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Customer Reviews (1)

An insightful reading of Agnon
This work is an insightful reading of Agnon which enriches our understanding of this very complicated writer. Agnon makes use of all the historical resources and levels of the language, and to really comprehend what he is doing it helps to have a commentary like this one. ... Read more

Book Description
Shmuel Yosef Agnon (1888-1970), winner of the Nobel Prize forLiterature in1966 and the undisputed master of the Hebrew novel,still remains largely anunknown or even misunderstood figure. Agnon'sinnovation was to construct anintricate dialectic between Hebrewtradition and the modern predicament,thereby producing a verydistinctive mode of modernist narrative. Agnondeployed a technique ofrich allusiveness drawn from traditional Hebrew loreand languageusing free-association, especially by means of imaginative dream-sequences designed to unveil the ambivalent but fateful meaningsin theapparently inconsequential events and thoughts which determinethe lives ofhis characters.This book explores the methods andmaterials of Agnon's art so as to providethe English reader withinsight into his unique fictional world, and itproposes a freshapproach to the reading of Agnon which will also be ofinterest tothose familiar with his work and the crucial literature on it. ... Read more

Book Description

In The Silence of Heaven, the world renowned Israeli novelist Amos Oz introduces us to an extraordinary masterpiece of Hebrew literature that is just now appearing in English, S. Y. Agnon's Only Yesterday. For Oz, Agnon is a treasure trove of a world no longer available to today's writers, yet deeply meaningful for his wonderment about God, the submerged eroticism of his writing, and his juggling of multiple texts from the historical Hebrew religious library. This collection of Oz's reflections on Agnon, which includes an essay on the essence of his ideology and poetics, is a rich interpretive work that shows how one great writer views another.

Oz admires Agnon especially for his ability to invoke and visualize the religious world of the simple folk in Eastern European Jewry, looking back from the territorial context of the Zionist revival in Palestine. The tragedy of Agnon's visions, Oz maintains, lies in his perspicacity. Long before the Holocaust, Agnon saw the degeneration, ruin, and end of Jewish culture in Eastern Europe. He knew, too, that the Zionist project was far from being a secure conquest and its champions far from being happy idealists. Oz explores these viewpoints in a series of thick readings that consider the tensions between faith and the shock of doubt, yearnings and revulsion, love and hate, and intimacy and disgust.

Although Oz himself is interested in particular ideological questions, he has the subtle sensibility of a master of fiction and can detect every technical device in Agnon's arsenal. With the verve of an excited reader, Oz dissects Agnon's texts and subtexts in a passionate argument about the major themes of Hebrew literature. This book also tells much about Oz. It represents the other side of Oz's book of reportage, In the Land of Israel, this time exploring the ideologies of Jewish identity not on the land but in texts of the modern classical heritage. The Silence of Heaven hence takes us on a remarkable journey into the minds of two major literary figures.

Customer Reviews (1)

A great student on a master of Hebrew literature
This book is at least on part based on public lectures given by Oz at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem. Oz is a tremendously powerful and beautiful speaker and reader of Hebrew. These lectures sounded not so much like academic criticism but as a kind of long prose-poem. I do not know Agnon's work well- enough to argue with the reading Oz makes of it. Agnon was a religious Jew who was deep inside the Tradition as is evidenced in some of the anthology work he did especially ' Days of Awe' . Oz has gone somewhere else, and does not have Agnon's midrashic and talmudic background. Yet the thesis that Oz proposes in regard to the contradiction between the ideals of the religious and Zionist return to the land, and the reality which was met and made in the Yishuv is a very real one. It is also true that Agnon's work is a chronicle of the collapse of Eastern Jewry written before the great destruction comes. Oz knows the Agnon text well, and his power as writer makes it seems as if his reading of Agnon is the most convincing one. I think however it should be balanced against the reading of other commentators including Baruch Kurzweil, Arnold Band, Hillel Weiss and a host of others.
However reading this work of Oz will give not only knowledge of two of the Hebrew language's greatest writers in modern times ( Agnon and Oz) it will illuminate the whole ideological dimension of the Jewish return to Eretz Yisrael. ... Read more