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 provides 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.
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