[In the following excerpt from an essay on contemporary Hebrew literature, Riggan calls Agnon the best of the “conservatives” who appreciated the nuances of the Hebrew language tradition.]

To read the creative and critical texts gathered here in this special issue of World Literature Today commemorating the fiftieth anniversary of the founding of the State of Israel is to witness, by and large, precisely such a turn from the collective to the personal, from state-building to the construction and protection of one's own private, personal space, from questions writ large about the history and nature of Jewry to concern with one's individual love life or education or domestic dilemmas or damaged psyche and soul. …

The fundamental importance of Hebrew as a sociocultural medium is self-evident. First, it is the bond of the individual with Jewish history, cerebration, and values that cannot be duplicated by any other medium. Second, it is the bond uniting the potpourri of Israelis, regardless of religion, country of origin, political posture, educational level, et cetera. The vexing question, however, is the degree to which Hebrew can be altered, transformed, and inundated with foreignisms and yet retain its ability to bond a Hebrew-speaker or Hebrew-reader to a Jewish past, a Jewish present, and a Jewish future, however these be defined. And on the pragmatic level, the question is whether the present trend can be ameliorated and possibly even reversed. For Hebrew, like any other language, is not merely a means of communication; it is a virtual organ of perception, despite the necessity of distinguishing between the world and our means of symbolizing it. Hebrew is not a neutral mechanism through which our evolving culture transacts its affairs. It is, by its very form and content, a shaper of values, an advocate of ideologies, a stimulus of senses, and an instructor of the mind.

Today, as in the past, the single most positive architect of the Hebrew language is the serious writer of poetry and of prose. A host of erudite and creative authors have coined neologisms, revived long-dormant terms and phrases, adapted Hebrew to modern use, and re-created it as a language with a rich treasury and variety of expression. This endeavor has involved both linguistic conservatism and creativity. The most successful of the conservatives was Israel's Nobel laureate S. Y. Agnon (1888-1970), who, more than any other writer, utilized to good advantage the Hebrew language from its biblical origins, through its rabbinic continuation, onward through medieval diction, to its modern renaissance. His style is not simply eclectic. Rather, “It is an artistic blend of various strands of language at an unusual pitch of intensity. Any paragraph in any story or any novel of Agnon's teems with half-phrases and quarter-phrases from the Bible, the Talmud, the medieval tract, the hassidic tale, the philosophic homily. And these language pebbles form a mosaic of unusual splendor and unusual brilliance. How they do this is Agnon's secret. In an age which has enriched but also vulgarized the Hebrew language, Agnon stands out as the self-appointed guardian of its purity, its wealth and its Semitic character.”¹ …

Note

1. See Eisig Silberschlag, From Renaissance to Renaissance, Vol. 2: Hebrew Literature in the Land of Israel, 1870-1970 p. 185. If Agnon is not as widely read as his magnificent writing deserves, it is not solely because he is basically a lauditor temporis acti, but because his myriad allusions escape modern readers.