Resumo de Book That Was Lost And Other Stories

In the title story of these of stories by Shmuel Yosef Agnon, the writer tells of his efforts to send the manuscript of a commentary on the Shulkhan Arukh from Buczacz, Galicia, to Jerusalem. Eager to find an audience for the unknown but brilliant commentary of which he has the only known copy, the writer saves his pennies for postage, bundles up the manuscript, and dispatches it to the National Library in Jerusalem for safekeeping. Years later, he wistfully discovers that despite his concerted efforts, the book has been lost. Agnon's goal in this short story proves an apt symbol for the intentions of Mintz and Golomb Hoffman in compiling this book. As the editors themselves observe, in "A Book that Was Lost," Agnon uses the "narrative frame of the story to construct a home for the lost book which never makes it to the new national library of the Jewish people." Likewise, Mintz and Golomb Hoffman use the well-known format of the critical edition to bring Agnon home to the English reader to make sure the vastly imaginative and multiform work of Agnon is never lost.
The density of Agnon's biblical, talmudic and midrashic allusions, his linguistic and stylistic ingenuity, his historical layering and poetic patterning have lead many to disparage the very idea of Agnon Anglicized. As Cynthia Ozick has written, what can "a poor non-Hebraist possibly make of Agnon when, willy-nilly, it is stripped of a quarter or a half of its texture and substance, when the brilliant leaves are shaken off the spare, bare, naked-toed trunk?"
Like the great modernists, James Joyce and William Faulkner, Agnon explores the universal anxieties and dislocations of modernity, using particular regional or religious materials. As in the case of Joyce and Faulkner, whose local references and experimental techniques are often best appreciated when accompanied by explanatory or interpretive notes, readers of Agnon's fiction need to be tutored in the culture and idiom in which he writes in order to appreciate the subtle intricacies of his art.
To read Agnon in translation with the help of essays and notes is to read him from a remove, from an exilic distance which many of his own protagonists occupy. Much of the fiction in this new collection deals with loss, with miscommunication and alienation. Traditional and modern alike, Agnon's characters often hover in a liminal zone between Diaspora and the Land of Israel, between exile and homecoming. In one story, a writer wanders "from lodging to lodging," ultimately leaving an Eden-like home in the countryside to return to a squalid apartment in Tel Aviv, where the landlord's sick child continually pokes him in the eye and kicks him in the stomach. In "The Tale of the Scribe," a pious scribe and his wife fail to observe the sacred commandment of "be fruitful and multiply," because their quest for righteousness itself thwarts their sexual union. In one of his most famous stories, the folktale-like "Fable of the Goat," a son follows a magical goat to Eretz-Israel and then sends the goat to his ill father with a note appended to his ear, instructing his father to follow the goat back to the Holy Land. The father, desperate over the loss of his son, slaughters the offending goat, only to find the note when it is too late. The disconsolate father thus lives out his days in bitter exile.
The sense of something not being quite fulfilled in translation, is cousin, then, to the frustration and alienation experienced by many of Agnon's protagonists. There are many books of Agnon, the translated version being just one more. The lost son, the lost book, the lost opportunity, the lost marriage, the lost sense of meaning and immediacy in all of these stories and instances of loss, something else of Agnon is found.

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