In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

Reviewed by:
  • The Sermon and Other Stories
  • Joel Streicker
The Sermon and Other Stories, by Haim Hazaz. Various translators. Introduction by Dan Miron. New Milford, CT, and London: The Toby Press, 2005. 355 pp. $14.95.

The Toby Press's collection of Haim Hazaz's stories is cause for celebration. Critics generally consider Hazaz to be, after S. Y. Agnon, the leading figure of Hebrew fiction during the roughly half century between the First World War and the Yom Kippur War, the year of Hazaz's death at the age of seventy five. Until now, his stories have largely been unavailable in English translation. The present collection both confirms the importance and the difficulties of Hazaz's work.

Hazaz's prolific output covered a wide range of Jewish experience, from the Eastern European shtetlach where he grew up, to Constantinople, from Yemen and the Yemenite community in Jerusalem, to life among religious and secular olim in the Yishuv and Israel, where he settled in 1931. It is as if Hazaz were attempting to embrace the entire range of Jewish experience in the fateful years between the Russian Revolution and the Shoah, between the Balfour Declaration and the establishment of the state of Israel. With few exceptions, the stories in the collection do not suggest a purely sociological interest in the [End Page 216] settings or characters. Rather, their particularity is subsumed under—or wedded to—Hazaz's preoccupation with redemption. As Dan Miron states in his admirable introduction, Hazaz masterfully portrays the messianic hope, both religious and secular, of a people in exile, or at best only beginning to secure a homeland. As with the variety of Jewish experience itself, the stories take on an epic quality when considered as a body, rather than individually.

Hazaz's re-working of traditional Jewish concerns with the relationship between the mundane and the transcendent often takes the form of a tangle of the comic and tragic that at times approaches the grotesque. For example, the chain of events that leads the Hasidic protagonist of "The Hidden Puddle" to find himself knee-deep in the foul muck is both antic (the luftmensch out looking for a deal, the taunting of the town's sole rationalist in "a brave whisper" which the maskil evidently does not hear, the priest passing by and laughing at the man while the priest's horse urinates in the puddle) and touching (the man jumped into the puddle to avoid embarrassing a debtor approaching him on the street). The story is all the more poignant given the reader's knowledge that the Jewish life depicted on the eve of the Russian Revolution is doomed to destruction. In "The Wanderer" a trader-scholar gives his donkey a burial in gratitude for its service in ferrying him from town to town while he sat on its back and studied Talmud. A saint from Safed later declares this site to be the grave of a famous rabbi, prompting pious pilgrimages. Envious Arabs seize the site, objecting that the bones are really of a companion of the Prophet Mohammed, and celebrate their own festivities. When the trader-scholar happens upon the scene of the Arabs' rejoicing at the grave,

Reb Meshel Yeshel felt no apprehensions of the popular saying, "Anybody who tells the truth deserves to be flung to the dogs"; nor did he apprehend the saying, "The tomb and what is below it are not subject to examination"; but he gave precedence to his mouth over his ears, and told them, "Why, thirteen years ago from this day I buried my donkey here!"

The angry crowd "tore him apart and rent him to pieces" (p. 202). The people of his town mourn him profoundly, "seeing that they were like him, he and they alike multiplying sanctity in the world . . . and held utterly in the hands of the Gentiles who could do unto them whatever might be their will" (p. 202).

Yet Hazaz is skeptical of messianism, religious or secular. Most provocatively, his stories suggest that the end of diaspora does not mean the fulfillment of redemption. "The Sermon," Hazaz's most famous statement on the issue, caused a stir when it was...

pdf