When we assemble the major motifs found in [Agnon's early] Yiddish poems, we are struck by the similarity between them and the major motifs of Agnon's mature works: the struggle with the devil; violent deaths; the failure of religious ritual to inspire the worshiper; the pervasive sensation of decay in the buildings as opposed to the vitality of the natural world outside; the self-consciousness of the creative artist; the love poems; the deep concern with the destiny of the Jewish people. The inescapable fact is that the kernel of much of Agnon's thematic preoccupation is found in these Yiddish poems. (p. 35)

Not all young Agnon's attempts at prose narrative were successful. At times the didactic message is too obvious, and at times the end of the sketch is painfully artificial. And yet, he already knew how to vary his narrative technique, at times with a "philosophic" preface …, at times with a monologue …, at times by a situation that becomes intelligible only via flashback, and so on. His forte is neither the description of landscape, nor the external features of his characters, nor psychological detail, but rather human actions, comic or tragic, sublime or ridiculous.

Here already are the ironic tone and structured situation that are salient characteristics of the mature writer. (p. 43)

The Hebrew version [of Agnon's stories] is invariably shorter and presents the plot action in balder form than the Yiddish. He obviously possessed much greater mastery over the Yiddish, which flows effortlessly and melodiously. The Yiddish always conveys a sensuous delight in language for its own sake, which is absent from the Hebrew; in Yiddish the imagery is richer, the verbs more intense, the adjectives more varied than in the Hebrew version. The achievement in prose composition evident in the Yiddish is so superior to that in the Hebrew that one wonders why [Agnon] ceased writing in Yiddish, but continued in Hebrew. Surely only a sentimental or idealistic attachment to Hebrew, the language of the national revival, is the explanation. (p. 49)

Following the Yiddish stories chronologically it is possible to discern a steady growth in mastery of narrative technique from story to story, culminating in the most fascinating of all [Agnon's] literary creations in Buczacz, "Toitentants" ("Dance of Death"). The story really does not comprise a narrative unit (it falls into three distinct sections) but more than makes up for its structural flaw by the force and virtuosity of each part. In addition to pure literary interest, the story is an invaluable historical document for charting the writer's development. (p. 52)

[The opening of "'Agunot" ("Agunot"), 1908] is one of the most famous in Agnon's works, not only because of its historical interest as the first paragraphs printed under the name 'Agnon,' but also because it presents the central cluster of themes in the artist's imagination. The deeds of the Jewish people are a lovely thread that the Lord weaves into a resplendent prayer shawl of grace in which the congregation of Israel wraps itself. This prayer shawl shines even in the lands of exile as it did in the house of the Lord in the royal city of Jerusalem, and when He notices that it has not been sullied or befouled, He nods His head approvingly: Thou art beautiful, my beloved, thou art beautiful. "And this is the secret of the greatness and the might and the exaltation and the true love that every Jew feels." But when the thread breaks, the shawl is blemished and evil winds penetrate within, tearing it; immediately all are ashamed, realizing that they are naked. Then the congregation of Israel wanders grieving and moaning, love-sick like the Shulamite of the Song of Songs. This love sickness for the Lord can be cured only if a spirit descends from on high stirring men to good deeds that repair the lovely thread of grace.

Drawing its metaphorical relationship from the allegorical interpretation of the Song of Songs, wherein Solomon becomes the Lord and the Shulamite becomes the congregation of Israel, the midrash adds substance to the abstract relationship of love by injecting the image of the thread and the prayer shawl. Agnon, in turn, carries the process one step further by spinning an attractive tale around the midrash, which immediately gives his tale a cosmic dimension by establishing a meaningful correlation between human action and human destiny and by raising a simple love story to a commentary on the human condition. It is crucial to concentrate upon this point, whether we call it a technique of composition or an intuitive imaginative grasp of reality, since the midrashic resonance gives body to so many of Agnon's stories and the midrashic method of homiletical expansion automatically induces him to think symbolically, to grasp abstracts through realistic objects and situations and, conversely, to infuse the tangible with transcendental meaning.

Inasmuch as the implication of the cited midrash is general and universal, that is, human strength, happiness, and love are predicated upon divine grace which is predicated, in turn, upon human deeds, the narrative possibilities are virtually infinite; secondary themes can be added and the initial theme of "the broken thread" can also be subordinated to other themes. In "'Agunot" the midrashic theme is injected into a love situation and is itself suffused with religious mystery. (pp. 58-9)

["'Agunot"] is a tale of disembodied souls doomed to be tragically anchored to that which they desire but apparently cannot obtain. That this romantic theme pulsates through a traditional, religious world that theoretically and historically held human experience together in a meaningful fabric, only serves to intensify the sense of alienation and to rend asunder the fabric, the "prayer shawl," of religious life. The void in the human soul immediately transcends the specifically Jewish situation in that it concerns first and last the human soul, which we accept as universal. (p. 60)

To many of Agnon's most devoted readers the stories that appeal the most are those called folktales or legends. It is statistically true that a major portion of Agnon's literary output is usually classified under the generic rubric Folktale, yet, the term folktale is by no means clear or precise and often signifies only external qualities. Broadly speaking, Agnon's folktales have as their milieu the community of pious Jews of either Eastern Europe (mostly Galicia) or the old yishuv in Palestine; the frame of reference is understood to be the world of traditional Jewish life, overseen by an almighty divinity identified as the God of Jewish history, and governed by talmudic law and accepted norms of behavior. The folktale we usually encounter in Hebrew literature since the 1880's is not the creation of naïve pious Jews, but rather of sophisticated urban writers who had experienced the milieu of the folktale as children, but had left that milieu for the city. The folktale therefore becomes a framework for various types of tales; its generic implication is often only external. (pp. 78-9)

[To this day the novelette "Vehaya he'akov lemishor" ("And the Crooked Shall Become Straight"), 1912] stands out as one of Agnon's greatest successes, a work that required but minor editing in later years…. If the story was written in four days, as Agnon claims it was, it was a prodigious literary feat. This is the first of Agnon's stories that evoke that "shock of recognition" the reader must feel as he stands in the presence of a great work of art. (p. 83)

More than any other story of this period, "Vehaya he'akov lemishor" utilizes the "new wine in old bottles" technique first tried successfully in "'Agunot"; within the framework of what seems to be a traditional folktale with conventional characteristics, Agnon tells a story that implies values and sentiments utterly different from those ordinarily conveyed by the folktale. An inner tension is therefore created between the plot and the genre in which it is contained. (p. 86)

The narrative technique displayed in the description of the decline of Menashe Hayim at the fair at Lashkovits, and in the moving passage leading up to the discovery that his wife had remarried, is remarkable and has rarely been equaled in Hebrew prose. The significant details are so deftly arranged and controlled that the reader is beguiled into the acceptance of an artistic illusion so convincing that even the constant deliberate intrusions of the writer with deliberately naïve remarks reminiscent of the Hebrew and Yiddish folktale cannot destroy the artistic illusion. The raconteur's ability to charm his audience into the acceptance of the reality of the tale he tells, be it near to or far from the experience of the listener, is unquestionably Agnon's talent and it first manifests itself in overpowering force in this story. (p. 89)

Within the genre of the Agnonic folktale, ["haNidah" ("The Banished One"), 1919] is almost archetypal in that it includes most of the thematic and compositional elements of the other stories of the genre. Great pains are taken to present the folkloristic milieu through which the plot moves; situations rely for their color and causation on the mores of the pious Eastern European community, here called Shibush as it often is in Agnon's stories. Indeed, the plot itself is motivated by the opposition between two distinctly different points of view as to the very nature of life in this milieu. (p. 97)

The suspense of the story is created by the deliberately slow pace in which Agnon works his way to the inevitable tragic ending. Situation by situation we learn more about Gershom, begin to understand him as a person, and consequently watch his steady progress to his doom in sympathy and horror…. The drama of Gershom is played out on two levels. On the metaphysical plane he is doomed because of the curse of Reb Uriel, hence the innocent victim of an ideological clash; on the psychological plane he is victimized by his own hypersensitivity. Both tensions, the metaphysical-ideological and the purely psychological convulse the tranquil folkloristic milieu resulting in the inevitable death….

The cycle of stories published under the rubric ["Polin: Sipure agadot" ("Poland: Legends")] constitutes a representative sample of Agnon's creative activity in the [Berlin period]. (p. 99)

These fourteen stories deal with Jewish life in Eastern Europe in past generations…. (p. 100)

By positing an expanse of historical experience and referring to local customs and places, Agnon succeeds in creating the image of a distinctive community, an image that becomes more and more central to the writer's imagination as the years pass. Indeed, it is important to note that Galicia and its peculiar Jewish folkways became the main focal point of Agnon's imagination precisely when he was living in the metropolitan centers of Germany and when Buczacz was no longer his home. The Jewish community is unquestioningly God-fearing, a basic fact that provides the writer with a ready-made world of mores and values and allows him to slip naturally into a world of fantasy and mystery. (p. 101)

["Bin'arenu uvizkenenu" ("With Our Youth and with Our Aged"), 1920, one of Agnon's most neglected works,] lacks the coherence and universality that make for great satire. Individual chapters, however, are terribly amusing as they shrewdly expose the foibles of life in Buczacz. The point of view, however, is not sustained for the twenty-seven chapters of the satire and too many autobiographical remarks and passages are strewn among the satiric sections, thereby creating a mixed effect. The writer's attitude toward his youthful persona in the story is not consistent. Only rarely does he include himself in the group to be satirized; frequently he is the outsider who is somewhat wiser than his contemporaries but who never has a personality of his own. And finally, even the satiric material is not related to one theme, which would produce a unified effect. The central object of ridicule, the activities of the young Zionists in Shibush (the literary correlative of Buczacz), is often lost amidst tangential matters and does not add up to the comic comment upon ineffectual political action that it purports to be. (p. 121)

Paradoxically, [Hakhnasat kala (The Bridal Canopy)], the first Agnon novel translated into English, is the most alien in atmosphere and style to forms of the novel known to the general reader, and presents the most problems. To one unfamiliar with the Hebrew or Yiddish folktale popular for centuries in Eastern Europe, this novel must seem bizarre; to the Hebrew reader or literary scholar, the novel-like structuring of diverse folktales around several interrelated folk motifs creates numerous questions of interpretation. The internal contradiction is inescapable: the folktale breathes the air of naïveté and ingenuousness while the structuring of a novel implies sophistication and artistic subtlety. (p. 126)

A close reading of the text and a perusal of the critical literature on the novel are more than enough to convince the scholar that the book must be dealt with in terms of ambiguity, parody, and oscillating reality. Unquestionably, the archetype of Don Quixote must be invoked, not for its superficial resemblances to Hakhnasat kala …, but for the narrative modes through which Cervantes set out to parody the chivalric tale. To be successful, a parodist must pay his price to the object of his parody; in entering the spirit of the object, he inevitably adopts some of the characteristics he intends to parody. The closer the parodist is to the object of parody either in temperament, background, or artistic imagination, the more ambivalent will be his attitude toward his object and the more ambiguous his style. Many of the critical problems raised by Hakhnasat kala can be solved if we understand that in this work Agnon identifies with the object of his parody to such a degree that there emerges a remarkably sustained ambiguity that is aesthetically independent and ultimately the most fascinating feature of the book.

Its very name, Hakhnasat kala, is indicative of many of the problems presented by the novel. The English title, The Bridal Canopy, is neither precise nor does it signify the main theme as does the Hebrew; literally, Hakhnasat kala means "bringing the bride under (the bridal canopy)," or, more loosely, "marrying her off according to traditional Jewish practices." (pp. 126-27)

No small part of Agnon's success in this novel and in his other works can be ascribed to his felicitous selection of the family as his dominant metaphor for it was both a living unit suitable for novelistic manipulation and the basic cell of the social and religious organism he was describing…. (pp. 127-28)

The subtitle, too, is significant: in an obviously archaizing method Agnon follows the convention of certain collections of Jewish folktales by adding an amplification of his title: "The wonders of the Hasid Reb Yudel of Brody (Brod, in Hebrew) and his three modest daughters and the account of the greatness of our brethren the children of Israel who reside in the country of his Majesty The Kaiser." The information given is comprehensive and essential. This is a tale of wonders in which the hero believes in miracles and expects them to happen in his life, in which the very climax of the plot is a miracle. (p. 128)

[The] plot presents a challenge to the critic for once one places it within its literary tradition or questions the simplicity and unity of its point of view, the entire plot appears deliberately incredible. As usual in the Agnon story, the plot line is deceptively simple. (p. 129)

Because the work abounds in parodies and ambiguities, the author stands not outside his work but within every sentence; and since he is demonstrably writing tongue in cheek, the naïve atmosphere of the folktale and the plausibility of the plot itself requires reconsideration. (p. 130)

The initial presentation of Reb Yudel is indicative of the tone of the entire novel. The style is obviously patterned after early hasidic tales with their naïveté, piety, and frequent reference to Scriptures. Reb Yudel himself has the basic characteristics of the literary type of the Hasid: he is poor; he is dedicated to God and His Tora; he is removed from worldly affairs. It is hardly coincidental that his name is mentioned only after two pages of general description of his living habits and even then by his wife who is far more realistic and worldly than he. One feels at the outset that here is a deliberate parody of the traditional hasidic tale…. (p. 138)

The endearing simplicity and honesty of the Hasid are conveyed tenderly and attractively; but the reader cannot escape the consuming effect of the parody. The pervasive denigration of the flesh, the relentless remorse that plagues any decision, the reliance on traditional texts rather than empirical experience for corroboration of fact, all dissolve in the acid of satire. Obviously, the exaggerated compunctions coupled with the spirit/flesh antithesis brought out in its most naked terms, tend to corrode the validity of this antithesis as a basic guide or framework to life.

Confronted by these two forces, the winning naïveté and the corrosive parody, which are almost always concomitantly operative in this novel, the reader must take the pains to prevent predispositions from dulling his sensitivity to either aspect. Both should be received in equilibrium until preponderance of one in a specific passage convinces the reader that the impact of that passage is more to one side than the other. The style of Hakhnasat kala is best studied under the rubric "ambiguity."… (p. 142)

In this novel, the logical, triumphal scene must be the wedding in which all the aspirations of the hero are fulfilled and all the major themes of the novel summed up: the wondrous change of fortune; the actual union of two families with promise of offspring; the acquaintances Yudel made on the road; man's fate and divine providence; the love and study of the Tora; the mistaken identity; the yearning for Erets Yisrael. All these themes are fused and illuminated by the elaborate description of the wedding ritual and celebration. (p. 176)

In Hakhnasat kala we see Agnon at the peak of his mythopoetic powers, creating a complete imaginative world at once self-contained and central in the writer's development…. The ironies engendered by the disparity between the writer's mentality and that of the mythic world he has created so meticulously are conclusive proof of the psychological distance between him and that world. For any student of literature, this novel offers a rare example of the narrative and spiritual problems involved in a modern attempt at myth-making. (p. 184)

When the first stories of the ["Sefer hama'asim" ("Book of Deeds")] cycle appeared in periodicals during the early thirties, both the critics and the general readers were shocked: the master of the pious tale seemed to be indulging in modernistic, Europeanized mannerisms. The outrage was compounded because the implications of this new mode ran against the grain of current ideology and sentiment. The Hebrew folktale is, in a sense, a literary expression of Jewish nationalist sentiments, of Zionism; in adopting obviously European or "Western" modes, Agnon was clearly exercising an independence of one of the conventions of his audience. And though he continued to write stories of the "Sefer hama'asim" cycle or type throughout the 1930's and 1940's, it was not until the late 1940's … that these stories found an appreciative audience. At that point, a new image of Agnon began to form in the reader's imagination, not that of a simple reconteur, but rather of a highly complex "modern" writer with a discernible affinity to the figures of the "existentialist" tradition, to Kafka, in particular. Gradually, more and more readers … began to penetrate the bright classical composure of Agnon's prose style to glimpse the murky spiritual anguish below, a veritable "dark night of the soul" that had persisted unnoticed for a quarter of a century. Agnon, of course, had employed dreams, allegories, and symbols before, but had always scattered them among pages of tales and folkloristic detail. In "Sefer hama'asim," however, he developed a highly compressed and suggestive narrative technique, not unlike Kafka's, which was obviously more suited to convey the doubt and confusion of the pious, traditional Jew who is also intellectually a citizen of Western Europe with its broad humanistic tradition. The agonized, ironical imagination was no longer hidden behind a mythic ethos, but instead paraded before the reader nakedly, often a trifle theatrically. The action always takes place in the mind of a hypersensitive, often neurotic, narrator who tells his story in the first person, naturally mixing memory, dream, fantasy, and reality, as the human imagination often does, particularly under psychic stress. Each story has its own structure, carefully contrived to involve the sensitive reader in the spiritual plight of the narrator, a plight that is moving because it can be shared by the reader who recognizes it as his own.

Once apprised so shockingly of the power of blackness in these nonrealistic short stories, critics returned to Agnon's earlier collected works and found there what they had previously overlooked. (pp. 187-88)

[Ore'ah nata lalun (A Wayfarer Who Tarried for a Night), 1939] presents few problems in interpretation. The meaning and tone of the novel, sustained from beginning to end by a simple plot outline and a series of homogeneous episodes, is all but inescapable. For here is a relentless panorama of physical and spiritual desolation which seizes the reader with the force of Picasso's "Guernica" with which it is, not too coincidentally, almost contemporary…. The unmitigated pain that pervades the book is the pain of a double disappointment. First the visitor discovers that the formerly flourishing Jewish community of Shibush, which always glowed in his imagination as a symbol of the best in traditional Jewish life, was crumbling into despondent ruin, and then the mature man returns to find that the dreamworld of childhood, of innocence, is forever lost. The man who does "come home again" finds that "home" is no more, that "home" is a shockingly hideous panorama of decay. The nostalgia that inspired the visit dissolves, when confronted with reality, into nightmare. (pp. 283-84)

The meaning of the novel is unambiguous, but one crucial misunderstanding common in studies of the book should be clarified at this point. The novel purports to be an autobiographical account of a deeply felt personal experience. True, Agnon did visit Buczacz, the real city that Agnon calls Shibush in the novel, in 1930; true, the story is narrated in the first person and the narrator himself is a character in the story. But narrative technique should not be confused with autobiography, for this leads one to take the novel as a literal, historical statement to be judged on these grounds rather than on those of a work of the imagination. And a work of the imagination it is, as the facts will prove. Agnon did not spend the better part of a year in Buczacz in 1930; he was there for only five days. Buczacz in 1930 was not Buczacz of 1907 when Agnon left it, but it was far from the symbol of desolation which Agnon presents to us as Shibush in his novel. On this point there is abundant documentation. Many critics, moreover, unfortunately tend to inject into their consideration the inescapable fact that the Jewish community of Buczacz was liquidated by the Nazis in the spring of 1943, a fact totally extraneous to the author's artistic vision in this novel. Whatever historical information there is here has been transfigured by the author's artistic vision. Any contention that in future generations Buczacz can be reconstructed from Agnon's excellent description of Shibush is sheer nonsense.

While it is impossible to attribute to Agnon prophetic fore-knowledge of the holocaust of World War II, one cannot neglect the Sitz im Leben of Ore'ah nata lalun. (pp. 284-85)

Throughout the story, situations, people and objects not only call attention to themselves but also refer to a coherent and readily comprehensible world of values which envelops them. While Agnon takes great pains to render the precise form of a statement, the exact implication of a gesture, or the true motive behind a human action, his vision of reality is always expanded by another dimension. Reality is also a manifestation or epiphany of a set of attitudes toward the condition of man in the modern world and particularly those modern men whose heritage is specifically Jewish and inexorably challenging in that it is still an integral part of their being. Even the reader who is wary of symbol searching and message hunting cannot deny the factual evidence of this technique: recurrent motifs and images that emerge as symbols, obvious, repeated juxtapositions and contrasts in situations, and the insightful commentary of the narrator himself. The novel does not move on two distinct planes, the realistic and the suggested ideational, like allegory, but on one, the realistic, which is animated and ordered by an inner meaning that in turn is conceived only in terms of the specific situation described. In allegory, the suggested idea can exist without the narrative material that seems to be presented only to concretize, often didactically, the moral to be taught; here, however, values are envisaged artistically only in terms of a specific existential situation. (pp. 285-86)

Usually considered the most tragic of Agnon's three major novels, Ore'ah nata lalun is really his most affirmative novelistic statement of belief. Both Hakhnasat kala and Temol shilshom reject the basic values rendered in them, the former by its unrelieved ironic tone, the latter by its plot action leading to the violent doglike death of its hero. But Ore'ah nata lalun, reaches a positive ending in spite of the mood of decay which pervades it. The narrator does rejoin his family in Jerusalem to live the life of the Tora there. Though he has had his childhood obliterated from his consciousness as a possible psychological refuge from reality, in his loss of innocence he gains a new childhood in the figure of the child of Rahel and Yeruham. Their child is given his name, a strange practice for Ashkenazic Jews who usually name the child after a dead person. I suggest that this strange act means that the narrator who entered the story has died as a personality: he has discovered his Shibush is no more, and he therefore undergoes a rebirth signified in the birth and circumcision of the child who will bear his name. (pp. 326-27)

[Agnon, responding to the stirring historical events of 1942–1953,] created many of his most impassioned artistic works, which attempt to cope, however indirectly, with the impulses of the period…. The very fact that Agnon did not succumb to the temptation to render superficial, reportorial accounts of major contemporary events sheds much light on his artistic imagination. One does not find concentration camps or heroic battle scenes in his writing; the specific upheavals are rarely mentioned and then only in veiled allusion. What one does encounter, however, is a turbulence of spirit greater than that in any other period of his long literary career, and a tortured grappling with some of the fundamental human questions raised by the actions and passions of those apocalyptic days. "Apocalyptic" is probably the most accurate word for the moral situation that characterizes the Sitz im Leben of many of these works, for it is clear that the writer is struggling here, more than ever before, with the moral suppositions of his life. This struggle, common to the major writers of this century, constitutes what Joyce has aptly called "the conscience of the race."

The dialectical moods of nostalgia and nightmare … reach their peaks in Ore'ah nata lalun …, and take new directions in the years between 1942 and 1953. Ore'ah nata lalun assumed that throughout this world of crumbling institutions and values, two focuses of faith and behavior still abide: Erets Yisrael and the Tora…. [Later] the redemptive power of these two focuses are severely questioned. Certainly, in Agnon's major work of this period, the novel [Temol shilshom (Only Yesterday), 1945],… all basic assumptions are challenged. (pp. 328-29)

Though not written as a trilogy, Agnon's three major novels, Hakhnasat kala, Ore'ah nata lalun, and Temol shilshom are related in several crucial aspects. All have their roots in Galicia and extend, in varying degrees, to Erets Yisrael; the degree of extension toward Erets Yisrael increases from novel to novel. The articulation of the relationship between Galicia … and Erets Yisrael is one of the central concerns of the writer. The relationship between the heroes is striking. Reb Yudel Hasid of Hakhnasat kala is an ancestor, five generations removed, of Yitshak Kummer of Temol shilshom; both the narrative "I" of Ore'ah nata lalum and Yitshak Kummer of Temol shilshom go from Galicia to Erets Yisrael. Hemdat, the young writer in Temol shilshom, is as much a projection of the writer's own personality as the narrator of Ore'ah nata lalum, but in a more removed and objective sense. And finally, all three novels display an unrelenting obsession with the broader problems of faith, identity, and home which beset many writers in this century. Consequently,… the three novels do form a cycle in which each member is illuminated by the other two…. [Temol shilshom] is doubtless the most successfully realized of the three novels, the richest in connotation, and the most universal in import.

In this novel, Agnon adopts a more straightforward narrative method in which a central figure, Yitshak Kummer, is observed moving through a series of episodes that affect him directly…. The book is a Bildungsroman that does not follow the conventional passage from innocence to experience but progresses from innocence to a feeble state of experience marked by its periods of bliss and composure often ruffled by the irrepressible consciousness of guilt and failure, and finally moves back to a state of innocence which our hero is not allowed to enjoy for he must pay with his life for his failure. (pp. 414-15)

Like the two preceding novels, Temol shilshom has its specific milieu, mostly Palestine of the central years of the Second Aliya…. [This milieu] is treated by Agnon as a means and not as an end, as material that he can manipulate for artistic purposes and not as material presented for its own sake. Agnon is not fundamentally a realistic writer and his use of detail peculiar to a period or a milieu should be termed quasi-realism. Were we to treat the book as a work of realism how, then, integrate into it the more than one hundred pages in which the dog, Balak, wends his way through the streets of Jerusalem?

It is the presence of Balak, who ultimately bites Yitshak Kummer, which has distorted much of the critical reading of the novel…. The explications have ranged rather amusingly from the inevitable hypothesis that the dog symbolizes the Jewish people, to more ingenious exercises that characterize the dog as a detailed articulation of the psyche of Yitshak Kummer which is presented in the simplest terms. Agnon, himself, has anticipated these critical gymnastics by including in the novel … a riotous satire of the many possible ways of interpreting this symbol, and he pokes fun at his critics: "The people of Jaffa who are all opinionated turned their attention to these matters, but did not know to whom they referred. One says 'there's something to it' and another says, 'we should learn the implicit from the explicit.' Meanwhile opinions were split, and there were as many opinions as people in the city."… Agnon's satire of his explicators actually reveals part of the truth…. [Actually] the dog is a many-faceted symbol alluding to different things in different places. The total meaning of the dog symbol is the sum total of all these facets, the core of which is the ambiguous, bold statement of the preacher Rabbi Gronam Yekum Purkan, "I consider the face of this generation to be like the face of a dog."… (pp. 415-17)

[The] agonized conclusion that the face of the generation is like the face of a mad dog is the result of the writer's disillusionment with certain ideals that give life meaning, and of his horrified witnessing of the disintegration of human values in Europe as the twentieth century progressed. (p. 418)

Temol shilshom, because of its density of varied episodes and recurring motifs, requires emphasis on the patterns of motifs and their significance. Neither the plot nor the character of Yitshak is responsible for the excitement of the novel. The plot takes us back and forth from Jaffa to Jerusalem with many digressions that, on first reading, seem to have little to do with the main story line. Yitshak Kummer is a deliberately flat character. Why would a writer choose to bother with him? As we shall see, both the meandering, seemingly suspenseless plot and the lackluster hero grow enormously in interest and significance when we begin to respond to the novel's patterns of motifs. They run throughout the entire novel and relate one episode to another, one attitude to another, even though a particular motif may imply different things in different contexts. And when we note the complex interrelationships of the major motifs, we begin to appreciate the fertility of the writer's imagination and his masterly control over the nagging anxieties of his life during the trying years of the novel's composition, mostly during World War II.

The disintegration of traditional religious practice and belief is the central motif to which all other motifs are organically related. This is why Yitshak must be portrayed as a flat personality. His gradual neglect of religious practices and his family, his assimilation of the behavior patterns of the ordinary haluts, his vague sensation of the tastelessness of life are certainly not due to the specific complexities of his personality, but rather are symptomatic of a generation. As a result, the religious motifs stand out more vividly than the personality of the hero himself. (p. 421)

Yitshak's behavior was, on the whole, nonoffensive and, at times, nondescript. Though a flat character, he arouses sympathy by his sincerity, his naïveté, his fundamental innocence. Why, then, was Yitshak struck down at the moment of his return to the religious way of life?… The universe of Temol shilshom, the world of Yitshak Kummer, can have shape and meaning only if it is governed by a just divinity. But this does not seem to be the case. Yitshak dies a dog's death, bound to a foul bed in a dark room; that is, he is bound on a meaningless altar, unlike the biblical Isaac whose binding was an act of enormous import for all humanity, and who was not killed in the end, but lived on to bear the message of Moriah to the world through his descendants. There is nothing Yitshak Kummer has done to warrant such punishment…. It is therefore necessary to probe the problem of causation to arrive at some concept of the writer's point of view regarding divine justice. (pp. 425-26)

Yitshak's death is … ironic because he is bitten and infected by the dog just when he has finally returned to his point of departure: he has returned to the religious practices of the traditional Jew, is married to a pious girl, and therefore theoretically beyond the reach of further temptation. It is absurd to posit Yitshak's death as the just punishment for his waywardness: his sins were minor and he did repent, actually returning to the path of piety. Throughout the book, he seems to be on a quest, however feeble and inarticulate…. The quest has two geographical and behavioral focuses: Jaffa and Jerusalem…. The novel is, in effect, a literary statement that redemption can be found in neither place, in neither way of life. Jaffa is unsatisfying; the satisfaction that Jerusalem offers is only a brief prelude to a brutal, meaningless death. The total impact of Temol shilshom can only be a confession of the writer's nihilism. (p. 444)

Agnon himself seems to be disturbed by the nihilistic implications of Yitshak's death, for he asks in [a] moving passage …: "Why was this Yitshak, who was no worse than other men, punished so much?" A possible answer to this question is suggested by the Sitz im Leben of the novel, most of which, we should recall, was written in the dark days of World War II when news of the meaningless slaughter of millions of Yitshaks in Europe reached Jerusalem. The correspondence between the central metaphor of the novel and the historical situation is too striking to be disregarded, particularly in a writer so steeped in Jewish literary sources as Agnon. In that the novel implies that there is no satisfying answer to this question, it is an honest, literary confrontation with one of the hard facts of our existence in the twentieth century. (p. 447)

[Nightmare] is one of two main focuses of Agnon's sentiment; the second focus, which is antithetical but complementary to the first, is nostalgia, an almost Proustian struggle to recapture temps perdu. But while Proust, in his reconstruction and preservation of the past, begins with the personal experiences of his fictional Marcel and includes through them a panorama of an entire segment of society, Agnon devotes hundreds of pages to the world of pious Jews, mostly of the past century or two, which is presented objectively and in the third person. Usually, neither the writer nor a literary projection of his psyche are characters in the story being told. Indeed, the writer is present only as the mythopoetic creator who consciously reconstructs an entire civilization which he years for nostalgically. At times he might entertain the rather fanciful notion that this tranquil world of piety and wholeness was the world of his childhood and that he could possibly return to it. But when nostalgic yearnings cannot be fulfilled and the writer realizes that the golden world of his fiction is nothing but fantasy, the nostalgia may very well turn into nightmare as it does in Ore'ah nata lalun. Nightmare and nostalgia, then, are two allied moods, both forms of the fictional "romance" that repeatedly endeavors to recapture an ideal world that can never be recaptured. (pp. 449-50)

Though astoundingly erudite in Jewish sources and an observant Jew, Agnon excels all other modern Hebrew prose writers in his devotion to his craft, to aesthetic form—a fact that has led some critics to doubt the sincerity of his attachment to traditional Jewish values or his concern with the vital issues of Jewish life in this century. But the truth is that Agnon intuitively grasps reality and human situations as a writer of fiction and not as an essayist or polemicist…. The agonizing spiritual problems that confront serious men of many countries in this century are all present in Agnon's writings, refracted through the artistic prism. (p. 450)

Arnold J. Band, in his Nostalgia and Nightmare: A Study in the Fiction of S. Y. Agnon (copyright © 1968 by the Regents of the University of California; reprinted by permission of the University of California Press). University of California Press, 1968, 553 p.