SOURCE: Bernheim, Mark. Review of A Book That Was Lost and Other Stories, by S. Y. Agnon. Studies in Short Fiction 34, no. 3 (summer 1997): 397-99.

In the following review, Bernheim offers a mostly positive assessment of a new edition of Agnon short stories.

In modern Jewish literature, S. Y. Agnon has long occupied a particular place. Undeniably the great Hebrew language craftsman of the century, this 1966 Nobel Laureate has been relatively inaccessible in the English-speaking world. Two other Nobel winners—I. B. Singer and Saul Bellow—are far more widely read and viewed as the voice of Yiddish literature on the one hand and explorer of besieged cultural values on the other. But Agnon, born Shmuel Yosef Czaczkes in 1888 in Galician Buczacz, then part of Austria-Hungary, and dead in 1970, may find his awaited audience in English more easily thanks to this handsome 1995 anthology bringing us twenty-five of his stories...