SOURCE: "Agnon's Mediterranean Fable," in Defenses of the Imagination: Jewish Writers and Modern Historical Crisis, The Jewish Publication Society of America, 1977, pp. 187-98.

In the following excerpt, Alter calls attention to Agnon's intermingling of ancient Hebrew and Greek worlds in Betrothed, a strategy that enhances the story's fabulous quality, according to the critic

S. Y. Agnon was a writer often fascinated with fabulous antiquity, but what is peculiar about Betrothed, one of his most intricately devised and original tales, is its seemingly promiscuous intermingling of different ancient worlds. The story is set in the early Zionist community at Jaffa, all its chief characters are Jewish, and the language of narration is of course the richly traditional Hebrew, with predominantly medieval-rabbinic tonalities, that is Agnon's stylistic hallmark. Yet the protagonist, in his student days an impassioned reader of Homer, freely invokes "the good gods" in his speech (though when...