Reverie and Reading: Encounters with Modern Jewish Culture in the Work of Alan Mintz

In his last book, Alan Mintz described Agnon's creation of a narrative persona who is not so much "a consumer or a beneficiary of the tradition of sacred song that goes back to the Temple" as someone who is "himself a belated link in that chain."¹ I'd like to highlight the belatedness of our friend, Alan, as fundamental to his critical practice: the concept of belatedness brings the writer or the critic into the long line of conversation—debate, interpretation, elaboration—that is so central to Jewish tradition. The very distance from the sources serves to energize the creativity of the writer or critic under the sign of belatedness. In fact, I think this awareness occasioned Alan's goal in undertaking his last unfinished project of an Agnon biography that would have included reflections on his own Jewish journey. I didn't know Alan in the years when he made the decision to leave Victorian literature and pursue Jewish studies, but I'm intrigued to imagine his deliberations as he came to choose modern Hebrew literature rather than midrash or the medieval piyyut. Modern Hebrew literature offered Alan a field of engagement with existential issues that were close to his heart. It positioned him, moreover, to highlight belatedness as a mode of critical reflection well suited to our modernity.

From the vantage point of the twentieth-anniversary issue of Prooftexts in 2001, Alan looked back to his first encounter with Agnon as a college freshman writing a paper in Hebrew on the novella Bilvav yamim (In the Heart of the Seas). He would translate this essay into English a few years later and rework it as a critique of American Judaism for the inaugural issue of Response, the journal he helped to create in 1967. Reflecting with some bemusement on his own youthful passion as a critic of American Jewish life, Alan nevertheless found, on returning to Agnon's novella in 2001, that his earlier encounter had been driven just as much by "the desire to experience the poetry of religion." Whatever his youthful frustrations with mid-century American Judaism may have been, returning to the novella gave Alan the pleasure of an experience of reading that made him feel again that he "was peering directly into the inner romance of faith and hearing its music in its original tones." Looking back, he found evidence in his earlier reading that "I was ready to listen, and grateful to be given the chance to seize through the reverie of reading what could not be given to me in life."²

The word "reverie" comes up occasionally in Alan's writing and suggests something of what literary experience made available to him. The phrase conveys awareness of a reader's absorption in a text as something that is outside and yet part of the self. In this instance, for Alan, the reverie of reading opened the potential space of absorption in Hebrew literature. As he noted elsewhere, Hebrew provided "the internal resources to negotiate the distance between old and new. Substitution, retrieval, containment, synthesis, reconciliation—all the dynamics of cultural change could take place within Hebrew literature because in that medium alone did the new meanings and old meanings exist simultaneously."³

In a 1984 essay on the siddur for the anthology Back to the Sources, Alan took note of the "roomy space of the synagogue service," highlighting its capacity to hold the currents of Jewish life.⁴ For Alan, Hebrew language and Jewish literary traditions offered spaces in which we might hear the voices of past and present mingling, arguing, and interacting in an ongoing conversation. This is abundantly evident in Ḥurban: Responses to Catastrophe in Hebrew Literature, a major opening move in a career devoted to the roomy spaces of Jewish textuality. Alan tells us that the motivation for the project grew out of the need to historicize the Holocaust. Yet, while his original intention may have been "to take the Holocaust literature of one interpretive community, Israeli culture and Hebrew literature, and read it against the...