It is only recently that such scholars as Derek Pensler and Jerry Muller, basing themselves on the work of Salo Baron and Jacob Katz, have made us admit that the study of the Jewish people must be grounded in much more than ideas and texts. Economic forces may not be the sole explanation for why Jewish communities flourish and decline, but this dimension deserves to play a stronger role in the study of Jewish history beyond the occasional piety about mercantile genius. In a very promising first book based on his New York University dissertation, Yonatan Sagiv applies economics to the study of Agnon. The application is twofold. Sagiv describes the economic forces and behaviors at work in a selection of Agnon's fiction, and he uses economics as a methodological lens through which to view literary works of art. Just as we have learned to use gender as lens that allows us to see things we never saw before, Sagiv proposes the use of economics to illuminate Agnon's major works. Judged by the new light shone on four much-discussed classic works of Agnon in this study, Sagiv's advocacy is justified.
Agnon's 1912 novella And the Crooked Shall Be Made Straight (Ve-hayah he-’akov le-mishor) is a natural for this approach because it displays Agnon's fine attunement to the economic conditions of Galician Jewry in the mid-nineteenth century. Agnon understands the precise mechanisms whereby the protagonist Menasheh Ḥayim descends the social ladder from a prosperous shopkeeper to an itinerant beggar. But Sagiv is less interested in the socioeconomic realia of the story than in the way Agnon uses economics for artistic purposes. He uses concepts of debt and credit to demonstrate how the novella is based on an analogy between religion and capitalism. Just as Menasheh Ḥayim is forced by economic conditions to shoulder a burden of debt he can never pay off, so to in the “divine economy” of sin and punishment he is crushed by an ever-accumulating debt to God, a debt that he can likewise never repay. Marcel Mauss's notions of gift exchange enable Sagiv to offer an intriguing explanation for Menasheh Ḥayim's great gesture at the end of the story when he conceals his survival from his wife, who has remarried on the assumption of his death.
In Agnon's great 1939 novel A Guest for the Night (’Oreaḥ natah la-lun), the parallel is between money and the sacred Hebrew language. These are two different systems of signification, Sagiv argues, which struggle with each other in the novel over “the definition of value.” His reading “analyzes the symbolic function of money as an arbitrary sign that thwarts the claim to truth of any other semiotic system.” The first-person autobiographical narrator of the novel, who has left Palestine to revive the spiritual life of the Galician town in which he grew up, believes the Holy Tongue—which represents a vision of religious and national revival—to be a gold standard of infinite worth. Basing himself on the ideas of Georg Simmel and Ferdinand de Saussure, Sagiv shows how the narrator's desire to deny the importance of money and commerce ends up ironically undercutting his capacity to realize his ideals. The narrator, and surely the novelist creating him, are themselves figures who engage in constant calculation within a linguistic medium whose resources are not unlimited, and the refusal to account for the utilitarian dimension of language ends up forcing the narrator to return defeated to Palestine.
In his analysis of A Simple Story (Sipur pashut), Agnon's 1935 novel set in Buczacz at the turn of the twentieth century, Sagiv finds a homology between the circulation of money and the circulation of libido in the very bourgeois and capitalist reality described in the novel. In his interestingly revisionist reading of this key work in Agnon's canon, Sagiv sees Hirshl aligned with his mother Tsirl. Agnon's text presents “Tsirl's greed and Hirshl's narcissistic love not as antagonistic, but as modeled upon a shared desire for endless accumulation and consumption based on an inherent sense of deficit” (14). Money and love—in a psychic economy of scarce resources there can never be enough of either. Most readers of this much-loved novel never warm up to Mina, the supposedly shallow girl Hirshl is maneuvered into marrying instead of his heart's desire Bluma Nacht. But Sagiv isn't having any of it. For him, Mina offers “an alternative economic model of love” that does not succumb to the logic of deprivation and consumption. “Instead, though her pain and grief, though conscious mourning, Mina is able to overcome her narcissist position and give life and love to others around her” (128). Thus she manages to escape the “law of permanent debt.”
Sagiv's final example is a text Agnon readers are likely to be less familiar with, “The Garment” (“Ha-mulbush”), a story from 1950. In this allegorical tale about a tailor who fails to finish a garment commissioned by a lord, Sagiv sees an incisive meditation on Agnon's own dilemma as a writer who, struggling to produce a coherent whole, finds himself in a state of permanent indebtedness.
As with any new critical discourse, readers can find themselves at times deep in the weeds of a theoretical idiolect. A method should be judged not by its correctness but by its ability to show us something new about the object under study. On this score, Sagiv's Indebted justifies itself by leaving us richer in insights than we were before.
