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Two Tales
Two tales of love. "Betrothed" portrays a teacher, whose love for the sea and all that it holds leads him to the town of Jaffa. Though many pursue him, Rechnitz eschews romantic love for his studies until he can no longer resist. The second tale, "Edo and Enam," is set after World War II in Jerusalem and considers how love evolves throughout the course of a marriage.The Wisconsin edition is not for sale in the Republic of Ireland, South Africa, or the traditional British Commonwealth (excluding Canada.)
160 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1966
About the author
S.Y. Agnon
125 books106 followersalso 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_...
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_...
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Displaying 1 - 15 of 15 reviews
April 23, 2018
I don't think I *got* this book. This was my first Agnon book, and I wanted to read him for a while. These stories seemed interesting, but there's a lot that's obviously beneath the surface that I didn't get. I also feel like I lost a lot in translation, so I'm going to try to read this in the original Hebrew. I'm going to continue to read Agnon in the attempt to get beneath the surface. I really liked this book, but just didn't get it.
May 23, 2021
Denser that I had anticipated but gorgeous, allegorical and other-worldly. Two novellas published together in English to celebrate Agnon's recent Nobel Prize in 1966. The first story The Betrothed is the longer one, set in Jaffa before the first world war. It reveals a society that feels mostly unrecorded, at least in English. There was a whole Jewish world going on in pre-Mandate Palestine. I should know more about this world, but I may have to read more Agnon to discover it in literature.
April 19, 2017
Two Tales
Betrothed & Edo and Enam
By Shmuel Yosef Agnon
Shmuel Yosef Agnon (July 17, 1888 – February 17, 1970) is considered one of Israel’s greatest writers. Agnon shared the Nobel Prize with the poet Nelly Sachs in 1966. Some of his works deal with the conflict between the traditional Orthodox Jewish life and life and behavior in the modern world.
Many of his stories are told by a narrator, and he is credited for contributing to the broadening the characteristic conception of the narrator role in literature. Many are written in the magical realism style of another Nobel Prize winning author Gabriel Garcia Marquez. Magic realism a literary or artistic genre in which realistic narrative and naturalistic technique are combined with surreal elements of dream or fantasy. An example would be where an author tells realistically about a man beginning to cross a bridge, but when he gets about half way across, he begins to rise in the air and float the rest of the way. The style is entertaining, thought provoking, and it prompts readers to form their own interpretation of the tale, as parables do.
Betrothed is about a man and a woman who as children promised to marry each other as they stood at the edge of a Viennese garden pool, as the biblical Jacob and Rachel stood by water in Genesis 29 and as kings were crowned by water, as in I Kings 1. The story focuses on what transpires to the couple when they fail to marry as they swore to do and their reunion after the passing of many years. As with many other Agnon stories, this one can be read literally, what is said in the tale is what happens. It can also be read as a rich allegory, as scholars insist it be read and enjoyed.
Similarly, some scholars insist that Edo and Enam can only be read as an allegory; otherwise it is enigmatic and inexplicable. But the scholar Arnold Band inveighed against focusing on the complexity of the tale “which detracts the reader and critic from the aesthetic charm of the story.” The tale is set in Jerusalem in the final years of the British Mandate. A couple, husband and wife, are house sitting, while in an adjacent room sits a scholar, a recluse, a mysterious man, who is studying an ancient culture. The wife is from a faraway land. She has a strange sleep walking disease and seems to walk toward the scholar.
Both stories are erotic, and both are superb on many levels.
Betrothed & Edo and Enam
By Shmuel Yosef Agnon
Shmuel Yosef Agnon (July 17, 1888 – February 17, 1970) is considered one of Israel’s greatest writers. Agnon shared the Nobel Prize with the poet Nelly Sachs in 1966. Some of his works deal with the conflict between the traditional Orthodox Jewish life and life and behavior in the modern world.
Many of his stories are told by a narrator, and he is credited for contributing to the broadening the characteristic conception of the narrator role in literature. Many are written in the magical realism style of another Nobel Prize winning author Gabriel Garcia Marquez. Magic realism a literary or artistic genre in which realistic narrative and naturalistic technique are combined with surreal elements of dream or fantasy. An example would be where an author tells realistically about a man beginning to cross a bridge, but when he gets about half way across, he begins to rise in the air and float the rest of the way. The style is entertaining, thought provoking, and it prompts readers to form their own interpretation of the tale, as parables do.
Betrothed is about a man and a woman who as children promised to marry each other as they stood at the edge of a Viennese garden pool, as the biblical Jacob and Rachel stood by water in Genesis 29 and as kings were crowned by water, as in I Kings 1. The story focuses on what transpires to the couple when they fail to marry as they swore to do and their reunion after the passing of many years. As with many other Agnon stories, this one can be read literally, what is said in the tale is what happens. It can also be read as a rich allegory, as scholars insist it be read and enjoyed.
Similarly, some scholars insist that Edo and Enam can only be read as an allegory; otherwise it is enigmatic and inexplicable. But the scholar Arnold Band inveighed against focusing on the complexity of the tale “which detracts the reader and critic from the aesthetic charm of the story.” The tale is set in Jerusalem in the final years of the British Mandate. A couple, husband and wife, are house sitting, while in an adjacent room sits a scholar, a recluse, a mysterious man, who is studying an ancient culture. The wife is from a faraway land. She has a strange sleep walking disease and seems to walk toward the scholar.
Both stories are erotic, and both are superb on many levels.
April 18, 2017
Evanescent, joyful, sad, pure magic
November 28, 2018
I expected something different from the pen of the 1966 Noble Prize winning novelist S.Y. Agnon. Two Tales might be labeled magic unrealism, but if you like that kind of thing--when a story wanders along with no seeming direction or intent, when characters are not very interesting and their world barely touches on reality, then this is the book for you. Both stories--novellas really--pay homage perhaps more to Agnon's Polish birth than to his life in Israel with hints of old world fairy tales, mysticism and imaginary characters. Not my cup of tea.
September 16, 2023
I loved the first tale, 'The Betrothed,' because it's a love story involving a marine biologist who has to choose between half a dozen women and yet there's nothing here that feels remarkably chauvinistic. The second left me cold - I couldn't get into it, and the names were all so similar that when something dramatic happened, I wasn't sure who it was happening to.
June 11, 2019
Enjoyable read.
February 27, 2020
Tedious, at times impenetrable. Classic it is not.
February 28, 2013
While I wasn’t overly enamoured of Agnon’s Two Tales, I did get the sense that he deserves a bit of a benefit of the doubt. I think there were motifs going on in the tales that I didn’t quite grasp – allusions to the Torah and Jewish beliefs and so on which I could sense but not quite comprehend.
One of the most interesting parts of Edo and Enam was the leitmotif of reincarnation. This included a sort of dramatic irony slant: ‘There is no event whose mark has not gone before it. Such is the parable of the bird: before it flies, it spreads its wings and they make a shadow; it looks at the shadow, raises its wings, and flies away.’ There is also, however, several explicit references to reincarnation as part of Jewish belief, which surprised me (expert Torah scholar as I am). I’ve never heard reincarnation mentioned outside a Hindu context, as far as actual religions go.
The two tales are linked – there is one direct allusion between them, but the themes of sleep or sleeplessness, relationships, and fate link them as well. Edo and Enam was, for me, the more satisfying of the two. Despite or perhaps because of its sometimes lengthy, and to me rather inexplicable, evocations of traditional Jewish beliefs and societies, it had a certain mystique to it. It’s very hard to encapsulate what the story’s ‘about’ – the forces that bring people together in mysterious and inescapable ways, the values of traditional beliefs versus science and modernity, wrapped up in a tale of a man and his sleepwalking wife and their connection to a shadowy scholar.
Betrothed, which was the first tale in the collection, rubbed me up the wrong way a bit in that it featured a young man surrounded by a coterie of women implicitly competing for his affections. These affections, however, were claimed long ago, although he himself doesn’t realize it until his betrothed comes back into his life and reminds him of their childhood vow. Again, it’s about the forces that bind people together and the inevitability of fate. It also features a woman with troubles sleeping – although in this case, the woman in question sleeps too much, an illness which the central character is oddly indifferent to.
Even if these tales aren’t the greatest things I’ve ever read, they seem like the sorts of things that would open up under close examination, revealing the motifs and imagery which can escape one at first, especially if care were taken to chase down the cultural and religious references. I don’t think this task is for me, but there’s something there below the surface. Two and a half stars.
One of the most interesting parts of Edo and Enam was the leitmotif of reincarnation. This included a sort of dramatic irony slant: ‘There is no event whose mark has not gone before it. Such is the parable of the bird: before it flies, it spreads its wings and they make a shadow; it looks at the shadow, raises its wings, and flies away.’ There is also, however, several explicit references to reincarnation as part of Jewish belief, which surprised me (expert Torah scholar as I am). I’ve never heard reincarnation mentioned outside a Hindu context, as far as actual religions go.
The two tales are linked – there is one direct allusion between them, but the themes of sleep or sleeplessness, relationships, and fate link them as well. Edo and Enam was, for me, the more satisfying of the two. Despite or perhaps because of its sometimes lengthy, and to me rather inexplicable, evocations of traditional Jewish beliefs and societies, it had a certain mystique to it. It’s very hard to encapsulate what the story’s ‘about’ – the forces that bring people together in mysterious and inescapable ways, the values of traditional beliefs versus science and modernity, wrapped up in a tale of a man and his sleepwalking wife and their connection to a shadowy scholar.
Betrothed, which was the first tale in the collection, rubbed me up the wrong way a bit in that it featured a young man surrounded by a coterie of women implicitly competing for his affections. These affections, however, were claimed long ago, although he himself doesn’t realize it until his betrothed comes back into his life and reminds him of their childhood vow. Again, it’s about the forces that bind people together and the inevitability of fate. It also features a woman with troubles sleeping – although in this case, the woman in question sleeps too much, an illness which the central character is oddly indifferent to.
Even if these tales aren’t the greatest things I’ve ever read, they seem like the sorts of things that would open up under close examination, revealing the motifs and imagery which can escape one at first, especially if care were taken to chase down the cultural and religious references. I don’t think this task is for me, but there’s something there below the surface. Two and a half stars.
December 17, 2016
SY.Agnon is known for stories inspired by Jewish religious scriptures, Jewish folk lore and work of Jewish mystics & sages. Without going into the religious symbolism used in two stories of the book Two Tales, both the stories are interesting, captive and create a sort of curiosity in the reader to know the end, I believe this is one major quality of good book that it motivates reader to get to the end.
First of two tales is betrothed which is about a marine biologist and his life at Jaffa. Second is a more complex story, titles as Edo and Enam which are some ancient culture and languages. Second story do have some mystic aspect roooted in the Jewish folk lore, and for a reader unfamiliar with that it is a bit difficult to grasp the exact message of the author. Nonetheless it is interesting and it definitely motivated me to Google things I was unaware of.
Both the stories are independent of each other, but they do have some similarities as well. In both tales lead woman characters are suffering from some kind of strange disease which make them immovable yet they managed to get to the people they loved.
In both stories the lead female characters longed for death, gemula in Edo and Enam says "I shall sing the song of the Grofit, and then we shall die"
similarly shoshanah lead female character in betrothed said
"How fortunate are those mummies, laid in the ground and freed from all trouble and toil. If I could only be like one of them!"
If one will read both books carefully, one can find many symbolic similarities. On the whole it's a short and interesting read.
First of two tales is betrothed which is about a marine biologist and his life at Jaffa. Second is a more complex story, titles as Edo and Enam which are some ancient culture and languages. Second story do have some mystic aspect roooted in the Jewish folk lore, and for a reader unfamiliar with that it is a bit difficult to grasp the exact message of the author. Nonetheless it is interesting and it definitely motivated me to Google things I was unaware of.
Both the stories are independent of each other, but they do have some similarities as well. In both tales lead woman characters are suffering from some kind of strange disease which make them immovable yet they managed to get to the people they loved.
In both stories the lead female characters longed for death, gemula in Edo and Enam says "I shall sing the song of the Grofit, and then we shall die"
similarly shoshanah lead female character in betrothed said
"How fortunate are those mummies, laid in the ground and freed from all trouble and toil. If I could only be like one of them!"
If one will read both books carefully, one can find many symbolic similarities. On the whole it's a short and interesting read.
December 7, 2020
December 7th, 2020 : Two of my favorites of Agnon's. Edo and Enam is way up there among the works of his I treasure most, all moon-struck, mysterious, and atmospheric as it is. Both the short novel (Betrothed) and the long story (Edo and Enam) are among Agnon's most lyrical; the Homeric tinge in Betrothed leads to some particularly exquisite passages. I love how unfathomable Edo and Enam seems, even two reads and an Alan Mintz lecture in. My favorite aspect of Betrothed is how it seems to be a depository for all the attraction (and here perhaps I'm just projecting) the writer felt for the women he knew and cared for when he was young and single, but whom he did not marry; the novel is a memorial for the shrouds they left in his heart.
I love stories that flare out unrepentently in all directions (John Cowper Powys!), and the two of these do that enough to get eminent Agnon scholar Arnold Band annoyed. But Robert Alter loves them, and he translated the Hebrew Bible.
I love stories that flare out unrepentently in all directions (John Cowper Powys!), and the two of these do that enough to get eminent Agnon scholar Arnold Band annoyed. But Robert Alter loves them, and he translated the Hebrew Bible.
January 20, 2013
If I had only read one book in the last half dozen years, I would want it to be this one for the second story "Edo and Enam." No wonder Agnon, who wrote in Hebrew, shared the Nobel Prize for Literature. I can't comment on the original Hebrew but the English translation was a revelation of Agnon's command of the storyteller's art and themes that keep shimmering like rainbow-hued oil on water. I would recommend this book for readers who combine a love of poetry and the novella. Agnon was born in Galicia to a Yiddish & Hebrew speaking family, moved to Palestine as a young man then to Germany for a dozen years, finally returning to Palestine.
January 4, 2008
The forgotten status of S Y Agnon stands as a dark mark on the face of our society. Certainly an author of his calibre (Nobel Laureate) deserves to be remembered. His stories are full of life, akin to Singer, but with a middle-eastern flair (he lived in Israel) that has been so rarely captures since. Amos Oz, currently perhaps Israel's greatest novelist, is a direct literary descendant Agnon. The two tales collected in this work are spell-binding. There simplicity masks Agnon's unmatched talents.
April 8, 2015
I wish the kindle version I read had the editor notes indexed and/or with links along with the the text. there are lots of references to Judaism, mishna, Talmud, scholars and so on that would make the stories much more interesting, peculiar and enjoyable if these notes came along with the text. however they were all at end.
anyways, I found the narrator of the first story too prolific. at the beginning it is great but after the 2nd half it gets boring and slow.
the second story starts great, but later again I found it slow and somewhat presumable.
anyways, I found the narrator of the first story too prolific. at the beginning it is great but after the 2nd half it gets boring and slow.
the second story starts great, but later again I found it slow and somewhat presumable.
December 29, 2012
The first tale took me by surprise: it was a love story about two childhood sweethearts. The second was a jumble of something... it was dry and hard to follow. But, it was worth the read.
Displaying 1 - 15 of 15 reviews