Mark Carroll's Journal

I was re-reading Agnon's 'A Book that Was Lost' (the story, in the collection of the same title) this morning. The first part of the story involves events that transpired maybe a century before the narrator's lifetime; so the narrator is effectively in omniscient, rather than first-person, mode here. We may assume that he pieced together the events of Rabbi Shmaria's absent-minded encounter with the bookbinder (and with the manuscript of the then-new Machtzit ha-Shekel, which R Shmaria believed eclipsed his own work) from circumstantial evidence or from oral history from the townspeople.

My first take-away on this story, speaking as an IT professional, is: This is why you always back up your data before you send your media out!

But the thing that jumps out for me about this story is the theme of self-doubt: R Shmaria, thumbing through R Kolin's work, immediately concludes that his own work of 12 years was a wasted effort and abandons the ms. on the counter of the bindery; and the young narrator, eager as he is to restore R Shmaria's work to its rightful place, sends it off to Jerusalem without copying it, apparently on the assumption that he himself will never see Jerusalem - even though he is busying himself with Zionist journals and activism.

I think there's a key in the narrator's observation that "every man who does not live in the Land of Israel is put to the test whether he is worthy of settling in the Land of Israel" (and likewise for Jerusalem itself). (This might also be a key to understanding 'Agunot', where Ezekiel makes aliyah to Israel and Jerusalem - seemingly a good thing - but for the wrong reasons, because of Ahiezer's slight against the existing community there; so the result is tragedy.) R Shamaria's doubts about the value of his own work are seen to be unfounded, as everyone who reads it - "[the narrator's] father, my teacher of blessed memory, and ... other scholars" - agree that it's a fine and worthy work; but all of this comes much too late to do poor R Shmaria any good. And the narrator's own younger self, even as he reads 'Hamitzpah' and writes poetry about Jerusalem, cannot really envision a future in which he himself will make the journey to Jerusalem to deposit the precious manuscript in the Ginzei Yosef archive; instead, he entrusts the manuscript to the post office. (Didn't even get a tracking number.) And - spoiler alert - the manuscript never arrives in Jerusalem; it is lost forever.

The narrator, now firmly settled in Jerusalem, attests that he has made many trips since then to the archive in search of the manuscript, but it has never been found. There's an ironic reversal in the ending of the story: the curator tells him that "due to lack of funds, piles and piles of books are lying around that still haven't been given out for binding". And yet the whole reason the manuscript was written (as well as the better-known Machtzit ha-Shekel) was to serve as an exposition for the classic work Magen Avraham - which is "obscure and enigmatic due to overabbreviation. For though a man of great learning, he was poor, without the means to buy paper ... and when a piece of paper came into his hands, he would compose his thoughts and jot down their essence in extremely concise language." So the problem went from being not enough paper (due to lack of funds) to too many books (due to lack of funds).

So at the end of the story, the "book that was lost" is never found, but the narrator does settle in Jerusalem, where he had long dreamed (even if with perhaps imperfect faith) of settling. How did he overcome whatever doubts he might have had? He tells us: "I can't tell whether the poems of Zion and Jerusalem brought me to Jerusalem or whether it was my longing for Zion and Jerusalem that brought me to compose poems about them." In either case, the narrator perceives a direct causal connection between the expression (in writing) of the wish, and its manifestation. [684]