Agnon and Flaubert: the conjunction is, at first blush, altogether unlikely. Their background and the kind of language in which each wrote could scarcely have been more different. Agnon, the commanding figure in Hebrew fiction in the twentieth century and the recipient of the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1966, grew up in an Orthodox Jewish home in Buczacz, Galicia, in the eastern end of the Hapsburg Empire. Yiddish was his first language, and he wrote a few stories and some poems in Yiddish when he was in his teens. He had no formal general education, but his mother read the classics of German literature with him, for German was the language of cultural prestige under the Hapsburgs, even where, as in Galicia, it was not the vernacular. In any case, the focus of his early education was on traditional Hebrew and Aramaic texts — the Bible, the Mishnah, the Talmud, Midrash, and the plethora of commentaries on all four of those hallowed works. He decisively turned from Yiddish to Hebrew because Hebrew was for him, as he wrote in one of his stories, “the language of all the generations that had gone before us and all the generations to come.” In keeping with this idea of the eternality of the language, the Hebrew that he wrote was essentially the Hebrew of the early rabbis in idiom, lexicon, and grammar, though it exhibited some elements of later strata of the language — but very few from modern Hebrew. To invoke a counter-factual analogue, it would strain the imagination to think of Flaubert writing in the French of the medieval fabliaux. One must add that Agnon, with scant exceptions, was repeatedly coy and evasive about his relation to European writers. He like to present himself as a traditional Hebrew teller of tales, which sometimes he was. The often proposed link with Kafka — especially after Agnon began writing dreamlike or surrealist stories in the 1930s — is a case in point. When he was asked, in an interview at the Schocken Library in Jerusalem after he received the Nobel Prize, whether he was influenced by Kafka, he was clearly nettled. “Kafka? Kafka?” he replied. “I have barely read one book by him.” (But how many books, after all, did Kafka write?) Then he added, archly, “Of course, my wife has the complete writings of Kafka on her shelf.” Agnon came to Palestine toward the end of his teens, in 1908, and stayed in the port city of Jaffa. During this time, adapting to the secular Zionist milieu there, he abandoned religious observance. In 1913 he went to Germany, evidently with the intention of immersing himself in European culture as an autodidact — reading through all the books in a large library, as he extravagantly claimed to Gershom Scholem, who became his friend during his German sojourn. At some point in this period, he returned to Orthodox practice, which he would maintain until the end of his life. Scholem shrewdly observed in an interview on Israeli television after the writer’s death that art was paramount for Agnon and that he was attached to religion because it served his purposes as an artist, his outward devotion to ritual and Jewish law confirming, among other things, the finely crafted rabbinic prose in which he wrote. Early during his decade in Germany that ended with a return to Palestine, Agnon discovered Flaubert. On December 17, 1916, in a letter to Zalman Schocken, the department store magnate who had become his patron, he wrote: “Flaubert and everything about him touch me deeply. He is a poet who mortified himself in the tent of poetry…. It is fitting for every writer to read about him before he writes and after he writes. Then no book would be blighted.” (All the translations from the Hebrew and the French are mine.) Note that he speaks of reading about Flaubert, not of reading him. The phrase, “mortified himself in the tent of poetry,” plays on the rabbinic “mortified himself in the tent of Torah,” suggesting a certain equivalence between the two, that is, between the devotion to the sacred text and the devotion to art. In calling the French writer a “poet,” Agnon is thinking of the German Dichter, which can refer to anyone using language creatively. The allusion to the French writer’s biography reflects one important way in which Flaubert was important for him. The stories that he had written in Jaffa certainly evinced a prodigious talent, but the lyric prose used for them was often excessively florid. Flaubert, with the many hundreds of draft pages that he honed down to the compact masterpiece that was Madame Bovary, showed Agnon what a serious writer needed to do. In fact, during his German years, Agnon took many of the stories that he had written during the first six years of his career and extensively pruned them — with a Flaubertian discipline, one might say. In a few instances he reduced an effusive paragraph to a single telling sentence of six or seven words. The result was beautifully concise fiction of the first order of originality. Yet it is inconceivable that Agnon would not have read Madame Bovary and in all likelihood Trois contes, or Three Tales, though perhaps not The Sentimental Education, arguably Flaubert’s most original book. His closest connection with Flaubert is his novel A Simple Story, published in 1935. Four years earlier, the first Hebrew translation of Madame Bovary, by the short-story writer Devorah Baron, had appeared, and after his early acquaintance with the German version Agnon surely would have at least leafed through it and probably read it all the way through. Thus, as he began work on A Simple Story, Flaubert’s novel would have been relatively fresh in his mind. The connection between the two books has been duly noticed in Hebrew criticism, which for the most part emphasizes themes and social setting. What may be more instructive in regard to the cross-fertilization between literatures is
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