THE SIGN

Autobiographical Essay by Shmuel Yosef Agnon, 1972

Shmuel Yosef Agnon's "The Sign" is an autobiographical essay thinly disguised as a short story. It reaches far back into Agnon's past. Agnon's work as a writer in the Hebrew language goes back to the turn of the twentieth century (his work in Yiddish goes back even further). Modern Hebrew literature at the turn of the twentieth century was informed and influenced by a language and literature from a religious tradition that was its only antecedent, although Modern Hebrew literature strove for secular goals. Agnon's first successes as a writer came during the earliest efforts to revive Hebrew as an active language.

Agnon left Poland for Palestine in 1907, during the Second Aliyah (second wave of modern Jewish immigration to Palestine). During this time Hebrew literature labored to be a connecting link between the disintegrating Jewish life in the Diaspora and the new society being developed in Palestine. He left Palestine in 1913 and settled in Germany but returned to Jerusalem in 1924 when the Nazis were on the horizon.

Agnon's work vacillates between two loci of struggle: Jewish life in Buczacz, Poland, and Jewish life in Palestine/Israel. He emphasizes the fragility of Jewish life in both locations but places great importance on the rituals of Judaism that give the Jewish community the strength to persevere.

"The Sign" begins with the Arab riots in Palestine in 1929, during which Agnon's home in Jerusalem is destroyed. At the same time he had heard that all the Jews in his hometown of Buczacz had been destroyed. He expresses a strong preference for the situation in Palestine: "With every sorrow I used to say how much better it was to live in the land of Israel than outside the land, for the Land of Israel has given us the strength to stand up for our lives, while outside the land we went to meet the enemy like sheep to the slaughter." Agnon laments that his European coreligionists reacted to the events of the Holocaust with a kind of defensive amnesia that disabled them from mounting any effective resistance to the monstrous persecution that engulfed them. Agnon prefers the more militant stance of Jews in Palestine and Israel in directly resisting their enemies.

Agnon recollects the holiday of Shavuot in terms of a dichotomy between bitter sorrow and needful celebration. He describes his new summer suit: it was a tradition to wear new clothes for the first time in the synagogue on a holiday. He discusses his amazement that he could celebrate a holiday while tens of thousands of his coreligionists were being killed in his hometown but maintains that religious celebration and ritual have given the Jews the strength to persevere through arduous hardships.

Agnon also reflects on the ritual candles in his contemporary House of Prayer that memorialize the victims of the genocide: "Six million Jews have been killed by the Gentiles, because of them a third of us are dead and two-thirds of us are orphans." He elucidates how his ties to Judaism are strengthened by reading the Jewish commandments every Shavuot as they were written down by Rabbi Solomon Ibn Gabriel. Agnon thereby links his religious ritual with his legendary penchant to be a bookworm.

—Peter R. Erspamer