The Home Town As Mother

Chapter 1 The Home Town as Mother

Shmuel Yosef Czaczkes, later known as Agnon, was born on August 7, 1887 in the Jewish shtetl of Buczacz on the River Strypa, in the Tarnopol district of the province of Galicia, then part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. The town had been founded in the fourteenth century by Polish noblemen, and Jews began to live there in the late-fifteenth or early-sixteenth century. From the tenth to the fourteenth century, Galicia had been part of the principality of Volhynia, which had been conquered by the Kievan king Vladimir Sviatoslav- ich1 and called Vladimeria or Lodomeria. In the thirteenth century Galicia was conquered by the marauding Mongols; in the fourteenth century it became part of the kingdom of Poland. Over the centuries, Galicia became more or less synonymous with Lodomeria.2 Jews immigrated to the kingdom of Poland-Lithuania, including Galicia, from Germany and other parts of Central Europe from late medieval and Early Modern times. They lived among the Poles and Ukrainians, while forming their own distinct communities. Americans are used to cities and towns having a single name. This was not the case in multicultural Eastern Europe, where several ethnic groups and cultures shared the same town, and each had its own name for it. A case in point was the capital of the Austrian province of East Galicia. The German speakers and the Jews called it Lemberg, the Poles called it Lwów and the Ukrainians Lviv.3 Austrian Lemberg was an important center of Jewish culture, home to several Yiddish and Hebrew periodicals and the celebrated University of Lemberg.4 Two major Jewish figures in international law studied there: Hersch Lauterpacht,5 who coined the term “war crimes” and was a member of the United Nations International Law Commission and a judge of the International Court of Justice, and Raphael Lemkin,6 who coined the term “genocide” and pushed for the United Nations to adopt the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide.7

1 Vladimir Sviatoslavich the Great (died 1015), medieval king of Kievan Rus. 2 Kratter 1786; Hann & Magocsi 2005; Wolff 2010. 3 Hrytsak 2000. 4 Later the Polish Jan Kazimierz university. 5 Hersch Lauterpacht (1897–1960), Austrian-Galician-born Jewish jurist. 6 Raphael (Rafał) Lemkin (1900–1959), Russian-Polish-born Jewish jurist. 7 Sands 2016.

The Home Town as Mother 23

For the young Agnon, who came from the small town of Buczacz, Lemberg was the big city of his youth. During most of the nineteenth century, Lemberg was the capital of the Austrian province of East Galicia, whose population was mostly Ukrainian. In addition to the Poles and the Ukrainians, there was a large Jewish population. Galicia was one of the world’s largest centers of Jewish life. By the end of the nineteenth century there were hundreds of thousands of Jews in Galicia; in 1914 their number was over eight hundred thousand. The wars changed Galicia’s geopolitical status. After the First World War, Galicia, including Buczacz, was restored to Poland; after the Second World War, East Galicia became part of Ukraine. Dominick LaCapra8 has shown that collective history and collective trauma are closely linked. The Jews reacted to the traumatic destruction of their Second Temple and their holy city of Jerusalem by the Romans in 70 ce, by developing psychogeographical fantasies, which included viewing European countries in terms of Biblical Hebrew ones. The persecuted medieval Jews gave the Biblical Hebrew name Ashkenaz to Germany; they called France Tsarefat and Spain Sepharad, Biblical names that had nothing to do with the European countries they were applied to. Jewry became divided into “Ashkenazi” and “Sephardic” groups. The Polish Jews, having emigrated from the German-speaking lands, brought their Jewish-German language, Yiddish,9 and their “Ashkenazi” Jewish culture with them. This included an Orthodox Judaism that stressed learning and piety. The Galician Jews were essentially Polish Jews who had become Austrian citizens.10 During the nineteenth century, the political, economic, and cultural life of the Austrian Jews, the majority of whom were Galician, steadily improved; by the time of Agnon’s birth in 1887 a Jewish intellectual and cultural movement called haskalah11 had developed. This movement, which sought to break out of the narrow confines of Jewish religious tradition and into the wide world of European languages, culture, and science, as well as Hebrew language and Jewish history, enjoyed steady growth in Galicia. The Maskilim or “enlightened” Jews rejected Jewish tradition in favor of modern learning. They also favored Hebrew over Yiddish, and there was a revival of Hebrew writing. Like most Eastern European Jews, however, the Galician Jews spoke Yiddish, while the non-Jews around them spoke Polish,

8 Dominick LaCapra (born 1939), American-born historian of European intellectual history. 9 The Jewish pronunciation of the German word jüdisch; it was also called iwri-teutsch (Hebrew German). 10 Genesis 10:3; Yerushalmi 1982; Falk 1996, pp. 364–365; LaCapra 2000. 11 A Hebrew word meaning “education” or “enlightenment.”