[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….
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