s repressed spiritual and poetic side. According to Ben-Dov, Hirshl tries to further reject his love for Bluma in favor of his self-subjugation to Tsirl’s world of capitalist commerce.

192

NOTES TO PAGES 118–125

83. See, for example, the essays by Yehoshua and Oz discussed earlier in this chapter. 84. The ancient Jewish custom of redemption of the son (‫ )פידיון הבן‬originates in Exodus 13:2. According to the Book of Exodus, in the last plague brought on Egypt, God spared all the firstborn sons of Israel, and killed the firstborn sons of Egypt. To commemorate this event, Israelite firstborn sons were consecrated to divine service in the Temple. Though the Temple no longer exists, in order to fully absolve his son from service the father is required to give money to a kohen (a member of the Jewish priestly order), thus buying back (redeeming) his male firstborn. 85. Ben-Dov, Unhappy/Unapproved Loves, 284, 286; Even, “A Few Remarks on A Simple Story,” 61, and Shamir, “Seventy Aspects of Simplicity,” 211. 86. See original text. Agnon, ‫סיפור פשוט‬, 90. 87. Freud, “On Narcissism,” 82. 88. Herman Melville, Bartleby the Scrivener and the Confidence Man (New York: Barnes and Noble, 2006), 12. 89. Segal and Bell, On Freud’s “On Narcissism”: An Introduction, 158–63. 90. Otto F. Kernberg, “A Contemporary Reading of “On Narcissism” in On Freud’s “On Narcissism: An Introduction” (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1991), 142. 91. Kernberg, “A Contemporary Reading of “On Narcissism,” 142.

Chapter 4. The Incomplete Text and the Indebted Author 1. See Agnon, A Simple Story, 272; 230. 2. See H. Porter Abbott, The Cambridge Introduction to Narrative (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 57–60. 3. Malcolm Bradbury and James McFarlane, Modernism: 1890–1930 (New York: Penguin Books, 1976), 44–52. While Bradbury and McFarlane argue that modernism reached its conclusion around 1930, other scholars claim that as a cultural formation modernism has yet to end. See Astradur Eysteinsson and Vivian Liska, “Introduction: Approaching Modernism,” in Modernism, vol. 1 (Amsterdam: John Benjamins Publishing Company, 2007), 1–10. 4. Barbara Herrnstein Smith, Poetic Closure: A Study of How Poems End (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1968), 234–35. 5. Dan Miron, “Domesticating of the Foreign Genre: Agnon’s Transactions with the Novel,” Prooftexts 7:1 (1987): 1–28, esp. 7. 6. Emunah Yaron, ed. From the Secret of the Wise: Letters 1909–1970.

NOTES TO PAGES 125–132

193

Agnon-Brenner-Bialik-Lachover-Katznelson-Sadan (Tel Aviv: Schocken, 2008), 240 [Hebrew]. Since Agnon’s letters and articles have not been translated into English, all translations of such texts are mine unless otherwise noted. 7. While both A Simple Story and Only Yesterday end with the narrator promising a sequel to compensate for unresolved problems, the closure of The Bridal Canopy and the later A Guest for the Night is unraveled by an ironic deus ex machina. Even Agnon’s posthumous Shira was published in 1971 as an unfinished novel. A year later, the last chapter of the novel, shelved by Agnon, was published in Ha’aretz to be included as an addendum entitled “last chapter” in the new edition. See Miron, “Domesticating of the Foreign Genre,” 8–14. 8. Gershon Shaked, Different Aspects of S. Y. Agnon’s Work (Tel Aviv: Hakibbutz Hameuchad, 1989), 84–89 [Hebrew]. 9. Michal Arbel, “Three Sisters: The Wish for Ending and the Request for Consolation in Agnon’s Art,” in Mada’ei haYahadut 42 (2004): 207–38, 312 [Hebrew]. My translation. 10. Moreover, in this essay and in her subsequent book Written on the Dog’s Skin, Arbel shows how many more of Agnon’s shorter works—such as “Betrothed,” “Metamorphosis,” and “Tale of the Scribe,” to name only a few—lack closure. 11. For Arbel’s survey of modernist and postmodernist approaches to the issue of literary closure, see Arbel, “Three Sisters,” 213–22. Similarly, previous chapters of this book have also shown how irony in Agnon’s shorter works—for example in And the Crooked Shall Be Made Straight, “And We Shall Not Fail,” and “The Sense of Smell”—subverts any unequivocal resolution. 12. Shaked, The Narrative Art, 267–70, and Shaked, Shmuel Yosef Agnon: A Revolutionary Traditionalist, 6–7. 13. Golomb Hoffman, Between Exile and Return, 62. 14. Golomb Hoffman, Between Exile and Return, 65. 15. Golomb Hoffman, Between Exile and Return, 61. 16. Agnon’s specific imagery of “writing as weaving a torn garment” appears in his 1910 essay “Line and Words,” as we shall see below. 17. There is no published English translation of “The Garment.” In my translation, I follow Arnold Band’s terminology as it appears in his reading of the story, which will be discussed below. 18. To recall, the word ‫ תיקון‬in Hebrew suggests the spiritual repair engaged by the Jewish subject in the world. For a fuller elaboration of this point, see note 1, chapter 2.

194

NOTES TO PAGES 132–135

19. Agnon, “‫המלבוש‬,” in ‫[ עד הנה‬To This Day] (Jerusalem: Schocken, 1966), 320. 20. See Shaked, The Narrative Art, 112–32; Glenda Abramson, “The Garment and The Loaf: Tales of an Unfinished Task,” in Tradition and Trauma: Studies in the Art of S. Y. Agnon, ed. Glenda Abramson and David Patterson (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1994), 65–87; Shoshana Rabin, “Midrashic Infrastructure in ‘The Garment’ of S. Y. Agnon,” Ma’amaqim 20 (2008): 102–15 [Hebrew]; and Arye Ben Yosef, “The Purpose of Man in S. Y. Agnon’s Work,” Ha’uma 20 (1982): 375–85 [Hebrew]. 21. See Shoshana Rabin, “Midrashic Infrastructure in ‘The Garment’ of S. Y. Agnon,” 102–15. 22. Arnold Band, Nostalgia and Nightmare, 405. 23. As I shall show in more detail below, in the 1908 “Agunot,” God is imagined as a tailor who spins a thread in an opening paragraph, which “weaves” itself into Jewish textual sources. Additionally, many more of Agnon’s texts include the intersection of writing and weaving. In the 1937 short story “Three Sisters” (“‫)”שלוש אחיות‬, three poor sisters weave plain clothing until one day they make a beautiful garment, commissioned for a rich bride. For Ariel Hirschfield, a well-known Agnon scholar, weaving comes to represent the creation of art. Also, as Kurzweil shows, in “At the Outset of the Day” (“‫)”עם כניסת היום‬, published in 1951, the books burned in the fire become analogous to the clothes torn off a girl who fled a pogrom. In the 1952 To This Day (‫)עד הנה‬, the narrator, a young aspiring scholar, is doing research for his essay on the universal history of clothing. Kurzweil, Essays, 190–93. Also see Ariel Hirschfield, Reading S. Y. Agnon (Tel Aviv: Aḥuzat Bayit Books, 2011), 15–25 [Hebrew]. 24. The myths of Arachne and Philomela in the Metamorphoses, Helen’s weaving in the Iliad, and Penelope’s weaving in the Odyssey feature the intersection of weaving and writing in Greek culture. See Kathryn Sullivan Kruger, Weaving the Word: The Metaphorics of Weaving and Female Textual Production (London: Associated University Presses, 2001), 59–83. 25. Joseph Hillis Miller, “The Problematic of Ending in Narrative,” in Nineteenth-Century Fiction 33:1 (1978): 3. 26. Hillis Miller, “The Problematic of Ending in Narrative,” 4. 27. Hillis Miller, Ariadne’s Thread (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1995), 18. 28. To recall, Ariadne gives Theseus a thread to help him find his way out of the labyrinth after he kills the Minotaur. 29. See Agnon, “Line and Words,” in From Myself to Me, 157. My translation. In the original text Agnon uses the word ‫שממית‬, which in Hebrew refers to either a gecko or a female spider.

NOTES TO PAGES 135–137

195

30. Shaked, The Narrative Art, 18–19. Notably, in reading the garment as exclusively symbolizing the soul in “The Garment,” Shaked ignores his own observation that Agnon referred to writing in terms of weaving. 31. Agnon, “Line and Words,” 157. 32. See Genesis 1:1. 33. For original text see: Agnon, ‫עד הנה‬, in ‫[ עד הנה‬To This Day] (Jerusalem: Schocken, 1966), 167. (For English see, Agnon, To This Day, trans. Hillel Halkin (New Milford: The Toby Press, 2008), 173. 34. Golomb Hoffman, Between Exile and Return, 66–70. 35. For original text, see Agnon, “‘‫עגונות‬,” in ‫( אלו ואלו‬These and Those), 405. (For English, see Agnon, “Agunot,” in A Book That Was Lost, 39–40.) 36. Gershon Shaked, Shmuel Yosef Agnon: A Revolutionary Traditionalist, 31–34. 37. Golomb Hoffman, Between Exile and Return, 69. 38. Golomb Hoffman, Between Exile and Return, 68–69. 39. According to Jewish tradition, God revealed all of the Torah at one time, on Mount Sinai, to Moses, who then wrote it down. Many biblical commentators believed that God not only gave Moses the Torah, but also the Mishnah and Talmud. See Exodus Rabbah 47:1. 40. Agnon here refers to the twenty-four books comprising the Old Testament. See Agnon, “Letters and Books,” in From Myself to Me, 74. 41. Agnon, “Letters and Books,” 76–77. Tehila, the protagonist of Agnon’s short story of the same name, claims that God grants a person a fixed quantity of words to use in their lifetime. See Agnon, “‫תהילה‬,” in ‫[ עד הנה‬To This Day], 185. 42. Agnon, “Letters and Books,” 76–77. 43. In antiquity, the word ‫ סופר‬could mean a scribe, a sage engaged in teaching the Torah, or a clerk. 44. See S. Y. Agnon, “Review of the Book: ‘The Treasure of the Language of the Mishnah,’” in From Myself to Me, 407. Emphasis mine. 45. Agnon, “Review of the Book: ‘The Treasure of the Language of the Mishnah,’” 408. 46. I am referring again to the concept of divine economy as the underlying economic infrastructure of religious thought, conceived on the basis of human debt and divine reward. See chapter 1 for further elaboration. 47. For Agnon’s letter, see Yaron, From the Secrets of the Wise, 21. 48. The lord’s servants refer to God’s angels of wrath, who in Jewish tradition punish the sinner. See Shaked, The Narrative Art, 115. 49. Agnon, From Myself to Me, 46. 50. Golomb Hoffman writes extensively about the double position modern writing occupies in Agnon’s work. I will refer to her observations in

196

NOTES TO PAGES 137–145

more detail below. See Golomb Hoffman, Between Exile and Return, 7–8, 66, 105–22. 51. Malka Shaked, “On the Issue of Drive, the Artist, and Art in Agnon’s Stories,” in The Collected Agnon, vol. 2 (Jeruslaem: J. L. Magnes Publishing, 2000), 295–308 [Hebrew]. 52. Shaked, “On the Issue of Drive, the Artist, and Art in Agnon’s Stories,” 303–4, 307. 53. Golomb Hoffman, Between Exile and Return, 7–8, 105–6, 120–22. 54. Golomb Hoffman, Between Exile and Return, 66. 55. For Derrida, the subject’s absolute duty to God or to any other, even any other cause, always comes at the cost of betraying ethics—of sacrificing all others to devote yourself to the one you choose. See Derrida, The Gift of Death (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996), 67–68. 56. To recall, in Hebrew the words guilty (‫ )חייב‬and debt (‫ )חוב‬share the same root. In German, the word Schuld refers both to guilt and debt. 57. See Genesis 3:17–19. 58. The tailor’s view of labor can be found in several traditional Jewish sources, which consider labor as God’s curse to man, following Adam’s sin. See Levin, Social and Economic Values, 25–26; Diamond, Holy Men and Hunger Artists, 24–26. 59. Paul Ricoeur, “Time and Narrative,” in Beyond Story and Discourse: Narrative Time in Postmodern and Nonmimetic Fiction, ed. Brian Richardson (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 2002), 40–41. 60. Kurzweil, Kurzweil, Agnon, Atzag: Correspondence (Ramat Gan: Bar-Ilan University Press, 1987), 32, 55 [Hebrew]. 61. See Agnon, My Dear Esterlyne, ed. Emunah Yaron (Jerusalem: Schocken, 2002), 46, 134 [Hebrew]. 62. Yaron, From the Secrets of the Wise, 234–36. 63. Yaron, From the Secrets of the Wise, 266, 295. Agnon’s feeling that even his published work is not complete appears in many more letters. See Yaron, From the Secrets of the Wise, 239–40, 257, 283–85, 319. 64. In another letter to Sadan, for example, Agnon keeps referring to the activities planned in his schedule as “paying off debts.” See Yaron, From the Secrets of the Wise, 274. 65. Abbott, The Cambridge Introduction to Narrative, 57. 66. Marc Shell reminds us that the word “economy” (oikonomia) referred originally to the production and distribution of goods in the household. Just as the term “political economy” came to denote relations of production, distribution, and consumption in the polis, so too does “literary economy” describe these relations in works of literature. See Marc Shell, The Economy of Literature, 90–91.

NOTES TO PAGES 146–153

197

67. See Abbott, The Cambridge Introduction to Narrative, 69. See also Aristotle, Poetics, ed. Stephen Halliwell (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1995), 49. (1450a: 5–15). 68. Seymour Chatman, “Towards a Theory of Narrative,” New Literary Theory 6:2 (1975): 295–300. 69. Herrnstein Smith, Poetic Closure, 16–17. 70. See Herrnstein Smith, “Narrative Versions, Narrative Theories,” Critical Inquiry 7:1 (1980): 213–36. 71. Aristotle, Poetics, 57 (1451a: 1–5). 72. See Marc Shell, The Economy of Literature, 90–91. 73. Quoted in Herrnstein Smith, Poetic Closure, 24. 74. See Herrnstein Smith, Poetic Closure, 2. We should not equate the expectation to find closure with the expectation that all of the reader’s expectations of the story will be fulfilled. As Herrnstein Smith underscores, the reader’s gratification is achieved through both the fulfillment and the disappointment of expectations. Here again the notion of calculation appears; the good poem, and in general the good work of fiction, needs to oscillate between fulfillment and disappointment, between predictability and surprise. “Art inhabits the country between chaos and cliché.” See Herrnstein Smith, Poetic Closure, 13–14. 75. Whereas many stories in The Book of Deeds, such as “Candles” (“‫)”נרות‬, “The Band” (“‫ )”התזמורת‬and “Knots” (“‫ )”קשרי קשרים‬openly identify their first person narrator as an author, others resort to a subtle play of similarities between Agnon’s biography and the characterization of the protagonists. For example, in the story “To Father’s House” (“‫ )”לבית אבא‬the narrator states: “I was far away from my father’s house and from my home town, and I was going about my work, which has neither beginning nor end, work which you start to no advantage and which never sets you free.” Similar descriptions of the task of writing are found in Agnon’s letters as well. See Agnon, “‫ ”לבית אבא‬in ‫[ סמוך ונראה‬Near and Apparent] (Jerusalem: Schocken, 1966), 103. (For translation, see Agnon, “To Father’s House,” in A Book That Was Lost, 433.) For Agnon’s letters, see Kurzweil, Kurzweil, Agnon, Atzag, 14, 32–33, 71–72. 76. Agnon, “‫פי שניים‬,” in ‫[ סמוך ונראה‬Near and Apparent], 141. My translation. 77. Agnon, “‫פי שניים‬,” 136. 78. Agnon, “‫פי שניים‬,” 144. In Hebrew, ‫ גרעון‬specifically denotes a monetary and economic deficit. 79. Agnon, “‫פי שניים‬,” 142. 80. Elaborating on the economic theory of sacrifice, Derrida states: “As

198

NOTES TO PAGES 153–156

soon as I enter into a relation with the other, with the gaze, look, request, love, command or call of the other, I know that I can respond only by sacrificing ethics, that is, by sacrificing whatever obliges me to also respond, in the same way, in the same instant, to all the others.” Adapting Derrida’s theory of sacrifice to a narrative theory, to write, to choose one narrative above all else, also amounts to the forsaking of all other narratives. See Derrida, The Gift of Death, 68. 81. To give only a few examples: in A Simple Story, the characters Tirza and Akavia Mazal from In The Prime of Her Life play a minor role. A Guest for the Night includes such characters as Bluma Nakht and Doctor Kabinhaut from A Simple Story, and also presents the doctor from “The Doctor’s Divorce” (“‫ )”הרופא וגרושתו‬which will appear two years later. Menasheh Hayim from And The Crooked is mentioned in With Our Youth and with Our Aged. Also, the grandfather of Yitzthak Kumer of Only Yesterday is Reb Yudel Hasid of The Bridal Canopy. Appearing in Only Yesterday are also a host of other characters from “The Hill of Sand,” who later also appear in Betrothed. 82. Abramson, “The Garment and the Loaf,” 67. 83. Roland Barthes, “The Death of the Author,” in Image-Music-Text, ed. Stephen Heath (Glasgow: Fontana, 1977), 146. 84. Barthes, S/Z, 4–5. 85. Barthes, “The Death of the Author,” 142. 86. Hillis Miller, Ariadne’s Thread, 21–22. 87. Golomb Hoffman, Between Exile and Return, 69. 88. See, for example, Agnon’s Nobel Prize acceptance speech. Agnon, From Myself to Me, 89–90. 89. Shaked, Other Aspects of the Work of S. Y. Agnon (Tel Aviv: Hakibbutz Hameuchad, 1989), 11 [Hebrew]. 90. Paraphrase of a comment in a personal communication from David H. Aaron (November 21, 2014); a full discussion will appear in his forthcoming book on Mishnah Avot.

Conclusion 1. Proverbs 11:28. 2. Friedrich Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morality, section 8, 259. 3. Baruch Kurzweil, Kurzweil, Agnon, Atzag: Correspondence, 20. 4. Simmel, The Philosophy of Money, 124, 221, 441. Also see Gianfranco Poggi, Money and the Mind: Georg Simmel’s Philosophy of Money, 146–48. 5. For original text, see Agnon, ‫עד הנה‬, 20. (For translation, see Agnon, To This Day, 32.)

NOTES TO PAGES 156–164

199

6. Marx, Capital, vol. 1, 166. 7. Dan Miron, “German Jews in Agnon’s Work,” 277. 8. In this sense, the ending of To This Day harkens back to the subplot concerning the original key to the house of study in A Guest for the Night. To recall, at the end of that novel, the narrator finds the lost key upon his return to the land of Israel. He then locks the key inside a box, waiting for a future time when, according to the sages, the houses of study in the diaspora will establish themselves in the land of Israel. See Agnon, ‫אורח נטה ללון‬, 440. (For translation, see Agnon, A Guest for the Night, 471.)

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NOTES TO PAGES 164–165

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‫‪Hebrew‬‬ ‫ארבל‪ ,‬מיכל‪ .2006 ,‬כתוב על עורו של הכלב‪ :‬על תפיסת היצירה אצל עגנון‪ ,‬כתר‪ ,‬ירושלים‪.‬‬ ‫———  ‪ .2004‬שלוש אחיות‪“:‬משאלת הסיום ובקשת הנחמה ביצירת עגנון” ‪ ,‬מדעי היהדות‪,‬‬ ‫‪.238–207 ,42‬‬ ‫בן‪-‬דב‪ ,‬ניצה‪ .1997 ,‬אהבות לא מאושרות‪ :‬תסכול אירוטי‪ ,‬אמנות ומוות ביצירת עגנון‪ ,‬עם עובד‪,‬‬ ‫תל אביב‪.‬‬ ‫בן‪-‬יוסף‪ ,‬אריה‪“ .1982 ,‬ייעודו של האדם ביצירת שמואל יוסף עגנון‪ ”,‬האומה‪.385–375 ,20 ,‬‬ ‫ביאל דוד‪“.1998 ,‬התשוקה לסגפנות בתנועה החסידית”‪ ,‬ארוס‪ ,‬אירוסין ואיסורים‪ ,‬עורכים ישראל‬ ‫ברטל וישעיהו גפני‪ ,‬מרכז זלמן שזר לתולדות ישראל‪ ,‬ירושלים‪.225–213 ,‬‬ ‫ביאליק‪ ,‬חיים נחמן‪ .1946 .‬כל כתבי חיים נחמן ביאליק‪ ,‬דביר‪ ,‬תל אביב‪.‬‬ ‫ברנר‪ ,‬יוסף חיים‪ .1953 ,‬כתבים‪ ,‬עם עובד‪ ,‬תל אביב‪.‬‬ ‫גלוזמן‪ ,‬מיכאל‪ .2007 ,‬הגוף הציוני‪ :‬לאומיות מגדר ומיניות בספרות העברית החדשה‪ ,‬הקיבוץ‬ ‫המאוחד‪ ,‬תל אביב‪.‬‬ ‫גרנצרסקה‪-‬קדרי‪ ,‬בינה‪“.1997 ,‬היהודים בהתפתחותה הכלכלית של פולין‪”,‬קיום ושבר‪ ,‬כרך א‪,‬‬ ‫עורכים ישראל גוטמן וישראל ברטל‪ ,‬מרכז זלמן שזר לתולדות ישראל‪ ,‬ירושלים‪.334–315 ,‬‬ ‫גרינברג‪ ,‬אורי צבי‪ .2007 ,‬בעובי השיר‪ :‬מבחר שירים‪ ,‬עורך דן מירון‪ ,‬מוסד ביאליק‪ ,‬ירושלים‪.‬‬ ‫דן‪ ,‬יוסף‪ .1997 ,‬על הקדושה‪ :‬דת מוסר ומיסטיקה ביהדות ודתות אחרות‪ ,‬י"ל מאגנס‪ ,‬ירושלים‪.‬‬ ‫הורביץ‪ ,‬אלימלך‪“.1995 ,‬צדקה‪ ,‬עניים ופיקוח חברתי בקהילות יהודי אירופה בין ימי הביניים‬ ‫לראשית העת החדשה” דת וכלכלה‪ ,‬מרכז זלמן שזר‪ ,‬ירושלים‪.‬‬ ‫הירשפלד‪ ,‬אריאל‪“.2000 ,‬את שירה לא אראה לך‪ :‬על סיומו של 'שירה'‪ ”,‬קובץ עגנון‪ ,‬כרך ב‪,‬‬ ‫עורכים דן לאור‪ ,‬רפאל ויזר וראובן מירקין‪ ,‬י"ל מאגנס‪ ,‬ירושלים‪.‬‬ ‫———  ‪ .2011‬לקרוא את ש"י עגנון‪ ,‬אחוזת בית‪ ,‬תל אביב‪.‬‬

‫‪BIBLIOGRAPHY‬‬

‫‪208‬‬

‫הלקין‪ ,‬שמעון‪“.1992 .‬על אורח נטה ללון”‪ ,‬ש"י עגנון בביקורת העברית‪ ,‬כרך ב‪ ,‬עורך אבינועם‬ ‫ברשאי‪ ,‬שוקן‪ ,‬תל אביב‪.195–180 ,‬‬ ‫וייס‪ ,‬הילל‪ .1974 ,‬פרשנות לחמישה מסיפורי ש"י עגנון‪ ,‬עקד‪ ,‬תל אביב‪.‬‬ ‫חבר‪ ,‬חנן‪ .2007 ,‬הסיפור והלאום‪ :‬קריאות ביקורתיות בקאנון הסיפורת העברית‪ ,‬רסלינג‪ ,‬תל‬ ‫אביב‪.‬‬ ‫חדד‪ ,‬שירה‪ .2011 ,‬מי שעושה סימן‪ ,‬מוסד ביאליק‪ ,‬ירושלים‪.‬‬ ‫הלפרין‪ ,‬שרה‪“.1981 ,‬לאופיה של הטרגדיה היהודית 'והיה העקוב למישור'”‪ ,‬עלי שיח‪,11 ,‬‬ ‫‪.108–101‬‬ ‫יהושע‪ ,‬א‪.‬ב‪“.1995 ,‬נקודת ההתרה בעלילה כמפתח לפירוש היצירה”‪ ,‬מבעד לפשטות‪ :‬על‬ ‫סיפור פשוט של ש"י עגנון בראי הביקורת‪ ,‬עורכים זיווה שמיר‪ ,‬דן לאור ועוזי שביט‪ .‬הקיבוץ‬ ‫המאוחד‪ ,‬תל אביב‪.‬‬ ‫כהן‪ ,‬אורי ש‪ .2007 ,.‬הישרדות‪ :‬על תפיסת המוות בין שתי מלחמות העולם בישראל ובאיטליה‪,‬‬ ‫רסלינג‪ ,‬תל אביב‪.‬‬ ‫לאור‪ ,‬דן‪ .1998 ,‬חיי עגנון‪ :‬ביוגרפיה‪ ,‬שוקן‪ ,‬ירושלים‪.‬‬ ‫———  ‪ .1995‬שמואל יוסף עגנון‪ :‬היבטים חדשים‪ ,‬ספרית הפועלים‪ ,‬תל אביב‪.‬‬ ‫לוין‪ ,‬מרדכי‪ .1975 ,‬ערכי חברה וכלכלה באידיאולוגיה של תקופת ההשכלה‪ ,‬מוסד ביאליק‪,‬‬ ‫ירושלים‪.‬‬ ‫לחובר‪ ,‬פישל‪'“.1993 ,‬והיה העקוב למישור'”‪ ,‬והיה העקוב למישור‪ :‬מסות על הנובלה לש"י עגנון‪,‬‬ ‫עורך יהודה פרידלנדר‪ ,‬אוניברסיטת בר אילן‪ ,‬רמת גן‪.21–13 ,‬‬ ‫לנדאו‪ ,‬לואיס‪“.1978 ,‬מקורות ופסבדו‪-‬מקורות ב'והיה העקוב למישור'”‪ ,‬הספרות‪,26 ,‬‬ ‫אוניברסיטת בר אילן‪ ,‬רמת גן‪.103–94 ,‬‬ ‫מירון‪ ,‬דן‪ .1979 ,‬בין חזון לאמת‪ :‬ניצני הרומן העברי והיידי במאה ה‪ ,19-‬מוסד ביאליק‪ ,‬ירושלים‪.‬‬ ‫———  ‪ .1995‬הרופא המדומה‪ :‬עיונים בספרות היהודית הקלאסית‪ ,‬הקיבוץ המאוחד‪ :‬תל אביב‪.‬‬ ‫———  ‪ .1996‬הסתכלות ברב נכר‪ :‬על הכנסת כלה לש"י עגנון‪ ,‬הקיבוץ המאוחד‪ :‬תל אביב‪.‬‬ ‫נגאל‪ ,‬גדליה‪“.1993 ,‬מקורות חסידיים באחד מסיפוריו של עגנון”‪ ,‬והיה העקוב למישור‪ :‬מסות על‬ ‫הנובלה לש"י עגנון‪ ,‬עורך יהודה פרידלנדר‪ ,‬אוניברסיטת בר אילן‪ ,‬רמת גן‪.175–166 ,‬‬ ‫סדן‪ ,‬דב‪ .1978 ,‬על ש"י עגנון‪ ,‬הקיבוץ המאוחד‪ ,‬תל אביב‪.‬‬ ‫עוז‪ ,‬עמוס‪ .1993 ,‬שתיקת השמיים‪ :‬עגנון משתומם על אלוהים‪ ,‬כתר‪ ,‬ירושלים‪.‬‬ ‫עגנון‪ ,‬שמואל יוסף‪“,1966 ,‬הכנסת כלה”‪ ,‬כל סיפוריו של שמואל יוסף עגנון‪ ,‬כרך א‪ ,‬שוקן‪,‬‬ ‫ירושלים‪.‬‬ ‫———  ‪“,1966‬אלו ואלו”‪ ,‬כל סיפוריו של שמואל יוסף עגנון‪ ,‬כרך ב‪ ,‬שוקן‪ ,‬ירושלים‪.‬‬ ‫———  ‪“,1966‬על כפות המנעול”‪ ,‬כל סיפוריו של שמואל יוסף עגנון‪ ,‬כרך ג‪ ,‬שוקן‪ ,‬ירושלים‪.‬‬ ‫———  ‪“,1966‬אורח נטה ללון”‪ ,‬כל סיפוריו של שמואל יוסף עגנון‪ ,‬כרך ד‪ ,‬שוקן‪ ,‬ירושלים‪.‬‬ ‫———  ‪“,1966‬תמול שלשום”‪ ,‬כל סיפוריו של שמואל יוסף עגנון‪ ,‬כרך ה‪ ,‬שוקן‪ ,‬ירושלים‪.‬‬ ‫———  ‪“,1966‬סמוך ונראה”‪ ,‬כל סיפוריו של שמואל יוסף עגנון‪ ,‬כרך ו‪ ,‬שוקן‪ ,‬ירושלים‪.‬‬ ‫———  ‪“,1966‬עד הנה”‪ ,‬כל סיפוריו של שמואל יוסף עגנון‪ ,‬כרך ז‪ ,‬שוקן‪ ,‬ירושלים‪.‬‬ ‫———  ‪“,1966‬האש העצים”‪ ,‬כל סיפוריו של שמואל יוסף עגנון‪ ,‬כרך ח‪ ,‬שוקן‪ ,‬ירושלים‪.‬‬ ‫———  ‪ .2002‬אסתרליין יקירתי‪ ,‬עורכת אמונה ירון‪ ,‬שוקן‪ ,‬ירושלים‪.‬‬ ‫———  ‪ .2000‬מעצמי אל עצמי‪ ,‬עורכת אמונה ירון‪ ,‬שוקן‪ ,‬ירושלים‪.‬‬ ‫———  ‪ .2008‬מסוד חכמים‪ :‬מכתבים ‪ 1970–1909‬עגנון‪-‬ברנר‪-‬ביאליק‪-‬לחובר‪-‬קצנלסון‪-‬סדן‪,‬‬ ‫עורכת אמונה ירון‪ ,‬שוקן‪ ,‬תל אביב‪.‬‬

‫‪209‬‬

‫‪BIBLIOGRAPHY‬‬

‫———  ‪ .1991‬ש"י עגנון – ש"ז שוקן‪ :‬חילופי איגרות ‪ ,1959–1916‬עורכת אמונה ירון‪ .‬שוקן‪ ,‬תל‬ ‫אביב‪.‬‬ ‫ערפלי‪ ,‬בועז‪ .1998 ,‬רב רומן‪ :‬חמישה מאמרים על תמול שלשום‪ ,‬הקיבוץ המאוחד‪ ,‬תל אביב‪.‬‬ ‫קורצווייל‪ ,‬ברוך‪ .1962 ,‬מסות על סיפורי ש"י עגנון‪ ,‬שוקן‪ ,‬ירושלים‪.‬‬ ‫——— ‪ .1987 .‬קורצווייל‪ ,‬עגנון‪ ,‬אצ"ג‪ :‬חילופי איגרות‪ ,‬הוצאת בר אילן‪ ,‬רמת גן‪.‬‬ ‫רבין‪ ,‬שושנה‪“.2008 ,‬תשתיות מדרשיות ב’מלבוש’ של ש"י עגנון”‪ ,‬ממעמקים‪.115–102 ,20 ,‬‬ ‫רוזנצווייג‪ ,‬ישראל‪“1955 ,‬התלונה על הקאפיטאליזם או והיה העקוב למישור”‪ ,‬אורלוגין‪,11 ,‬‬ ‫‪.314–312‬‬ ‫שגיב‪ ,‬יונתן‪.2014 ,‬‬ ‫”ואני אוהב אותך בשביל שאני נזכר בסנדליך העקומים‪ :‬ציונות‪ ,‬קפיטליזם ופטישיזם ב'תמול‬ ‫שלשום' של עגנון“‪ ,‬מחשבות על נעליים‪ ,‬עורכים אורי ברטל גל ונטורה ועינת לידר‪,‬‬ ‫‪.172–146‬‬ ‫שמיר‪ ,‬זיוה‪“.1989 ,‬ההלכה למעשה‪ :‬תשובת עגנון ליל"ג בסיפורו 'והיה העקוב למישור'”‪,‬‬ ‫מאזניים‪.64 ,13–4 ,‬‬ ‫———  ‪“.1995‬שבעים פנים לפשטות‪ :‬עיון נוסף ב'סיפור פשוט'”‪,‬מבעד לפשטות‪ :‬על סיפור פשוט‬ ‫של ש"י עגנון בראי הביקורת‪ ,‬עורכים זיווה שמיר‪ ,‬דן לאור ועוזי שביט‪ .‬הקיבוץ המאוחד‪ ,‬תל‬ ‫אביב‪.‬‬ ‫שקד‪ ,‬גרשון‪ .1973 ,‬אמנות הסיפור של ש”י עגנון‪ ,‬ספרית הפועלים‪ ,‬תל אביב‪.‬‬ ‫———  ‪ .1977‬הסיפורת העברית ‪ ,1980–1880‬כרך א‪ ,‬הקיבוץ המאוחד‪ ,‬תל אביב‪.‬‬ ‫———  ‪ .1983‬הסיפורת העברית ‪ ,1980–1880‬כרך ב‪ ,‬הקיבוץ המאוחד‪ ,‬תל אביב‪.‬‬ ‫———  ‪ .1988‬הסיפורת העברית ‪ ,1980–1880‬כרך ג‪ ,‬הקיבוץ המאוחד‪ ,‬תל אביב‪.‬‬ ‫———  ‪ .2004‬מנדלי‪ :‬לפניו ואחריו‪ ,‬י"ל מאגנס‪ ,‬ירושלים‪.‬‬ ‫———  ‪ .1989‬פנים אחרות ביצירתו של עגנון‪ ,‬הקיבוץ המאוחד‪ ,‬תל אביב‪.‬‬ ‫שקד‪ ,‬מלכה‪“ .2000 ,‬לסוגיית יצר‪ ,‬יוצר‪ ,‬יצירה בסיפורי עגנון”‪ ,‬קובץ עגנון‪ ,‬כרך ב‪ ,‬עורכים דן‬ ‫לאור‪ ,‬רפאל ויזר וראובן מירקין‪ ,‬י"ל מאגנס‪ ,‬ירושלים‪.‬‬ ‫———  ‪“ .1982‬האם היה הירשל משוגע – לקראת ראייה פלוריאליסטית של העלילה ב'סיפור‬ ‫פשוט'“‪ ,‬הספרות ‪.147–132 ,32‬‏‬ ‫תומשבסקי‪ ,‬יאז’י‪“ .1997 ,‬היהודים בכלכלה של פולין”‪ ,‬קיום ושבר‪ ,‬כרך א‪ ,‬עורכים ישראל גוטמן‬ ‫וישראל ברטל‪ ,‬מרכז שזר לתולדות ישראל‪ ,‬ירושלים‪.334–315 ,‬‬

‫‪BIBLIOGRAPHY‬‬

‫‪210‬‬

INDEX

Aaron, David H., ix, 160 Abbott, H. Porter, 130–31, 153 Agnon, S. Y., 1; biography of, xiv–xx, 55, 105, 133–34; on charity, 30–36, 64; closure and, 130–34, 136–39, 152–60, 182n57, 197n63, 198n75; debt as key trope, 16–30, 36, 43–47, 56–61, 101–3, 122–23, 152–66; deficit of time, 149–52; on divine economy, 11–15, 24–26, 36, 40–47, 56–61; extrapolated narrative theory (the law of permanent debt) of, 152–60; imagery of words-as-coins, 48–52, 143; irony, 162; letters of, xviii–xx, 53, 132, 151–52, 182n57, 197n63, 198n75; literary interest in calculation, 70–73, 141–45, 152–60, 196n41; loss of the mother as key trope, 108; modernity and, 1–2, 53, 99, 130–34, 136–39, 152–60; money as key trope, 16–17, 48–52, 70–89, 162–66; personal preoccupation with economy, xviii–xx, 1–5, 40, 53, 69, 105, 151–52; portrait of the indebted author, 133–34, 141–60, 182n57, 197n63, 198n75; pseudonym of, 133–34, 169n6; relation to Jewish religious textual tradition, xvii–xix, 1–2, 51, 139–41, 158–60; relation to modern writing, 51, 89–91, 146–52, 136–60; time in Germany, xiv–xx

A Guest for the Night, 13–14, 53–91, 142–44, 151–52, 180n39, 183n76, 200n8; asceticism, 61–63, 67, 94, 179n35; author as parasite, 89–91; Bialik’s “In the City of Slaughter,” 60; calculation, 70–73; charity, 64–65, 173n32; divine economy, 57–89; effacement of money from the religious sphere, 56–66; effacement of money from the Zionist sphere, 66–73; God-as-debtor, 56–61; Greenberg’s “With My God the Blacksmith,” 88, 90, 185n98; history of Jewish economic activity and approaches, 61–63, 67–69; inflation and meaning, 74–76, 83; martyrdom, 57–60, 70, 72, 179n29, 185n96; money as a double sign, 55–56, 70, 85; money and irony, 70, 84–89; money as a pure relative semiotic sign, 48–52, 73–89; money as a symbol of material conditions, 56–73; money, metaphor, différance, and sacred language, 76–84; philosophical and religious approach to money, 53–55, 61–63; words-ascoins, 49–52, 73, 81–83 “Agunot,” xvi–xvii, 2–5, 11–12, 89, 133–37, 140–46, 159 Aksenfeld, Israel, 8, 23 allegory, 10–11, 15, 89, 135–36, 140–41, 146, 156–58, 184n91

211

anti-Semitism, 6, 68, 105 “And We Shall Not Fail,” 48–52, 74, 81, 176n2, 194n11 And the Crooked Shall be Made Straight, xvi, 13; asceticism, 19–20; Book of Job, 39–41, 46; The Bridal Canopy, 25–26; capitalism and crisis, 21, 26–30, 38; charity (the gift) 30–36, 42–47; “The Coin,” 25; conflicting debts, 29–30, 42–47; crisis in meaning, 38; divine debt, 22–47; divine economy, 16–47; divine economy as opaque and crisis-prone, 26–30, 37–47; divine economy as profitable and reciprocal, 22–26; gift of debt, 42–47; gift of flesh and blood, 30–34, 43–47; God as owner, 18; guilt, 24–25, 41–43; Haskalah and Zionist critique of trust, 23, 45; Jewish religious approaches to economics, 16–20; the letter and the breakdown of signification, 37–39; linguistic reflection on divine economy, 24; love as based on asymmetrical exchange, 42–47; monetary debt, 23–41; religious thought and crisis, 26–30, 37–41, 43; sacrifice, 25, 31, 33; sacrifice for the homeland, 45; self-sacrifice, 33, 43–47; trust, 23–32, 37–39, 40–47 Arbel, Michal, 89, 133, 179n29, 194n11 Aristotle, Politics, 53–54, 56, 63; Poetics, 136–37, 153–56, 184n91 asceticism, 5, 20, 62–63, 67, 94, 168n11, 179n35 “At the Outset of the Day,” 195n23 “The Band,” 198n75 Bamidbar Rabbah, 183n73 Barthes, Roland, 11–12, 74, 84, 130, 157–58 Ben-Dov, Nitza, 93, 99, 113, 116, 123–24, 126, 190n55 Ben Zion, Shin, 137–38 Berdyczewski, Mikhah Yosef, xvii

212

Bergmann, Martin, 111–12, 119 Betrothed, 108, 194n10, 199n81 Biale, David, 179n35, 189n39 Bialik, Hayim Nachman, 60, 150, 179n33 Birken, Lawrence, 95–97 The Book of Deeds, 133, 155–56, 198n75 Book of Exodus, 193n84, 198n40 Book of Job, 39–41, 46, 60, 175n58, 179n32 Book of Proverbs, 26, 32, 161, 174n41 Bordieu, Pierre, 18 Braudes, Asher, 8 The Bridal Canopy, 25, 61, 104, 173n25, 199n81 Brenner, Yosef Haim, 9, 11, 17–18, 144, 150 Brown, Joanne, 94, 111 Buber, Martin, xvi–xviii calculation, xiii, 39; calculating character of Jews, xv; calculation and the gift 30–36, 64; in capitalism, 12, 31, 38, 100–105; in divine economy, 12, 26, 30–36, 42–47, 148, 180n39; of love, 115, 119, 129; of money, 24, 85–91, 100–105, 180n39; of narrative, 71–73, 85, 141–45, 148, 150–57, 160, 198n74; Nietzsche and, 24, 73; as rational peace, 44; sacrifice and, 42–47, 60, 71–72; of time, 150–52 “Candles,” 198n75 capitalism, xiv, xix, 2, 13, 42, 45, 163; capitalist circulation, 14, 27–28, 31, 53, 79, 157, 189n34; charity (gift), 31–38; crisis, 21, 27–28, 30, 38, 61, 103, 145; economic theory, xiii, xv, 21, 92–95, 109; exchange, 79, 90, 92; globalization of, 98, 187n16; golden age of, 97, 187n16; industrial age of, xiv–xv, xix, 67, 97, 109; and irrationality, 20–23, 92, 100, 105–6, 189n34; Jewish economic activity, xv, 6–7, 67, 105, 181n47, 181n52;

INDEX

logic of, 92–95, 102, 189n34; market, 14, 90, 92; Marxist theory of crisis, 21, 27, 75, 101, 103, 173n28, 189n34; and modern Hebrew literature, 7–10, production, 53–54; and psychoanalysis, 97–99, 187n21; and rationality, xiii–xv, 8–10, 20–26, 38, 92–94, 105–6, 186n12, 187n14; and religion, xv, xviii, 20–29, 31–38, 168n12; and romantic love, 92–95, 109; and writing, 90; and Yiddish, 67; and Zionism, 69–73. See also classical British economic theory; commodity theory of money; credit theory of money; German Historical School of Economics; “Homo Economicus”; Marx, Karl; Simmel, Georg catharsis, 153–54. See also closure Christianity, 13, 54, 62, 68, 105, 109, 171n2 charity, 30–36, 64–65, 103, 173n32, 181n40. See also debt; gift Chatman, Seymour, 153 classical British economic theory, xiii–xv, 167n9. See also commodity theory of money closure, 5, 12, 15, 179n32, 194n7; in narrative theory, 130–33, 137, 152–54, 157–59, 198n74. See also law of permanent debt; literary economy “The Coin,” 25 commerce, xix, 14, 17, 24, 28, 34, 93; Aristotle on, 54–55; and Christian thought, 54–55, 62, 68, 105; economic theories of, 9, 168n12, 187n16; Haskalah and Zionist critique of, 8–11, 67–73; Jewish economic activity, xv, 8–11, 54–55, 67–73, 97–106, 168n12, 186n2; and Jewish religion, 9, 34, 54–55, 62, 67–68, 105; Levinas on, 44; and romantic love, 93, 114, 129, 186n6,

189n40. See also Jewish economic activity; Sombart, Werner commodities, 28, 35, 92, 93, 126, 186n6; authors as, 163; books as, 90, 164–66; children as, 29; commodity theory of money, xiii–xiv, 54, 103, 167n9; Marxist theory of, 50, 79. See also capitalism; exchange; Marxism; money commodity theory of money, xiii–xiv, 53–56, 103, 167n9. See also classical British economic theory; credit theory of money; German Historical School of Economics; Knapp, Georg Friedrich; Marx, Karl; Simmel, Georg credit theory of money, xiv–xv, 53–56, 75, 103, 167n9. See also classical British economic theory; credit theory of money; German Historical School of Economics; Knapp, Georg Friedrich; Marx, Karl; Simmel, Georg crisis, 1, 7, 37, 46, 101, 166; economic, 5, 21, 27–28, 30, 38, 61; in language/ meaning, 38, 61, 145; in libidinal economy/psychoanalysis, 93, 101, 106–7, 113–14, 121–23; Marxist theory of, 21, 27, 103, 172n17; religious, 5, 26–30, 37–47, 56–61, 162. See also capitalism; debt; Marxist theory; narrative theory; psychoanalysis; trust Dan, Yosef, 77 De Man, Paul 84, 184n91 debt, 2, 90, 172n19; in capitalism, 27, 32–33; credit theory of money, xiv; deficit, 14, 29; Derrida on, 31–32, 36, 46; to the divine, 12–15, 17, 23–41, 103–6, 141–51, 162, 178n26; gift of, 43–47; God-as-debtor, 57–61; law of permanent debt, 12, 134, 151–62; Levinas on, 13, 43–47;

INDEX

213

in libidinal economy, 103–8, 111, 118–19; in literary economy, 149– 52, 155; monetary, 12–15, 23–41, 103–6, 157; Nietzsche on, 23–25; and romantic love, 100–101; of time 149–52; and writing, 131–34, 141–60 Derrida, Jacques, 31–32, 36, 46, 78–79, 101, 183n75, 198n80. See also différance; sacred language; semiotics; words-as-coins Deuteronomy, xix, 173n34, 174n41 Diamond, Eliezer, 62, 179n35 différance, 79, 183n57. See also Barthes, Roland; Derrida, Jacques; sacred language; semiotics; words-as-coins divine economy, 5, 17, 25–30, 43, 46–47, 104, 160–63; Book of Job and, 39–41, 46, 60; linguistic reflection on, 24; love and, 2–5, 29, 42–47, 101, 116; and martyrdom/body, 56–60, 86–88; and money, 25–30, 61–64, 163–66; Nietzsche on, 11–13, 22–26; as opaque and crisis-prone, 26–30, 37–47, 56–61, 86–88; as profitable and reciprocal, 22–26, 57; and writing, 142–48, 157–58. See also asceticism; capitalism; debt; Diamond, Eliezer; gift; Levin, Mordechai; Marx, Karl; Mauss, Marcel; Nietzsche, Friedrich; Tamari, Meir; trust “The Doctor’s Divorce,” 199n81 economy of love, 14, 29–30, 46, 96, 106, 108–25; Aristophanes’ parable, 110; as based on asymmetrical exchange, 29, 42–47, 129. See also libidinal economy economy of reading, 84, 156–58. See also closure; economy of writing; indebted author; indebted writing; law of permanent debt; literary economy; literary production; narrative theory

214

economy of writing, 15, 132, 144–45, 156–58. See also closure; economy of reading; indebted author; indebted writing; law of permanent debt; literary economy; literary production; narrative theory ego, 14, 96, 107–18, 121–24, 129, 188n31, 191n66. See also Bergmann, Martin; Birken, Lawrence; Kernberg, David; Klein, Melanie; libidinal economy; libido; melancholy; narcissism; object relations theory; psychoanalysis; Segal, Hannah (and David Bell) exchange, xiii, 2, 17; asymmetrical, 45–47, 58, 129, 145, 162; in divine economy, 4–5, 12–13, 24–47, 53–64, 178n26, 180n39; endless nature of, 54, 73–91; gift-through-exchange, 31, 36; of guilt, 24–25, 148; language and, 15, 37–39, 50–52, 73–91, 145, 155–63, 183n75; of love, 45–47, 58, 106–29, 145; mercantile, 97, 114–15, 125, 128; as Money (exchangeability personified), 14, 65, 163; money as medium, xiii, 53, 75, 163; narrative and, 71–73, 85–91, 145, 155–63, 183n75; Nietzsche on, xiv, 24–25; profit of, 30, 24–47, 57, 62–64, 97, 103; and psychoanalysis, 92, 95, 97, 106–29; in romantic love, 14, 92–100; utilitarian nature of, 14, 24–47, 57, 62–64. See also capitalism; Levinas, Emmanuel; Marx, Karl; Nietzsche, Friedrich Exodus Rabbah, 196n39 Feldman, Yael, 57, 83, 179n30 Freud, Sigmund, 14, 92; biography and poorhouse neurosis, 104–5; economic infrastructure, 95–96, 107, 111–18, 121; “Mourning and Melancholia,” 107, 111–18; object relations’ critique of, 129, 188n31; “On Narcissism: An Introduction,” 111–18, 121, 127. See also ego; libidinal economy; libido;

INDEX

melancholy; narcissism; object relations theory; psychoanalysis; romantic love “From Dwelling to Dwelling,” 2 “The Garment,” 14–15; A Guest for the Night, 152; And the Crooked Shall be Made Straight, 145, 148, 152; A Simple Story, 152; The Book of Deeds, 136, 155; closure in Agnon’s poetics, 130–34, 152–60; closure in literary theory, 130–34, 152–54, 158–59; the dual position of modern Hebrew literature, 140–45, 158–60; the endless production of incomplete texts, 140–41, 152–60; garment as soul, 135; garment as text, 136–38; God as creditor of writing, 141–45; indebted author as a tragic figure, 130, 134, 141, 143–45, 148, 152; indebted writing, 132–36, 141, 159–60; law of permanent debt, 152–60; mis/calculation of writing in modern Hebrew, 140–45, 152–60; notion of literary economy, 145, 153–56, 159; writing as weaving in literary theory, 136–37; writing as weaving a torn garment, 136–41 Genesis Rabbah, 110 German Historical School of Economics, xiv–xv, 167n6, 167n9. See also classical British economic theory; commodity theory of money; credit theory of money; Marx, Karl; Menger, Carl; Simmel, Georg; Sombart, Werner; Weber, Max gift, 4, 39, 51–52, 166; Derrida on, 31–32, 36, 46, 176n73; gift economy, 4, 17, 19, 25–26, 30–36; gift of debt, 13, 43–47; gift of flesh and blood, 30–34, 43–47, 58; gift of self-sacrifice, 30–34, 43–47, 129; God’s, 19, 26, 40, 62; Jewish gift economy, 30–38, 42, 64, 180n39; Maimonides

on, 31–32, 181n40; Mauss’s theory of, 4, 25–26, 30–34, 173n33. See also debt; economy of love Gordon, Yehuda Leib, 68 Gordon, A. D., 6, 68 Greenberg, Uri Zvi, 88, 90 Gurion, David Ben, 6 Hadad, Shira, 175n52 Hagbi, Yaniv, 177n7 halakhah, 3, 19, 29, 42, 169n4, 176n2, 178n20, 180n39 Harvey, David, 172n17, 188n26, 189n34 Hasidic Judaism, 7–8, 20, 32, 52; liturgy, 48; tales, 18, 21–24, 27–30, 34, 46, 171n6, 192n74; thought and asceticism, 20–21, 62–63, 179n35 Haskalah, 1–3, 23, 30, 45, 67, 168n1; and Jewish sexuality, 109–10; literature, 7, 8–11, 23; and rational modern economics, 23, 30, 45 Hebrew Bible, 138; Agnon and, 159, 170n19; charity in, 30–36; gold and wealth in, 18–19, 26–27, 32, 39–41, 161, 173n34, 174n41; Jewish textual tradition, 80, 146, 159. See also midrash; Mishnah; sacred language; Talmud Herrnstein Smith, Barbara, 131, 153–54, 198n74 “The Hill of Sand,” 114, 199n81 Hillis Miller, Joseph, 15, 136–37, 156, 158 Hoffman, Anne Golomb, 66, 84; on Agnon’s biography, 133–34; on Agnon’s pseudonym, 133–34, 169n6; on Agnon’s writing, 14, 51, 84, 140, 145–47, 159 “Homo Economicus,” 96, 187n14. See also capitalism; “Homo Sexualis”; rationality “Homo Sexualis,” 96. See also Freud, Sigmund; “Homo Economicus”; psychoanalysis

INDEX

215

Illouz, Eva, 92–94, 109 indebted writing, 132–36, 141, 159–60. See also closure; economy of reading; economy of writing; indebted author; law of permanent debt; literary economy; literary production; narrative theory indebted author, 14–15, 130, 134, 141, 143–45, 148, 152. See also closure; economy of reading; economy of writing; indebted writing; law of permanent debt; literary economy; literary production; narrative theory In the Heart of the Seas, 61, 104, 188n31 In the Prime of Her Life, xvii, 108, 116, 191n62, 199n81 irony, 162, 194n11; in A Guest for the Night, 70, 82–85, 88, 185n103; in And the Crooked Shall be Made Straight, 20, 27, 174n51; in A Simple Story, 118, 125, 142; De Man on, 84, 184n91 Jewish economic activity, xv–xviii; and asceticism, 5, 20, 62–63, 67, 94, 168n11, 179n35; and commerce, xv, 19–20, 54–55, 67–70, 97–106, 168n12, 181n47, 186n2; and Haskalah, 6–11, 23, 30, 67–73; and Judaism, 17–20, 23, 30, 61–62, 67–73, 97–98, 100–106; and modern Hebrew literature, 6–11, 68, 169n9; psychoanalysis of, 92, 100–106; and Zionism, 6–11, 67–73, 169n9. See also anti-Semitism; commerce; Judaism; Sombart, Werner Judaism, xviii, 59; asceticism in, 5, 20, 62–63, 67, 94, 168n11, 179n35; and atheism, 58; and capitalism, xv, xviii, 6–13, 61–70, 103–6; charity in, 30–36; and commerce, xv, 6–13, 61–70; divine economy of, 16–47, 56–60, 86–88, 142–48, 157–58; economic perceptions in,

216

16–25, 38, 61–70, 178n26, 179n35; Hasidic Judaism, 7–8, 20–23, 32, 48, 52, 62–63, 179n35; Haskalah, 2–4, 6–13, 22–23, 67, 109; Jewish religious textual tradition, xvii, 1, 51, 60, 146, 159–60, 168n1; martyrdom in, 45, 57–60, 70, 72, 179n29, 185n96; and money, 6–13, 16–25, 55, 61–70, 178n26; mystical tradition, 77, 110, 135, 176n1, 185n95; rabbinic Judaism, xix, 7–8, 18–20, 27, 32, 54–55, 62–63, 169n4; sacred language, 48–52, 77; Zionism, 59, 67, 85–86 Kabbalah, 48, 176n1, 185n95 Karp, Jonathan, 7, 186n2 Katz, Jacob, 6 Kernberg, David, 129 Klein, Melanie, 113, 188n31, 191n66 Knaani, David, 169n9 Knapp, Georg Friedrich, xiv–xv, 167n9 “Knots,” 198n75 Kurzweil, Baruch, 150; on “Agunot,” 169n5; on A Guest for the Night, 55, 83; on And the Crooked Shall be Made Straight, 16, 23, 38, 174n50, 176n56; on A Simple Story, 93, 186n6, 188n25, 191n61; on “The Garment,” 136, 140, 195n23; letters of Agnon to, 150, 162 Laḥover, Fishel, 17 law of permanent debt, 12, 15, 134, 152–53, 155–56, 158–60. See also Agnon; closure; economy of reading; economy of writing; indebted author; indebted writing; literary economy; literary production; narrative theory Levin, Mordechai, 19, 179n35 Levinas, Emmanuel, 13, 44, 176n66 libidinal economy, 3, 5, 11, 14, 96, 106, 108–25. See also ego; libido; melancholy; narcissism; object relations

INDEX

theory; psychoanalysis; romantic love libido, 14, 96, 107, 111–13, 116, 118–19, 129. See also ego; libidinal economy; melancholy; narcissism; object relations theory; psychoanalysis; romantic love literary economy, 12, 15, 145, 153–56, 159, 161–62. See also closure; economy of reading; economy of writing; indebted author; indebted writing; law of permanent debt; literary production; narrative theory literary production, 18, 90, 156, 159; of incomplete texts, 15, 134, 138, 156–60. See also closure; economy of reading; economy of writing; indebted author; indebted writing; law of permanent debt; literary economy; narrative theory literary representation, 60, 71, 131, 153, 168n16 Maimonides, 31–32, 70, 181n40, 185n95 Mapu, Abraham, 9, 68 martyrdom, 45, 57–60, 70, 72, 179n29, 185n96. See also sacrifice Marx, Karl, xiv, 50, 101–3; on commodities, 50, 164; theory of crisis, 21, 27, 75, 101, 103, 173n28, 189n34; theory of money, 53–54, 75–76, 78–79, 173n28, 178n17. See also commodities; crisis; Marxism; money Marxism, xviii, 12; commodities, 50, 164; critique of modern Hebrew culture, 6, 169n9, 171n1; and Freudian psychoanalysis, 187n21; and literary theory, 98; theory of crisis, 21, 27, 75, 101, 103, 173n28, 189n34; and Zionism, 7, 68, 72. See also commodities; crisis; money “Matching Reward to Agony,” 180n39 Mauss, Marcel, 4, 25, 31–34, 36

Mendele Moykher Sforim, 10–11, 23, 170n24 melancholy, in “Agunot,” 4, 140; in psychoanalysis, 14, 106–8, 110–13, 116, 122–25, 129, 188n31. See also libidinal economy; narcissism; object relations theory; psychoanalysis; romantic love Menger, Carl, xv, 167n6, 167n9. See also classical British economic theory; commodity theory of money; German Historical School of Economics metaphor, 2, 17, 19, 28, 38, 40, 183n72, 190n55; of authors, 89–91; of economics, 2, 16–20, 27; of language-coin, 49–50; of money, 16–20, 48–52, 78–82, 88–89, 143; Nietzsche on, 81–82; of weaving/ writing, 4, 15, 136–37, 146, 158, 195n29 “Metamorphosis,” xvii, 114, 194n10 midrash, 3, 77, 82, 135, 183n75. See also Hebrew Bible; Mishnah; sacred language; Talmud Miron, Dan, 9, 69, 123, 132–33, 164, 173n25, 192n79 Mishnah, 18, 54, 146, 159, 169n4, 173n34, 196n39. See also Hebrew Bible; midrash; sacred language; Talmud modern Hebrew literature, xvi, xx, 111; Agnon’s dual approach to, 140, 145, 183n76; and Jewish economic activity, 6–11, 17, 23, 68; JewishSpanish secular poetry, 183n76; and sacrifice for the homeland, 45; term “author” in, 142 modernism, 53, 99, 131, 133, 193n3, 194n11. See also closure money, 2, 21, 115–16, 118, 142–43, 157, 161; Aristotle on, 53–56; and asceticism, 5, 20, 62–63, 67, 94, 168n11, 179n35; and blood, 65–68, 179n27; as charity, 30, 64–66; commodity

INDEX

217

theory of, xiii–xix, 53–56; counterfeit, 49–53, 74; credit theory of, xiii–xix, 53–56, 103; and crisis, 27, 100–106; debt, xiii–xix, 38, 53–56, 103–6, 173n28; economic rationality, xiii, 8; as “exchangeability personified,” 14, 65, 163; inflation, 74– 76; irony, 84–90; Jewish economic activity, 6–10, 67–70, 100–106, 186n2; limitlessness of, 54, 79–80, 100–106, 183n75; Marx on, 53–54, 75–76, 78–79, 173n28, 178n17; and metaphor, 49–50, 78–82, 88–89; and modern Hebrew literature, 7–10, 45, 67–70, 88–90, 185n98; and modernity, xviii, xiv–xix, 65, 162–63; Nietzsche on, 24—25, 162; and psychological motivations, 100–106; in religious thought, 2–6, 16–30, 53–57, 61–66, 162, 193n84; as sign, 12–14, 37–39, 49–53, 73–91, 183n75; Simmel on, xiii–xix, 14, 65, 76, 163; and value, 73–91; and Yiddish, 67; and Zionism, 67–73, 86–90. See also Barthes, Roland; classical British economic theory; credit theory of money; German Historical School of Economics; Knapp, Georg Friedrich; Saussure, Ferdinand de; Shell, Marc narcissism, 14, 111–19, 121, 123–29; Aristophanes’ parable, 110. See also Bergmann, Martin; Birken, Lawrence; ego; Freud, Sigmund; Kernberg, David; Klein, Melanie; libidinal economy; libido; melancholy; object relations theory; psychoanalysis; romantic love; Segal, Hannah (and David Bell) narrative theory, 130, 134, 137, 152–58, 161, 198n80. See also Arbel, Michal; Aristotle; closure; Herrnstein

218

Smith, Barbara; Hillis Miller, J.; literary economy; law of permanent debt Nietzsche, Friedrich, xiv, 13–17, 24, 40, 73, 82, 161 object relations theory, 112, 117–18, 129, 191n66. See also Bergmann, Martin; ego; Freud, Sigmund; Kernberg, David; Klein, Melanie; libidinal economy; libido; melancholy; narcissism; psychoanalysis; romantic love; Segal, Hannah (and David Bell) Only Yesterday, xviii, 2, 69, 162, 182n55, 194n7, 199n81 Oz, Amos, 95, 193n83 Penslar, Derek J., 6, 168n12 Philo-semitism, 6 psychoanalysis, 12–14, 92–96, 111–14, 123, 153, 187n21, 192n79; economic infrastructure of, 92, 95–97, 103–6, 111–29, 189n34; psychoanalytic theories of Jewish economic activity, 63, 92, 97–106, 189n34. See also Bergmann, Martin; Birken, Lawrence; ego; Freud, Sigmund; Kernberg, David; Klein, Melanie; libidinal economy; libido; melancholy; narcissism; object relations theory; romantic love; Segal, Hannah (and David Bell) rabbinic Judaism, xix, 7–8, 169n4, 171n7; and Aristophanes’ parable, 110; and asceticism, 7–8, 62–63, 179n35; and economic activity, 18–20, 27, 32, 54–55, 67; and sacred language, 51 repair (mystical tradition), 48, 63, 81, 108, 116, 136–59, 176n1 Ricoeur, Paul, 150

INDEX

romantic love, 3–4, 12, 14, 92–99, 106, 109–14, 125; Aristophanes’ parable about, 110. See also economy of love; Biale, David; Brown, Joanne; Illouz, Eva Romanticism, 131, 146–47 Rosenzweig, Franz, xvi, xviii Rosenzweig, Israel, 169n9 sacred language, 14, 50–53, 56, 74–88, 142–43, 147, 183n76. See also semiotics; words-as-coins sacrifice, 10, 25, 31, 33, 197n55; sacrifice of body, 57–59; sacrifice for the homeland, 45, 70–72; sacrifice and narrative, 198n80; self-sacrifice, 33, 43–47, 57–59, 86, 129, 162, 173n70, 173n73. See also Judaism; martyrdom; Zionism Sadan, Dov, 93, 132, 150–51, 188n25, 191n64 Saussure, Ferdinand de, 14, 50–51, 55, 73–76, 79. See also sacred language; semiotics; words-as-coins Scholem, Gershom, xvi–xviii, 176n1 Segal, Hannah (and David Bell), 113, 117–18, 129, 190n50 semiotics 12–14, 56, 73, 76–77, 85, 161, 177n7. See also Barthes, Roland; Derrida, Jacques; GolombHoffman, Anne; money; Saussure, Ferdinand de; Shell, Marc; sign; Stern, Daniel; words-as-coins “The Sense of Smell,” 48–52, 74, 176n2, 194n11 Shell, Marc, 12, 73, 79, 176n2, 197n66 Shira, 194n7 Sholem Aleichem, 10, 170n24 sign, 9; money as a pure, relative, unmotivated sign, 14, 50–56, 73–85, 183n75; and system of signification, 38–39, 50–56, 73–85, 183n75. See also semiotics

Simmel, Georg, xiv–xviii, 14, 50, 65, 76, 162, 167n9. See also classical British economic theory; credit theory of money; German Historical School of Economics; money A Simple Story, xvii, 2, 14; Aristophanes’ parable, 110; Betrothed, 108; economic infrastructure of psychoanalysis in, 92, 95–97, 103–6, 111–29, 189n34; and the economy of love, 14, 29–30, 46, 96, 106, 108–25; endless consumption and accumulation based on inherent deficit, 101–6; “Hill of Sand,” 114; In the Prime of Her life, 108, 116, 191n62; Jewish economic activity, 97–106; libidinal economy, 96, 106, 108–25; love as asymmetrical exchange, 129; love as endless consumption, 106–11, 125; love as mercantile exchange, 114–15, 125; melancholy, 106–8, 110–13, 116, 122–25, 129, 188n31; mental break as bankruptcy, 117–23; “Metamorphosis,” 114, 194n10; mourning, 128–29; narcissism, 14, 111–19, 121, 123–129; poorhouse neurosis, 103–6; psychoanalytic theories of Jewish economic activity, 92, 97–106; theories of romantic love, 92–99, 106, 109–14, 125 Shaked, Gershon, 1, 65, 83, 89–90, 102–3, 121, 132–38, 160 Shaked, Malka, 117, 145–47 Shamir, Nitza, 99, 126 Shlonsky, Abraham, 9 Smolenskin, Peretz, 8 Sombart, Werner, xv, 168n12. See also anti-Semitism; capitalism; German Historical School of Economics; philo-Semitism; Weber, Max Stern, David, 183n75

INDEX

219

“The Tale of the Scribe,” xvii, 145–46 Talmud, 18, 159, 169n4, 196n39; Babylonian Talmud, 34–35, 54, 140, 146; Jerusalem Talmud, 54 Tamari, Meir, 19, 181n40 19, 179n35. See also asceticism; Diamond, Eliezer; divine economy; Hebrew Bible; Levin, Mordechai “Tehila,” 196n41 To this Day, xix, 136, 139, 163–66, 195n23, 200n8 “To Father’s House,” 198n75 trust, 5, 22, 37–39, 55; and divine economy, 23–32, 37–39, 40–47, 53–61, 84, 104, 172n19; Haskalah and Zionist critique of, 23, 45; language/ semiotics on, 37–39, 52, 81; and money, 37–39, 53, 74, 76, 106, 161; social trust, xiv, xv, 37, 76, 81. See also credit theory of money; divine economy; Marxist theory; money; Saussure, Ferdinand de “Twofold,” 155 usury, 11, 54, 62, 68, 105, 178n21, 185n98. See also Christianity; Jewish economic activity; Judaism; money value, 6, 9, 29, 32, 69; economic value, 16–18, 24–25, 53, 99–100, 120,

220

163–66; linguistic value, 9, 50, 73–91, 143–44; love as supreme value, 108–9; monetary value, xiii–xix, 9, 16–18, 53–57, 73–91, 103, 143–44; moral value, 24–25, 35; Nietzsche on, 24–25, 161; religious value, 9, 24–25, 35, 63, 69; Weber on, xv, 94, 168n12. See also anti-Semitism; capitalism; German Historical School of Economics; philoSemitism; Sombart, Werner. Weber, Max, xv, 94, 168n12 Weiss, Hillel, 174n50, 175n57 With Our Youth and with Our Aged, 1, 199n81 words-as-coins, 49–52, 73, 81–83, 143–44, 176n2 Yehoshua, A. B., 95, 107, 190n54, 193n83 Zionism, 11, 83–86, 88, 110; and economy, xv–xx, 6–7, 66–69, 181n52; Labor Zionism 6–7, 66–69; and literature, 9, 68; and Marxism, 72–73; and religion, 13, 45, 53, 55, 67, 70. See also Jewish economic activity; Judaism; modern Hebrew literature.

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