Shmuel Yosef Agnon Critical Essay | Critical Essay by Curt Leviant

Critical Essay by Curt Leviant

SOURCE: "Seeing into the Hidden Interior of Things," in Saturday Review, May 16, 1970, pp. 27-30, 46-8.

In the following excerpt, Leviant observes that Agnon incorporated some of his favorite themes into the narratives of Twenty-One Stories, a collection that the critic perceives as steeped in Hebrew history, culture, and language.

In Twenty-one Stories we see the themes that had become almost obsessive with Agnon throughout his long career: loss of home, exile from family, Diaspora, alienation, despair, loss of faith. Half of the stories come from Agnon's Sefer ha-Maasim (variously translated as Book of Tales, Deeds, or Happenings), one of the heights of Agnon's achievements. In these surreal works action takes place in a world devoid of laws of time and place, cause and effect, and, occasionally, life and death. Here Agnon accents modes of perceptions and experience normally blocked in realistic fiction. And in subverting the rational, normal...
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