["Betrothed"] has some moments of lyrical description and of direct psychological notation which are immediately successful. Yet we are absolutely compelled—by the deliberate insubstantiality of its central events and characters, by its studied narrative disjunctions, and by the author's own interpolated comments—to take it allegorically….

[Reading] Agnon's tales one feels that anything can happen next; and that the author fully intends that the secret of why one thing happens rather than another should remain his own….

Confronted with a series of riddles to which I have no key, I am bound to suspect that my not having the key is the very point of the stories: that they are essentially fables about the universal failures in communication between God and man, and among men. This interpretation would perhaps be confirmed by what one knows of Agnon's passionate attachment to the Talmudic tradition, to the many centuries of devotional writing and study which came to a catastrophic end with the destruction of East European Jewry. In English his work hardly has the power to make us realise anew what that destruction must have meant to the author. But his Hebrew is, I believe, closely packed with evocations of the past; and it may well be that these constant echoes go a long way towards providing the ballast of common experience, the burden of necessity, for which the reader of his fantasies in any other language looks in vain.