[Agnon] is a writer of startling and total originality, resembling other Hebrew writers of the century almost as faintly as he does his European contemporaries.

He draws on vast knowledge of Jewish tradition—that of the commentaries and homilies of the Talmud and the folklore of the Hasidim. His use of their language, their dialectic, their rhetoric, is deliberately imitative, but the ends to which he turns this tradition are entirely his own. Though highly allusive, his prose style is simplicity itself. His range is enormous….

Agnon is not a historical novelist in the accepted European sense: he writes of the last century partly from hearsay, from a kind of folk knowledge passed down from one generation of Jews to another. Nor is he entirely an elegist of a past age, for he can subject the past to satiric appraisal. Nor is he a moralist, though he uses the moralist's voice as a stylistic device. Much of his subject-matter would seem to indicate that he is a religious writer: but his intensely distinctive tone—a combination of the false-naive and the ironical—immediately sets him apart from the writer whose view of the world is dictated by his religious beliefs. His is certainly that recognisable Jewish irony which meets disaster with argument, seeking to reconcile the glories of the divine promise with the realities of the Jewish predicament.

No European writer has expressed more powerfully than Agnon the catastrophic break with the past marked by the First World War. His three great novels describe the culture of Diaspora Jewry at its peak (The Bridal Canopy 1931), the wasteland of that culture in Galicia after 1918 (A Guest for the Night—untranslated, 1939), and the unsuccessful struggle to reconcile the old world and the new, as seen in the adventures of a simple-minded, orthodox pioneer in Palestine (Days Gone By—untranslated, 1945). (p. 877)

In Agnon's stories, as in his novels, the recurring themes are those of perplexity, of wandering, of the chaos that prefigures death. In his secular stories, the family and the home compose a value like that of true faith, and just as obscure and difficult to achieve. Instead of the psychological determinism that runs through modern European writing, we have a kind of fatalism about relations between men and women. Agnon writes quietly, almost pedantically, about violent passions….

The problem of translating Agnon is a very serious one. The fallacy of his translators is to believe that Agnon is writing in an archaic style…. Agnon does not write in deliberate archaisms, though his simplicity of style probably began as an attempt to avoid anachronisms. Echoes of the Bible and the Talmud make it difficult for young Hebrew writers to use the language for the purposes of the modern novel. But Agnon welcomes such echoes. Rendered into English, however, as in 'Betrothed', the Biblical phrases and references to Talmudic lore jar violently with the precise social observation of the Jaffa of 50 years ago. (p. 878)