[Agnon] is a writer of startling and total originality, resembling other Hebrew writers of the century almost as faintly as he does his European contemporaries.

He draws on vast knowledge of Jewish tradition—that of the commentaries and homilies of the Talmud and the folklore of the Hasidim. His use of their language, their dialectic, their rhetoric, is deliberately imitative, but the ends to which he turns this tradition are entirely his own. Though highly allusive, his prose style is simplicity itself. His range is enormous….

Agnon is not a historical novelist in the accepted European sense: he writes of the last century partly from hearsay, from a kind of folk knowledge passed down from one generation of Jews to another. Nor is he entirely an elegist of a past age, for he can subject the past to satiric appraisal. Nor is he a moralist, though he uses...