SOURCE: Roskies, David G. ”Essay on ‘The Sense of Smell’.” In Reading Hebrew Literature, edited by Alan Mintz, pp. 118-25. Hanover, N.H.: Brandeis University Press, 2003.

In the following essay from a collection which offers several commentaries about specific works of Hebrew literature, Roskies discusses the complexities of an Agnon short story, “The Sense of Smell.”

Despite its brevity, Agnon's “The Sense of Smell” combines disparate elements that are not easily reconciled. The story's homiletic structure, storybook headings, archaic style, and anecdotal plot, and its coincidental encounters, dream sequence, and moment of mystical reverie bespeak a world of all-too-perfect harmony. Yet the narrative is riddled with riddles. Is the writer/protagonist a pious raconteur or a misanthrope? Does not the closed and self-referential world of Torah study, with its obsessive search for authority, clash with the solipsism of the artist, who lives in the subjective realm of the...