This is indeed a simple story, simply told, of events that are less than earth-shattering. It involves birth, marriage and death; matchmaking, love, commerce, travel to strange but not too distant places, religion, and a measure of scholarship; all the commonplace features...
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This is indeed a simple story, simply told, of events that are less than earth-shattering. It involves birth, marriage and death; matchmaking, love, commerce, travel to strange but not too distant places, religion, and a measure of scholarship; all the commonplace features of settled life as it moves through succeeding generations.
The setting is a fictionalized version of the author's birthplace, now Buchach, Ukraine, but at the time - along with the rest of Galicia - a backwater of the pre-World War I Austro-Hungarian Empire. The Russo-Japanese War and Dreyfus' acquittal provide noises off, dating the events described to about 1906, a couple of years before Agnon, at the age of 19, left Galicia for Palestine. He wrote the novel in 1935.
In common with many other central European towns and villages, Buchach was for several centuries prior to the Second World War a shtetl, a town dominated by a Jewish population whose way of life accorded with traditional Hebraic teaching. In A Simple Story, Agnon writes that the town had more than 15,000 people, of whom more than half were Jews. Rich or poor, master or servant, all the principal and all but a few minor characters in the novel are Jewish.
A large part of the interest of the novel derives from Agnon's portrayal of the shtetl way of life, which was permanently destroyed by the holocaust. The simple, deliberately naive tone adopted by the narrator is ideally suited to describing a life-style that was based on customs, traditions and inherited assumptions that, superficially at least, were accepted without close examination or question. Much of the legacy made a virtue of being antiquated, but the community was flexible enough to adapt to the times, and had probably always done so. Each generation prefers the ways in which things were done in its youth, or says it does; the novel suggests that where this relates to upholding family life, that may in fact be for the best.
A Simple Story is quiet, but thought provoking. The reader is liable to continue reflecting on it for some time after finishing it. Done well, simple requires an author of considerable but well-concealed sophistication. With this story, S Y Agnon provides an accomplished example. The afterword by translator Hillel Halkim offers a worthwhile bonus.
This is indeed a simple story, simply told, of events that are less than earth-shattering. It involves birth, marriage and death; matchmaking, love, commerce, travel to strange but not too distant places, religion, and a measure of scholarship; all the commonplace features of settled life as it moves through succeeding generations.
The setting is a fictionalized version of the author's birthplace, now Buchach, Ukraine, but at the time - along with the rest of Galicia - a backwater of the pre-World War I Austro-Hungarian Empire. The Russo-Japanese War and Dreyfus' acquittal provide noises off, dating the events described to about 1906, a couple of years before Agnon, at the age of 19, left Galicia for Palestine. He wrote the novel in 1935.
In common with many other central European towns and villages, Buchach was for several centuries prior to the Second World War a shtetl, a town dominated by a Jewish population whose way of life accorded with traditional Hebraic teaching. In A Simple Story, Agnon writes that the town had more than 15,000 people, of whom more than half were Jews. Rich or poor, master or servant, all the principal and all but a few minor characters in the novel are Jewish.
A large part of the interest of the novel derives from Agnon's portrayal of the shtetl way of life, which was permanently destroyed by the holocaust. The simple, deliberately naive tone adopted by the narrator is ideally suited to describing a life-style that was based on customs, traditions and inherited assumptions that, superficially at least, were accepted without close examination or question. Much of the legacy made a virtue of being antiquated, but the community was flexible enough to adapt to the times, and had probably always done so. Each generation prefers the ways in which things were done in its youth, or says it does; the novel suggests that where this relates to upholding family life, that may in fact be for the best.
A Simple Story is quiet, but thought provoking. The reader is liable to continue reflecting on it for some time after finishing it. Done well, simple requires an author of considerable but well-concealed sophistication. With this story, S Y Agnon provides an accomplished example. The afterword by translator Hillel Halkim offers a worthwhile bonus.
