Table of Contents Acknowledgments Alan Lelchuck Introduction Bibliographic Note Uri Nissan Gnessin Chapter one Chapter two Chapter three Yosef Haim Brenner Chapter one Chapter two Chapter three Chapter four Chapter five Chapter six Chapter seven Chapter eight Chapter nine Chapter ten Yitzhak Shami Chapter one Chapter two Chapter three Chapter four Chapter five Chapter six Chapter seven Chapter eight Chapter nine Chapter ten S.Y. Agnon Chapter one David Fogel Chapter one Amos Oz Chapter one Chapter two Chapter three Chapter four Chapter five Chapter six Chapter seven Chapter eight Chapter nine Chapter ten Chapter eleven Chapter twelve Chapter thirteen Yehoshua Kenaz Chapter one A.B. Yehoshua Chapter one About the Editors Eight Great Hebrew Short Novels EDITED BY Alan Lelchuk and Gershon Shaked WITH AN INTRODUCTION BY Alan Lelchuk The Toby Press The Toby Press Third Revised Edition, 2009 The Toby Press llc POB 8531, New Milford, CT 06776-8531, USA & POB 2455, London W1A 5WY, England www.tobypress.com Copyright © 1983 by Alan Lelchuk and Gershon Shaked Introduction Copyright © 1983 by Alan Lelchuk The Toby Press thanks The Institute for the Translation of Hebrew Literature for their kind assistance in the preparation of this revised edition. All translations are © The Institute for the Translation of Hebrew Literature, except as noted below. SIDEWAYS, by Uri Nissan Gnessin. First published in Hebrew in ha-Z’man, 1905. English translation by Hillel Halkin, copyright © 1983 NERVES, by Yosef Haim Brenner. First published in Hebrew in Shalekhet, Revivim, 1910–11. English translation by Hillel Halkin, copyright © 1983 THE VENGEANCE OF THE FATHERS, by Yitzhak Shami. First published in Hebrew by Mitzpe, 1928. English translation by Richard Flantz, copyright © 1983 IN THE PRIME OF HER LIFE, by S.Y. Agnon. First published in Hebrew in ha-Tekufah, 1922. Translated from the Hebrew by permission of Schocken Publishing House, Ltd. English translation by Gabriel Levin, copyright © 1983, revised © 2004 FACING THE SEA, by David Fogel. First published in Hebrew in Mitzpe: A Yearbook, ed. F. Lachover, 1933, and reprinted in Siman Kriah, 1974. Reprinted by permission of Siman Kriah, English translation by Daniel Silverstone, copyright © 1983 by Daniel Silverstone. THE HILL OF EVIL COUNSEL, by Amos Oz, copyright © 1976 by Amos Oz and Am Oved Publishers, Ltd. English translation by Nicholas de Lange, copyright © 1978 by Amos Oz. Reprinted by permission of Harcourt, Inc. MUSICAL MOMENT, by Yehoshua Kenaz. First published in Hebrew in Siman Kriah, 1978. English translation by Betsy Rosenberg, copyright © 1983, revised © 2004 (based on fifth edition of Musical Moment published in 2001 by Kibbutz Hameuchad/Hasifria Hahadasha) THE CONTINUING SILENCE OF THE POET, by A.B. Yehoshua. First published in Hebrew in Keshetb, 1966. English translation published in THREE DAYS AND A CHILD, Doubleday, 1970, copyright © 1970, A.B. Yehoshua. English translation by Miriam Arad, copyright © 1970 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles or reviews. This is a collection of fiction. The characters, incidents, and dialogues are products of the authors’ imagination and are not to be construed as real. Any resemblance to actual events or persons, living or dead is entirely coincidental. ISBN 978 1 59264 112 3, paperback A cip catalogue record for this title is available from the British Library Typeset in Garamond by KPS Printed and bound in the United States In memory of Philip Rahav, Ya’akov Shabtai Contents Introduction by Alan Lelchuk, xi Bibliographic Note, xxv Uri Nissan Gnessin, Sideways, 1 Yosef Haim Brenner, Nerves, 35 Yitzhak Shami, The Vengeance of the Fathers, 79 S.Y. Agnon, In the Prime of her Life, 213 David Fogel, Facing the Sea, 273 Amos Oz, The Hill of Evil Counsel, 335 Yehoshua Kenaz, Musical Moment, 409 A.B. Yehoshua, The Continuing Silence of a Poet, 455 About the Editors, 497 Acknowledgments We gratefully acknowledge the services and the support of The Institute for the Translation of Hebrew Literature, and the many kindnesses of Nilli Cohen. Our thanks to other friends who aided this project: Yehuda Melzer, Gabriel Levin, Amos Oz, Menahem Brinker, and A.B. Yehoshua. Alan Lelchuck Introduction These eight short novels were selected primarily for their literary merit, not for their historical place in Hebrew literature, and our emphasis will be on their literary qualities. The assumption, of course, is that they hold up admirably according to the highest standards of world literature. Our aim is to draw attention specifically to these outstanding writers and their distinct contributions in the novella form, without bolstering them, as it were, with that background of politics or sociology that has often been used, if not as apologetics, at least as explanation, for much of Israeli literature. That form of approach, or sentimental parti pris, conceived by well-intentioned friends of Israel and Hebrew literature, has, we fear, in the end done only a disservice to the literature. For it has instilled in many readers the suspicion that Hebrew fiction must be read in the context of its literary youth, against the backdrop of the country’s especially hard-pressed condition. In other words, that Hebrew literature exists with an asterisk alongside it, signifying that it cannot and should not be considered independent of the fact of Israel’s birth over five decades ago. This anthology seeks to correct that false view. Perhaps another misconception to be dissolved immediately for the general reader is that modern Hebrew literature is a recent phenomenon. Not so. As we can see even from this selection of works, the literature predates the state by at least five decades. Nor was it confined, in place of origin, to that sliver of land alongside the Mediterranean. In fact, most early Hebrew literature was composed in Poland, Russia, Germany, Austria, and Czechoslovakia… . This geography is significant in literary terms, for it means that many of the artists here—Gnessin, Brenner, Agnon, Fogel— were writing within the vital atmosphere of European literary modernism, and not in provincial isolation. In both theme and style, their works frequently reflect elements of modernism and reveal the dramatic sophistication of these artists. The strain of sophistication may be viewed in such an unlikely case as that of Uri N. Gnessin (1879–1913), whose background would suggest a particular insularity and literary innocence. Son of a rabbi in the Ukraine and a student at his father’s yeshiva, Gnessin spent practically his whole life in the shtetl of Potchep, traveling to Palestine for a few months in 1908 to visit his brother and departing with a distaste for the primitive land and crude society. Yet Gnessin, whose major reputation rests basically on four novellas, was anything but a literary provincial, as Sideways indicates. He handled the stream-of-consciousness technique, for example, with easy efficiency at about the same time that Joyce was making it famous. And in several of Gnessin’s themes—the lonely fate of the intellectual, the vacuum of belief after the loss of faith in God, the protagonist who sees what must be changed for his happiness but lacks the will to do anything—Gnessin shows himself to be a self-conscious modern. For Gnessin, despite his narrow background, was much more interested in the soul of man than the social reality of the Jews. To be sure, this reclusive figure who forms one point of the triad that was the base for modern Hebrew literature—the other two being Brenner and Agnon—was more of an aesthete and purist than a cheder boy. Dead at thirty-three of tuberculosis, Gnessin surely needed more years to develop his brand of neo-Romanticism, with its muted but clearly felt eroticism and its poignant portrait of the intellectual’s ennui and ineffectiveness. Yet his four novellas are achievement enough. In certain ways he is the most unique writer in our collection—a sensitive stylist who hardly ever left White Russia yet whose work was suffused with the most advanced techniques and themes of Continental literature. An unfinished writer, he nevertheless exerted a large influence over later Hebrew writers, notably S. Yizhar, who some fifty years later adopted Gnessin’s style in his huge novel of the War of Independence, The Days of Ziklag (1958), and still later, by another two decades, Ya’akov Shabtai, in his important novel Time Continuous (1979). Gnessin, meanwhile, had his own influences. Indeed, when a character says, in the low-key Sideways, sensitively and skillfully translated by Hillel Halkin, “Why is it so boring around here, it’s always so boring? And we’re bores too,” the reader hears vividly the distant melancholic melodies of a Chekhov play. Or again, when the hero Hagzar is out walking: “The cries of the crows assailed and stunned him, told him with a bitter vengeance that people like him could never take what life offered them, had no business living at all. Ka-a, ka-a, ka-a.” Now we are in the midst of one of Chekhov’s later masterpieces in the novella. Yet certainly Sideways affords its own charm and power, in its careful delineation of the three Baer sisters, the fine cadences and perceptions filling the deliberate style, the social reality of Jewish village life. Of course the story rises or falls with the protagonist, and here Gnessin is entirely successful. Nahum Hagzar is a moving portrait of the stymied scholar and critic, a self-defeating creature of morbidity and asceticism, whose closest literary brother may be George Gissing’s Edwin Reardon of New Grub Street.