Every Monday And Every Thursday Poem by gershon hepner

Every Monday and every Thursday,
Agnon was told he must report
to the police. Controlled this way,
the Jews whom they could not export
performed a ritual different from
the one performed in shul those days.
Although the Torah’s not a bomb,
the Germans feared that he who prays
with tallis and tefillin may
endanger state security.
Though Leipzig let Shai Agnon stay,
and write in the obscurity
of Hebrew no one understood,
it would have been a great surprise
to Jews and goyim that he would,
long after, win the Nobel Prize.

Linda pointed out to me this story from Hillel Halkin’s translation of S. Y. Agnon’s “To This Day”. Born in Austrian Galicia, he left Palestine before the First World War to go and live in Leipzig, which is how my father got to meet him once. Linda found the story of the Monday and Thursday ritual particularly intriguing because I had just told her that I found the ritual of birthday candles fascinating when my two granddaughters, Eve and Ada, blew out seven candles on their brother Yoav’s birthday cake but didn’t realize that this signified that he was no longer six years old.

5/26/08