Shmuel Yosef Agnon Critical Essay | Critical Review by Bernard Knieger

Critical Review by Bernard Knieger

SOURCE: Knieger, Bernard. “Shmuel Yosef Agnon's ‘The Face and the Image’.” Studies in Short Fiction 12, no. 2 (1975): 184-85.

In the following review of an Agnon short story, Knieger calls attention to the Hebrew meaning of the phrase “face-to-face,” concluding that the narrator is facing his own isolation from traditional faith.

One of the Agnon stories in Twenty-One Stories (New York: Schocken, 1970) is “The Face and the Image.” But this title is a metaphorical translation of the Hebrew Ha-panim la-panim, which literally translates into “The Face to the Face.” The editor Nahum N. Glatzer in his “Editorial Postscript” writes (on page 283) that the “Hebrew title of the story is taken from Proverbs 27:19, which the standard translations render as, ‘As in the water face answereth to face, so the heart of man to man.’” But what is the relevance of this proverb to the story? Presumably the...
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