SOURCE: Almog, Shulamit. “Literature, Politics, and the Law: On Blacksmiths, Tailors, and the Demolition of Houses.” Interdisciplinary Literary Studies 1, no. 1 (fall 1999): 37-52.

In the following essay, Almog draws linguistic comparisons between a story by Agnon and the transcript of an actual legal case in modern-day Israel, concluding that the literary text reveals more of the true nature of human conflict.

I. Introduction

In 1962, Haim H. Cohn, at the time the Attorney General of the State of Israel, approached Shmuel Yosef Agnon and asked him to contribute to a collection of articles being prepared to commemorate the seventy-fifth birthday of Pinhas Rosen, then Minister of Justice. Agnon, who had not as yet been awarded the Nobel Prize but was nevertheless the most widely acclaimed living author in Israel, agreed, and the same year contributed a collation consisting of seventeen short stories, entitled A Small Book of Tales.¹ One of...