S. Y. Agnon
All of them illustrate the predicament of Jewish identity, but not all in the same way.
To the great Hebrew writer S.Y. Agnon, balance is all—and imbalance, as in the novel Only Yesterday, a devastating calamity.
In his fiction, and especially in the novel Only Yesterday, S.Y. Agnon casts an ironic, unfooled eye on the inner lives of his fellow Jews and their lopsided bargains with modernity.
Reb Aryeh’s etrog.
Babel, Singer, Agnon.
The last Hebrew classic?
Agnon or Herzog?
A City and Its Fullness.
He positions himself not as a subtly ironic modernist but as a humble, heartbroken preserver of memory.
A Tom Thumb rabbi and a blood libel.
A kinship between the artist and the outlaw.
An author who upended his own parables.
Fish that turn into frogs, a dead count, and halakhic humor.