Observant Jews are celebrating the holiday of Sukkot this week, celebrating the journey to Jerusalem. During festival rituals, the observant use an esrog, a type of citron fruit. And yes, I had to look it up! How’d I learn about esrogs? From the following passage in the novel, A Simple Story, by the late Israeli writer S.Y. Agnon (who won the Nobel Prize in ’66). The story is set in Galicia, a section of Poland/the Ukraine in which Agnon grew up. The passage describes a train ride by the novel’s hero Hirshl Hurvitz, back home from a loonybin to his native city, Szybusz.
[T]here was no need to entertain Hirshl on the way, for a train ride to Szybusz, especially in the month of Elul, was entertainment in itself. The passengers, it turned out, were divided into four camps. The first of these, a party of esrog dealers on their way back from Greece, was in a bellicose mood. Why, to think of the weeks they had just spent running around that land of unscrupulous cutthroats without tasting a Jewish meal or hearing a Jewish prayer in order to bring Jews esrogs for Sukkos–and here the local Zionist press had the gall to attack them and blacken their names! The Zionists in the car shouted back that any Jew buying or blessing citrons from Corfu when Jewish farmers were sweating blood to grow the same fruit in Palestine was an out-and-out anti-Semite. At this point the fray was joined by a band of Hasidim, some of them returning from taking the baths and others on their way to their rabbis for the High Holy Days: anyone purchasing an esrog from Palestine, they yelled, was himself doing business with anti-Semites, which was what the irreligious Jewish farmers there were.
