SOURCE: Ozick, Cynthia. “Agnon's Antagonisms.” Commentary 86 (December 1988): 43-8.

In the following essay, Ozick uses Agnon's novella Edo and Enam to reflect on the ambiguities of translation and on the oppositions between ideas of safety and destruction, redemption and illusion, and exile and return.

Shmuel Yosef Agnon, the 1966 Nobel winner for literature, was born one hundred years ago, in Galicia, Poland, and died in Jerusalem in 1970. Not long after his death, I wrote a story about Agnon, a kind of parable that meant to toy with the overweening scramble of writers for reputation and the halo of renown. It was called “Usurpation” and never mentioned Agnon by name. Instead, I pretended he was still alive, not yet a laureate: “It happens that there lives in Jerusalem a writer who one day will win the most immense literary prize on the planet.” I referred to this writer as “the old...