SOURCE: Aschkenasy, Nehama. “Biblical Substructures in the Tragic Form: Hardy, The Mayor of Casterbridge; Agnon, And the Crooked Shall Be Made Straight.” Modern Language Studies 13, no. 1 (winter 1983): 101-10.

In the following essay, Aschkenasy compares biblical references in The Mayor of Casterbridge and And the Crooked Shall Be Made Straight, concluding that Agnon's use of the biblical dimension is more subtle than Hardy's.

Bringing together Hardy's The Mayor of Casterbridge (1886)¹ and Agnon's And the Crooked Shall Be Made Straight (1912),² a novella not yet translated into English, may seem an arbitrary yoking of different social milieus, cultural frames of reference, and verbal associations. But the apparent gap between Hardy and Agnon, and especially between these two particular works, is reduced considerably once we become aware of striking similarities in a number of artistic motifs and dramatic coincidences, as well as in the central tragic vision. Though both stories first appeared...