On Yael Feldman's No Room of Their Own

DURING ONE OF MY MANY extended stays in Jerusalem, I lived on Klausner Street in Talpiot, the same street on which you can find the relatively large and certainly comfortable house in which Agnon lived from the 1920s onward. Clearly marked as a mini-museum, and open to the public, the house looked inviting. I went inside to glean something about Agnon, Israel's 1966 Nobel Laureate in Literature. Photographs of Agnon hung on the walls of the front room, as might be expected. There were also photographs of people with Agnon, including young attractive women. There were no photographs of his wife. Upstairs, his desk is on display. On it is a kind of "out" basket with a sheaf of papers covered with his nearly illegible handwriting. If ever handwriting deserved to be called "chicken scratches," this was it.

A guide told me that it was Agnon's wife's task to take these sheets of paper with Agnon's stories and type them so that Agnon could make revisions. Then it was her task to enter the revisions until Agnon had got it just right. Finally, it was her job to prepare the manuscript for publication. I began to wonder if there was ever a woman writer whose husband performed these tasks in the same way. What I asked the guide, however, was "Who was this wife?"

I was told that she had been a student of Arabic and had wanted to pursue a career in that field. Nevertheless, her husband compelled her to abandon her intellectual hopes in order to assist him. His library was filled with reference works or books by him, or dedicated to him. Everything was arranged to help him express his thoughts. And then her husband won the Nobel Prize for literature, with a little help from his friend, Gershom Schocken.

I asked the guide if Mrs. Agnon also had a library, a room of her own. The guide showed me a few shelves in a corridor where Mrs. Agnon kept her books. No room of her own, no literary works of her own, not even a mention in the Agnon entry in the Encyclopedia Judaica.

Dan Laor, professor of Hebrew Literature at Tel-Aviv University, has written a well-received biography of Agnon, reviewed glowingly in the pages of the Jerusalem Report. ² There I found the information I needed: Apparently, during Agnon's "sojourn in Germany, he met and married Esther Marx, the spirited daughter of a wealthy Orthodox family that believed she was marrying below her station." The couple's relationship was "complex," because "Agnon needed Esther and yet (he felt) "her presence impinged on his privacy." During one of their many separations, she wrote him, "I love you more than anyone else in the world. But I am not sure we could live together."

In Laor's biography, "Agnon's egocentrism . . . emerges, particularly in his relation to his wife and family. When Agnon decided to return to the Land of Israel, he left his wife with the two children in Germany until he could organize housing. But he seemed to enjoy the solitude and lack of familial responsibility, and continuously found excuses why they should remain in Germany. After a year, Esther gave him an ultimatum, and he sent for them. He vetoed her wish that she have her own career, expecting her to help him with his work, typing up his almost illegible manuscripts. Often depressed, Esther would take the children to visit her sister [who lived] near Haifa, often for weeks at a time." Laor also "delicately suggests other women . . . [and shows how] Agnon was very watchful of his creaturely needs." ³

The guide was accurate. Esther Marx Agnon had no room of her own. The Agnon house should be visited, not only to learn about Agnon, but also to learn about sexism in the arts.

Yael Feldman does not discuss Esther Marx or others like...