Two Scholars Who Were in our Town and other Novellas

Bibliography of Works in English

Like most of Agnon’s important stories, the four novellas in this volume have been the object of analysis and interpretation by the major scholars and critics of Hebrew literature. Readers who would like to sample some of that body of scholarship and commentary, but are limited to material available in English, would find the following book chapters and essays to be worthwhile.

The most comprehensive, nearly encyclopedic, book on Agnon in English remains: Arnold Band, Nostalgia and Nightmare: A Study in the Fiction of S.Y. Agnon (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1968). Each of the four stories in this volume are treated there, and the reader will find concise reviews of plot and theme for: “Two Scholars Who Were in Our Town” on pp. 402–405; “In the Heart of the Seas” on pp. 262–270; “In the Prime of Her Life” on pp. 115–118; and “Tehilla” on pp. 406–409.

“Two Scholars Who Were in Our Town” *

Lea Goldberg, “The Author and his Hero,” Ariel 17 (1966-67), pp. 37–54 — Agnon’s artful work as an author who speaks through a story-teller narrative to both portray an innocent and pure ideal while at the same time creating space for two different interpretations — as demonstrated in “Two Scholars Who Were in Our Town” along with other stories.

Yair Mazor, “S.Y. Agnon’s Art of Composition: The Befuddling Turn of the Compositional Screw,” Hebrew Annual Review 10 (1986), pp. 197–208 — on Agnon’s use of unexpected plot development, as exemplified in “Two Scholars Who Were in Our Town”.

Harvey Shapiro, “Multivocal Narrative and the Teacher as Narrator: The Case of Agnon’s ‘Two Scholars Who Were in Our Town’,” Shofar 29:4 (2011), pp. 23–45 — explores the narrative voices that guide the reader through the story, comparing the pious traditional voice at the core versus the modern voice of the framework which distances the reader from the tale.

[* Not having been translated until now, the absence of many critical studies in English on “Two Scholars Who Were in Our Town” is not surprising. It is hoped that this volume will help spur the growth of such secondary literature and analysis.]

“In the Heart of the Seas”

Sidra DeKoven Ezrahi, Booking Passage: Exile and Homecoming in the Modern Jewish Imagination (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2000), chapter 3, pp. 81-102 — on Agnon’s use of the contradiction between mythic and political Zionism to “reclaim the future in the name of the past.”

Roman Katsman, The Time of Cruel Miracles: Mythopoesis in Dostoevsky and Agnon (Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang, 2002), pp. 15–21 — the issue of myth and miracle in the novella.

Alan L. Mintz, “In the Seas of Youth,” Prooftexts 21:1 (2001), pp. 57–70 — proof of the value of prolonged engagement with an Agnonian text; demonstration of what Agnon said: “Any book not worth reading twice probably wasn’t worth reading the first time.” [Mintz revisits his earlier reading of the story in: “Agnon on the Individual and the Community,” Response (Summer 1967), pp. 28–31.]

Ruth R. Wisse, No Joke: Making Jewish Humor (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2013), pp. 189–192 — on the amalgam of serious and comic to form an ironic statement in the novella.

“In the Prime of Her Life”

Nitza Ben-Dov, Agnon’s Art of Indirection: Uncovering Latent Content in the Fiction of S.Y. Agnon (Leiden and New York: E.J. Brill, 1993), pp. 135–138 on the novella’s web of Biblical allusions; chapter 7, pp. 107–133, on the role of the old woman (“Benign Mentor or Evil Genius?”).

Nitza Ben-Dov, “Lambs in Their Mother’s Pasture: Latent Content in Agnon’s ‘In the Prime of Her Life’,” Hebrew Studies 29 (1988), pp. 67–80 — explores the thematic and structural function of Tirzta’s dream as it operates in the novella.

Yael Halevi-Wise, “Reading Agnon’s In the Prime of Her Life in Light of Freud’s Dora,” Jewish Quarterly Review, 98:1 (Winter 2008), pp. 29–40 — on Agnon’s sources for the paradigm he establishes of dysfunctional generations linked by a shared love, which became such a potent template for subsequent Hebrew authors.

Astrid Popien, “Tirtza and Hirshl in Germany: S.Y. Agnon’s In the Prime of Her Life and A Simple Story in the Context of the Family Novel in European Realism” in Agnon and Germany: The Presence of the German World in the Writings of S.Y. Agnon, edited by H. Becker and H. Weiss (Ramat Gan: Bar-Ilan University Press, 2010), pp. 115–150 — on Agnon’s “realistic family novels” as adaptations and ironic transformations of the European model (as exemplified by Theodor Fontane and Thomas Mann).

Naomi B. Sokoloff, “Narrative Ventriloquism and Muted Feminine Voice: Agnon’s ‘In the Prime of Her Life’,” Prooftexts 9:2 (1989), pp. 115–137 — reading the novella in light of feminist critical thought and literary interpretation.

Abraham B. Yehoshua, The Terrible Power of a Minor Guilt: Literary Essays (Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 2000), chapter 7, pp. 108–130 — on the father-daughter relationship as a key to the moral map of the work.

“Tehilla”

Risa Domb, “Is Tehillah Worthy of Her Praise” in History and Literature: New Readings of Jewish Texts in Honor of Arnold J. Band, ed. W. Cutter and D. Jacobson (Providence, RI: Brown Judaic Studies, 2002), pp. 107–115 — an against the consensus reading which posits an ironic portrait in which Tehilla is not the exemplar of piety usually assumed.

Nitza Ben-Dov, “The Dead Do Not Praise the Lord: Alter’s Psalms, Agnon’s Tehilla, Pasternak’s Docter Zhivago,” Hebrew Studies 51 (2010), pp. 203–210 — the tension between belief in this world and belief in the world to come, as telegraphed through the use of (Alter’s translation of) Tehillim in “Tehilla”.

Theodore Friedman, “Exploring Agnon’s Symbols,” Conservative Judaism 21:3 (Spring 1967), pp. 65–71 — aims to unravel the character of Tehilla through what she might symbolize on different levels of meaning in the text.

Amos Oz, The Silence of Heaven: Agnon’s Fear of God (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2000), chapter 2, pp. 13–29 — a controversial book by Israel’s leading contemporary novelist, which dedicates one of its three chapters to exploring religious themes in “Tehilla”.

Hillel Weiss, “The Messianic Theme in the Works of A.B. Yehoshua and Amos Oz,” in Israel and the Post-Zionists, ed. S. Sharan (Tel Aviv: Ariel Center, 2003), pp. 204–226 — response to Oz’s reading of “Tehilla” in The Silence of Heaven.