[S. Y. Agnon's] language demands attention, like a dream calling attention to itself, or a narrator telling a story about his friends that turns out to be a tale detailing the structure of his own psyche.

This aspect of Agnon's work links him not to Kafka, to whom he has often been compared, but to Borges, in whose work we find a similar interest in language as self-conscious dreaming. Both writers seek to evoke the dreamlike moment in which the symbol-making activity of language is half-hidden yet half-revealed, just as spiritual and psychic events are linked to, discovered in, and articulated by the language-making act. They also share an effort to revitalize their respective languages by connecting them not merely to the spoken argot of the street—a concern of many Argentinian and Israeli writers of this century—but to a classical tradition which is available to Agnon...