To This Day by S.Y. Agnon

To This Day Reviews

• 
  Quo

  S.Y. Agnon, born Shmuel Yosef Halevi Czaczkes, seemed to spend a life reflecting on the nature of his own identity as a refugee from Silesia in present-day Ukraine, being tied to his Hasidic Jewish roots but seeing himself in exile of sorts for much of his life, having fled to Ottoman-controlled Palestine prior to WWI, while continuing to feel the lure of Europe, especially of Berlin where he lived for more than a decade between the 2 world wars.
  
  
  
  Agnon's final novel, To This Day, set in Germany during WWI, is very reflective of the tension between assimilated, mostly non-observant German Jews and Yiddish-speaking Ostjuden, Jews from Eastern Europe who were very often from the Orthodox Hasidic tradition and frequently seen as insular & only marginally civilized by more westernized Jews. And while their fellow Jews looked down on them as "foreigners", they tried to blend in as best they could.

  Although the God of Israel is one, the synagogues built in his honor are many. This is not the time for a lecture on Jewish prayer but while the Galician Jews used the same prayer book all were raised on, they still quarreled in the end. It was not over money. No, it was over matters of principle. Although God is one & his Torah is one, Jews have many principles. So, it was necessary to found their own synagogue, which they named after German President von Hindenburg to let their fellow Jews know that they would deal with them as von Hindenburg dealt with his foes.

  The novel also represents a kind of inner dialogue extolling the merits of Jaffa in today's Israel, a place which the narrator & main character had intended to only temporarily leave behind, only to become stranded in Berlin by WWI, a city beset by ration cards, scarce food, general uncertainty about Germany's performance in the war + an extreme shortage of rooms for transient boarders.
  
  As indicated, the German Jews take pride in their culture & surroundings and the narrator comments that they are often "more German than the non-Jewish Germans". Beyond that the difference between a Jew & a German is that "while some Jews go to temple, most Germans don't like Jews." While in Leipzig, a temporary refuge, attempting to defend his own people, the narrator remarks that

  it is a Christian city with few Jews but most of them are worse than Germans. Didn't I tell you what fine people the Galician Hasidim are? If all other Jews were like us, the Messiah would have come long ago.

  Still, while casting about for a room, in the midst of multiple evictions & discomforts within temporary abodes, Shmuel Yosef, the narrator & stand-in for his namesake author, seems tempted on more than one occasion by women who are not Jewish or who are of mixed heritage. Many boarding houses where he takes shelter are noisy or foul-smelling or poorly furnished and some of his interim homes are said "out of sheer sadism to have chosen him" rather than having been chosen by him.
  
  At one point, when he returns late after a visit to a friend in another town, with all available rooms taken, he spends a night in the communal bathtub of a small hotel, provided with only a pillow & blanket by the staff. For, while there was "no light, no air, no joy & no life, it was the only place there was."
  
  There is no sign of overt anti-Semitism within the novel & any harsh treatment he receives is mostly from other Jews who wish to reclaim the room he occupies for a boarder who can pay more or for a son suddenly home on leave from the war or having become invalided in battle.
  
  In one home, he is treated to free meals, laundry service, an excellent library & the friendship of the Lichtensteins, German-Jews with whom our wanderer quickly bonds. However, very soon their house is acquired by a publishing company & the older couple are forced to move to a smaller home to live with a daughter whose husband was killed in the war, sending our peripatetic narrator once again in search of yet another temporary roof over his head.

  The point is this: It's a big world with many countries, each with its cities, villages, houses & rooms. Sometimes one person has many houses & sometimes many people share one room. Our story is about a man who had neither a country nor a room, having left the land he lived in & gone to another, where he lost even the four walls that he had.

  There is also a kind of subtext involving the reclaiming of a large library of books in Hebrew that had belonged to the late Dr. Levi, which stand as a repository of Jewish history & which will eventually find their way back to what is to become the new nation of Israel, in tow with the novel's narrator.
  
  The words "To this day", taken from a Sabbath morning prayer, stand as the language of thanksgiving for the past & a hopeful prayer for the future. Thus, To This Day is a novel about a kind of unintended homelessness that over time resembles an exile, perhaps an on-going metaphor for the Jewish diaspora.
  
  This is a quirky book that at times I had to push myself to continue rather than being pulled along by its prose and ultimately I liked the context for the novel far more than the reading of it. The author was awarded a Nobel Prize for Literature in 1956 and several of his other, earlier & longer novels are more highly regarded but To This Day offered a nice introduction to the rather idiosyncratic voice of S.Y. Agnon, an author who was heavily influenced by the Talmud and considered himself born in Jerusalem, even though he did not reach there until he was 19.
  
  *The photo within my review is of the author. My copy of the book has a helpful introduction by Hillel Halkin, who also translated the book from Hebrew into English.
• 
  robin friedman

  Rootless In WW I Germany
  
  Published in 1952, "To this Day" was the last novel of Israeli author, S.Y. Agnon, (1887 --1970) who won the Nobel Prize for literature in 1965. Hillel Halkin (b. 1939), a prolific translator, journalist, and author, translated the book and wrote a lengthy, detailed Introduction. Halkin was born in New York City and emigrated to Israel where he has been a tireless champion of Zionism.
  
  Set in Berlin, Leipzig, and a small town, Grimma, during the Great War, "To this Day" is narrated in the first person by a young man in his mid-20s, Shmuel Josef, a name shared with another character in the story. The narrator is a non-practicing Orthodox Jew who had emigrated from Eastern Europe to Palestine and then emigrated again to Germany at the outset of the Great War. He is compelled to remain in Germany until the war's end. The narrator describes his efforts in Berlin to find a room in the face of a severe housing shortage resulting from wartime conditions. He moves again and again with many comical misadventures with his landladies. He learns during his stay that an old scholarly friend in Grimma has died and that the friend's ailing wife wants his help in preserving her husband's large library of Judaica. The narrator goes back and forth on crowded, dirty trains from Berlin to the transfer station of Leipzig to Grimma to see to the books. In the process, he meets many old friends, including an old flame, together with new people.
  
  It is a bare bones story. told with humor. The story, however, is told in a meandering, bantering, and elliptical way as the narrator often gets seemingly sidetracked with anecdotes piling upon on each other. The point of the story becomes hidden or lost. In addition, the story moves forward through long discussions between the narrator, his landladies, and his many former acquaintances. The discussions involve difficult topics, including the nature of Germany's war effort, Zionism, Judaism and secularism, and identity and self-knowledge. These themes create a difficult, reflective book while threatening to overwhelm the slender line of the story.
  
  The narrator is shown as rootless and in exile with, during most of his stay in Germany, little direction in his life. He moved to Palestine and then, will little explanation in the novel, returned to Europe. His actions show a tension between his sense of Jewish identity, to use an over-worked phrase, and a desire for a broader, secular life, including a sexual life. The book suggests that meaningful Jewish life is not to be found in Europe as the narrator moves unhappily from room to room, suggesting that there is no place for him outside of Palestine. German life is critiqued throughout in its materialism and militarism even while the narrator does not suffer from any overt acts of anti-Semitism. The book explores the differences between the secularized, educated German Jews, who are disliked by most of their German neighbors, and the Russian and East European Jews who find themselves in Germany during the course of the War. The values of Jewishness in a Jewish homeland in the presence of books, prayers, and those of Jewish background is juxtaposed against life in the diaspora with its many influences. The book is full of lengthy religious and philosophical discussions involving the narrator and others. At one point late in the novel, a character observes how some Jews have turned to philosophy in a futile effort to resolve the tensions in their situations. The character objects to philosophy as leading to a lack of faith and concludes "[M]ay we worship Him in simplicity as befits the descendants of Jacob, whom the Bible calls a simple man." To Agnon's credit, the book is subtle and nuanced and many different positions are presented.
  
  Halkin's Introduction points out that the book generally has not been highly regarded among Agnon's work. He discusses well the many ambiguities and layers of the story. I found the introduction helped my understanding of what is, in any event, a puzzling, wandering narrative, difficult to follow. Halkin gives a strongly Zionistic reading to the book which accords with his own position and, probably, that of the author.
  
  I was glad I read this book, with its patchwork style, and had the opportunity to think through various of its sections of the questions it raises. The book offers a view of the home front in WW I Germany. It offers a sense of the difficulties of finding an identity both for the narrator and for a people. Readers will come to understand the conditions leading to the narrator's and to the author's and translator's understanding of religion, identity and Zionism even if they do not see their own lives in the terms of this book.
  
  Robin Friedman
• 
  Jan Rice

  This book came with a lengthy introduction by the translator. I took the option offered at the end of the introduction's first page to go straight to the book first. That first page, though, warned that Agnon is a great literary trickster who in this one toys with readers and critics alike and not to believe too easily any dismissive opinions.
  
  The book begins with a young man mostly confined to his rented room in WWI-era Berlin, so I immediately assumed this was going to be one of those books about a great loner or introvert. Not! By the second chapter, the protagonist is out and about, getting hailed in the streets by a vivacious former actress and others. He takes off via Leipzig for a small town from where the widow of a Dr. Levy has written him for help on what to do with her late husband's library.
  
  Oh, by the way, he's from Galicia (Eastern Europe, not Spain) which is in today's western Ukraine and then was a part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. He has lived in (then) Palestine for a while before moving back to Berlin and getting stuck there because of the war.
  
  His journey is round-about and frustrating, ostensibly because of the war, but in an existential sort of way. He keeps meeting up unexpectedly with new people and failing to connect with those with whom he meant to connect.
  
  Everybody he meets (and he himself) has a story (or parable) to recount. Digression is the name of the game.
  
  He meets all sorts of people who were around in those days, many who are the various kinds of Jews, German Jews who have assimilated, Hasidim, who, in those days, were the revivalist Jews from points East, and various Rabbinic or scholarly sorts, as well as other Germans and those of whose extraction I'm uncertain. Oh, and, once again, the former actress who's now running a nursing home for war casualties and a cousin. Sadly, people were losing their sons in the war.
  
  There are shortages -- particularly of rooms to rent -- and part of his wild goose chase is looking for a room. The impact on me prior to going back and reading the introduction was of an existential dilemma, but probably because I didn't know enough to take it some other way.
  
  The book isn't difficult to read. The translation is clear and immediate and related in vernacular terms appropriate to the times but also modern. And if the ending crept up a little too neat and sudden, I was underwhelmed, again because of not knowing enough.
  
  But in that, apparently, I'm not alone.
  
  The translator says, in another book on the evolution of modern Hebrew literature (
  The Lady of Hebrew and Her Lovers of Zion), that up until the early twentieth century, past facets of Hebrew -- biblical, talmudic -- remained accessible and available for use. But once Hebrew became a spoken language, it evolved so fast that older forms of Hebrew were rapidly becoming archaic. The spoken language suffered from that (which was happening much faster than in other languages that had been spoken continually) and also from the fact there had been no regularly spoken language from which to pick up idiomatic depth. The translator says frankly that while modern spoken Hebrew was a miracle, its necessarily rapid growth that cut off the past and adulterated itself with all sorts of loan words and the like made it an "immigrant" language limited as to vocabulary and expression compared to European languages.
  
  Agnon was rebelling against the foreshortening of the language by reclaiming and layering in the older, dying forms of expression.
  
  All that, of course, isn't translatable. I would enjoy talking with a native or long-time Hebrew speaker (other than the translator!) regarding how this book sounds when read in its original language.
  
  Also -- and stop here if you'd like to find out further interpretation only after you read the book -- the translator shows how Agnon makes the book refer to other than it seems: WWII instead of I, when antisemitism in Germany was not yet a thing; and the problems in finding a room to rent to the uprootedness and refugee issues of WWII.
  
  The overly neat ending turns out to be satirizing the Labor Zionist narrative that reduced the suffering of the Diaspora in WWII by giving it a Candidean, best-of-all-possible-worlds slant.
  
  With the inclusion of the translator's help, I rate this four stars.
• 
  Melani

  I have recently been undertaking with a friend to read the works of Nobel Prize winners past. We started with the letter "a," and I picked first,and so our first book was to be anything Shmuel Agnon. I really enjoyed the book -- in a way.
  
  In order to justify how I can say that I like a book which I found in the end to be so pointless, I will include the following passage:
  
  "When the war broke out, I stopped working. I even put aside my big book on the history of clothing. I couldn't write a thing as long as the fighting went on. All I wanted was to crumple the days into as small a ball as possible until it was over. In this way, a winter went by, and then a summer, and then another winter. When spring came again, I could feel my room getting smaller. Half of it was perpetually dark and half was perpetually cold, and neither got any sunlight."
  
  When I read this passage I found it to be so golden and wonderful that I had to find someone to read it to right away. The book contains a lot of very beautiful and funny writing. But again, I was really tripped up by what may have been my own failing quest to find the themes, main ideas... in other words the meaning of the novel. I really don't want to blame the book for this, I may have just been out of my depth all along. A person who fails to find meaning in a book about a wandering jew may just be a novice.
  
  The basic plot of the book is itself fairly simple. A traditionally orthodox jew, who does not really practice his faith, but still clings to its traditions, has left his warm, sunny home in Palestine for Eastern Europe. He has impeccably bad timing, as WWI has just broken out. He wants to go back to Paletine, but he is stuck living in Berlin as a boarder. Throughout the novel he moves from room to room as a lodger with different landladies. He travels to a town outside of Berlin to visit friends and help to take care of the library of a deceased acquaintance. However, in a truly kafakaesque fashion, he never gets to see the books and goes back to Berlin having accomplished nothing.
  
  I was so sure that the book was full of hidden meaning and could not be pointless, that I actually consulted with some of the interpretation of the book by its translator (the book was originally written in Hebrew -- a language which the translator assured was a thousand times funnier than english -- and he thought much of Agnon was lost in translation)
  
  Even though I was too lazy to really read the analysis completely. It did open my eyes (at least so I could squint through them) to the symbolism of its main character's random wanderings.
  
  There are some things that happen in the novel that are so quietly strange, that they draw attention to themselves. For instance, at one point in the novel, the main character recieves from his country cousin he is visiting, a fresh goose liver. This gift predated tupperware and was just carried out dripping into the world. As the main character walks back to meet an old flame of his at the nursing home for convalescing soldiers that she runs, he slowly becomes more and more bloodied by the liver. He wants to get rid of it deperately, not only because it is making a mess, but also because although there are many food shortages, he is a vegetarian.
  
  A moment like that, it just has to be filled with meaning -- it just has to. Such wanderings with a bloody, dripping liver can't happen for no reason.
  
  (Incidentally, the translator thought the liver was a symbol of unrequited love. I think it was a symbol of how our families can sometimes give us gifts that we don't want and can't use and are looking to offload as soon as possible)
  
  I think that the main character's seemingly pointless meanderings are richly symbolic of the reader's terrible search for meaning once the anchor of plot motivation has been lifted from the sea floor. Seriously, once you no longer have plot to under pin your interpretation of a novel, you do feel cast adrift. You can feel a kind of literary sweat break out. A feeling of terrible desperation that comes as soon as you begin to grasp that your instinctive search for meaning will be more difficult than you thought.
  
  On to letter "B," Rachel.
  
  
• 
  Robert Wechsler

  This is an odd first-person narrative in which nothing much happens, but wonderful little stories are told. The narrative voice is unique: chatty, intimate and sometimes even confessional and yet not very open, critical and cynical but appreciative. This look at Germany during wartime (WWI) from a Jewish point of view is told mostly indirectly, in pieces and parables. Its characters are sketched rather than drawn. The narrator wanders and goes back and forth, a piece of flotsam that can also be self-propelling.
  
  The translator sums up Agnon’s approach at the end of an equally odd introduction that is best to read as an afterword:
  
  "Agnon often sets out to fool us. He deviously hides what is important and dangles before us what isn’t. He entangles us in his net and smiles as we flounder there. But in the end, he trusts us to free ourselves and to profit from the exertion of doing so. … When we have finished following
  To This Day’s many loops, we find ourselves a surprisingly long way from where we started. It’s enough to make one want to repeat the journey."
  
  Although while reading it, this feels more like a quirky novel than a great one, it’s one that I can imagine reading again, after I’ve made it through all Agnon’s novels and stories.
• 
  Stephen Durrant

  S.Y. Agnon won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1966. He is, I think, the only Israeli writer to have done so. This is his last novel and is a slender one, at least compared to some of his earlier, rather hefty works. It is a simple story, apparently somewhat autobiographical, of a Galician Jew who wanders from place to place in World War I Germany looking for a place to stay . . . a kind of representative, I suspect, of the wandering Jew. During the course of his journey, he comes into contact with a variety of friends, which gives him opportunity for observations of war-time Germany and the plight of the Jew in Germany at that time. The book might be slight, but it is filled with trenchant, sometimes humorous and sometimes bitter, observations. Three examples: "For this war we can thank a generation of German teachers who instilled in their pupils the absurd belief that they were the heirs of ancient Greece and Rome" (108). "Nowadays the only difference between a Jew and a German was that some Jews went to temple and most Germans didn't like Jews" (111). "An intellectual is someone who can recite Psalms without tears" (53).
• 
  Diana

  I've read no Agnon and I thought I should. This was available from the library (not easily as it was loaned from San Diego!) and I tried. I read the whole book, 175 pages, which is a quasi-autobiographical recounting of his life in Germany during WWI. A highly transient life, always moving from one rented room to another, running into people who seemed to move in an out of his life with little imprint, no purpose, no accomplishment during this time. Descriptions and details are interesting; not sure about a connecting thread.
• 
  Jenna

  Many of the Nobel prize for literature authors who are not on classic reading lists have fallen away for a reason, but I enjoyed this book more than I expected. Comic surface, unsettling subtext/metaphors, not necessarily subtle but evocative. I may or may not read more, but I am glad to know of him.
• 
  Kim

  Book club read.
• 
  Jeffrey

  Never has a piece of comic literature hit me as hard as this little book. Recounting the journey of a Jewish man caught up in the First World War as a civilian in Germany. The book is his tale of journey through the country to provide a service for a widow and the people he meets along the way as he searches for a room. This comic tale is a subtle indictment against human egoism as it is a commentary on exile, loneliness and Zionism. The book was first written in Hebrew and now translated by Hillel Halkin into a beautifully strong English version.
  
  I had never read any of Agnon’s works before this book. I now see that he deserves a place with the finest writers that are celebrated. This is the type of work I always wish Chabon would write, but rarely does he match this luminary from the past. One finds themselves traveling with the narrator as he encounters friends and family from his past in the most detached way.
  
  
• 
  Jacek

  It seems that in some works—like A Simple Story, A Guest for the Night, and this—Agnon keeps himself at a certain calculated remove from the reader. This remove hides delights and complexities, maybe even (as is certainly the case in A Simple Story) webs and webs and webs of them. But he does not quite meet you halfway, perhaps only a quarter of the way. More of the work has to be yours. So with To This Day, which is brilliant and engaging but so dense and intense that, by the end, I could barely take my bearings. Hillel Halkin, the translator of the book into English, provides a lengthy introduction that makes the head spin with all the possibilities and layers in the story that it points to; and that's according to only one reader's experience!
• 
  Marjanne

  For the first time in a long time I decided to skip the introduction to this novel and then go back to it after I was finished. I think that was a good choice, mostly because I was able to sit back and enjoy the story without thinking in too much depth about it. The author's experiences in WWI Germany were interesting. I also liked how the story was told, it was easy to read. Then I read the introduction and read about how much is 'between the lines' in the story, the social commentary, etc. While it was interesting to look at the story from those perspectives, I enjoyed it more just as an entertaining story.
• 
  Monty

  This book was enjoyable because it felt to me that the author was talking me as he told his story. It takes place in WW I Germany and is told by an Austrian Jew. The narrator tends to ramble at times, yet his musings don't seem to be on a tangent even when he does wander off because that's what people do when they are telling you a story. I didn't understand the symbolism until I read the translator's comments after finishing the book.
• 
  Israel Drazin

  The late Israeli author S. Y. Agnon is recognized as “a man of unquestionable genius” and one of the great storytellers of our time.” As I wrote in another review. “The prestigious publishing house, Toby Press, which is part of Koren Press, published over a half dozen books by the famed Israel Nobel Prize Winner S. Y. Agnon. The stories show how great a writer Agnon (1888-1970) was and why he was given the Nobel Prize for Literature. Some of the stories contain what some call “magical realism,” such as, in stories not in this volume, candles suspended in the air and a twentieth-century man meeting an eighteenth-century scholar. Also where a man draws a synagogue in the sand, knocks on its door and walks in. Some of Agnon’s tales are dream-like, Kafkaism, as when a man disliking his visit with a neighbor decides to go home, but he cannot find his way back and has even forgotten his address, a blind friend he hasn’t seen for many years helps him, and he discovers he is standing right beside his home. Still others show how life changes, as when a married couple become distant to one another and divorce, but once the divorce is consummated they become attracted to each other. Most of Agnon’s stories have many interpretations, layers of them, one deeper than the next, stories that can be understood literally but also as thought-provoking parables. Others are realistic, even strikingly so, and are very moving, pathetic tales. Two or more people can read the same story and understand it in the same way, or they may derive a different meaning, but however one interprets the tales, they will gain much, very much from the reading. One should be reminded of the rabbinical saying about the Bible, that it has seventy layers. Agnon’s books, of course, are not scripture, but they can and should be understood on the literal level and can also, if one wishes, understand a deeper, more profound meaning.”
  
  Agnon published six novels in addition to many short stories. “To This Day” is the shortest of his novels, comprising just 158 pages in this beautiful English translation by Hillel Halkin of Agnon’s original Hebrew. The story is, on a literal level, a humorous tale of a young man with scholarly and literary ambitions who goes from Palestine to Berlin with the hope to be able to buy the large library of a deceased scholar. It is the time of World War I. He is trapped in Germany and is unable to return home. He encounters many problems, which are hilarious to the reader. There is a shortage of housing. He wanders from one rented room to another. Each room has a flaw which compels him to try to find a better one.
  
  While the novel can and should be read as a humorous tale, it should also be mined for its deeper meaning, which is explained in an informative fifteen-page Introduction, which if read gives not only deeper insights, but also increases the delight in reading the tale. Underlying motives include commentary on exile both today and in ancient Israel, the good and the bad about Zionism, Orthodoxy in religion, divine providence, human egoism and fallibility.