My Life As a Dog

When S.Y. Agnon published “Only Yesterday” in 1945 at the age of 58, he had been writing fiction for almost four decades and had been regarded as the virtually undisputed Hebrew modern master for a quarter of a century. Hebrew critics and readers, however, were only beginning to develop a just sense of the radical nature of his enterprise as a writer. Taken in by the stylistic ventriloquism of tradition enacted in his prose and by the seeming piety of many of his subjects, they often clung to a notion of Agnon as a latter-day teller of pious tales, artfully channeling the voices of the early rabbis. In fact, a good deal of his writing from its earliest phases had been devoted to a probing psychological realism, with special attention given to the deflections and failures of male sexuality. And early in the 1930s, he began writing weirdly disjunctive surreal stories of an aggressively modernist caste.

By 1945, Agnon had published several volumes of short stories and novellas, and three novels: “The Bridal Canopy” (1931), a frame-story with multiple inset tales set in 18th century Galicia (the Eastern province of the Austro-Hungarian Empire where he grew up); “A Simple Story” (1935), a Flaubert-esque representation of frustrated desire and social constraint in turn-of-the-century Jewish Galicia; and “A Guest for the Night” (1938), a symbol-fraught narrative meditation on the irrevocable dwindling of East European Jewish life in the wake of World War I.

None of this could have entirely prepared readers for the scathing vision of God and man, Zionism and Jewish history, desire and guilt, language and meaning of “Only Yesterday.” Though Agnon would go on to write much of compelling interest during his remaining 25 years, this would be his masterpiece--a novel that deserves comparison with Kafka’s “The Trial,” Mann’s “The Magic Mountain” and Hermann Broch’s “The Sleepwalkers” as a deployment of the resources of fiction for plumbing those abysses of cultural and personal crisis that haunted so many imaginations in the modernist period. Its appearance in English now, delayed for half a century by the formidable difficulties of translating its Hebrew, makes available to American readers a work of powerful, and eccentric, originality.

Isaac Kumer, the novel’s young protagonist, makes his way from his native Galicia to Palestine around 1907 (the period of Agnon’s immigration). From the opening lines, the ironic narrator marks Isaac as an incorrigible naif coming to the Land of Israel “to build it from its destruction and to be rebuilt by it,” imagining the country in the language of a Zionist idyll as “a blessed dwelling place . . . its inhabitants blessed by God . . . villages hidden in the shade of vineyards, the fields enveloped in grains” and much more of the same. In fact, what Isaac will encounter in the land is a blistering, implacable sun and physical wretchedness and squalor, bickering and rivalry among the Zionists in Jaffa and venomous fanaticism among the ultra-Orthodox of Jerusalem. In the end, he will build nothing and meet a personal fate of destruction, not construction.

This sketch of the plot may suggest its affiliation with a number of major 19th century novels and ultimately with “Don Quixote,” which lies behind them. Isaac’s youthful idealistic attachment to Zionism is not unlike the youthful Bonapartist idealism of Stendhal’s Fabrice in “The Charterhouse of Parma,” an idealism subjected to jolting revision by Fabrice’s encounter with the reality of war at Waterloo. Several traits, however, set Agnon’s novel apart from its 19th century antecedents. To begin with, its protagonist is passive, malleable, hopelessly incapable of asserting any sustained effort of will or self-reflection. Among the secular Zionists in Jaffa, Isaac sloughs off the regimen of Jewish observance in which he was raised. Among the Orthodox in Jerusalem, he gradually lapses back into Orthodoxy. In Jaffa, a worldly young woman named Sonya takes him by the hand and makes him her lover. In Jerusalem, a fortuitous encounter with a pious young woman named Shifra soon leads him to imagine himself as her tradition-sanctioned bridegroom, despite the hostility he arouses in the community around her.

“Only Yesterday” manifests, moreover, a peculiar mixture of modes. It resembles other ambitious modernist novels in working out its themes through an elaborate tracery of recurring motifs: Isaac’s perturbations of heart and spirit over eros, family, faith, self-realization. Zionist and bourgeois values are intimated through a highly inventive deployment of reiterated motifs such as shoes, feet, food, water, painting and, above all, dogs. (This motif-structure is nicely illuminated by the eminent Israeli novelist Amos Oz in “The Silence of Heaven,” a lively appreciation of Agnon in which the centerpiece is an episode-by-episode discussion of “Only Yesterday.”) What may seem contradictory is that this modernist fondness for architectonic patterns is coupled with a narrative strategy for encompassing the historical panorama that is anecdotal, associative, and at times ambling.

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Benjamin Harshav, in his astute introduction to the novel, plausibly aligns this peculiarity of fictional method with the lateral movement, the fondness for local effect and verbal performance, of what he calls Jewish discourse. In the Hebrew, the anecdotal aspect of the writing is carried off by the sheer magic of the style, shaped by the language of the early rabbis, by the rich and subtle texture of its ironic allusions to countless classical Jewish sources, the resourceful wit and charm of the language. Barbara Harshav (who is married to Benjamin Harshav) has done a heroic job in trying to convey this in the English translation, but the fundamental problem is that there is no English equivalent to Rabbinic Hebrew, 15 centuries removed yet intimately close for the literate Hebrew reader, a language that is supple and at times delicately lyrical. She does succeed in conveying the flagrantly archaic character of Agnon’s prose but, in literally reproducing verb tenses, idioms and word-choices from the Hebrew, she risks a stylistic oddness that could be an obstacle for the English reader. In any case, it would require the technical resources of a James Joyce or a Vladimir Nabokov to invent a really effective English counterpart to Agnon’s prose, and Harshav’s translation truly shines in the crucial long sections of the novel devoted to the point of view of the dog Balak.

That point of view in turn reflects another aspect of mixed modes in “Only Yesterday”: its veering from social realism to the grotesque and the fantastic and then, through this stretch of absurdist comedy, to a wrenching tragic conclusion. In the Jaffa section of the novel, we remain within the framework of class relations, social behavior and distinctive individual character familiar from the 19th century realist novel and often evoked by Agnon with an extraordinary economy of notation. Here, for example, is how we learn of Sonya’s sexual initiation in urban Russia, before her immigration to Palestine: “Sonya thought about three or four fellows she had come across in the Land, and also about one Russian journalist, a friend of her father who taught her Hebrew, who would take his rings off his fingers when he was about to embrace her.” One swift clause tells us all we need to know about her social milieu and upbringing and about the showy unsavory character of her seducer with his multiplicity of rings. The Russian journalist’s fastidiousness, moreover, in removing the rings before embracing her resonates with an adjacent passage in which, after Sonya stands on the shoes of her departing lover Rabinowitz to kiss him, he takes out a handkerchief to restore the shoes’ pristine shine. One already begins to understand why Sonya feels an inclination toward the shy and virginal Isaac, and perhaps also why she will eventually become bored with him.

Midway through the novel, the narrative suddenly skids off these beautifully oiled realist tracks into another kind of fiction. Isaac, working as a house painter in Jerusalem, comes across a stray dog. On a seeming whim he dips his brush into the bucket and drizzles onto the dog’s back the Hebrew word kelev, “dog,” to which, on a second impulse, he adds meshuga, “crazy.” The narrative point of view then switches to the dog, who first feels the cool drops on his skin, then ponders what it’s all about, then is utterly disconcerted when the denizens of Meah Shearim, the Orthodox quarter that is his home, either flee from him or pelt him with stones and other hard objects. Much of this is quite funny, as when the shopkeepers bombard him with the fraudulent weights they use for weighing out merchandise:

” . . . [Balak, the dog] inferred that the court had sent to examine the weights. He started shouting Arf, Arf, I can’t swallow all the defective weights and conceal them from the agents of the court. If the weights weighed as much as they should, they would have killed him, but the Holy-One-Blessed-Be-He had compassion on the dog and made them light. The dog shouted, Where is Heaven? Your sons have sinned and I am beaten.”

As Balak’s last words here suggest (the phrase--”Where is Heaven?”--actually means “Alas, O Heaven”), he has an indignant sense of cosmic injustice and is much involved in issues of theology. Altogether, he is the most engaging character in the novel. He is introspective and intellectually determined in ways that Isaac--in part, but only in part, his alter ego--is not. Occasionally, he speaks in rhyming prose (nicely rendered by Barbara Harshav) and even composes a poem, which ends with appropriately canine resonance: “All over the land / No one passing now / All flesh is silent / Bow wow wow.” At one point, he dabbles in cosmology, tracing an utterly grotesque tale of origins involving a primordial dog, camel and vulture. Actuated by a strong sense of tradition, he knows, as though he had learned it from a doggy Mishnah, that it is a dog’s sacred obligation to arise in the second watch of the night and howl. He is desolated by his “exile” from Meah Shearim, and he is saddened to have to abandon the kosher scraps of the Jewish butchers for the abominations of the Gentiles in foreign parts of the city.

From one angle, Balak is a kind of canine Job. Suffering overtakes him suddenly and inexplicably, and as he is chased from pillar to post, he becomes obsessed with the idea that he has to uncover the truth about his bitter destiny and that the house painter must be the one who holds the secret. When he again meets Isaac near the end of the novel, the encounter will have dire consequences for Isaac. Beyond this dog’s fate, terrible suffering for no evident reason abounds in the world of the novel, which through its landscape of maimed and dying figures poses hard questions about God’s supposed justice.

What makes “Only Yesterday” endlessly fascinating, and stubbornly resistant to any neat interpretation, is that Balak is a tightly wound bundle of contradictory thematic and symbolic strands. Dogs run rife through the novel, and they don’t all mean the same thing. This dog whose fate is joined with Isaac’s proves to be a seeker, a resolute reasoner and a kind of poet. Elsewhere, the Talmudic association between dog and the evil impulse is invoked. There is a dog with a stick in its mouth embroidered on the cover of Sonya’s distinctly erotic bed (Agnon was an assiduous reader of Freud). Another dog is the loyal companion of Yohanan Light Foot, a kind of secular bohemian saint who befriends Isaac in Jaffa. The grim Talmudic denunciation, “the face of the generation is like the face of a dog,” is heard in the rantings of a Meah Shearim preacher, and Agnon on his part takes care to suggest repulsively canine features in the two most egregious religious fanatics in the book. At one point, a chapter of reported speculations about the meaning of Balak is served up, as if to preempt, by way of parody in advance, any allegorical readings of the novel.

Balak’s inscription and name are a junction of confusions. As the narrator points out, not only is Balak perfectly sane when he gets labeled by Isaac, but proper usage would require “mad dog,” not “crazy dog.” His name, too, is a mistake: a Gentile school principal, with a rather imperfect idea of Hebrew, reads the three consonants of kelev backward, that is, from left to right, and so comes out with “Balak,” the name of the Moabite king who sought to destroy Israel in the Book of Numbers. This gross blunder does not prevent the narrator from proceeding to adopt Balak as the dog’s fixed name. What, we are led to ponder, is the relation between word and referent, between language and reality? The last bizarre turn of the plot raises further questions about whether language is merely arbitrary or uncannily causal.

There is wry humor in all this, but it gets blacker and blacker as the novel nears its end. The reader is reminded that the protagonist bears the same name as the biblical Isaac, who was bound upon an altar to be slaughtered by his own father. Agnon, too, in a shattering account of the death agony of his Isaac, has him bound with ropes--like a dog--as he writhes in the torments of the disease that has overtaken him just when he imagined he was on the threshold of a kind of happiness. “Finally, his pained soul passed away and he returned his spirit to the God of spirits for whom there is no joke and no frivolity.”

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What are we to make of this absurdist Akedah, this Binding of Isaac, with no providentially intervening angel? Is the pronouncement about the God who tolerates no frivolity, a gesture of theodicy, a condemnation of Isaac’s lack of moral weight or rather a condemnation of God’s implacability? The aftermath of the death of the hero, adumbrated in the last two pages of the novel, is as ambiguous as the death itself. The long drought, repeatedly invoked in all its desiccating fierceness, is at last broken by torrential rains, and the parched land revives. Is this, then, a sacrificial death, required to fructify the land, and if that is the case, could this “God of spirits” really be the same as the God of the Bible and Jewish tradition? Or are we to take this as a parody of the pagan notion of a fertility sacrifice, the last cosmic turn of the screw of irony?

“Only Yesterday” is a deeply troubling, spiritually unblinking novel that conjures up a richly imagined founding moment in Zionist history. We are fortunate at last to have it in English.