Between 'The Shadow of His Hand' by Haim Be’er and Agnon’s 'In Mr. Lublin’s Store'

Abstract

Haim Be’er’s novel The Shadow of His Hand (2021) focuses on the autobiographical narrator’s relationship with his father, who passed away when the narrator was a youth. Be’er creates a fictional setting in which the narrator meets his father and ten townspeople from his father’s hometown, resurrected from the dead. I argue that the main situation in The Shadow of His Hand – the narrator’s dialogue with the dead – is connected to the final chapter of S.Y. Agnon’s unfinished novel In Mr. Lublin’s Store, though Agnon’s work is not explicitly mentioned in The Shadow of His Hand. Both texts share the device of resurrecting the dead, recalling the familiar motif of the living-dead. In both, the narrator, isolated from home and family, converses with the dead, fully aware that they are dead. Both works address a lost past that will never return and involve an encounter between the narrator and his deceased father. Nonetheless, there are significant differences between them in the portrayal of the living-dead characters, particularly the fathers, and the guilt felt by the sons. Another key difference is the presence or absence of books, which are metonymic of Jewish culture: they are missing in Agnon and insufficient in Be’er. Be’er’s use of the chapter from Agnon makes a meta-literary statement on literature’s role in preserving the past and mediating personal memories and emotions.