The Parable and Its Lesson

by S.Y. Agnon, Alan Mintz (Introduction), James Diamond (Translator)

S.Y. Agnon was the greatest Hebrew writer of the twentieth century, and the only Hebrew writer to receive the Nobel Prize for literature. He devoted the last years of his life to writing a massive cycle of stories about Buczacz, the Galician town (now in Ukraine) in which he grew up. Yet when these stories were collected and published three years after Agnon's death, few took notice. Years passed before the brilliance and audacity of Agnon's late project could be appreciated.

The Parable and Its Lesson is one of the major stories from this work. Set shortly after the massacres of hundreds of Jewish communities in the Ukraine in 1648, it tells the tale of a journey into the Netherworld taken by a rabbi and his young assistant. What the rabbi finds in his infernal journey is a series of troubling theological contradictions that bear on divine justice. Agnon's story gives us a fascinating window onto a community in the throes of mourning its losses and reconstituting its spiritual, communal, and economic life in the aftermath of catastrophe. There is no question that Agnon wrote of the 1648 massacres out of an awareness of the singular catastrophic massacre of his own time—the Holocaust.

James S. Diamond has provided an extensive set of notes to make it possible for today's reader to grasp the rich cultural world of the text. The introduction and interpretive essay by Alan Mintz illuminate Agnon's grand project for recreating the life of Polish Jewry, and steer the reader through the knots and twists of the plot.

Genres: Fiction

178 pages, Kindle Edition

First published January 1, 1973

About the author

also known as Shai Agnon

Dramatic novels in Hebrew of Polish-born Israeli writer Shmuel Yosef Agnon include A Guest for the Night (1939); he shared the Nobel Prize of 1966 for literature.

"For his profoundly characteristic narrative art with motifs from the life of the Jewish people," he shared this award with Nelly Sachs. He died in Jerusalem, Israel.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shmuel_...

Reviews

[Marc Gerstein · Rating 5 out of 5]

Rather say this is a five-star work, let me say five stars with an asterisk.

I’m not a fan of books that are incomprehensible, or comprehensible only with extreme effort. usually I rank them one-star. But I’m making an exception here because there is so much substance. It also helps that it’s very short, even by novella standards.

The story itself really isn’t much. The point it makes is about how terrible it is to talk during the course of jewish religious services, and especially during the reading of the Torah. There’s a side bit about an effort to rescue a young bride from the state of limbo in not knowing whether her vanished husband is dead 9she can remarry) or alive (she can’t). And the main action is set shortly after a major 1648 pogrom in Eastern Europe.

But there are far deeper layers here. to provide a sense of how deep, I’ll just say that a little more than half of the already-short Kindle version of the book consists of an Introduction and a critical essay about the work. Unraveling this takes patience and, I suspect, a strong familiarity with ultra-orthodox Jewish patterns of thought, speech, and discussion. I can relate to that because of family background. If you have this sort of background, dive in and see where it goes. If not, I suggest passing on this (and I suspect this may account for the scarcity of Goodreads treatment for a work by a Nobel Prize winning author).

[Pep Bonet · Rating 3 out of 5]

Not an easy book. The fact that it takes the same amount of pages to explain the book as the book itself is telling. Retrospective view on the Jewish village of Buczacz, in Polish Galitzia and a number of stories told in the old Jewish flourishing way. It's like reading anthropology through a series of very short stories linked to be a novella.