The Bridal Canopy

The Bridal Canopy, Nobel laureate S.Y. Agnon’s mock epic novel, is an elaborate frame story encompassing dozens of Hassidic tales. Set in early nineteenth-century Galicia, the plot is part quest, part comedy of errors, progressively departing from its opening tone of realism. It is the tale of poor Reb Yudel of Brody (in today’s western Ukraine, about 100 miles north of Agnon’s native Buczacz), his long-suffering wife, Frummet, and their three modest and righteous daughters, each in need of a bridegroom. The narrative is decisively double-edged: na ve, in the manner of classic folk tales, as well as sophisticated and artful, as a modern work. The Bridal Canopy parodies the Hassidic folk tale, but does so very delicately; it censures without acrimony, always maintaining an air of reverence for the Old World. Unlike other depictions of Eastern European Jewry’s shtetl life, the story is sufficiently subtle to support divergent readings and that is clearly part of Agnon’s accomplishmen