SOURCE: "The Web of Biblical Allusion," in Agnon's Art of Indirection: Uncovering Latent Content in the Fiction of S. Y. Agnon, E. J. Brill, Leiden, Netherlands, 1993, pp. 135-52.

In the following excerpt, Ben-Dov contends that a buried layer of biblical allusion in "The Dance of Death, or the Lovely and Pleasant" belies the overt meaning of the story.)

Agnon's scriptural and talmudic resonances and nuances, his historical and textual layers, his allusive and elusive echoings and patternings, are so marvelously multiform, dense, and imbricated that he is daunting even to the most sophisticated Hebrew readers.

—Cynthia Ozick "Agnon's Antagonisms"

In this [essay], we shall be concerned exclusively with examining how the multiplicity of meaning so integral to Agnon's style, which makes it difficult for his readers to retrace a situation, utterance, motif, or even the plot of his narratives without sensing that the concealed exceeds the revealed, owes...